We left this one in the writing doc for a couple weeks so that by the time we did it, any sting from the spoiler content would be minimized. The strip also has a perspective on the Sting Itself! It's a robust document.

So I've played a lot more Demeo, enough to see some annoying bugs that get fixed when we rejoin the game, but I'm still bullish on it. Incredibly so. I think the success of the game has been a huge surprise to the team, but their love for old school Dungeons & Dragons horseshit was strong enough to become real. A real thing, you can play with their friends. It's not some obsequious, labored thing - it's not trying to be literal about its inspirations. What it wants do is make you feel like those games did. And they got there. It's startling in its authenticity. Unsettling, even.

VR shit has to be pretty cool in order for Gabriel to endure its extreme effects on his body; the kids have played together more than we have. Medical sacraments prolong his capacity to withstand it, but metaphorically it's like nailing a couple thin boards over a window and it's only a matter of time before whatever is out there gets in. Or, to invert the metaphor, whatever is in there comes out.

I had read about these mars mushrooms in a couple places, places I thought wouldn't be full of shit, but ended up being full of shit. When I told Michael about my incredible new find, lifting the lid on the little cigar box my grandfather had given me to store treasures, a few seconds from him on Google - the same Google I'd used a couple days before to ascertain consensus - revealed not only that they were rocks but that they'd been revealed as as rocks years before.

Because he liked Andy Weir's first book The Martian - and because the cover shows a person that appears to be in space - Galabriel purchased Project Hail Mary immediately. He has already developed a robust headcanon that has come to define the product.

I can’t explain how I end up falling into these hobbies or why I tend to get sucked in by them. I watched Ford vs. Ferrari on a plane ride and became obsessed with motorsports and eventually sim racing. That was over a year ago now and I still race every week with the Penny Arcade iRacing league. I’ve met so many cool people and had so much fun thanks to sim racing that it is hard for me to imagine the last year without it. It really was just dumb luck that I stumbled into it and my most recent obsession Gunpla is no different. 

The Division kicks ass. All of it. I would say, purely in the interest of bet-hedging, that the second game sorta failed on the narrative aspects up front but then began to deliver on the back as content continued to arrive. So, let's go back to the first part. It kicks ass.

Once he told me that he'd done actual online research into the nuance and mores of Gunpla - specifically around what gesticulations were required for entry into the sacred realm - I knew that's what the strip was about.

I would like to play Returnal! I think because I have been considering the ongoing plague, and also because I don't own any next generation systems, I guess I didn't know it was seventy dollars. Because of where I'm at as a person, I purchase and play roguelite deckbuilders almost exclusively, and everything else is probably played on Game Pass or free somewhere, so I hadn't really felt that yet.

I love the early stages of a hobby when there is so much to learn. That’s the phase I’m in with Gunpla right now and I love it. I am watching tutorials and reading guides every day and it’s almost as satisfying as building the actual kits. I would be ashamed to say how much time I spend carefully posing and placing the little robots after I build them. I may not know all the shows and movies they are from but I know which ones look rad, and Goddamnit that’s enough for me. 

Kitboga is a kind of Reverse Scammer, whatever the latin is for Who Scams The Scammers, that Gabriel the Younger turned Gabriel the Elder onto. The novel bit - aside from the "characters" he takes on - is that he essentially has would-be thieves, brigands, and elder abusers connect to a virtual machine that has more or less been configured as a haunted labyrinth. Then it is up to scammers to engage in a truncated version of the Hero's Journey as they try and contend with its lessons, jukes, and intrigues. The Virtual Machine Part is very important. If you did this with just a Regular Machine you're gonna have problems.

It's like a book club, but for games...?  I think that gets most of the way there.  This month's game is Olija, available everywhere and on everything, and I get to talk to lead developer Thomas Olsson about it today - Soon, even!  

The Destiny Reddit is such a complex place. I can't stay there for very long - it's like trying to fit inside of a grandfather clock without a) interrupting its function or b) having your own function interrupted by its gears or pendulum. It's a perfect commingling of matter and antimatter, an open forum where there are precisely the same number of proponents for or against any action, and a reasonably high level of conceptual rigor, so that by the time I finish a thread the only thing I'm convinced of is that a bunch of my time is irretrievably lost and I don't have anything to show for it.

Last year around this time I discovered sim racing and this year I’ve discovered Gunpla. I guess I’m just a sucker for a new hobby. I’ve seen Gundam models in hobby shops my entire life, but I had never seen any of the shows and while I thought the robots looked cool, I just never investigated them. I certainly had no idea that they fit together entirely without glue or that the models came in a variety of grades each with its own level of difficulty and detail. After starting the original series on a lark a couple weeks ago, I became a fast fan of the story and the setting. I picked up a beginner level Gunpla kit and built it with my son Noah who just turned 11 yesterday. We had so much fun we moved up right away to the next grade of difficulty called High Grade. These kits are the same size (1/144) but much more intricate and fun to build. 

We sorta have the opposite problem; I have hands that resent their given function, hands that flop and writhe, hands that are happy to cover an entire PCB in a thin layer of solder when trying to join a single junction. He has perfectly still art hands. If I'm gonna undertake the kind of labor required to build a bunch of models, there has to be a scenario where I arrange said models with precision, roll well, and still lose somehow. Sorry! That's how it's gotta be.

I understand he might have gone hard at the USA Gundam Store. That's not, like, an affiliate link or anything. We don't know them. I just sorta know that once Gabe had boiled down a bunch of the options he ended up going with them.