#1569; The Foldery has Folded

Comic Transcripts

A couple walks down the street, the man in a turban, the woman in a very high-collared fur coat. This is ASHWAY and BERTREX

A: You know that origami flower shop we keep talking about maybe one day wandering through?
A: I finally had an occasion for which I would have liked some paper flowers. But they’ve closed!

B: That’s a shame, they just opened like five years ago!
B: I wonder how much of our community is powered by people imprudently opening wildly unprofitable businesses, pouring their time and savings into them for the period of exactly one commercial lease, then letting them close.

B: Like, it didn’t turn out to be sustainable, but for a while, you offered some cool origami classes for kids, and some people in the neighborhood have some paper flowers in their homes now? I assume?

B: Sorry it didn’t make you a millionaire, but you shoved the big stone wheel back uphill a few turns, and that helped us all.
A: And, in this metaphor, the big stone wheel is…
B: The thing that’ll smash us all into dust with its uncaring inertia if we don’t hold it at bay with our collective effort, yeah

A: Okay, cool. And our collective effort, in this context, means buying forty-dollar paper flowers?
B: Is THAT how much they cost?
B: I kept meaning to look in the store window when I walked by, but I never managed to tear my eyes away from my phone.

#1569; The Foldery has Folded transcribed by in

A couple walks down the street, the man in a turban, the woman in a very high-collared fur coat. This is ASHWAY and BERTREX

A: You know that origami flower shop we keep talking about maybe one day wandering through?
A: I finally had an occasion for which I would have liked some paper flowers. But they’ve closed!

B: Sorry it didn’t make you a millionaire, but you shoved the big stone wheel back uphill a few turns, and that helped us all.
A: And, in this metaphor, the big stone wheel is...
B: The thing that’ll smash us all into dust with its uncaring inertia if we don’t hold it at bay with our collective effort, yeah

That forty dollars goes to good use -- it allows the flower shop owner to buy a forty-dollar sculpted soap set from the soapery next door. The soapmaker will go on to buy some paper flowers with that same money. Then both of them will pay income tax on their earnings, which will go toward paying a defense contractor to build bombs for military drones to drop onto various strangers. It’s all part of living in an interconnected community

#1569; The Foldery has Folded

— June 24th, 2025

[ Tags: entrepreneurship, origami, our surroundings ] Permalink: https://wondermark.com/c/1569/

[ Comment thread on Discord ]

Buy a Print

The past few weeks have been a frenzy of assembling the very laborious, very bespoke first print run of NOODLE BATTLE, the puzzle game I am releasing this weekend at PAX West in Seattle!

PAX has an event called the PNW Tabletop Game Market (Saturday night ONLY), which is a curated selection of short-run games from local designers. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I applied for a space in this fall’s event mainly as a way to force myself to finish a new game. And here it is!

The drawings are all by Jason Poland, good pal and cartoonist of My Dad Is Dracula. Jason played an early version of this game at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp this spring, and really liked it!

So I said, “Do you want to help me make it?” And so he has! It was his idea to make all the characters fun little animals, and I think it adds a ton of charm.

Because this edition is limited-run, it has been incredibly labor-intensive to make! The boxes and cards were made by a game factory in the usual fashion, but separately. The blank tiles were made by a woodworker dude out of Connecticut. For each game, we have had to:

Cut a piece of plastic and install the box window
Paint all the tiles, hundreds at a time
Apply a sticker to both sides of every tile
Apply stickers to the box (we couldn’t get the box back printed in time, so the whole back side of the box is a sticker too)
Apply the “Nutrition Facts” sticker, which was a late suggestion by my kid that I just had to run with
Fold up the rule sheet (they come from the printer as big strips of paper)
Put all the components into the box and seal it all up

I knew it would be a lot of work and would require some inefficient, expensive compromises AND I WAS RIGHT. But the final product is turning out great, which is the important thing!!

I will have 50 copies with me (if all goes well) at PAX, and then between now and the holidays we will be putting together additional copies to round out this first edition.

I will announce additional copies on Patreon first, once they are available online!! And here too, naturally, before long.

You can also sign up here if you’d like me to email you once the game is available online!

Comic Transcripts

#1569; The Foldery has Folded

— June 24th, 2025

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