Gabriel, as his posts on the site reveal, has retreated into the games of youth - and now, having consumed them, has found himself bereft. I'm sorta in the same place; I've installed three comfort games over the last week. Last night I installed Paladins, which I unironically think is more fun than Overwatch. And I mean good, old Overwatch. Recent reviews are mixed, but I don't know why; in service games, communities use reviews to "communicate" with developers but I don't know precisely what they're "communicating" about because I only installed it yesterday.  

The Concord cinematic feels like what you would get if you asked Chat GPT to make you a Marvel movie. I can’t believe they threatened to release one of these story trailers every week once it launches! At least the new Astro Bot game looks cool. 

-Gabe Out

Sometimes I think that I like things a normal amount, when I like them a completely crazy amount or that I should, in all seriousness, hesitate to broadcast openly. The last time this happened I was like "obviously, I like Transformers like any normal person who came of age in the particular context I arose in" but that's not true at all. I want to open my ribcage and find there the Matrix of Leadership, which I will use to imbue machines with sentience - with the vibration of sacred life.

It's Tuesday, and it will soon be 2:30pm PST - which means our Battletech wargame/RPG hybride Black Remnant has returned to the fore.  I am joined by gamemaster Eric Benson and friend Kiko Villasenor and it is NOT SERIOUS until such time as it is VERY serious. Check it out!

(CW)TB 

There isn't really any profit in going endlessly over just how badly megacorporations have stewarded the web. It's not worthwhile as a hobby! And if they didn't exceed themselves at literally every turn, I wouldn't be forced to do so. This isn't a matter of someone being wrong on the Internet, although that certainly does occur. This is more about someone making the internet wrong.

Back in August of last year I switched out my iPhone 12 for a Motorola Razr+ Flip phone. Today I switched back to my old iPhone because I hate the Razr+ phone with every fiber of my being. 

You mighta gotten a preview of this powerful beast from PAX East - and now, it has materialized here on your native plane.  As I suggested on Tweeter, it's not a Dabe product if it doesn't have several garments' worth of additional design.  Just one of these sleeves is essentially a store's worth of looks.  Take a peek:

There has been a hairline crack in the facade of AI hucksters recently. WIll it last the weekend? I guess we'll see; fucking with ScarJo probably wasn't the strongest play.

On today's #Warhammer For Lunch, MORE Birds. MORE bugs! Well, the same amount of birds as last time, but way more bugs in this list. Bear witness as @theKiko's Raven Guard🐦‍⬛ squander their warp-wrought gifts against my Tyranid🪲 invasion fleet. Noon PST!

Twitch.tv/pennyarcade

(CW)TB

The sticker business I decided to start this year continues to grow. Gabe’s Sticker Shoppe has been updated today with my latest offerings including what is probably the coolest sticker sheet I’ve made!

I don't have any particular military or paramilitary fantasies, except perhaps to simulate very small versions of them with tiny dolls I have painted, but one thing I did like about playing Call of Duty's only canonical mode Kill Confirmed was how unified it was conceptually.  You could really buy it, and it was fast enough to sand down any sticky-outy edges.  Gabriel got back in recently, because it's always sorta the right time to get into it, and he says that capitalism has transformed the game into a lethal mall kiosk that sells Funko Pops.

Need For Speed Unbound got some cool new stuff yesterday with its free Volume 7 update. I spent a few hours playing and I love the new modes! 

After my trip through the history of Need for Speed games I decided to do something similar for the Forza Horizon series. I blew the dust off my Series X and logged in to see what Forza games I still had access to in my library. The earliest one in there was 3 which came out back in 2016, fully 4 years before the pandemic when I actually got seriously obsessed with driving games. The times before Covid seem like a million years ago and I had very little memory of Horizon 3. I honestly couldn't even remember if I played it very much. So I downloaded it and yeah…I played it a lot. 

It occasionally falls to me to play Gaming Historian, and as Gabriel is in another of his Retro Moods it was easy to recall the incredibly dark times associated with the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. Living room garottings were commonplace - but our lust for buttons and various bars and XP was so raw, so stokéd, that we just piled them to the side. Oh, eventually MadCatz would offer succor to The Ruined - but that trailing z always made them suspect. It wasn't until the majestic WaveBird lit upon the scene that the future truly began.

I apologize for the delay, but the May Sticker pack for Club PA members will hit the store on May 23rd. Things have just been crazy at the PA offices with multiple weddings and a new software rollout. The good news is that in addition to the Club PA sticker pack, some new professionally printed designs will also hit the sticker shop on the 23rd that anyone will be able to grab. These will be my Acquisitions Inc full sheet and my Est.1998 PA design. So check out Gabe’s Sticker shop next Thursday for all the new goodies!

-Gabe out

We had roused a novel demographic with a recent strip - namely, Mormons who also worship Elon Musk. I hadn't been previously aware of this tendency. Spokane, or at least the places I've lived in Spokane, were full of unfailingly nice Mormons who were having the same trouble navigating religion and adolescence I was, except they seemed to be doing better at it. It's possible that I learned too late that the much-referenced "bite" in Barq's - Barq's Rooted Beers - was caffeine. I was already vibrating at a dangerous frequency, just being fifteen. It probably wasn't helping.