Raising the Roof

Having been bold enough to buck the trend of community mandated hatred, now we have to enact the odious task of reeling all that goodwill back in. Well, not really. Grub has merely determined that he doesn't need something like Highguard in his life, though he has certainly enjoyed the game in its many primordial configurations. I think it looks very cool, but I'm intimidated as fuck to go in there as thirty-three percent of a three person team, brow damp, logging into sweaty hyphen lobbies dot com.

Played some Highguard

Reading the strip reminded me I needed to use the credentials I had been given in order to enter the consensual hallucination of the Krahulik Hytale Server. The comparisons to Minecraft are very frequent, but Minecraft came out in 2009. In truth, the most Minecraft thing about it is that they did what Notch did: own every cent the game produces per sale by having you buy directly from them. Anyway, it's obviously a clone of Infiniminer. Kids these days!

Snorks, like many of our most treasured institutions, are real but not in any way that matters. Such are the wages of decrepitude and the fundamentally human centipede of cultural grist.

Mark has covered a lot of it, he and I had discussed it at length, and so will probably go over a lot of the same ground. But did he have any Aliens references? No. Would such a reference even be welcome in a Star Trek: Starfleet Academy context? I guess we'll find out!

I have watched only the first episode of the new Starfleet Academy show and as the comic suggests, I like the hook, the characters and the actors. What I don’t like is pretty much every word of dialog written for them to say. When the incredible Paul Giamatti launched into a wild speech comparing time to an origami chicken I nearly shut the show off. I finished the episode though and while I intend to continue watching for at least a few more episodes I have to say I am dissapointed by the desicion to use so much modern language and current idioms.

I have way, way more than this done, but it seemed like a super funny situation and who knows; I'd love to see him go for it. Let's see him put his best foot forward on such a rich narrativo. I would definitely like to read a couple strips about that, maybe on some Cave of Tits type action, but then I would have to write it. Inconvenient!

I shared some stuff over on BlueSky that I thought readers here might also enjoy. I don't blame anyone for not installing or monitoring a new social media site. So no need to go anywhere, just sit back and relax as I bring the social media to you!

I am utterly dominated by Road to Empress. Absolutely, one hundred percent its servant. The fact that it's $8.49 is completely nuts. I got that much value out of it a long time ago. Plus, when I'm Empress, eight fifty won't mean shit.  Eight fifties will fall at once, all around me, like the golden leaves of the Maidenhair Tree.

I started being fed a ton of ads for Greenland 2: Migration, which sounds like it would be a special presentation by Nat Geo, but I hadn't seen the first one and also I didn't know there had been a first one. It seems like that would be the end of this story; there's lots of things I don't know, and this was just one more. But then Gabe was talking about how excited his family was to go and see the movie last weekend. In his house, Greenland is apparently a frequently returned-to comfort watch! Which is maybe, you know, a little odd.

The presumption I used to have was that nostalgia was my elders' version of the drugs I was doing. For them, it was absolutely deleterious nonsense and they should be sheepish about it. Now that I am myself an Elder, I see that nostalgia was a crutch for these weaklings - the weaklings who fashioned brick by brick the hideous world we must endure. By comparison, my own nostalgia is carved from marble, a material thing, and represents the weight and precision of fact.

The most formative part of my life was spent in a kind of ahistorical interregnum. Many people were under the impression that history was over, and from where they were standing they could certainly make a case. I think it's sorta beyond debate that many things were better, but I am a gentleman. Let's tart it up linguistically, if that will help. Would it be better to say that this previous era was different, and that some of these phenomena could be said to have degraded since?

A dark harvest has come - one which our fully armed and operational Penny Arcade Store is prepared to manage.  Potent values.  Fuckin, y'know...  get ready: 

There was a boss that made him quit Metroid Prime 4, but he rallied later simply so the official record would not record him having been defeated by it. He ultimately found success, but it eroded what was left of his affection for the game. There's a lot of post-mortem content out there about the game's difficult birth, but the early part I played was cool and good! Maybe I just stop there.

I hope you mofos didn't have any expectations going into the final Absolute strip, because we're gonna subvert all that shit. Scripts? Flipped. You simply aren't ready - flat-footed, naive - unless you thought it was gonna be another silly dumb one. Those people are still locked in. The others, ravaged by our potent psychological content, are lost - they're careening around the place like Beyblades.

Okay, so, when we were writing this one - which we thought was surely the last of its ilk - we were texting about these "Goons" in the first panel and came up with a way to make it even more stupid. Dumber than ever! And it was already pretty Goddamn dumb.

Gabe's been buying comics through Comixology and reading them on his fancy pants color Kindle thing, and I started messing with it because now I want to catch up on shit, but he's essentially grabbing digital versions of trades and I am looking for a buffet. The Comixology subscription thing felt like a pain in the ass to use; I tried the trial and shut it down the next day. Because most of what I want to catch up on is DC shit I tried our their buffet and glutted myself on Absolutes, both Batman and Wonder Woman, and chewed up Woman of Tomorrow which was an absolute blast. Now I see why he wanted to draw all this crazy crap, and today's offering is the dark fruit of this obsession. Monday's will be also! And then I think he will go to his rest because he's going crazy on these and probably developed an RSI.