Penny Arcade

Everything is good downstairs. Upstairs is a complete mess! But that's been true for decades.

I guess it's true what they say - you never really know what's going on in another person's scrotum. It's just as true today as it was whenever it was said the first time. That might literally be two sentences before this one. I guess what I would say is that I thought everybody being able to talk all the time about everything was more or less gonna be an unmitigated good, and being up to my ass in it now for a couple decades I think there are probably hard limits on what we as people can process and make sense of. I don't have a solution for that. The Internet we have now is an arms race of algorithms designed to make war out of every distinction. One of the outputs of this system is ad revenue. The other is, well, War.

Remember that the Management of Motorsports has been made difficult if not impossible with the return of in-person school! It was like a year and a half where the world operated in a radically different way, and I guess the kids were in the house every day? It's only been a couple weeks of school now and I don't even remember that. A year and a half? Really? Shit.

(CW)TB out.

I am ridiculously excited to announce that coming up on Saturday the 25th (my birthday!) I’m doing an ASUS x Gundam PC build with my son Gabe on the PA Twitch channel.  Thankfully Chris Barr from ROG North America will join us to supervise and provide valuable info.

Also Jerry will be there.

-Gabe Out

What kids in the house watch on their own time is fairly constrained, but what we watch when we're together might be a little broader than what's considered normal. For example, Derry Girls is probably the piece of media most prized by our clan, and it's replete with filthy language, blasphemy, and references to the sort of intimate congress that - despite its apparently scandalous nature - produced every human being on Earth. Because of the way they experience the world, with unrelenting immediacy, I honestly don't even know if you could show them a piece of media they'd recognize as true if it weren't Rated R.

"Swearing," Oaths of the classic variety, are so commonplace in the culture they're steeped in that I might remark on a particularly novel usage thereof but as a generality they're aware that these words aren't for use in the house and are tied to specific contexts. Beyond that, I think saying a no-no word is one of the safest forms of rebellion there is. I just don't care about this shit. And neither do they, really.

Behold! For tonight, we're playing Dungeons & Dragons. I, your humble Dungeon Master, will twiddle the knobs of a wholly invented universe while my friends attempt to break it. We call it Acquisitions Incorporated: The "C" Team, and it's something like a dark office comedy that takes place on multiple planes of existence. We've been playing it for about four years, and of course it's based on something we've been playing for more than a decade, so it might take you a little bit to catch up. That said, if you've been with us for a while, we're back up to our old shenanigans with the Classic "C" Team characters tonight, so do stop by at 4pm PDT - only on Twanch.

(CW)TB out.

Warnett Humboldt wasn't a snake, but he got snakes. He was content to own the concept of a snake in his mind; he had no interest in having one in the house. That seemed a little too on the nose - or whatever a snake had. There, up front; two quick snake-holes that suggested a colon. Suggested a breath: literally and perhaps even figuratively.

He thought about a woman for a little while.

He did his best thinking while his body drove the car. He wondered what it would be like to eat something hungry. Would it even satisfy? He was curious about it but not enough to interview every creature he was going to eat. There was a restaurant called Shakey's Pizza, and Shakey sounded like if you turned the word snake into an adjective. He didn't know who Shakey was. Maybe Shakey was a snake - a lazy one who couldn't be bothered to craft a bulletproof second identity. A clue-leaver, like those killer guys.  That seemed snakey to him.

That was when the snake that represented all the things this book is about squoze through the crease in the seat - the place where things get lost. Humboldt was lost, too. He felt like the world and his job was a seat or something and he was in the crack at the hinge area in the bottom. He wanted to push his way back up through the seat to where the chair part was. He thought about it practically for a moment. He would be fine if he just fell through the back of it probably into the floor in the back seat, too. The chair was probably something like Self-Acceptance but he didn't know what the floor was in the back. He didn't know what the boot waffle in the soda spill represented. He couldn't account, metaphysically, for the lint.

The not-snake shrugged the shoulders it didn't have. "Shit's crazy," it said.

(CW)TB out.

Whatever you may think of me now - how I comport myself, what I "get up to" - I'm fried dough compared to my previous incarnation. He was not exactly done in the middle, and that is being diplomatic. I had to endure successive annihilations to shave down a variety of sticky-outy bits which made being around me complex and not in a Pinot Noir way. More like complex in a fuckin' shut up way. I see that Michael has rendered me with the teabag I would occasionally tie to my glasses because I liked the smell. This was around the time I started wearing sweatpants exclusively - I realized that while I was required to go to school, I was not required to wear uncomfortable pants while I was at school. The realizations only bloomed from there. I came to understand I was also wearing a host of constraining ideas that were of no benefit, either. It was around this time that I invented the hippo.

Some online have asked that we invert this comic, and show Gabriel's future path, and so we just wrote it. Certainly, engaging in this kind of behavior is redolent of Dreaded Continuity, that treacherous force wise men must ever steel themselves against. I vow to resist it.

With the kids back in school, and with my eldest going to a high school out of range of the buses, it's really done a number on when I can pop in and stream - it's fucked it up pretty bad, honestly. Until I can figure out exactly how to resolve these things, Tuesday and Wednesday are probably the only days I'm gonna be guaranteed to do it. They give you a city bus card, but if you're talking about a kid on what they currently call "the spectrum" there's some significant scaffolding that is gonna have to occur to prepare them for that and it's got to be my priority.

What that means is that currently Golgolfa on Wednesdays and the Motorsports Manager streams are essentially paused until I can rewire a human mind to identify fear as opportunity. Let's see how this goes; somebody start a clock.

(CW)TB out.