I don't know if Ambien is sleep, exactly, but it's definitely not lying in bed looking at the ceiling, or pressure-sealed into a Sky Coffin, and that can be a nice change of pace. Gabe had tried it once to great success on the Australian Flight, but the second time he tried it he entered a Devil Dream that lasted almost sixteen hours - one from which he could not wake. As per usual, we tried to shape and mould these horrors into something silly, an attempt at inoculation in the form of a feathered sky serpent called J.D. that at least I found enjoyable. We made a joke about me taking it, mostly just so we could see J.D. again, but until a couple weeks ago I'd never tried it at all. I only had a couple, I mostly ran out, and I'm glad. That's the kind of shit a witch would give you in a fairy tale. I have a little left, like a few crumbs of lembas wrapped in mallorn leaves, and I'll be using it to board one of the motherfucking White Ships to the motherfucking West. I apologize in advance - it would appear Dreaded Continuity has reared its wicked and serpentine head once again.

Josef Fares has carved out a crazy history in game dev - he was a filmmaker before, which makes sense I guess if you look at his work. He started with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons back at Starbreeze, who is making a D&D game now I guess? Brothers has a weird trick it pulls that I still think about ten years later, and I'm confident that it has the power to heal the rift.

Acquisitions Incorporated Returns To Aus - With the Brand New Arkham Horror RPG! I've been playing Arkham Horror stuff for decades at this point - and like the moist and shapeless creatures it depicts, the game itself has taken many forms over the years and has somehow, impossibly, remained good. A living card game? Absolutely. Dice, somehow? Great, incomprehensibly so, and I am forced by the disease I have to tell you that divination using dice is called "Astragalomancy." But they aren't done, they go wide with the mythos: social deduction? Also yes. Co-op adventure? This too. But!

But.

When my mom calls, I feel like it's because she has a preternatural ability to contact me right as I'm about to engage in a task. It's a skill, and she has mastered it. The moment a task is about to begin, as soon as the mise en place has been… you know, placed, a communique from my Creator bores into the proceedings. I think I have inherited her uncanny knack for auguring into otherwise useful moments, because when I call my own child - who is not a child, I must remind myself, but a legal adult - they act like I'm trying to sell them a timeshare.

A big part of reading reviews and coverage and discourse and whatever the fuck is squinting your eyes real tight and trying to divine what the actual motivation for writing something even is. There's been aggression of various kinds toward the movie from the jump, but there's some Dark River underneath the surface conversation. Even if "all" it ended up being was a hundred million dollar jobs program for a ton of weirdos on both sides of a camera, that's fine. Good, actually. It's plenty.

I am opening up four commission slots for the month of October. I’ve been drawing some really fun stuff including D&D characters, MMO characters, X-men, the family dog but like in space and I even had a commission last month to redraw our old Strawberry Shortcake comic.

These things come in seasons, I guess; they've been through a couple rounds of intense Warhammer 40k interest at Chez Gabriel. This most recent fever is almost certainly the result of Space Marine II, and as I said before, the game is so ardent in its manifestation of the brand and its lore that I think it could mint new fans just as well as repel them. But the borderline? The person who owns models, many of whom are gray, or still lie flensed on their sprues? Those who are down to clown, but haven't prioritized the hobby recently? Their minds will be terraformed by this game. Those people are well and truly fucked.

The boys and I decided to try and learn how to play 40K 10th edition. There’s a lot to learn and I figured we’d start with the basics. In order to learn the core rules we avoided playing with objective markers we decided to keep it simple and just try to kill each other's army in a straight up fight. Jerry, Kiko and Eric came over yesterday to play some 40k and teach us the rules. What they told us is that the game is not really balanced for the way we were playing and actually needed the objectives to work. This made sense because I have to say it was damn near impossible to beat Noah’s Death Guard army in a fist fight. 

Right here!

Mormons used to call the house all the time, because my dad - and his nine brothers and sisters - grew up Mormon. Mormonism has always been very normalized for me, very ordinary stuff, but I just happened to come up in a place that has a unique relationship with the faith. Until you really get into the lore, it's essentially a Christian sect that shares a lot of what you might call "class features" with Bible Classic. But in one of the most incredible flexes of all time, their founder Joseph Smith literally wrote what is essentially a sequel to The Bible. And, well, yeah. You know what they say about sequels.

I don't really go in for Remasters generally, there's always somebody doing something new and incredible and I never want to miss it - I always want to get in just as it's being removed from the oven, where consensus has yet to transform a dynamic, hand-made experience into a number. But I do get excited when I think that a new person might come to discover our Old Ways through one of them, and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is very particular vertical slice of an era. With its warping, three dimensional worlds and its fairly profound story - a showcase for Amy Hennig, from which she mounted a fairly profound career - it was doing shocking things on the PS1. It has some incredibly hard lines - bars, in the modern parlance. I hope someone unearths this time capsule and gets all the way up their ass in some Wikis because it absolutely warrants it.

Having crushed Space Marine 2 beneath my ceramite heel, I'm now in a position to observe Gabe rolling hard on his own playthrough. It's just very, very good. Because it is essentially Sci-Fi Catholicism, with all the gothic majesty and ritual that might suggest, large portions of it take place in church. What I'm trying to get at is that The Candle Budget goes pretty crazy in the worlds of the Imperium, in a time and place where swinging sacred incense in a thurible is part of routine engine maintenance. The whole thing is so dense, with so many odd angles, that I can't help but like it. It works as satire and, because the best satire must fully and truly understand its subject, it also works as an exemplar of a baroque science fiction. You can tell it wry or tell it straight and it works either way.

I was seventeen when the first Crow movie hit theaters. It’s hard to imagine a better movie for an angsty teen in 1994. I was already a fan of the comic book and absolutely loved the movie. There are lines from the Crow that I still quote to this day! Obviously a lot has changed in the past 30 years. Art that I might have called “sincere” is now considered “cringe”. Everything today needs to be viewed through a protective layer of irony. You need to deliver a wink to the audience every once in a while to let them know you’re not actually taking this shit too seriously. Maybe it’s the Gen X in me, but sometimes I want to take this shit too seriously.

You know what? Gabe actually really liked the new Crow, or as it is being called in higher-end circles, Le Crow Nouveaux. He says it feels like a throwback in the fun way. I'm curious, but not so curious yet that I would prioritize it over any other activity. I wonder if it's the same thing with a hard seven in game reviews - occasionally sevens are, in actuality, sevens. But there's also a handful of cases where the game is a nine for some and a five for others and the mechanism doesn't know what else to do with it. Also, hell is bad! It's not a first-choice destination.

The potential of a third D is immense - however you might parse the phrase. It seems like there's a lot of cool stuff that could happen out there; it's a lot of room. Are we doing the best we could with it? Maybe not. It would be nice to have a point of comparison, like an alien world. I saw a TikTok that said that the James Webb Telescope had found city lights on a planet several trillion miles away, but then another TikTok a few seconds later said that the James Webb Telescope can't even see things like that. It was a heady couple minutes or so and I'm still whirling psychologically. In any event, we'll have to wait to see what others are managing to accomplish with their D.

True to the strange force that keeps us in perpetual opposition, any video of Gabriel must also be a video of me eating shit: