Penny Arcade

We talked about it a little bit when the movie for Ready Player One came out in the post and the strip. My policy on Nostalgia is the same as the laws sweeping the nation and perhaps the world - I think it should be legal for responsible, recreational use. If used in a work, optimally it's used in a way that interprets or transforms so that we get more work to interpret or transform. I adhere to the sourdough starter principle where such things are concerned.

As I said before, I do not adhere to the Catechism model where Nostalgia becomes just… recitation. Brenna really enjoyed Ready Player One, in a way I couldn't, because it gave her a whirlwind tour of the media I grew up with - a parallel universe in some respects, from an era where the overlaps didn't lap over quite so much. Some flaw in my cognition makes me very resistant to this lure, and resentful of those who wield it artlessly.

Today - that is to say, Wednesday Nov. 11th at 4pm PDT - we begin our (deep breath) Acquisitions Incorporated: The "C" Team, Tales From The Loop miniseries. This isn't like existing AcqInc stuff - it doesn't require knowledge of the last four years of The "C" Team, let alone the more than a decade of Acquisitions Incorporated content. This isn't like some test you have to cram for, it's starting now.  That said, it's not exactly a One Shot either, because this is a Good Time you can have every Wednesday for a month. Two completely self-contained stories, investigating the world and personalities "C" Team fans enjoy from a different angle. Come and git it.

(CW)TB out.

Kind Words is not new by any means, I got it a super long time ago - I think even before it was on Steam, though I could be remembering that wrong? For some reason I remember - as one does - unzipping a file into a folder and clicking on something inside there.

It is, functionally speaking, a kind of anonymous post office operated by a friendly deer. That's probably enough to bifurcate any audience, but let us cleave it further: this post office is designed to connect people with problems to friendly, concerned others who will respond with care and grace. I would say it exists in the infragame space, or maybe ultragame, in any case you don't earn XP. You do earn stickers and new lo-fi beats to listen to while you answer people's letters. I mean... that works for me.  I think that would probably work in real life.

I can't put my problems into a machine like this, even completely anonymously. The things that actually bother me are so bound up in shame and terror that I could never reveal them, even if I thought comfort might be forthcoming. I try to project myself just past the moment I subject myself to this device, to see what outcome I'm afraid of, and I can't discern it - it's like the timeline beyond it is just infinitely expanding white ash. I'll have to get around to that at some point I guess. But for now, I've been embroiled in enough nettlesome shit to offer something to the occasional tormented soul.

Hey! This Wednesday at 4pm PDT, we begin an excursion into the same terrifying wilds of Spokane that we plumbed with the Club PA enabled "The A.V. Club," the entirety of which you can now view on YouTube. The "C" Team has been on hiatus for a minute now; we founded that game looking at each other's faces, and that's how we want to finish it. But it occurred to me that if we changed systems and did something for a remote play game that we didn't have the other associations with, we could be together again in a way we could have some fun with. This miniseries, like The A.V. Club, doesn't require any prior knowledge of anything to enjoy it. You don't need to cram like a hundred hours of podcasts in at 4x or something. You might get some fun references if you've already spent time with us, but it's not even the same system! Tales From The Loop's 80's Movie Kids In Danger thing is its own delight as a format.  It's a game that really encourages players to take the reins, and when you have the kind of players I do…  Well, you should come see.

(CW)TB out.

This year’s Child’s Play auction has gone online and today is the last day to purchase one of the Mix and Mingle tickets. This ticket option includes a box with drink fixings and some other goodies that we want you to have on December 10th, the night of the auction. I’ve offered up a few of my original acrylic paintings this year. I did these back around 2008 along with a dozen more or so. This is the first time I’ve auctioned any of them off and I’m hoping they find good homes and help raise some money for a very good cause.

If you have something you think would be cool for the auction and you'd like to donate it to Child's Play you can do that right here. 

-Gabe out

As with so many strips, this one is about a real happening that authentically occurred. Typically I can't prove it, though - not so this time. This link will deliver you unto the moment where we explored an anomalous Animus glitch in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, and the about twenty-five minute period after where we smashed our heads against a literally impossible puzzle and then ultimately succeeded, but not because we were possessed of any profound intellectual capacity but because we turned it off and then turned it back on again. I love that this answer holds true even when you're talking about a machine that dredges up holographic, livable representations of the past from DNA.

But, you can see it in the chat, and it's mirrored even in our own dialogue on the stream with each other. It's just assumed that this literally impossible problem has a solution and that we're simply not solutioning it correctly. Perhaps it's some steganography buried in the lazy whorls of this simulated orrery; maybe it's some other fuckin' shit ensconced in this deeply improbable blue light. No. It was just broken. We quit and came back and now it worked. I'd like to call the previous state of affairs some kind of optimism but in practice it was actually more like faith. These words are sort of bound up in each other, but at root we had a sense that this clearly un-doable thing was, in fact, doable. I'm glad it only took us ten minutes to question it. I consider that a good "score" when confronting deeply held preconceptions, frankly.

With last week's fourth and fifth place finishes - in a league where only P1 through P5 get points - Gabir Motors struck at the very heart of Formula 2 with their second race. With a resurgent Hong Liao and a ravenous Enriqua Lara devouring the midfield, no doubt Dragon Race Team China likes what they see. With the "Lament Configuration" Gearbox fresh out of performance and reliability, will they be able to deliver the results that their fans - decked from head to toe in stupendous branded merch - demand of them? Today's the day to find out - it all starts today at 2pm PDT, only on Twitch.

(CW)TB out.

I was trying to get the gist of what the Ghost Rider movie was even about, and Gabriel was able to reconstruct these painful events with some difficulty. I watched a few clips online, and couldn't believe the levels of camp on display - I'm tempted to say it's just… bad, certainly that would save me a lot of cognitive resources, but it's so winky and plus Nic Cage is there that some weird, stark corner of my mind thinks you arrive at this kind of bad without a conscious effort.

Oh! It should be established that today is the anniversary of the first published Penny Arcade strip, which has served as a Capital A Anniversary since then, though anybody who makes stuff knows that there are various Inciting Events en route to the big one - I met someone in News Production who'd brought a Portfolio of work when everybody else just brought their backpacks. I was curious about that, and was given a tour of the goods. Arguably, that's what is responsible for all this, so if you have recently come into the possession of a time machine and want to engage in a few choice edits to the timeline you'll want to set it for around September 6th, 1993. It's gonna involve going to Spokane. I should tell you that up front. Maybe that changes the math.

Then again, you might also want to intercede slightly later, when we were making copies of a comic we made and convinced the owner of Gorilla Bob's comic shop to place them very near - though not too near - the register, where they looked for all the world like legitimate products. It suggested twenty-five cents on the cover, but in truth we would have been delighted if someone had just... looked at it.

It's also possible that you might want to insert yourself into the food court where the prototype for PAX was held, or maybe a later version of it that took place in Canada where a few enterprising dorks managed to steal Internet for the LAN from rooftop dishes downtown. Lots of opportunities for the enterprising chrononaut.

The main thing to understand is that a lot of times, the rungs on route to where you're going might not look like much. Your theoretical time assassin would need a lot of very strict instructions on how to deter you. What this means is that, as weird as it seems, as small as the acts may be, you are doing it even now.  Let that be a comfort to you in this haunted part of the year, when it gets dark around fucking noon.

(CW)TB out.