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Stadii

I'm not sure I want a new gaming platform right now, one that isn't connected to anything I already own or any of the people that I know. At this point in the perpetual ebb and flow of centralization and decentralization, this is just what's happening: the real vigor is supposed to be elsewhere, and you're supposed to borrow it forever. I understand why it's a good business model, but it's so clearly a model in search of an audience that I'm content to just let their wet tentacle slap against the windowpane for a while.

Pre-PAX Pox

This, or something very close to it, really did happen. It's a brand that brings people together, forging a connection between them, even if they should be discussing the infection that is - even now - gnawing at the root of his lifespan.

Deer Diary

One of the the things I like about Games Workshop's 40k shit is that one of the fundamental tenets of the grim darkness of the far future is that nobody understands how anything works. Not really. This doesn't mean that they are ineffective, or that they constitute non-factors in the events that surround them. Quite the contrary; it's just that the range of expression available to human beings is very narrow. Society has essentially been distilled into a weapon. It describes a culture where all of its points are in one thing.

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Shirt(s)

Wow! Huge refresh on the AI shirts, with custom character art by Gabe, plus some real inside baseball at the end for the true connoisseur. I'll have you know I spelled that correctly the first time.
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The Deeper South

Gabe's "Brightgrave" campaign continues apace, revelations have been… revealed, and he literally had a point where something big happened and the Title came up. This is some pretty meta shit: it required describing, as an object inside the shared hallucination of the game world, a word materializing and then hanging in the air.

Lose Lose

Gabe is literally playing Gambit Prime as I type this, and despite what we might say in the strip he's over there tooling team after team. It can't help but activate an ill-timed sympathy response: he's like a wicked ghost, iterating a malevolent grudge throughout eternity.

Hell In Stereo

Gabriel went into incredible detail about today's strip already, so I don't think I'm one hundred percent required to. A smarter person would look at the double threat nature of a MIke Krahulik and say, "Huh. Maybe my utility here is precarious," but not me. Not me! Not having to do a post for a comic I didn't have to draw is the optimal scenair - "scenair" being the new truncation I've come up with for scenario. I wouldn't have had the time to make that great word if I'd been doing worky type horseshit.

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Career Day!

I was invited to participate in the career day at my son’s middle school last Wednesday. However when I arrived I quickly discovered that they had forgotten to put me on the list of presenters. Each of the adults who came had been given a room, and all the kids had a guide book that told them who was in each room and what their job was. I am never one to make a fuss and so when they told me they would find a room for me I just smiled and waited patiently. As it turns out they had a veterinarian not show up and her room was free. As a teacher was guiding me to the room it dawned on me that all the kids I was about to talk to were waiting to hear from a vet. I was assured that this would not matter very much but I did not find that to be the case.

Active Compounds

I'm not going with him to this one, but I certainly have in the past, and it's always a little weird to figure out how to tell students what they need to know in a way that a) they can understand and b) won't make their parents really, really mad about the weirdos their school inexplicably brought in.

Barrier To Re-entry

Anthem continues to unfurl its dark fronds, casting doubt on the fortunes of a once legendary house. Such houses generally fall either to dissipation or treachery. I don't know what it would be like to toil on something with the understanding that absolutely everything relied upon it. I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to spend years in the manufacture of my own mausoleum. Who could withstand it? What happens now?

Anthem

Anthem came out eleven days ago and so far I’ve managed to play about 8 hours of it. It’s honestly the game I most want to play right now and I try multiple times a day. Most of the time when I attempt to play I simply can’t log on. Sometimes it will act like it connected and start loading but it’s actually loading a screen that tells me I have lost my connection to the EA servers. Fun! When I do manage to get into the game, every load screen is a 50/50 chance I’ll get disconnected. If I survive the loading screens I’ve never managed to play the game for more than half an hour without a hard lock that makes me restart my entire computer. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled 5 times. I tried playing in French because someone said that fixed their connection issues. I turned graphics settings down and updated drivers for every device I own. No matter what I do Anthem still crashes, freezes, and shits itself every time I load it up. A quick glance at the games subreddit tells me I’m not alone either.

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Calibration

I like Devolver. I mean, yeah. They definitely have a thing. It might best be described as a "kink." I tried to find the particular phrasing I had used once before, but I think I might only have used it in my mind: Devolver often publishes the kinds of games your parents would hate.

Sea of Thieves

I’ve been playing a ton of Sea of Thieves lately with my family. The four of us have been playing off and on since launch but in the last month or so we’ve been playing nearly every day. It’s a great game but it’s also an incredible team building exercises for a family. When we first started I will admit we had some frustrating experiences. My boys are 14 and 8 and I love them very much but getting them to work together can be... challenging. Sea of Thieves really requires you to work as a team and that’s been a great lesson for my kids.

Root Issues

At lunch, while Kiko and I took turns attacking the banchan, we tried to get Gabriel to try Crackdown 3. I'd never been able to get Gabriel to try the other ones, but because Crackdown was free with Game Pass (here, "free" means "ten dollars a month") it seemed like we might finally have him cornered.