The dynamics of talking with an insurance adjuster are quite complex. This is a person you are paying to protect the profits of the company that you pay to give you money. You can read that sentence as many times as you need to. In Mike's case, he has been paying Allstate his entire life - and the one time he's needed help they're out here trying to pig-wrestle him like he's trying to get one over on them, when what he's actually trying to do is keep water from getting inside his house. Sometimes if you are receiving a lot of contradictory data you have to look directly at the thing in question, without engaging your cognition or attempting to slot it into a narrative framework. Just observe it mechanically. Once you do, in this case and in others, you will ascertain the truth of it: the purpose of the company is to retain money not give you money. It's not complicated! I'm always looking at things like this and saying to myself, "This can't possibly be how it works!" but it works in exactly that way.

I am going to go to Japan! Indeed, I am going to go to a couple different places in Japan. I am going to ride the Shinkansen and I'm also going to eat something that has been grilled on a stick. I'll get back to you re: what animal it ends up being, I'm told there are a couple options. There are also various hot balls which may be eaten. I'm mostly interested in the food but I am told there is also a country there as well. I'll try to give you as much information about it when I can. Gabe said I shouldn't tell people I was leaving but I think I just fucked that up.

Mister Gribbz has been shlorped fully into the digestive tract of Final Fantasy XVI. There, he is being groomed by strange cilia and he is subject to phantasmagorical sights and sounds. He is also having a really good time, and if this is even conceivable to you, he isn't skipping dense cutscenes full of names and countries. It probably helps that the game has something like "pop up video" that can catch you up on stuff or remind you who the eff the guy with the hat is.

I thought Rainbow Six: Siege was underrated from the jump, and watching it grow and thrive - watching Ubisoft allow it to grow and thrive - has been so heartening. It's absolutely a shooter but it also has a really whacked out "puzzle-like" arc per round that makes it one of the most incredible viewing experiences also. It has completely unique dynamics that have only grown more… unique over time.

Need for Speed Unbound just got a big update that among other things added a new cooperative multiplayer event called “Linkups”. Turns out working with other drivers is just as much fun as racing against them!

When we were talking about all these Kick.com defections, the conversation became so stupid that only a political cartoon could capture it. I'd love to crank the word count here, really pump the SEO. Unfortunately, at least in the case of xQc, I've already summed it up fractally:

Coke addict gets a job at https://t.co/9s5PZxElQW https://t.co/qsYgoPqmSa

— Tycho Brahe (@TychoBrahe) June 17, 2023

Oh shit! Ham Radio people do not like it when you suggest that they are perverts. What I was made to understand very quickly is that the use of Ham Radio is core to their identity and that casting aspersions on a group unified by instantaneous connection is not strategic. But I only meant to suggest that one of them was a pervert! You're telling me none of you require novel stimuli? Seems unlikely. Anyway, you guys can all figure out which one of you it is.

Two things: one, CB stands for Citizen's Band. That's really beautiful in a way. And second, if a bunch of your favorite subreddits go down, Ham Radio is not an effective substitute.

My family continues to be sequestered in the upstairs portion of our house. We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel though. The gaping holes in our walls have been patched and new paint is going up. I think this weekend we will be able to start moving our stuff from the garage back into the house and resume something like normal life. In the meantime I’ve been playing a lot of video games!

When we were writing this strip, Mr. Gribbs asked if I was going to play Diorblo with Dabe after, on our #Fridabe stream. I told him… well, the whole conversation is literally in the strip. I don't have to go over it all again here. Suffice it to say that we did end up playing for a while before he had to go draw something you will like, and then he left.

I've found myself trying fruitlessly to pause Diorblo more often than you would think, maybe I've just entered a phase of life where pausing is required. Shit will be going on, there's a bunch of fuckin' goats or some shit, and I will instinctively brush the ESC key - a key which has so often offered refuge in the past. It doesn't do that here. Now, I continue getting murdered, only the screen is a little darker and there are menu options. None of them is "pause." That's because even if you are playing all by yourself, alone, there is no single player mode because Diablo isn't a single player game.

I'm confident that there are people playing other classes, but when I am in there doing shit, I see a lot of other players who - like myself - are servants of Death Itself. The vast majority. I saw one Barbarian, but I could tell they regretted their choice. They saw the fit - my wicked diadem, burial rags fixed by a chittering scarab - and were fully chastised. Beneath their knitted brow, I could see the idea form: if the sacred rites of their people resulted in them looking like that and me looking like this, how sacred could these rites possibly be? I barely lift a finger when combat begins. I have employees for that. Well, not employees exactly. I haven't opened a jar for myself in a hundred years.

Watching streamers come to grips with Street Fighter 6 - any fighter really - is one of the best uses of the medium. Gabriel is also learning the game, and learning a lot of other things too. Like, about himself.

Monsieur Gribeaux and I have been checking out Farlight 84, a new BR for mobile and PC, and it's incredibly fun even if things didn't go your way.

Apparently yesterday was the true anniversary of Acquisitions Incorporated, an imaginary company that provides imaginary services to an imaginary universe, and yet somehow that has not stopped it from being something a lot of people care about. You might be one of those people! Here is a celebration of said date, which folds within it the promise of more.

For our wicked youth, and I don't mean like the "youth of the nation" or something I mean the larval humans in our care, the "Wii" is retro and anything before that is apocrypha. Like, you'd need a team of experts and dig licenses and shit to reveal a GBA. There's gonna be a woman in one of those hats, like the… the wide hat, with the net, and the camera is going to pan down into the site and catch on the hinge of a startlingly preserved SP.