As someone who had the novel experience of operating a company during a global pandemic, occasionally I was made to interface with functionaries at varying levels of the government apparatus whose jobs were never under any kind of threat. It took me a really long time to figure out that the purpose of these organizations was to make getting what you're owed incredibly difficult. It's the only way to parse their incredibly clear actions. You would have to perform a profundity of mental labor to believe that their stated purpose is anything like the purpose they serve. If you did your part, and went through all this shit, and then had to pig-wrestle them for the money they say you're owed, from them, and they never gave it to you, and now you have been made to engage in a bunch of unpaid labor, it's no longer a tax return. Now it's a loan, with monthly interest - in any system that references reality.

Maybe because I hadn't spent the last week gathering many of the same resources, when I popped into Enshrouded it got me pretty cranked up. Also, my damp larvae have brought back another January illness, the second one this month, so I'm kinda goof troop right now.

The time of stickers is nigh! 

I assumed when I saw Gabe, his cool wife Kara, and their rad scion Noah all playing Palworld they were all playing it together. I was wrong; each of them is playing in their own entirely separate worlds. It's exactly the kind of game they would play together, as they had Valheim - but no. They all wanna, like… chop that wood themselves? Or Rorschach themselves into some kind of industrial grade despot?

I don't know why this thing is so cool, but it really is.  It has a completely weird texture and I don't remember writing about it at all.  It's like eight pages! Check it out, you'll see.

God willing and the creek don’t rise, Gabe’s Sticker Shoppe should be launching this week on Thursday the 25th. This will essentially be an Etsy shop inside the main Penny Arcade store where Club Penny Arcade members will be able to shop for unique handmade stickers designed by me!

I kinda like MachineGames, not only for their own cool shit, but as an organization of Starbreeze Studios escapees, who I also liked. I think that if it's possible to make an Indiana Jones game like the one in the trailer they released good, then they will. I think that just in general we're of the opinion that licensing Indiana Jones for anything other than novelty lunchboxes constitutes a form of necromancy.

Sam Altman is so adept at manipulating the media without them being conscious of it at all. He's in 'em like cordyceps - not since Trump has there been someone who just effortlessly injects their narratives and has them so dutifully rebroadcast. Because OpenAI is clearly in the wrong - because they fed their botchkin stuff they didn't own, in this case from one of the most respected manufacturers of news ever - they have had to change their tack somewhat. I boiled down a few of the industry's arguments before, but this is just a recitation of Meta's position here. And even then, it's stupid. His case is that they don't really need the New York Times' stuff, because they have so much other stuff. Well, first, it sounds like you kinda did need the New York Times' stuff, because you took it. Second, what is the copyright status of the rest of the corpus you just gestured at, Sam? There are types of idiocy which only the very intelligent may aspire to. Ordinarily it would be a great relief to have doofus argumentation like this as your foe, but losing to it is going to feel very, very bad.

It is weird to think that in another tab of this same browser, I have a finished draft of a book. The strip is about… well, you'll see I guess, but the main takeaway is that I don't even really want to show it to that person. I will show it to them when I show it to Brenna - probably two edit passes and some content later. The first one is gonna be bad, but… if this shit gets past Brenna? She's the Gates of fucking Argonath, dude. This book will be the next great American novel. Well, novella I guess. People are gonna teach classes on it and shit. Not because I wrote it! Because it's the kind of book she likes.

I see lots of lists of “hidden Gems” on the Steam Deck but in my experience these all tend to list the same handful of games that to me at least all seem well known. So I decided to make a quick list of a few games I’ve checked out on my Steam Deck that I enjoy and think might have slipped past a lot of folks' radars. 

Morak isn't big on Metroidvanias, but Prince of Persia is core to his identity as a man and as a father. Well, that may be too dramatic. Let's say that it is a kind of videogame he likes; that may be sufficient. He wants to play through a game and he doesn't necessarily want to replay parts of a game over and over, which is why most roguelites bounced off him until the pure, uncut fucking heroin of Vampire Surviors. I told him about it when it came out, but he couldn't see it. He sees it now. I like this genre, so I'll probably grab it today. Metroid Dread kicks ass too, if you like this kind of stuff. But Mike also sorta likes Prince of Persia. Like, Prince of Persia Prince of Persia. Y'know?

I managed to take a short break from sticker making to check out a couple demos that just hit the PS5. You can play the new Prince of Persia:The Lost Crown as well as Granblue fantasy:relink right now. I played a bit of both and came away excited for each of their full releases. 

For a while now, about fourteen years I think, Brenna's hip sometimes decides that it is completely done being a hip and it's time for something else to happen. It doesn't want to get pigeonholed as a rigid structure that connects the torso to the legs. It can be so much more. Where does it end up, you might wonder? It never decides. It's an eternal student situation. But in the meantime what it means is that she essentially can't do any stuff. I haven't really done any research but I came away from all of that thinking "Wow. Hips are a big deal."

Star Wars has run up its tab. That's how I feel about it now: it has to pay me for all the time I spent giving them a chance over and over the last few years. Is that gonna be "The Mandalorian & Grogu"? Even the name sounds weird.

Stickerfication is a process whereby a person - maybe Gabriel - gets hooked on stickers and then starts making stickers all the fucking time. You'll note that on his Instagram this hellward descent has been captured at the highest resomolutions possible. I knew that things had gone amiss at the molecular level when he started putting stickers on the thing he uses to make stickers.

In the way that a tree produces oxygen, I now produce stickers thanks to some built in chemical reaction. Growing up, my Mom was always very into crafts. I have very fond memories of making reindeer out of clothespins and ghosts from cheesecloth soaked in starch. I’ve maintained a love of doing crafty stuff as is evidenced by the way I run my D&D games. I have often joked that running games for me is just an excuse to visit Michaels. Even when it comes to Wargaming I think I prefer that building and painting to the actual playing. My latest obsession, sticker making scratches a lot of my itches. I get to draw and then I get crafty with the art once it’s printed!