Imperium Maledictum

Gabe is losing his shit over Adventures of Elliot, which was not a sure thing, because there are two versions of the demo and only one of them lets you continue from where you left off in the retail version. I'll leave it to you to guess which one he had, and the theft of several hours would ordinarily be a dealbreaker but it charmed the pants off him. Technically his pants sublimated, moving directly to a gaseous form without first passing through a liquid state.

I try to be as much of a moving target for social media algos as I can, battering it with strange data; the best guess TikTok could possibly make is that I'm an ancient moth with zymurgical inclinations who works part-time as a welder. At least, that's what I thought. Somewhere in that hostile nonsense it managed to constellate a route from point A to point B and put my whole deal into stark relief. I am someone who likes robots that turn into shit, and vice-versa. I was under the impression that Transformers ruled the roost - by and large a metaphorical roost, but I assume Swoop has a literal aerie in addition to the rhetorical one. But there's a whole industry now around making things not as they were, but as you remember them. Sorcerous.

Apple TV is fascinating. It doesn't have a super deep roster, but it has a weirdly high ratio of absolutely must watch shit. I got some free Apple TV when I got an iPad a few Christmases ago, and ended up hooked on For All Mankind - then let it lapse, and now my three favorite shows are all from there. It goes Severance, Pluribus, and now Widow's Bay. They don't seem to be able to produce on any kind of schedule, but then, I don't think they're even trying to. This is exactly what a modern leviathan should be doing with its bulging coffers. As a young man, I was told that Campbell's Chunky Soup was said to eat like a meal. These are shows that watch like books, that benefit very clearly from study.

It's very textbook stuff; now that the game festivals are over, now that the charm offensive has been executed more or less flawlessly and there's no more juice to squeeze from it, it's time to produce an incredibly large cartoon knife from nowhere and move to the next phase.

We had an opportunity to dip back into the List of the Forgotten, as we had already detailed the perfidy of Niantic Spatial in full. The current list is constantly being added to, and so release from this obligation may never truly arrive. Currently it stands as follows, if you would like a sort of preview:

Fruit Fucker
The food court dragon
Rex Ready
L. H. Franzibald
CTS
Twisp & Catsby
Jim
K-Reazy

"Tag urself," etc.

I really want to make this year’s Child’s Play dinner auction the best that we have ever had and to do that I am asking for your help and I am asking for it early! 

I had seen a post from Kris Straub - whom I call Krasp - about… Well, I'll just embed it.

new stage discovered beyond end-stage capitalism

[image or embed]

— Kris Straub (كريس) (@krisstraub.com) June 12, 2026 at 9:36 AM

This glorious #Fridabe, we are back on our bullshit with a several more hours of buildcrafting, bon mots, and then battles with the channel at the end.  Come hang out around 11am PST on the stream, and grab a copy here on Steam or your phone to test your mettle against us live!

(CW)TB  

Morak wasn't sure he wanted to discuss the scourge of "bisexual lighting," because he didn't want to glorify the assertion. His other contention was that it might simply be rage-bait, and he was hesitant to be baited into rage. I'm open to these ideas, certainly. Let's deal with the second one first: I think it's incredibly silly stuff. And what's more, rage-bait has a way of becoming canonized, calcified, because the revolution must always act at the edge - the frontier - where experimental rhetoric bakes into ideology. Whether it's meant authentically or not, goofball adherents have already internalized it. It's simply a premonition of some future battle. As for the first contention, that we don't want to inadvertently glorify it, well, you tell me. I'd be surprised if it did!

I loved Masters of the Universe so much that I had to do some fan art yesterday. I shared it over on my Bluesky but wanted to make sure it got posted here as well. 

I saw He-Man shit at other kids' houses, but like a lot of the eighties it simply wasn't allowed in my house. Even The Smurfs were considered a monstrous affront - not only the sorcerer Gargamel, but the "demonic" Smurfs used magic as well! My mother had a book called Turmoil In The Toybox which she used as a kind cultural baleen to winnow the (sacred) wheat from the (profane) chaff, because sometimes you gotta look really really hard at toys in order to figure out why they're bad and that's why it's somebody's full-time job. You might think My Little Pony is about horse dolls, but what these wanton mares actually do is seize daughters nationwide and corrupt them into hellbound sluts.

I saw Masters of the Universe over the weekend and wanted to give my review as a long time fan of the cartoon and the toys. 

Having run credits on 007 First Light - and I don't think there's another ending in here somewhere - my feeling is that they stuck the landing and that I want to know what's next in an unreasonable amount of time. Sometime late next week, perhaps. No? That's probably not going to happen? Alright. Well, I had to try.

What we discovered when creating this strip is that people have NSA stalker tier levels of knowledge about these mice. It sounds like Gabe has some serious competition in this arena and should - until further notice - make his enemies start his jeep. Just until things cool down.

The movies running away with the box office are "indie ahh" horror flicks, tuned to Generation Zed. Quarantine sorta permanently broke the theatre habit for Gabe I think, though he'll occasionally lurch out of his cavern for something his larvae might be interested in. By comparison, there are people in my neighborhood's younger cadre who are, like, members of AMC Stubs and shit. They love going to the Goddamn movies. And I'd bet that a strong part of the take for films like Obsession and Backrooms - which Gabriel will not be seeing - are people who were essentially robbed of the ritual because a actual horror movie was taking place worldwide.

If you aren't a moral busybody or a turbo wastrel there's no world for you left. I sometimes try to determine which performance I like least, but the answer is something I apparently have to build from first principles every time. They're utter duplications of the other, arguably manufactured by each other; sometimes they can even switch sides successfully. It's a personality type, as near as I can tell, trailed by a velvet cape of adherents. On the one side, you've got young people becoming old people, desperate to outrun their Something Awful posting history by pledging allegiance to… themselves, I guess. And on the other side, you've got people who get irrationally angry when they see an A cup. You know? It's the, uh… it's the fight of the century.