Penny Arcade

I. I just woke up from surgery. I wish that I knew what was happening. The main thing I gotta do is apologize to all these people for making them wake up in the middle of the night. I ate some chicken wrong and it’s now impacted a lot of lives. Let's get the ol’ shame engine warmed up - it’s never been off this long before, two full hours they tell me, and I feel naked in the absense of its oily cloak. Dr. Shanna, Nurse Belva, I'm sorry. I think a better man might not have instigated the causal chain that resulted in you having to come in here at two in the morning. That’s what I mean to say, and I take a running start at it, except the place where their names should be are like the holes that lead down into a rabbit’s den. If I try to grab them, they just go further in. I learn that if I want to retrieve one of these warm, lost words, I simply form the sentence around it, like a Mad Lib. I leave a little space for the name, and it sniffles its way out of the warren right after the honorifics. When it finally does come out, in the sacred sequence that retains its meaning, they don’t even know what I’m talking about. They don’t know why I’m using my energy in this way. They only want me to feel better. That’s something that firmly distinguishes them from Dr. Fuckface.

II. It’s easy to tell they think I’m one of Those Patients even from my little room. They are tired of how anxious I am, but I haven’t been able to swallow for five hours so my mouth is just running like a drainage pipe. I drooled a quart at home and now I’m filling this bag they’ve given me, in the least pleasant take possible on a balloon animal. The nurses are doing their shit, more or less. They aren’t really telling me what’s going on, but at least they don’t audibly sigh whenever I get sick. “Stop trying to vomit,” he says, exasperated, and in between my body’s attempts to crack its upper half like a whip over and over to expel the cork it’s made of the chicken bite, I manage to plate and subsequently serve the following: “This is completely involuntary.”

III. Before she came at me with the IV more or less without warning - you can imagine my delight - they tried to make me drink Pepsi because that sometimes works. There was also an Ativan. This is an Ativan, she says, after I ask what she’s trying to give me. She forgot that part. Do you know what that is? And I do, because for a little while Ativan was what allowed Mike to go to Australia by plane. Eventually that horror simply shredded the drug, draping it in a kind of timeless pagan mist. It’s an anti-anxiety medication, and I’m not opposed to it - conceptually, or literally. In the devil church of American hell medicine it’s a sacrament that enables greater sacraments. I appreciate the offer. But.

I can’t swallow, I said. That’s a big part of why I’m here.

IV. At some point in his medical training or his practise of same, Dr. Fuckface came to believe he was fucking Charon or something. And you’re subject to men like this if you ever have the temerity to deviate from some model they have in their mind, something from a book, some optimal chimaera. I’m not trying to make a case that my story is some kind of special instance, it’s not. But it’s true, and it’s real, and it’s common as the rain. When I left his domain, taken by cool, nice people who had some concept of what was happening, he got one last one in: he wanted to make sure I knew that I was lucky the surgeons had deigned to come in, because otherwise it would have been several more hours of this. Except before he told me they weren’t coming, so I sent Brenna back to where we were staying, forty-five minutes away. That meant that I had to emerge from Roman Numeral One above and then try to recuperate in the White Sun of the Emergency Room lobby for several hours. The surgeons didn’t feel I’d strayed from the Pure Way at all. They didn’t think I’d deviated from the human apex, they knew that bodies sometimes require maintenance. And eventually sleep. Which is what I’m going to do now.

We also wrote a strip about PAC-MAN 99 which you can find here. Noah and Gabe - the euphemistic Gabe, that is - are here to delight you on stream from 2-4 PDT, with a blistering combo of “the fortnite” and Monster Hunter.

(CW)TB out.

They threw the crib door wide in Washington State for vaccines come the 15th, if you want one you can have one, provided you’re over sixteen I think. I got in just under the wire because of the old Asthma commingled with my substantial bulk. For the longest time I wasn’t really aware of the fact that I had fairly significant asthma, just that I preferred Strength to Cardio, at least partially because it was physically possible for me to do the first one without feeling like a black, sucking hole had formed in my chest cavity. I always look to myself first, when I detect a failure on some level: is this failure the result of my being weak, vile, or otherwise reprehensible?

Am I moist where I should be dry, and dry where I should be moist?

In this case there’s some real concerns re: my alveoli, and it’s not really connected to my moral character. Speaking of lungs, there’s some issues with one of Gabriel’s cavities and it’s something we investigate with unswerving enthusiasm in today’s strip.

Can’t flex my Golf stream today, back at it next week with the usual brigands slash ne’er-do-wells, but Josh has you covered with what used to happen then which is Dark Souls II from noon on. And then, in the manner of Pirate Radio, the people’c champion Laura Frohmwerk seizes the channel from 4-7 for additional delights and profundities.

(CW)TB out.

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.