I'm frightened, frankly, at what the environment must be like at Bethesda Softworks - A ZeniMax Company. I wouldn't want to be there. Asha gave Obsidian one of their best toys, and Starfield was essentially a sidequest. I'm a bad Elder Scrolls player, a fake fan; I wash out on stuff like their faces and animations. I always feel like I find something within the first few hours that nobody seems to have cared about at all. A beaky, triangular lip. A line I hear one too many times. For the vast majority of people, those just become memes. For me, it just makes me feel like they double-spaced their homework - a reference almost nobody would get anymore. If you were a million years old also, I promise you this metaphor would hit.

People have said that the new Acquisitions Incorporated game at PAX Aus - running on the young and vital Daggerheart system - was a top five game. I was there, and I know that it felt good, but of course you have the final say:

▶ Watch Video on YouTube ↗

I think you'll love the addition of my friend John.  It marks the return of Austin Creed to the table, with his massive turtle-man bouncer Julius Smalls - a second player has fallen prey to the bestial options available to players in the new game. The first was Gorbiriel, whose "frog jim" was canonized in the strip here, although I suppose he already did a turn as a mouse. This is all just the launch phase to a mercenary, mercantile entreaty - aren't I sneaky?

The Circle Of Jim Pinny Arcade Pin Set is now available, and yes - the little eggs in the first pin do rattle and shake. There's a few other cool items on the store's Featured Page.

(CW)TB out.

We had a few kids this year, one of whom was an especially convincing Indiana Jones, but at the end of the night we were left with a couple saddlebags of high-end product: one plump with tangy gummies, the other a medley of fun-size favorites. We were willing to part with more, had there been more larvae; they need sugar in order to molt. But this is not a universally distributed ethos.

Here in the word mines, I chip phonemes from the human corpus. But I also play videogames on occasion:

When I first saw a Queen's Domain demo during a "fest" I was like, hold up. Are these dorks making a King's Field ref? Even referencing it myself indicates that I am a man of a certain age: we imported King's Field from Japan in ninety-four, utilizing the potent Toothpick Trick to play games from the mysterious East. I'm almost certain I mentioned it before, so tickled was I. But it's out! You can buy it, and it's out.

Dark Souls, a game Sony felt was so Japanese they didn't even bother to publish it outside of Japan, has its roots in King's Field. The thing I would compare it the most to hardly even makes sense to mention, that is to say text adventures; we like to dress our text adventures up in a variety of ways now but Emily Short is almost certainly the modern master of a more traditional form. Ultimately, when I say it feels like a text adventure, it's because exploration in a text adventure is something you feel in the hairs of your neck.

I knew a kid about half-way down the hill when I was younger, this would have been out Sumner way, and this was when computers were sorta nasty ugly things that needed to be hidden away. More than forty years ago I was playing Zork in a tiny room off the garage in the dark, and it's simply the case that a 5090 could not produce the kind of visuals that green text drew from my brain. Because our minds are the only GPUs anyone can afford anymore, the only ones we're allowed, I'd been thinking of it anyway.

I only ever played the first King's Field, but when I look at screens of it I think, no, this could not possibly be how it looked. It absolutely did. But in the same way that Turok's fog could, at its best, imply space, these dark corridors and massive beasts suggested checks that the PlayStation's processor could never cash. Here's an example. I'm putting this picture in here primarily for Gabe's use, but you will see it also, just because of how the Internet works:

We used to call him "Big Head Todd," another ancient reference. I feel like I've aged two hundred years or so since the beginning of this post.

So the maximal case is text becoming mental images, but the lo-fi, arguably retro texture swim of a PS1 experiment by FromSoftware leaves so much room for you to fill in those cracks. Queen's Domain operates in this space, somehow more than thirty years later, and it's mean as fuck but I can't stop going back in.

(CW)TB out.

I'm not even kidding; with Valve's AI Disclosures, they really have founded a wholly new mode of expression. You can reverse engineer how a developer feels about the disclosure by a close reading of the text, you can unfold the interior part of their skull and walk around in it. I bet it does suck.  I'm honor bound to understand the why, and AI coding is growing normative in the space.  It's hard to truly have beef with such a clannish, propagandized cadre.  I mean, my doom is to understand why even a mortal enemy might dislike me; I routinely extend greater humanity to my utter foes than I have ever received in return. It helps that many of them have been cartoon villains, desperate to distract from their own monstrous conduct. Ask Max Temkin, or Scott Gaynor. I know exactly why they did it. I never lifted a finger, and I didn't have to. Vengeance is mine, saith The Lord.

Never let it be said that I am not conscious of this moment's strange dynamics. I fully comprehend why a person would use this stuff.  That said, I do demand  to be understood: opponents of it aren't simply Cro-Magnons pounding hitting rocks with sticks.  Our goals extend beyond the quarter, the the day, the moment.

There is a silly, gotcha-ahh rhetorical salvo on Twitter where people will show you a piece of AI art without telling you its AI art and someone likes it, but then when you tell them it's AI art they don't like it anymore. They're really impressed with themselves on this one, but there's a lot of reasons why a person might not like being lied to, one of them being the manipulative lies. It matters how something is produced. People have opinions on cannibalism. People have opinions on Blood Diamonds. And maybe you might be like, well, that's going a little far don't you think? Allow me to decelerate, then. People have opinions on the greatest art theft in history. People who don't understand people, who say terrifying things about the world they hasten to birth, are in a position to determine how everyone will live and work. It seems kind of bad on its face.  Many of the dynamics you can see online are functionally the dynamics betwen a Warlock and their shadow'd Patron.

All the best engineers I know have serious trust issues. After PHP2Shell, ours decided he was done being exposed to such a vast attack surface and started pulling it out by the roots. He had recently learned Rust, and that seemed like the right approach. You learn in order to learn in order to learn. I understand that efficiency is good but it is a virtue. I mentioned that this is what he was doing, and somebody was like, but he's gonna use AI to do that, and you hate AI. Now what?!? And it's like, dude. He hates that stuff more than I do.

There are different kinds of haters. Some think that the models don't actually do stuff. I think they do, in fact, do stuff. I'm more on the side of the Luddites Union: I think we should get a say in how the world operates, what systems we carry forward. I think workers and citizens should be able to enunciate their dispossession without being insulted by this priestly cadre. They saw Terminator, and said hell yeah - a tireless, time-traveling robot that murders women. A lot of the rest of us emerged with the idea that the future is not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.

Gabe does not like to write. If you ever see him on here writing, he must have really wanted to do it. He doesn't like to do finish work and he's not interested in grammar. He wants to draw things, but doesn't always know what; I can't draw, but I always know what I would set down if I could. We met in high school, and even though it was difficult we made a little place where we could reach across the gulf. Anything that disturbs that dynamic is existential, and anyone who advocates for it is to be watched.

You need to start asking yourselves who benefits from this level of atomization. It ain't us.

(CW)TB out.

I identified something really odd while I was out at PAX Aus; the normal cadence and tenor of the AI discourse began to vibrate at an especially high frequency. The conversation has always been fraught, but everywhere I turned the side which advocated for the tools was really spun up, aggressive, and emboldened, and I wasn't seeing the counterpunches I'm used to. My presumption is that it's connected broadly to the Anthropic IPO, which is a severe test of… well, it's a gut check for the whole ball of wax - the future they are attempting to sell.

It's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that mind-sculpting the public, that is to say Manufacturing Consent, is trivial and largely invisible in the social media era. It's the air we breathe. If you are here, tolerating me, it's possible you remember when they hadn't learned to do it online yet. Nobody ever believes it when I tell them; they're conditioned to demand that any proposed functional aspect of the past is a psyop, nostalgia. It's really, really important that they make you believe that. As the man says: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."  If you think humans have ever flourished outside of the future they will literally murder you to create, it's because you're a reactionary and a heckin' bad pupper.  

This is connected in some ways to staunch AI warrior Tim Sweeney, whose enthusiasms we have depicted in our thrice-weekly comic strip, Penny Arcade. Because Unreal Engine is moving to an AI-first workflow, and Steam requires that the use of AI tools be declared, everything made with the engine must wear a Scarlet Letter on their store page. He describes these as "abhorrent" and functionally a political statement. As I have said many times, a person's politics are often what they don't consider to be political. I don't consider AI political. So… there you go, I guess.  Until they're ready to discuss the original sin of the training data, I'm done discussing it with them.  

This is all the most recent set of maneuvers in an ongoing one-sided feud Tim has with Gabe Newell, a man who snorkels when he wakes up and lives on a yacht constellated by the other yachts he owns. It's a real madmen.gif situation. Right now, Valve is working on a game whose mystery is so ubiquitous that it constitutes an urban legend for three generations, and another game so dense and mad as to constitute continuously unfolding n-Dimensional Asylum. They aren't bound by the laws of the Earth. God has turned his eyes away.

Fortnite was a failed game that changed everything for Epic when a few human beings there identified PUBG's ascendance, cloned it, and drafted on that. Musical artists and a torrent of beloved characters, toys, and worlds have propped it up for almost a decade. Good luck making the unpredictable with your prediction engine.

(CW)TB out.

There can be no question, at long last, that Soulja Boy has told them: he wants those cards. Everybody wants those signed cards and it makes sense. At a certain point it seems like the Federal government would just allow Wizards to just print the money directly. Skip a step, you know? Save everybody a bunch of time.

Hey! Did you know that Desert Bus For Hope is popping off? Probably, maybe you saw Gabe's thing. As of this exact second they have piled up $341,644.35, and they ain't done with the pilin'. I called in on Saturday to engage in some light sermonizing re: our responsibility to the other, and inadvertently ended up feeling something which was not the goal. I've known that DB/LRR crew for so long now that I didn't remember Desert Bus is the whole reason I know them. They came up to our booth at SDCC one year with this bizarre scheme to support Child's Play already hatched and we didn't jump over the table and actively try to stop them. There is a maxim which states "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," and it would appear that the inverse is also true.

We went on to support some video work of their also but the main thing we worked on together aside from Desert Bus was the reality show art competition Strip Search, a name which I would learn later has another deeply unpleasant meaning. Probably too late to apologize now, but it was earnestly meant and I hope nobody's psychology has been abraded in the interim. In any case, Desert Bus (and indeed the larger LRR continuum) is a communique from when creative people ruled the Internet and a reminder that it could be that way again, as soon as we want it to be.

(CW)TB out.

The Desert Bus for Hope charity stream has just begun! Head over and watch them drive the bus and raise money for Child’s Play! 

This crew goes above and beyond every year! You can join the stream right here.

Desert Bus for Hope 🚌 #DB2026 OCTOBER 23rd

@desertbus.org

BlueSky ↗

The chat's already in the house! The tyres have been kicked, the fires have been lit! The only thing we're missing is YOU! Desert Bus starts in 30 minutes! Get in here! desertbus.org

Desert Bus 2026

A charity fundraising marathon in support of Child's Play Charity

-Gabe out

If Gabe finished your Call of Duty campaign, it must be pretty fucking good. The last time around was functionally a playable meme that didn't line up with the milspec fantasy they typically offer, i.e., a three-story combat knife might fall out of the sky. He says that he spent way longer than strictly necessary inside of a Korean convenience store, and if they're anything like konbini you can spend a very very long time in one. Comparing a 7-Eleven in Japan to a 7-Eleven in Seattle is like comparing an eight ounce, medium-rare filet mignon to roadkill. Now, Gabriel would like to inoculate you against a specific type of content in the game but beyond that he grants whatever wastrel seal of approval he can muster.

He also tells me that he has installed some kind of mod for Steam that clearly identifies which games in NextFest do and do not feature AI assets. That's probably better than what I was doing, which was seeing something I was curious about and then scrolling all the way to the bottom of the offering to find The Scarlet Letter. I was already miffed about the last NextFest, PreviousFest I guess, because its main purpose for me was to act as Exhibit A for why discovery is the only problem worth thinking about.

I was glad to see Demos make a return, as a way to stand out - depending on the era, demos have been a magazine incentive or a sales lure, until they were considered to cannibalize sales, which lead to them falling significantly out of favor at the top. Indies always kept the tool in their back pocket. But AI or no, I have no idea what to do with this many games. I really, really like this stuff and I get redlined a couple minutes in.

I'm not gonna make you listen to some long harangue about AI or Slop, I've been doing that for years and it has had precisely zero effect. Gamespot has a good article on some of the concerns specifically as they relate to the 'Fest. For me, ultimately it comes down to the bandwidth of the channel. I don't know if Steam constitutes a "public commons," but it is where tens of millions of people work and seek good work daily. It only has so much functional throughput for the user. I might be able to buy games from there, but I certainly can't find them.

The amount of time it takes to create work was once a limiting factor that could retain the legibility of spaces. I already don't like work that isn't made by people, purely on its own demerits, but the fact that it also chokes out the native life of every social environment we construct on here is something I feel in the pit of my stomach.

(CW)TB out.

Running ads is essentially broken, which is why so many sites have essentially become unusable especially on mobile.  If I even tried to make the site look like that the designers wouild twist my head off like a bottlecap.  So, we've been working with friends by and large to get ads up that we feel good about.  Bride of Spooktacular fits snugly in that place. 

I just really like Brad's designs; his obsession is with asymmetrical strategy games.   I could list them for a very long time, but he's the king of fighting games you play with cards, whether you think the best version of that is BatlleCON or EXCEED because he designed both.  Spooktacular and its Bride posit that terrors beyond mortal ken have burst through the screens in the theatre, and those are the entities you play as - devouring horrified moviegoers by the gobfull.  Every one of the original's twenty monsters or the Bride's ten additional ones is essentially playing a different game while going after the same points, with ramifications for your opponents and even in some cases the way the game plays.  Evil cars, a Queen and her Hive, zombified versions of our founding fathers...  this is just where it starts.  This Gamefound camnpaign also offers the Double Feature as an optional add-on, which are twenty new remixes of the original game's monsters that play completely differently or even invert their mechanics.  Anyway, putting up his ads was the easiest decision I made all year.  Only about a week left on the campaign... if you dare, etc.

(CW)TB   

Bungie is between Scylla and Charybdis, two words I spelled correctly on my first try. What are these two things? We don't need to go into all that - just know that they're both unwelcome, and you don't want to be there. Bungie's thing is to make its own weird and peerless shit, they've been doing it since the Mac, and maybe on some level there might be a perceived loss of face or identity associated with hauling somebody else's rope. Fuck allat. This is Live To Fight Another Day shit. Get the skunkworks popping while Lucasfilm keeps the stove warm and fends off Sony with a chair and a whip. The deal is bigger than paper, as choosing to slot work with the leading console manufacturer is just a good thing to have in your back pocket. And we already know Bungie would crush it: Renegades, their collab/crossover/Star Wars fic, was sick to death. Indeed, I propose that this is so cosmic, powerful, and correct that it represents an auspicious stellar configuration - something as good as Scylla and Charybdis, whatever they may be, are bad.

Because the drive for virality is so high, I will often see high-profile searches for things that I doubt very seriously are true even though people make videos about them. I will still check it sometimes, most of the time, I will still click or tap on them a hundred percent of the time, just in case Dolly Parton really has died.

So, Bioware's real shutdown was first introduced to me as one of these lures about ten minutes ago. EA's acquisition was always going to result in graves, but the configuration of the Jenga tower going into this was not favorable for Bioware. I didn't like Andromeda, I really felt like they missed a step there, but it turned a profit; management enforced live-service mania arguably derailed the entire studio. Anthem was Anthem; hard to know where to start there, except for at the end. Remixed from what was functionally another product concept, Dragon Age: Veilguard seems to have been a lethal high-wire test of the studio post-COVID. I mean, there's nasty things you could say about it but it was meant earnestly and now they all lost their jobs so what punishment are we trying to devise? If somebody gave me budget to talk my shit, brother - you'd better believe my shit is gonna get talked.

I read that Mass Effect 5 was cancelled as part of all this, but it isn't, and they can't - it's just called EXODUS now, and it's outside their reach. That spirit flew away and lit in little places here and there, in games at varying stages of development, in the hands that made them, and in the other games they inspired. Look for Bioware everywhere but the tomb.

(CW)TB out.

I love all of the incredible handmade items we get donated for the Child’s Play auction. We are less than a month away from this year’s dinner and I wanted to share a couple pictures of one of our awesome live auction items.

Jennifer Hostbjor makes beautiful pieces of custom chainmail and has been a long time supporter of Child’s Play. Here is a description and some pictures of the piece she has generously donated this year.

Inspired by the elegance of lace and the enduring strength of armor, this piece was meticulously handwoven from nearly 26,000 anodized aluminum jump rings.  It features a subtle transition from luminous silver to warm rose gold tones, accented by an intricate openwork pattern.

More than an accessory, this piece is wearable art. It embodies the idea that true strength can be both beautiful and fierce, making it a meaningful statement for anyone who embraces individuality and self-expression. A truly unique creation, this piece is sure to spark conversation wherever it is worn.

You can still get your tickets for the Child’s Play dinner and auction right here. Come join Jerry and I as we do our best impression of actual auctioneers and try to raise some money for a good cause!

-Gabe out

▶ Watch Video on YouTube ↗

Mr. Gibb got hauled back into ARC by his eldest; that last link goes to his full report if you haven't seen it. Today's strip is a "war journal" of the kind of twisted, post-apocalyptic hellscape that you might experience in a food court.

I've actively avoided Twitter's For You tab; they started making it go there at some point and I decided to see who it thought I was - or, at any rate, what the highest bidder might like me to be. It wasn't super good. A lot of it is people asking Grok things, to the extent that I think it must be preferred as a mode of content. There's a lot of people asking weird sex questions, indeed, the same sex questions in different languages if you look long enough. Fake personal stories; incendiary political rhetoric from people with absolutely zero geographical skin in the game. There's a level of AI Boosterism that over the last week became absolutely inescapable. Enough exposure reveals the same fundamental social geometry iterated at various scales. A lot of the people engaging with it aren't people at all, just vectors; it is a self-replicating, algorithmic favela.

TikTok, the app that everyone endeavors to emulate, is a completely different app for everyone in my house. For the others, it's fun shit. For me, it's become a brutal conditioning exercise. Cory Doctorow's enshittification concept describes a downward arc where a company delivers a good product, then they make a product which is only good for the business partners, then they make a product that is only good for them. I have a slight twist on the initial descent.

It used to want me to have fun so I would come back. Eventually it changed the fuel source, like going to diesel, where the combustibles rest in a pressurized chamber: now it wants me to be mad. It worked for a bit, but that's not something I can snack on and I was going to this channel for snacks and also to understand what the eff is going on in my daughter's life. It is now scooting me supine, across the pavement, with an omnichannel firehose of absolutely obscene gender takes.

I've always known more people than the statistical average; I did mobile technology service at something like 57 distinct sites, and then I became a public person. I simply know too many women to be swayed by entreaties about what bitches be like. My mom is a musical florist with a counseling degree. My sister is a gay M1 Abrams draped in flannel who is also a chef. My first real boss was a woman who felt like she had to mindkill herself to be taken seriously, an irreproducible woman. Tech in schools has a gender ratio that looks nothing like the traditional industry - indeed, half my coworkers were women who programmed mainframes and were being reskilled into personal computers. Also, when I was growing up, they were pushing the Free To Be You And Me pretty hard. It's possible that I grew up in a completely alien slice of reality but it did inoculate me from a certain percentage of dogshit takes.

Neofeudalism probably requires conditioning at this scale to muzzle and direct the populace. Such lenses must commingle recognizable fact silhouettes with motivated internecine war templates to drape such a fraudulent system. They'll manufacture mortal enemies for you in your homes if it means rolling our nation's corpse uphill. The world is disintegrating on every axis. I'd like to say I'm as demoralized as I could possibly be, but I'm sure there's still room for more; I've always considered myself an optimist.

(CW)TB out.

I quit playing ARC Raiders for a couple of reasons. The two big ones being I did not want to support their use of AI voices and I was sick of getting shot in the back and losing all my shit. My eldest son Gabe loves the game and never stopped playing. He told me about how they replaced their AI voice work with human actors and that they were testing a new PvE mode. He asked if I wanted to try a few rounds with him and since I am at all times desperately trying to avoid a “Cat’s in the Cradle” situation I said yes.

He took me to a new map that came out after I quit playing and as soon as I loaded in my stomach tightened up. My immediate physical reaction to being back in an ARC Raiders map was stress. Then almost as fast, I remembered we were playing PvE and all that tension disappeared. We strolled into the main part of town and found it full of people looting and just hanging out. Gabe gave me a sort of maraca and he pulled out a guitar. We walked around playing music and chatting with folks. A guy came up and told us he was a streamer who could only gain items if they were gifted to him by other players. I gave him everything in my inventory. He thanked us profusely and as he ran off I heard “Holy shit chat those guys were so cool!” 

Gabe wanted to show me an interesting phenomenon that happens in PvE. He has been playing consistently since launch and so has all kinds of amazing gear. It was trivial for him to take down one of the massive walking ARCs that used to mean instant death to me. Before we could even get to the corpse it was covered with looters. They ran from all angles jumping out of windows and off of roofs to get to the wreck. As I opened the first compartment I saw all the items vanish right before my eyes. Gabe laughed and said I wasn’t going to get anything. He explained that people listen and wait for someone to take down a large Arc and then hit it like locusts. I was frustrated at first but the truth is I didn’t need any of that shit. I had already decided I was not going to come back to the game. These poor souls stuck here in this wasteland obviously needed these wires and rare scraps more than I did. 

Eventually I found the stress of trying to avoid being murdered and stripped of all my loot, not especialy fun. I don’t think that means it is a bad game though or that it should change because I also think that tension is what makes the game great for those who can tolerate it. I love the setting they have built and I thought what I wanted was PvE but in my mind what that means is a game like Destiny. Designing and implementing compelling singleplayer or co-op PvE content is time consuming and expensive. I don’t think it is as simple as making it so that you can’t deal damage to other Raiders which is essentially what we have here minus a few other minor tweaks. I also think the developers knew this already and that is why they built the game they did. It is true they have technically delivered a “PvE” experience but just like in PvP, other people are still the real content in ARC Raiders.

-Gabe Out