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An omnibus is ‘a volume containing several books previously published separately’. Technically, most comics sold as books fall into this category, with trade paperbacks (TPBs) being omnibuses collecting floppies, larger TPBs being omnibuses of smaller TPBs, and the traditional comics omnibuses collecting these into an even larger volume, in both length and page size. In the world of comics, omnibus largely refers to these editions, oversized hardcovers with massive page counts – many over a thousand, although many smaller ones have been printed. Comic omnibuses are pretty damn cool, and it borders on tragedy that they’re largely the domain of capeshit. Luckily, both Marvel and DC have published a range of omnibuses collecting stories outside their main universes, including both popular IP like Star Wars or Conan, and stories that began in the medium like Sandman, Lucifer, and Preacher. By cool, I mean cool. On some level, the only thing that differentiates an omnibus from a typical ove...

Loading screens in video games are pretty boring. Sure, you can fluff them up with a little animation or music, but they’re still there for the player to wait while the console does its thing. The good stuff is on the other side, no matter what’s added to enrich the experience or distract from the boredom. Loading screens, especially longer ones, are a good opportunity to leave, to grab a glass of water or a snack, to check on something in the house, to stand up and stretch. The problem then, is that players might have left the room entirely by the time the game loads and dumps them into the action. In the worst cases this will force a restart, and with it another stretch of loading. I recently encountered this in the Resident Evil 3 remake, where the loading bar hung around 10% for most of the time, before quickly jumping to 90% and then throwing Jill in front of a hungry zombie. One way to negate this issue is a confirmation prompt replacing the progress bar when it reaches 100%, req...