#i think donnie was kind of boring in some of the older versions so for him to have this snarky little goblin energy makes me chuckle

[veearrifarrariboom]

Got bored in class here’s a little Captainx2 but bad ending where the go back in time. You know the drill.

“-And you're sure he’s not some alien clone or something??”

Their minds started to stir at the muffled noises around them. It sounded like talking? But they weren't too sure. Maybe they just slept in again, or…did something happen? He knows that he should’ve been more quick in getting up but they felt so drowsy. Leo thought about taking a bit longer laying down in the surprisingly comfortable bed, but against his will their eyes slowly opened. It was all blurry, there was light, he squinted, he could make out a group with bright colors around their head, then he saw a blurry figure coming closer to him. His vision cleared at the figure.

“Casey…?”

“Sensei! You're awake!”

With the sound of his voice to reassure him Casey was actually there, he started to feel a strong sadness but also pride built up in him.

“Casey!”

He lunged off the bed ignoring the stinging at their side and engulfed the boy in a hug, patting his hair with their non metal hand.

“Casey I thought I’d never see you again…” Tears began to sting their left eye.

“I know I thought you were…but you're here! You're really here!”

“I’m here Casey, we're here.”

After a few more seconds of their tearful hug someone gave a loud-obviously fake- cough. They looked up from Casey's shoulder to the group of familiar faces all with color coded bandanas, The younger versions of their brothers and themselves. They were so happy to see Casey again that they forgot where they were, or when they were- how did they even get here? The resistance failed -Mikey… -time gateway -the laser… -how are we even alive? - how did we go back in time? -Maybe Mikey cast some spell or somethin’ -He never told us he had a spell to do anything like that -Maybe- There was another fake cough and they were snapped back to the present -past? -focus -sorry!

“Ah um- I’m sorry -um Hi” Leo said with his hand still on Casey's shoulder. Terrible opening -well they caught us off guard!

“Nice ta meet you?” They put their metal hand out in front of them. I mean technically we're not meeting them -Well what else am I supposed to say Leo? Nice ta ‘technically’ meet ya? -I don't know! The younger turtles glanced at each other and started pushing at each other. They kept squabbling and pushing until Raph was pushed in front. Do we really look that bad???

“Uh nice ta meet ya...older…Leo..?” He shook their hand with a nervous smile.

Leo? They looked confused and turned to Casey,

“Casey, did you tell them?”

“Tell them what?”

“About Raph…and the whole situation?”

“Oh! Right! um well… it never really came up..? I’m so sorry, Senseis!” He apologized with his hands together and bowed his head, it was kind of funny to them.

“It’s alright kid.” They patted the boy's head. That just means we get to wow some suspicious teens.

“Tell us about what…?” Younger Leo said, squinting his eyes.

The older double stood up to their full height which was equal to the younger Raph’s.

“Alright, you guessed half right on who I am…” Oh brother, they all got their hands close to their weapons -except for Casey, he looked like an excited puppy.

“I am Leo.” He said left hand over his chest. On his right arm, red ninpo started to flare up and twirled above until it took on a huge transparent form.

“And I’m Raph!” He said flexing one arm.

“Raph!!??” The younger turtles all said in unison, jaws dropped. The pair started to laugh at their amusing reaction -maybe a little hard as their side struck them with a sharp pain. Raph’s ninpo dissipated and they were hunched over hands on their bandaged wound. Casey quickly gave them support.

“Get him back to bed, not even a few minutes and he’s already exerted himself.” Doctor Donnie ordered and then they were set back in bed, their side throbbing. Sorry, maybe using my ninpo wasn’t a good idea.. -it’s fine. Even trying to think was hard to do. They saw Donnie dropping something into a tube that they hadn’t realized was attached to their arm.

“Donnie wait! Don’t put him to sleep yet, I have so many questions!!” Mikey was pulling on Donnie’s arm. The pain started to dull and everything became fuzzy again until there wasn’t anything.

[kursedmayo]

I find it really funny how some people put Future Donnie (or literally like. Any version of Donnie that is older than canon even if slightly) into this sort of pedestal since hes so smart and also really cool and sorta insane hes incredible and silly and funny and kinda (twirls hair and giggles) so this got me thinking. Donnie x Reader fic where the Reader is just depressed because they cant possibly be anywhere near donnies league,, theyll just settle for being his friend or something and each one of his brothers are all like "what nooo hes not that cool hes a kind of a loser actually he eat stuff off the floor even if he says its gross and groans like an old man when he gets up from his seat and snacks on coffee beans when he got too lazy to make coffee wdym hes too cool for you?? just shoot ur shot its aight" and everytime they try to bring him to the lair and try to catch Donnie doing something dumb to show them that hes actually just some guy he does something that is definitely not Some Guy Things. Like build a fucking Super Collider. Or accidently cure Cancer. Just because hes bored or something. How the hell do you convince a friend who has a crush on your smart dumbass of a brother that hes not that cool when he keeps doing that shit

[angelpuns]

Small story!! (Because I was bored and love kid Leo au)

It was already night time and for the first time, Leo was meant to sleep in a new, unknown strange place. Away from his home. The older clone version of his brothers had gave him a tour through the "lair". Everything was different, nothing to do with his home he ever knew. This lair was way bigger, the room were train cars and not the room sewer tunnels. The projector room was wider... not to mention dad's old chair... all he knew was no more to see around. It wasn't even in the same location; he could easily be lost... again.

That made Leo sad. He didn't like it, he didn't want to be there. He wanted all to be just a dream, he wanted to cry, but actually he was really tired, his eyes were tired. But he can't let his guard down. This clones might experiment in his sleep. Never gonna happen. Not on his watch.

Clone Mikey had suggested a turtle pile. That would make their job easier, right? Well they wrong, Leo wasn't dumb, he won't be fooled by no clone.

Raph guide to his train car, his room. It was kind of obvious by the color coded. Leo tried to climb to the bed, he was to small to do without help. He struggled until Raph gave him little boost.

Raph didn't look so sure to let him sleep alone, but Leo didn't seem to fully trust him yet. He thought it'll be better to give him some time to make him feel more comfortable around them.

After everyone went to sleep; after a couple hours, our Leo wasn't capable of sleeping. Was it because he didn't felt sure about the evil clones? Or was it the bed? Maybe not comfy enough like his own bed. His bed was way better. No. It wasn't something, it was someone. He never sleep alone. He was missing his twin brother... that made Leo finally cried. He cried for a few minutes... until an idea pass through his mind. Maybe clones have heavy sleep, maybe they won't feel his presence. He will wake up before they do and they never know what happened.

Leo climbed down slowly, it was easy peasy limon squeezy. He silently like the great ninja he was went to evil clone Donnie's lab. It appeared to be empty. That's weird, where does he charge his batteries if it wasn't in his evil villain lab-ortory?

Leo continued his search he went to wagon next to the lab. Eorika! or what its said... he found the Donnie not-donnie. Leo was nervous to continue with his plan, but he was really tired. He needed sleep.

Next morning Donnie never felt this tired like to sleep in his bed, there was too much to think and to much to do, and all that made him exhausted. A nice smell reached to his snoot, meaning that Angelo was already up and cooking something delicious, also meaning that if he don't get up on his own, he'll have a nice early visit from Dr. Delicate touch and nobody wants that. Donnie tried to get up but he felt a little extra weight on his back (Donnie alway sleeps face down) he turn his neck as he could and could reach to see that it was none other than Leo sleeping peacefully on top of Donnie shell. Kinda looked like a cat, and if so, there was a sacred rule: you can't move or you'll wake him up. This reminded him when they were both toddlers, Leo always slept on top of him, both were comfy like that. There was never a single night didn't sleep together... until they got their own seperate rooms, nothing was the same, their special relationship also changed, they felt more distant. Donnie's fond smile vanished. He gave another look to Leo who still was sleeping. Donnie rested his head on the pillow and decided to sleep for few more minutes until Leo was awake. He didn't want this little moment to finish so soon. They stayed like that until Mikey went looking for them. Of course, Leo escaped running from the room to his. But still went to enjoy breakfast with the wrong made copy of his brothers. Both Leo and Donnie slept very well that night. 💜💙

Love you Angel!!!!

-🌸

WAGHGGHHHHHH I READ THIS LIKE 4 TIMES

OMGKMGOMGOK OK SO MUVH TO TALK ABOUT CAUSE WAAAAAAAA

Leo being like ' this bed is just not as comfy as mine: WAAAAAAAAA CAUSE THATS HONESTLY AN EXCUSE HE WOULD MAKE

ALSL ALSO ALSO THE IDEA THAT HE THINKS DONNIE NEEDS TO CHARGE HIS BATTERIES IS SO CUTE AND I WANNA DRAW IT SO BAAAAAAAAAADDDDDD

AND AND AND DONNIE'S SNOOT ;-; WAAAAA

Anyway this is so so so cute I read it so many times ;-;

[bluewithpurplepolkadots]

One thing I really liked about the ROTTMNT movie is that it had a version of Casey Jones who was closer to a different turtle than usual (Leonardo to Casey Jones rather than Raphael).

So a part of me wondered about that.

Usually a human will be closer or at least interact more with a turtle: Karai is mostly with Leo; and April with Donnie but what if there were versions which further mixed things up like ROTTMNT did? So I came up with these versions of the turtles and humans being closer/with their favourite turtle instead being:

Leonardo and April

Raphael and Irma

Donatello and Karai

Michelangelo and Casey

Leo and April:

Leonardo is the oldest and the leader like in most incarnations. It’s in more recent years put a wall between him and his brothers he doesn’t care for. As well as the expectation of being ‘a good example’ all the time. At first kind of worries he’s boring too and just feels so dang lonely all the time.

April, a year older than him, is an only child and at one stage was on track to being a doctor/lawyer/something equally high societally praised and snapped one day from the pressure. It resulted in a juvenile record, possibly dashing chances at the future her parents wanted and being unsure of what she herself wants. She was sent to New York to stay with relatives away from her more rural part of the state for a new start. She’s unsure of what she wants in life and what to do. She’s smart but hated the expectations placed on her and knows the doctor/lawyer track wasn’t it for her. She also hates how other kids in school seem to think they know her because of her past.

After the classic case of being saved by the turtles she decided she wants to learn to defend herself better and Leo pretty much takes charge of her beginning training when asked: causing them to grow closer. April in addition helps Leo to chill because she sees the signs of a potential future snap all too well. Together she introduces him to the mystic art of trashy detective movies and dance costume parties and ignoring that annoying part of your brain that isn’t in your best interest about having to be perfect.

Their mutual interest in detectives does point April in the classic arc of becoming an investigative reporter along with occasional mysterious camera man Leo who never appears on screen both while using their ninja skills.

Kind of the incarnation of that one blog post where you are only truly best friends if people think or are unsure if you’re dating but there is never in fact any kind of confirmation for or against this for the audience or anyone else. They just hug a lot. And maybe hold hands. Don’t worry about it. (If I was an official creator I’d fully expect to be murdered by both shippers and anti shippers because of it).

April paints Leo’s nails like all the time though Mikey likes his done too.

Raphael and Irma

Irma usually interacted most with Donatello in the 80s show but instead in this version interacts most with angry hothead Raphael (and isn’t a Kraang bot like 2012).

Kind of slightly based on my rewrite of 2012 Irma in that she is a computer expert.

Becomes friends through April: who she becomes friends with because if you need dirt, she’s got it. Because ‘Honestly April the things I know about these other kids? Your record is nothing. They need to get over themselves’

Irma in personality is kind of like Pinkie Pie on pixie sticks in this version however which Raphael finds very very annoying at first: but eventually has some respect for her intimidation skills without any kind of physical prowess (I know your internet history is a phrase which often strikes terror).

They play video games a lot as an outlet for Raphs competitive streak and rage and Irma likes to troll him: a lot. In fact they find out they know each other through online co-op games before they even met. It’s kind of like exposure therapy in a sense. They also watch horrible horrible romantic soaps/movies and argue about shipping but it becomes more like fun than anything.

Unfortunately Irma (having a somewhat romantic streak) does catch feelings for him which are unreturned: but they work through it eventually. They still remain friends.

Donatello and Karai

Time for some angst! Donatello doesn’t like humans very much in this version to begin with. He did once. He thought they were amazing and the things they made were amazing. (And still begrudgingly agrees with the latter).

But as a seven year old he one day dragged Mikey out of the sewers without permission and had a very traumatic experience with regards horrible human teenagers (Mikey was also badly hurt and it basically had a crying Donnie over a knocked out Mikey until Splinter saved them). As a result does not care for them. At all. Is unsure of April and rebuffs Irma despite her computer skills. And still feels guilt for the incident even if Mikey seems to have moved on completely.

Donatello steals a lot. He kind of has to anyway in order to get the stuff he’s made but it does become a point of contention with him and Leo (more for the risks really but it gets Donnies hackles up, Raphael and Mike kind of sweat when it comes up).

Karai, while also being human doesn’t seem to care for other humans either. (Interesting). Eventually they sort of have an ally ship where they sometimes are breaking into the same places and it’s kind of like in their best interest for neither of them to be caught. Temporary ally ships which continue to run into each other.

They also become deeply deeply emo together and talk garbage about humanity a lot. It’s… interesting but in pretending they don’t care together they become a sort of friends. Donnie is now friends with a human. Whoops.

Karai isnt related to the turtles or Splinter but is either a direct clone of Tang Shen or Shredder’s daughter from the deranged man combining their DNA in a lab without Tang Shen knowing (whichever is creepier and more deranged sounding honestly).

Karai takes a lot of risks and eventually this disturbs even Donatello: and the truth is because of faulty equipment in her creation it’s possible she won’t see 20 and it terrifies her. Donatello now caring for a human wants to solve this. Karai eventually risks her life saving the one person she cares about against her father.

Mikey and Casey

A break from the angst for some simple dudes.

The ultimate ‘broooooo’ coupling with Raph occasionally asking if they are stoned or something because Jesus Christ.

Casey does do his classic run around in a hockey mask and Mikey occasionally knows the terror of having to be the responsible one. Casey just kind of… showed up one day. On the couch eating with Mikey. No explanation. He was just there. Irma and April are equally as weirded out by this as Leo and Raph but kind of have to throw up their hands at it. Casey Jones just happens sometimes.

Like April and Leo initially seem just like very close friends who cuddle but eventually turn out to be a couple with Jones now having three older bros and sisters give him the shovel talk. (Irma who also has a soft spot for Mikey is the one to actually make him terrified).

Splinter is very very tired.

[hexavox]

if u dont like rise donnie then i think ur wrong and i dont like u

( im kidding i can respect ur opinion even if its wrong )

[goddes-arab]

You can read the AO3 version here if you prefer. if not, keep reading.

Not So Different [TMNT 2012 & ROTTMNT 2018 crossover]

They didn't get along at first, but it wasn’t their fault! It's not like they didn't try or anything but...

Who we're they kidding? They hadn't tried talking with each other since they got into this whole situation. Not really.

They didn’t hate or dislike the other, it was just that... They didn’t have anything in common, which was strange because they were technically still the same person.

With the others it was more easy to see the similarities, the Mikeys were rays of sunshine and the heart of the family, the Donnies were both pretty sarcastic and genius, y, and although a bit more difficult to see, the Raphs had a strong kind of passion to protect the family, with some anger issues, thought the younger Raph knew to direct it to their enemies and objects better.

But them? Yeah... Better each one their way.

Both were asked about it when the others noticed they were the ones who spent the lesser time with the other, it was quite clear they were avoiding each other.

—I don’t know what to tell ya bro, maybe we just don’t click. He seems kinda boring, not gonna lie. Besides, I’m not really sure if he even likes me.

—I don’t know him enough to tell you something like that. He seems kinda annoying, to be honest. Besides, I’m not really sure if he likes me.

So they continued without talking to the other. The others seemed a little put off with the behaviour but otherwise they didn’t do anything about it, they all had seen how different they were and weren’t sure if trying to get them together would be a good idea, so they left it like that.

But with time, things were starting to change a little, well, not really, they just started noticing things about the other that they didn’t think would be possible.

-Do you meditate too? –asked Leonardo to his younger counterpart, it didn’t seem possible with how hyperactive seemed the other, but it wasn’t a bad surprise, it was kinda nice to know someone else in the family meditates.

-Of course! Gotta clear my head from time to time, y’know? It’s relaxing. Couldn’t convince my brothers to do it too, though.

-Same, but it wasn’t a big deal, I know it’s just not their thing.

-Yeah, hey, I have this cool meditation thing in my room that I always forgot the name of and I know a place where it’s really peaceful, wanna hang out there?

-Sure, lead the way.

Or on other ocassions.

-You don’t know Jupiter Jim?! It’s like, the best thing ever. Absolutely nothing compares.

-I wouldn’t be so sure, Space Heroes it’s the best.

-Nuh-huh, it can’t be that good.

-Yes it can.

-Wanna bet?

-Let’s just watch them and decide which is superior.

-It’s on.

So they watched everything and sure enough, both loved every. second. of. it. Why would anyone expect different? They were both space fiction fanboys. But well, at least now could talk each other ear off about it. They were quite happy afterwards. And they even learned that Leonardo had quite the funny side (Nardo words), but didn’t express it as much as Leo, but that was alright, while they were together the slider would make sure his older counterpart could be as funny as he wanted and stayed relaxed. Can’t be a stick in the mud if you are a Leo, and all that jazz.

They weren’t the same person and were the same person at the same time, they had their differences and their similarities. And that was alright, because they were Leonardo, a son and a brother and a friend and their own self, and that was enough.

[spynotebook]

GIF

If you grew up on the internet, Homestar Runner represents a time when the world wide web felt a little bit smaller. It was hilariously sarcastic, but unlike the rest of the Flash landscape in the early 2000s, Homestar was never hateful or cheap.

Matt and Mike Chapman spent a childhood cutting up Super 8 tape, writing amateur comic books, and absorbing every nugget of disposable pop culture they could get their hands on. Years later, they would distil their fascination with the fringe edges of Americana into their very own online cartoon show. Homestar Runner is a place of screwball public access television, byzantine parallel universes, and miles-deep references to sports, music, video games, and everything else they loved. The Chapmans may have chided the stupidity of cultural debris, but they still loved it.

Today, we carry infinity in our pockets and bounce selfies off of satellites. But, in the early 2000s, there was something kind of remote about a homemade Flash animation site. The internet still felt like a secret, and in a moment where it’s hard to feel hopeful about the cyberspace coursing through humanity’s veins, returning to Homestar Runner offers a shred of optimism.

In recent years, Matt and Mike Chapman parlayed the legacy of Homestar Runner into a number of rewarding (and lucrative) jobs at Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, making television shows like Yo Gabba Gabba!, Gravity Falls, and most recently, Two More Eggs. The era of the weekly Strong Bad email is in the past, but the brothers still make time to update the site when their busy lives afford them the time. We called up the Chapmans, and asked them to tell us the story of Homestar Runner from start to finish.

A Foundation of Snark

The Chapmans’ spend their early years learning how to make fun of things and amassing decades of pop culture references in a very short time.

Mike Chapman: We were the youngest of five kids. We grew up in the ‘80s and I think a lot of our humor sort of developed from taking some terrible Atlanta commercial and exaggerating part of it, and repeating it 5,000 times to make a joke. It wasn’t something funny, but the five of us made it funny.

Matt Chapman: We had the collective knowledge of four other siblings, like pop culture knowledge including the ‘60s and ‘70s. So from early on we had stuff. I started watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 from a young age, and I would get jokes because I’d be like, “Oh my brother has been saying that since I was a little kid! I know it’s from some old bubble gum commercial that isn’t around anymore!”

Mike: Our older brother Donny taught us how to be snarky, before we even knew what it meant or how to use that type of humor. I remember him watching The Love Boat just to make fun of it. He did not like The Love Boat at all. He would just sit there and rag on everybody the whole time. He thought it was hilarious. He had this kid’s book called The Daddy Book, a very ‘70s kid’s picture book, and it was just a nice book about different dads. “Dads, they’re all different! They do different things! They look different!” And he would go through it and add his own commentary, where the dads would do horrible things to the kids, and it was really awful. I mean, that’s like straight-up a Strong Bad move.

Mike: When the five of us get together we’re gonna reference some dumb commercial from 30 or 40 years ago. I feel like as a big family, it’s almost like a defense mechanism. It makes you stick together and bond more. “Look at that sad guy selling used cars! We’re all better off than that guy!” Or there’s some kid who said something in 1983 that we continue to repeat to this day that would mean nothing to anyone else. I don’t know why we felt so threatened at the time. Apparently, we had to put on this weird rough exterior.

Matt: We’ve tempered it as we’ve gotten older, but it’s probably always been in us to sorta assume everything is gonna suck.

From Kid’s Book to Cartoon

The Chapmans decide to author a tongue-in-cheek homemade children’s book called Homestar Runner as a goof between friends.

Mike: The whole thing came from our friend Jamie who, again, was mimicking a local terrible Atlanta grocery store commercial with one of the Braves in it. He said, like “Homestar runner for the Braves Mike Lemke!” And Matt and I laughed like, “what the hell is a homestar runner?” That was probably in 1995 or something, the phrase was just bouncing around in our head because we thought it was hilarious. One day Craig [Craig Zobel, filmmaker and friend of The Brothers Chaps] and I went to the bookstore because we were bored and we were just looking at kid’s books and were like, “Let’s make a kid’s book.”

Matt: It was like “hey, let’s make one of these! Look at these weird kid’s books! Kid’s books are terrible! Let’s make our own terrible kid’s books!”

Mike: We decided to just use Homestar Runner. We made that his name, and then we drew all the characters that day. In that one day, we came up with Homestar, and Pom Pom, and Strong Bad, and The Cheat, and Strong Mad. They were all created in a roughly two-hour period. The characters hadn’t existed in our head for a long time, and while they’ve changed a bit since then, they were all born at once.

Mike: We didn’t want to publish it. We just made it for ourselves. We probably printed five or 10 copies and gave it to our friends. It wasn’t like “our hopes and dreams depend on Homestar Runner!” But our dad actually sent it out to like 80 publishers without us knowing, and I remember being pissed at him when I found out. I think he got a couple rejection letters. A couple years passed without us doing anything with Homestar when we were in college, so it wasn’t until we started making web cartoons and learned Flash that things took off.

Matt: We were just trying to learn Flash using those characters. Once we had enough stuff we were like “we should put this on a website or whatever.”

Mike: We had Flash tutorial books and I dropped out of grad school for photography and was like, “I gotta learn this web design stuff man! I mean, it’s on the web!”

Matt: I think we intended the cartoons to be similar to early Cartoon Network, like Dexter’s Laboratory or Power Puff Girls. Like, those were kid’s cartoons but anyone could enjoy them. Very early on, in like 2000 or something, we pitched that version of Homestar Runner where it’s like, “every episode there’s a new competition! And Strong Bad’s the bad guy and Homestar’s the good guy!” They passed on that, and we were like “well, let’s keep doing this!” The next cartoons were like, “wouldn’t it be funny if we made this be about the moments in between the competitions?” And so that was the stuff that was funnier, the stuff happening between the plot points, which is hilarious because we hadn’t even established a routine of making cartoons about competitions, we’d made like one.

Mike: A lot of the world-building stuff happened quickly, like the old-timey 1936 version of the characters happened within the first three or four months. We had made like one or two cartoons and were like “we should do old-timey versions!” and soon after that, we were like “we should make anime versions!” The world started building from the get-go.

A Home Run

Without any advertising or publicity, Homestar Runner started to catch on through pure word of mouth, and Matt and Mike Chapman found themselves with truly unique full-time jobs. 

Mike: We started selling our first shirt in 2001. There wasn’t huge demand or anything. I wouldn’t say it had caught on yet.

Matt: I was living in New York at the time and I remember Mike sending me a picture of himself in our shirt, I was very jealous.

Mike: For the first shirt we had, you needed to send a check to our parent’s house. So we sold a few dozen shirts by check only. Our dad was our accountant, so he started reviewing all that stuff. It wasn’t anything we intended to do full time.

Mike: I had a Cartoon Network calendar, and I kept our traffic stats in it. This was early on because shortly after we stopped looking at our stats entirely because we didn’t want that to affect how we made stuff or what we did. But I wrote down how many new visitors we got each day, and I remember hitting 1,000 visitors in a day sometime in 2001 or 2002.

Matt: We started doing a weekly cartoon when I moved back from New York. That’s when we first made Strong Bad Emails. I have to thank Earthlink Corporation for funding a year of Strong Bad Emails. I wouldn’t actually work on them at work, but I’d come into work after having stayed up all night making Strong Bad Emails on a Sunday night. The fact that I was allowed to go into work at 11am instead of 9am definitely contributed to the rise of Homestar.

Matt: Once we started getting angry emails when we were late getting a new cartoon up, I think it hit us that folks were counting on new stuff from us. That’s a cool feeling to know you’re as important as a cup of coffee or morning crossword to some folks. And then definitely when we received our first wedding/dating stories from people that bonded over our cartoons or met because of them and put a Homestar and Marzipan on their wedding cake. That’s nuts! Makes me feel like I should email the ghost of Paul Newman and tell him that my wife and I bonded over Cool Hand Luke!

Mike: In 2003, our dad told Matt to quit his job and do Homestar full-time. This is our financially conservative dad, telling us to quit our jobs to make Flash cartoons.

Matt: Mike and I would collaborate together all the time when we were kids, and when were home for Christmas break we’d always end up making something together, so doing Homestar full-time was really fun - but I remember friends saying “can we come over when you make a cartoon?” And we would be like “okay,” and we’d have a couple beers while we brainstormed an idea, and then it’s like “okay, Mike and I are going to put on headphones for 18 hours now and you’re not going to talk to us anymore until we’re done.” It was super fun, but it could also be hard work, which is also why once we had children and wives it made it a little harder to pull all-nighters and not sleep for three days to make a cartoon.

Matt: The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn’t believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded ‘Working Man’ so I’ll take it!

Matt: I have no idea when our peak was viewership-wise, but 2002-2005 was definitely when we got to go the most nuts creatively. We expanded into weird live action and puppet stuff, CD’s, DVD’s, video games, toys, all kindsa crazy dream-come-true stuff we never thought we’d get to do. But, for me, if you want a more precise moment, I would say February of 2004, when on the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000. I remember specifically thinking, “It’s okay if no one watches another Homestar Runner cartoon or buys another t-shirt now, because today happened.”

“...Never a Real Business Plan.”

By 2010, Matt and Mike were both married with kids and were looking for other jobs in the television industry. They’ve had a hand in a number of acclaimed kid’s shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! Gravity Falls, The Aquabats Super Show, and Wander Over Yonder. Unfortunately, this didn’t leave a lot of time for Homestar Runner.

Mike: We always knew our business model was temporary. Everyday it was like, “We’re on borrowed time here, there’s just no way to make a living off of this, because it’s unsustainable.” We didn’t want to start selling ads, and this was before the era of Kickstarter or Patreon and other ways of artists monetizing directly from their audience. We were just like, “Let’s just do it this way, rather than try to change our business plan,” which was never a real business plan. Our mindset was, “We’re lucky to make money off this in the first place, and if it’s no longer making enough money to not have other jobs, we’ll not worry about it and get another job.” We didn’t to be one of those things that started selling e-cards or whatever.

We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture.

Mike: There [were] definitely people who bought way more shirts than they had any business buying, and it’s great that people felt that way without us having to be like,“Hey guys, we’re having a pledge drive.” It’s just a double-edged sword. Homestar needed to be supported somehow, but you never wanted to come out and say,“Hey, remember the only way we’re able to do this is if you buy a shirt, so buy a shirt!” We’ve always been uncomfortable with that. Our dad suggested adding a button to the end of the cartoons that said “Buy a shirt with Strong Bad on it!” And we were like “No, dad! That’s so lame!”

Matt: We have a property in Homestar called Cheat Commandos, which is basically making fun of old G.I. Joe cartoons. We eventually made Cheat Commandos toys and we wouldn’t even put an ad for the toys in the cartoon. That’s like, part of the joke, why didn’t we just do that and make some money? Like there was someone who told me recently that their favorite thing we ever did was Cheat Commandos, and they had no idea we’d even made toys! Probably a missed opportunity there! If anything we might’ve taken our punk rock status too far.

Mike: We went on hiatus after Matt had his second daughter. Around that time we knew we were going to have to start looking for other jobs, and we really just didn’t know how long it’d be before we could get back to Homestar. Maybe one month, two months, six months. After a certain point it almost became weird to say something about the break. In retrospect, we probably could’ve handled it a little better, but we just didn’t know.

Matt: We didn’t want to believe it either. I didn’t want to come out and say “hey we’re not doing this anymore for a while,” because that sucks! I wanted to be like “yeah we’re gonna make one this week! I swear! We’ll have time this week to make a new Strong Bad Email!” I know we probably bummed people out or lost some people’s respect for not saying anything, but we also wanted the site to be focused on the characters, so it would’ve felt like pulling back the curtain too far to suddenly be like “Hey! We’ve got kids! And it’s hard!” It didn’t seem worth it to be like, “We wrote the Yo Gabba Gabba! Christmas special! That’s why we’re taking a hiatus!”

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Mike: There was also some creative burnout too. We had been doing it for 10 years and we probably stuck to that weekly schedule a little more strictly than we needed to, so we needed a break. It was definitely a slog sometimes. Like Saturday you’re at a friend’s house and it slowly dawns on you that “ah shit, we don’t have an idea for a cartoon.” Even during the hiatus I’d feel weird on the weekends because for 10 years there was this cloud looming over me that I had 20 hours straight of sitting in front of a computer bleary-eyed on Sunday night.

Done Running

On April 1, 2014, a new Homestar Runner cartoon was posted to the site. A few months later, Matt Chapman announced plans to continue the series, and since then they’ve done new Homestar content every couple of months. Right now the brothers are living it Atlanta again, working side by side on the Disney XD show Two More Eggs.

Mike: When we made the April Fool’s cartoon it had been about four years since we put anything on the site. Matt had moved to Los Angeles three years before to work on Gravity Falls and some other Disney stuff. I think he’d just decided that he was moving back to Atlanta, and we knew Homestar was going to make sense for us. The joke of that cartoon was Homestar finally updating his website, which is all dusty and unattended. The process wasn’t quite the same because we weren’t living together, but we pulled an all-nighter for the next one we did. Well, an all-nighter for us now means like staying up til 1am.

Last October, the Homestar Runner gang emerged from obscurity, and now it's the moment we have … Read more Read more

Matt: We really had no idea how many people would care or check back in if we made something new. It was a little scary tiptoeing back into things which is why we made it an April Fool’s cartoon. If nobody cared or everybody hated it, we could just say, “that was part of the joke! See ya in another 10 years!” and disappear. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do that. And even though we’ve only been able to make a few cartoons every year since, people still seem genuinely psyched when we are able to update. Coolest fans ever, man.

Mike: It’s kind of funny how much it feels the same when we make Homestar cartoons today. for I’m still sitting across my brother with my headphones on, working for 12 hours, putting it up in the early morning, and maybe stopping at Waffle House on the way home.

Matt: We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture. We recently did a couple Homestar 20th anniversary live shows here in Atlanta and the response was bigger and farther reaching than we could’ve imagined. A father and son came all the way from Anchorage just to see the show. That blew our minds and made us want to pay for their airfare.

Mike: It was always a very singular creative vision. It’s pretty much just the two of us, and there’s never a moment where one of us writes something and the other one doesn’t agree. Any joke is something either one of us could’ve written. It’s pretty crazy that we have four or five hundred cartoons that are all largely tied together, and it’s nuts that 20 years since making that initial book I’m still talking about it.

Matt: We’ve felt so many times over the years that we are super fortunate, that it can’t get any better, that no matter what else we do, we did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while. Is that a good epitaph, “He did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while?” We always say that we could get jobs making donuts at a grocery store bakery and be totally happy for the rest of our lives since we got to do Homestar. And now we’ve been saying that for over a decade.

Mike: We do Two More Eggs with the exact same process. We do one cartoon a week. We think of it, write it, animate it, and it’s done pretty quickly. I get the same weekly feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Some of the other projects we’ve done force you to think about the same thing for a month, and my brain just doesn’t work that way.

Matt: It’s great to be back working in the same room with my brother, surrounded by the weird junk we hang on our walls, flanked by the wood-paneled television from the basement of our childhood home and a wall of outdated video games and electronics. A few weeks ago we got to spend all day 3D printing a fake action figure and filling it with beef stroganoff for the Walt Disney company. Once you hit that point, I don’t think you’re allowed to complain ever again.

Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego and living in Austin, Texas. He writes about music, video games, professional wrestling, and whatever else interests him. You can find him on Twitter @luke_winkie.

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An Oral History of Homestar Runner, the Internet's Favorite Cartoon

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If you grew up on the internet, Homestar Runner represents a time when the world wide web felt a little bit smaller. It was hilariously sarcastic, but unlike the rest of the Flash landscape in the early 2000s, Homestar was never hateful or cheap.

Matt and Mike Chapman spent a childhood cutting up Super 8 tape, writing amateur comic books, and absorbing every nugget of disposable pop culture they could get their hands on. Years later, they would distil their fascination with the fringe edges of Americana into their very own online cartoon show. Homestar Runner is a place of screwball public access television, byzantine parallel universes, and miles-deep references to sports, music, video games, and everything else they loved. The Chapmans may have chided the stupidity of cultural debris, but they still loved it.

Today, we carry infinity in our pockets and bounce selfies off of satellites. But, in the early 2000s, there was something kind of remote about a homemade Flash animation site. The internet still felt like a secret, and in a moment where it’s hard to feel hopeful about the cyberspace coursing through humanity’s veins, returning to Homestar Runner offers a shred of optimism.

In recent years, Matt and Mike Chapman parlayed the legacy of Homestar Runner into a number of rewarding (and lucrative) jobs at Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, making television shows like Yo Gabba Gabba!, Gravity Falls, and most recently, Two More Eggs. The era of the weekly Strong Bad email is in the past, but the brothers still make time to update the site when their busy lives afford them the time. We called up the Chapmans, and asked them to tell us the story of Homestar Runner from start to finish.

A Foundation of Snark

The Chapmans’ spend their early years learning how to make fun of things and amassing decades of pop culture references in a very short time.

Mike Chapman: We were the youngest of five kids. We grew up in the ‘80s and I think a lot of our humor sort of developed from taking some terrible Atlanta commercial and exaggerating part of it, and repeating it 5,000 times to make a joke. It wasn’t something funny, but the five of us made it funny.

Matt Chapman: We had the collective knowledge of four other siblings, like pop culture knowledge including the ‘60s and ‘70s. So from early on we had stuff. I started watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 from a young age, and I would get jokes because I’d be like, “Oh my brother has been saying that since I was a little kid! I know it’s from some old bubble gum commercial that isn’t around anymore!”

Mike: Our older brother Donny taught us how to be snarky, before we even knew what it meant or how to use that type of humor. I remember him watching The Love Boat just to make fun of it. He did not like The Love Boat at all. He would just sit there and rag on everybody the whole time. He thought it was hilarious. He had this kid’s book called The Daddy Book, a very ‘70s kid’s picture book, and it was just a nice book about different dads. “Dads, they’re all different! They do different things! They look different!” And he would go through it and add his own commentary, where the dads would do horrible things to the kids, and it was really awful. I mean, that’s like straight-up a Strong Bad move.

Mike: When the five of us get together we’re gonna reference some dumb commercial from 30 or 40 years ago. I feel like as a big family, it’s almost like a defense mechanism. It makes you stick together and bond more. “Look at that sad guy selling used cars! We’re all better off than that guy!” Or there’s some kid who said something in 1983 that we continue to repeat to this day that would mean nothing to anyone else. I don’t know why we felt so threatened at the time. Apparently, we had to put on this weird rough exterior.

Matt: We’ve tempered it as we’ve gotten older, but it’s probably always been in us to sorta assume everything is gonna suck.

From Kid’s Book to Cartoon

The Chapmans decide to author a tongue-in-cheek homemade children’s book called Homestar Runner as a goof between friends.

Mike: The whole thing came from our friend Jamie who, again, was mimicking a local terrible Atlanta grocery store commercial with one of the Braves in it. He said, like “Homestar runner for the Braves Mike Lemke!” And Matt and I laughed like, “what the hell is a homestar runner?” That was probably in 1995 or something, the phrase was just bouncing around in our head because we thought it was hilarious. One day Craig [Craig Zobel, filmmaker and friend of The Brothers Chaps] and I went to the bookstore because we were bored and we were just looking at kid’s books and were like, “Let’s make a kid’s book.”

Matt: It was like “hey, let’s make one of these! Look at these weird kid’s books! Kid’s books are terrible! Let’s make our own terrible kid’s books!”

Mike: We decided to just use Homestar Runner. We made that his name, and then we drew all the characters that day. In that one day, we came up with Homestar, and Pom Pom, and Strong Bad, and The Cheat, and Strong Mad. They were all created in a roughly two-hour period. The characters hadn’t existed in our head for a long time, and while they’ve changed a bit since then, they were all born at once.

Mike: We didn’t want to publish it. We just made it for ourselves. We probably printed five or 10 copies and gave it to our friends. It wasn’t like “our hopes and dreams depend on Homestar Runner!” But our dad actually sent it out to like 80 publishers without us knowing, and I remember being pissed at him when I found out. I think he got a couple rejection letters. A couple years passed without us doing anything with Homestar when we were in college, so it wasn’t until we started making web cartoons and learned Flash that things took off.

Matt: We were just trying to learn Flash using those characters. Once we had enough stuff we were like “we should put this on a website or whatever.”

Mike: We had Flash tutorial books and I dropped out of grad school for photography and was like, “I gotta learn this web design stuff man! I mean, it’s on the web!”

Matt: I think we intended the cartoons to be similar to early Cartoon Network, like Dexter’s Laboratory or Power Puff Girls. Like, those were kid’s cartoons but anyone could enjoy them. Very early on, in like 2000 or something, we pitched that version of Homestar Runner where it’s like, “every episode there’s a new competition! And Strong Bad’s the bad guy and Homestar’s the good guy!” They passed on that, and we were like “well, let’s keep doing this!” The next cartoons were like, “wouldn’t it be funny if we made this be about the moments in between the competitions?” And so that was the stuff that was funnier, the stuff happening between the plot points, which is hilarious because we hadn’t even established a routine of making cartoons about competitions, we’d made like one.

Mike: A lot of the world-building stuff happened quickly, like the old-timey 1936 version of the characters happened within the first three or four months. We had made like one or two cartoons and were like “we should do old-timey versions!” and soon after that, we were like “we should make anime versions!” The world started building from the get-go.

A Home Run

Without any advertising or publicity, Homestar Runner started to catch on through pure word of mouth, and Matt and Mike Chapman found themselves with truly unique full-time jobs. 

Mike: We started selling our first shirt in 2001. There wasn’t huge demand or anything. I wouldn’t say it had caught on yet.

Matt: I was living in New York at the time and I remember Mike sending me a picture of himself in our shirt, I was very jealous.

Mike: For the first shirt we had, you needed to send a check to our parent’s house. So we sold a few dozen shirts by check only. Our dad was our accountant, so he started reviewing all that stuff. It wasn’t anything we intended to do full time.

Mike: I had a Cartoon Network calendar, and I kept our traffic stats in it. This was early on because shortly after we stopped looking at our stats entirely because we didn’t want that to affect how we made stuff or what we did. But I wrote down how many new visitors we got each day, and I remember hitting 1,000 visitors in a day sometime in 2001 or 2002.

Matt: We started doing a weekly cartoon when I moved back from New York. That’s when we first made Strong Bad Emails. I have to thank Earthlink Corporation for funding a year of Strong Bad Emails. I wouldn’t actually work on them at work, but I’d come into work after having stayed up all night making Strong Bad Emails on a Sunday night. The fact that I was allowed to go into work at 11am instead of 9am definitely contributed to the rise of Homestar.

Matt: Once we started getting angry emails when we were late getting a new cartoon up, I think it hit us that folks were counting on new stuff from us. That’s a cool feeling to know you’re as important as a cup of coffee or morning crossword to some folks. And then definitely when we received our first wedding/dating stories from people that bonded over our cartoons or met because of them and put a Homestar and Marzipan on their wedding cake. That’s nuts! Makes me feel like I should email the ghost of Paul Newman and tell him that my wife and I bonded over Cool Hand Luke!

Mike: In 2003, our dad told Matt to quit his job and do Homestar full-time. This is our financially conservative dad, telling us to quit our jobs to make Flash cartoons.

Matt: Mike and I would collaborate together all the time when we were kids, and when were home for Christmas break we’d always end up making something together, so doing Homestar full-time was really fun - but I remember friends saying “can we come over when you make a cartoon?” And we would be like “okay,” and we’d have a couple beers while we brainstormed an idea, and then it’s like “okay, Mike and I are going to put on headphones for 18 hours now and you’re not going to talk to us anymore until we’re done.” It was super fun, but it could also be hard work, which is also why once we had children and wives it made it a little harder to pull all-nighters and not sleep for three days to make a cartoon.

Matt: The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn’t believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded ‘Working Man’ so I’ll take it!

Matt: I have no idea when our peak was viewership-wise, but 2002-2005 was definitely when we got to go the most nuts creatively. We expanded into weird live action and puppet stuff, CD’s, DVD’s, video games, toys, all kindsa crazy dream-come-true stuff we never thought we’d get to do. But, for me, if you want a more precise moment, I would say February of 2004, when on the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000. I remember specifically thinking, “It’s okay if no one watches another Homestar Runner cartoon or buys another t-shirt now, because today happened.”

“...Never a Real Business Plan.”

By 2010, Matt and Mike were both married with kids and were looking for other jobs in the television industry. They’ve had a hand in a number of acclaimed kid’s shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! Gravity Falls, The Aquabats Super Show, and Wander Over Yonder. Unfortunately, this didn’t leave a lot of time for Homestar Runner.

Mike: We always knew our business model was temporary. Everyday it was like, “We’re on borrowed time here, there’s just no way to make a living off of this, because it’s unsustainable.” We didn’t want to start selling ads, and this was before the era of Kickstarter or Patreon and other ways of artists monetizing directly from their audience. We were just like, “Let’s just do it this way, rather than try to change our business plan,” which was never a real business plan. Our mindset was, “We’re lucky to make money off this in the first place, and if it’s no longer making enough money to not have other jobs, we’ll not worry about it and get another job.” We didn’t to be one of those things that started selling e-cards or whatever.

We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture.

Mike: There [were] definitely people who bought way more shirts than they had any business buying, and it’s great that people felt that way without us having to be like,“Hey guys, we’re having a pledge drive.” It’s just a double-edged sword. Homestar needed to be supported somehow, but you never wanted to come out and say,“Hey, remember the only way we’re able to do this is if you buy a shirt, so buy a shirt!” We’ve always been uncomfortable with that. Our dad suggested adding a button to the end of the cartoons that said “Buy a shirt with Strong Bad on it!” And we were like “No, dad! That’s so lame!”

Matt: We have a property in Homestar called Cheat Commandos, which is basically making fun of old G.I. Joe cartoons. We eventually made Cheat Commandos toys and we wouldn’t even put an ad for the toys in the cartoon. That’s like, part of the joke, why didn’t we just do that and make some money? Like there was someone who told me recently that their favorite thing we ever did was Cheat Commandos, and they had no idea we’d even made toys! Probably a missed opportunity there! If anything we might’ve taken our punk rock status too far.

Mike: We went on hiatus after Matt had his second daughter. Around that time we knew we were going to have to start looking for other jobs, and we really just didn’t know how long it’d be before we could get back to Homestar. Maybe one month, two months, six months. After a certain point it almost became weird to say something about the break. In retrospect, we probably could’ve handled it a little better, but we just didn’t know.

Matt: We didn’t want to believe it either. I didn’t want to come out and say “hey we’re not doing this anymore for a while,” because that sucks! I wanted to be like “yeah we’re gonna make one this week! I swear! We’ll have time this week to make a new Strong Bad Email!” I know we probably bummed people out or lost some people’s respect for not saying anything, but we also wanted the site to be focused on the characters, so it would’ve felt like pulling back the curtain too far to suddenly be like “Hey! We’ve got kids! And it’s hard!” It didn’t seem worth it to be like, “We wrote the Yo Gabba Gabba! Christmas special! That’s why we’re taking a hiatus!”

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Mike: There was also some creative burnout too. We had been doing it for 10 years and we probably stuck to that weekly schedule a little more strictly than we needed to, so we needed a break. It was definitely a slog sometimes. Like Saturday you’re at a friend’s house and it slowly dawns on you that “ah shit, we don’t have an idea for a cartoon.” Even during the hiatus I’d feel weird on the weekends because for 10 years there was this cloud looming over me that I had 20 hours straight of sitting in front of a computer bleary-eyed on Sunday night.

Done Running

On April 1, 2014, a new Homestar Runner cartoon was posted to the site. A few months later, Matt Chapman announced plans to continue the series, and since then they’ve done new Homestar content every couple of months. Right now the brothers are living it Atlanta again, working side by side on the Disney XD show Two More Eggs.

Mike: When we made the April Fool’s cartoon it had been about four years since we put anything on the site. Matt had moved to Los Angeles three years before to work on Gravity Falls and some other Disney stuff. I think he’d just decided that he was moving back to Atlanta, and we knew Homestar was going to make sense for us. The joke of that cartoon was Homestar finally updating his website, which is all dusty and unattended. The process wasn’t quite the same because we weren’t living together, but we pulled an all-nighter for the next one we did. Well, an all-nighter for us now means like staying up til 1am.

Last October, the Homestar Runner gang emerged from obscurity, and now it's the moment we have … Read more Read more

Matt: We really had no idea how many people would care or check back in if we made something new. It was a little scary tiptoeing back into things which is why we made it an April Fool’s cartoon. If nobody cared or everybody hated it, we could just say, “that was part of the joke! See ya in another 10 years!” and disappear. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do that. And even though we’ve only been able to make a few cartoons every year since, people still seem genuinely psyched when we are able to update. Coolest fans ever, man.

Mike: It’s kind of funny how much it feels the same when we make Homestar cartoons today. for I’m still sitting across my brother with my headphones on, working for 12 hours, putting it up in the early morning, and maybe stopping at Waffle House on the way home.

Matt: We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture. We recently did a couple Homestar 20th anniversary live shows here in Atlanta and the response was bigger and farther reaching than we could’ve imagined. A father and son came all the way from Anchorage just to see the show. That blew our minds and made us want to pay for their airfare.

Mike: It was always a very singular creative vision. It’s pretty much just the two of us, and there’s never a moment where one of us writes something and the other one doesn’t agree. Any joke is something either one of us could’ve written. It’s pretty crazy that we have four or five hundred cartoons that are all largely tied together, and it’s nuts that 20 years since making that initial book I’m still talking about it.

Matt: We’ve felt so many times over the years that we are super fortunate, that it can’t get any better, that no matter what else we do, we did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while. Is that a good epitaph, “He did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while?” We always say that we could get jobs making donuts at a grocery store bakery and be totally happy for the rest of our lives since we got to do Homestar. And now we’ve been saying that for over a decade.

Mike: We do Two More Eggs with the exact same process. We do one cartoon a week. We think of it, write it, animate it, and it’s done pretty quickly. I get the same weekly feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Some of the other projects we’ve done force you to think about the same thing for a month, and my brain just doesn’t work that way.

Matt: It’s great to be back working in the same room with my brother, surrounded by the weird junk we hang on our walls, flanked by the wood-paneled television from the basement of our childhood home and a wall of outdated video games and electronics. A few weeks ago we got to spend all day 3D printing a fake action figure and filling it with beef stroganoff for the Walt Disney company. Once you hit that point, I don’t think you’re allowed to complain ever again.

Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego and living in Austin, Texas. He writes about music, video games, professional wrestling, and whatever else interests him. You can find him on Twitter @luke_winkie.