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.

I’d be ashamed to tell you how much Enlisted I’ve played since discovering it last weekend. I feel bad sometimes recommending a free to play game but sometimes the gameplay is solid and that’s the case here. Enlisted is a WWII shooter that features large scale battles with infantry, armor and aircraft. It’s got classes like engineers that can construct all sorts of handy defenses and radio men who can call in artillery strikes. These classes are doled out slowly via a battle pass with each faction having their own unique units and progress. This is all cool and executed well here but for me the really interesting thing about Enlisted is how their squads work.

There is no end to his wickedness and perfidy, and not merely as regards the cream his notoriety has enabled him to skim. At the last PAX Unplugged, I bought a bunch of VAST stuff from Leder Games, with the money that I earned from working. I had it shipped to the office because, if you have ever been to PAX Unplugged, you know it is very easy to purchase games and I had already done so to the maximum limit - filling even the extra bag I had brought, and then one additional bag I bought at the show to carry the other things I bought. It's a strange realm where, via some process cloaked from the eye of noble science, one game may become three.

Have you heard about Dungeon Encounters? It's possible you saw it when it popped up briefly in a Nintendo stream, but there wasn't a lot of info. Or, it appeared that there wasn't a lot of info. They actually told us - more or less - everything we needed to know.

When Gabriel gets into something, every molecule of his being is bent toward it. So, if he's curious about World War, he's reading books and watching documentaries and playing games also. Gabriel ended up taking a detour out of Battlefield V over to Enlisted, a freemium excursion in a similar vein, with a few novel twists.

When I was a kid we used to get the Sears catalog delivered to our house. This was a huge book of stuff you could buy from Sears including clothes, tools, appliances and Toys. Oh God, the toys. I used to spend hours drooling over Micro Machines, G.I. Joe figures and Ninja Turtles. There’s not really a Sears anymore but we happened to get an Amazon catalog in the mail a few weeks ago. While going through it with my 11yo son Noah we saw an ad for something called Snap Ships.

Because we were given the opportunity to build a machine using all the ASUS x GUNDAM stuff for a sponsored stream, among other things it means that Gabriel actually has something I would call a computer.

Somebody claiming they aren't going to the thing I specifically disinvited them from isn't some kinda savvy rhetorical judo.

Tonight the Penny Arcade iRacing league is headed to USA International (the dirt oval) and we'll be racing the dirt street stocks. Join us in the pit crew at 7:30 PST over on Twitch for the chaotic opening to season 8! Oh and if you aren't familiar with the PA league check out this awesome hype video with footage from last season!

The story in the strip is mostly exact; I did invent a sedative when in truth regular, human sedatives were sufficient. Even if they did inspire some amateur Krav Maga.

I’m getting back to the Gunpla streams today at 1:30PT over on the Twitch. Thanks to the folks at ROG North America this will be a sponsored stream with some cool giveaways. Check out these incredible custom Zaku head keycaps from the people responsible for the Asus x Gundam collaboration. and I’ll be giving away two of them during each of my upcoming streams! 

They are apparently, well… not rebooting Willy Wonka, but now that Warner Bros. has secured the rights they're engaging in some light Issue Zero/Origin story type embroidery just around the edge.

These have been weird times for Twitch. Obviously the hack is the more recent issue, laying the very spine of the operation bare, and their ongoing issues with moderation - but this week's strips were written in advance so that Gabriel's tender craw could heal, and we were unable to pierce the veil of time and peer into the future. Although, I should see what pills they gave him. One of those might do the trick.