Join the new world

Greetings fellow Carbon-based lifeforms (and you silicon jockeys too, I see you). Trekker “the sexiest lizard” Tlumac here to whisper sweet nothings into your ear, or belly button. Your choice really.

I’m just a lizard, standing in front of an eWorld, asking it to love him.



I haven’t been around much. Just enough logins this month to be sure that the 506th still exists and I did not fall into some waking nightmare.

I have been meaning to publish something but had little ambition to do so in the free time I have had. I got a boot in the ass the other day from the 506 discord server where Custer, with visual aids, showed exactly how slow media is right now.

I can’t say that I really know what to write about at the moment. I’m on the 506 ballot for PP, but I do not feel that should be the topic of this article.

So how about I go with something more mundane: a fairly brief summary of the things going on in my life.







I guess I’ll address this in a mostly chronological order. The last 18 months have been pretty crazy for me.

For starters, I do not have permanent housing at the moment (since November 2021). I’ve been kind of sleeping in my buddy’s kitchen/living room. It’s a thing, not a terrible thing, as I have not had to try to sleep in my car or anything. It’s mostly a result of an ongoing situation that I have not been able to resolve involving a cousin and my grandfather’s estate. But it is what it is.

So February 2022 I was in my first car accident as a driver. The other guy hit my passenger rear side, just behind the wheel well. My car ended up with 8000 dollars in repairs, originally quoted at 3400. I think the claim said the other car's estimate was a little over 600 dollars. I got blamed for it, which royally annoyed me, given what happened. But it is life. It did take my insurance rate from roughly equal to half my car payment to a little more than it. I’m on a really tight budget, so that priced me out of car ownership. I sold my car to Carvana. That was a surprisingly easy process. 11/10 would sell my car to them again. Buying a car from them, I, personally, would not do after looking into it further.

That left me stranded in my buddy’s place pretty much 24/7 (rural Maine is rural).

My favorite aunt called me a couple days after my birthday last February and let me know that she was sick. Not fun, especially because I couldn’t actually do anything for her without transportation.

Also last February, one of my cousin’s went into the Navy after several years of trying to get the stars to align. So we’re all pretty proud of him. We had a party, there was no cake.

March through August was pretty slow. I did some minor short stories, some streaming on video games and some other stuff. But the lack of transportation limited me in a number of ways, including providing a wonderful mental block that I loved so freaking much.

I hope I don’t need to add a disclaimer that the last part of that statement was sarcasm, but I am going to add a disclaimer that the previous statement was sarcasm.

In September I finally decided to get to work on shaping one of my writing works into publishable shape. I found an artist and bought a cover, went through and edited it a couple times, had a buddy format it, and published it in late October. So I was pretty proud of myself about that. I have way too much writing I have done over the last twenty years that has never seen the light of day. It was a relief. Now I can always say I have published something.

It’s called Owen’s Girl by A G Hopkins, and is on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

After I published it, I had an interesting conversation with someone who wanted to turn one of my horror short stories into a picture book. I was feeling particularly bad about not seeing my sick aunt (it’d been like three visits over the course of eight months, which is about the number I saw her monthly beforehand). My brain snowballed, and I decided to make a picture book of cats and books for her (because she loves cats and books, or something).

I published that one under the pen name of Tlumac.

It took me a long day (like ten hours) to leave all the necessary skills to make, format, and publish the book to Kindle. Then I bought a copy and shipped it to her.

Then I got to thinking about how I did not hate that process, and I may have gone a little overboard between the end of October and the end of November, and published a large number of picture books of cute things with books.

I did not advertise much for Owen’s Girl or the picture books, and to date, neither is a best seller. I am pretty sure that of the 20+ picture books by Tlumac I put up after the original one I made for my aunt, I have sold six individual books (no repeats), that were not bought by or for family, and those were all between Canada, Mexico, and Germany.

That’s fine by me. I honestly enjoyed the learning process of it more than anything. And it was more productive than doing a great many other things I could have been doing.

November was interesting. One of my uncle’s got married. It was short travel destination wedding. They rented out a bunch of luxury cabins at a mountain entertainment center for the family. So I spent the weekend in a cabin with fourteen members of my family. It was fun though. It was a weekend long good vibes party. I have never seen my uncle so loose and relaxed. My new aunt is awesome. And I am pretty sure that of the 20 cabins on the center’s grounds, all of them were rented by their other guests.

I will not lie. It was the best weekend I have had in a long time.

I did, however, feel super fancy. Most of my family did. None of us are in the wealth bracket to be able to rent out a luxury cabin at a thousand bucks a night. It was a rare treat.

Oh… And there was a FREAKING Poutine Bar at the wedding! I repeat, a poutine bar at the wedding!

I did manage to catch covid immediately after the wedding.

Beginning of December we had a going away party for a different cousin going into the Navy. We had lasagna, like a lot of lasagna. Like so much lasagna that I got sent away with an entire lasagna just for me because of the sheer amount of leftovers.

I later bought a car from the same cousin right before she shipped off. It’s basically the same car I had before, just four years older than the original. So I was mobile again. Yay!

First thing I started to do was hitting the gym.

A couple of months later I am still at it.

Hmm. Uh, Christmas I had Christmas tacos on Eve with some family, and ham with a different set on Day. New years I slept.

Sometime in December my buddy decided he wants to start a YouTube live stream show and wants me to be on it. I had 0 followers on YouTube and no content, so I did not qualify to join a live stream (need 50 followers, apparently). So my buddy went to work on emailing youtube and requested special host status (or some other Google witchery) and got approved a couple weeks ago. So now I can join his stream with my newly risen 4 current followers (I know, I am all baller now, with those followers, who are ABSOLUTE legends for following me).

Our first topic is going to be a polite and intellectual conversation about which cyptid is more likely: LOAB or Bigfoot.

I almost wrote that with a straight face.

We just decided the topic and are taking a week or two to set up our viewpoints and research the topics more in depth so we do not sound completely inept.

It will be a return to the podcast narrative for me. While I’ve done some video game streams in the last few years, I haven’t done anything halfway serious since I used to be on the Fed Radio show regularly back in 2014 and 2015.

My YouTube is @TrekkerTlumac (which has no content of its own yet and a ton of playlists of things I find interesting). Or if you want to see gameplay without any sound but the game itself, my gaming channel is @newnamepending (full disclosure, no new name is pending)

It should be fun. What I really want to do is get some videos up about other stuff that interests me, like science, science fiction, fantasy, weird history, cryptids, and just bizarre stuff. Meh. Maybe I’ll actually start it this year.

I get too excited about new ideas.

Let’s see, that brings us up to January and early February. Uh, I started playing a TTRPG with a couple friends on Roll20.net. It’s a game called Dungeon Crawler Classics. It’s heavily based on Gygax’s original vision for 1st edition DnD and influences that aided in the creation of it. It’s been fun so far, and our DM is doing great.

Hmm. What else. Ah, yeah. I just had my birthday too. I celebrated by shopping for food and going to the gym. And that essentially covers my last year or so.

If you read this long, thanks for putting up with the lightly structured ramble that is my off the cuff and impromptu writing.












And now time for the obligatory real-life history plug: If you are at all interested in the real-life namesakes of the party and the MU, I encourage you to read up about the 506 Infantry Regiment and its legendary E Company. To get you started, I have included the wiki links to both below.



Here’s the 506th
Here’s E Company


I find so many things endlessly fascinating (it’s one of my many faults) and history (near and dear, to ancient and largely forgotten) interests me on so many levels. History gets straight up wild and is sometimes beyond belief. Just go Google Audie Murphy or Jack Churchill or Aimo Koivunen. And they are all from WW2.

Are some accounts of their exploits exaggerated? Probably. I would wager that some of the accounts are also underplayed, since history is a fickle business. Still, it makes for some entertaining and, at times, inspiring reading. It gives us a sense of heroes and heroic feats have been possible in the past, so why can’t they still be.

And that, more than many other things, is what interests me. The liberties taken are par for the course. You’d be hard pressed to find any lasting history that is not highly colored to one means or another. Heck, we can’t even agree on what’s happening in the present, what makes us believe that we are the first people to ever not agree with the narrative of history as we experience it?

At least the feats and exploits of the soldiers from the Greatest Generation and those immediately adjacent enough to serve in either of the great wars are likely to be a bit more accurate than some of the other things presented as “having happened” (I’m looking at you, Netflix).

That said, I am absolutely going to go watch “Cocaine Bear” in theaters in a couple weeks and love every highly exaggerated minute of it.




Until next time,
Trekker SpanksALot Tlumac