The best, most entertaining, more productive way for Gabriel and I to "play" a game together is for me to just sit next to him on the couch. That's more or less the ethos of the site anyway, it's represented by an incalculable (that is to say, deeply and profoundly calculable) number of strips where we do just that. I have a lot of valuable opinions on when he should jump and he shouldn't be deprived of that. A lot of it depends on the game. I feel like this is basically how it would go.

(This is the last day I'm pushing this - consider supporting the vast network of people who make a living connected to events.  There are a lot of them.)

I don't actually consider it a big deal if you change your difficulty, though the outcome in this case is legitimately funny. I've done it a couple times myself, but I have to be pretty mad at a game in order to do it. If Metroid Dread had given me the option to, I might have given in on one or two of those encounters, but in that case I'm glad it didn't. Outside of sequence breaks, I like that anyone who beat that game has a shared experience. I feel the same way about Soulsbourne games. It makes them a little less lonely.

Techno-feudalism - catch the wave! I can't even maintain this posture as a joke. Obviously, happy to license or even sell IP to somebody who we think could do more with some of our settings and stories, but probably not the whole thing.

Well, so, it sounds like Pokemon Legends: Arceus is both a cool, new direction for Pocket Monsters and the environments are… you know, they're environments. Right? That ain't nothin'!

Something I've always held as an article of faith is that life is not a purely local phenomenon. Its origins in my mind are strange, but the fundamentals have been retained: the church I went to as a young person told me that telescopes had recently identified the Gates of Heaven approaching the Earth.

2020 has progressed unabated. The treacherous Gary Whitta - merely this era's wet vessel for the perfidious and eternal sorcerer Gar'Whita - has unleashed his naughty Wordle clone, Lewdle, where morally wrong answers are always right. Will this lead to an age of license and perversity in the young? Undoubtedly, yes. This was almost certainly its purpose. Such are his workings that they may take centuries to come to fruition - his was the bony hand behind "Fruit By The Foot," too long the fuel for rough teen behavior, a crimson snack that is somehow also, improbably, a whip. It is the very icon of his wickedness.

I still haven't had a chance to get into this fuckin' Valheim server - maybe I'll do it today. It will definitely require that I scroll up my text history with Gabe until it reaches the cached portion. That's the kind of sacrifice I'm willing to make, and I think it's an indication of my vigor and resolve.

I'd actually decided not to read this Joss Whedon article; I'm not super interested in a piece that layers bullshit retcons of his behavior with flaky pastry and tender rabbit. I'm not in the market for some kind of artisinal rehabilitation. But… it's not that. It's something that is, in fact, truly revelatory. It's a confession, lurid and ornate; it's the last ten minutes of a procedural where the villain can't help himself anymore. He has to make absolutely certain that you know just how smart he is.

Sometimes on the Internet sometimes "thing happens" and all you can see are the ripples out, not the inciting event. Microsoft's move to purchase Activision Blizzard was in that category. There were a lot of one and two word tweets; I couldn't help but get in on it myself. The headlines all seem to say slightly different things - Microsoft bought them, they intend to buy them, those are pretty different. It's possible that those who say it's already done are simply saying the FTC isn't even gonna look at it. That's a charitable interpretation.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus hits on the 28th, which means it's time to ritually cleanse our decrepit equipment and prepare ourselves mentally, physically, and spiritually. It's such a whacked out interpretation of the series I genuinely wonder how people are gonna take it. On the one hand, it's hard to imagine a lightning mouse as controversial. On the other, people have played these games their whole life and the developer appears to have made Breath of the Wild. I'm just saying, there's sides to this thing.

This Boba Fett show can't figure its shit out. First episode, show hadn't started yet. Second episode, okay, now I sorta get it and I like it even if the end was kinda abrupt. I feel like if you end the show during a flashback it's a little disorienting, but whatever. This third episode was like the first two put together - really cool stuff, some nostalgia, commingled with truly bizarre decisions I'm still trying to puzzle out.

I was reading about the TV Meta, where millionaires watch television shows on stream and then get banned, and it sounded like a lifestyle I wanted to be a part of - so I consulted with an artist friend of mine about what it would take to get that shit poppin' in our neck of the woods. It's not impossible, but it's also not super possible either. We could do it, but he would have to draw twenty-four hours a day for over a year. By that time, hopefully the meta will switch to artists livestreaming themselves killing their writers because we will be well positioned to take advantage of it.

It's absolutely true that there is still an Xbox 360 with a Kinect hooked up in the living room. How else do you expect me to watch my Two Towers Director's Cut on DVD? Hang on, I gotta change the disc.

The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett was fine, but - like The Mandalorian - the first two episodes combine into the Actual Thing and now I'm in. This is pretty fun. It also seems like the people making it think Star Wars is kind of cool and don't feel ashamed of that, but they aren't so enthralled by it that they won't explore the margins of it and contribute. Dream job shit.

We had hit a point with the first versions of Valheim where we'd done a bunch of cool stuff, but monsters were always pecking at it because it was live 24/7 and this was before we had Wards. There's sort of an upper bound on how many times you want to come back to a pile of crafting materials instead of a house.