How to Find Me @ PAX!

Zero Company practically from the jump has been described as - and literally embodies - the Ayurvedic concept of "Star Wars plus XCOM." I think it's best to resist this kind of mathematics when you're thinking about these things, it collapses too many variables, but then again I'm obsessed with lineage in games and so the two might be considered parents…? It doesn't really matter, though. You can say that phrase, and recognize that it refers to a truth in our world, and still not really know what it would mean. XCOM, like many wargames, tells a story through mechanics that the mind is only too happy to fill with context.  That happens here, too.  But it also has a baller story, good writing, and some startling suprises.  If we gotta get our Star Wars from the computer now, this is a great start.

I know that all my Foon Fiends are already logged the fuck in, but Mork and I somehow wriggled our way into the realm of the Podcast - and further incursions into the mainstream can't be far off.  If you already know what the show is, then that's good.  If not, I might just go in blind.  I just listened to the first half, and I can verify that everybody but me was incredibly funny.

(CW)TB

I eventually bounced off the first Mortal Shell because it was too fucking hard, but I ended up screwing around with the Open Beta for the sequel and it got its hooks in. That's one of the best demos I've ever played for a game, and it did a mean trick where there are invisible forcefields at certain points to halt your progress. I mean, I guess they can't give the whole game away, but God Damn if that didn't inspire a purchase. Now I know exactly what's behind that shimmering curtain of force: death, death, and more death. Which I should have guessed from the jump.

I'm obsessed with Lanterns. We both are. And even though our affection for justice is roughly equivalent - even though I'm the only one who knows what Sector we're in - still, the ring chose him. I have a rubric for keeping myself unmolested in this time, and it involves recognizing if something is green or not. Historically, green has been an inviting color - that's what makes it all so insidious.

I have been spending a few hours each weekend working with traditional tools. My family started requesting Pokemon and I’ve been sharing some of my progress over on my BlueSky. I know not everyone is on social media these days so I’m sharing here:

I haven't even seen any of the leaks; they are effervescent, and quickly boil away. I just know that there are a steady set of leaks for a game that is considered synonymous with the industry, and it only blooms narratively from there: now in addition to the data heist we've got crypto, and for a brief time there was a supposed Dead Man's Switch that would have released the game to the world if anything happens to him. Just unbelievable stuff. I hope the "Cyberleek Entity" is having fun while it lasts. You know? Order DoorDash or something. Do it up.

I always thought the comparison between "Actual Play" and Pornography was kind of a silly joke that had a little bit of truth in it, like all jokes which have the capacity to endure. Apparently this is something that people fought over, and were subsequently dissuaded from, all before I ever got to it. It's certainly never stopped me before. Previous interlocutors might have been dissuaded on account of their social station or desire to appease a cryptographically cycling moral framework. In my degraded state, laid low by my…. Well, by my "me," currying favor is not only beneath me it's literally impossible.

Whenever Gabe gets a bee in his bonnet about something, I tend to benefit. So do you, ultimately. When he got seriously into Formula 1, somehow by the end of it we were operating a racing reality show via Motorsport Manager with larger than life characters and life-changing stakes every week. I guess the actual cars were also cool.

For what always felt like a one-off experiment, Splatoon has had a long and successful career of being The Weird Kid in the family. If you have a child on the spectrum, there is a chance that you know a lot about Splatoon. In my experience, they're often ready to detail things for you. I suspect there's something about growing up feeling like an alien that makes this hyperpop, alternate-earth music video feel like home.

Ronia got back from Brand New Day with a lot of questions about Jean Grey, and it seemed like I might have to make a Powerpoint deck or something to paper over the fact that I failed as a father - as a man. There's a lot of comic shit I haven't told her, I guess. There's a lot of it out there! I chose the path of curation; we did not come to rest on any of this quotidian mutant fare When those assholes at Marvel finally get around to Ryan North' and Erica Henderson's run on The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Ronia will know Goddamn near everything. The only comfort I have otherwise is that Gabriel failed in this task also. Worse probably! Way worse I bet, when you really think about it altogether.

Among fighting game developers, one stands out as more damp and weird than the others. Their carapace is more mottled, their palps somehow more pedi than the rest. Arc System Works! We've been fans of their fermented, piquant takes on the genre for a while and were delighted to see they'd managed to enter the 3D era without giving up the incredible silhouettes of their 2D heritage. Gabriel thought he might sip the summerwine one last time with Marvel Tokon, as he had in the days of his exultant youth, but he says that he washed out during the tutorial. I don't have the game, so I don't know what that would even look like, but the tutorial for 2XKO was perverse enough that I might be able to guess. It was like Operant Conditioning, like I was gonna have to falsify some number of lights at some point or murder a public figure. I didn't even dislike it, necessarily! But it did feel like I was being psychologically terraformed by a force alien to our Earth.

I think Gabe has wanted to draw Asmongold for awhile, and generally these days the thing that keeps him from doing it is that he doesn't want to draw attention to the target. Except the target in this case is one of the biggest streamers on planet Earth. He can't actually be obscured; the strip is about his most recent fourteen day ban, but having been banned as often as he is, this is just part of the business model. The video he made in response to the ban will probably have three million views by the end of the day. You get kicked out of one place, and somebody else is always there to monetize your riposte. YouTube, generally - Streamer Switzerland.

The first panel of this strip has a joke so dumb it arrested my consciousness. I had to crank the key and turn it over several times to get it started again. Gabe bounced off Beast of Reincarnation at light speed, but it did inspire several minutes of reflection on the supernatural. Or, the natural I guess. It's about a concept that I was warned away from as a child, along with Yoga and Transcendental Meditation. I led a somewhat cloistered young existence, where the only drug on offer was Marital Coitus. But it… I mean, it takes a while to set that shit up.

Big Walk fucks. Even the reviews of the game are good! It occurs to me that this might be ambiguous phrasing. What I mean is that the reviews themselves are of a high quality. They can't wait to tell people about it! They had so much weird fun that they have been transformed into repeater stations - they're shedding spores. They've reached the fruiting phase! That's how good it is.

Morak and I are on the same page where the Supergirl movie is concerned, which is that it is pretty good and we can't wait to see the children of Krypton together again, but that as entertainment it genuinely can't get out of its own way. The clearest example of this was a last minute series of A/B tests where they previewed two different cuts of the film, and in the end the studio went with its cut over the director's own. If you make things, though - and maybe even if you don't - there's simply confusion in the piece and a schizoid edit that indicates nobody's vision is on display. Also, there's a lotta rocks.

Raccoons in my neighborhood, save one, are not spherical. They are big though, off that Seattle trash. They're fat as fuck off Brie rinds and jamón ibérico trimmings. Some of these bad boys can deliver near-cryptid thrills. When I was driving home one night, I saw one that didn't even read as a raccoon visually - my mind told me that it was most likely a toddler that had escaped from some kind of toddler… prison. That's what it gave me! Not helpful.