The Blessing, Part One

I saw a few full-throated defenses of Tilly Norwood, a kind of cybergolem designed to supplant human actors. It's from Particle6, a company nobody had ever heard of before a week ago, utilizing their DeepFame engine - a name I assure you I did not make up. I haven't seen an article about Tilly Norwood that didn't include the note that there were already suitors lined up to utilize their tech, which there is no proof of, and no way to prove it. SAG-AFTRA would fuck anybody who even attempted to use this in a production directly up their ass.

An AI version of Stan Lee was fashioned by infernal necromongers, and we do not like it. It's not even a hundred percent clear that he wasn't manipulated into business agreements at the end of his life, which graduates us into grave robbing and potentially even necrophilia. As bold thought leaders, we're prepared to come out firmly against those (bad) things.

JUMP IN

(CW)TB out.

Now that Jump Space - née Jump Ship - is out in Early Access, I've been crewing voidcraft with the Krahulik family and eventually arriving at some kind of success. It has the by now universal Slay The Spire map, where you go to different icons and stuff related to the icons happens, except you're going to them with your friends inside a spaceship that has roughly the same structural integrity as a piñata. You play as the candy in a space piñata, and wicked roboids want to chomp. Mork and I play the game as the below decks crew while Gabriel the Younger pilots the craft and and Kara is in the gunnery seat. Both of those positions lock you into external views, so it's often the case that fires will break out five feet away from them and they aren't aware of it. They have no idea what's going on below decks either and frankly it's for the best.

I am loving Hades II and had to do some Melinoe fan art. 

My daughter is whole! She has not succumbed to peer pressure, at least not in the way the strip suggests. She is no doubt subject to it on some wavelength my calcified brain can't even perceive, but she doesn't have a Hades II style ghost arm and I don't believe she is learning witchcraft at the foot of Hecate, patroness of witches. I feel like there would be signs. And potentially wonders. Maybe even both.

My mom was really late coming home from work once, and cellular phones cost around ten thousand dollars adjusted for inflation then so I couldn't call or text her. It was my presumption that she had been Raptured and that I had been found wanting. Like, first thought.

My friends Jerry and Ryan both told me that Borderlands 4 is cool and fun once you get far enough into the game. Like the comic suggests, I bounced right off the intro. I kept getting shitty sub machine guns while running through featureless grey rooms. Eventually I got to a shack and that’s when Claptrap started talking and I had to stop.  It’s possible it gets good but I’m just not wired to chew through the bad bits to get to the good stuff.

Lego Voyagers is great.  I heard it was three or so hours total, but I clocked in at just about five.  Some of the coolest parts of it were not "gameplay" but just being there in the world.  It's very impressionistic; there are actual lego pieces that look like scorpions, or fish, but Light Brick would rather evoke them with even simpler shapes.  It also made my computer run so hot that it shut completely off and wouldn't turn back on.  And that made me think about Borderlands.

Man, I need this shit real bad.

Apparently Amazon added a bunch of Price is Right episodes called "The Barker Era" to their hoard, and Grib is watching a couple of these things a night. I just pulled one up to verify what he had told me: that it's an incredibly robust Time Capsule that cuts through every layer. Fashion, palette, aspirations… the ambient radiation of an era. Dangerous Barker particles leapt straight through flesh - famously an enemy of animal cruelty, he had less chivalry perhaps for the human women who might share the stage. It's an insane diorama, and its descriptive power projects down into the substrata.

My eldest son Gabe is in his third year at Digipen and we like working on projects together. We’ve attempted to make some games before and while none of them made it past family testing, we both had fun and learned a bunch of cool new skills. Our latest endeavor has already reached the "testing with friends" phase which is a big step for us and a sign I think that this one might have legs. Speaking of legs, the project we are working on is an Eyrewood step tracking app.

I started playing Star Wars Outlaws when it came out last year on the PS5 and I really liked it. Eventually other games came out though and I didn’t end up finishing Outlaws. Well I heard the Switch 2 version was excellent and I honestly had a hard time believing that so I decided to grab it and check it out for myself. It supports cross save so I was able to pick up right where I left off on the Playstation. I was expecting to load it up, be disappointed in how it ran and call it a day but it was so good I ended up playing another 10 hours and beat the damn game. 

The insides of this computer haven't been touched since Quarantine with the addition of a 3080, which was the right time to have a good card. Everything else in this shitbox, what the ragged youth of my street would call a Potato, is from years before that. I'm actually in a position to take advantage of Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling precisely because it's so decrepit elsewhere. I'll Fuck Around in an .ini, and Find Out about marginal gains. I was up in Borderland's guts before I ever even made a character, it ran goof troop, and then when I reset to defaults it played great. PC Gaming, folks! PC motherfuckin' gaming.

I think you sorta have to read the patent that Nintendo was granted to understand the whole thing, but as a generality broad patents preemptively constrain possibility and so I oppose them. Also, the people who seem to grant patents don't seem to know anything about anything; they're like newly hatched chicks for whom all the world constitutes wonder and novelty. The early Internet was full of stuff where people were like, "Yeah, I came up with the idea of information itself" which people had to defend themselves from. I want to say that it's like a battlefield from a parallel dimension, except in a very real way it is a higher dimension, because it determines what we can do down here.

It goes without saying that the Deadzone is dangerous. It's not a preferred zone. If it had any other redeeming characteristics, we would be calling it something else. Still, when you shoot an enemy's weakpoint, the game makes a sound like a river of coins flowing from a garish slot machine. Whoever made it sound this way should receive the bulk of the proceeds for this game.