The Right Hand of The King

In the modern era of course, Gabe is a petrol-huffing speed demon. In Wheel Saint, he made me anodize his filthy carnography with a Catholoid sheen. But even if we weren't obsessives in the past, we usually kept up with the big franchises because there was a lot of fun metaphors they could bang into unique gameplay. Burnout is the, I don't know… racing platformer, I guess? Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit was a really fun version of tag. We grabbed The Crew back in the day, sometimes called a "CaRPG," and Ubisoft allowed it to live and breathe and develop a unique audience. An audience they would scourge at the beginning of the month by seizing access to the game they bought.

There is no universe in which I purchase the new Ubisoft Star Wars game for $70 much less $200 now that they just delete games you bought from your library. This is especially frustrating considering I’ve been playing a lot of old games recently, specifically racing ones. Going back and playing these decade old games made me realize how much I dislike the new “festival” design for these sorts of racers. The Crew Motorfest and Horizon both want me to believe that I’m participating in some kind of sanctioned event and compared to games like NFS or even the original Crew it’s just super boring. I’m having a blast with NFS Payback and NFS 2015 right now which sadly is another of these Always Online games meaning that EA could pull the plug on it at anypoint. It’s wild because they still look and play better than many modern racing games. Just because a game is 10 years old doesn’t mean it’s no good anymore especially when you look at the current state of triple A games. 

When I see our engineer playing something in Early Access, I always make a note to come back and check it out - but Gabe beat me to it. This time it's The Planet Crafter, which just hit 1.0. It's a multiplayer techy buildy enviro sim type thing, but the couple screens and videos I saw didn't really communicate the arc. The arc is terraforming a hostile world into a paradise, which you can see in the video below. I've done the first part a ton - picking up all that shit, making shit from the shit, so many times that I don't really get out of bed for that layer anymore. I sure as shit haven't done this:

For Christmas I got a very nice printer and a Cricut cutting machine. I quickly became obsessed with making stickers. I was taken back to the days of my youth in the 80’s when sticker collecting was HUGE. Like all kids I loved cartoons back then but I specifically liked the art. I used to take the comic section from the Sunday newspaper and trace all my favorite characters. When stickers became a thing I was powerless to resist. There were dedicated sticker shops all over and inside they were essentially candy stores but for art! I filled my official Hallmark sticker album with Garfield, Snoopy, Care Bears and then spent hours trying to draw them. I specifically remember learning to draw the bald eagle mascot of the 1984 Olympics whose look I loved and was on all kinds of merch back then including stickers. It’s been fun drawing sttuff reminiscent of those old designs. More stickers are dropping today if you’d like to get nostalgic with me.

Gabriel was telling me about Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and about how… just about how it was, what it was like. He told me things that I guess are technically spoilers but I don't know if you can meaningfully spoil or even harm this type of content. It is a buddy cop movie about a nuclear dinosaur and a monkey that is too big. He's too big! I can't stress that enough.

I was trying to find something for my newspost on Friday, some ancient snip of gabriana, and Twitter said that there was no such thing as a Gabe. Certainly we have our disagreements from time to time on matters of import, and also… condiments, but nothing to cast him into the void over. If I get a vote, he should continue to exist. But he made that account a billion years ago in Internet terms, and now it's gone.

As a fundamentally antisocial person, I’m not sure social media was ever going to be a good fit for me. Like the comic suggests, I have finally deleted my Twitter account. I don’t think it’s ever been a healthy place to be for me but under its new management the service has gotten even worse. I found myself spending hours reading through trending hashtags and blocking idiots. After realizing what a colossal waste of fucking time this was I quit the service back in December but still felt weird about having an account. I was a frog who had managed to jump out of the boiling water but felt like he needed to keep the pot around. Finally I reached out to about five people that I had only ever communicated with via Twitter, gave them my email address and then nuked the account.  I highly encourage anyone else still there to do the same. Trust me, ditch your twitter account and spend that time playing games. You’ll feel a lot better. 

Mork is obsessed with X-Men '97 - I was more of a Batman: The Animated Series guy, they started the same year, and I used to run up the hill - it was like a forty-five degree angle - and I could usually get home before the credits were over. But X-Men was probably more nineties, overall: the palette, the music, it's an incredible time capsule and they have brought it into the modern day via some kind of alchemy. We started all this just a few years later, which is sort of hard to get my head around.

That is the whole post. I deleted my Twitter so, get used to this.

-Gabe Out

I've described the hedonic burnout that must naturally come from triggering the same psychological reward system over and over for the duration of my World of Warcraft career. And, no hate - if you rode that particular rollercoaster all the way up and all the way down, it was a singular era. I fucking lived there. There is a tower in the starting area outside of Stormwind where my character "lived" and I have a lot of incredibly serious backstory which occurred there. I would pass it, seventy levels later, and think of the hempen blanket and that humble straw which she could afford.

The new character - in Final Fantasy XIV? Catgirl. I'm going a different direction this time.

I just installed AFK Journey, and after I get done with this post and finish recording the podcast for the Clurb PA patrons I'm gonna jump in. I kept seeing it at PAX East - their booth stood sentinel in a central area between tabletop and digital, and so I was always passing it. It looks incredibly beautiful. Beautiful and dangerous!!!  Young Mork discussed it a bit, but it's hard not to feel that the art has been trapped somehow in this game.  I have friends who derive a lot of enjoyment from this genre, and clearly millions and people (and dollars) exist as my opposite here.  It's a mode of play I don't actively seek.  I get that it can fill in for more dedicated pursuits.  I understand that part.  It just sorta feels like a sandwich made from condiments.  You know?  I feel like there's something I'm not getting.

I tried “Playing” AFK Journey just because it’s so damn pretty. I don’t like games that have to walk you through their convoluted structure with big arrows. “Now go here to check your mail and accept the 200 free Shit crystals then go here and use them to upgrade your Fuck guy.” As soon as I am presented with these freemium systems my instinct is to run. It’s a bummer because the little bit of AFK Journey I saw was gorgeous. I just wish it was literally any other kind of game.

I really, really like The Three-Body Problem. I was on vacation with Ryan once, he was reading it, and I read a few pages and then - if memory serves - essentially held the book hostage until I completed it. I read very fast. But still! It was a criminal act. In my defense - and I'm not saying it is defensible - the book was very good. Imagine that you had been eating something delicious, and were excited to continue. And then I took the plate, unhinged my jaw, and slid the contents of the plate down into my gullet. Ryan remembers this theft, all of it, at 120 frames per second: each turn of the page nearly pornographic, an eternity of lust.

You might have read what we did, which is that Jeffrey Lin, of Fast And/Or Furious fame, is floating around as the director for the next Spider-Man movie. As one of the few manifestations of Marvel-type shit that actually still works - I have what I believe are an "earned" set of expectations for Deadpool & Wolverine - it's one of a very small number of movies that I would prioritize seeing in a theater. I don't know if that is still completely fucked up as an industry; the only movies I followed closely were movies in this particular genre, and they weren't performing for reasons that weren't entirely to do with the plague. I only know that my own behavior around it has changed, and it's entirely possible that Gabe isn't really going back at all. If there's something that makes us wanna, it's probably worth noting when it happens.

I know there’s lots of new games to play right now but for some reason none of them are especially calling to me. Instead I played NFS Unbound all weekend. I ended up building out my own class A car for the races yesterday and somehow stumbled onto a real monster. I honestly don’t know what I did but this Audi S5 Sportback was an absolute blast to drive and it destroyed my competition. Here’s a couple races I saved.

Now I'm on another plane, the 737 MAX, whose various debilitations and inopportune door-fallings-out resulted in the removal of Boeing's CEO just an hour or so ago. The only  reason he had this job in the first place is because of the 2019-2021 groundings launched his predecessor into space - a trip through the Wikipedia Page about the incident describes the shit this other asshole was exiled for, and it's utterly fucking nuts. It's hard to believe I'm just learning this details now, and the idea that it didn't result in an internal culture that would forestall their current troubles makes me think we need to bring back the fucking stocks.