September has mostly escaped now, so I should report on my activities in case they provide any alibis:

• THE SECOND FLASH FOSTER STORY: I polled my Patron(s) about how I should follow up my coverage of the first Flash Foster and his High-Gear Hot-Shots story, it was decided I should check out Flash’s story from the following issue. I did so, and it is a better story, though it gives most of its emotional weight over to a different character.
• PHONE GUYS: My Phone Guys comics were the big point of focus for me this month. There are two important things to know about Phone Guys. 1) This comic is a foundation on which this website stands. I have put up a Phone Guys comic every week since the first of November, 2010. During some of my more depressed eras, there are probably months where it was the only thing that went up. And 2) This comic is not well made. I don’t mean that it isn’t good (though that is a claim I wouldn’t fight), what I mean is that I make it in a bad way to make a comic. At about this time every year I make all 52 Phone Guys comics that will go up over the following year. That means that for most of the month I’m trying to get two or more of them done in a day, often in the wee hours after being wiped out by work often resulting in the very “good enough, print it” comics that have become a tradition. So I did that this month. 52 more comics in which two people say stupid things at each other over phone. The lifeblood of the Book of PDR.
• THE MARVEL APPENDIX 25 YEAR ANNIVERSARY EVENT: My favourite encyclopedic website of obscure Marvel Comics knowledge, The Marvel Appendix, has been around for 25 years (Hey, that’s even longer than this website). To celebrate, they’ve been putting up a truly overwhelming number of profiles covering every corner of the Marvel Universe and then some. I helped out with a small handful (including an android superhero, a civilian, a motorcycle designer, a team of mercenaries, a jerk Deadpool knew, and of course an alternate universe version of my beloved Rocket Racer), but my entries were a drop in a waterfall compared to what everyone else put up. I enjoy helping the Appendix when I can, but I am constantly reminded that I am a mere sidekick compared to the other contributors. My Marvel love is highly focused, but they seem to have expansive collections and organization skills I envy. I could not have got 25 years out of that site, but they could have done it without me easily. Congratulations to them, I’ll continue to do what I can, when I can.
• BEEKEEPER REVIEW: CAPTAIN QUAID: The beekeeper I reviewed this month is from a show based on Disney’s Tangled. That was a movie I remember enjoying, so it was easy to dip into the show for Quaid’s two episodes. For the record, this is my 96th Beekeeper Review here on the site and I’d love to finally make it to 100 soon, so I will probably try to do a monthly review for a while.
• MUSING ABOUT THE MERMAID MASK: I decided I should start a regular thing on the site where I talk about adventure games I’ve played. I love adventure games so much and don’t talk about them enough, so this will force me to do so. I checked my Steam library and wishlist a few days back and I have around 90 games waiting to be played. Let’s get that number down.
• OBSCURE MARVEL CHARACTER PIXEL ART: This month I have drawn none other than Dennis Dunphy, aka Demolition Dunphy, aka D-Man. Dennis is a character that has been treated with little respect in a lot of stories over the years, often used him as the butt of a joke. He is a funny character, it’s true, but they tend toward mean-spirited mockery. But I assure you he’s actually one of the most purely heroic characters in the Marvel Universe anddeserves respect, so don’t come talkin’ around here unless you treat him right.

• STUDENT LOAN DEBT BELOW $3000: That’s right, it says it right there. The student loan that has absolutely upended every aspect of my life (in spite of the fact that it didn’t even help me actually graduate) has been brought to a number below three thousand dollars! It is, I admit, going more slowly than I had hoped. Every time I make an actual budget to organize my life, something happens. I have an expensive car problem or I am made to move into a more expensive apartment or the prices of all gas and food and everything everywhere increases. Every dollar paid off comes with a struggle. But that struggle is slowly paying off. At the risk of “jinxing” it, I am currently on track to have this shit finally gone from over my head in three years or so. After that the money that currently goes toward it could actually be saved up, a scenario I can almost not imagine right now.
• HOVER HEAD COVERS: After my success at making the Adventure Dennis section of the site better last month, I’ve decided to continue improving and beautifying things around here. To that end, I have given comics-style covers to my Hover Head comics, as seen below:

• ETHAN COEN’S MOVIES: I am a big fan of the work of the Coen Brothers, but I had not got around to checking out the movies that Ethan Coen has made sans brother/avec wife. Until now! I do think that part of the reason it took me so long to watch Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t is because the reactions I heard said they were middling at best. Well, now that I have seen them, I can see where those reactions were coming from. They seem intended to be a sort of b-movie fun romp, but they’re still full of Coen-esque action and tension and quirky characters and dialogue. I can kinda see the seams that hint at which of the Coen Brothers brings which aspects of their team fims, but I enjoyed these fine. If I find most of the Coen Brothers’ work to be incredibly good, a movie that is half that level in quality is actually still pretty okay. The real question is, won’t anyone save Curlie?
• WEIRD TALES MAGAZINE: I can’t remember how I came across it, but I was searching for some old story in an issue of Weird Tales and found it on the Internet Archive. After I noticed they had a lot of issues of the magazine on there, I’ve just been checking out a short story or two a week. I don’t think I have any specific recommendations, I’ve just been picking things that look short and have an interesting name. You could do that too, if you want.

Why is it safe to tell actors to “break a leg?”
Because they’re already in a cast.

Well, this has been the first month since I began my Patreon, so now I need to figure out how I’m going to deal with that. I think that every month I am going to do a newsletter like this in which I discuss what things I got done during the month. Let’s try that!

• First and foremost there is the article I wrote based on the choice of my Patron(s). My look into the first story found in the 1953 comic Young Men #21, Flash Foster And His High-Gear Hot-Shots. This is the first of what I intend as a series of looks at the kinds of stories they were giving to kids when superheroes were not the dominant genre of comics.
• Probably the thing I spent the most time working on this month is Cruciatus Animi Fracti, a one page solo-journaling RPG. I made it to submit to the One-Page RPG Jam 2026. I have enjoyed doing something for the Jam the last three years and I will continue to do so, though I’d really love to design a print-and-play RPG that isn’t designed to fit on a single page. Imagine the freedom! Someday, someday…
• To maintain my status as the world’s foremost reviewer of fictional beekeepers, I watched an episode of NCIS: Origins to review a guy named Linus Eckles. I gotta be honest, I didn’t enjoy the show, but that is never the beekeeper’s fault, and that’s what I am reviewing. Anyway, I can’t rebuke the show entirely if it is giving Patrick Fischler a paycheque.
• On the pop-culture website the Avocado I have an ongoing series of articles called Superman vs Bigots in which I take a look at stories from the Superman franchise that deal with themes of racism and such. This month I covered an episode of the television show “Superman and Lois” that was titled “A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events” that featured the show’s version of a classic Nazi superman foe.
• I did a profile for the Marvel Appendix website about a character called Shuffles. Shuffles is an shady underworld sort, an information dealer, who appeared in about five pages of comics in 1978 and has not been seen since. He’s a bit of a Blaxsploitation stereotype kinda guy, so maybe Marvel was embarrassed to acknowledge him (more likely I think nobody remembered him at all), but I think if you bring him back in a comic where he isn’t the sole representative of Black people he could just be a fun and flamboyant figure. I found absolutely no other profile for this guy on any of the Internet’s various websites where obsessive people like me track that sort of thing, so it is a point of pride that I got to him first.
• On the topic of Marvel, I decided that I am going to do a pixel art image of an obscure Marvel character each month for a while. I’ll only give my self a day to work on each one, because I could tinker with pixels forever and not be happy with the result, but my hope is that I will simultaneously be noticed by fans of the obscurities featured while also making them less obscure. It will surprise nobody who knows me that the first to get the treatment is the Rocket Racer.

Not everything I do is a project finished within a month that I can easily link to, but I will always have other things to talk about, so let’s do a category for that stuff.

• I admit that I’m still reluctant to this whole Patreon thing. I feel like if I’m going to pretend to be worth anyone’s time (let alone money), I need to be more professional-seeming. To that end, I’ve begun doing some cleaning-up around the ol’ Book of PDR here. A point of focus this month has been the webcomic Adventure Dennis, which is one of my earliest surviving works from on the Internet. For years now it has been confined to a little Javascript format that, while admittedly is kinda fun, is not a perfect format. So I’ve been giving each chapter of the comic its own page, hopefully easier for browsing. As I go I’ve also been including a sort of Commentary Track of footnotes at the bottom explaining references and stuff, when I can remember what I was referencing at least.
• During August I also participated in multiple online studies about aphantasia. It was into my thirties before I realized that I didn’t have the ability to visualize things in my head the way most people do, but to be fair aphantasia was barely acknowledged or studied before the 21st century. Years ago I joined the Aphantasia Network and have been receiving emails from them. I’d like to see the phenomenon more widely understood, so whenever I get an email about an online study I can participate in, if I have the time I try to do it. As I say, that happened twice this month.

It occurred to me that if I want to make myself seem human, I should talk about one or two of the things I enjoyed.

• This month I came across Chucky: The Game, a board game based on the horror movies about the killer doll. I am a horror fan and I am not kidding when I say that of all the long-running slasher franchises, Chucky is my favourite and it is not a close contest. But what really appeals to me about this game is that it is cooperative. I’m not a competitive person by nature and I find games where you have to compete against the other players annoying at best because I genuinely do not care about winning against my friends. But winning or losing alongside my friends is great! (I have, for years now, been working on Surrounded By Danger, a cooperative board game of my own design.) For the record Chucky: The Game does work with a single player, so even though I haven’t had a chance to try it with others yet, I have played alone and both killed and been killed by Charles Lee Ray.
• the Drifter is a point-and-click adventure game that came out last year. I had heard good things, so I was happy to finally check it out. I have loved adventure games for as long as I can remember and this one does some things I greatly enjoyed, especially with the interface. The genre is even now plagued by the soul-crushing difficulty and jankiness that cursed it in the olden days, so any time a game simplifies the interface in an elegant way, I am happy to think it might make it appealing to a younger generation. I sometimes find modern adventure games too easy (they are so afraid of the stigma of difficulty) but I didn’t mind this one. The only negative I can think to say at the moment is that there didn’t seem to be much in the way of alternate solutions to puzzles or different endings. I always maintain that the thing games can do that movies can’t is allow player agency, so I like when every player has variations in the story making it their own experience. The Drifter’s seemed very linear to me, so it isn’t the perfect adventure game ideal that exists in my head, but I can’t punish it for that. After all, it joins games like the first Gabriel Knight and Space Quest III in having a late-game location that is shaped like a cylinder.

Finally, I’ve got a file on my phone that is nothing but dumb little jokes I’ve thought of. Maybe if I dole them out once a month on here I can finally be free. Here’s this month’s!

Why shouldn’t you trust a small harp?
It might be a lyre.