Opfor

We exist in an incredibly weird space; we know a lot of people we really shouldn't know, given our irascible natures and rustic beliefs. We simply end up in the path of novel individuals from time to time and even if we start off on the wrong foot with them, which we often do because of the aforementioned irascibility, we typically arrive at some kind of positive relationship. I'm unfailingly polite in real life because my momma raised me right. This is a performance space; getting mad at me is like getting mad at an actor for something their character did.

If you could watch a pringle instead of eat one, just look at it and absorb it, that's essentially Love is Blind. The show is Certifiable, definition 2. It's a dating show in its molecular form, it's clearly been designed by certified (definition 1) psychiatric experts to perforate human beings, to peel them like an onion. Its structure is something like a rocket - there's a Booster Phase where the participants can't see each other, and the participants wade through waist-high gossip to and from the little chambers they make them sit in. Then, once that phase balls into the atmosphere, they get fucking engaged with these people they've never seen before and this goes all the ways you think. You gotta meet a woman's dad who hates you and hates the show and thinks it's a mockery of the society they grew up in. Then you see if any of those people actually go through with it. Then they do an episode where they get all those people later and put them in the same room! Heavy sheets of plastic are laid down and stapled to the walls because three to four people get murdered in this episode, on average.

I guess it makes a little more sense that Amazon secured James Bond when you consider that one of the many, many, many things they have been allowed to buy is MGM. It's not just, like, for Prime Video or something. They're gonna make a real movie and stuff.

My comics knowledge is made up of modern weirdo auteur shit and whatever my friends were reading back in the oughts. World War Hulk I kinda sorta know about but not really, mostly because aspects of the lead up were parted out in other movies and my brain demanded that I spend a lot of time on wikis. So I didn't know until we were writing the strip yesterday that Red Hulk is called Rulk. Rulk! Okay, sure.

We borrowed the punchline from Dabe, who actually had this experience IRL. Or, in game I guess. But the game was being played in real life? I'll have to sit down for a second and really think about where the parentheses begin and end on this shit - I'm being seized 24/7 by incalculable whorls. You usually try to figure it out from the names, there's only a few total formats they use, but occasionally you don't know and you might feel compelled to ask. I feel like asking a person if they are a bot is probably worse than leaving it ambiguous; it's nice when they simply volunteer the information. I guess we also have to consider that these bots have become ensnared by carnal hungers. I'll keep an eye on it, I guess.

We had seen something about a new show called Doc. Here is the trailer for it; I don't watch a lot of broadcast television but this is a show that looks and feels like a pharmaceutical ad, which I suppose is at least somewhat on-brand.

Everybody in Marvel Rivals is completely busted in some way. Their low-key disregard for dogma in the traditional Triangle of damage and healing has given rise to all manner of moist and wicked chimeras. They'll let a duelist be - in the words of 2 Live Crew - as nasty as they wanna be, just utter demons, but they don't get to have any health not even as a treat. Tank is a deep genre in this game; I think there's a reason we haven't gotten any new ones since launch. Strategists also go extremely hard. There is a strategist whose ult essentially just calls halftime and you have to go do something else for a little while. It's an ult that projects out into the real world.

As someone who came into quote unquote prominence in the early Internet - and I say Quote Unquote because it was a matter of being big in a much smaller place - creative work existed within some very particular dynamics. The work we were trying to do was text and images, which the Internet of the time was adept at - it would take a little longer for people making music, video, or games to get the same opportunity. This meant that "distribution," previously a very thorny concept, could be a couple badly formatted tables and an FTP client. We still managed to find abuse at the hands of various demons trying to get paid for it, but this new problem is at least a novel one and the old one was gone forever.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the kind of life-sim, Steam Charts pervert game I have a hard time engaging with. Well, that's not true. It's that I engage with one tiny part of it obsessively and then I have a sixty dollar game I've eaten the nuts and chewies out of and the rest of the box gets thrown in the garbage. It's like Disgaea Item Worlds; that just becomes the whole game. I watched somebody make a sword in KC:D2 and sharpen it, and though it didn't take the amount of time it would actually take it took a long-ass motherfuckin' time. Long enough to lose myself meditatively in the quenching, perhaps. Hmm.

Hmm.

Gonna get down on Rivals with Dabe and Mike until noon, then more of the incredible Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  When we left off we had just entered a darkened crypt!  I bet that's gonna happen a couple times.  I'll see you there.

(CW)TB

With the acquisitions of Lucasfilm and Marvel, Science Fiction and Comics themselves - as they exist in the public imagination - became the property of Disney. After some initial success, and up to Endgame what might be one of the most effective and lucrative cinematic engines of all time, they have waned in dissipation and arrogance. Even the cool stuff they manage to get out on accident is catching strays because they've fucked this up so royally. Disney has invented a machine that kills golden geese.

DeepSeek - we all know about this, right? The Chinese model that came out of nowhere, became the number one installed app and remains so? And it's way cheaper, plus it's open source? That DeepSeek. That's the one I mean. Anyway, if it were possible to detonate a nuclear bomb inside nVidia's stock price, that's essentially what happened. How did it get so good, so fast, so cheap? Is it actually cheap? Who knows. But there's rumblings from OpenAI that one reason is that it stood on the shoulders of illegal, copyright infringing giants. Boo fucking hoo.

Dabe and I played, like, two hours of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle weeks ago and I still think about it all the time. I would play it more, just install it myself, but I feel very strongly that you need a witness to extract the most out of it. I think there's too much texture, too much detail for a single person and I am prepared to sign up for either side of the dyad. It's also updated the genre itself - something like an immersive sim, immy simmy perhaps, with some creature comforts for players that jettison some of the drudgery we associate with this sort of game.

I’ve been playing a ton of Marvel Rivals recently. I’m even playing ranked, which is something I almost never do in these sorts of games. I just hit Silver 1 yesterday and I hope to get to gold before the season ends but holy shit you can lose a lot or rounds in a row. My favorite character to play is Cloak and Dagger and I did a quick sketch of them just for fun the other day that I shared over on my Blue Sky account. 

The war over whether it was Guy or Gay raged in the schoolyards and cafeterias of Ridgeview Elementary School. We did not live in an age where such things could be resolved immediately. No, we lived in an age where such things were casus belli even though nobody actually had any grounding for their positions. We had not yet arrived at the era of a Resident Evil, where the game Resident Evil begins by literally saying the words "Resident Evil" out loud. We could agree that it was hard as fuck and that the ninja dude looked hellafied running in the intro. This allowed our congregation of youthful, callus-thumbed warriors to unite against the true threat: Jacquio, and his demon-cult.

I once had a customer service experience with an Apple phone that was so Kafkaesque that I bought a Pixel the same day. I'm not saying that the Pixel is good or that you should think it's good or that Apple is evil or anything like that. It just occurred to me that it was within my power to never have this particular experience again. I can have other bad experiences, but when I realized I could consign this particular one to The Void I leapt with ravenous hunger.