The late 2022 Twitter fiascochuro¹ necessitated the creation of a socials post detailing where you might find me on the various social media platforms. Here we go!

howardtayler.com
schlockmercenary.com
twitch.tv/howardtayler
post.news/howardtayler
tumblr.com/howardtayler
twitter.com/howardtayler
dice.camp/@howardtayler
youtube.com/howardtayler
instagram.com/howardvtayler
patreon.com/schlockmercenary
kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler

These were sorted in order of URL length, rather than in order of preference, or priority, or anything like that.

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¹ I totally made this word up. I think “fiascochuro” would have meant “darkness in a bottle” in old Italian, but since “fiasco” kind of means “disaster” these days, my word probably means “dark disaster,” or maybe “a bottle of dark disaster” if we push the envelope a bit.

If you’re looking for a starting point for Schlock Mercenary, we recommend starting with Book 10, The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse.

“I bet I can turn this tank into a longshoreman…”
Their first job for their new employers is a glorified delivery run, and when things go wrong Tagon’s Toughs can honestly point at the mess they did not make and say “this was not our fault.”
As with any public mess, however, it only gets messier as it gets more public, and a celebrity journalist is looking to pin the blame on someone. Like perhaps the company of violent sociopaths whose job it was to deliver the groceries.

Like all Schlock Mercenary books, Longshoreman of the Apocalypse introduces the key characters and concepts early on so you don’t need to read the previous nine books to catch up. You can if you’d like, though. We’re not the boss of you.

Schlock Mercenary ran daily for twenty years, so the archives are deep. We’d love for you to read all of them, but we do counsel a bit of caution before you dive in.

We’ve launched the Kickstarter for Mandatory Failure: Schlock Mercenary Book 18, and it has already funded.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/howardtayler/mandatory-failure-schlock-mercenary-book-18

Not only have we funded, but we’ve reached some stretch goals, too! Click here to visit the Kickstarter and see the latest news.

The project will run until October 20th of 2023. Back it early to ensure that you don’t miss out on the bonus goodies, and to help us afford even more bonus goodies.

Here’s the Kickstarter link for Mandatory Failure: Schlock Mercenary Book 18.

The project closes this Friday, October 20th, at 5pm Eastern time. I’d love for you to not miss out on it.

If you’ve never purchased a Schlock Mercenary book before, this is a great place to start. Mandatory Failure functions well as a stand-alone story, but it’s also the first book in the capstone trilogy for all of Schlock Mercenary. See, I wrote Books 18, 19, and 20 as a trilogy because that structure helped me keep things focused—no small challenge when wrapping up a story that took me twenty years to write.

Anyway, the Kickstarter… we’ve unlocked some ship coins, and a mission patch, and some desktop wallpapers. If you want any of those (especially the mission patch, which is a Kickstarter Exclusive) you should back the project now, before it closes.

Here’s the link, just in case you scrolled past it…

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/howardtayler/mandatory-failure-schlock-mercenary-book-18

We have a lot going on this year, but most of it isn’t happening here on this site. Yes, some of our plans involve additional content here at schlockmercenary.com, but the biggest plans revolve around finally getting the entire series into print.

I’ll try to do better about posting things here. Until then, you might consider checking out our Discord community server, “Hypernode Connect,” where I’m quite a bit more active. This invite link should be good through January 17th.

(If you miss the window, you can request a fresh link by emailing schlockmercenary@gmail.com.)

It took way too long for us to figure it out, and that figuring is a story unto itself that is too long for this post, but I have Long Covid. The impact can best be summed up thusly: it is a disability, not a disease.

Disease suggests that I might get better. I wouldn’t mind getting better, of course, but as of this writing there’s not only no cure, there’s no consistent treatment, and many medical professionals will mis-diagnose Long Covid, or even deny that it exists.

So, disability. The “disabled” demographic is perhaps the only marginalized minority group that everyone who lives long enough will eventually join. My own disability presents itself much like chronic fatigue (ME/CFS). On some days I’m fine. On others I may find myself light-headed and struggling for breath as if I’d just run a mile when all I’ve done is stand around in the kitchen talking to to the kids.

Please don’t send us your medical advice. That “too long for this post” story begins with two years of visits to specialists wherein we ruled out all of the usual suspects. You may have heard the old aphorism “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” We’ve ruled out the horses, and looking around at the (metaphorical) scenery, we’re not in Kansas anymore, this is the Serengeti.

But I’m not here to ask for help, or to garner sympathy. I’m here by way of explanation: the things I used to do, the things I still WANT to do? I can’t do all of them anymore. I’d love to be creating a daily comic strip and reviewing 1st-run movies on the day they arrive in my local cinema, but those aren’t options for me anymore. The point of this post, which I’ll admit I’ve taken my time getting around to, is to explain what I can do, and what you can expect.

First and foremost: Schlock books in print! This is taking longer than we wanted it to, but we have a plan and we have the ability, and we hope to get books 18, 19, and 20 in print over the course of the next 12 to 18 months.

Seventy Maxims Reprint! This coming Tuesday we’re launching a Backerkit project to reprint the Seventy Maxims books, and as part of that we’ll be doing an all-on-one-page Seventy Maxims poster. Click either of the links above for the pre-launch page.

Using My Powers for Good: I’ll be posting parts lists and instructions for some of the mobility and workplace aids we’ve custom-built for me. Long Covid affects millions of people worldwide, probably tens of millions, and this little platform of mine can be used to make their lives easier.

Reviews of Movies, Games, and More: I can’t offer reviews of new-release cinematic things because I don’t go to the theater anymore, but I do still consume a lot of media, and it’s quite easy for me to write reviews. In fact, the fancy zero-gravity chair I use to keep my heart rate manageable is the same one I’m sitting in while I write this AND while I watch TV, listen to music, and read.

I’m Not Letting This Stop Me: Yes, I’m disabled. I can’t do all the things I used to do, and I can’t do them as quickly, but I can still do quite a bit. So I shall do quite a bit. And this place is where you’ll always be able to find me doing it.

I hope you’ll come back and find me again soon.

I’ve been working on the “Two Chinooks” print, which is one of the deliverables for the Mandatory Failure: Schlock Mercenary Book 18 project, and I’ve found it very relaxing.

Here’s a progress shot.

I haven’t finished painting Rage Chinook’s smoke-cloak, and the background needs a lot of attention once the painting is done, but I’m quite happy with the way this is turning out.

I finished painting the two Chinooks a couple of weeks ago, and have been busy layering stuff behind them for assorted desktop wallpapers and for the promised 8″x10″ print. Absent those layers, this is what the Goddess of Earth, Wind, and Plumbing looks like before and then after her temper-tantrum…

I’d write more about this project, but I have another project to write about, so I’m gonna move on to that update next.

We’re reprinting the Seventy Maxims “defaced” edition, and the crowdfunding project for that wraps up in just under a week.

As part of this project I’m designing two posters, both of which will have all seventy maxims on them. Yesterday I spent a few hours tweaking various text attributes like kerning and quote height, and finished up the two-column version of the poster. It’ll be a 16″x20″ thing, and will look something like this…

If you want to get your hands on one of these posters, perhaps for the wall of your office, or maybe the local kindergarten, jump in on the Backerkit project today. We’ll be printing extras, of course, but backing the project is the only way to ensure that we set one aside for you.

And speaking of Backerkit… this project is an experiment, a stress-test of a new soup-to-nuts crowdfunding service, an alternative to Kickstarter. For several projects we’ve used Backerkit in conjunction with Kickstarter, because Backerkit makes fulfilment easier for complex projects. They’ve been around for a while, and we love working with them.

We still like working with Kickstarter, but it’s good to have an alternative—especially since Kickstarter briefly flirted with adding NFTs to their blockchain infrastructure, sending much of their community scrambling for other options. They’ve backed away from that ledge, at least for now, which makes us happy. Also, we are happy to be trying out a different service. We like having options.

Unsurprisingly, there are a couple of maxims that may apply here:

50: If it only works in exactly the way the manufacturer intended, it is defective.
30: A little trust goes a long way. The less you use, the further you’ll go.

(You, too, can cite maxims as if from memory… all you need is one of these fancy new posters on a wall where you can see it.)

Today’s the final day of (the final hours, at this point) of the Seventy Maxims Reprint project. Here, then is a nice origin story for you, the origin of Maxim 32.

I was signing and sketching at GenCon Indy a decade or so ago when some young men approached the table. They were what a friend of mine likes to call “baby sailors”: relatively new members of the US Navy. One of them said “we have a suggestion for a maxim.”

I smiled. “Let’s hear it.”

“Anything is amphibious if you can fit it into an AAV.”

I chuckled. “That’s pretty good, but the term ‘AAV’ is too specific for Schlock Mercenary use.” Then I went silent, stared off into the distance, and I guess this made everyone uncomfortable because our Booth Captain, Darren, spoke next.

“Shhh… don’t interrupt him. The magic is happening.”

It’s true, I’d been wondering how this US Navy aphorism could be repurposed, but I had expected to be able to mull it over all day. Now, however, Darren had turned it into the promise of performance art. Did I curse silently? Maybe. I don’t remember, because I was panicking.

Still staring into space, trying not to show fear, I dove into the “formulae” for the maxims. I knew that many of the maxims were subversions of existing aphorisms. Several of them formed thematic couplets, like Maxims 2 and 3 (“a sergeant in motion” and “an ordnance tech in motion”) are a great example of this. And Maxim 23, “Anything is air-droppable at least once,” seemed like a good candidate for pairing with what the Navy boys had suggested, especially since “Anything is air-droppable” and “Anything is amphibious” were already pretty close.

All I needed to do was break the amphibious-ness in the same way I’d broken the air-droppability… and I think it was that moment, when I contemplated “breaking” amphibious-ness, when the final text arrived in my head.

“Anything is amphibious if you can get it back out of the water.”

A quick note. The United States Navy exists to keep things DRY. Everything except the hulls, really. The very idea of dropping something into the water that is not already a boat, runs counter to Navy thinking.

So it’s no surprise that those Navy boys were visibly horrified by my subversion of their aphorism. “That’s terrible” one of them said. And then they started to laugh.

And then I wrote Maxim 32 in my notebook, because obviously it was perfect.