Social media has provided something no other service has since its inception: a platform upon which anyone with an internet connection and access to a browser may share their infinitely shitty opinions. Did you know there are some people who only read dialogue? I did not know this. But thanks to social media, I now know! And now, so do you. Did you know some people read first-person POV in a literal sense, as in they get upset if the narrator acts different to what they would if they were the ones in the story? Then there are the people who whine about too much description, not enough description, too big words, too complex sentence structures, narratives written above a third grade reading level … the list goes on, and it gets ever more fucking stupid the deeper into the list you get. Social media has unleashed levels of stupidity most of us were not prepared for. And thanks to social media’s diminishing returns when it comes to attention span, this shit will only get worse.

But you’re not any of those kinds of readers, are you? Of course not. You are refined. You are intelligent. You kind of have to be, because there is nothing here written at a third-grade reading level. Hence why you can recognize how fucking stupid the examples I described are. It’s preposterous that people are fucking incapable of educating themselves and learning to become better readers.

But I digress. You are here, and I am excited that you are here, and I hope you enjoy the features and attractions I have prepared for you in this edition. Isabelle and Edgar have to make sense of space craft that’s somehow landed underground. There is danger in the Damage Factory, and it’s up to a field operative to figure it out. Classic horror brings us a feature filled with multiple turns of vengeance. And we’re still parked in the lot, waiting for the damn plane in with the bus driver and the other passengers.

^{As a final thought, I want to point out that not a single word of this edition—nor any prior—whether expository or narrative (read: editorial content or stories) has been written with the use of AI. I now feel it entirely necessary to state this fact since AI has become prevalent in a number of ways across society, and I want to reassure you, my dearest guest, that what you consume here is all dreamed up by a human—me—and created by hand, the old fashioned way. Enjoy it as you like, though if you are inclined to attempt to feed my work to any AI model or platform, then I curse you with coffee that will always be either not hot enough, or not cold enough, nothing but red lights when you are in a hurry, and as miserable a death as can be called down upon you. If you don’t feed my work to AI, you can ignore all of that.}

Let’s get into it →

This week was spent working on more Conglomerate stuff! Wow some of this feel like it’s taking forever, and I’m realizing it might: there’s just so much to create and settle before diving into the documentation around The Maw. As much as I would like to jump the gun, write the docs, prep the story, then ship it, I must bide my time and do it correctly if I don’t want to be stuck working over half-baked decisions and systems when it comes to write the next story. There are already a number of major revisions Bus Driver will undergo in order to align properly with the world that is being built beneath it, to support it. I am not interested in doing this repeatedly, so the slow and difficult work takes priority. Regardless, The Maw is coming, and so is Bus Driver, so stay tuned!