Penny Arcade

I got home from Australia yesterday in something like a Cordyceps infected state, maddened but somehow also lethargic, too dry in some places while unforgivably rank and greasy elsewhere.  When I get down to the very bottom of my reserves, I’m lucky to have a level of consciousness that is up to most of the things society asks of us with virtually no resource requirements. It just handles it.  My actual self, the one that writes these, just has to float in a sac and gain strength.

The last Microsoft Flight Simulator, the one called X, came out more than a decade ago.  I wasn’t entirely sure there would be another one.  I use the term Kink euphemistically to describe various Edge Cases in genre or peripheral enthusiasm, but using flightsticks or some shit is just Tuesday compared to where you can get to in these.  LARP-tier plane fucking on a global scale.  You might derive from all this that I don’t think it’s cool, but that’s not true.  I’m simply using the language of visceral obsession; I’ll never like anything as much as these motherfuckers like planes.  And I honor them.  But from, like… over here.

When the Xbox One came out, they talked about how the “Cloud” was gonna change a bunch of shit, particularly around Crackdown - they were gonna simulate all the bricks or something.  LIke, all the bricks in a town.  So, what if that, but plane?  And they actually did it?  Because that’s what the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is trying to do.  It’s a really cool use of satellite data; there are some very popular games that use map data to ground their play in the real world, but if there’s an effort by anybody to try and use it with this kind of fidelity I don’t know about it.  We made a strip about it mostly because we just thought it was really cool, with the knowledge that at some level I don’t have the receptors to understand just how cool it actually is.

(CW)TB out.

I’ve been trying to take more time to draw for fun recently and here is the result. I’m 100% hooked on Destiny again and it feels great to be back on the moon kicking ass. If you’ve been away for a while I recommend jumping back in and giving Shadowkeep a try.

-Gabe out

This was the fortieth PAX, which means it was my fortieth PAX.  A couple things about that.

First, I think I’ve never actually written out or maybe even said “fortierth” before.  It sure as shit doesn’t look like “fortieth.”  It looks like it says “for Teeth.”  I don’t think I like that.  Second, Kiko and I are now the only people who have been to every PAX.  They can’t mint anymore of us.  Because every PAX started in a different year, I haven’t had a robust way of keeping track of my score -  but that’s all settled now, because we’re at forty and there’s five “paxen” a year.  I can count them all from this show, the most recent PAX Aus, and I’ll always know where I’m at.  This will be a very good PAX to use for this purpose; I loved this show.  Remembering it will be easy.

My friend Kris Straub and I wrote this strip and he drew it on stage, to celebrate the very first Acquisitions Incorporated: Call of Cthulhu.  Like the Acquisitions Incorporated: The “C” Team Halloween Special we did on Sunday, it’s not super easy to find right now.  You can dig around in the Twitch archive if you want to but it’s gonna be a rough ride probably.  I’ll link them in a post and on Tweeter when they hit YouTube, which has been pretty fast lately.  Plus, a big part of the Call of Cthulhu game was novel interactions with the person writing the captions, and these weren’t carried out over the feed - but Elyssa was able to get the transcript in full, so we’ll composite these together so you can experience it as the audience did.  Being perpetually observed by an invisible, inscrutable entity really sold the setting, for sure.

Alright, jumping on a plane so that I can fly for a whole day and then land the same day I took off.  I don’t trust time at all anymore and I think that’s probably gonna be permanent from here on out.

(CW)TB out.

You aren’t going to believe this, every neuron in your brain will shriek at the revelation. But we live on a sphere(!!!).  I thought I was the only one having a hard time with some of this stuff, so I asked Kiko to perform some feat of chrono-cognition for me.  He’s my rock, but he couldn’t map time appropriately either.  He just sat down slowly, with his hand on his knees, shaking his head as though he were remembering “the war.”

So I’m just gonna do my post now, while I’m thinking of it.  I’m about to go over to the convention center now for the first Q&A, because apparently it’s Friday, but just right here locally.  Learning that there are these bright stripes of arbitrary time on the map hasn’t taught me the correct lesson, which is that we can tame and tame various phenomena under certain conditions.  No, what it’s taught me is that we can all decide what time it is for ourselves.  That being said, everybody down here has agreed that it’s all a specific time and that might help when you’re trying to watch streamed content from PAX.

I was horrified to learn that Gabriel’s son Gabriel was learning to drive, not because I think he’ll be bad at it but because it presages this inexorable scenario creeping toward my own family.  We always get a preview of these life moments from him, he’s about a year or so older than Elliot because after Gabe was born I was under a lot of pressure from Mike to get this baby shit underway.  Not so we could share in this font of human mystery together, thus to make light work of these labors, but so that “ could suffer like [he has].”

Alright!  I’ll see you at the show, provided that you are in Australia, in Melbourne, have a ticket to PAX Aus, etc.

(CW)TB out.