Okay, basically, gambling is where you play games that rely on CHANCE.
Slot machines, poker, blackjack, video games that have gachas where you get a character or item based on luck, even simply flipping a coin or rolling a dice are all GAMBLING.
Doing the pirouette ACT in my fight is also a form of gambling!
(Unless you're one of those lame people who look up the turn order online...)
Since you rely on such randomness, you never know what you're gonna get! And that's where the excitement of it comes from!
Due to this, a lot of people often bet things like money in these games, which they may lose or win more of, often in casinos, with friends, or in digital games!
YOU shouldn't bet on real currency if you wanna gamble though, okay? The joy you receive from a win is huge, but if you dig yourself in too deep, you may not be able to get back up to the surface! Uee hee!
I haven't really been active here on TKP in a while. I figure it's probably long overdue for me to post a general status update for the blog, to let y'all know where I'm at.
The TL;DR version is that further coverage of the Archie Sonic comics is still on hiatus. I'd like to get back to reading and discussing the rest of Ian's run, I just don't know when it'll happen. But it will happen. Eventually. It'd be really nice if it was this year. No promises, though.
The long version is that a lot of time has passed. It's been over 11 years since I started this blog and almost five years since I paused my Archie coverage to focus on getting @slarpg done. Things have changed a lot in that time.
I've changed, for one. I've changed as a person and a critic. I still love Sonic, but my perspective, my thoughts on storytelling, my familiarity with things that influenced these comics, my choice of words, all of this has changed over time. I'm now 32, and while there's a lot I still stand by, it's inevitable that I'm going to look back on things I wrote at age 20 at the start of this blog and cringe at things I didn't articulate well, or fannish takes about how it's bad writing when things I don't like happen to my faves, or things that feel like a relic of a different era of feminist pop culture criticism, or cheap "is this the writer's thinly veiled fetish?" jokes, or complaints that I hammed up for comic or dramatic effect.
Because it's been so long, it's kind of hard to fight the urge to just... start over, in some way? I already toyed with this in the format of the four TKP Addendums I wrote in 2021-2022, going back over the first three issues of the main series and also the Endgame arc in greater detail and nuance. But truly starting the whole thing over would probably be insane. I've covered almost 300 issues, and it would be foolish to redo all of that, even if I cringe knowing that the recommended chronological reading order of this blog means starting with a bunch of writing from when I was barely out of high school before getting to the stuff I'm really proud of. So how much I do and don't want to retread old ground is something I'm still considering, especially since I need to reread everything anyway as a refresher before I get back to analyzing Ian's continuity-dense run.
But perhaps more importantly, Sonic has changed in those intervening years, and with that change comes a very different cultural context for these comics.
When I began this blog, the Archie comics... well, they were still being made, for one thing. But they were also just a niche curiosity off to the side of the mainline Sonic franchise. They were a self-contained evolutionary offshoot of regular Sonic for the small subset of weirdos who were into them. Now, though, the IDW comics are canon, and the people making them are major contributors to the wider franchise. And make no mistake, I think they've absolutely earned it and that they're doing great work. But the level of scrutiny even the defunct Archie comics are under is completely different now that their most prolific writer is now the go-to writer across the franchise.
In other words: the constant needlessly heated discourse about Ian Flynn (and the rest of the western contributors) is fucking miserable, and it's made thinking about the Sonic comics significantly less fun for me. Not to the extent that I wanna quit, but, like, man. It sucks.
It used to just be some weirdos on DeviantArt posting unhinged Pepe Silvia conspiracy boards about how that damn Ian Flynn killed their ships because of his SJW agenda. Now that the IDW comics are canon and he's writing the games, it's everywhere in the fandom. For a lot of people, you can just disengage, just read the comics and ignore the internet and touch grass. But I run this blog, and that inherently means partaking in The Discourse and having people declare their Sonic opinions at me all the time. I can block fandom reactionaries and people will still just send me asks on Tumblr about my thoughts on their rage bait. Younger fans online also seem to be increasingly hostile towards the Archie comics and their fans as a whole in this climate where canon compliance is treated as the most important thing in the world. It's tiring, to say the least.
Almost a year ago now I started writing a longform post about this state of things, using the then-recent Lanolin discourse as a springboard to discuss how it's become miserable to talk about the Sonic comics online, and how I worry that that constant deluge of bad faith criticism anytime anything interesting happens is affecting creative decisions made on the IDW series. That should be the next big Sonic-related thing you see from me, whenever I get around to finishing it. I delayed it partially to see how the stuff with Lanolin played out long-term. But also, again, this shit is just such a drag now that I would usually rather focus my attention elsewhere, such as the various other things I write about on The Ponett Gazette. I'll get it done, though, because I think there are things in that post that need to be said.
Also, as a side note, the big video essay I announced the intent to do a while back is probably not going to happen, for anyone still waiting for that. I felt motivated to do it after thinking about all the times my writing about Archie Sonic has been ripped off for some clickbait bullshit in the wake of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video, and also Hbomberguy literally personally encouraged me to do it. But I am not a video essayist, and I need to prioritize my gamedev work. Maybe I'll still make it happen someday, but it won't be anytime soon. I also haven't felt the need to keep posting updates on Ken's Archie Sonic reprint collections because I feel like I'd just be repeating myself. Though the plagiarized variant cover for the hardcover collection he's doing of all his Shadow stories is at least ostentatious enough to be funny. It's always something with him. I just don't want this blog to devolve into a Penders callout blog in the absence of regular updates.
But, yes. Thanks Ken Penders will return. I just might need to rethink how I want to approach it a little, and also rediscover my passion for these comics in this strange new era we find ourselves in.
Penciling is a pattern of two to four black lines following the contour of the feathers on either a gold or silver (white) base. The dark brahma variety is silver penciled. In most breeds, gold penciled is called partridge. Adding blue or lavender dilution genes dilutes the black to a shade of grey. Dilution of gold in addition to the lavender gene results in a color commonly referred to as Isabel/Isabella
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