GRAB YOUR CRAYONS, MARINES!*
Coloring for Marines is available right now on Amazon!
This coloring and activity book from Terminal Lance is sure to keep you entertained while you stand duty, stand post, or just stand by to stand by in your barracks room.
Inside, you’ll find pictures and activities designed just for Marines!
Coloring for Marines is available NOW on Amazon. Click here!
*Crayons are for coloring, not eating.
As an infantry Marine veteran myself, I can’t recommend the Post 9/11 GI Bill enough. Many people enlist to gain practical skills that they might “transfer” over to the civilian workforce in the future.
Not me.
As an artist, I just wanted to do something difficult and shitty. The Marine Corps infantry was the only option for me.
The great news? It actually doesn’t matter what you do as a Marine, because you’re granted a second life once you EAS. The GI Bill enables you to pick and choose your career path to literally anything you want. You’re not defined by your enlisted path in life.
Go be a pilot. An engineer. A journalist.
An artist.
Southern California faces an unusual weather event this weekend: Hurricane Hilary. While the hurricane is expected to be downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it hits California, Marines are expected to embrace the Suck as the storm plows through Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms, and other military installations in the area.
As they say: if it ain’t rainin, we ain’t training. Marines are supposed to be an amphibious force, no?
Stay safe out there, Marines. I’ll be hunkered down in Los Angeles, myself.
If you love TL, you can support Terminal Lance by subscribing to our Patreon: the Lance Corporal Underground. You’ll get an inside look at upcoming stuff, behind-the-scenes process drawings of every comic, and access to some exclusive other stuff like a special Discord role!
They say that Marines don’t see skin-color, and that all Marines are green. While this is debatable with regard to race and ethnicity, it’s hard not to notice becoming drastically two-toned during your enlistment.
Marines spend a lot of time outside. As well, uniform regulations state that the vast majority of the time spent outside will be done with at least a T-shirt on. Field-ops, working parties, training, formations, and more will see Marines standing out in the sun for often hours on-end.
It is near-impossible to avoid the inevitable “Farmer’s Tan” that is a trademark of all Marines and the lament of Marine spouses and partners across the globe. Put on some sunscreen and embrace your multi-toned future, warrior.
Every veteran or service member has been faced with whether or not they want to ask for the military discount at select retailers and restaurants. Maybe it’s painless at a famously patriotic stop like Lowes or Home Depot, or maybe it’s less advertised and more awkward.
Do you go for it? Do you ask for the discount? It can’t hurt, right?
As you may imagine if you’ve been following Terminal Lance for a while, I’m with Abe on this one. If a business wants to give me 10-15% off my purchase because I wore camouflage or whatever, that’s their problem and my gain. Life is hard enough, I’ll take what I can get. Maybe it’s awkward for some, but I went to Iraq twice and I grew up poor as hell.
You think I’m too good to take advantage of the world’s largest corporation giving me 10% off a new iPad? Hell no I’m not.
If you’re anything like me, you may appreciate this comprehensive list of places you can shamelessly play the Veteran card.
Speaking of being shameless, please check out the official TL Patreon! My goal is to get enough subscribers on Patreon that we no longer need these eye-sore ads. Help Terminal Lance go ad-free and subscribe today!
…There is no military discount.
There comes a moment in every enlisted Marine’s career when they cross the threshold of darkness into leadership. When they become the very thing they swore against. Turned against their brothers in arms, it tears their dark souls and icy hearts to the point of destruction.
By the time an enlisted Marine reaches the rank of Sergeant Major, there is no going back. They have become the institution itself, wielding incredible Green Weenie powers that few can defend against.
This isn’t to say that all Sergeants Major are bad or evil, but what other conclusion can one draw from a class of people that insist that the plural of “Sergeant Major” is “Sergeants Major”?
Insanity.
In other news, you may have noticed that TL is now on Patreon! Terminal Lance is an independent comic, going on 13 years now, and it’s a lot of work. People often wonder how they can support the work I’ve done here, and this is the perfect opportunity.
My goal for TL is to expand our efforts. Create more entertainment for Marines. Not just me, but empower other voices across the Corps and just have a lot of fun.
If you want to get some behind-the-scenes access and extra fan-service, join the TL Underground today and support the mission of entertaining Marines!
Terminal Lance is now on Patreon!
Warrior! TL needs you! The Green Weenie forces grow stronger by the hour. Heroes that are good and chill are needed to stem the tide against such treachery.
Join the TL Underground today on Patreon to join the fight!
In all seriousness, we could really use your help. Traditionally, Terminal Lance had been supported via ad revenue on this website (terminallance.com). However, the very nature of the internet has changed drastically over the years.
Now, instead of just posting my comic and content here, it’s posted organically on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Facebook, etc. The quest for eyeballs on the comics has meant that less traffic heads to terminallance.com. In addition, ad revenue across the board is trash these days, so it’s doubly bad.
My goal with Terminal Lance is to expand. Expansion of the brand, creating more content, and empowering new voices across the Corps is what I envision for TL. Simply put, I can’t keep doing this forever, and the more we can turn TL into a self-sustaining machine that entertains Marines, the more I can begin to step away take a more overseer role here.
With steady cashflow, we can create more content for Marines. More fun, more entertainment, more LCPL stuff. If we succeed, TL can go ad-free and we won’t need to shill energy drinks and protein powder.
Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, Final Fantasy made its glorious return recently in the form of Final Fantasy XVI for PlayStation 5. What began humbly in 1987 on the NES as a turn-based dungeon-crawler culminates in 2023 as a cinematic showcase of polished videogame storytelling and action. Final Fantasy XVI has incredible highs and middling lows, ultimately making it a worthy follow-up in the long-running series.
Final Fantasy XVI follows the story of Clive, a prince who’s been displaced as a slave after war tears his family and homeland apart. What makes Clive unique is that he also carries the power of the Eikon, Ifrit. Eikons are what we normally know in Final Fantasy games as “summons,” or giant godlike entities that we all know and love like Shiva, Ramuh, Odin and Bahamut.
The game starts with an incredible bang, diving right into the epic Eikon action with an absolutely mesmerizing Ifrit VS Phoenix fight. It’s here that you realize this isn’t like any Final Fantasy game before it, as the gameplay turns into a flight-sim cinematic-action extravaganza with a roaring choir and orchestral score as the two monsters tear each other apart.
I found it really interesting how the game embraced the Eikons as a major part of the story. Hell, the whole story really revolves around them. In previous Final Fantasy titles, the “summons,” really just pop up as spells during battle, inflicting damage on enemies and then disappearing. Final Fantasy XVI doesn’t make this stark distinction between the battle system and the story, as anything that Clive can do in a fight, he can do in story cinematics as well.
This made the cutscenes particularly interesting, as they really embraced a kind of anime-inspired epic absurdity that previous games hadn’t. Watching Ifrit battle Bahamut above the earth’s atmosphere was probably the most incredible shit I’ve ever seen in a video game.
Me playing the Ifrit vs Bahamut fight in FFXVI: pic.twitter.com/DfAurSqlWa
— Maximilian Uriarte (@TLCplMax) July 6, 2023
These insane highs are punctuated by unfortunately overlong and meandering sidequests that, while adding some lore and background to the world, are an absolute slog to play through.
Main quests are marked by red icons in the game, while green markers indicate a “side quest.” While some of the side quests unlock upgrades and new features, I groaned every time one of those damn green icons popped up, because I knew I was in for about 20 minutes of boredom.
The problem is that, while most of the main story is fully fleshed out with well-directed and acted cinematics that push the boundaries of videogames, the side quests are often relegated to the “B-team,” and feel incredibly video-gamey, with bad camera angles and stiff animations of talking heads saying way too much dialog to each other.
Despite these bits bogging the game down, I found the positives really outweighed the negatives. I think there was a point about halfway through where the game really clicked for me and went from being a 7 to being a 9. I think if you can embrace the anime-inspiration of Final Fantasy XVI and just love it for what it is, you’ll have a great time with this game.
The battle system in particular I found to be tons of fun. While it lacked the depth of other action RPG’s like Elden Ring, it was flashy enough and fun enough that I didn’t care. There’s something so satisfying about flying around and unleashing Eikon powers that just never gets old. Despite having more simplified RPG mechanics, there is still plenty of game here. Overall, Final Fantasy XVI took me well over 50 hours to complete from start to finish.
Overall, I think Final Fantasy XVI is a great game that gets occasionally bogged down by some annoyingly outdated game design decisions. As a longtime fan of Final Fantasy, I felt like it was a worthy follow-up to the series and ultimately incredible in its own right in many ways.
People typically think that junior-enlisted Marines have no power over the world around them. This simply isn’t true. If a junior-enlisted Marine wants to stop everything, everywhere, all at once, all they have to do is lose a piece of serialized gear.
There is nothing more heart-stopping, butt-puckering, and brow-sweatingly panic-inducing as losing a piece of serialized gear. The world stops for nothing… Except for this.
Serialized gear is anything that has been issued to you by the armory, essentially. Any weapon, equipment, or gear that you don’t get to keep in your barracks room is considered “serialized.”
(This is different than your typical CIF loadout that includes your pack and sleeping system, et all)
While the military might have the highest budget of any singular entity on earth, you’d better believe if you lose a $1200 piece of gear that your ass is going to pay for it.
Don’t be the one.
Also, please support TL on Patreon! Help us so we don’t have to start shilling energy drinks and protein powders.
They say that scent is the sense that is closest linked to memory. One whiff of something from a past life can send you on a journey of pungent nostalgia. Well, at least, I saw this in an Axe Bodyspray commercial once.
For me, I can’t get a sniff of Purell Hand Sanitizer without having flashbacks to my time at the San Diego Recruit Depot. It’s one of the many smells that make up the pungent funk of Marine Corps recruits en masse. Anyone who’s been in a Marine Corps squad bay knows the smell of 60-plus barely-bathed recruits is one that is not easily forgotten.
Drill Instructors are surely a hardy breed to be able to put up with such foul wretches for as long as they do.
We should be thankful.