A little tangent between bigger projects: a few game night pals and I played the post-apocalyptic driving/destruction game Gaslands by Mike Hutchinson. It's a tabletop game where you drive around Mad Max/Death Race 2000-style cars and race to finish lines, blow each other up, and all the shenanigans you'd expect. You use movement templates to drive around, but there's no pre-measuring, so this often results in disaster...and that's before all the skidding and spinning out that happens! It was a chaotic, very entertaining experience.

I was also intrigued by the fact that Gaslands is designed for die-cast cars—you know, Hot Wheels, Micro Machines, Matchbox, stuff like that—so you can grab some old toy cars (or pick them up for next to nothing at Family Dollar like I did), and then modify them to look like crazy desert murder-wagons. Fun!

In the midst of all my Big Projects (HUNDREDS, The Blades Of Gixa, tat, Osma), I wanted a little quick one for a change of pace, a refresher. I love my long-term projects but it can be tough to be working and working for months on end and not have anything finished to show for it. So it was nice to just take a minute to put a few silly cars together, film it, make a rough stop-motion animation (watch to the end!) and have a complete project under my belt. Plus it was fun to dig through some public domain footage for the intro and outro.

Special thanks to the phenomenal Red Means Recording, whose music is all over the episode, and especially to all of the new and continuing PARADISO members! Welcome! There's been a surge of people joining since the last update, which has been massively helpful for my motivation and, you know, my ability to make rent 😅 Thank you all so much!

Members Gallery

As usual, some nice photos and stills for the members—now with commentary 🖤