Hot Ones

They kept making them even after I stopped watching them, and now they made even more, at such a late hour that some of the cast are ambulatory skeletons and the rest have AARP cards. I grew up in the "historical period" Stranger Things takes place in, so there's always a certain amount of stuff you just gotta put up with I guess. The things that bother me are - for the sixteen year old that lives here - pure retro candy. But, seriously though: I was under the impression that we all thought season three was kinda ahh.

I mean, I gotta make comics and stuff because it's a big part of my job. And Tim Sweeney and I probably wouldn't get along in real life; some people are literally too smart to talk to and I think he's probably one of them. I really, really want him to be wrong that AI will be involved in all future (game) production but I'm afraid he isn't.

Sometimes we swap who has the experience in real life for who has it in the strip, sometimes so one of us doesn't get in trouble with Kara, and sometimes because each of the strip's primary participants - the pieces Gabriel and I move around tactically in the comic - has access to different words and tones. Gabriel could deliver a similar sentiment to Wednesday's first panel, perhaps, but it got a strong assist from baroque language and a whiff of ancient mystery. In the case of today's offering, it's actually my neighbor - but Gabriel's exasperation made it more fun in our opinion.

I have a very weird memory, or… I mean shit, I don't know. Let me tell you how it works and you tell me if it's weird. My memories go back very far and include a full sensorium. When I was two years old I got out of our apartment and tried to cross the street in front of our house. I can be there anytime I want! I don't really want to, though. My earliest memories are strange because everyone is so big. My grudges are, as a result, legendary - the crime was always five seconds ago. So, I can get older, but I have all these save points where I have varying levels of experience. I hope it doesn't make me more vulnerable to nostalgia, but when do I ever get what I want?!?

This is just one last reminder that the 22nd annual Child’s Play auction and dinner is coming up next week on December 5th. Jerry and I will be your hosts for the evening and we hope you will join us to support the Child's Play mission of helping kids all over the world through the power of play. You can get your tickets right here!

-Gabe Out

20 years ago Harlan Ellison said I was "a superannuated teen-age golem with a slack jaw, a slow manner, a typical pointless surliness at a world unwilling or unable to accept him as Superlative, and on sum a twerp easy to dismiss" and I am still very proud of that.

Here's "The Story".

-Gabe Out

Part of being a core demo means being catered to by a variety of products and services - trinkets and baubles, lotions and potions, slakes for mortal lusts. Mork and I had a run-in with Candles For Men, back when someone recognized that men also have noses and thus might be addressable by olfactory weaponry. At the show, Gabriel was sold a candle not as a man - a state we match only the most rudimentary distinctions of - but as an adventurer, perhaps the only state to which we are less entitled to. Alas! No law may bind him; he is fifty to seventy percent beast.

There are a few things I am an absolute sucker for, just suckin' like crazy, and one of them is dice.  Or, several of them I guess.  It depends on how granular we're being. I thought that I was in remission, but here at PAX I've been thrust into the fire like a hot poker - a hot poker that for some inexplicable  reason wants to buy dice.

We like to write science fiction thinly disguised as industry commentary, or vice versa, and we also really like Antiques Roadshow. This sturdy triangle offered unprecedented strip opportunities, the kind that leave precedented strip opportunities in the dust.  This, I thought. This is how we drive brand loyalty and earn share in crowded marketplace.

It's incredibly silly to think that we have been at this - whatever this is - for twenty-seven years. That is a crazy thing to do for as long as we've been doing it. Any rational actor would have boarded the white ships aeons ago, as men reckon time. From this throne in the ATL, Ludacris calls upon all of us to - in his words - "Act A Fool." But he could never have imagined this kind of foolishness extended over such a substantial period of time.

Eurogamer's review is precisely the kind of activism they specialize in, but they're so earnest about it that I consider it an aesthetic. It only makes me mad when they pretend they aren't doing it - by and large they just have tender hearts and venerate the priors of their social class. I'm only mentioning them again because they gave the best shooter this year a two out of five because Embark used AI voices. Well, kinda. They might have, or they might do more in the future. I, uh… Goddammit. Far be it from me to venerate a prior, but I gotta give it to 'em.

Just another reminder that the 22nd annual Child’s Play Auction and dinner is coming up on December 5th. After a long break, Jerry and I are back as hosts. Come hang out with us and help us raise money for kids in Children’s hospitals all over the world! You can get your tickets right here.

Gabe has been pushing this new Frankenstein shit pretty hard, but I don't have to be nudged with any intensity into seeing a Guillermo Del Toro movie. I can close my eyes and see one, I love his shit. Apparently this new one balls out of control, and a wisp of a scene at the very end of the runtime hints at the kind of structures in play.

Because Mork is a literal Redditor, he let me know that the ARC Raiders community has split itself into two subreddits over some basic questions about the intention of the game. We're putting together a summit of course, on a summit, because it seems like that would be a cool place for one. We'll let you know how it goes.

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.