We talked about it a little bit when the movie for Ready Player One came out in the post and the strip. My policy on Nostalgia is the same as the laws sweeping the nation and perhaps the world - I think it should be legal for responsible, recreational use. If used in a work, optimally it's used in a way that interprets or transforms so that we get more work to interpret or transform. I adhere to the sourdough starter principle where such things are concerned.

Kind Words is not new by any means, I got it a super long time ago - I think even before it was on Steam, though I could be remembering that wrong? For some reason I remember - as one does - unzipping a file into a folder and clicking on something inside there.

This year’s Child’s Play auction has gone online and today is the last day to purchase one of the Mix and Mingle tickets. This ticket option includes a box with drink fixings and some other goodies that we want you to have on December 10th, the night of the auction. I’ve offered up a few of my original acrylic paintings this year. I did these back around 2008 along with a dozen more or so. This is the first time I’ve auctioned any of them off and I’m hoping they find good homes and help raise some money for a very good cause.

As with so many strips, this one is about a real happening that authentically occurred. Typically I can't prove it, though - not so this time. This link will deliver you unto the moment where we explored an anomalous Animus glitch in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, and the about twenty-five minute period after where we smashed our heads against a literally impossible puzzle and then ultimately succeeded, but not because we were possessed of any profound intellectual capacity but because we turned it off and then turned it back on again. I love that this answer holds true even when you're talking about a machine that dredges up holographic, livable representations of the past from DNA.

I was trying to get the gist of what the Ghost Rider movie was even about, and Gabriel was able to reconstruct these painful events with some difficulty. I watched a few clips online, and couldn't believe the levels of camp on display - I'm tempted to say it's just… bad, certainly that would save me a lot of cognitive resources, but it's so winky and plus Nic Cage is there that some weird, stark corner of my mind thinks you arrive at this kind of bad without a conscious effort.

Having been made to drink poison in hell with his wide eyed son, Gabriel had an opportunity to recall just how carelessly Marvel intellectual property had been scattered on the ground before it occurred to someone that they could fashion a nested modern mythology largely out of existing work and make billions. How stunted were the weird, dry fronds of the plants that once grew there. Bent shapes like symbols of agony! This is the vital portion:

With this year's Child's Play auction going online, I decided to offer up a few special pieces. Back in 2008 I decided to try my hand at acrylic painting and I made about a dozen paintings or so of varying sizes. Four of these hang in my house, two are at the PA office and the rest were in storage. During a recent cleaning of my garage I found some of these old pieces and I've decided to donate a few of them to Child's Play in the hopes that they will help raise some money and find good homes. Here's a quick look at the three pieces I'm handing over to Child's Play this afternoon. 

"Modern Day" shit in Assassin's Creed has executed at various levels of quality, and it manifests in different areas of the game - much of it through text. I know I'm not the only person who likes some of that stuff, because Gavin and I used to share entries that we liked with each other. So I'm open to the idea that it's just Gavin and I, but it's definitely not just me.

I wasn't sure it would, but Thursday is back again like clockwork and the Penny Arcade iRacing League is ready to race. Tonight we’re going to the USA International Speedway which is what I would call an “intimate” dirt oval. The action will be fast and dirty tonight so be there when the Pit Crew opens at 7:30PT!

Man, I already said I wasn't gonna fuck any kinda Goddamn map in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Not playing Valhalla enabled me to finish Lexcalibur II in record time, thirty poems I like even better than the first book, and I say this as someone who stands opposed to every syllable of my work thus far. I am its nemesis, and the work of each day is to destroy it with new work. But somehow these poems escaped!

I grabbed Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on Stadia when it dropped around 9PM my time on Monday. No download required so I was able to start playing immediately which was cool. It played great and I didn’t end up getting to bed until after 1 am. I have to admit it was Orlog that kept me from getting to bed at a reasonable time. It’s a deceptively simple little dice drafting mini game that you can play all around the world similar to Gwent. After spending another day with Valhalla I am absolutely loving the game and I would pay money for an Orlog app on my phone. 

I wouldn't say that either Gabriel or myself are active seekers of inconvenience.

The amount of love Michael clearly has for the guy asking the question in the third panel is incredible. It has caused me to love him too.

I’ve spent more time with Stadia and it continues to be really impressive. Since my last post a week ago, I got a Stadia controller and put just over sixteen hours into the Division 2. I also checked out a bunch of other games like Super Hot: Mind Control Delete, Orcs Must Die 3 and an early access game called Embr. Kara and I have been killing Orcs together and having a great time with all the traps and new characters. Embr has got its hooks in my son Noah and I. This is a co-op fire fighting game with ridiculous ragdoll physics and a goofy premise. You need to work together to battle the fire and save all the people trapped inside...and also you can rob them. It’s a great game that I had never even heard of but it was included with Stadia Pro. Super Hot Mind Control Delete is also great, it takes the gameplay of the normal game and delivers it in a new almost Roguelike way. 

If you dig further than the initial search, you'll find other information about people who have worn this suit - people who look much, much cooler than the image you're almost certain to find first. But that doesn't mean you won't find this image first, and then become physically and spiritually hollowed out as anyone would be to learning that the icon of dangerous, mysterious cool which defined your very conceptions is actually an accountant ("Technically speaking, a comptroller,") from Scranton, PA.

Thanks again to the powerful Trystan Falcone for handling the art duties on the last strip; the writing process was not without anguish for my friend Michael, whose neck had tired of providing neck duties day in and day out and had instead become a kind of high efficiency pain cylinder with unparalleled uptime and responsiveness.