Papa Gurgle

After those first Marvel Rivals streams, where our celestial betters were allowed to frolic and play amongst the stars, I felt sorta confident not engaging with it. Every hero I saw in this hero shooter seemed to be a kind of gumbo made from the rinds and tailings of the Overwatch characters they'd mined out. I saw them pushing the kind of cart I was already sick of pushing when I was pushing carts before I quit Overwatch.

And then they showed Squirrel Girl.

People have been saying they were gonna leave Twitter for a super long time, in the same way they often claim they're going to move to Canada, and with roughly the same level of success. I'm not trying to say they're dumb liars; full synchronicity with our personal ethics requires a nearly cosmic level of effort, and in my experience always comes with painful sacrifice, which is why most people are content merely to describe this wicked gulf in others. But it actually seems to be happening, this time. There is a sundering of sorts, the kind of thing you would read in the Silmarillion. At least, I think. I've never read it. But it's still true: BlueSky and Threads are now functional, catalyzed venues for discourse with varying levels or intentions to Federate. Federation is sort of a sophisticated concept to explain, but it might be reasonable here to say that it is an orthogonal philosophy to the Internet as it works now. Another way of saying it: Federation has ideas in common with the Internet that was stolen from us.

This week I’ll be leaving for Philadelphia and PAX Unplugged. This is one of my favorite shows and I’m super excited to be bringing my youngest son Noah with me this year. He’s obsessed with Warhammer 40k right now so I think a tabletop gaming expo will be a lot of fun. 

Some of you have already taken us up on the offers of our humble shop - but there are, perhaps, those who are hungry for a sweeter offer. And we can provide: at 2pm PST, we will unleash a horde of our famous Double Secret boxes for the true pin enthusiast. Hunger for these boxes has historically been ravenous, so plan accordingly. I packed a ton of these myself, and there are some true delights to be had in this heady mix.

When we were learning about wargaming from The Germans - two German men who taught us wargames - they always say that you should not pay to reroll something unless the chance of you succeeding is at least sixty-six percent. I try to remember that every time; I can hear their voices in my head every time I forego their sensible advice. We offer another piece of advice to you today, a corollary of sorts, in today's incomparable strip.

I would rather be eaten in my front yard by wild dogs, but it's not to be. I'm heading over to Spokane where I will no doubt be eaten by something much worse.

Gabriel the Younger is quite a bit like his dad, but his youngest creature - like my own - simply can't be derived conceptually from a combination of their parents' traits. It's shocking to the layman, like multiplying two negatives and getting a positive. In practice, it's like entering the world with a service animal. There's just stuff about it I can't perceive despite my prodigious attempts and ample time to have done so. They see and delight in these hidden geometries! So it is that Noah often accompanies his father as an Adventure Companion, most recently to the Child's Play Charity dinner and auction. They did not secure the UCS Millenium Falcon (75192), but I think Noah would like you to know that he knew the designation and part number off the top of his head.

We had something called a "Bomb Cyclone" over here, which sounds bad, but it was okay! Well, it was okay if you live on what we call The West Side. On The East Side, something like a half a million homes had no power. It essentially turns your home into a freezing, freestanding Cave and it instituted a kind of extemporaneous "Return To Office" mandate but it was mostly just to charge people's phones. It made relatively normal things difficult, and it made difficult things impossible.

We've been saying that Game Pass is the platform for years; I let my sub lapse, but even on PC I was nominally an Xbox gamer for years. I don't know who is doing the curation on the PC side of things, though if I were doing it myself in some kind of Ambien soaked nocturnal fugue state it would be more or less the same slate. But their This Is An Xbox campaign, which we go into in the strip, kinda hurts.

Every crease and fold of the Concord saga is so confusing to me. After the response to the trailer, you'd think there might be a pause to reflect. After the performance of that beta, you'd think that would have pulled a comically large lever of some kind to take a breath. To hear Sony tell it, their process didn't involve "Gates" early enough, rounds of user testing or evaluation. The whole thing seems like it was greenlit by Vibes.

Channing Tatum is an incredible Gambit as long as you close your eyes. I can see a scenario where true innovators utilize forced perspective or something but there would be significant challenges. The suit looked uncomfortable; imagine that Channing Tatum were a squeezable product. This is what the tube would look like.

I loved Deadpool and Wolverine, especially the team of forgotten heroes they assembled. I leaned over to Noah in the theater and shook him shouting “BLADE” when Wesley Snipes appeared. While I liked seeing Gambit on screen and I appreciate that Channing Tatum likes the character, I have to say I don’t really see him as Gambit. He tried very hard and I don’t even hate the accent but he just doesn’t physically look like Gambit to me. If they want to get serious I think they need to hire someone like Austin Butler who I think would kill the role accent and all. 

About a week ago Eric Benson - known variably as Edge Benson, Azerbaijan, or The Notorious E.J.B. - dropped a shot of the League installer into the group chat. The reaction was as though he had shown us a venomous snake or a troubling X-Ray from his doctor. Has he been bamboozled by Arcane? We can't say it never happens.

I absolutely love the Arcane series on Netflix. It’s one of the most beautiful animated productions I’ve ever seen but they don’t just nail the art. It also has incredible music, great writing and killer voice performances. It’s the complete package and it’s so good at making me love the League of Legends universe that I get the twinge to reinstall after each episode. So far I have managed to avoid getting back into LOL. I’ve been down that road enough times that I know how it ends. Spoiler warning, it ends with me uninstalling the game in a fit of rage. 

I think R6 is probably a top five game for me, if not top three. The most common rejoinder I hear from people who washed out of it has to do with the sheer number of champions - I mean heroes, I mean Operators - you have to contend with. It's coming up on something like eighty, but they are divided into Attackers and Defenders and I think the asymmetry helps a lot. Also, I'm a dessicated and ancient genetic doldrum and I managed to get it. It's worth a couple nights and some time on YouTube to gain entrance to the Inner Sanctum - to play a dynamic, aggressive social deduction game masquerading as a shooter. It's simultaneously still kickin' and profoundly slept on.

So I just finished reading the Warhammer 40k book A Thousand Sons, and now I’m reading Prospero Burns. Like Jerry said in his post it would be hard to explain what these books are about if you are not already neck deep in 40K lore. Just know that Magnus was a good boy who was just trying to warn his Dad about something very bad that was going to happen, but instead he ended up making his Dad super mad. Like…SUPER mad. There is a saying in the community that “Magnus did nothing wrong” and while I am not sure if that’s entirely true (he did after all destroy the magical wards that protected holy Terra from the Warp), I do think he had good intentions.