I wasn't sure it would, but Thursday is back again like clockwork and the Penny Arcade iRacing League is ready to race. Tonight we’re going to the USA International Speedway which is what I would call an “intimate” dirt oval. The action will be fast and dirty tonight so be there when the Pit Crew opens at 7:30PT!

Man, I already said I wasn't gonna fuck any kinda Goddamn map in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Not playing Valhalla enabled me to finish Lexcalibur II in record time, thirty poems I like even better than the first book, and I say this as someone who stands opposed to every syllable of my work thus far. I am its nemesis, and the work of each day is to destroy it with new work. But somehow these poems escaped!

I grabbed Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on Stadia when it dropped around 9PM my time on Monday. No download required so I was able to start playing immediately which was cool. It played great and I didn’t end up getting to bed until after 1 am. I have to admit it was Orlog that kept me from getting to bed at a reasonable time. It’s a deceptively simple little dice drafting mini game that you can play all around the world similar to Gwent. After spending another day with Valhalla I am absolutely loving the game and I would pay money for an Orlog app on my phone. 

I wouldn't say that either Gabriel or myself are active seekers of inconvenience.

The amount of love Michael clearly has for the guy asking the question in the third panel is incredible. It has caused me to love him too.

I’ve spent more time with Stadia and it continues to be really impressive. Since my last post a week ago, I got a Stadia controller and put just over sixteen hours into the Division 2. I also checked out a bunch of other games like Super Hot: Mind Control Delete, Orcs Must Die 3 and an early access game called Embr. Kara and I have been killing Orcs together and having a great time with all the traps and new characters. Embr has got its hooks in my son Noah and I. This is a co-op fire fighting game with ridiculous ragdoll physics and a goofy premise. You need to work together to battle the fire and save all the people trapped inside...and also you can rob them. It’s a great game that I had never even heard of but it was included with Stadia Pro. Super Hot Mind Control Delete is also great, it takes the gameplay of the normal game and delivers it in a new almost Roguelike way. 

If you dig further than the initial search, you'll find other information about people who have worn this suit - people who look much, much cooler than the image you're almost certain to find first. But that doesn't mean you won't find this image first, and then become physically and spiritually hollowed out as anyone would be to learning that the icon of dangerous, mysterious cool which defined your very conceptions is actually an accountant ("Technically speaking, a comptroller,") from Scranton, PA.

Thanks again to the powerful Trystan Falcone for handling the art duties on the last strip; the writing process was not without anguish for my friend Michael, whose neck had tired of providing neck duties day in and day out and had instead become a kind of high efficiency pain cylinder with unparalleled uptime and responsiveness.

Something happened to Gabriel's body yesterday, we don't know what, only that any maneuver of the head and neck resulted in gruesome agony. Luckily, we were rescued by Trystan Falcone on the art side so our exegesis on the short term memory of guards in Watch Dogs (et al.) could be delivered according to the ancient, now almost twenty-two year old schedule.

(At this point, continuing to demand that Cyberpunk get released this year is just dumb. I'd celebrate a delay if I thought it meant a material easing of the process for the people caught inside it, but the last delay certainly didn't and I don't think this one will either. When I was a new father, learning how to feed a child, I did so according to a clock that I'd set to make sure they were getting enough to eat. I was cautioned against this by the midwife, who taught me instead to be conscious of the child I was feeding instead. It seems clear now that they're feeding a clock.

The threshold of my mind, the point where thoughts are converted into shapes others can perceive, performs a number of helpful services. It's essentially a programmable gate. Right now, and I hadn't intended to write this before, it really wants me to make sure that's how you spell the word "perceive."

I was curious enough about Immortals: Fenyx Rising to investigate the demo they released on Stadia last week. Logging in with my google account was simple and within seconds of clicking on the game in a Chrome window, I was loading into the demo. The game itself is beautiful and the combat is cool but poorly mapped to a controller. I probably could have played more of it if not for the obnoxious tone of the entire experience. Playing Immortals: Fynx Rising is like watching a low budget CG animated kids film. It feels like a straight to video sequel to a children's movie I hated. 

Hades is real good. This is a fact in evidence, and I'd talk about it way more if I didn't consider a couple of the people who made it not even friends but, like… allies. I would spend more time praising them if I didn't know them, which is its own counterproductive dynamic. I'm actually in a position to know how much they give a shit about what they make, products which strike almost unerringly, and that's what keeps me from doing it. You could certainly argue that I've spent this paragraph doing the opposite of what I've just said, but I'd prefer it if you considered the whole thing couched in a kind of ironic performance. It can only help my case that everything I've said is absolutely true.

I guess I sorta figured they'd haul a bunch of these fucking warlocks onto Zoom and yell at them for a while, and that was gonna be it. It wasn't. And then, when we started talking about writing a strip about it, we laughed ourselves hoarse because it turns out our entire workflow winds through Google's intestinal tract.

And their names are, respectively, Gary Whitta and Will Smith.  These greasy, inhuman leavings only materialize when, as now, the veil between this world and the next grows thin - and only in places where a great wrong has been done.  In the ongoing mythology of the tournament, the "great wrong" is when they beat us really badly all those other times and I got sad.  Join us on streem at 4pm PDT when we will set these events right and exile them into the Shadowdeep once and for all.