Happy New Year nerds! After taking a break for December I will be getting back to doing monthly commissions. I plan on opening up four slots on my Atristree page for January this coming Friday morning. Between PAX Unplugged and the holidays I just didn’t feel like I had time for commissions in December.  I really enjoy doing them though and I’m excited to get back to it this month. If you grab one of the four slots on Friday I’ll work with you to draw whatever character you like be it from comics,games, movies or something from D&D or any other RPG. I’ve drawn family pets, original characters, Marvel heroes and even redrew a classic Penny Arcade strip at someone's request. You’ll get the final piece around the end of the month including high res files suitable for printing. So if you’d like to get a custom piece from me, keep an eye on the site Friday morning or just watch my Atristree page for the slots to open up on the 3rd. Thanks!

-Gabe Out

It's not a hundred percent clear what ills Gabriel is looking to secure, or at least tamp down, but we do have to respect that he's willing to invest in unorthodox techniques to manage them. We are all subject to pique, maladies of the body and mind, terrors of all stripes. To find a panacea for that which Scourges Man is a noble effort - a boon to the finder, but a treasury to our extended human family as well. I wish him every success.

Marvel Rivals has taken over fully now as the Snack Game. For a while I was playing it exclusively with other people, it was a Hang Out Game, but Quick Matches just don't take very long and they can fit in anywhere. It's also an opportunity for others, our erstwhile allies, to learn remedial hero shooter skills at our expense!

James Gunn has made lots of movies that I like, and he even made a teevee show called Peacemaker that I like, and part of the reason I like it when he gets his filthy mitts all over this comic stuff is that he understands that comics are kind of dumb. If the hairs on your neck are standing up, let me gently pat them back down. I don't mean that they're not worthwhile. I mean that people get bit by spiders and get spider powers. Because anything can happen, some of the things that do happen are silly. But that flexibility means that anything can happen. He is somebody who will take swings.  He made Rocket Raccoon work! And now I gotta deal with that shit every day in Rivals.

Young women today don't have to choose, as their foremothers did. They don't have to be pigeonholed into the staid and static roles they've always had to select from, either candle maker or Hive Matriarch. They can be both. I think. I don't really know, I guess. Isn't a hive basically just a big candle you never light? That seems reasonable to me.

Far be it from me to shame and goad you for how you invest your time, even if I do that explicitly, over and over, in today's incomparable strip. You only have so much time crawling the rough skin of the Earth - if you want to invest that time contemplating the human bottom, you do you. Broadly speaking, it has been a site of continued and devoted interest. G'on get it.

A combination of a very strong army choice, great rules, and a warrior's spirit has continued to see Gabriel's youngest terrorize the game table at home - sowing discord in the family unit. Not really! Gabriel is certainly more competitive than me, but being defeated by your child at something still feels like winning to a somewhat integrated person. That said, I would never undertake the actions seen here in a million years. For one, it would be like gettin' the whippin' switch. For two, that ain't my kid. That would be like getting beat by a literal fucking baby.

The squad is essentially splitting time between Rainbow Six and Marvel Rivals now, and because they do something almost completely different you can "hold space" for them, as they say. If Marvels was a bit more constrained, or if R6 were a little less… whatever it is, maybe they would start bleeding into each other. In a round of Rainbow, for example, we probably won't be erased from reality by Scarlet Witch's "Reality Erasure" ult. You know? It helps you compartmentalize. If you're at the store, and you hear the bark for this ultimate? Don't shop at that store anymore.

It is no longer safe.

I'm not here to hold forth on the ethics around being high on goofballs. There are those who seek refuge in the goofball, and find comfort there. Or, maybe you are coming out onto the stage at a videogame awards thing and you goofed three or four balls right before you got out - their spent husks tossed hither and yon. The VGAs are a little more lo-fi than the sorts of things he typically goes to, and that might provide some license. It's also possible he's just a huge fan of Critical Role or something but also wanted a little carcinization, as a treat.

Those of you who grew up with The Bible will recognize instantly the opportunity Marvel Rivals grants the player - the opportunity to meditate on mortality itself while spending time inside of a fish. I didn't understand before that I craved this state, a fishy state, where the cares of the world disappear beyond a wall of cool meat.

Coming back to Seattle from Philadelphia, you have a couple options when travelling by sky-bullet. One of them has you leaving at 6:20 in the evening, and the other - the one less travelled by - leaves in the crisp light of a new star, at the very moment the world was born. That is to say, 7:14am, which necessitates waking up at a ghastly juncture prior to causality itself. I was originally configured for the more humane option, but descended into madness and swapped. Then the machine in the security line detected some kind of pantal anomaly and we all laughed our asses off for a while.

I am home recovering from an incredible PAX Unplugged. I love the show but I always need a few days afterwards to hibernate and recharge my batteries. This Unplugged was especially cool because it was just me and my youngest son Noah. He’s 14 now and as a Dad it was just an incredible opportunity to get to spend the entire weekend with him. We spent time roaming the massive expo floor, watching folks play games in the freeplay area and trading pins at the community events every day. I also took great pleasure in introducing him to the magic that is Reading Terminal and its culinary delights. 

I am a sucker for demos at PAX; I'm also too polite to extract myself after a certain point, even if the theme or mechanics don't particularly entice. Oh! And try not to be disgusted overmuch by the greasy and wicked levitator floating in Panel 2. This vile beast, the Cheesesteak Fairy, earned more than ten gees for Child's Play if you can believe it. The ritual involves holding the mascot hostage until the audience ponies up, and thus far this mercenary tendency has served the teens very well.

I know there are those of you who want to rock the purple, and we are here to oblige you - check out the range, up for a limited time!

(CW)TB out.

If you are a dork of a specific flavor, a subset of a subset, you might be watching a pretend advent calendar on the Warhammer Community site. Because wargames exist at the nexus of tiny plastic freaks and walls of text - with affection for either marking one as somewhat outside the bounds of society - adding a little bit more text can change everything about how these poles interact. Well, they're adding all kinds of text over there - Thousand Sons got some love today, my evil bugs got some love the day before, and a couple days ago Noah - who doesn't need any fucking help at all - got some new toys as well. He doesn't know, because he can't be allowed to know. It's for the best.

After those first Marvel Rivals streams, where our celestial betters were allowed to frolic and play amongst the stars, I felt sorta confident not engaging with it. Every hero I saw in this hero shooter seemed to be a kind of gumbo made from the rinds and tailings of the Overwatch characters they'd mined out. I saw them pushing the kind of cart I was already sick of pushing when I was pushing carts before I quit Overwatch.

And then they showed Squirrel Girl.