The Stella Montis Summit

I know that there are spelunkers reclaiming FMV, but the strip concept was too silly to resist.

Because we're still in the first flush of ARC Raiders, no equilibrium has been truly reached and thus raw potential permeates every interaction. This is the terrifying, middle-space ambiguity. You've heard - from us and others - that solo runs very nearly constitute a separate product from the first. You can and will get put under and robbed by rats and scoundrels, but the ratio is much different. I would say it's the inversion, almost to the number, of the group play dynamics. They are gonna try to kill and eat you the vast majority of the time, but every now and then they are just trying to check a box on the meta progression - a human universal, something anyone can understand. I have a button that shoots a gun and I have a button that talks to strangers. They're both modes of communication.

This is just a quick post to remind folks that the annual Child's Play charity dinner and auction is coming up on December 5th and you can get your tickets right here. The big news this year is that Jerry and I are returning to the stage to host the evening and serve as your terrible auctioneers! 

"Always two there are" isn't an adage limited just to the traditional distribution of evil Jedi. There are also two reasons why a person might engage with Extraction as a genre. I indicated the first on Friday, but one more appropriate to Gabriel and others.

I am obsessed with ARC Raiders. This is my first time playing an extraction shooter and I am fascinated by the social experiment angle of it. I have had some absolutely unforgettable encounters with other people in the game and I’d say the overwhelming majority of those experiences have been positive. 

The best possible advertisement for ARC Raiders is that Gabe likes it. Might actually be obsessed with it. Called me up to play! Played solo, late, and then woke up early. Sent me clips of his derring do late in the night, awoke to write the strip with his mind clouded by the peals and shrieks of the Earth's cybernetic inheritors. He has aspirations for his play experience that are situated perhaps a little above mine. But there is a point, somewhere between his best laid plans (men) and my best laid plans (mice) where it's essentially a co-op horror game and I almost always have the appetite for one round.

One presumes my final form is just me as I am now, a greasy and glistening sphere, within which plump veins can be seen writhing in their labors. There are disadvantages obviously but if we're both trying to get to the bottom of a hill, and we're putting money on it? Good luck, bro. Good fuckin' luck.

After experiencing the full arc of Gabriel's argumentation, robust in its profundity and vice versa, you may wonder why things have resolved as they did. That is because Smokey The Bear and Yogi The Bear are neither - they are simply Smokey Bear and Yogi Bear. So what he did was technically crimes. But I've never been effected by a Mandela so hard in my entire life.

At SDCC one year, some of the writers on The Simpsons came by to say hi. They told us something we thought was bizarre at the time, but they would know better than us: that it's okay to use the same joke again but it has to be at least ten years later. The parachute stuff was back in 2002; I think we're in the clear.

I didn't know! Back in the day, it literally used to be the 9 key, placed there as a kind of test by the developers. One of the more twisted executions of this concept must have been in America's Army, where if you didn't land correctly via a specific input you'd break your leg at the spawn point and just… crawl around. Is that meaner? I guess they're both pretty mean.

After finishing up the recent Lookouts storyline I still felt like drawing Eyrewood stuff so I did a new Hanna piece.

I don't think I've ever deployed the terminology here, but Gabriel and I will sometimes use the term "videogame" to describe a game that feels good to play. It's the result of many games being so bent toward epitomizing their genre conventions that they lose sight of the fact that they are something you have to play with in order to enjoy. There are a lot of Bethesda games that are very "open world," which is not without its virtues, but the actual experience of playing them is worthwhile because of those factors and not because someone thoughtfully modelled the experience of being there. As an example: Battlefield has always offered scale, but their gunplay and movement haven't always risen to the moment; I feel like BF6 is a videogame, even if my own sloth and ineptitude sometimes obscures it. At least they know what's going on.

The 22nd annual Child’s Play charity auction and dinner is comig up on December 5th and you can get your tickets right now. As usual we will be starting the night with a silent auction before moving to the dinner and live auction part of the evening. The big news this year is that Jerry and I will be returning as your hosts and auctioneers! 

The funny thing is that I know what happens after this, but as much as I would enjoy it I think it should probably be its own thing by itself. There are a bunch of folkways around a Lookouts' sword coming back to the village, and a few more surprises, but that's something we can get into at some point in the future when the real world becomes too stupid to write about. Again.

Okay! So, there are a few dots here for you to connect if you like the Eyrewood stuff. Gabe was plagued by technical issues throughout the whole project thus far, in large part because many ports that look superficially like USB-C don't do all the things we would expect from USB-C. Certainly we know that - like the Nintendo DS - he emits harmful rays, but USB-C was supposed to ferry us into an Elysian realm and by and large it's more of a Charon situation.

There's a shout-out to The Ebb in this one, for the OGs who might have savored the Thornwatch boardgame.