Huang Bang

I don't know why I get so hung up on the things people say on social media, the socials, when it's just a performance space. It's not really possible to tell if anybody means any of the things they say on there. Gunn was controversial, I believe that much, but the idea that someone would still be pining for the Snyderverse at this late hour and respond to the ouster of James Gunn with vengeful delight just seems like a wild ride to me.

The very first Penny Arcade comic came out about five days before the original Ocarina of Time hit the N64. I didn’t actually play much of it back then for a lot of reasons. I was playing a lot of PC games with Jerry at the time. It was also an incredible year for the PlayStation with Gran Turismo, Resident Evil 2, Metal Gear and Tekken 3 all coming out. Also I had to pawn my N64 to pay rent so that made it tricky to keep playing Zelda.  

Zulu's is a real place you can go, technically place(s). Gorb got roped into a Star Trek event by his scions, presumably so he could handle the tab. Magic might be the one thing these boys agree on; one of the key bifurcations between them is that while they both go in for Stars, one prefers Wars while the other prefers Treks. Attempting to shape this conflict has been met with varying degrees of success, provided failure is part of that continuum - near the bottom, I would assume.

HORI made an electronic ocarina for the new Ocarina Of Time Gabe is obsessed with, good luck fuckin' finding one though. It can autoplay the traditional songs, or you can learn to play them yourself, and the game can hear you do it! It also has a headphone jack, which is a profound kindness and might save us a trip to the hospital.

I'm frightened, frankly, at what the environment must be like at Bethesda Softworks - A ZeniMax Company. I wouldn't want to be there. Asha gave Obsidian one of their best toys, and Starfield was essentially a sidequest. I'm a bad Elder Scrolls player, a fake fan; I wash out on stuff like their faces and animations. I always feel like I find something within the first few hours that nobody seems to have cared about at all. A beaky, triangular lip. A line I hear one too many times. For the vast majority of people, those just become memes. For me, it just makes me feel like they double-spaced their homework - a reference almost nobody would get anymore. If you were a million years old also, I promise you this metaphor would hit.

We had a few kids this year, one of whom was an especially convincing Indiana Jones, but at the end of the night we were left with a couple saddlebags of high-end product: one plump with tangy gummies, the other a medley of fun-size favorites. We were willing to part with more, had there been more larvae; they need sugar in order to molt. But this is not a universally distributed ethos.

I'm not even kidding; with Valve's AI Disclosures, they really have founded a wholly new mode of expression. You can reverse engineer how a developer feels about the disclosure by a close reading of the text, you can unfold the interior part of their skull and walk around in it. I bet it does suck.  I'm honor bound to understand the why, and AI coding is growing normative in the space.  It's hard to truly have beef with such a clannish, propagandized cadre.  I mean, my doom is to understand why even a mortal enemy might dislike me; I routinely extend greater humanity to my utter foes than I have ever received in return. It helps that many of them have been cartoon villains, desperate to distract from their own monstrous conduct. Ask Max Temkin, or Scott Gaynor. I know exactly why they did it. I never lifted a finger, and I didn't have to. Vengeance is mine, saith The Lord.

I identified something really odd while I was out at PAX Aus; the normal cadence and tenor of the AI discourse began to vibrate at an especially high frequency. The conversation has always been fraught, but everywhere I turned the side which advocated for the tools was really spun up, aggressive, and emboldened, and I wasn't seeing the counterpunches I'm used to. My presumption is that it's connected broadly to the Anthropic IPO, which is a severe test of… well, it's a gut check for the whole ball of wax - the future they are attempting to sell.

There can be no question, at long last, that Soulja Boy has told them: he wants those cards. Everybody wants those signed cards and it makes sense. At a certain point it seems like the Federal government would just allow Wizards to just print the money directly. Skip a step, you know? Save everybody a bunch of time.

The Desert Bus for Hope charity stream has just begun! Head over and watch them drive the bus and raise money for Child’s Play! 

If Gabe finished your Call of Duty campaign, it must be pretty fucking good. The last time around was functionally a playable meme that didn't line up with the milspec fantasy they typically offer, i.e., a three-story combat knife might fall out of the sky. He says that he spent way longer than strictly necessary inside of a Korean convenience store, and if they're anything like konbini you can spend a very very long time in one. Comparing a 7-Eleven in Japan to a 7-Eleven in Seattle is like comparing an eight ounce, medium-rare filet mignon to roadkill. Now, Gabriel would like to inoculate you against a specific type of content in the game but beyond that he grants whatever wastrel seal of approval he can muster.

Running ads is essentially broken, which is why so many sites have essentially become unusable especially on mobile.  If I even tried to make the site look like that the designers wouild twist my head off like a bottlecap.  So, we've been working with friends by and large to get ads up that we feel good about.  Bride of Spooktacular fits snugly in that place. 

I just really like Brad's designs; his obsession is with asymmetrical strategy games.   I could list them for a very long time, but he's the king of fighting games you play with cards, whether you think the best version of that is BatlleCON or EXCEED because he designed both.  Spooktacular and its Bride posit that terrors beyond mortal ken have burst through the screens in the theatre, and those are the entities you play as - devouring horrified moviegoers by the gobfull.  Every one of the original's twenty monsters or the Bride's ten additional ones is essentially playing a different game while going after the same points, with ramifications for your opponents and even in some cases the way the game plays.  Evil cars, a Queen and her Hive, zombified versions of our founding fathers...  this is just where it starts.  This Gamefound camnpaign also offers the Double Feature as an optional add-on, which are twenty new remixes of the original game's monsters that play completely differently or even invert their mechanics.  Anyway, putting up his ads was the easiest decision I made all year.  Only about a week left on the campaign... if you dare, etc.

(CW)TB   

Bungie is between Scylla and Charybdis, two words I spelled correctly on my first try. What are these two things? We don't need to go into all that - just know that they're both unwelcome, and you don't want to be there. Bungie's thing is to make its own weird and peerless shit, they've been doing it since the Mac, and maybe on some level there might be a perceived loss of face or identity associated with hauling somebody else's rope. Fuck allat. This is Live To Fight Another Day shit. Get the skunkworks popping while Lucasfilm keeps the stove warm and fends off Sony with a chair and a whip. The deal is bigger than paper, as choosing to slot work with the leading console manufacturer is just a good thing to have in your back pocket. And we already know Bungie would crush it: Renegades, their collab/crossover/Star Wars fic, was sick to death. Indeed, I propose that this is so cosmic, powerful, and correct that it represents an auspicious stellar configuration - something as good as Scylla and Charybdis, whatever they may be, are bad.

I love all of the incredible handmade items we get donated for the Child’s Play auction. We are less than a month away from this year’s dinner and I wanted to share a couple pictures of one of our awesome live auction items.

Mr. Gibb got hauled back into ARC by his eldest; that last link goes to his full report if you haven't seen it. Today's strip is a "war journal" of the kind of twisted, post-apocalyptic hellscape that you might experience in a food court.

I quit playing ARC Raiders for a couple of reasons. The two big ones being I did not want to support their use of AI voices and I was sick of getting shot in the back and losing all my shit. My eldest son Gabe loves the game and never stopped playing. He told me about how they replaced their AI voice work with human actors and that they were testing a new PvE mode. He asked if I wanted to try a few rounds with him and since I am at all times desperately trying to avoid a “Cat’s in the Cradle” situation I said yes.