Way back in 2016, I started this yearly Halloween Reading tradition by performing "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers, the first story from The King in Yellow. Now, all of these years later, I bring you the final of the four horror stories that open that book.An aloof painter has a grudge against a nightwatchman at the church across from his studio, a strange man who disturbs anyone who sees him or interacts with him. This includes his favorite model, Tessie. As he learns more about his and Tessie's dream regarding the man, they discover that they've long been doomed by the Yellow Sign and the grim omens it portends.Music used: "Varklärte Nacht, Op. 4 - Boulez" by Aldan Schoenberg, and "An Ending (Ascent)" by Brian Eno.Other Halloween Readings:"The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers"This Band Could Be Your Life" by Gary Butterfield"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman"The Mask" by Robert W. Chambers"The Tower" by Marghanita Laski"The Prodigy of Dreams" by Thomas Ligotti"In the Court of the Dragon" by Robert W. Chambers"In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka"Shiva Open Your Eye" by Laird Barron

Hello all,Every once in a while we like to make a big post like this to announce some changes. 2024 marked our ten year anniversary of funding ourselves through Patreon, and over that time we’ve increased the amount of content we put out each month. This year’s changes are going to be about refocusing, reining things in a bit, and making sure we’re putting our energy where it does the most good.The inspiration for these changes came from a WOFF! Dispatch question about vacations, and how we don’t take them. Because the content calendar marches on, doing things like going to conventions, taking time off for holidays, or even preparing for events like Duckstream… anything that requires taking a break from recording requires us to flex doubletime in the run-up and in the aftermath. The result is that “time off” really isn’t a thing for us, and it never really can be a thing.These changes are about creating room in our schedule so this can be more like a regular job. The hope is that reducing our burnout will make us better podcasters. This doesn’t come naturally to us, because our instinct is to offer more instead of less, but that has led us to an unsustainable place, even with Gwen’s help. (And don’t worry, we’re keeping her around! We couldn’t do this without her at this point).For some sobering math, in 2024 we will have released 371 episodes across our 12 active shows. That’s 230 free episodes, and 141 premium episodes. That’s an average of a little more than 7 episodes per week, at about 8 hours of content per week (on average). This is a lot more than is usual for most Patreon campaigns and networks. While we pride ourselves on providing a lot of bang per dollar, these are hard numbers to look at.Guest Episodes of Watch Out for Fireballs!A couple of times per year, a WOFF! episode will have a guest host, meaning it will be Gary and a guest or Kole and a guest. This will solve two problems for us:First, it gets the responsibility of beating a whole video game in a week off of our plate for one week. WOFF! accounts for the majority of our work in a given week, and being able to tap out occasionally is a pre-requisite for any kind of workload lightening.Second, it addresses the problem of having half of the show play and discuss a game from a genre they don’t really like, and have nothing to say about. This is a drag for everyone, we think! We don’t want to stop covering things like console RPGs, adventure games, roguelikes, or RTS games altogether because of this dynamic. Tapping in a guest who is down with one of those genres makes sense, and we think it will make for better episodes. It will also bring in some fresh perspectives from people we know and trust to be great contributors (who we will also pay for their time).To tease a specific example, at some point early next year we will be covering Command & Conquer: Red Alert II, a game a lot of people have asked for. But for this episode, Kole will be sitting it out and we’re tapping in the wonderful Brayton Cameron.If someone sponsors an episode that makes sense to handle with a guest, we will check with them to see if they’re okay with this. We don’t want anyone to feel like they’re getting short shrift.Open Season on Revisiting Early WOFF! GamesWhile we’re teasing things… this has nothing to do with balancing our workloads, but in 2025 we’ll officially be open to covering games again. Specifically, a patron asked if we could revisit Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a game that we covered wayyy too early (13 years ago), when the format of the show was different and we were worse podcasters.This will be a “sometimes treat” when it feels appropriate.Very Occasional RerunsIn addition to the guest episodes, we might occasionally designate a week to not feature an entirely new episode of a show. This won’t happen for Premium shows. Either we will pick an older episode that feels right, or we will make a premium or rarity episode free for everyone. By “rarity”, we mean episodes featured in bundles over the years. The unlocked premium episodes will take the place of our standard “welcome packs”. All of these episodes will have cleaned up audio when we can make that happen, and we will also record wrappers for the episodes to give some new context on the subject.We’ll do this sparingly when the guest episodes can’t work to help us accommodate events like conventions.We are Retiring Exquisite SufferingThere will be one episode of Exquisite Suffering in January, and then no more. We’ve done two premium episodes per month for a long time now, and we’ve decided that doing six (sometimes seven!) episodes of a mostly improv and digressionary show each month isn’t working as well as we’d like. So we’re going down to 4 or 5 regular episodes per month, available to all, with the hope that what we lose in quantity will be made up for in quality.There is no current plan to replace Exquisite Suffering with a new show, since that would work against our goal of refocusing. We feel like a $5 tier that includes premium episodes of Watch Out for Fireballs!, Bonfireside Chat (when it’s active), Real Lich Hours, and Unfilmable is pretty action packed even before you realize that it also includes the archives of all of those shows and 200+ episodes of Exquisite Suffering.The topic of the final episode of Exquisite Suffering will be determined by one lucky listener who wins a drawing. To enter this drawing, please complete this year’s listener survey (see below). The drawing will take place on New Years’ Day, and we will contact the winner to pick the game we’re covering. (Note that our usual standard for choosing an episode applies, no Custer’s Revenges please).For anyone who will miss the monthly polls, we are still going to run a poll to select one of the games we’ll cover in a given month.Using More of Patreon’s FeaturesThis announcement is more of an FYI than anything else. Patreon has added features like discounts and gifting, and we’re going to try to use those more. This means we’ll occasionally run specials on new memberships, and bring up that people can gift a subscription to our content to each other if they’d like.There are other new features that Patreon is developing that will be of more direct help to us as podcasters, and we’re going to be playing around with them as they come out.Days of Future Cast Will Be Back!Gary and Jeremy have talked about it plenty on the show, but this year has been pretty rough. We’re not saying we’ll never retire the show, but now is not its time, since we still have X-Men ‘97 and 2-3 great comics runs to talk about. There’s plenty to say. There’s a possibility that it will return to fortnightly releases, however, and we apologize for the show’s sporadic schedule recently.Listener SurveyIt’s been a very long time since we’ve done this, but we’d like to ask you to fill out this brief listener survey. It will help us understand who you are and what you want, and inform future decisions about the network in the coming year. Be sure to tick the box that enters you into the raffle to choose the subject of the last episode of Exquisite Suffering, if you’d like to do that.Closing RemarksWe are very grateful for your support, which allows us to make a living off of doing the work that we want to do. Our hope is that these changes are a welcome shakeup that will help us make our shows even better for you.This is always the case, but none of the changes outlined above are written in stone. Everything is an experiment and if any of this doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.Thanks again for listening and backing us. 2024 was a bad year for humans generally, but having you along has brought a little light to the proceedings. Please be safe over the holidays!Kole and GaryP.S. The music in the podcast version of this announcement is "Cool Cave" from the Kirby's Epic Yarn soundtrack. People tend to ask.

It felt right to take a break from our normal programming (talking about things that don't matter) to process our feelings about what just happened this week in American politics. It's not our expectation that you share our exact values when it comes to electoral outcomes, but our bet is that you're pretty similar to us in feeling pretty bad about Trump winning a second term. If that's the case, we hope that this is of some value to you in helping you figure out a way forward, to make a positive difference for the people closest to you.Related to this, please save the date for DuckStream 2024. The weekend of December 5-7, we will be holding a 48 hour streaming marathon to benefit the TransActive Gender Project out of Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon. It will be broadcast live on the Duckfeed Twitch channel, which you can follow now to get notifications. More details about the event will be coming shortly.We're not going anywhere. We'll keep doing our best to be entertaining and distracting for when you need that. We stand with the marginalized and vulnerable, and wish you all the good fortune and resolve to be in the fight for as long as possible.

It's never good news when an investigator comes knocking at your door. The question is, is the news bad for you for the P.I.? What secrets dwell out in the barn, or deep in your past, or at the heart of things tracing back to a time before things with legs walked the land?Laird Barron's "Shiva, Open Your Eye", published for free in NIghtmare Magazine, is a Lovecraftian tale told from the other side. Curiosity has driven the investigator far into territory more dangerous than he comprehends... but not even the monster he seeks knows the full truth of the cyclical horror that entraps us all.Other Halloween Readings:"The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers"This Band Could Be Your Life" by Gary Butterfield"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman"The Mask" by Robert W. Chambers"The Tower" by Marghanita Laski"The Prodigy of Dreams" by Thomas Ligotti"In the Court of the Dragon" by Robert W. Chambers"In the Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka

It's been a long time coming, but we're revisiting this project! Over a decade of podcasting, we've developed a voluminous vocabulary to describe games and media, or just to make inside jokes and comparisons. So we asked you, the listeners, what terms you'd like us to define, and this is what we came up with.Terms Defined This Episode:Towers of HanoiRot GutDiverticulaNo Lesson TodayZelda Your Way Across the RoomAnything.txtThe Dark GyfteIt's Been a While!Transmorphative+2% Frost DamageWhat's Happening in Narshe?Gary, No!Defensive VocabularyNight EggsThrottle/AcceleratorEmotional violenceRecommendations are time violenceRandomization instead of improvBackpackula

A Traveler has arrived at a penal colony to observe a strange manner of execution: a device that takes twelve hours to kill the offender. Its biggest proponent, an Officer still loyal to an old regime, fanatically explains the devices's intricacies while preparing a Condemned Man for slaughter. Then, he reveals his plan to implicate the Traveler in its further operation.No stranger to existential horror, this is Franz Kafka's most viscerally upsetting story. "In the Penal Colony" brings a twisted Saw-like sense of justice and clockwork machinery into contact with his normal domain of fussy clerks and bureaucrats who exist to reveal religious epiphanies but never experience them for themselves.Other Halloween Readings:"The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers"This Band Could Be Your Life" by Gary Butterfield"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman"The Mask" by Robert W. Chambers"The Tower" by Marghanita Laski"The Prodigy of Dreams" by Thomas Ligotti"In the Court of the Dragon" by Robert W. Chambers

The audio attached to this post is clipped from this month's Watch Out for Fireballs! Dispatch.Hello! We are excited to share some big news with you. Later this year, we will be launching a new premium podcast that is a deep dive into Baldur's Gate III. We're calling it "Real Lich Hours". It will be a weekly show at the $5 tier, with the first handful of episodes being free to everyone so you can get a taste.One of the reasons we started Bonfireside Chat was because Dark Souls was too good of a game to not make a show about. We feel the same way about Baldur's Gate III. Add that on top of our pre-existing love for Dungeons and Dragons and the Forgotten Realms, and it just makes sense that we'd be doing this.Let's talk about how the show will be structured. It will be a bit different than Bonfireside Chat, with less emphasis on locations and more emphasis on individual quests and the characters, world-building, monsters, and lore around them.The conceit will be to make it resemble a periodical like Dragon magazine, with weekly recurring segments and sidebars that focus on things like monster ecologies, character deep dives, and the particularities of the Forgotten Realms and the Sword Coast. This will be in addition to the kind of dissection of encounter design, tactics, and lore that we normally do. The emphasis will always be to single out and answer the question: "What's cool about this?"We will also be pursuing a gimmick, for lack of a better word, that the show playthroughs we do will be divided by morality. Kole will be playing a real saint, a paragon of good, and Gary will be indulging in every form of evil crapulence available to him.Baldur's Gate III being the expansive and generous miracle that it is, it will take a long time to cover. When we finish, if this show gets traction and it feels like there's demand (and interest on our part) we might continue onward to talk about other games in the setting. Possibly including going back to the other Baldur's Gate games, or even returning to Planescape: Torment to do a season on that setting and its factions.There are all kinds of possibilities.Knock-On EffectsThere are some details to this rollout and how it will affect both Bonfireside Chat and Watch Out for Fireballs!, so check out the points below.What's happening with Bonfireside Chat?Bonfireside Chat will become a seasonal show. This means when FromSoft puts out new content that fits our format, the show will resume at the $5 tier just like before. The current run will continue through the Elden Ring miscellanea (soundtrack, cut content, mods, etc.).When Shadows of the Erdtree comes out, we will do however many episodes it takes to cover that at the quality and level of thoroughness you've come to expect.We understand this might not be welcome news for people who are here for Souls and only Souls. But switching our attention to Baldur's Gate III and really giving our all to something we know we'll be enthusiastic about will make a better show than stringing BSC along by taking gambles on increasingly obscure Soulslikes.Where will Soulslikes be covered?When a Soulslike comes along that we're super excited to cover, we will cover it on Watch Out for Fireballs! To that end, we're pre-announcing that in January we will be covering Blasphemous II on that show.There are several reasons we're doing this, but the primary one is that Soulslikes commonplace now in a way that they weren't back when something like Lords of the Fallen (the old one) came out. They can be analyzed in the context of a broader range of games, not just on a specialty show. Additionally, non-From Soulslikes don't usually warrant more than the WOFF! level of zoom.What of Winter PCRPG Month?Fans of WOFF! know that every December we pick a PC-style RPG and camp out on it for the whole month. Real Lich Hours could be seen as an eternal PCRPG Winter, but we don't want to stop covering those on Watch Out for Fireballs!.We will instead be focusing on more games from the genre that can be covered in an episode or two, similar to how we've recently been handling the Summer Console RPG for a while. Mammoth games might still be considered, we're just winging it like always.ConclusionWe are currently working on getting official art and music for the show, and doing prepping and playing so we can structure the launch and really hit the ground running. Keep an ear out for more announcements!

Bet you were wondering what Mario tastes like in person!

Hey folks, this is a quick announcement that's also a bummer.Earlier in the year we'd said that we planned to return to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. We submitted a proposal for our panel, and waited, and waited, and waited... only to learn just recently that we'd been rejected.Without doing a live panel it doesn't make sense for us to spend the money and time to make an appearance at the show. We apologize sincerely if you'd already made plans to attend... Gary will still be around, and it's still a fun show to attend (even if just to see the Retronauts, who will be doing a panel this year).In the podcast episode attached to this post we talk about what we asked for, and what our plans for live appearances will be. In short, we're looking at attending other shows in other parts of the country. So if you know of any video game expos or conferences, let us know about them, but more importantly, ASK THEM TO BOOK US. Reaching out on social media makes a difference, for real.We are also looking at doing another Duckfest, if that ends up making sense.This is a little rough because obviously we have very normal brains and aren't sensitive to rejection at all. But we soldier on, and are grateful for all of your support, which makes these ups and downs easier to weather.Thanks!Kole

Carmelo said your face looks like a clock.