I've just had too much to do leading up to the show to catch it, and when I rest I fall into the dark sleep of prophecy - but the Doctor Strange episode of What If? is something I need to make time for. At least, that's what I'm being told by Gabriel, except he told me in a weird way that doesn't map onto any known sayings. Please let me emphasize that this is something he really said. It was probably a slip of the tongue, but now it's out here and we need to contend with that.

The designers love making this stuff, and it's not hard to tell.  Just look at it! This year's Camp theme is a blast, and for the first time it's available both at the show proper and up on the Online Store starting Friday, September 3rd.  Here's the banners from the show:

I spent most of today thinking it was Thursday. I don't have a newspost on Thursdays! That's the important piece of information you should know. Not for any particular reason. Certainly don't look at what time the post went up. It was also the first day of school. And two days before PAX. Plus I had to go to the dentist! So, hey. How was your day?

Once the app became available in English I bit the bullet and ordered myself a Digimon Vital Bracelet. I posted a quick photo of it last week on Twitter and many of you were curious  about what exactly it was. Now that I’ve spent almost a week with it I feel comfortable telling you all about it. I’ll go into detail but basically it’s a fitness tracker that lets you raise and battle Digimon. The device itself is a lightweight bracelet and the Digimon come on separate little cards called DIMs. Each one is a unique digital monster that you evolve through a combination of moving your real world meat body and battles that take place in the watch or on the companion app. 

I can see a universe where something like an NFT is enduring and normal, provided the externalities of their proliferation and use can be tamped down. Most of their current incarnations seem incredibly dumb, or are so not-my-thing that I can't tell the difference. What I can't figure out is why, when NASCAR decided to get into racing NFTs, they went with horses instead of cars…? That's a wild fucking (conceptual) ride. That's Mr. Toad's wild fucking (conceptual) ride.

We really want Lexcalibur II out this year if we can swing it, so he's gonna be drawing shit like this today instead:

Once it became clear that the remastered Quake was Quake I already had in my own home, I reinstalled it straight away and jumped in - long enough to determine that these places are filed mentally as real places I have been.

The Penny Arcade league is back on the Daytona road course tonight in the Mazda MX-5! This week’s theme is "toys" so come for the racing and stay for the livery parade afterwards because I am actually participating today. We will also be giving away a couple of three month subscriptions to iRacing during tonight’s show so join the Pit Crew on Twitch tonight at 7:30 PT for a chance to win! 

Because our house is, for reasons unknown, the place where young women in the neighborhood gather I have ample opportunity to learn where their various interests intersect. Well, I guess the reasons aren't entirely unknown: we have gigabit fiber, robust sewing, crafting, and computing resources, and they aren't my kids so if they want to watch The Dragon Prince or whatever all day while they hatch schemes and draw OCs it's no skin off my substantial nose.

Gabriel has returned, whole but not unchanged by The Wilderness.

I'm willing to accept that you don't actually know you're inventing "the television" when you undertake a project. I don't mean inventing the device we call a television - you should probably know some of the basics there - I mean, the cultural apparatus television represents. So I'm sympathetic to the idea that Twitch existed at an unpredictable crossroads and then became a place where culture occurs at scale.

The Krahuliks had a great family vacation up in the mountains. We played a lot of Pokemon Go while hiking around in the woods and watched the Owl House while chilling back at the house.

Bidet Normalization continues apace. I know many who have fallen prey to these sorcerous fonts, and their promise of a truer clean, but there is no way to utilize these magicks and remain pure. Shrug emoji, I don't make the rules, etc.

Gabe is out this week; he is attempting to disappear, a fraught proposition even in the best of times. May God speed him on his journey. He did tell me our strip for Wednesday was going up today, so I gave it a name that made it weird. It'll make more sense on Wednesday. Plus, it gave me an opportunity to give Wednesday's strip a different name that was a PowerWash Simulator reference, but I guess it's just a reference to powerwashing in general, which is very hot right now on social media. That's sure to goose the numbers for Q3.

I had seen an article about how it was okay to be horny for the villain, and I don't disagree, plus the prevalence of horniness for villains is as close to a universal as you're gonna get. I think a lot of young people extracted some very novel content from Labyrinth, for example. Romance, particularly the indie romance space I discovered on Kindle when we were making a strip about a Hot Anteater Lycanthrope Man, exemplifies these desires in an almost hyperreal way. There are a dizzying number of increasingly refined categories these books fall into; for precision genre bifurcations, even electronica can't compare with shifter romance. Who gives a shit? It's not real.

I love the early days of a multiplayer game - before things are settled and optimized, in some cases before final decisions have even been made in the design. I sorta knew it was gonna get wild fast, I suggested as much on Monday, but the skill ceiling in Splitgate is… high. It's very high. A round of Splitgate makes me feel like my brain is being braided by hand, which is typically the feeling I get when I'm laying new psychological track. I'm not even sure all this is gonna stop me from playing! But it's definitely gonna stop me from winning.