On My Mother's Side

We will be celebrating the two year anniversary of the Penny Arcade iRacing league tonight! 

One of the things that results from this level of industry consolidation is even more consolidation. It happens for all the same reasons that the original ones did, the preconditions still exist, but then when the FTC asks you why this merger is necessary, you just gesture out your window at the Kaiju Amalgams they've feted previously. You indicate their chimerical body plan, the gnarled tusks, the trail of smoking, emerald slime behind them, and you say there's no way for us to even exist in this place with those things running around. Look at its taut, distended belly, the trapped spirits swirling within, desperate for release. It doesn't even matter what we make, they will say, our industry is a feeding ground. We must become monsters, or we will be food for monsters.

Jerry is coming over this afternoon to continue our D&D adventures on the Genesis.

I think Strange New Worlds is on track to be a really fun return to form for the series.

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If you were wondering how MiYoHo was investing their Genshin billions, now we know. They're making some kind of crazy action thing called Zenless Zone Zero and it is exclusively for those with the natural and wholesome glow of youth, as opposed to humanity's waste products - remaindered husks of once vital souls, cherubic perfection fettered by the accretion of time and skin.

I've been in a bit of a slump recently when it comes to drawing but a new idea has got me drawing a bunch more and feeling better!

As a corrolary to the assertion that there are certain flavors of stupid you can only learn at college, I think we have to say that there are certain types of harm that only the very, very well-intentioned can even aspire to.

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The first couple minutes of the first episode of Halo, I was like… shit, man. Okay. Maybe we're getting somewhere. But then as soon as Chief comes in, clearly, obviously, definitely swiping at things that aren't actually there - like man in the throes of some kind of episode - I stopped it.

Until I saw the latest trailers, I could take or leave an Obi-Wan show. You literally never know what you're gonna get from these guys anymore. They managed to fuck up Boba Fett, somehow! Then, if you see the trailer, and you have any affection for Star Wars at all - any pure remnant of the joy they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars reducing to ash - you might think to yourself, well, maybe I'm in for one more go-'round.

It's all true, of course. I can imagine that if I took myself very seriously, this kind of thing would fuck me up. But I mostly think it is funny because it is funny. Mike laughed and laughed. I just told him because I thought he would like the story, but it absolutely works as a comic.

Do you want to come over to my house tomorrow and play Dungeons and Dragons Warriors of the Eternal Sun on the Genesis?

We have discussed Gabriel's requirements for book covers before, I'm sure - almost certainly in a podcast - but when he was telling me about a new Alastair Reynolds book, I did a quick search for the man and saw this:

Here's another random assortment of sketches from the Penny Arcade archives. The Penny Arcade Archives in this case are a DropBox that I forgot about for a few years. Enjoy!

I would say that we won't do it again, by which I mean continue to intricately stitch Gabriel's "potent" original IP, but I can't do that in good conscience. This is because I didn't mean to touch on it even one more time and indeed wrote a comic shaming the very concept of the excursion itself, and it happened anyway!