Penny Arcade

Here’s how it works: if a person comes toward me with a needle, for any reason, my mind becomes decoupled from my body. It floats above, looking down.

Thus freed from natural human strictures, and possessed of a wild animal’s desperate desire to live, the body does everything it can to confound and evade any attempt to puncture it. Blood draws are this way, but also the administration of a life-giving - or, at any rate, life retaining - serum, and so when the needle approaches my arms begin to wave and swipe in wide arcs as though dispersing phantasmal insects. This is frustrating for the person trying to poke me, but it’s also frustrating for me, because it’s not something I’m in conscious control over. I will tell them this, and the look they give me is one that says, ”I don’t believe you.” I‘ll be, like, this is the time I’m not gonna do it. I‘m gonna hold my arms in a very specific way and they’ll be proud of me. I‘m thinking this while my left swipes toward the foe with a knife palm.

In truth, other than being tired, nothing really happened when I got the shot. Nothing bad, at least. I was tired, and I still am, although it’s difficult to discern if I’m tired because my body has become the newest front in our war with the Coronavirus or if it’s merely because I’m ancient beyond the counting of years. The worst side-effect, and I suggested something similar online, is that getting the shot makes you feel all the feelings you’ve suppressed and interred and calcified the last year all at once. That’s something you should know going in.

(CW)TB out.

It's a really twisted business model to rob people of the sunset of their lives by goading them with shit they never would have seen otherwise. Grandma doesn't need to know about this shit. She doesn't need to know about demonic sneakers. Unless Lil Nas X drops a sick collab with Dr. Scholls, she's good.

I was raised to think of Satan as a real person, so when songs or album covers invoked this kind of imagery and they told me it was all devil worship I believed them - except it was more or less all marketing to taunt squares. Taunting squares is good fucking money. But Ozzy Osborne is a fucking doofus. Go watch any of that "satanic" shit - it's dorks all the way down. Putting aside for the moment the fact - the incontrovertible fact - that there's no such thing as a Satan, the most square thing you can do is to take the fucking bait. This is a masterclass in trolling from a digital native, and the end result is that it's number one wherever people count things like this and more people know about it than ever. Plus, the video ends with Lil Nas X in the very throne room of Hell, murdering Satan. Doesn't this motherfucker get any points for that?!

Tender new drops on the store today; you have your choice of unisex chenille comfort for that chest slot or an ironic take on an old favorite. First, the sweatshirt:

With a really nice detail shot:

And also the Tee,

Emblazon'd upon the sleeve with a well known sigil:

In the pause between Seasons in Motorsport Manager - and because we're both sort of obsessed with it - we're gonna do Monster Hunter Rise for this afternoon's stream. We'll get back to the racing and the cars soon, but for now there's way too many monsters and we have the solution. Technically I might be speaking out of turn here, but the solution we have involves clubs - some of which are also instruments. Come see how clubs and a wyvern's bony head crest intersect today at 2pm PDT, in the usual place.

(CW)TB out.

League of Legends: Wild Rift is executed to a really high degree. Right now, I can't play that and Monster Hunter so I'm playing Monster Hunter. Not because they didn't do a good job or because I don't have cross-game access to my shit or whatever. It's just literally not possible to do because of how time is dumb.

Gabe works on an iPad Pro, so he's probably experiencing something like the optimal experience for the game. It's like a drug made from some other already powerful drug; a clear liquor. In the same way that Valorant's purpose is to project power into an existing enemy stronghold, Wild Rift's purpose is to make strongholds of the places they didn't already own - mobile, sure, with its massive audience and turnkey monetization, but the version of it I actually want to play is on console and almost certainly on Switch. Right now, it's "coming soon to consoles" and I can wait. But that sounds like the videogame version of gummy Lifesavers. I assume that if you stop playing, it's because you died.

It's on the Twitch Broadcast Schedule, but just in case - I'm keeping 2pm-4pm PDT sacred for Golf. It's almost always gonna be PGA Tour 2K1 right now, which is inexplicably $20 on Steam - but there's a lot of indie stuff that messes with golf as a mechanic and a new Mario Golf is also about to be real. But today, my guest is longtime foe Not That Will Smith and we will tear and claw at each other 1v1 within the confines of this novel dialectic. We've been pretty closely matched in the past, and without his demon-scribe Gary Whitta to pull him relentlessly toward the bottom of the ocean I might be in a lot of trouble. If you have harbored a grudge against me in the past and would like to see me get my comeuppance, or if you like me and believe I'm capable of more than I thought possible, there's a unique convergence point for these two parties today at 2pm PDT on our Twitch channel.

(CW)TB out.

Well, shit.

Precisely because I knew that if the game got its claws in they would get in too deep and cause grievous internal injury, I did my best to avoid Monster Hunter Rise.  I grabbed the demo as a kind of inoculation - a brief exposure to the kind of complexity the game has on offer, an opportunity to remember just how cramp inducing its puppeteering is. It really does feel that way - very QWOP, and then there's a second layer of this on top of the other one, where you literally puppeteer monsters into Kaiju battles you try to pick the winners of.  When I thought it was just gonna be me in there it was easy to stay out. But it's not. It's both of us. It's a problem right now and I think it's gonna stay a problem.

These VG24/7 videos by Dorrani Mischief - one for the basics and the "pro wyvern riding guide" - are great for a lot of reasons, but they provide a really gentle on-ramp to some of the concepts. Capcom has made MH progressively more legible in some ways but it still keeps to itself in others. Monster Hunter is like its own genre, and a lot of what it gets at doesn't apply to other games - though I suspect some of these instincts might serve you pretty well in Soulsborne. But this Dorrani Mischief dude has your back.

The optimal scenario for Gabriel and I would almost certainly be to get a blade in the mix to handle some of these tails, but we're both essentially addicted to the heavy, risk-reward momentum of hammers - he with the traditional style, and I with the Hunting Horn, which is like a hammer for unrepentant dorks. This hammer is for kids in the music wing - choir kids, band kids, the ones who the world hasn't finished destroying yet. It's a hammer but it's also an electric guitar or a cello made out of bugs. I've never felt so seen in my entire life.

Hey! So, in order to warm up our incredible PAX Engine, we've got something coming up this weekend: The PAX Indie Showcase SHOWCASE (ahem) is a new event where we circle back with all the winners of the 2020 PAX Indie Showcases for a series of Q&A's to talk about their games, the ups and downs of being an indie developer in 2021, and where they see gaming going forward. This is a rare chance for the community to interact directly with the developers of some of the best indie games out there and celebrate all they do. At the same time, we'll be streaming  Let's Plays of the developers playing their own games on our Twitch channel at twitch.tv/pax.

Early access to the Discord server will begin Friday afternoon, and people can expect some of the PAX Online bots also making appearances (All Hail Ball, etc). Keep an eye on PAX socials for the link!

(CW)TB out.

God dammit, I thought it was gonna be fine, I thought I was gonna get out clean, S-Tier (Full Escape), but now Gabriel has made the slightest, almost silent invitation to play and now it's installing. Fuck! I held out for almost a full day.

He's lost it completely; Gabe doesn't play every Monster Hunter game, but when he decides that's what he's gonna do, he fuckin' loses it. It's the same with Pokemon, actually. He's not in for every game but when it happens he becomes an unrelenting force. We were talking about how some of the beasts are gross, as in, like… groady, Grodeo Drive, maybe enough to interrupt the game's core loop. Honestly, I can see it. I'd talk more, but it just got finished downloading. Gigabit is no fucking joke.

It's taken almost a full year in the real world, but we're just about to wrap up our fourth season in Motorsport Manager as Gabir Motors - proud member of the Dragon Race Team China family of motorsports brands. Only one race remains, and with enough points to comfortably assuage Chairperson Bo Chonglin it would appear that there's another season in our future. It was difficult to remember the days when we were pleased as punch to get even into the top ten, but with our elevation to F2 we had the "opportunity" to experience these barely remembered levels of depredation. So, closing out the season is a bittersweet time, but it leads directly into building a car for next year - one that will tattoo this growing brand directly onto the zeitgeist. We'll see you there at 2pm PDT, only on Twinch.

(CW)TB out.