Those of you who host regular events (gaming nights, parties, orgies, whatever) always have that one person you never invite. You know the guy. The social reject that never talks, or never stops talking, or eats all the dip, or somehow manages to lock himself in the bathroom/shed/hall closet for several hours before anyone knows he’s even in there. Winslow is that person. He knows it. And it’s taken a heavy psychological toll.
I would like to live in a cave. Not one where you take an elevator to get down to it and the tour guide lady reminds you to dress warmly because it’s a climate-controlled 52 degree Fahrenheit cave. That’s too cold and you can bang your head on stalactites and stub your toes on stalagmites. Most people can’t remember which is which. That tour guide lady told me there’s a way to remember: “stalactite” has a “t” in it for “top.” That way, you’ll know it’s a stalactite when you bang your head on it.
I wish I could say that this comic is based on a true story, but sadly, none of my friends have ever used a flare gun to summon fellow gamers to their RPG. We always used such boring methods as text messages, or e-mails, or phone calls, or even–dare I say it–organizing a game in person! Of course, if we used flares, particularly novelty flares that “look like things,” we could end up summoning the wrong sort of people entirely. Like when you find Fezzik’s Summoning Pot in the lowest depths of the dungeon, and you try to use it but fail your intelligence test on a d20 roll of 13 or higher, and instead of summoning a level 7 ifrit you summon a demon from the Blackest Nether Reaches that gobbles up you and the rest of your party.
The first thing I think about when I walk into an office party is harakiri. I hate forced social time. Your coworkers, much like your family, are not pickable pals. Usually, I can manage ten minutes of a birthday/holiday/last day party until I reach my breaking point. Then I think of an excuse to leave
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I was walking down the beautiful, white washed streets of my home in sunny, southern Spain when I saw two things that combined to bring back a long suppressed memory; a drunken father staggering along with his son in tow, and a dead cat under a parked car . See my dad was sometimes a dick, to put it mildly. He was a heavy drinker, with a penchant for terrorizing his son practical jokes.