What are we supposed to make of Starbucks Odyssey, a metastasized version of their rewards program? Let's have Howard Something Something tell us directly:

"We believe this new digital Web3-enabled initiative will allow us to build on the current Starbucks Rewards engagement model with its powerful spend-to-earn Stars approach while also introducing new methods of emotionally engaging customers, expanding our digital third place community, and offering a broader set of rewards, including one-of-a-kind experiences that you can't get anywhere else, integrating our digital Starbucks Rewards ecosystem with Starbucks-branded digital collectibles as both a reward and a community building element."

Eugh. Now, he didn't say NFTs, because he's not dumb. But they're NFTs.

Kris "Krasp" Straub is back at the tiller again, for another peek into a dimension where Penny Arcade consists of two Tychos. No way in Hell is Mike letting me get away with a punchline like that. Ain't fuckin' happening.

I want to thank Local 58's own Kris Straub for taking over Art duties today. Gabe has been more careful than anyone I know, he's still retained many talismanic practices I have softened on, at least in my own neighborhood - but one of the ways your world is trash is that kids at school will bully you if you wear a mask until you take it off and get COVID. And then your dad takes care of you, and he gets it. At home! At fucking home. In the end, he got it at home. When I talked with him before it really took hold, he suggested the call had come from inside the house.

I can very clearly recall riding in the back of the station wagon with my sister, in the era where you could place your children in the equivalent of a deadly rock tumbler and everybody was basically fine with it. We had no particular allegiance to IP holders, and were flagrant in our abuses of their precious wealth. The Constructicons and The Ponies didn't necessarily have common cause in particular domain, seeing as they're almost completely orthogonal to each other on every axis, but they were united in their loathing for the treacherous drive to Spokane. Treacherous two ways: one, the winding, icy mountain pass. And two, once you get there, it's like… Spokane.

Ronia was born at PAX West in 2009. Well, she decided to be born, at any rate. I catalogued the proceedings in a post back in the day, but to sum up: the bed was incredibly wet.

Gabriel suggested an idea for a comic we had already done in the past, indeed in Earth's distant past - 2012, which our database informs me was a real year.

Maintaining even a single mechanism like this in your mind, functionally, with all its eddies and cheeky exceptions, isn't without a strange kind of labor. For years, when I had to fly all over the place, bringing a new rulebook on the plane and trying to build that exquisite clock within my skull has been my primary form of entertainment. I assemble it in my mind until nothing I read surprises me. This process typically knocks me completely out.

Initially scandalized slash incensed that he would have to play the roger roger robots in Star Wars; Legion to offer his son's Clone Troopers a period appropriate foe, Gabriel discovered that he could also field Darth Maul and various other underworld scum instead - averting disaster. Although he did invest himself for a time in a flight of fancy that I'm afraid I'll be forced to investigate in a strip. This is gonna be like his dog superhero thing all over again. This is what my bones are telling me.

In this particular case, it was leveled against Gabriel - but here, even here, he’s found some way to transmogrify it into some skulking attack.

He has started to dip his toes back into the game nights at Over The Brick for collectible card games, he did a draft or some shit, which to my mind is the most fun way to engage with those systems. Everybody’s starting from the same place, kinda. You aren’t gonna see some kind of flesh-eating deck you can only handle with gloves.

Mark Zuckerberg took a selfie in his VR thing that was not… aspirational, is how I would put it. His model looked like they couldn't figure out whether to rip off Avatars or Miis. There was a shitty version of the Eiffel Tower behind him or something; it was as appealing as the Phantom Zone. Picture this: you're hot off destroying online media with the Pivot to Video and the Jedi Blue advertising cartel you formed with Google. Now, it's time to dominate the future: and you do so by creating a digital version of the DashCon ball pit.

I only learned about the term Hyperfixation in the last year or so. Before that I just thought I was an interesting person. You know what I mean? Like I was a true renaissance man. I guess it’s just a mental disorder though.  Oh well. 

Because it was his first version, Gabir often recalls those golden days when everything 4th was in ascendance. Jim Darkmagic was born there, so it will always be a kind of home. We don't need to talk about how odd it can get at higher levels, or how slow the official software toolset got as the powers database became more plump, or the kind of analysis paralysis that could occur for players new and old. It was also rad in its own way, and the notion of a "power source" - like Martial, or Divine - lead to some really interesting new class concepts I still kinda miss.

The Penny Arcade iRacing league will be celebrating another milestone tonight. This will be our 100th Thursday night race! In order to celebrate I’ll be giving away a bunch of codes for iRacing throughout tonight’s stream!

I remember when Kiko and Greeb got super into Pokemon TCG, they were listening to podcasts and stuff, and because they played the game on a card table in my office I had a chance to watch their friendship stretch and become taut in real-time. The card game has incredible heft, actually, on multiple axes: toy collecting isn't something I honor essentially, but there are cards in this game worth hundreds of thousands, even a million dollars. But the game itself, even though it is largely concerned with tussles between colorful beasts, has a couple really unique dynamics that are not only really interesting they also keep it from being Just Magic Again, which is a genre dense with the ruins and gnawed bones of many Noble Attempts.

Having a tabletop game store open up just minutes from my house has been fun and expensive. I can’t run up to the grocery store for milk without having to walk past Over the Brick and its shelves of minis, cards, paints and games.