As PAX returns to real life venues I want to announce that I am actually retiring from real life venues. That is to say, I’m no longer going to be attending the US shows. It’s possible you might see me with my family at some future PAX but every show every year is just no longer doable for me. Like a lot of people the recent life pause has given me some perspective and I’m changing my routine coming out of this pandemic.
After a couple weeks off I am back in the driver’s seat tonight for another Penny Arcade League race! We are all heading to Watkins Glen for a multi class race that will once again see me driving the slowest car on the track, the Mazda MX-5. There will also be more Stream Racer shenanigans this evening before and after the show. No need to download anything, just login and type !boost in the chat to give your car the goose juice!
As a spectacle, as a meticulously engineered media experience lensed through the twin magnifications of IMAX and 3D, James Cameron's Avatar is absolutely - I am confident in saying this - a film. It didn't really stick with me. I was at Disney World a couple years back, and they had a whole fuckin' Avatar, like… zone, and I was surprised. Like The Matrix, I think it provided a tool to get at some existential concepts a youth informed William Gibson had already formatted me for. Ubisoft is now doing a second Avatar game - oh? You don't remember the first? I'm not a hundred percent sure what we're supposed to glean from the trailer, other than the idea that butterfly lizards apparently beat attack helicopters in whatever enigmatic version of Rock Paper Scissors they play in the future. The best we can hope for at this point is Appa DLC.
Loki is like Wandavision in that it's a kind of puzzle, which is the sort of show I like best. It's also the most optimized use of Disney+ as a platform, because now the hook is set and I sorta have to stick around to find out what this shit is about now. I go hog-ass fucking wild for a Primer, or a Memento. Or even a regular Mento. I should buy some Mentos.
I genuinely don't know a lot about He-Man, although my friend Damon had a Battle Armor He-Man whose inner workings perpetually mystified me. You could strike the breastplate, and every time it would reveal a progressively more damaged version until it was perfect again. What a terrifying foe. Strike your enemy dead in the chest three times to… perfect him? I'm not fucking fighting this guy. That explains the raft of robots, weird snake guys, and bipedal insects he's has to contend with. He's almost certainly murdered everyone else, except for the one guy whose face is already a skull.
The main thing you have to know about streaming platforms is that their dynamics are such that it's too rich for Microsoft's blood. Microsoft. After squeezing to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, they determined that the volume and quality of the juice hadn't been worth it. Which is too bad, because it was… kinda good. The latency was really low; it felt like you could have real conversations with chat almost. It had a built-in studio you could use to manufacture cool interactions for your channel.
You mighta seen the story - maybe you didn't? I don't feel like we've exaggerated the arc really in any way. This is more or less what happened! They definitely activated social; I bet shares were through the roof. I suspect that sometimes, very rarely, there is a such a thing as bad press.
I would say that a weird amount of the games I get truly obsessed with come from Scandinavian countries. Or, Nordic countries. Either the usage changed, or it's regional in nature. In any case, I trust in their intrepid spirit and proven capacity to get my Vacuum Battle Royale game off the ground. Get in touch. And I know you're wondering - Vacuum Battle Royale? How would that work? Here's the secret: the carpets are dirtier than usual. And the house is very large.
The strip is a response to a tweet from renowned tennis person Naomi Osaka. I don't really follow the sport; I'm more of a ping-pong or pickleball man myself, pickleball being the twisted hybrid of the other two. Anyway, the tweet:
I think we can say with some degree of certainty that Twitter has systematically elevated fringe positions and granted sociopaths - whose feeding grounds have typically been constrained by natural factors - a global remit. This barely constitutes an "observation." It's a fairly simple transform executed on the absolute edges of the signal, what these instruments are painstakingly designed to do, and we get to live in the chasm that has opened between them. Imagine if a sore could have sores. It's a hellscape that gleefully commingles Dante's Inferno and a high school cafeteria.
As I type this, I have a box behind me that is itself filled with smaller boxes. Inside each of these boxes is a tiny plastic person, or some festoon of their war raiment, all of which rest atomized on the sprue as they await their manufacture. I invest my Tuesdays on Gabe's Gunpla stream, where I think it can be reasonably said he is putting our entire streaming operation at risk. Just look at this filth:
Today marks the one year anniversary of the Penny Arcade iRacing league! It’s important to note here at the one year mark that this could not have happened without the hard work of the league admins who have been organizing all the races and managing the league Discord. I honestly just get to show up and have fun because of their hard work. So I’d like to give a big thank you from Mike Racecar, all the drivers and the entire Pit Crew to Skiggity, BeastGP, Draxond and Brainling for making it all happen. We are still accepting new drivers just look us up in the iRacing league directory. I've seen a bunch of new faces on the track and in the Pit Crew recently which is awesome. It's not too late to get in on the action!
Army of the Dead is an eighties homage through and through, and redeploys large portions of Aliens without even filing off the serials. It's exactly what I expected, except in the moments it surprised me, but I think my expectations for (and let's go down the list)
I haven't played Overwatch in years, I don't think; it's been two, maybe. I don't have any particular enmity for it, I'm just profligate and I comport myself in a Caligulan manner. It's never even been installed on the machine I'm typing this on because I would rather engage in 24/7 dalliances with Deckbuilter Roguelites. Gabe still plays this game with his entire family in tow, so I think he was more attuned to the announcement that even in the original Overwatch, they're moving to 5v5.
Attendees have always formed the greatest portion of the show content, and it's no different in our Online Excursions. People have been getting together with friends and colleagues more or less from the jump, and revealing what's important to them about this medium is something we're proud to offer a stage for. Because doing this kind of panel in real time can be kind of a pain, with various challenges above and beyond trying to do cool shit, we encourage pre-recording your panel - which, in my opinion, actually makes it available to more people. As someone who (in the World Before) was routinely thrust on stage, I understand entirely why being live on camera ahhhh is spooky and I invite you to make a play for one of our spots. Here is the panel submission thingy, and as firmly established in a larger font above, the deadline for submissions is this very night.
Twitch doesn't show me Hot Tub streams. It knows that I want to see Kate doing GTA RP and itmeJP or CohhCarnage doing whatever they're doing at the time. The only reason I know that there is such a thing as a Hot Tub Stream is that people are mad about them, and then other people are mad that they're mad, and that's more or less how the Internet works now: as an aggressively monetized - and therefore increasingly puritanical - algorithmically reinforced bed of nails.