23 years of Child's Play!

I mean, I'm a sucker for it too, and I came of age when that's just what teevee looked like. My youngest craves horror, horror of all kinds, but if she sees the tracking go off on a pretend VCR she recoils as though from a serpent.

There's nothing I love more than a wiggling rune, God damn. As soon as I know there's gonna be a rune I stand up a little straighter, maybe groom my eyebrows real quick. I'm always trying to work one into the strip and this time I managed to accomplish it in the most meta way possible. It's powerful stuff.

I ate some food court Chinese and now, by every observable metric, the food court Chinese is eating me. I was able to play a couple rounds of Blood on the Clocktower last night before I began to get a wobbly feeling I described as "nautical" and I have spent the last ten hours or so in a state similar to a furniture warehouse whose boss is out of town, i.e., "Everything Must Go."

My brand has long been "Atheist Jerk-off," but wtf I love Catholicism now.

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) October 2, 2026

After Wednesday's Wattersonian horseshit, we're back to what we do best: animal cruelty.

There was a period of time where they were just putting Star Wars on shit. Games Workshop used to do that too, with their license. There was some filth. But they've both figured out that - and I'll agree it's a little crazy - if you give the licenses to cool people who make good games it's a better play. In the same way that ex-Firaxis people proved that Star Wars XCOM could be much more than the sum of its parts, ex-Criterion people are making some kind of Goddamn roguelite racing game and it looks fucking sick.

He's still being dragged down into an incredibly deep hole with the new Fire Emblem, enough to wonder how some of the math could possibly math in this way. He sounds like me when I got heavily - heavily - into Dynasty Tactics, which I was horrified to learn is twenty-four years old. Fire Emblem is about type-matching and abilities, which is already drugs; Dynasty Tactics is largely about creating a favorable battlefield by positioning your units so that, like striking a match, you attack once and it triggers additional attacks from the rest of your army. I don't know that I've ever had to think that hard in a game since. They made a second one, but I didn't like it as well. That could be due to the fact that it wasn't as good, maybe, but who knows. It's also possible that the exertions of arranging and then triggering ten discrete units on a two-dimensional plane so that they all perform in a harmonious sequence is only something you can feel once.

Thanks for the Birthday wishes guys I appreciate it! Gabe’s Birthday being a worldwide phenomenon is one of my favorite running gags in the strip. 

Strips about "The Christmas In September" go back, yea, unto the site's very founding. This was during a time where "sites" were a thing, luckily we came to our right minds and converted the frontier into a series of corporate intranets. Dodged a bullet, there. But! There are several more strips in that vein, and there are two strips in particular that have the visual cues to help you understand the rich lore he has been embroidering the holiday with. I should tell you that he and I never once discussed a single stitch of this stuff. I'll just get a strip outta nowhere and he's got a fez and there's a fish for some reason.

One of the weirder things about algorithmic media is that I will receive apology videos from people I've never even heard of simply because it's media that has been engaged with beyond a certain threshold. It's a genre; they seem real sad. I thought Bungie's new video was going to be another entry in this Al-Qaeda Hostage genre, but at least I know what this one is about. Bungie's corporate leadership sold them up the river, made impossible promises, and then actual human beings had to try to spin that candy floss into real products, all while getting chopped up like a boosted Audi. A lot of people mourned Destiny, as they were essentially told to by the company itself. But now it's back! Kinda. Maybe?

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave has Mr. Gribbz by the shortest and curliest hairs he's got. You know it's fucked up when he feels compelled to make a whole post about something, as he abhors the written word. But when a game gets him to stop skipping cutscenes, a phenomenon whose rarity would allow me to count it on one hand, that's when you know you're dealing with some all-time shit. I don't think he's a casual-t, but he's way too invested in the story to miss something because of a bad roll.

Sometimes I bounce right off of a Fire Emblem game, and sometimes they get their hooks in me. On paper I should not be into Fortune’s Weave with all its social dynamics and heavy story bits but I somehow managed to play long enough to discover a gameplay loop that has me completely obsessed. 

God damn, Mork drew his ass off on this shit. I was just typing that he seemed to have a sparkle in his voice as I told him about World of Warcraft Forever, but he just called to write the strip and he was already installing it. Soooo…

Before, Gorbiriel lamented that he had to wait longer than reviewers to be disappointed. Now he has begun to lap at that darkwine, drawing from it a dark strength. Or… rage, at least. He plays games for the Art, in the way some do things for the 'gram. The art is basically killing him.

I think it’s possible that someone could have a good time with Wolverine. Personally I was bored after a few hours. Eventually I was skipping cut scenes to get to the game and then I realised I wished I could skip the game parts too. Personally I have found Onimusha to be much more entertaining. Both games are combat focused but Onimusha actually feels interesting and fresh whereas Wolverine feels like they are still just ripping off the combat from Arkham which was fun but was also almost 20 years ago. It was fine in Spider-Man where swinging around New York was actually the game but Wolverine feels like a massive downgrade to me. 

Let's go over a few things.

1. If OpenAI or Anthropic breaches another company's systems, even if no money changed hands, these are Federal and State crimes. Currently, these narratives are being deployed essentially as a mode of advertising to "pump those numbers." This is why I don't believe anything remotely like what they describe occurred. At all. In any way. They are, in plain terms, "lies." Lies in the context of an IPO are called Securities Fraud - now the SEC is involved. It's astonishing what we're being asked to believe. Listen to these pinchy-faced fucking weasels talk. You would only endure these transhuman idolaters if you thought there was an upside. For you.

2. When they say shit - and they do say shit - like "there's a greater than ten percent chance our product will kill all humans within the next decade," you black bag the leadership of these companies. Again - this is how you know it's a bag pump; an op. First it was like, "Yup, we're spinning up a Jobpocalypse." I guess that stopped moving the needle, huh? A machine that recreates the conditions for feudalism? Every one of its thoughts manufactured, in part or in whole, by the disenfranchised? There's no way to overstate the hideousness they proudly emit. Now it's like, yeah, our Demon Engine might kill your kids - the ones we didn't kill already I guess. It's not serious, I'm sorry. It's Doctor Doom shit. Except in this case, Doctor Doom isn't a techno-sorcerer with Diplomatic Immunity. It's a guy who works in an air-conditioned office whenever he isn't telecommuting or warping capital markets with every breath. Black Bag.

3. Let's say we do need National AI to do battle with the AI of foreign adversaries - sounds like a great anime. If it's as crucial as we're being told, if we stand on the precipice of some great invisible conflict - like the "spirit war" my Church used to rail about - none of it would look this way. They would seize these companies via Eminent Domain, just as they did in World War II. If they did the shit these people say they do, it's not like fucking Coca-Cola. If they can batter any system or kill the world or any of this shit they aren't normal companies and they wouldn't be treated with the deference they are. They're already a cartel, clearly, which gives the government even more potent tools. Fucking come on.

4. All the hokey, handwavey parts of Cyberpunk that you just accept - the origin story of the neofeudal, technocratic state - you always wonder what that looks like. How the interests converge, how they're allowed to converge. I can tell you.

It looks like this.

(CW)TB