Awful Green Things In The Dungeon

After many months of being like Oh man I gotta do that, my friend recently dug up the copy of Awful Green Things From Outer Space that he first played as a child--originally printed in Dragon Magazine in 1979 and with the chits originally glued to little pieces of linoleum or something by some 12 year old of his acquaintance back in the day. 

To be quick:

1. It rules.

2. It is highly D&Dable.

So the basics are this:

-There's a ship (above)

-There's little counters for Player One: Crew members with what a gamer will recognize as different Move, Attack and Health stats who can move around the ship.

-There's little counters for weapons they can pick up (pool cues, knives, stun guns, cans of rocket fuel, etc) which have different characteristics.

-There's little counters for Player Two: Aliens who invade the ship starting in a random location. The aliens start as eggs, then become babies, then become adults--all 3 stages with different stats.

-They fight.

If you are familiar with the Warhammer family of games, you may recognize all these elements from the Warhammer 40k-derived game Space Hulk, where one side plays Genestealers (Alien alien knock-offs) and one side place Terminators (big guys in oversized extra-cool space marine armor).

Space Hulk replaces chits with miniatures (cool improvement) and replaces the map-ripped-from-Dragon-Magazine with a board full of cardboard tunnels you can make yourself (cool improvement), however, unless Space Hulk has been upgraded since I've played it lacks the one super-cool thing that makes Awful Green Things really special and replayable:

Weapons are scattered all over the ship when the aliens invade--and each one has one of a variety of totally random effects. Everything from a blaster to an electric fence can do one of about a dozen things and you don't know which until you use it on an alien.

Some do a ton of damage, some do almost none, some shrink the aliens, some grow the aliens, some make the aliens burst into tiny fragments which then grow--it's scary using weapons but you will lose if you don't experiment with them. It makes for a new experience every time.

There's later editions and an expansion game for Green Things--I don't know if they added "randomly teleports you to another room" or "turns out the lights in the corridor no-one can see" to the weapon effects, but they should.

Smear Math for Morons

 One very weird thing I've noticed when people discuss the smear campaign is people saying these two thing, often in the same breath:

• lol Zak is so cancelled we sure destroyed his life lmao!
• lol Zak is suing people saying he lost millions, what an idiot lmao!

Now, if you're not a moron (and it should go without saying that anyone participating in the smear is a moron) you'll realize these are basically opposite statements.

If you smear someone and so completely destroy anybody's ability to earn a living doing their job as long as there's an internet, you've likely cost them over a million dollars. That's not about me specifically, that's anyone.

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The math:

Let's say you, like me, live in California.

Minimum wage is 16$ per hour.

That's 128$ per day.

That's 3,840$ per month.

That's 46,080$ per year.

Assuming the person lives a minimum of 30 more years and (like most artists) never retires, that's 1,382,400$.

That's assuming no inflation and just using minimum wage--and I did make more than minimum wage.

(Just for the development of I Am The Weapon alone, I was making 3000$ per month before the smear. If that less-than-minimum-wage figure seems high remember I'm contracted for all the writing and all the illustration. If you would like the documentation on that--just ask. This is also in every court record. I also had two projects in development with LotFP at the time--Bards and Violence in the Nympharium. Both of those included a cash advance and then I make a percentage after. Or ignore all these numbers and look at how much the artists and writers make on literally any mid-tier indie RPG kickstarter.)

Now, I am publishing again and so that income's not all lost, but that's only after having successfully sued three people who smeared me.

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And here's probably the main thing seem to forget or not realize:

RPGs isn't my main job, I've never claimed it was. I am a painter. I paint paintings for a living that people are supposed to buy. That is my job and was long before any game stuff I did ever existed.

Just because the people who smeared me were themselves in RPGs doesn't mean that I only lost RPG work. You'd have to have brain damage to think that only people in games noticed your smear campaign. All that work disappeared as well.

This is all in the article Dr Weisman wrote (missing audio here).

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And, of course, on top of that, destroying someone's reputation doesn't just destroy their income, it destroys their entire life.

And the non-monetary damage to their life is undeniably worse than the loss of income.

Since death is preferable to my current situation, if you're me, basically this cost me however much my entire life is worth. That's a price higher than any dollar amount. The only reason I am sticking around is the very slim hope it gets undone.

Again: this isn't special. I assume you think your life is worth a lot to you, too. If someone offered you a million dollars to die, you probably wouldn't take that deal.

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There are a lot of things that are really obvious about the situation the hatemob created that seem to be lost on everyone talking about it online, this about money is just one of them. But it fits in a blog entry so there you go.

If you lie about someone being a felon and put it all over the internet and that person's entire life is working in public, you did way more than a million dollars worth of damage.

It's not about me being special, that's just life.

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How To Fix Everything

This is a really interesting article about how some people managed to talk like adults about a piece of art they didn't like. Whether or not you like their solution: it appears they came to a solution that made a variety of people who disagreed but who all cared happy.

Basically, they solved this thorny public art problem by not allowing drive-by comments.

Without fail, people arrived at these events primed to make public comments, only to be surprised when they could not find a formal body to make a speech to, as there were only small-group conversations to join. They didn’t want to spend their time having to speak and listen at human scale. Indeed, listening, in small groups or one-on-one, over long periods, tried the patience of some participants. But it also bled out the cursed public discourse that had surrounded the issue for so long—exhausting those who had just one point to make and no interest in connecting or communicating, only in winning.

They point out that the usual process--people lining up to give a speech to an assembly of other people (most of whom were also there to give speeches) was tried and, as usual, didn't work. 

It's worthwhile thinking about how many online platforms are basically that: someone who will monologue but is not expected to engage getting access to a big audience of people who all want to engage or, themselves, monologue. Forums are like that, Twitter is like that. (People who write blogs but don't answer the comments are like that.)

And it's worth thinking about which kinds of people thrive in specifically those environments--people who have a deep belief in one-way communication and not being fact-checked. People who are twitter-famous or familiar forum-faces but not well-known as creators tend to be, basically, righteous trash.

So that's that.

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Anybody curious about court news with Gencon--it's on appeal to the higher court now. If you didn't see that coming you haven't been paying attention.

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Three Kinds of Mystery

Ok, there are three kinds of mystery in stories--

Classic 'What's Gonna Happen?' Mystery (diegetic mystery)

This is a mystery to both the audience and the main characters in the story: They are wondering how events will play out (or, in the case of a Sherlock-Holmes-style-mystery have played out). What will happen to Jack, Wendy, and Danny in the Overlook Hotel is a 'What's Gonna Happen?" Mystery, as is who framed Roger Rabbit? and who did the murder on the Orient Express and what will happen when we have these two couples swap wives. It's often the basic engine of the plot.

This happens in RPGs all the time.

WTF is Going On Mystery? (temporary narrative mystery)

This kind of mystery is created not in the story but by the way of telling a story. These are things that are not immediately known to the audience but are understood by the characters involved and we only learn them by following the story. Nearly every first line of a first-person novel involves this mystery (Who is narrating? What kind of person are they?) It was the best of times and it was the worst of times? For who? In the first scene of Pulp Fiction where we see Jules and Vincent talking in a car about the Royale With Cheese we don't know who these guys are. We don't know what they're about to do. We don't know where they're going or why. These are WTF is Going On mysteries. When Luke Skywalker first talks to his aunt and uncle about Ben Kenobi, we don't know who that is yet. These are temporary narrative mysteries--things kept secret by the writer until they want you--the audience--to find out.

One hallmark of good writing is very careful control of this kind of mystery. A lot of lackluster writers tell you where you are and who everyone is right away and so waste a lot of the potential of this kind of mystery.

This one is rare in RPG sessions, since the whole point is players need to know enough of their characters' POV to make decisions.

Eternal Mystery (mysterious-vibes mystery)

This is a mystery that never gets answered in the story. It can overlap with the other two, but also not. The point of this mystery is that it is never revealed and is part of the vibe. The lady or the tiger? What's in the Pulp Fiction brief case? Why is a guy in a bear suit giving some dude a blowjob in the Overlook Hotel? Why does Agent Cooper keep dreaming of a dwarf? These things just are. They make the situation seem mysterious but will not be revealed in the story.

This is a bread-and-butter device in pulp storytelling and so is all over RPGs. 

Some notes

• One thing sequels often do is take something conceived as an mysterious-vibes mystery and turn them into a temporary narrative mystery. In the original two seasons of Twin Peaks Agent Cooper keeps talking to a "Dian" on his tape recorder and that's just a thing he does. In the much later Season Three, we meet Dian--she's Laura Dern. Lovecraft stories are full of this--we hear a mysterious reference to the Pnakotic Manuscripts or Necronomicon in an early story and its just meant to be a mysterious name, but then in some later story (occasionally by another author) it is revealed what that thing is. The big alien "space jockey" in Alien had this done to it.
• One element of stories called "surreal" is the deliberate piling up of the second two kinds of mystery: we get a load of details and we don't know which are actually things that we need to pay attention to because they resolve and which are just weirdness. This tension is part of the excitement in these kinds of stories but if the proportions aren't right it can make someone check out because the mysteries begin to feel "hollow"--that is, there's no reason to wrestle with them.
• You can also pile the first type of mystery onto these two to make a Twin-Peaks-style mysterious mystery story mysteriously told, but unless you take care to highlight the first kind of mystery's importance (as Twin Peaks did by reiterating the question "Who Killed Laura Palmer?") the audience may not ever realize there is a plot to uncover.
• The massive part of the appeal of RPG campaigns is that everyone feels a great sense of the first kind of mystery as a campaign begins--unlike so many stories we don't who will live or die, how long the story will last, or often even what it will be about. We know more about a movie from its trailer or a book from its jacket than we do what will happen in a campaign with our characters--even if we know all about the characters at the start.

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Hell Sent Me Back

I'm back publishing games with Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Details about all that here.

Right now there's an adventure available at Gen Con--In The Night Fortress. It is free at the LotFP table booth 2937.

I've playtested it a few times and I kinda love it, because it has a central problem to solve that can be got past socially, magically, with combat,  with trickery or a bunch of different ways, but is weird enough that it will probably require all three.

Y'know how the tooth-sacrifice door that James wrote in Death Frost Doom was cool because every time you ran it you were like "I wonder how they're gonna get a tooth..."--well this adventure is kind of all that way. Kinda accidentally. It's very much a "Oh how are they gonna do this?"adventure.

I am very happy with it.

Also it has cheetahs. They were fun to paint.

So, yeah, there will also be some new LotFP stuff from me. Big stuff? Yeah.

One more funny piece of news:

Remember Fiona Geist from Dr Weisman's article? The one who said in the audio that she wanted LotFP to go bankrupt and she'd buy it for pennies on the dollar and then had that whole rant about how her co-harasser was a jerk?

Well she just walked up to James and Gen Con and was like "Hi!". 

Not like "I'm so sorry I was in that whole hatemob and then admitted it on tape" just "Hi!".

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There's A New Zak Book Available for Pre-Order

I have a new art retrospective book coming out now available for pre-order. The price will jump in a few days, so if you're interested, best to grab one soon. It covers the last 20 years of art.

With essays by Ana Finel Honigman, Anuradah Vikram and Eileen Townsend.

Link and info here.

Good Deed Goes Punished

 The Demon City galley--proofs are sitting on my table:

The real books should be actually printed soon...

The section on political campaigns was written by Linda Tirado, the journalist who wrote the section on political campaigns and whose been a stalwart ally on the project since day one:

She is now not expected to live very long due to complications from the police shooting her in the eye while she was covering the Black Lives Matter protests. (There is a link there for anyone who would like to donate to palliative hospice care or to her kids and family). This section of Demon City may, weirdly, be the last thing she wrote that sees print.

Linda interviewing a source for a
story at my place

I've known Linda for about a decade. She knew me, she knew my ex, she'd been to my house, she played games with us, she gave me 10,000$ to help with my court cases (it was 10k she couldn't afford: within the year she was asking if I could spare anything.) Although she didn't get to LA nearly enough, she tried hard to help whenever she could.

I am now going to tell my favorite Linda story:

So as you may know, losing one eye is *not* just like it looks when you cover one eye or see a pirate movie. It really messes with your depth perception in ways a person used to two eyes can't simulate. Linda had real trouble getting around alone even just in my apartment or, more to the point, in her own house

So they live down south, from the point of view of the kids (elementary school at this time): perfectly operational mommy goes away to Minneapolis, comes back stomping on toys, using a walker, losing short-term memory, etc

Her daughter (8-ish) goes to school one day. The school is having one of those fire drills or active shooter lectures or anti-graffiti assemblies or whatever and so there's a Tennessee state trooper or sheriff or something in the hall waiting to tell these children whats what.

Linda's daughter walks up to this man and says "Fuck the cops!" then heads down the hall to third grade

The Tirado household gets a phone call from the principal's office. They would like to have a parent-teacher conference.

So in comes Linda.  Down the hall with her walker clank clank and comes in and sits down and meets the principal in the office. And they say:

 "Your daughter said 'fuck the cops' to a sworn officer in the hallway last week".

So Linda fixes them with her eye, lights a cigarette (would you stop her?) and says "I don't see the problem here".

The principal was like "Ah, I think I understand". And that was that.

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Also: Linda has known she was dying for several months. She was one of the few people I could talk frankly about my possible impending death with and vice versa. She understood about court cases (there were no criminal charges against the cop who shot her so, like me, she had to sue), she understood the idea of getting your affairs in order for the sake of what happens after, and that most people do not know how to talk about that and freak out and freeze up and are the opposite of helpful. This put her in a very rare class of people for me.

And she was really funny. "Tell everyone when I die: Sunscreen". For that reason and many others, I recommend her books.

I will miss her very much. 

The Zak Conspiracy Theorists Admitted They Lied

If you read his blog, this is the most important thing that's ever been on it:

I started this blog in 2009 to document my mostly-porn-stars' game group's D&D game and my game ideas.

A little while later, I started getting asked to make my own game stuff, and I did.

As is typical for someone a little internet-famous, lots of conspiracy theories about me started spreading.

Most of these didn't affect much until 2019, when basically they destroyed my life

An Oxford-educated psychotherapist and researcher wrote a story about all this, documenting the conspiracy theorists harassing me, doing extensive interviews with the harassers where they openly admit they know they weren't telling the truth:

http://archive.is/0Nv3c

The researcher got harassed as soon as she published and got scared and took it down. However the audio clips of the folks admitting they lied are here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GJAJNbF2Tg

Interviewees confirmed they talked to her here:

and here:

https://x.com/pjamesstuart/status/1751884833867890952

https://x.com/machineiv/status/1752010444712128749

Goatmansgoblet/Brian Yaksha/Brian Richmond deleted his twitter after he was exposed.

Others apologized spontaneously:

...others had to be sued before they apologized:

Because Mike Mearls (formerly of offical WOTC D&D and someone else targeted by the conspiracy theory described in the article) was recently hired by Chaosium, the conspiracy theorists are having a field day again, lying all over again, and being believed all over again.  

I've successfully sued three times over this. The research is done, it's public. People involved directly admitted into an audio recorder that they lied, didn't check sources, spread things they didn't confirm.

This should matter. This should end. 

Claims like this are basically attempted murder--and they will succeed unless the people who don't want me dead take this as seriously as the people who do.

I am at the limit of my ability to communicate the seriousness of the situation. I don't know what to do.

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Interview With A Dork Who Is Mad About Female Space Marines

There are gates? They fell? wtf?

If you follow Warhammer 40k stuff (which I do a little because I'm running this), then you know that their crazed hatemob issue for the last few years is female space marines.

For many years Games Workshop sold no little space marine miniatures with female-looking heads sticking out of their big-ass cool space armor and the lore agreed that space marines were guys.

Many fans thought this should change because why not? A wild number of vocal people on the internet who had time to type thought it should not change at all.

Boy do these dudes type a lot on the Internet I tell you what.

Long ago I learned that one of the little tasks that The Almighty God Emperor has set aside for me personally is to explain why people do stupid things.

So, to wit, I interviewed a volunteer--a man, a stranger, A Dork Who Is Mad There Are Female Space Marines.

The interview was very long and had a lot of dead ends and a few places where the otherwise generous-with-his-time dork got mad about the process of being asked questions and had to be talked down from reverting from man to troll, but I eventually got there. 

Anyway we spoke at length and his ideas are stupid.

The interview was conducted via Facebook

The TL;DR

The dork has signed off on the following summary of his basic deal, which I wrote after the interview:

-His own words: "I identify as center right, so you could say I identify as conservative but the current Canadian conservative leader in the running is an asshole so I likely won't vote conservative in the next election."

-His own words: "I spent the majority of my adult life living in major cities, mostly Toronto, spent some time in Calgary and Vancouver as well. I live away from them now by choice, not because of lack of experience."

-He views Warhammer 40k as such a high-buy-in-hobby that changes in official policy could effectively change the pool of people who are interested in it and—longterm—affect the people he could know in the future and play with and meet at cons.

-He likes the people he knows already in the space (mostly dudes) because of shared sensibility.

-He wants to meet more dudes like that and play with them.

-Has had bad experiences with people I’d agree to call "moral scolds" in the RPG space irl where he says things of real value were fucked up for him in games and he identified these people as social justice advocates.

-He wants to deal with less people who seem like the scoldy social justice advocates he met irl in his real life game spaces.

-These advocates people seem to him to resemble the people who want female space marines online.

-He admits he can’t be sure whether they’re representative of the general ok-with-female-space-marines populace because he has limited knowledge of life in areas with cosmopolitan values.

-He doesn’t see female space marines as a big deal alone but he sees a chance they might precipitate a shift toward the company bringing in more people like them and less like himself.

-He doesn’t want to play with these people, he wants to play with his (self-identified) “socially awkward nerd dude” types. Those are his words.

-...even if many of the new people were not only super-hot but available and liked him and wanted to play with him he wouldn't want to.

-Because playing with people who share his sensibility is more interesting to him than any amount of sexual adventure. He's married but he would like to think he'd say the same thing before getting married.

-And he sees the benefits to any genuinely marginalized group of these changes in the game of Warhammer as marginal at best

Some excerpts of talking with the dork in his own words...

by Dark Mechanic

On What The Dork Thinks People Who Like Female Space Marines Believe

KAGE

I would assume you are for removing the "Shaman" and "Druid" creature types from MTG because it might offend real life Shamans and druids?

ZAK

Nope--and again, not anyone I know would give a fuck. Including the leftiest trans people ever to get arrested on LAPD property then come roll here as soon as they get out.

So let's say you were to play with people who are cool with female marines. Someone walks up to you and...what? What do they do that makes them no fun?

KAGE

I show up to GM, I announce that an evil tribe of orcs is invading the town, someone taps the x card 14 times, refusing to elaborate until I figure out that they didn't like the fact that I called them an "evil tribe".

ZAK

Ok, I am going to say this:

Last weekend I went to an event at the downtown LA Alamo Drafthouse. Official event for a corporate game company. The Alamo Drafthouse is an arty theater and a big one. Movie stars go see movies there with their hairdressers. This is a paid event. With strangers. At the table: 2 trans people, 2 movie industry people, one porn actor, one screenwriter. You CANNOT GET MORE "typical coastal elite gamers" than this crowd. What did we do?

Fought a tribe of evil gnolls. One dude played an orc barbarian. He played him as stupid. This was a totally normal day of D&D for everyone involved, not just me. These are not outliers. Do you believe me this happened in this way?

(Also: no X card or safety tools).

KAGE

I 100% believe it, but you are having the same problem I have with my athletes [dork is a wrestler] all the time.

You, an exception, an exemplar, are not representative of the industry, or community as a whole. Anyone who showed up for a game with you knew exactly what they were getting into beforehand.

ZAK

They didn't know I'd be there. I just paid for my ticket like everyone else. There were 5 tables of regular LA gamers who just wanted to play at the movie theater. No famous people were on the bill. Nobody was on the bill, it was just this [I link the event].

KAGE

Dude I believe you, and yet the code of conduct at the D&D convention in the city nearest me mandates an x card.

ZAK

Ok, i believe you

KAGE

Along with a whole bunch of other rules which amount to "If you do anything that anyone perceives as offensive, you get bounced and no refund".

ZAK

I am just saying that it looks like you are maybe so far geographically from the average person who might wanna play a female space marine that you are reacting to loud shitheads on the internet (cherry picked as examples by other loud shitty people on the internet) instead of to the average person who might want to play a female marine

KAGE

You have a very valid point. I am speaking only from my own experience.

My group has largely been immune to these issues, its only when I have travelled for either professional games or convention games.

However I have experienced these things happen to multiple other hobbies, and as far as I can tell it's the same people wanting female space marines.

Could I be wrong? Absolutely, but it's not a risk I'm willing to take without putting up a fight.

But at least you give me hope that if for whatever reason I find myself in LA again, I may still be able to find a game if I cough up the dough.

painted by ALESSANDRAPLAYS40K

ON NOT HAVING THOUGHT THIS OUT VERY MUCH

KAGE

The percentage of changes made in the name of politics, social progress or anything else along those lines should be 0.

ZAK

So the removal of "homosexuality" from the list of insanities in an early RPG was bad?

KAGE

That's a very tough and thought provoking question.

[Zak note: He never thought about that before?]

I don't see anything wrong with removing it. On the other hand I would be opposed to changing it to appease a niche group.

Interesting conflict of interests here.

ZAK

What qualifies a group as a "niche group"?

KAGE

Any specific group. Perhaps I should elaborate.

I don't view homosexuality as a mental illness.

I however would not ever attempt to pressure a game system that listed it as one to change it.

ZAK

What makes a group "specific"?

KAGE

A specific way of differentiating them from the whole? There are a lot of different ways to do this.

ZAK

Well you said you wouldn't want to changing something to appeal to a "specific group"? What makes a group a "specific group" rather than just a "group"?

KAGE

If you have 10 people standing together you have a group. If you have 5 of them wearing red shirts that's a specific group.

You could say "that group over there" and it would now be specific as well.

ZAK

So if more than one person wants a change then it should not be made. A change should only be made if literally only one person likes it or if no-one likes it?

I am genuinely confused

KAGE

No that's poor choice of words for myself. So if there are 100 people in a group, and 10 of then complain about something, I would be opposed to changing something to appease those 10, if the other 90 were not interested.

ZAK

So a change should not be made unless the majority of the fanbase wants it?

KAGE

Yes. And it's incumbent on the minority who wants change, or the outsiders coming in, to convince the existing fan base that the change is worthwhile.

[Zak note: at this point the interview gets confusing because he gets confused between saying both "the company should do what it wants!" and "it should do what most fans want". It never gets sorted out, really. Then Kage opines he doesn't care that much about female marines, actually.]

painted by CerberusXTSpace Maid (3D model by Solflamer)

ZAK

Let's not backslide to "you dont care" about this issue you've extensively described the shape of your worries about.

KAGE

Oh I don't not care at all, but I don't care as much as you seem to think I do either.

ZAK

You care way more than not at all which is the norm or "they can have candy if they want idk" which is probably the next most ordinary position. You have a whole narrative about why it represents something. You've thought it out more than most people--can we agree to that?

KAGE

Yes, but I have also put more thought into it over the course of the last 2 days than the previous 6 months before that.

[Zak note: So we're back to "I haven't thought this through".]

by nirach

WHEN DID YOU LEAVE THE BIG CITY?

KAGE

8 years back. There was a whole not of reasons but it boiled down to the only real reason I was staying in the city was money.

I make a lot less out here but it is worth every penny, quality of life is better in every way except having to drive a long way for good sushi

ZAK

I think there's probably a larger overlap between wanting female space marines and knowing where the good sushi is than any other signifier you mentioned

KAGE

Lol that's probably true

ZAK

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/people-who-think-sushis-gross-also-probably-oppose-gay-marriage/317903/

People Who Think Sushi's Gross Also Probably Oppose Gay Marriage

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KAGE

That doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

ZAK

Just be glad you don't like anime bro

painter unknown

Thank you to the dork for telling us where your bad ideas came from.

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