Today marks the 16 year anniversary of the very first Lookouts  comic strip. Created during the original “Pitch Week” in which we present to you the reader three new comic ideas presented as a single page pitch. This particular week saw us pitch the ideas for Lookouts, Automata and Jim Darkmagic. Lookouts won the voting but we ended up making a bunch more Automata as well.

The reek - the stench - of dreaded continuity can be whiffed from nearly a mile away, like a distended whale carcass reaching critical mass. It took more than twenty years, but finally conditions in the retail space aligned with an ancient character's… well, let's not say predilections, They are now more in line with his lived experience.

I had put up a preview of the first panel, and Best Buy stalwarts swooped in from their blue and gold aerie to let me know that Best Buy doesn't have jungle plants growing inside - nor does it have a gouge taken out of the roof, where warm Summer rains might dance and drip down the gnawed-out scaffolds and steel bones of the retail pit. I don't think I've stepped foot in one for coming up on a decade, and it had been a site of last resort for a while - the third or fourth choice. Choices one through three are all websites. The last time I was there I think it was literally to buy the original Switch.

As part of a demo for the newest version of the Unreal Engine, CD Projekt RED showed off some Witcher 4 shit that is, just… I mean, look at it.

I posted a few photos from my huge binder of original Penny Arcade art over on my Bluesky account and it turned into a fun thread where I ended up redrawing some of that old artwork in my current style. For those of you consuming media of the social variety I’ll post it here:

Gabe doesn't even watch trailers, so some attempt to lure him with grainy cell phone shots ain't gon' work. I watch trailers all the time just to find something I missed! We are up to our asses in information, and I usually feel like I'm seeing the parts of it that I need to see, but then I find out there's some kind of Scottish samurai movie or some shit. I feel very strongly that they have enough psychometric data on me to have shown me this one, but I had to dig around in the dirt for it like a marmot.

Occasionally at the Child's Play Charity Dinner & Auction Mork will put a custom strip on the block. Just as frequently, the request will get lost for a very long time, only to sheepishly surface much later. Thanks so much to this mysterious donor man, who had a couple suggestions and a heroic self insert as his wish. We are only too happy to oblige! Child's Play's mission continues apace, after an explosive PAX East and the placement of our very first Game Specialist in Scotland. It's all made possible by your donations, and we're inspired by your faith.

There was always a lot of "boy stuff" I was never particularly good at, or interested in - and there's an important nexus between those two concepts. Also, like… my dad woke up at three in the morning to go fishing, according to some Naiad Lore whose provenance was never fully explained to me. Also, you had to be quiet in a boat for about a thousand years. Reader, let me tell you: it was a task at which I did not excel. Gabriel was a disappointment also but time heals all wounds.

I’ve decided to take a brief break from playing Fantasy Life i to write about Fantasy Life i. I’ve just passed the 40 hour mark and I feel like I have some wisdom I can share with those of you just getting started in your Fantasy Life adventure. 

The weekend after the Google I/O presentation has been dizzying. Most of the time when they drop shit like this it's a bunch of tech demos - systems in search of a use case, let alone an end product. Naw. We're fucked. They have put a stick in their own spokes so many times on the way to this moment, and have now arrived at the point where they can just do a kickflip on the grave of the worker. I wonder if they just asked their Devil Engine, in the end. I suspect the version they have is perhaps less circumspect than the ones we are allowed to play with.

I might actually have to grab Fantasy Life i now - after launch, they've pretty significantly changed how multiplayer functions, which in this case means it now has some of the things we would consider "multiplayer functions." And only a couple days after launch! They just announced free DLC to celebrate, shit must be going well over there.

Level-5 is a legendary outfit that just drops bar after bar and has for a quarter century. My initial plan was to be, like, "Here are the games they have made which ended up being super meaningful to me," but when I looked at the list there were way too many - but Ni no Kuni and Professor Layton oughta be a decent start.

You can now kick it with Darth Vader in Fortnite, which filled the weekend with bizarre audiovisual snacks, but nothing like what we saw at the beginning; the creature has no doubt been lobotomized several times since then.

I think Doom: The Dark Ages is really, really good. I also think there's no reason to review it in the classic sense. This is not to denigrate it or to say that it possesses undetectable levels of virtue, so any attempt to access it isn't required. No! I say thee nay. It's like Kellog's trying to seek a Michelin star for a Pringle. It has plain, universal virtues that don't require any fine equipment to detect. We don't gotta plug anything in.

Whether something is a review or review bombing is purely rhetorical; the color of the dress is based on a bunch of stuff you believed before the thing in question ever happened. It's essentially a kind of intellectual pose, an inoculation against new information, the implementation of a kind of mental hygiene. At some level I think that dogmas exist to control the biological costs of cognition, but we don't have to trek all the way out there. It's not any more complex than this: people we don't like will sometimes be correct. Because we live in a world largely made of information now, we can curate ourselves utterly out of any functional mode of self-correction. It hasn't made us any smarter, and when we become aware of just how thoroughly we have invested ourselves in illusion it falls on you like a guillotine.

My mind can do a couple neat tricks; this site is a kind of display case for the one or two novel maneuvers I got up top. One thing it definitely cannot do is know whether I'm going to be hungry or not hungry for a specific food at a particular time in the future. I can turn a blank sheet of paper into a place you can journey to but if a feat of imagination involves theoretical fruit and cheese it's simply beyond my ability to calculate.