At some point it became clear that if I ever wanted to play a videogame with Gabriil again, I'd have to take up Destiny. So I did, purely as a medium of communication. I thought of it as being something like going to a bar I didn't especially like because it was my friend's favorite bar. And maybe I don't have a high opinion of my friend's opinion on this bar. He doesn't even drink, he eats here. On purpose. He only likes this bar because he can sub tots for fries at no additional charge.

"Doomed cycles" form the scaffold off which so many dork narratives hang, and this one - the generational doom - is an especially potent one.

Here's your weekly peek into my sketchbook.

We just recently found an ancient podcast that Tycho and I recorded back in 2008 while working on the RSPD games. A forumer named Adus actually helped us recover it so thanks Adus! We’ve gone ahead and added it to the DLC bonus content section and you can find it at the bottom of this page labeled RSPD podcast. I’m gonna be 100% honest with you and say I have not listened to it so I have no idea if it’s any good. I vaguely remember recording it but for all I know it’s just 15 minutes of us talking about butts.

All of Tycho's dialogue in this strip is either a direct quote from Will Wright or is paraphrased in some way from interviews. I'm sorry: I can't actually write anything funnier than the way people present their revolutionary social media shit. I can detail the loop that resulted in my closing the app, maybe forever. I read an article about the app on a website. Then, I installed the app, and swiped through a number of people's psychologically measurable, Exhibit A type narcissism. Then, I found a thread by the person who had written the article, and it was just a set of links to articles on the website I had found the original article on. Nope! That's on some Ouroboros type shit. Closing up shop.

** UPDATE, SOLD OUT **

I was a weird kid.

The teachers at my son's school are staging some sort of walk out today. I'm guessing it's about class size and money but I'm not really sure. All I know is that since my wife will be at the dentist most of the day I need to stay home with my kid. His little brother still has a school to go to so it's just gonna be Gabe and I at home all afternoon. Last week I got him his own PSN account so we could play games together. This morning he asked if we could just play Destiny all day since no one else would be home. "Son" I said "As your father I can't sit on the couch and play games with you all day just because you got a free day off of school. That's ridiculous. Obviously we will need to take a break for lunch and milkshakes at some point."

Remember what I said about drawing for fun again? Yeah well this is what it looks like:

The joke used to be that if the Internet here wasn't working, Kiko was torrenting several seasons of an anime simultaneously - but it wasn't a joke so much as it was a true fact. It was an awful business, and not simply because of the profound immorality of these acts - the disregard for the edifice of law, which separates man from the hyena. That's what I told him. But it also made it very difficult, if not impossible, to complete my own torrents.

My new year’s resolution this year was to push myself to get better at drawing. I was in a rut and feeling pretty shitty about my art in general. This year my goal was to break through that wall and really try to improve. Part of that meant sketching as much as I could. I’d stopped drawing for fun. I’d gotten into the habit of only drawing when I had a job to do. Now I draw almost every night and I try and force myself to NOT draw things for work. It’s been awesome and while it was hard at first, It’s getting much easier.

I had the weird-ass Brown And Green Zune, so I am not really in a position to defend myself; I made tremendous use of the device. I think it's my job to act as a halfway house for orphaned, exiled things; I have always had a fear that a preconception or the preconception of another will foreclose realities in some way. I thought it was solid. IP wrangling being what it is, some of its cool tricks couldn't manifest. It was a pretty fucked up time - you'll recall that you couldn't buy MP3s directly, yet. Microsoft has a strange, almost preternaturally doomed habit of releasing things at exactly the wrong time.

I should have understood at some level that Silent Hills was too beautiful to live. If P.T. was any indication, we'd be talking about a psychological piece in the horror furnace of that damned place, executed by two unconventional, unquenchable, functionally speaking invulnerable fucking weirdos. I have let the part of my brain which has no contact with linear time run free on what it all means, though what it means in truth is that reality is a kind of sieve that retains horror and lets noble potential run straight through.

I wouldn't mind playing around with an Apple Watch, and I don't doubt that it represents a very specific fork of our wearable future, but I don't sense a hole in my life the device would fill. I also think the pricing is outta fucking control. What's funny is that I would not find a traditional timepiece in that range offensive; such a device represents a graphable point in life, is Property, is functionally a phylactery which will communicate my cold will to future generations. I am trying to imagine how one would "inherit" a piece of notoriously transient first generation hardware. My daughter's daughter would have to hit up Future Etsy for an artisanally made cable just to update the firmware.

I have a bunch of digital sketches for you this week.

Tycho is off getting his first tattoo today and I’m really excited for him. I like the design he chose which is more than I can say for my first tattoo. In fact I know a lot of people who aren’t thrilled with their first tattoo. I got my first one about twenty years ago when Tycho was considering his Gargoyles homage. We were living together at the time and I was looking through some of his RPG books. I found this illustration of a heart with a crown of thorns around it and decided that would be my first tattoo. It’s still sitting there on the back of my calf. If nothing else it reminds me of that time in my life and who I was back then, even if I’m not thrilled with the design itself anymore.