The Urdspine

You can now kick it with Darth Vader in Fortnite, which filled the weekend with bizarre audiovisual snacks, but nothing like what we saw at the beginning; the creature has no doubt been lobotomized several times since then.

I think Doom: The Dark Ages is really, really good. I also think there's no reason to review it in the classic sense. This is not to denigrate it or to say that it possesses undetectable levels of virtue, so any attempt to access it isn't required. No! I say thee nay. It's like Kellog's trying to seek a Michelin star for a Pringle. It has plain, universal virtues that don't require any fine equipment to detect. We don't gotta plug anything in.

Whether something is a review or review bombing is purely rhetorical; the color of the dress is based on a bunch of stuff you believed before the thing in question ever happened. It's essentially a kind of intellectual pose, an inoculation against new information, the implementation of a kind of mental hygiene. At some level I think that dogmas exist to control the biological costs of cognition, but we don't have to trek all the way out there. It's not any more complex than this: people we don't like will sometimes be correct. Because we live in a world largely made of information now, we can curate ourselves utterly out of any functional mode of self-correction. It hasn't made us any smarter, and when we become aware of just how thoroughly we have invested ourselves in illusion it falls on you like a guillotine.

My mind can do a couple neat tricks; this site is a kind of display case for the one or two novel maneuvers I got up top. One thing it definitely cannot do is know whether I'm going to be hungry or not hungry for a specific food at a particular time in the future. I can turn a blank sheet of paper into a place you can journey to but if a feat of imagination involves theoretical fruit and cheese it's simply beyond my ability to calculate.

For those of you not in the know, a streamer named Dr. Lupo - we played Amogus with him for charity! - admitted to cheating in a chess tournament. I don't think I would enter a tournament for a game I didn't know how to play except as comic relief or something. I would gladly get dumpstered live, but then, my work mostly involves making jokes at my own expense.

I spent the last couple of days working on getting my sim racing rig set up again and I took this opportunity to attempt a new VR solution. I was curious if I could get my PSVR2 headset working with iRacing on my PC. The TLDR is yes it can be done and it looks great! 

I'm heading down to PAX East now, maybe you are too, but I know a lot of people who make games there and I gotta ask them how in the fuck they're doing what they did in that GTA VI trailer. I didn't understand how they did the first one, and I'm even less able to get this one dialed in.

I finally got to what Gabe has been dying to talk to me about in Clair Obscur, and now I know why he wanted to talk to me about it so bad. That it still has serious things to reveal coming up on fifty hours is cool, but the things it goes into are gobsmacking. No part of the gob has remained unsmacked - it's barely recognizable as a gob at all.

I did another batch of Marvel Snap cards and at the end of this week during PAX East they will arrive in the game! Since they have already been revealed I figured it was okay to share the original art. So here’s a look at my five new Snap Variants:

If they had dripped those first three episodes of Andor Season 2 out, the community would be in crisis. I understand what they were trying to do, because some aspects of it get unfolded in the second three episode arc - which is excellent and is exactly what I want. But those first three feel mostly like setup, sawdust in the flour, because that's sorta what it is.

All of these things more or less happened when we were playing Sunderfolk and the amount I can get away with as honorary Uncle is profound. Profound!

When Gabriel told me that he hadn't skipped a single cutscene in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I sat bolt upright. Well, I slouched less - let's say that. But when he told me he was walking around and initiating dialogue with random NPCs, just to stretch it out like so many Caramellos, that's when I did the thing I said I had done initially. This is how I came to be ensorcelled by some of the Frenchest horseshit I've ever been exposed to in my life.

Over the last couple of days I’ve checked out two games that were not even on my radar a few weeks ago and I now love. I figured I’d pop in here and give you my quick impressions of Sunderfolk and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. 

Gabriel's family, stuffed as it is with gamers, boardgamers, and wargamers of all stripes, seems uniquely subject to what Sunderfolk is trying to do.

I was delighted to see Indiana Jones and The Great Circle hit Playstation for a few reasons - one, it should always have been a Playstation game. This was a weird one to hold back. Two, the time I've spent with Dabe playing it is some of the most fun I've had this year so far. It's just incredibly thoughtful and has an ongoing franchise play written all over it. Three, I suspected that the PS release might put it on Gabe's radar finally. Which it did! What did he think of it? Let's go to the tape.

Long ago, what YouTube tells me is Seven Years Ago, Gabe ran an episode of my old Acquisitions Incorporated: The "C" Team show. Called simply Jimterlude, because it was a Mike Krahulik DM Experience Tee Em, of course it involved an incredibly elaborate, fully functional board game called Wizard Kart. I want to emphasize that Wizard Kart is our wholly owned, original IP and any resemblance or even direct references to other games are either just some thing you made up or direct attacks on our sovereignty. In either case, they're deeply unwelcome!!!