The Child’s Play Charity dinner auction has gone virtual again this year and that means you can pick up some tickets and bid on cool stuff from the comfort of your own home. The auction will be on December 2nd this year and I’ve got a sneak peek at some of the items you can get your hands on. 

At first, I thought Ridley Scott was laying the blame for his movie's failure at the door of milliners - hardworking folk whose craft is plied to the delight of the head and scalp. But no! No. It was instead placed on the brow of that oft maligned cadre, The Millennial, whose disinterest in the schemes of their boomer forebears is well known.

I was telling Mark about this new Riot fighting game, because a trailery thing just came out, and how I'd played its philosophical predecessor Rising Thunder at PAX fuckin'... years ago. I can see why that team would get bought, even just off that sliver, because I've thought about it consistently ever since then.

The idea that I delight in killing players is essentially a fiction, and the way you know that's it's not true is because - as suggested previously - a bunch of dead characters and their resentful, starving players aren't a receptive audience for my intricate statue puzzle, whose solution is contained within twelve lines of immaculate, technical verse.

I only knew about this because Gabriel's son, who is actually named Gabriel, was incensed enough to bring it to his attention. People watch this for the trailers, that is simply… a fact, but Gen Z is such a spicy cadre that it is hard not to be delighted by it. Servants of Nidhoggr, all.

At the very highest level, looking down, I think that the Halo Infinite Battle Pass has progressed thinking on this form of monetization in a way that suggests that they have, uh, parents on the team. Or, at the very least, that they have a philosophical bone to pick with the typical FOMO pump that a timed season creates. This is the part I like: you own the Battle Pass. It's like a TTRPG supplement or something, and it even occupies a space on a kind of shelf; the pass itself is something you own, and you can shelve it when a new one comes out if you're excited about that, but you can always come back to the other one, or swap to a third, whatever. This is what respect for my money and time looks like.

I'm just not in the market for Battlefield 2042. I would like very much to look at it, and to see the physical comedy that results when C5 is placed on an allied drone and flown into groups of enemies, but there are services now that can let me watch others do exactly that for free. The savings are incredible - for some. Some have not saved as much. Indeed, some have paid full price! We live in the long shadow cast by wicked men.

The last few Call of Duty games just haven't stuck with me. It's not like I haven't gotten a ridiculous amount of amusement out of the model Infinity Ward crafted - FPS perfection, coupled with an addictive RPG loop. Purely from a brain chemical perspective, these dynamics woven with Kill Confirmed gameplay constitute the gold standard for the genre. But I did it, already. I done did it.

Whenever we start scrolling for news right now, ever in search of grist, it's always some kind of NFT thing. I don't even remember what set Gabe off this time - there are many axes upon which to find this stuff distasteful, but generally for him the aesthetics of what is on offer is sufficient to inspire loathing.

If you spend a lot of time on social media or moving throughout the world eventually you will discover that there is a class of men - I've never once seen a distaff manifestation of it - who has an almost instinctive ability to identify and manipulate other men with distant, cruel, or useless fathers. Obviously, parenting is quite a lossy form of data transfer - but the only way to protect your children from these men is to ensure that they never need what these warlocks purport to offer. It's probably going to require that you become much, much better than you are.

I'm not, like… mad, it's a great comfort to me if something looks so dumb that it's going to save me the time of watching it. I've put Morbius in that category after the trailer. I was iffy before Jared Leto says he has "some form of bat radar," and that utterance sheared the entire face of it off. And look, I love to be wrong. If you aren't working on a nuclear warhead, it's probably fine to be wrong. I love to move things from the category of Oblivion back into Being; I lose absolutely nothing when I reconsider phenomena. If anything, I profit from it.

I was reading an article at Kotaku about how this "Mario Kart 'NFT' Idea" was "The Worst Thing" they "Had Ever Read." I'm leaving the obvious rejoinders on the ground; that's a good place for them generally. Suffice it to say, it's not the worst thing I've ever read. But that doesn't mean I actually like it.

It’s almost time for the 2021 Child’s Play dinner and auction. I know there are some who were hoping for a return to the in-person “Nerd Prom” but a poll of recent attendees showed that most of us just aren’t ready to leave the safety of our bunkers. With that in mind, this year's Child’s Play charity dinner auction has been moved to the virtumal realms similar to last year’s event. The nice thing about this is that we can all attend in our pajamas and stay cozy while we bid on unique collectibles from the world of games. 

I was in bed the other night watching Mark Zuckerberg get dressed in VR and make some kinda joke about something and I had to pause it. I just had to rest. I had to let my mind rest.

People started sharing weird emails they'd received from the villain of Far Cry 6 about what a disappointment the player is, and how they can do better than this, which I think is honestly a lot to ask. I think people are doing what they can on a number of fronts, and if they haven't leisured hard enough, I can think of about a million reasons why that might be the case. Maybe they couldn't get a bed in a hospital because the consolidation in the healthcare industry has hollowed out the supply of acute care beds so they had to die in their garage. I dunno! I'm just working within the available information.

So, there was a minute there where whenever Gabriel wasn't playing Enlisted he was reading Spearhead and vice versa. I started reading it also, it's sort of the Tanker accompaniment to Band of Brothers and it's frequently terrifying. I think I would be exceedingly bad at being a Tank Man. When my father was stationed in Germany, he managed to get a tank stuck on a stump and throw a track during peacetime in an otherwise empty forest, and I like to think I could approximate the same level of valor. Some fathers set a high bar! Mine did me a kindness.