28 Decades Later

I start tons of books using the Kindle preview but end up actually buying and finishing far fewer. I lean towards hard Sci-Fi. I like inscrutable alien artifacts and massive jumps through time. If I’m not reading about spaceships I’m reading history books for some reason. I think because the good ones at least are sort of like time travel books. I’ve managed to finish a bunch of great books recently from both these genres and I wanted to share my finds here for those of you with similar reading interests.

I haven't played a Kojima game all the way through since Metal Gear Solid 2, and that was before he started getting truly wild with the cutscenes. I love to watch them though, which is fully in-line with the profound, unique spectacle they offer. 2 Live Crew's third album was entitled "As Nasty As They Wanna Be," and there is a version of this principle in place for Hideo Kojima - very, very few people are allowed by the universe to be this true to their instincts, to "shock the world" as Silkk The Shocker put it. I'm trying to figure out another old school hip hop reference but I think this paragraph is essentially spent. Everything that we say in the strip is true, though.

We're starting to really get into it now on the legal framework that underpins AI training data. Disney is trying to kick over Midjourney with one foot while wedging its other foot in the door at OpenAI for a possible licensing deal. It's kind of a hardcore play, when you think about it; it's something like testing the Death Star on Alderaan.

I would be overjoyed to say that all these lures and snips of prose and epitomized human forms all constitute pornography, but I won't unilaterally disarm. I think it's okay to be a weird little freak and fuck your aging necromancers or your sex vampires or even, in rare and select cases for the real sickos, human beings. People get super mad when you talk shit about their porn, and that's sorta how you know it's porn. I wish there were a way to, in a robust and ongoing way, simply admit that people have kinks without making them into purity spirals and empowering endless grifts.

Last Sunday we released the Super Wizard Kart episode of Acquisitions Inc and I just wanted to drop another link to it here for the Friday crowd.

Troubling content abounds in today's startling sequel. If you dare to click, know this: your perversion will be registered at the highest level.

The only thing I actually know about Stellar Blade is that it is a Site of Conflict. I didn't have a PS5 and continue to not have one, so it wasn't especially actionable at the time. Well, I guess I know one more thing about it - that there is almost certainly a Federal Bureau dedicated to apprehending the wicked men who… do what, exactly? Look at a picture?

The cat knight collecting gatcha game "Kätzen Knights" from yesterday's comic is not a real video game. I am sorry. 

Hey Jerry!

Yo.

I just wanted to say thank you for talking up Sunderfolk. My girlfriend is not into video games AT ALL, but she likes boardgames. She was willing to give Sunderfolk a shot and has fallen completely in love with it, to the point that she asks me if we can play when I get home. I love that I can share something I have always enjoyed with her now. I hope we get more games like this in the future. Thanks again.  -Erik

I love Secret Door, I love Dreamhaven, and I love Sunderfolk.  I did a sponsored panel for Sunderfolk at PAX with a bunch of other cool people and I charged zero dollars.  That's how cool I think it is.  There are quite a few gamers on PC that don't really understand "Jackbox Gloomhaven," the phone as a controller for a co-op tactics feast is either alien or distasteful, like trying to play the game with a dead rat.  I wonder sometimes if it could have a different life with a PC specific UI, but that's neither here nor there - I'm glad you two are having fun with it.  If you need naming suggestions for any of the things you discover obviously we're here to help.

(CW)TB

If you watched my Super Wizard Kart game from yesterday and you’d like to try running it yourself at home, I’ve collected all my rules into a PDF file you can download right here. 

A new gacha has its teeth in Gorbiriel - or perhaps its claws, canonically - and he is as powerless to resist it as a level one Kätzenlandsknecht.

I was asked to run a game of Acquisitions Incorporated and decided to dust off some ideas I had after running Wizard Kart for the C Team about a million years ago. While Wizard Kart was a sort of goofy way to play D&D, its sequel Super Wizard Kart is a fully self-contained board game. The players did not even need to bring their character sheets to the session. I’d like to thank my incredible players Jerry Holkins, Jasmine Bhullar, Kate Welch and Trystan Falcone for agreeing to sit down and play the results of my mad tinkering. You can watch the results right here!

It's true, though. Sorry. We made another Jump Ship comic. Which is also a strategy guide…? I'm told such guides are a hot commodity.

I realized now that I should have put the name of the game in the strip title, maybe. If you got super cranked up looking at the power board in the comic, and you were like "surely they aren't doing a Tetris-inspired block puzzle to manage their ship, just like I saw in that dream I had. A dream I've held so close" well I got real good news for you, space cowboy. The game is called Jump Ship and that's exactly how it fucking works.

Today marks the 16 year anniversary of the very first Lookouts  comic strip. Created during the original “Pitch Week” in which we present to you the reader three new comic ideas presented as a single page pitch. This particular week saw us pitch the ideas for Lookouts, Automata and Jim Darkmagic. Lookouts won the voting but we ended up making a bunch more Automata as well.

The reek - the stench - of dreaded continuity can be whiffed from nearly a mile away, like a distended whale carcass reaching critical mass. It took more than twenty years, but finally conditions in the retail space aligned with an ancient character's… well, let's not say predilections, They are now more in line with his lived experience.