The Metaverse isn't a thing companies can truly say aloud, where the marks can hear, for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is that it's more or less synonymous with putting good money after bad at a scale that an arboreal monkey brain, regardless of its revision number, can't truly understand. This story from last July suggests that attempts by Facebook to become Meta instead through the creation of a wholly-owned prison universe had already lost forty billion dollars. Some small part of that goes to the people I know who work there, and I authorize those particular expenditures, but the rest is a boondoggle. Anyway, you can still make a Metaverse and you can still basically sell NFTs as long as you don't call them that.

I’ve been spending a lot of time pouring over pictures of stickers and albums from the 80’s and it’s bringing back lots of good memories. I can still recall walking into a sticker shop at the height of the collecting craze and being blown away by what I saw. It was like a candy store for art and I was ensorcelled. They had stickers on sheets, on rolls, in packs of cards, holographic, puffy, scratch and sniff, googly eyes, lenticular, I can still smell the shop when I think about it.

As our Design Director Kiko Villasenor and I are the only two people to have attended every PAX, and as Kiko doesn't especially delight in public speaking, it falls to me to be The Chronicler.  We'll have other ways for you to travel through all that history this year, I think you'll be impressed, but there are a couple real things that are worth setting down.

We've been saying that Game Pass was the platform for a really, really long time. As soon as I heard about a rumored HDMI stick with Game Pass it hermetically sealed the deal. Both of my consoles are broken, and I don't use them enough to go through the process of repair - the amount of value I get from Game Pass, and I wouldn't even say it's the main place that service lives, is profound. The end of ZIRP means the end of certain forms of corporate psychosis - big companies actually have to make money, and in the same way that Minecraft lives everywhere it doesn't make sense to own some of the things Microsoft owns now and just… hoard them. But this has now officially gotten weirder than I expected, and I do wonder exactly how much history we'll be expected to live through in this bizarre and pregnant now.

Gab likes Granblue Fantasy Relink so goddamn much that after playing it for fifteen or something hours on PS5, he ended up reinstalling to play with Kara on PC. He's now way past where he was on a new save and hasn't slowed down in any way. It has "cross platform play," but only on PS4 and PS5, which… I guess I don't consider that cross platform? It could be my advanced age, and the attendant ossification of my thought-meat, but I consider that just, like… "platform."

Kara and I dropped off 200 february sticker packs at the office yesterday and got the details on the upcoming sticker roll out. 

It's just like I told Morak: not being down with hyperpigs is like not being down with OPP. It's simply an inconceivable state. A pig like this, so elevated above the others? Preapproved for a card with a good rate? He lives with somebody right now, but they're thinking about moving out? It's a full spectrum hog and these other hogs out here are fuckin' cooked.

I will admit I did no research before drawing the Hyperpig in the last panel of today’s strip. So I am not sure how closely my take lines up with the Hyperpigs in Alastair Reynolds book series. I assume they are pretty close though. 

I understand that it's a little off brand, but it's not even close; Mork reads way more than I do. Now, it should be said: are the books I read of a more sophisticated nature? There's no question. Is there more nutrition for the mind in my stalwart tomes? I'll give you an index; my brain is forty-eight percent of my bodyweight. I mean, compare and contrast. How would something be written in his book, and opposed to mine? Let's look inside:

I am now aware that Machine Vendetta is apparently the third book in a series that I am sure introduces Hyperpigs early on. 

Future historians will refer to the "Arkhamization of Melee Combat" in their treatise on this era; it will be an entire section. It's not a hundred percent clear what they'll say about Suicide Squad yet. And since the only people who can play at the moment are authorized streamers and people who paid a hundred dollars, the dataset is somewhat confounded. The weirdest thing we can detect so far is that, however we jumped the track into this reality, Gotham Knights is much closer to the Arkham mold than Suicide Squad. That's a lot to take in.

I played a few hours of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and came away completely uninterested in playing anymore of it. It’s 100% totally a looter shooter and I’ve played my fair share of those, but this one feels like it showed up years late. I’ve spent countless hours in Destiny and the Division looting and shooting. In both of those instances the game almost becomes a part time job. Sucide Squad has some cool mechanics but I can see the loop and honestly if it was an original IP I might be interested. As it stands though I have no desire to be one of these fuckwits for 20 hours a week.

As someone who had the novel experience of operating a company during a global pandemic, occasionally I was made to interface with functionaries at varying levels of the government apparatus whose jobs were never under any kind of threat. It took me a really long time to figure out that the purpose of these organizations was to make getting what you're owed incredibly difficult. It's the only way to parse their incredibly clear actions. You would have to perform a profundity of mental labor to believe that their stated purpose is anything like the purpose they serve. If you did your part, and went through all this shit, and then had to pig-wrestle them for the money they say you're owed, from them, and they never gave it to you, and now you have been made to engage in a bunch of unpaid labor, it's no longer a tax return. Now it's a loan, with monthly interest - in any system that references reality.

Maybe because I hadn't spent the last week gathering many of the same resources, when I popped into Enshrouded it got me pretty cranked up. Also, my damp larvae have brought back another January illness, the second one this month, so I'm kinda goof troop right now.

The time of stickers is nigh! 

I assumed when I saw Gabe, his cool wife Kara, and their rad scion Noah all playing Palworld they were all playing it together. I was wrong; each of them is playing in their own entirely separate worlds. It's exactly the kind of game they would play together, as they had Valheim - but no. They all wanna, like… chop that wood themselves? Or Rorschach themselves into some kind of industrial grade despot?