Author: fernandt

April 25, 2025

Fantasy Fight Club: Bill & Ted vs. Wayne & Garth

Welcome back to Fictional Fight Club, where fictional characters FIGHT TO THE DEATH! In this edition, we have two dynamic duos facing off against each other in the battle for radicalness. In one corner, we have two time-traveling best friends (deleted comma) who will do anything to make their adventures “excellent” — Bill & Ted. In the other corner, we have basement-show-hosts-turned-mainstream-sensations. who are here to rock your world — Wayne & Garth. Let’s get ready to rumble!

Starting off with Bill & Ted, they are just two dudes trying to start their band, Wyld Stallyns, and prevent Ted from being shipped off to military school. Needing to pass their history final, they use a phone booth to go back in time to interact with the greatest people in history. Having the power to time travel is a great skill, especially for getting advice for your history final.

Moving on, we have Wayne & Garth. They started off from humble beginnings, having a public–access TV show in their basement. When they get their big break, they discover the highs and lows of mainstream television. But with their goofy antics, they got their show and a lot of memorable allies to help them in the future.

With these two duos, the loveable idiot factor goes above and beyond. We’re dealing with time travel and the power to break the fourth wall. Both things would destroy the world as we know it. But if they went head-to-head, I believe that Bill & Ted will take the win. First off, they can go to any point in time, including the future. Fun fact about these two: they are worshipped in the future. Even if Wayne and Garth took them down, they can change the events of time.

Even if Bill & Ted annihilate the Wayne’s World bros, Wayne & Garth have an ace up their sleeve. They can manipulate the audience. The fourth wall is a powerful weapon, and Wayne & Garth could potentially make Bill & Ted come off as the worst people in the world. The only problem with that is I don’t think Wayne & Garth would stoop that low.

According to a local ’90s legend, my mom, Bill & Ted will win, she states, “because Bill & Ted were prepared to take on any challenge that came at them through all of time. Wayne & Garth just wanted to party on.” And honestly, I couldn’t agree more. But don’t fear Wayne & Garth fans, because I don’t think Bill & Ted would kill them. They probably would give them a primetime slot for Bill & Ted TV. I personally want to watch Wayne’s World in a Bill & Ted future.

And that will do it for another rendition of Fictional Fight Club. Tune in next time to see who will be fighting to the death!

April 25, 2025

Four Tips to Being a Good D&D Player (from a Forever DM)

Envision this: you are at your typical D&D table; everyone is laughing at the Dungeon Master’s (DM’s) silly jokes and people are making heroic moves, but eventually you end up in a serious and dangerous position with the main villain right in front of you. Your villain gives you a deal: he will spare your lives and leave you alone as long as you hand him one mysterious stone you found after clearing the dungeon. The entire party agrees, going with the obvious plot hook, except for one. Jimmy McJimface, your resident D&D pro, stands up and shouts, “We aren’t agreeing with this guy, right guys?!” and rolls a nat-one to attack.

Have you ever wondered if you are being a good player at your D&D table? Are you ever worried that the other players are getting annoyed at your antics? Do you struggle with communication skills? Well, follow these four tips to being a better D&D player!

1. Don’t be afraid of communicating openly! D&D is a team game. You’re playing with a group of people, which means you should have a clear idea of everyone’s expectations. Before you play D&D, have conversations about your expectations, what you want out of the game, your plans for your character, and if there are any problems with how someone plays D&D. When it comes to this amazing tabletop game, we all might have different expectations and playstyles, which is completely okay, but if you aren’t willing to communicate those aspects or adjust to other people, then you won’t have as much fun. You might also be ruining other people’s experiences without communicating openly. This isn’t saying that you can’t be a crazy character, or play as a murder hobo, but make that clear. Ensure that how you want to play also is fun for everyone else.
2. Make friends! If you are playing D&D, make friends with everyone at the table! If you aren’t doing that, then be prepared for things to be very awkward when you are sitting around the table before a game starts. This tip also applies to being in character! When you are playing as your character, be well acquainted with your other party members. You don’t exactly have to make your character friendly with everyone, but that doesn’t mean you should be some loner who is constantly leaving the party alone to do their own thing which takes time away from everyone else. If you are playing as someone who doesn’t make friends easily, play into that. Have awkward character interactions with other players. Make flavorful argument scenes. Spring your antagonistic character into a reluctant friend of the party. Remember, D&D is a team game, so always be willing to interact with other people and stop thinking that you don’t have a team!
3. Stop trying to “win!” D&D is a game yes, but unlike many games, you aren’t just trying to beat a level; you are trying to work your way through the story. For D&D, the game is the journey. The journey might lead to an awesome ending, but until you get there, stop trying to constantly speed things up. Yes, if you do somehow successfully kill the main villain in the first session, you would prevent lots of tragedy, but then where’s the flavor for the rest of the entire campaign? As a player, you are playing in a world or story that the DM is running; that doesn’t mean you have to act as a train being railroaded but also stop treating the game like a race. Sometimes in D&D, you will encounter difficult boss battles, or you might even lose something precious to you. Frustrating things might happen, and it’s all okay. Take a moment to breathe and remember that the point of the game is to have a fun journey. Journeys contain all sorts of twists and turns, so be prepared for all sorts of things. That means no, Jimmy, you may not use prestidigitation to kill the evil god that is bringing ruin to this world.
4. Your number one priority is having fun! This last tip is very simple. Have fun! That’s all that D&D is for; it’s an entertaining activity, and if you aren’t enjoying the hobby, then why are you doing it? When playing D&D, remember that you are just having fun with a group of friends all sitting around and acting like geeks. So, go have fun, you nerd!

April 25, 2025

The most unsettling true-crime cases … 

Joseph Clark, The Baraboo Bone Breaker

Trigger warning: child assault and torture.

Many people today never think that a sadistic killer could be living among them in their home state or even right next door. They typically believe that to only happen in the true crime TV shows and movies that are played and replayed across their TV screens at night. However, that nightmare can and did happen for one boy living in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Coming out of Baraboo, Wisconsin, in 1995, our case for this week’s issue of Creep of the Week surrounds the methodical kidnapping and two-day torture of 13-year-old, Thadius (Thad) Phillips by his 17-year-old neighbor, Joseph (Joe) C. Clark.

In the early morning hours of July 29, 1995, Thad found himself being carried out of his house by an unknown individual. In his groggy state, Thad thought nothing of it, thinking it was just a family friend. After being carried for half a mile, Thad ws brought into a dirty, cluttered home, and quickly realized that it wasn’t a family friend who’d taken him, but his neighbor, Joe Clark. Inside the house, Joe lured Thad upstairs to his bedroom with the promise of looking at a model car collection. However, as soon as the pair got up to the room, Joe flew into an unprovoked rage. He threw Thad onto the bed on his back and grabbed his ankle, twisting it around until the bone snapped. Following this attack, Thad broke free, ran out of the room, and down the stairs while Joe chased after him. He made it halfway across the kitchen before Joe caught up to him and threw him onto the sofa, where he proceeded to break Thad’s femur. After this, Joe’s entire demeanor switched. He began to act normal and friendly again. Eventually, he would even go as far as to create “make-shift casts” for Thad by putting layers of crew socks on over his broken bones. This theme continued over and over for the next two days; Thad attempting to escape after throwing himself down the stairs, Joe catching up to him, snapping a bone, placing socks over it, and then acting like everything was normal again.

It wasn’t until the second night that Thad decided to make another attempt at escaping the house. Joe was gone, and Thad was locked in Joe’s bedroom closet, as he did not want to take the chance of Thad escaping again. While inside the closet, Thad was able to find a wooden guitar that he then used to smash through the door. After escaping the closet and bedroom, Thad threw his broken body down the stairs for the final time and crawled to the kitchen where he was able to reach a phone and call 9-1-1. This resulted in Thad being rescued from the house and the apprehension of Joe later that night while at a party. His arrest resulted in a life sentence plus one hundred years in prison, and Thad was able to make a full recovery.

Thad’s incredible story of survival can be heard in its entirety by searching for Season 5, Episode 18 of the hit television series I Survived, available free on Tubi, Sling TV, and Pluto TV.

April 25, 2025

Eco-Conscious Food Labels

An important part of shrinking our ecological footprints is making informed decisions about the products we consume — in many cases, the things we literally consume. Making informed decisions about what we eat means understanding the terminology and labeling that affect these choices. Organic: For something to be organic, the producer has to do more than just avoid using chemicals in pesticides and fertilizers. Organic growers are required to protect soil quality through things like rotating crops, limiting how much they plow their land, and planting cover crops to limit erosion. For animal products to be labeled organic, the animals that produce them must have a certain amount of access to pasturage, fresh air, and sunshine. Because of the requirements for something to be organic, we as consumers are exposed to fewer potentially toxic substances when we eat organic foods, and farmers are able to preserve valuable resources, like soil. For more information, you can read USDA’s “Introduction to Organic Practices.” Natural: If something is labeled “all-natural,” that does not mean that it is organic or even antibiotic- or hormone-free. It simply means that nothing synthetic or artificial has been added, such as flavorings or food colorings. This helps us avoid putting things in our bodies when we don’t know what they are.

Antibiotic-free: This is a label applied to animal products and means pretty much exactly what you would think it would mean — the animals that produce the products are raised without antibiotics or artificial hormones. This is important because antibiotics are often overused on factory farms, which can lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This means that when a human gets infected with the same bacteria, there is a higher chance that the antibiotics will be less effective.

Cage-free vs. free-range vs. pastured-raised: A standard practice for industrially farmed chickens is to put them in cages for their entire lives. If eggs or something else are labeled as “cage-free,” that means that they were produced by animals who weren’t in cages. It doesn’t guarantee anything past that. “Free-range” means that the animals have a certain amount of access to an outdoors pasture area, but it doesn’t necessitate that they ever go out in this area. “Pasture-raised” means that the animals are allowed to graze and forage in a pasture for a significant part of their lives.

Of course, there are many more terms than these, but I thought these would be a good place to start, as these are some of the more common or important ones and have given me the most confusion in the past. I hope this is useful for you!

—Neesa Peak, Eco-Actions Editor

Fun with Google Gemini

In our last issue of The Quill, student editors Sylvie Cavros, Alex Lopez, and Julia Hahn got creative with their “fantasy fight club” pieces; Sylvie pit the Road Runner against The Flash, Julia had Captain Boomerang battle it out with Wile E. Coyote, and Alex reimagined the Flash-Road Runner match-up as a D&D battle. Since time was of the essence, I decided to turn to Google’s Gemini AI tool to generate images for their pieces.

Gemini did pretty well with all of them. Until, that is, I turned to Julia’s Captain Boomerang vs. Wile E. Coyote battle. Up to that point, Gemini and I had been having a grand old time, but like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, my overconfidence would prove to be my undoing.

My initial prompts generated a few riffs on this concept:

The outfit wasn’t even close to what Captain Boomerang wears, with its adult diaper, waist bandolier, and Army-green tricorn hat. Also, this supervillain was apparently an idiot who mistook random pieces of metal for boomerangs. Judging from the words at the top of this image, Gemini garbled my prompt and generated Captain BOM-BARTHAANG instead of Captain Boomerang. An easy mistake. I tried again.

(I also wasn’t sure what that random guy was doing in the back, but pieces of his face appeared to be flying off. Perhaps making bits of one’s face spontaneously separate from one’s head is Captain BOM-BARTHAANG’s superpower.)

PROMPT: Take out the words and the guy in the back.

Gemini stubbornly refused to remove the words, and none of its subsequent attempts looked any more like the actual Captain Boomerang and less like Captain BOM-BARTHAANG. This despite the fact that Gemini is powered by arguably the smartest search engine in the world.

Respecting Gemini’s right to nurse an unhealthy obsession, I decided to take my prompts back to basics.

“DC supervillain, Australian, throws boomerangs for fun and profit,” I muttered.

PROMPT: Hugh Jackman in a navy blue supervillain outfit with a dark gray trench coat fighting Wile E. Coyote in a DC Comics illustration.

This looked promising! Face, hair, and outfit were close, but a slight tweak was needed.

PROMPT: Remove Hugh Jackman’s third arm and give him a boomerang.

Who needs a boomerang when you can have a boomerang-shaped Wile E. Coyote holding a pair of handlebars with legs? As one does.

PROMPT: Hugh Jackman should hold a boomerang.

As you can see, this attempt had him holding a giant hypodermic needle with a weird growth on the top. Captain Giant Hypodermic Needle is not a catchy supervillain name. But on the upside, everyone had two arms and two legs! I took a deep breath and went in for another attempt.

PROMPT: Take whatever Hugh Jackman is holding out of his hand. Hugh Jackman should be holding a boomerang.

I could show you what Hugh Jackman ended up actually holding, but I would probably lose my job. Needless to say, it was not a boomerang.

PROMPT: Make the boomerang curvier. It needs to look like a boomerang, not a [REDACTED].

Still not a boomerang, but at least this metal jump rope won’t get me sent to HR. Something seemed off with Wile E.’s hands and feet, though.

PROMPT: Make the boomerang look more like a boomerang. Wile E. Coyote should have only two arms and two legs.

Like Gemini with Captain BOM-BARTHAANG, I can’t let this go. I will have a boomerang. I will not shame Australia’s signature pastime after submitting one of the country’s best-known stars to numerous indignities.

I … kinda liked this one. Except this Captain Boomerang was so dimwitted, he replaced his boomerang with a deeply unsafe sword with no handle. Oh, and he had three feet, but maybe The Quill readers would be too distracted by his excellent supervillain suit-and-trench combo to notice. I unceremoniously gave up on the boomerang.

PROMPT: Use this same illustration. Take out Hugh Jackman’s middle foot so he only has two.

Spoiler: Gemini did not use this same illustration.

I was oddly distracted by the fact that Captain Boomerang/Hugh Jackman’s costume was Blue Beetle blue, not Captain Boomerang blue. But … was that …? Could it be…?

In my excitement over the actual, honest-to-goodness boomerang-shaped boomerang in this image, I almost missed the fact that Wile E. Coyote had a third foot growing out of his right toes, as well as a second tail inexplicably sprouting from his opponent’s left thigh. What in the name of Elisasue from The Substance have you wrought, Gemini?

I decided to distract Gemini by craftily veering in an unexpected direction.

PROMPT: Give Hugh Jackman a navy blue beanie hat with a white V on it.

Captain Boomerang does not have prosthetic chicken legs with clown shoes. Nor does Wile E. Coyote have a third floating arm or a reason to throw a boomerang, as his name clearly does not include the word “boomerang.” Spot-on with the beanie, though.

PROMPT: Hugh Jackman should not have prosthetic legs. Take away Wile E. Coyote’s middle arm.

PROMPT: This is a mess, Gemini. You should be ashamed of yourself.

PROMPT: I miss Captain BOM-BARTHAANG.

I logged off before Gemini could respond. I apologize to all of Australia for having to deal with this on top of the existence of Sydney funnelweb spiders.

The moral of this story? Take care when using AI for assignments, friends. Unless you want it to BOM-BARTHAANG up your class papers, in which case, vaya con Dios.

The Quill is our new student-centered e-newsletter for the Applied Writing & English (AWE) department at UW-Green Bay. We’ll bring you tips for navigating life as a writing or English major. And we’ll give you suggestions for entertaining yourself when you’re not reading or writing.

Student Editors

• Tiffany Jablonowski: Co-Editor-in-Chief
• Ginger Knauer: Co-Editor-in-Chief
• Sierra Nyokka: Marketing & Engagement Manager
• Sylvie Cavros: The Nerd Zone Co-Editor
• Clover Cicha: Local Favorites Editor
• Kendall Cox: TV Editor
• Shane Ewig: Anime Editor
• Jenna Fintelmann: Self-Care Editor
• Katie Frank: Video Games Editor
• Aiden Gervais: Editor
• Julia Hahn: The Nerd Zone Co-Editor
• Alex Lopez: Fictional Fiance Editor
• Neesa Peak: Eco-Actions Editor
• Mia Perez-Behringer: The Quill’s Flame Editor
• Payton Rhyner: Music Editor
• Brooke Schoening: Book Quiz and Movies Editor
• Cheyenne Shull: Today’s Trends Editor
• Noah Spellich: Books Editor
• Seth Van Ess: True Crime and Sports Editor
• Karrie Wortner: Book Travel Editor

The Quill Advisor: Tracy Fernandez Rysavy

Interested in being on The Quill and Northern Lights staff? Enroll in ENG 224: Practicum in Literary Publishing, available every spring.

Questions or News Items? Contact The Quill’s advisor, Tracy Fernandez Rysavy.

The Quill is our new student-centered e-newsletter for the Applied Writing & English (AWE) department at UW-Green Bay. We’ll bring you tips for navigating life as a writing or English major. And we’ll give you suggestions for entertaining yourself when you’re not reading or writing.

Student Editors

• Tiffany Jablonowski: Co-Editor-in-Chief
• Ginger Knauer: Co-Editor-in-Chief
• Sierra Nyokka: Marketing & Engagement Manager
• Sylvie Cavros: The Nerd Zone Co-Editor
• Clover Cicha: Local Favorites Editor
• Kendall Cox: TV Editor
• Shane Ewig: Anime Editor
• Marco Fernandez: The Trash Vortex Editor
• Jenna Fintelmann: Self-Care Editor
• Katie Frank: Video Games Editor
• Aiden Gervais: Editor
• Julia Hahn: The Nerd Zone Co-Editor
• Alex Lopez: Fictional Fiance Editor
• Neesa Peak: Eco-Actions Editor
• Mia Perez-Behringer: The Quill’s Flame Editor
• Payton Rhyner: Music Editor
• Brooke Schoening: Book Quiz and Movies Editor
• Cheyenne Shull: Today’s Trends Editor
• Noah Spellich: Books Editor
• Seth Van Ess: True Crime and Sports Editor
• Karrie Wortner: Book Travel Editor

The Quill Advisor: Tracy Fernandez Rysavy

Interested in being on The Quill and Northern Lights staff? Enroll in ENG 224: Practicum in Literary Publishing, available every spring.

Questions or News Items? Contact The Quill’s advisor, Tracy Fernandez Rysavy.

February 17, 2025

Favorite Fantasy Reads

Fourth Wing
by Rebecca Yarros

Wyrd Sisters
by Terry Pratchett

February 17, 2025

QUIZ: What’s Your Cliche Book Love Story?