I played a lot of games over the weekend including Monster Hunter Wilds and Split Fiction. If you’ve got someone to play it with, Split Fiction is a blast. It’s full of fun, unique cooperative mechanics that will have you and whoever you're playing with working together to navigate each new level. Kara and I had planned on giving it a quick try and then playing some Marvel Rivals but once we fired it up we couldn’t stop and spent the rest of the night in Split Fiction. The hook is also great as the game has you bouncing between the imaginations of two different writers, one who does fantasy and the other who does Sci-Fi. Don’t skip this one if you have a gaming partner. It would also make a great entry point if you have someone who isn’t a gamer yet but you want to play something with them. Kara and I give it all the thumbs up. 

Now that Eric, Kiko, and Grib are all knee deep in monster guts, the idea of running with a full four is too tantalizing to resist. I've just been doing shit! It shouldn't be considered unwillingness on my part. I did grab the benchmark, and it seems like performance won't be too bad, but apparently this benchmark isn't a good indicator of performance? What kind of bench is it marking exactly? Maybe it just indicates how willing you are to install benchmarks. In that realm, dear readers, I've proved exemplary.

When I first talked to Grib about the new Monster Hunter, it was similar to talking to him about racing games before he actually liked cars. "The cars look like real cars," he'd say. "You drive them around on tracks and roads." One day later, his Hunter was Hunting some kind of octopus thing and now he's gone batshit for it. Kiko has never played one, but he's got a storehouse of skill he developed playing Bloodborne and a lot of that is gonna map. I'm comfortable saying that Monster Hunter is, itself, a genre.

In realspace, Gabriel has a tooth problem - several - and the arduous journey of taming this zone is nearly at an end. I wasn't aware that he was even sad about his toofs; I'm an eye looker, not some brigand crawsman. I didn't know until I was thirty two years old that my dad was literally missing one of his upper middle teeth and I had known the man since I condensed into this form. My fang trubs are the opposite - my teeth are goosed because I had braces and didn't, you know, one hundred percent wear my retainers all the time. I mean, they're fine. I can chew stuff. But there are a couple of 'em that lean a bit, like they're posted up outside the corner store. That leer. Rough characters.

Reacher is big, dumb fun about a big smart man who fucks people up. I can't even imagine the patience - the forbearance - to wait until the third season to put him against someone larger than he is. And I guess I say patience and forbearance, but there's also the possibility that it simply took a long time to find someone that large who wasn't the grim fruit of some blacksite military experiment.

We exist in an incredibly weird space; we know a lot of people we really shouldn't know, given our irascible natures and rustic beliefs. We simply end up in the path of novel individuals from time to time and even if we start off on the wrong foot with them, which we often do because of the aforementioned irascibility, we typically arrive at some kind of positive relationship. I'm unfailingly polite in real life because my momma raised me right. This is a performance space; getting mad at me is like getting mad at an actor for something their character did.

If you could watch a pringle instead of eat one, just look at it and absorb it, that's essentially Love is Blind. The show is Certifiable, definition 2. It's a dating show in its molecular form, it's clearly been designed by certified (definition 1) psychiatric experts to perforate human beings, to peel them like an onion. Its structure is something like a rocket - there's a Booster Phase where the participants can't see each other, and the participants wade through waist-high gossip to and from the little chambers they make them sit in. Then, once that phase balls into the atmosphere, they get fucking engaged with these people they've never seen before and this goes all the ways you think. You gotta meet a woman's dad who hates you and hates the show and thinks it's a mockery of the society they grew up in. Then you see if any of those people actually go through with it. Then they do an episode where they get all those people later and put them in the same room! Heavy sheets of plastic are laid down and stapled to the walls because three to four people get murdered in this episode, on average.

I guess it makes a little more sense that Amazon secured James Bond when you consider that one of the many, many, many things they have been allowed to buy is MGM. It's not just, like, for Prime Video or something. They're gonna make a real movie and stuff.

My comics knowledge is made up of modern weirdo auteur shit and whatever my friends were reading back in the oughts. World War Hulk I kinda sorta know about but not really, mostly because aspects of the lead up were parted out in other movies and my brain demanded that I spend a lot of time on wikis. So I didn't know until we were writing the strip yesterday that Red Hulk is called Rulk. Rulk! Okay, sure.

We borrowed the punchline from Dabe, who actually had this experience IRL. Or, in game I guess. But the game was being played in real life? I'll have to sit down for a second and really think about where the parentheses begin and end on this shit - I'm being seized 24/7 by incalculable whorls. You usually try to figure it out from the names, there's only a few total formats they use, but occasionally you don't know and you might feel compelled to ask. I feel like asking a person if they are a bot is probably worse than leaving it ambiguous; it's nice when they simply volunteer the information. I guess we also have to consider that these bots have become ensnared by carnal hungers. I'll keep an eye on it, I guess.

We had seen something about a new show called Doc. Here is the trailer for it; I don't watch a lot of broadcast television but this is a show that looks and feels like a pharmaceutical ad, which I suppose is at least somewhat on-brand.

Everybody in Marvel Rivals is completely busted in some way. Their low-key disregard for dogma in the traditional Triangle of damage and healing has given rise to all manner of moist and wicked chimeras. They'll let a duelist be - in the words of 2 Live Crew - as nasty as they wanna be, just utter demons, but they don't get to have any health not even as a treat. Tank is a deep genre in this game; I think there's a reason we haven't gotten any new ones since launch. Strategists also go extremely hard. There is a strategist whose ult essentially just calls halftime and you have to go do something else for a little while. It's an ult that projects out into the real world.

As someone who came into quote unquote prominence in the early Internet - and I say Quote Unquote because it was a matter of being big in a much smaller place - creative work existed within some very particular dynamics. The work we were trying to do was text and images, which the Internet of the time was adept at - it would take a little longer for people making music, video, or games to get the same opportunity. This meant that "distribution," previously a very thorny concept, could be a couple badly formatted tables and an FTP client. We still managed to find abuse at the hands of various demons trying to get paid for it, but this new problem is at least a novel one and the old one was gone forever.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the kind of life-sim, Steam Charts pervert game I have a hard time engaging with. Well, that's not true. It's that I engage with one tiny part of it obsessively and then I have a sixty dollar game I've eaten the nuts and chewies out of and the rest of the box gets thrown in the garbage. It's like Disgaea Item Worlds; that just becomes the whole game. I watched somebody make a sword in KC:D2 and sharpen it, and though it didn't take the amount of time it would actually take it took a long-ass motherfuckin' time. Long enough to lose myself meditatively in the quenching, perhaps. Hmm.

Hmm.

Gonna get down on Rivals with Dabe and Mike until noon, then more of the incredible Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  When we left off we had just entered a darkened crypt!  I bet that's gonna happen a couple times.  I'll see you there.

(CW)TB

With the acquisitions of Lucasfilm and Marvel, Science Fiction and Comics themselves - as they exist in the public imagination - became the property of Disney. After some initial success, and up to Endgame what might be one of the most effective and lucrative cinematic engines of all time, they have waned in dissipation and arrogance. Even the cool stuff they manage to get out on accident is catching strays because they've fucked this up so royally. Disney has invented a machine that kills golden geese.