Every now and then I'll click somewhere on Steam and see that I have some wealth of Steam Points, I think it's something like eight hundred and sixty thousand, and get curious about what can be done with them. Not much, friends! Not much. You can buy gifs and stuff. You can also award people's posts with badges you buy with them or some shit. They could be sort of a profound thing with all kinds of ramifications but I don't really think anybody "owns" that internally. At least, I hope they don't! That would make everything else I said very hurtful and mean. It could be ballin', an industry defining loyalty program I would actually give a shit about, but it isn't and I guess it doesn't have to be.

Again, that's just what it looks like. Most of my friends in the industry have been in it long enough to have escaped into the Indie space, which isn't without its own bloodletting, but the dynamics are very different. It's starting to reach down into there, though: I've heard horror stories of a single missed milestone that dissolves an entire contract, or the increasingly Darwinian terms. Bad seems insufficient, but it's also a very broad spectrum. So: things are bad.

There's a remaster coming for The Last Of Us Part Two, which is a very Naughty Dog thing to do in general. I'd read a thing about how the remaster was "feeding a misguided narrative" about how these are taking resources away from making new games, but I don't care about that shit. It's the Internet - you will find every conceivable position enunciated with full-throated vigor. No; the problem with it is that it's boring - and potentially dangerous.

Sorry, these were too silly not to show off.  I got the okay from Lidija to show off Dabe's newest, authentically wacky shit.  

I had an incredible time playing in this new season of the Acquisitions Inc series.The 10th episode premieres this afternoon on YouTube and the finale will be played live at PAX Unplugged next month!

The two all-time best VR games are Job Simulator and Demeo - I won't be taking questions at this time. I will, however, be taking comments that acquiesce fully to my worldview.

Penny Arcade turns 25 years old tomorrow! That’s a quarter of a century of whatever the hell it is we do here. 

So, I am on the red-eye flight from Seattle to what Ludacris has assured me is called "The ATL," where "the pimps and the players dwell." That second bit of information is also from Ludacris. Basically all of my information about Atlanta is from Luda. Well, Luda, or Keith Lee. In any event, this is where the World Championships for Warhammer are being held and I want to go to there. Indeed, that process is already two hours underway. Did you know Georgia was right above Florida? Did you know that part of Georgia touches the fucking ocean?! Be honest.

If you have kids, you're already having to manage a bunch of stuff related to Keighley Day at school - they're bringing home the little Keighleys that they made, setting up the little shrines, all that shit. If you don't have kids, and you have a K-force Indicator, you know that the threshold is drawing close - the "curtain" is thinning. Shape the tines of the instrument and check a graveyard - that needle is gonna dance in its enclosure. Geoff Keighley is planning something. Something big.

Yesterday I mentioned the application Gurney Journey that turns a kids trip to the OR into a magical adventure using AR tech and the Quest 3. Well, I was able to get a video to share!

Young Mork attended the Child's Play Dinner, a traditional haunt, and offered up an auction off the cuff - drawing your D&D character, that ended up bringing in twenty-thousand dollars. I was gonna type that with numbers, but stretched out it's such a fucking slab. It was a crafty play and it's the sort of thing he has done many times at the event - reading the room, then identifying and playing along to its energy. He wrote up a whole thingy about the night plus Child's Play in general, here twenty years in.

The Child’s Play charity reached its 20th anniversary last week and I had the pleasure of attending the celebratory dinner and auction!

There was a brief window where I was gonna go to college. Well, I was gonna try to. And it was community college - the same one that Gabriel attended, very briefly, until the N64 came out and he never went back.

A couple new gaming commentary collectives materialized over the past couple days. The first one I saw was Second Wind, which hatched from a firing at The Escapist that saw many others descend along with him - the whole thing is very Lucifer. Initially, I thought Second Wind might be named after Christian rock powerhouse Petra's seminal 1982 track - but it's more likely related to the rising phoenix they have taken as their sacred heraldry. Aftermath ex-Kotaku supergroup featuring writers from various taylorian Eras. In either case, it's the continuation of a trend. Centralization and Decentralization: welcome to the ladder. We were around long enough to see "blogging" born. These dynamics have been around.

I just couldn't look away from Silent Hill: Ascension apparently. Part of it may be that I keep typing it as Silent Hill: Ascencion, which I feel adds a little excitement. But also because the developer has already had to disable chat because they don't have a robust system for policing it. Apparently their chat was incredibly horny and racist simultaneously, too horny and racist to continue, so now chat consists exclusively (I believe) of stickers you purchase from them.

There's a whole video you need to watch to understand what is even happening in Silent Hill: Ascension, called "The Essentials." That's because it's a genuinely weird combination of livestream, choose your own adventure, FOMO pump, and pay to win. And that certainly sounds bad, but there are some whacked out, really cool ideas in here along with the rest of the Modernity that has gripped so much of the space. There is, in fact, a Silent Hill Battle Pass, which… well, just read the strip.