Author’s Afterthoughts were written on 12/31/24 before the new year!

Misadventures of Randall M Ceah is weird. It is a very irreverent and odd thing that I have created. And the whole purpose of this series was to give a fictional and fun origin to the lettering on the blog’s title picture. Yes, I wrote fictional stories about the fun little title pictures.

I was talking with Zachary Berue long before making my website. I jokingly said to Zach that “Oh, would it not be fun and funny if I took my dice tray, ripped apart old keyboards for their buttons, and spelled out my blog titles and then took a picture and made them the header picture for the blog!”

Zach responded with: “Do it.” He gave me a long reason why, which is mainly because people with a following on the internet usually have some gimmick or unique thing to them. And so, I did it. I had some old, old keyboards on hand and, with a plastic comb, I ripped and tore through them and took their key buttons.

And these keyboards were, for lack of a better term, dank. They were dusty, covered in old grime from years of use, and most of the keys were pretty worn out. For some reason, to my wild imagination, they looked like they came from ancient ruins.

And for some reason R’lyeh and Cthulhu came to mind. Possible because I discovered the Miskatonic University Podcast around that time and had Lovecraft’s work in mind. So, I decided to make a silly story about how I acquired the ancient keyboards from forgotten ruins.

So how do I get the keyboards from the ruins? I was tempted to make it a self-insertion story but I did not want to make my very first story to star . . . me, the author, Buck Bloom. It seemed a bit of a stretch to do so early on in the website’s life.

So, I invented the concept of a guy who can walk through time and space. A Doctor Who but less adventurous and more of a tourist. I then came up with the name on the fly, Randall M Ceah, and I have no idea where this name came from. I guess because it gave my character-self a chance to text “Randy MC” as the lead’s nickname.

And so, I invented this Doctor Who-esque character to wander into R’lyeh, meet Cthulhu and then take the keyboards and walk away. And while writing “Randall M Ceah at R’lyeh” I asked myself: well, how did the keyboards get there?

My Answer: a trolley interdimensional traveler dropped them on Cthulhu’s head and then bounced. What is this troll’s name? Three Ts came to mind and I was racking my brain for a name with three initials. And so, Terrible Time-Trasher was born! And wow, my mind is just a stream of consciousness made of twists, turns, and salmon swimming upstream.

Honestly, I enjoyed writing this nonsense. I especially like writing a straight man character like RMC. Who probably should not be putting his important dimensional door device on random. But he does, because he likes to explore, and gets into odd situations.

And it was only going to be this one story. But then my uncle gave me an old keyboard that had never been opened. And I was tempted to do another Randall M Ceah story explaining the existence of new keyboard keys in the title pics.

Now, for those of you who have guessed and may have guessed right, the man and boy that RMC meets in “... and the Awkward Encounter” are inspired by characters from the anime series One Piece. I recently watched the live action version of One Piece on Netflix and had it in mind when writing this short story.

In both iterations of One Piece, two characters, Chef Zeff and a young Sanji, are stranded on a rocky island for days on end. They eventually are rescued but Zeff loses his leg. I had the random thought of them ending up not on a rocky island but the worshiping pillar of Dagon from the Lovecraft story “Dagon.”

Which made for the perfect setup for the second story with Randall M Ceah. I am curious how many people would get the reference of Zeff and Sanji. Dagon being indifferent to the plight of those around him is a perfect setup for RMC to just lose his crap. Honestly, Randall is a hypocrite, and could honestly have saved the man and the boy. And here he is in the story berating Dagon.

RMC eventually does convince Dagon to help but he plans on going about it in an iffy way.

And the keyboard being a compass is just deliciously random. Yeah, through the dark humor of Dagon and the man and the boy, there is a keyboard involved. A keyboard that RMC finds for me and sends it to me after leaving that dimension. I can’t help but look back at this one and smile and shake my head at how random it is.

But when I was making the title pic, I realized that I will need more keyboard numbers to spell out titles the way I want them. Three keyboards means three of one letter. And I do have these big letter dice but they are limited and I only have four. So, I searched the internet for a possible keyboard to rip and tear through and build up my resources for future titles.

And then I came up with a random idea to use Scrabble and get more letter dice. And so I did, after a long time of procrastinating this idea. I ordered 100 scrabble tiles from Amazon and a cute crossword dice game (The Crossword Solitaire Game). I got them in late December, which is why the stories “...and Babysitting a Thousand Young” and “...and Rolling with the King.”

I knew I wanted Shub-Niggurath to be the next Lovcraft deity to make an appearance in the story. And the Scrabble pieces fit with the madness of having a thousand giant kids running around. Now, what the heck would be the situation with this one?

Obvious RMC finds himself in Shub-Niggurath’s domain. I recently watched an anime called “The Monster Girl Doctor” and thought of a hilarious aspect of RMC’s persona that he has a soft spot for monster girls. And you can’t get more monstrous than Shub-Niggurath. So, Randy MC succumbs to her “feminine wiles” and agrees to watch after her kids while she goes play poker in R’lyeh.

I like doing callbacks to other stories and that poker night at R’lyeh addin is a concept idea I would like to play with in the future. Anyway, so a thousand monster kids and for good measure, let's just put a million scrabble tiles in a pile for them to play with. But what words do they spell?

Well, Zach and I looked up long words for fun and found some real wacky and long beauties. And I decided to have RMC do this crazy competition for the young to spell long words. And Most of the words I found through a Google search and AI gave me some real fun ones to play with. And I do love how most of the winners in the top five are not actual words.

RMC’s huge rant on why he judged the words the way he did feels to me like a huge ego not wanting to get eaten by monster kids but also holding onto some level of pride. That and he did not want the game to go on forever. Though, it is important to keep monster kids occupied before they start to get hungry.

So, RMC is rewarded with scrabble tiles and he gives them to me. A fun little story that revolves around long words. Honestly, I wonder if Scrabble has various that utilize longer words like the ones I found.

Now “...and Rolling With the King” was admittedly rushed to have some explanation in the Randall M Ceah cannon for the letter dice I just bought. I wrote both this story and the Scrabble origin story in a single day. This one was a little harder to crack. I figured the King in Yellow would make the perfect monster of the story. But if I had to come clean, this is a weaker one because I did not give myself time to develop it.

The other three stories had a period of time for my brain to play with the idea. The Scrabble and Shub-Niggurath story especially was something I was mulling over for weeks before writing it. And the Dagon story too. Honestly, I don’t hate the story featuring the King and the Crossword Dice.

Actually, it kind of focuses more on the lore of Randall M Ceah and the multiverse traveling culture he is a part of. And now the King in Yellow is a part of that culture. One thing that stumped me was what do RMC and the King spell with the dice.

Randall having unrequited affection for monster girls, specifically one that is totally not the lead lamia girl from “Monster Girl Doctor”, prompted me to have him spell out various monsters he would not mind dating. But what would the King spell out?

Well, I looked up the original creator of the King, Robert W Chambers and found his day of death was in December. And the macabre idea of the King missing Chambers and others who have contributed to the King in Yellow lore came to me. Honestly, it works. I have yet to read anything outside of the original story of “The King In Yellow” and Lovecraft’s contribution but the plot point made sense to me.

The King is a lonely guy and he befriended people who were inspired to write about him. But he never left Carcosa to make new friends after his old ones passed. That is until Randall M Ceah appears and makes the suggestion that the King becomes a traveler.

I will come out and say this now, the silly origin story lore thing with the letters spelling things out in the blog title pic has come to an end. I feel like I want to flush out Randall M Ceah and this interdimensional traveling culture without the need for inserting the letters. It feels like I have created something very interesting to have endless fun and utilize unlimited creativity.

So I am officially saying that any continuation of “The Misadventures of Randall M Ceah” will focus on the titular lead himself and the multiverse he explores. I could have him even interact with characters in other blog stories. The universe is the limit!

[Collection 1] of this series will be more or less some fun little experimental silliness in the early times of the site’s history. I did enjoy making them. And maybe I will return to Randy MC in the future. For now, he can spend his days in the Monster Girl World, until the authorities find him and recruit him for some crazy mission (possibly involving the King in Yellow or the Terrible Time-Trasher).

Now the most important question of all shall be laid to rest:

What the heck does Randall look like?

Yes, I never did establish what he looks like. I kind of want to keep that ambiguous. I am curious what artists on the internet would come up with for his design.

But if anyone is curious of my headcanon of Randall M Ceah’s look, I shall reveal:

Take Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape from the Harry Potter movies and have him dress up like Matt Ryan’s John Constantine. Maybe Randall wears a bigger trenchcoat and he sports a super tech bracelet with glowing blues and greens (which is the dimensional door device). And I’m thinking the device produces hard light and holograms like the tools from Mass Effect.

And everything I just listed makes Randall M Ceah out to be more badass than he really is. This man is more of a Rincewind from Discworld. He is not a heroic figure and he is no saint. But he’s not a villain and has no malicious intent. Things just happen to him and he just shrugs things off and tries to make the best of a situation.

So those are my thoughts on this little silly series featuring a character that was invented because of a goofy idea I had. This was fun to do and I would love to have Randy MC appear again. But next time it will be more of a . . . story-story rather than some meta-nonsense. And to cap things off, I created a cover pic specifically for the “Stories” section for [Collection 1] and compiled the links for the Randy MC blogs. I love the pic that incorporates all of the letter stuff and some unique dice like the hipster dice and moon dice.

And I just graffiti’ed on that pic with “Afterthoughts!” to make the pic for this blog. Yee-ah! for recycling material to make things coherent! Yeah, totally 😜Oh, and I used the FRIJOLE font, in case anyone was wondering. Oh and I almost forgot, the disclaimer at the end of each story was just some humorous gag. I did it as a joke and it just went on for consistency purposes. And I will not be doing that joke again for Randall M Ceah’s return, whenever in time and space that might be.

Anyway, time to end this Afterthoughts section and bid you all a happy new year!

Good Luck and always be Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,

—Buck

PS: I was going to try and get to midnight but I might just call it. Getting pretty tired after writing all this on Randy MC and the Update for 1/1/2025. I am so looking forward to doing more with this site and stories in the future. Thank you for joining the journey!