The Tri-Fold Augur

I love all of the incredible handmade items we get donated for the Child’s Play auction. We are less than a month away from this year’s dinner and I wanted to share a couple pictures of one of our awesome live auction items.

Mr. Gibb got hauled back into ARC by his eldest; that last link goes to his full report if you haven't seen it. Today's strip is a "war journal" of the kind of twisted, post-apocalyptic hellscape that you might experience in a food court.

I quit playing ARC Raiders for a couple of reasons. The two big ones being I did not want to support their use of AI voices and I was sick of getting shot in the back and losing all my shit. My eldest son Gabe loves the game and never stopped playing. He told me about how they replaced their AI voice work with human actors and that they were testing a new PvE mode. He asked if I wanted to try a few rounds with him and since I am at all times desperately trying to avoid a “Cat’s in the Cradle” situation I said yes.

I got a text from the designer of Gundam Assemble about today's strip, which was very nice of him. His name is Justin Gary; we met during quarantine and he was one of the first non-family humans I saw in person. We played Solforge out on the porch. He's probably best known for creating Ascension, which was one of the heavy-hitter deckbuilders back in the day. I was already going to be interested in Gundam Assemble, a wargame using the cutest miniature gunpla you ever did see, but when I found out he had made the engine for it that elevated the offering substantially.

My flight ended up being delayed, so in a strange and auspicious turn I happened to be ready to write the strip at the exact same time we typically do. Biddy Blas is constantly being tooled by others in the racing camp, hazed to within an inch of his life, and he certainly deserves a win. Does this constitute a win? I mean, maybe.

We are just about one month out from the 2026 Child’s Play charity dinner and auction! On November 13th we will once again be getting together to raise money for the cause we started all the way back in 2003! 

I mean, I'm a sucker for it too, and I came of age when that's just what teevee looked like. My youngest craves horror, horror of all kinds, but if she sees the tracking go off on a pretend VCR she recoils as though from a serpent.

There's nothing I love more than a wiggling rune, God damn. As soon as I know there's gonna be a rune I stand up a little straighter, maybe groom my eyebrows real quick. I'm always trying to work one into the strip and this time I managed to accomplish it in the most meta way possible. It's powerful stuff.

I ate some food court Chinese and now, by every observable metric, the food court Chinese is eating me. I was able to play a couple rounds of Blood on the Clocktower last night before I began to get a wobbly feeling I described as "nautical" and I have spent the last ten hours or so in a state similar to a furniture warehouse whose boss is out of town, i.e., "Everything Must Go."

My brand has long been "Atheist Jerk-off," but wtf I love Catholicism now.

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) October 2, 2026

After Wednesday's Wattersonian horseshit, we're back to what we do best: animal cruelty.

There was a period of time where they were just putting Star Wars on shit. Games Workshop used to do that too, with their license. There was some filth. But they've both figured out that - and I'll agree it's a little crazy - if you give the licenses to cool people who make good games it's a better play. In the same way that ex-Firaxis people proved that Star Wars XCOM could be much more than the sum of its parts, ex-Criterion people are making some kind of Goddamn roguelite racing game and it looks fucking sick.

He's still being dragged down into an incredibly deep hole with the new Fire Emblem, enough to wonder how some of the math could possibly math in this way. He sounds like me when I got heavily - heavily - into Dynasty Tactics, which I was horrified to learn is twenty-four years old. Fire Emblem is about type-matching and abilities, which is already drugs; Dynasty Tactics is largely about creating a favorable battlefield by positioning your units so that, like striking a match, you attack once and it triggers additional attacks from the rest of your army. I don't know that I've ever had to think that hard in a game since. They made a second one, but I didn't like it as well. That could be due to the fact that it wasn't as good, maybe, but who knows. It's also possible that the exertions of arranging and then triggering ten discrete units on a two-dimensional plane so that they all perform in a harmonious sequence is only something you can feel once.

Thanks for the Birthday wishes guys I appreciate it! Gabe’s Birthday being a worldwide phenomenon is one of my favorite running gags in the strip. 

Strips about "The Christmas In September" go back, yea, unto the site's very founding. This was during a time where "sites" were a thing, luckily we came to our right minds and converted the frontier into a series of corporate intranets. Dodged a bullet, there. But! There are several more strips in that vein, and there are two strips in particular that have the visual cues to help you understand the rich lore he has been embroidering the holiday with. I should tell you that he and I never once discussed a single stitch of this stuff. I'll just get a strip outta nowhere and he's got a fez and there's a fish for some reason.

One of the weirder things about algorithmic media is that I will receive apology videos from people I've never even heard of simply because it's media that has been engaged with beyond a certain threshold. It's a genre; they seem real sad. I thought Bungie's new video was going to be another entry in this Al-Qaeda Hostage genre, but at least I know what this one is about. Bungie's corporate leadership sold them up the river, made impossible promises, and then actual human beings had to try to spin that candy floss into real products, all while getting chopped up like a boosted Audi. A lot of people mourned Destiny, as they were essentially told to by the company itself. But now it's back! Kinda. Maybe?