I don't think I've ever deployed the terminology here, but Gabriel and I will sometimes use the term "videogame" to describe a game that feels good to play. It's the result of many games being so bent toward epitomizing their genre conventions that they lose sight of the fact that they are something you have to play with in order to enjoy. There are a lot of Bethesda games that are very "open world," which is not without its virtues, but the actual experience of playing them is worthwhile because of those factors and not because someone thoughtfully modelled the experience of being there. As an example: Battlefield has always offered scale, but their gunplay and movement haven't always risen to the moment; I feel like BF6 is a videogame, even if my own sloth and ineptitude sometimes obscures it. At least they know what's going on.

The 22nd annual Child’s Play charity auction and dinner is comig up on December 5th and you can get your tickets right now. As usual we will be starting the night with a silent auction before moving to the dinner and live auction part of the evening. The big news this year is that Jerry and I will be returning as your hosts and auctioneers! 

The funny thing is that I know what happens after this, but as much as I would enjoy it I think it should probably be its own thing by itself. There are a bunch of folkways around a Lookouts' sword coming back to the village, and a few more surprises, but that's something we can get into at some point in the future when the real world becomes too stupid to write about. Again.

Okay! So, there are a few dots here for you to connect if you like the Eyrewood stuff. Gabe was plagued by technical issues throughout the whole project thus far, in large part because many ports that look superficially like USB-C don't do all the things we would expect from USB-C. Certainly we know that - like the Nintendo DS - he emits harmful rays, but USB-C was supposed to ferry us into an Elysian realm and by and large it's more of a Charon situation.

There's a shout-out to The Ebb in this one, for the OGs who might have savored the Thornwatch boardgame.

I'm about to head to my Jackbox panel, but I wanted to check in: how are things with you? Oh, feeling fragile? Today's strip probably won't help.

It's still Monday, I wrote the last post a few hours ago, but the process of going to Australia alienates one from linear time so utterly that I feel like I should just get one in the can. And anyway, I already know what this strip is about: it is about feeling bad!

As I suggested previously, with me heading down to PAX Aus for about a week Gabriel suggested that we might sup from the bitter bowl of Dreaded Continuity. He asked if I had a Lookouts story I wanted to do, and I didn't when he asked but this was remedied swiftly by the portal which exists in all beings to the unsullied Infinite.

I saw a few full-throated defenses of Tilly Norwood, a kind of cybergolem designed to supplant human actors. It's from Particle6, a company nobody had ever heard of before a week ago, utilizing their DeepFame engine - a name I assure you I did not make up. I haven't seen an article about Tilly Norwood that didn't include the note that there were already suitors lined up to utilize their tech, which there is no proof of, and no way to prove it. SAG-AFTRA would fuck anybody who even attempted to use this in a production directly up their ass.

An AI version of Stan Lee was fashioned by infernal necromongers, and we do not like it. It's not even a hundred percent clear that he wasn't manipulated into business agreements at the end of his life, which graduates us into grave robbing and potentially even necrophilia. As bold thought leaders, we're prepared to come out firmly against those (bad) things.

JUMP IN

(CW)TB out.

Now that Jump Space - née Jump Ship - is out in Early Access, I've been crewing voidcraft with the Krahulik family and eventually arriving at some kind of success. It has the by now universal Slay The Spire map, where you go to different icons and stuff related to the icons happens, except you're going to them with your friends inside a spaceship that has roughly the same structural integrity as a piñata. You play as the candy in a space piñata, and wicked roboids want to chomp. Mork and I play the game as the below decks crew while Gabriel the Younger pilots the craft and and Kara is in the gunnery seat. Both of those positions lock you into external views, so it's often the case that fires will break out five feet away from them and they aren't aware of it. They have no idea what's going on below decks either and frankly it's for the best.

I am loving Hades II and had to do some Melinoe fan art. 

My daughter is whole! She has not succumbed to peer pressure, at least not in the way the strip suggests. She is no doubt subject to it on some wavelength my calcified brain can't even perceive, but she doesn't have a Hades II style ghost arm and I don't believe she is learning witchcraft at the foot of Hecate, patroness of witches. I feel like there would be signs. And potentially wonders. Maybe even both.

My mom was really late coming home from work once, and cellular phones cost around ten thousand dollars adjusted for inflation then so I couldn't call or text her. It was my presumption that she had been Raptured and that I had been found wanting. Like, first thought.

My friends Jerry and Ryan both told me that Borderlands 4 is cool and fun once you get far enough into the game. Like the comic suggests, I bounced right off the intro. I kept getting shitty sub machine guns while running through featureless grey rooms. Eventually I got to a shack and that’s when Claptrap started talking and I had to stop.  It’s possible it gets good but I’m just not wired to chew through the bad bits to get to the good stuff.