My existing VR headsets have always had some kind of foam around the porthole - the aperture which enables mere meat to traverse the digimal realmz. There are even people who add more foam, as though we weren't in the kraken's-grip of a global foam shortage! The PSVR2 has a kind of thin, rubber accordion between the screen and your face which is legitimately crafty because it's always the right size. It was so good at its job that I wondered why it isn't more common. And then I very quickly discovered why. Gabriel asked if I wanted a wet wipe for it, and I asked for a dry wipe instead, which I think is just… a towel.

It's true! Gabriel The Younger has been accepted into DigiPen, where he will hone his already prodigious skills even further. As his erstwhile uncle, having the opportunity to watch this young man become himself has been a profound honor. I would like to have a talk with him in greater detail about the mutton chops. You know? I'd like to go into that a bit. But, beyond that: exemplary teen. Full marks.

He's out here going wild - potentially even hog-wild. He has the Wildness of the Hog about him. When he situates the mind-cap, he begins to travel at great speed through a grip of trackless no-wheres. PSVR2 did not need to be as strong as it is. The last one, as I have suggested, wasn't anywhere near state of the art, even at release. Now this Devil's Instrument it has you merely looking at something to kill it, heretofore the sacred domain of the Gods:

Here’s a look at REZ using eye tracking, it’s wild! pic.twitter.com/MfXVzCjiCX

— Gabe (@cwgabriel) February 27, 2023

I’ve spent the last 6 days putting the PSVR2 through its paces along with the rest of my family. I played as many games as I could and I figured I’d break down my thoughts on the hardware and tell you about the games I really liked. 

It turns out that Gabe is fucking obsessed with PSVR2. The improvements to the overall experience - and a certain amount of personal curation of the game library based on his shameful weaknesses - mean that he is going hog fucking wild on games like Rez, even though already owns it everywhere it's ever come out, but now he can live inside it and blast target chains with his literal eyes. Gran Turismo in VR is the apotheosis of some desire in him, made manifest initially through iRacing, but elevated here through GT7's well understood "auto-eroticism" and the Logitech PRO Racing Wheel he got from Logitech because people are always giving him shit.

I think that I initially thought of it as a joke, a Magic x Hot Pockets collab, but it's not! It's a real thing. There is a picture of Gideon Jura on a box of Meatballs & Mozzarella Hot Pockets, and I think it might be stock art or something, but the way they're presented on the box he is looking at these flaky snacks with wicked intent. Or just… maybe he's just hungry, which in this case probably ends much the same way.

Here's a look at the Miles Variant I did for Marvel Snap!

It just sorta is what it is. Brenna's had to tolerate incursions like this at the doctor forever, they're commonplace - omnipresent, like sax solos in the eighties. Until I paid a man and his inexplicably present assistant to sterilize me a decade or so ago, zealous strangers interacting with my most secret places were pretty thin on the ground. Now I've entered a phase of life where doctors just slap your shit around and it's not super clear why.

VR is still pretty big in his house, just not with him; whatever weakness lives in him was bred out, allowing his progeny entre into the digimal realms which are my sole domain.

I started thinking about the Eyrewood a few days ago and wondered what Hanna might be up to. It’s been 10 years since her story ran on Penny Arcade, if you can believe that! So I decided to draw what a slightly more grown up Hanna might look like these days.

So, maybe it's a Valentine's Week sale.  Anywho, there's a ton of our designers' incredible work whose prices have beem grievously slashed and perhaps even seriously injured!  I'm going to call out a couple of the things I think are especially cool/delicious:

For the price-conscious Acquisitions Incorporated devotee, there are deep-ass cuts broadly.  But for a deeper sort of cut, a metaphorical one, our official "creature feature" series of grindhouse takes on classic D&D monsters are now juicily priced.  I'm talking about these here:

Given how skittish and cowardly megacorporations tend to be, and especially given how much creative work Warners Brothers has either destroyed or sold for parts recently, their unwillingness to simply launch the film into the sun is quite novel, for reasons we'll go into. I suspect in addition to these, or any other invisible dynamics, the fact that it's an ensemble film means there are many, many moneyed individuals ready to take a bite of them if they do.

Late fees are not the part of the ritual I honor; if I recall correctly, there is still a fee on my credit score from Hastings - "my entertainment superstore" - as the result of a misplaced Monster Rancher. I had placed it under the seat of my car so it would always be in there, maximizing the return opportunities while minimizing its attack surface. I forgot about it completely. This is the kind of fruitless, clever-in-quotes ritual I have come to call "outsmarting yourself."

As a young person, I went to friend-of-a-friend Davy's apartment once, and in addition to the traditional panoply of wastrel paraphernalia, there was also a five foot tall bong. Don't ask why I was there. But there's a similar dynamic, with different material components, when I go over to the home of Mr. Gribbs. His drug of choice is ancient silicon, and so far it seems like his kids are still eating food and stuff so I haven't called the police.

When I was checking out watchmeforever, a procedurally generated sitcom on Twitch that would have gone on in perpetuity if it hadn't been banned, it routinely had more than ten thousand viewers. Most human beings don't do these kinds of numbers! I certainly don't. To see it engage in precisely the sort of behavior that gets streamers yanked in real life is weird but also just… correct. It's Turing stuff. No reason at this point not to just complete the prescribed arc.

I have a couple friends for whom the crucible is apparently not good enough for their dice, when it's possible that the opposite is true: they are insufficient for the crucible. Craps is essentially a big dice tray inlaid with a mystic topography. Try to imagine the dice rolling off of the table, and onto the floor - like so many meatballs - and the Dice Priest being like "hey, nbd - you do you."