Penny Arcade

As a spectacle, as a meticulously engineered media experience lensed through the twin magnifications of IMAX and 3D, James Cameron's Avatar is absolutely - I am confident in saying this - a film. It didn't really stick with me. I was at Disney World a couple years back, and they had a whole fuckin' Avatar, like… zone, and I was surprised. Like The Matrix, I think it provided a tool to get at some existential concepts a youth informed William Gibson had already formatted me for.  Ubisoft is now doing a second Avatar game - oh? You don't remember the first? I'm not a hundred percent sure what we're supposed to glean from the trailer, other than the idea that butterfly lizards apparently beat attack helicopters in whatever enigmatic version of Rock Paper Scissors they play in the future. The best we can hope for at this point is Appa DLC.

If you have missed your friends from The "C" Team, so cruelly ripped from you by the Plague Year, stop by the stream at 4pm PDT for their sponsored Wildermyth Stream. This shit is gonna twist your head around - check out PC Gamer's review if you're curious, but your primary means of interaction is telling a story(!!!). Said story is undergirded by a tactics game where time passes and heroes grow old. Steam says I bought it on March 8th, 2020, and I remember thinking "You are cool, and I'm gonna come back to you when you're out." And now it's out, currently sitting at "Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam. Congrats to the team at Worldwalker Games, and thanks for the opportunity.  Check that custom art!

We all know the greatest skill of the #Cteam is their impeccable strategic thinking. Right? Right?!?

Come hang out with @TrystanFalcone, @krisstraub, @katewelchhhh, & @rhartman today at 4pm PT on https://t.co/A9BCARgnth and preview the newly released #Wildermyth! #MOLPY #AcqInc pic.twitter.com/ZdtptgcQDI

— Penny Arcade (@PA_Megacorp) June 16, 2021

But, just before...

New prophecy just dropped: it's about how the brutal warlord Garr and his unkempt, mostly skin scavenger bird Willie Smithers made a pact with the inscrutable lords of Golgolfa with one foul aim: to despoil the Green Supreme. Obviously, my stalwart second Gabir Liel and I aren't about to let this happen. I bade him: stay thy club, brother. Let us meet them upon that manicured field, that field which is made right for war, and… you know, we'll play golf with them on Wednesday. Well, it's Wednesday! We've all got time for one round, so you'll probably want to be there at 2pm sharp.

(CW)TB out.

Loki is like Wandavision in that it's a kind of puzzle, which is the sort of show I like best. It's also the most optimized use of Disney+ as a platform, because now the hook is set and I sorta have to stick around to find out what this shit is about now. I go hog-ass fucking wild for a Primer, or a Memento. Or even a regular Mento. I should buy some Mentos.

I don't surf the Internet correctly. For one thing, I either ronically or i-ronically still use the term surf. I tend to go to individual sites for information; it's not really mediated by feeds or algo shenanigans. But until I got an Android phone a couple years ago, when I thought Google Fi would make travel to Canada and Australia more sensible, I hadn't been exposed to this bizarre underbelly of content whose provenance is difficult to discern. Content that essentially makes me feel like I'm going crazy reading it. There's a panel on my phone if you swipe left from the home screen that tells you what the algorithm really thinks of you, and what it thinks is that I want a bunch of articles which purport to have - but do not actually have - clear answers to increasingly granular horseshit.

These articles are like the broth you would make by filling a pot with water, looking at the water very intently, and thinking about a chicken. You'll get to the fifth paragraph of one of these, where you imagine the answer to the question posed by the headline might be, and find out that they don't have the answer either. They don't know if the new Ratchet & Clank is coming to PS4. Wandavision is what broke me, because it was bullshit ninety five percent of the time, just completely unmoored from reality. I was under the impression that these pieces constituted information - I thought they were someone's thoughts and ideas set down in a way that I could observe and process. Great pains had been taken to make them appear like communication.

These articles are essentially genuflections, completely empty ritualized movements and assertions, acts of worship for this devil we made. We have stories about Viziers for this fucking reason, about outsourcing our cognition, but now the feedback loop is essentially inescapable. I feel bad for the people who have to make these, but at the end of the day I'm glad someone is making money writing even if they're merely hanging a kind of linguistic drywall. It's not a choice they're making; the Internet has essentially been apportioned into fiefdoms and you have to sing these strange songs to be let in the gate. I'm essentially at the ragged end of a radicalization funnel, it just thinks that my belief system is The MCU. I don't think we can say that selectively pruning and breeding our attention in this way isn't twisting our heads around in a way that pop cultural ephemera isn't simply a proxy for.

(CW)TB out.

I genuinely don't know a lot about He-Man, although my friend Damon had a Battle Armor He-Man whose inner workings perpetually mystified me. You could strike the breastplate, and every time it would reveal a progressively more damaged version until it was perfect again. What a terrifying foe. Strike your enemy dead in the chest three times to… perfect him? I'm not fucking fighting this guy. That explains the raft of robots, weird snake guys, and bipedal insects he's has to contend with. He's almost certainly murdered everyone else, except for the one guy whose face is already a skull.

I thought the trailer looked pretty wild. She-Ra on Netflix seemed like a reboot of the whole thing; I didn't have to see the original to know that they were on some other shit.  The whole family watched and enjoyed it, which almost never happens here.  I wondered if they were trying to do some kind of reboot of the shared brand, but this He-Man thing seems more like… well, from an outsider's perspective, it looks sorta like He-Man.

It's time to Manage Motorsports yet again, as we get right down into the action with Gabir Motorsports - proud member of the Dragon Race Team China of automotive brands. We're heading into the back half of the season now, where our factory is fairly consistently delivering podium quality parts. With the rainy season coming in, can Gabir Motors maintain its momentum? And what's this we hear about The Hogfather's new album? Find out today at 2pm PDT, only on Twinch.

(CW)TB out.

The main thing you have to know about streaming platforms is that their dynamics are such that it's too rich for Microsoft's blood. Microsoft. After squeezing to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, they determined that the volume and quality of the juice hadn't been worth it. Which is too bad, because it was… kinda good. The latency was really low; it felt like you could have real conversations with chat almost. It had a built-in studio you could use to manufacture cool interactions for your channel.

Facebook is extending a program where they don't get a cut of subscriptions. We should be as clear as they are, though - you get full value for subs, yes, provided they are purchased on desktop.

We’re doubling down on creators. Facebook has waived all revshare from subscriptions until 2023! Yeah, you read that correctly. You’ll continue to receive 100% of your subscriptions when purchased on desktop.

This applies to Partners, Level Up and all FB creators. #CreatorFirst

— Josh (@CatchMeStreamin) June 7, 2021

This means, in essence, that when your grandma subs to your channel you'll extract the full value. I'm not sayin' that's nothin'. Grandma's gonna sub. You know she's good for it.

And so, yeah, we have to make a comic strip about it, but it's worth mentioning at least that Facebook has done things like license music so streamers don't have to worry about shit like that. These things are really cool. They don't seem to matter. Incredibly famous YouTubers… stream on Twitch. Because that's where the streaming happens. The kind of dominance you can amass online, without the natural, ordinary, nettlesome challenges of the physical world, is incredibly durable. I love that there exists anywhere somebody who can provide something approximating competition in this space, a game played by giants, whose ante alone reaches into the inconceivable.

You remember this, right?! Because it's fucking today!!!

Join Walnut on her quest to stay out of the dog(/bear/weasel/wolf)house in the @Lambert_House Special today, June 9th, at 4pm PT! #Pride

Tune-in: https://t.co/6dcJZbFWnn
Donate directly: https://t.co/h33m8uMflG pic.twitter.com/xpMAxZcJTX

— Dungeons & Dragons (@Wizards_DnD) June 9, 2021

Much love to Lambert House, who receives all viewer donations. Remember also that all profit from Gavin's Pride pin set supports them also. Our PRIDE LOVE pin offers a similar, sleek charitable profile, but supports the work of Gay Gaming Professionals (GGP) instead. But why choose? Both pins will fit in your cart at once.

Today is hopefully my last round of Solo PVE Golf, because after E3 we should get our Will Smith back, the Will Smith that - regardless of what I might have said before - I consider the authentic and true Will Smith. But I'll be there checking out the best courses the community has to offer on PGA Tour 2k1 from 2pm PDT to 3:50 or so, when I'll drop out for the Pride game's pre-roll.

(CW)TB out.

You mighta seen the story - maybe you didn't? I don't feel like we've exaggerated the arc really in any way. This is more or less what happened! They definitely activated social; I bet shares were through the roof. I suspect that sometimes, very rarely, there is a such a thing as bad press.

Eric is attending a training tomorrow, so we won't be able to do the brewing show, but Gabriel has kindly taken up that precious zone between 12:00pm and 1:30pm PDT and wherever two or more Gundam are gathered in my name, there shall I be also. What I'm saying is that Mike and I will be streaming together. Maybe you never went to church and didn't hear that phrase. Anyway, he's gonna keep going on his Perfect Grade Sinanju, which is some pretty serious shit and has taken up several afternoons on the channel so far:

It's weirdly relaxing to watch it manufactured, and I don't miss an episode. We spend the rest of the time discussing shit while it comes together. I look forward to it a weird amount.

(CW)TB out.