The Vanity Fair article we are all slicing thin and plating up on our own sites is genuinely packed with bizarre truths. I'd sorta been content to say, hey, the director shift resulted in a different perspective on largely the same corpus. That's not what happened at all. There's some ratfucking in there, and then Joss Whedon's head rises, like a bad moon, breaking the soup of algae laid over a brackish pond.

Okay. So. Since the last time we talked on Monday, where I was like, "I guess Valheim sold a million copies this week," they just announced that they sold another million copies. You know, sometimes you look at the roadmap for an Early Access game you've bought, and you wonder if you're gonna see any of that stuff. I think we might actually see all that stuff. I can't imagine the pressure. Might be time to hire that sixth employee...?

I bought Minecraft when it was ten dollars. At least, I think it was ten dollars. It was close to that. It was about that many years ago, so don't hold me to it. I think it's really cool but I never actually lost myself to it. Valheim feels like Minecraft to me, except I actually fell in.

I'll talk more about Valheim later, after I've played more. But I'd say that's the main takeaway - it's my intention to play a lot more, with more people.

I was playing Gunfire Reborn with Gabriil and Kara on Monday, and their youngest rounded it out. He's good at shit like this so he was an excellent addition. I asked him what he thought of the game, and he said that it was pretty good, but that it copied a lot of stuff from Fortnite.

Nobody can do it! All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Some of the more traditional tools you might be able to bring to bear on Valentine's Day aren't available, but there are some classic standbys that never fail to please.

It's all true! And I can prove it:

The creative director on the Ori games got mad online, and then apologized more or less immediately. His profile pic is the currently the one Gabe drew of him in the strip. Now, the loop is complete.

There's only a handful of games where I come through as a Factor. This is the Kiko term: he once called me a factor in a game three years ago and I'm still high.

I mean, it's some very PC shit, honestly. I'm sure that in Destruction AllStars, it sees the controller as both a Speaker and a Microphone and just maps them. As a practical matter, though, we haven't had to put up with shit like this in multiplayer games for… man. It's been a minute.

Before we go into anything else I want to emphasize something at maximum volume. I already made a big deal out of the fact that Gunfire Reborn - a game at the crossroads of every salient trend in the industry - was only twelve fuckin' dollars. Except now this twelve (fuckin') dollar game is on sale for nine dollars and forty seven cents! You could buy four of these, which is the correct amount, and give them to your friends. It's recently been approved for medical use as I understand it, for pain "caused by (or related to) consciousness."

I think I actually do understand what is happening with Gamestop, Short Squeeze, this type of stuff, but it's spreading into contexts like AMC with very different dynamics. There are so many metaphors out there in the marketplace, and they're all a little different, and all a little wrong, so generally you just believe whatever you believed before.

There was an issue a couple nights ago that involved me alt-tabbing out of Gunfire Reborn to type a skeletal version of today's strip into the doc. It was a fire-related scenario - the details aren't important now. And, ultimately, I think I'll be exonerated. The deeper you look, I think you'll find that mythic substrates were in play, and it's like (gestures wildly) you know what I mean?

You might have seen this video pop up, a 1991 slab of what seems like B-roll from Toys "R" Us: