Devil Dogs

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.

I got a text from the designer of Gundam Assemble about today's strip, which was very nice of him. His name is Justin Gary; we met during quarantine and he was one of the first non-family humans I saw in person. We played Solforge out on the porch. He's probably best known for creating Ascension, which was one of the heavy-hitter deckbuilders back in the day. I was already going to be interested in Gundam Assemble, a wargame using the cutest miniature gunpla you ever did see, but when I found out he had made the engine for it that elevated the offering substantially.

My flight ended up being delayed, so in a strange and auspicious turn I happened to be ready to write the strip at the exact same time we typically do. Biddy Blas is constantly being tooled by others in the racing camp, hazed to within an inch of his life, and he certainly deserves a win. Does this constitute a win? I mean, maybe.

We are just about one month out from the 2026 Child’s Play charity dinner and auction! On November 13th we will once again be getting together to raise money for the cause we started all the way back in 2003! 

I mean, I'm a sucker for it too, and I came of age when that's just what teevee looked like. My youngest craves horror, horror of all kinds, but if she sees the tracking go off on a pretend VCR she recoils as though from a serpent.

There's nothing I love more than a wiggling rune, God damn. As soon as I know there's gonna be a rune I stand up a little straighter, maybe groom my eyebrows real quick. I'm always trying to work one into the strip and this time I managed to accomplish it in the most meta way possible. It's powerful stuff.

I ate some food court Chinese and now, by every observable metric, the food court Chinese is eating me. I was able to play a couple rounds of Blood on the Clocktower last night before I began to get a wobbly feeling I described as "nautical" and I have spent the last ten hours or so in a state similar to a furniture warehouse whose boss is out of town, i.e., "Everything Must Go."

My brand has long been "Atheist Jerk-off," but wtf I love Catholicism now.

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) October 2, 2026

After Wednesday's Wattersonian horseshit, we're back to what we do best: animal cruelty.

There was a period of time where they were just putting Star Wars on shit. Games Workshop used to do that too, with their license. There was some filth. But they've both figured out that - and I'll agree it's a little crazy - if you give the licenses to cool people who make good games it's a better play. In the same way that ex-Firaxis people proved that Star Wars XCOM could be much more than the sum of its parts, ex-Criterion people are making some kind of Goddamn roguelite racing game and it looks fucking sick.

He's still being dragged down into an incredibly deep hole with the new Fire Emblem, enough to wonder how some of the math could possibly math in this way. He sounds like me when I got heavily - heavily - into Dynasty Tactics, which I was horrified to learn is twenty-four years old. Fire Emblem is about type-matching and abilities, which is already drugs; Dynasty Tactics is largely about creating a favorable battlefield by positioning your units so that, like striking a match, you attack once and it triggers additional attacks from the rest of your army. I don't know that I've ever had to think that hard in a game since. They made a second one, but I didn't like it as well. That could be due to the fact that it wasn't as good, maybe, but who knows. It's also possible that the exertions of arranging and then triggering ten discrete units on a two-dimensional plane so that they all perform in a harmonious sequence is only something you can feel once.

Thanks for the Birthday wishes guys I appreciate it! Gabe’s Birthday being a worldwide phenomenon is one of my favorite running gags in the strip.