Whatever you may think of me now - how I comport myself, what I "get up to" - I'm fried dough compared to my previous incarnation. He was not exactly done in the middle, and that is being diplomatic. I had to endure successive annihilations to shave down a variety of sticky-outy bits which made being around me complex and not in a Pinot Noir way. More like complex in a fuckin' shut up way. I see that Michael has rendered me with the teabag I would occasionally tie to my glasses because I liked the smell. This was around the time I started wearing sweatpants exclusively - I realized that while I was required to go to school, I was not required to wear uncomfortable pants while I was at school. The realizations only bloomed from there. I came to understand I was also wearing a host of constraining ideas that were of no benefit, either. It was around this time that I invented the hippo.

Dabe sent me a ton of cool shots of the table he made the custom skin for.  They are presented below, with my director's commentary:

I haven't played it in a bit, since they added Blissey - a few weeks, then - but Pokemon Unite is still a very frequent occurrence over at Chez Gabe's House. He's gotten to the point where… well, I mean, it's all in the strip.

I've had so much going on the last month or so that I haven't had time to even purchase Aliens: Fireteam Elite, let alone install or play it. I'm generally insufferable about Aliens shit, so insufferable that I often avoid games of this kind altogether just because I know that I'm exceedingly picky about this kind of shit. I've told you before: I'm "that guy" about it. It's not a point of pride for me. It actively diminishes the joy I might otherwise receive from substandard horseshit and is something I consider a net loss.

I've just had too much to do leading up to the show to catch it, and when I rest I fall into the dark sleep of prophecy - but the Doctor Strange episode of What If? is something I need to make time for. At least, that's what I'm being told by Gabriel, except he told me in a weird way that doesn't map onto any known sayings. Please let me emphasize that this is something he really said. It was probably a slip of the tongue, but now it's out here and we need to contend with that.

The designers love making this stuff, and it's not hard to tell.  Just look at it! This year's Camp theme is a blast, and for the first time it's available both at the show proper and up on the Online Store starting Friday, September 3rd.  Here's the banners from the show:

I spent most of today thinking it was Thursday. I don't have a newspost on Thursdays! That's the important piece of information you should know. Not for any particular reason. Certainly don't look at what time the post went up. It was also the first day of school. And two days before PAX. Plus I had to go to the dentist! So, hey. How was your day?

Once the app became available in English I bit the bullet and ordered myself a Digimon Vital Bracelet. I posted a quick photo of it last week on Twitter and many of you were curious  about what exactly it was. Now that I’ve spent almost a week with it I feel comfortable telling you all about it. I’ll go into detail but basically it’s a fitness tracker that lets you raise and battle Digimon. The device itself is a lightweight bracelet and the Digimon come on separate little cards called DIMs. Each one is a unique digital monster that you evolve through a combination of moving your real world meat body and battles that take place in the watch or on the companion app. 

I can see a universe where something like an NFT is enduring and normal, provided the externalities of their proliferation and use can be tamped down. Most of their current incarnations seem incredibly dumb, or are so not-my-thing that I can't tell the difference. What I can't figure out is why, when NASCAR decided to get into racing NFTs, they went with horses instead of cars…? That's a wild fucking (conceptual) ride. That's Mr. Toad's wild fucking (conceptual) ride.

We really want Lexcalibur II out this year if we can swing it, so he's gonna be drawing shit like this today instead:

Once it became clear that the remastered Quake was Quake I already had in my own home, I reinstalled it straight away and jumped in - long enough to determine that these places are filed mentally as real places I have been.

The Penny Arcade league is back on the Daytona road course tonight in the Mazda MX-5! This week’s theme is "toys" so come for the racing and stay for the livery parade afterwards because I am actually participating today. We will also be giving away a couple of three month subscriptions to iRacing during tonight’s show so join the Pit Crew on Twitch tonight at 7:30 PT for a chance to win! 

Because our house is, for reasons unknown, the place where young women in the neighborhood gather I have ample opportunity to learn where their various interests intersect. Well, I guess the reasons aren't entirely unknown: we have gigabit fiber, robust sewing, crafting, and computing resources, and they aren't my kids so if they want to watch The Dragon Prince or whatever all day while they hatch schemes and draw OCs it's no skin off my substantial nose.

Gabriel has returned, whole but not unchanged by The Wilderness.

I'm willing to accept that you don't actually know you're inventing "the television" when you undertake a project. I don't mean inventing the device we call a television - you should probably know some of the basics there - I mean, the cultural apparatus television represents. So I'm sympathetic to the idea that Twitch existed at an unpredictable crossroads and then became a place where culture occurs at scale.

The Krahuliks had a great family vacation up in the mountains. We played a lot of Pokemon Go while hiking around in the woods and watched the Owl House while chilling back at the house.