Tony Hurk

I’ve been messing around with the tools Clip Studio has for recording your work. I forgot to turn it on until I had finished my first sketch pass but I do have a recording of today’s strip getting made. If you like to see how the sausage gets made here is a quick little timelapse that shows how a Penny Arcade strip comes together. 

When Gabe and I were writing the strip, Brenna came in and was talking about some kind of altercation she had gotten into with a man online about "woke diabetes barbie." I feel like… I feel like if I had spent a lot of time thinking about that, I would be kind of embarrassed. I have a somewhat complex relationship with masculinity in general, which I'm sure comes as no surprise given my, you know, everything. I had to compile a custom manhood from snips of things I found on GitHub and I don't know if it would even be a durable identity for anyone else. I don't feel any particular compulsion to be a guard on the gate that winnows true men from beta cucks. I have much, much bigger fish to fry. Whatever masculinity is, though, I'm certain it doesn't involve arguing with my wife online about dolls.

I watched a streamer man called Northernlion run an Umamusume Pretty Derby tournament and thirty thousand people were in the channel. Haven't heard of this potent brand, just as vigorous as the horses that inspired it? Of course you have. It's the anime/manga/music/game series from Cygames about beautiful, fast young women who are reincarnations of famous historical racehorses. Obviously.

I remember seeing the first corporate entreaties about AI that had jumped containment and been posted online. They were not gentle, but they weren't overtly hostile: how have you used AI this week to accomplish your tasks? If you squint a little, you can see kind of a weird visage in the negative space. The newer ones I've seen are a little more like placing a loaded gun on the table before you speak. Why haven't you? I think the third evolution of this dialogue is just you getting locked out of Slack, with a mysterious meeting placed on your calendar for later that day.

I was just talking about how Mork's hunger for the written word exposed him to all manner of richness, and one of those was a book called The Martian that a man named Andy Weir self-published first on his blog and then on Kindle. Weir wrote more books later, apparently he "caught the bug," and one of them was called Project Hail Mary. There is a spoiler for the book that Mike has judiciously protected me from for four years, and at around two minutes into the trailer they just straight up let the space-cat out of the starbag.

I was talking to Kiko, whose entire social media diet is checking BlueSky once a week, and it was clear to me how hale and vigorous he was as a result. My own nutrition, pilfered by these deleterious forces, is patchy at best. Necessary compounds are scarce; youthful skin is a memory. I just saw myself in a mirror - for a few moments, I thought I was looking at bowling ball with a greasy napkin draped over it.

There's a lot of focus on the brains and the flesh and whatnot - long, ragged strips of manflesh, juicy like a papaya. But what do zombies want in the long term? Has anybody even asked? Or are they too busy running away from zombies in the corrugated metal maze of a favela? Look. We're always being told to let people cook, with questionable results. Wastrels, "writers" and the like. They've been extended a blank check; an unlimited opportunity to cook the void. Thankfully, the 28 Days X franchise is bold enough to get down to brass fucking tacks.

I start tons of books using the Kindle preview but end up actually buying and finishing far fewer. I lean towards hard Sci-Fi. I like inscrutable alien artifacts and massive jumps through time. If I’m not reading about spaceships I’m reading history books for some reason. I think because the good ones at least are sort of like time travel books. I’ve managed to finish a bunch of great books recently from both these genres and I wanted to share my finds here for those of you with similar reading interests.

I haven't played a Kojima game all the way through since Metal Gear Solid 2, and that was before he started getting truly wild with the cutscenes. I love to watch them though, which is fully in-line with the profound, unique spectacle they offer. 2 Live Crew's third album was entitled "As Nasty As They Wanna Be," and there is a version of this principle in place for Hideo Kojima - very, very few people are allowed by the universe to be this true to their instincts, to "shock the world" as Silkk The Shocker put it. I'm trying to figure out another old school hip hop reference but I think this paragraph is essentially spent. Everything that we say in the strip is true, though.

We're starting to really get into it now on the legal framework that underpins AI training data. Disney is trying to kick over Midjourney with one foot while wedging its other foot in the door at OpenAI for a possible licensing deal. It's kind of a hardcore play, when you think about it; it's something like testing the Death Star on Alderaan.

I would be overjoyed to say that all these lures and snips of prose and epitomized human forms all constitute pornography, but I won't unilaterally disarm. I think it's okay to be a weird little freak and fuck your aging necromancers or your sex vampires or even, in rare and select cases for the real sickos, human beings. People get super mad when you talk shit about their porn, and that's sorta how you know it's porn. I wish there were a way to, in a robust and ongoing way, simply admit that people have kinks without making them into purity spirals and empowering endless grifts.

Last Sunday we released the Super Wizard Kart episode of Acquisitions Inc and I just wanted to drop another link to it here for the Friday crowd.

Troubling content abounds in today's startling sequel. If you dare to click, know this: your perversion will be registered at the highest level.

The only thing I actually know about Stellar Blade is that it is a Site of Conflict. I didn't have a PS5 and continue to not have one, so it wasn't especially actionable at the time. Well, I guess I know one more thing about it - that there is almost certainly a Federal Bureau dedicated to apprehending the wicked men who… do what, exactly? Look at a picture?

The cat knight collecting gatcha game "Kätzen Knights" from yesterday's comic is not a real video game. I am sorry. 

Hey Jerry!

Yo.

I just wanted to say thank you for talking up Sunderfolk. My girlfriend is not into video games AT ALL, but she likes boardgames. She was willing to give Sunderfolk a shot and has fallen completely in love with it, to the point that she asks me if we can play when I get home. I love that I can share something I have always enjoyed with her now. I hope we get more games like this in the future. Thanks again.  -Erik

I love Secret Door, I love Dreamhaven, and I love Sunderfolk.  I did a sponsored panel for Sunderfolk at PAX with a bunch of other cool people and I charged zero dollars.  That's how cool I think it is.  There are quite a few gamers on PC that don't really understand "Jackbox Gloomhaven," the phone as a controller for a co-op tactics feast is either alien or distasteful, like trying to play the game with a dead rat.  I wonder sometimes if it could have a different life with a PC specific UI, but that's neither here nor there - I'm glad you two are having fun with it.  If you need naming suggestions for any of the things you discover obviously we're here to help.

(CW)TB