Parsnip Supplement ~ Issue 5 ~ 31-10-2025

31st October 2025

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Issue 5

Character Spotlight

Emm

April Emma Winters, "Emm" to her friends, "That bundle of hair that keeps trying to nibble the wax displays" to the kebab shop down the road, is an eternal child at heart and a malco-ordinated scarecrow at body.

She is a lover of hugs, chunky-knit jumpers, waffles and getting stuck in awkward places. Also a hater of liars, arguments, Brussels sprouts and the sharper side of velcro. She contains multitudes, contradictions, surprising amounts of polyester stuffing, enveloping hugs and an overwhelming potential to break anything not fixed down with industrial-grade adhesive.

Emm may not have had the best start to life. Intense energy when alone, intense shyness when not, she often found herself a convenient source of blame for a variety of unrelated accidents. Shyness turned to reclusiveness. Reclusiveness bred mutism. Mutism led to a lack of agency and she soon found herself without support wandering the streets away from a family that didn't seem all that interested in following her.

A chance midnight encounter with an irascible pink-haired punk in the form of Malakhi signaled the turn of her fortunes as she soon found herself ingratiated into a fold of oddballs and outliers who'd gladly love and support her without the demand for her to change her comfort habits. It also bequeathed her someone with enough money backing them up to replace most of the things she broke.

In exchange she provides on-demand (and often impromptu) companionship, warmth, hugs, waffles in meals you wouldn't expect waffles to work (and sometimes they do) and a never-ending stream of unexpected happenings. You're unlikely to think life is dragging on a bit if you wake up one morning to the sound of a small carboard box full of voles wearing post-it-note party-hats on the pillow beside you.

That is, of course, if you have the good fortune to be in her good books. Get on her bad side and she'll have a tendency to physically lift up any of her friends you try to talk to and run away with them whilst throwing the occasional potato at you. Or patio furniture.

Emm's intense curiosity marks her as a strong, if compulsive, lateral thinker and physical puzzle solver/seeker. She may be capable of solving a Rubik's cube in under a minute, but give her a locked door and a key that fits and she'll find a way in through what was once the air conditioning system.

When focused she can find herself surprisingly agile and balanced. When unfocused she finds everything in the proximity forty centimeters lower than before and in at least two more pieces. The clumsiest flailing of limbs you ever did see she's in fact an expert Twister-player, oft practicing by herself. That said, anyone in a 2-3 meter radius may find themselves inadvertantly tangled in with her.

Her other talents include playing the drums with surprising consistency & volume, impressively fluid shadow-puppetry, and a surprisingly high Dance Dance Revolution score and bill.

Oh, and she also made friends with the monster under her childhood bed. Standard fare.

Sillies

Jokes

I threw a stick for my dog and she came back wearing a top hat and waistcoat. She was oddly fetching. Rorchach's famous ink-blot tests aren't actually considered legitimate psychiatric diagnosis tools, but Rorschach himself really saw something in them. Will there be bondage at this kink party? There's bound to be! I can't stop writing fanfic about how loud foghorns are. It's got to be my favourite ship dynamic. My trouser press is causing creases! Oh, the ironing!

Crispy English Dictionary

• Bucharest v. To purchase a stay at a hotel or inn
• Duffle n. Two thirds of a trifle
• Panache n. Pansexual longing
• Sanskrit n. A 19-sided die
• Undermine n. Magma

Puzzles

Dracula's Wordsearch!

In the spooky spirit of our recently completed Dracula 3 playthrough our puzzle section this month finds itself freshly haunted by a mystery most foul! The wordsearch!

Following on from the game's incredibly convincing concept of wordsearches predicting all of the world's evils, I've made this homage containing 18 thematically appropriate words to find. You might also stumble upon some of the 20 other, completely unrelated, words I've also hidden within. Words that, with the right interpretation, might just reveal the truth about fortune-telling. Enjoy!

Yes Yes! It's Nonograms!

As if we simply couldn't get enough of Dracula 3 (and golly if that's not the exact opposite of the truth), another of its expertly-integrated puzzle forms was that of the humble Nonogram or Picross! And if ol' Drac can shoehorn them in, why can't I?

Just a couple of simple 10x10 examples to ramp newcomers up, with suitably spooky solutions. Let me know if you'd like larger puzzles in the future!

Comics

Outliers ~ California

N.B. This is my first ever pen-and-paper hand-inked comic. Excuse and/or enjoy the wibbliness.

Outliers ~ Vintage

Beyond the Hedgerow

Loremen

Do you like silly British people talking about nonsense? I'll be frank, if you said 'no' I'm going to wonder why you're here. But for the non-masochists amongst you, today's peek above the hedgerow is very much your shade of green as we glance a gander into the lush lands of the Loremen.

Comprised of comedians Alasdair Beckett-King and James Shakeshaft, the podcast Loremen sees the two of them exchanging "local legends and obscure curiosities from days of yore" in a loose competition for arbitrary points. Stories of provincial ghosts, parochial cryptids, unsolved mysteries, phantom islands, and frankly just very odd figures from antiquity through modernish day abound, presented with as many non-sequiturs and running jokes as you can string into a meta-narrative.

This, of course, should be enough to tittilate your intrigues, but it is with the method of delivery that I find the most pleasure. Both hosts deliver their (often sourced!) findings in a form deliberately performed to entertain the other. Their scoring system is, ultimately, a vector for ensuring the information is presented in as punchy, comical, intriguing and silly way possible. And puns. The scoring system has quite a few puns.

So why not take a gander at some weird and wonderful local tales from around the British Isles and even further afield! You know, the rest of the world, that place. Many hundreds of episodes deep with no intertwining narrative (besides perhaps a out of context chuckle whenever something 'in Dorset' is mentioned) just jump in wherever your heart tells you. Available on YouTube and all good podcast-peddlers.

Epilogue

As the ghosts of whimsy past flutter off into the approaching winter skies, we bid adieu to another newsletter passing into it's oldsletter dotage.

A soul is not yet passed whose name remains spoken, so feel free to pass this around to friends, family, loved ones, perhaps the occasional arch-nemesis. And via the your chosen medium (perhaps even a medium) we may have the chance to better these hallowed lands with, uh, feedback and such. Submit feedback. Via ouija board.

If you fancy subscribing to this newsletter through the archaic wizardry of the old tomes of RSS you can do so through this link. Or you could subscribe to my website's general feed for all updates and comics with this link.

Be seeing you,
Crispy 💜