December 19, 2025
Lord only knows what could be going on here! The idea that we might want to leverage dreaded continuity to paper over some personal deficiencies - such as the universal human need for rest - gave way as it typically does into something we really wanted to do and it just took more than one strip to do it. It might take more than three strips to do it! Or just three. I think we'll probably come back to it, for cool reasons you will like.
All I knew about The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship was that it was basically impossible to buy - even for ready money. It wasn't clear to me at the time that it was Pandemic: Middle Earth, because if it had been, that's a beg, borrow, or steal scenario. Imagine having that shit over the break! That's what Mork was imagining, no doubt. And he will continue to.
I had seen this dude before, because he's a megafauna in a very specific context, and I never saw a rabbit hole I didn't want to inhabit for a while. But Morak had mentioned that whenever they turned the camera back on this guy, he was holding some crazy, borderline imaginary geometry to his lips and blowing through it. It's not something you have to imagine - you can literally see it here:
With his investment in OpenAI, Bob Iger has signaled that he at least is no longer interested in Disney’s legacy of incredible art and artists. As a Disney fan this is sad and honestly hard to believe. It’s like watching someone set their own house on fire. There are still people making Disney stuff that do care though and I think it’s important to recognize them. For example, Shane Hartley is the creative director for the Disney TCG Lorcana and he just made a very strong anti AI art statement over on his Instagram essentially saying he will never allow it in their game and praising the work of their talented artists. I would love to see something similar from other big card games.
I was listening to a Satanic cultist talk about how people don't like AI ads once they find out that they're AI ads. His response wasn't to not make AI ads; that would be too straightforward a path. No, what he suggested was to make AI ads in an animated or cartoonish style so that the artifacts of their dark labor - the human beings they falsified - were more difficult to perceive. I've sat here watching this blinking cursor for a few moments now, replacing the filament in my mind, trying to figure out what kind of language I should be extruding next, how to respond to that in a way that won't land me in jail. I can't do it.
I had a few people come up to me at PAX Unplugged last month and ask for more behind the scenes videos of the comic making process. I know I personally enjoy this sort of content from other artists but I rarely think about doing it myself. Well I remembered yesterday or at least I remembered after doing the rough sketch. You can watch the full video below!
God dammit! We only wrote the strip yesterday, and now wicked men have revealed all. Look what Wario64 has posted!
Mp1st report: New Divinity Trademark Uncovered as New Icon Matches Statue https://t.co/z6D8dFtjuH pic.twitter.com/KQltlluXvs
— Wario64 (@Wario64) December 9, 2025
I wish I could muster authentic surprise, but it is Wario we're talking about: an individual whose inverted virtues (and occasional forays into ill-fated entrepreneurial schemes) place him against mankind and perhaps history itself as a base and prolific villain.
We usually write the strip on Discord, and so it came to pass that while we were doing so Discord wanted to remind me that I had been using Discord with their "Checkpoint," which is a kind of Wrapped. There are all these different wrappeds and they're wrappin' up all these crazy kinds of shit.
The Child’s Play dinner auction last Friday was an incredible night!. During the dinner we showed a new video all about the Game Tech positions Child’s Play has been funding all over the world. Trust me when I tell you that this video is an incredible way to start your week. Grab some tissues for the tears and check out the amazing video below!
One of the many things I am planning to do this weekend, and we'll see what percentage of these things get accomplished, but playing Metroid in the dark sounds real, real good. I'm up to my ass in some kind of discourse about it, there's a talky guy who is or isn't a big deal depending on who you talk to, or… it's ugly? It looks like a PS3 game? That's just what I read. When you become a connoisseur like me, a man of taste and culture installed in the hierarchy of elite sense-making institutions, you start fetishizing a nice HDR implementation over raw triangles. I can't expect you to understand, face down in that ditch, playing Fuck, Marry, Kill but the choice matrix consists of three different rats.
They kept making them even after I stopped watching them, and now they made even more, at such a late hour that some of the cast are ambulatory skeletons and the rest have AARP cards. I grew up in the "historical period" Stranger Things takes place in, so there's always a certain amount of stuff you just gotta put up with I guess. The things that bother me are - for the sixteen year old that lives here - pure retro candy. But, seriously though: I was under the impression that we all thought season three was kinda ahh.
I mean, I gotta make comics and stuff because it's a big part of my job. And Tim Sweeney and I probably wouldn't get along in real life; some people are literally too smart to talk to and I think he's probably one of them. I really, really want him to be wrong that AI will be involved in all future (game) production but I'm afraid he isn't.
Sometimes we swap who has the experience in real life for who has it in the strip, sometimes so one of us doesn't get in trouble with Kara, and sometimes because each of the strip's primary participants - the pieces Gabriel and I move around tactically in the comic - has access to different words and tones. Gabriel could deliver a similar sentiment to Wednesday's first panel, perhaps, but it got a strong assist from baroque language and a whiff of ancient mystery. In the case of today's offering, it's actually my neighbor - but Gabriel's exasperation made it more fun in our opinion.
I have a very weird memory, or… I mean shit, I don't know. Let me tell you how it works and you tell me if it's weird. My memories go back very far and include a full sensorium. When I was two years old I got out of our apartment and tried to cross the street in front of our house. I can be there anytime I want! I don't really want to, though. My earliest memories are strange because everyone is so big. My grudges are, as a result, legendary - the crime was always five seconds ago. So, I can get older, but I have all these save points where I have varying levels of experience. I hope it doesn't make me more vulnerable to nostalgia, but when do I ever get what I want?!?
This is just one last reminder that the 22nd annual Child’s Play auction and dinner is coming up next week on December 5th. Jerry and I will be your hosts for the evening and we hope you will join us to support the Child's Play mission of helping kids all over the world through the power of play. You can get your tickets right here!
-Gabe Out
20 years ago Harlan Ellison said I was "a superannuated teen-age golem with a slack jaw, a slow manner, a typical pointless surliness at a world unwilling or unable to accept him as Superlative, and on sum a twerp easy to dismiss" and I am still very proud of that.
Here's "The Story".
-Gabe Out
Part of being a core demo means being catered to by a variety of products and services - trinkets and baubles, lotions and potions, slakes for mortal lusts. Mork and I had a run-in with Candles For Men, back when someone recognized that men also have noses and thus might be addressable by olfactory weaponry. At the show, Gabriel was sold a candle not as a man - a state we match only the most rudimentary distinctions of - but as an adventurer, perhaps the only state to which we are less entitled to. Alas! No law may bind him; he is fifty to seventy percent beast.
