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.

Having a bunch of strangers working in your house all day takes some getting used to. I can’t really get into VR because at any minute one of these guys might need to tell me they discovered a pocket of poisonous gas or another forest of black mold in my walls. 

It's true!  It has almost a thousand backers, many of whom are grabbing both games simultaneously - and I'm so pleased.  It's really, really special, and I can't wait for you to see it.  

(CW)TB

Somebody asked Mork if I was doing okay, and I am, at least as I define it. If I were to go into a definition of what is and isn't okay, though, I think you would not recognize it. Ultimately, if the world is going to be as fucked up as it is and I'm never supposed to mention it, it just feels worse. And so the conversations people are having with him about me are, essentially, why I hadn't really spoken up before. There's an inflection point somewhere between making other people's lives worse and making my own life worse and eventually some portion of the diagram had to buckle. The alternative was to use my own mind as the load bearing structure for the universe.

Today's strip isn't literally true, but it's figuratively true. Unless you're talking about the fact that Grab's house is being tore up from the floor up - that's definitely true. It's also true that from the very second you get inside the walls of an old house, every sin of its manufacture is laid bare. And not just in the ways we mention in the last couple panels - all manner of Dad Sins eventually become somebody else's problem, some ancient wickedness to inherit. I can give an example of something that happened to me personally, and it didn't result in any significant cost or danger, which makes it a rarity in this kind of tale. We had to get in the basement walls of our house once, and if we hadn't, we would never have known that the house was made almost entirely of fence posts. I remember thinking, "It's weird to see a fencepost inside."

Obviously, it won't do to come off the blocks with an unnecessarily aggressive posture when all I'm trying to do is inform. Media broadly has become a cauldron of omnidirectional cruelty whose barely concealed purpose is to foment and then tirelessly stoke insensate rage - and for what? "Engagement"? The marred coin of a twisted realm. That said, Willow on Disney+ is literal violence.

I don't really have anything to add about Overwatch 2's PvE mode that Tamoor Hussain didn't cover in their definitive GameSpot interview with Blizzard. Well, I guess I do have this mean comic. Overwatch 2 has been a bizarre bait and switch experience almost from the jump, the replacement of a sacred golden idol with a bag of sand. It's one of the most inconceivable maneuvers I've ever seen in my decades long observation of the industry. It's not "inconceivable," I guess. I can conceive it. It's just an act of such profound brand destruction that it's hard to contain entirely in the mind.

I haven't read Silo, in part because Silo isn't a book - it's a series. I think it actually starts with Wool. Something you might not know about young Mork is that this motherfucker probably reads a book a week. He's fucking voracious. To stuff his mind's craw, he also has to be on the prowl for shit constantly, which may be how he ended up becoming an early fan of a self-published digital book before there was such a thing as an Apple TV.

Thank you to everyone who voted for your favortie new IP over the last few days!

I did live with Gabriel for a time, in the hallow'd Apartment 26 which so often made its appearance in the early days, and for the most part it was pretty good. There were some instances of roommate terrorism, but I would say these were universally oriented toward my compatriot, because I've never really understood how to be a person. That said, when he did finally move out - and Brenna moved in, because our formerly tawdry union had been sanctified by marriage - his bathroom was in a fucking haunted state. He neglected to inform me that this sink did not drain, as is traditional for sinks. In fact, even a flush of the toilet would result in a black, rank, presumably sentient ichor rising to fill it a third of the way up. It would then take its own sweet time going down, thick bubbles rising, speaking in a wet voice.

I’ve played a bit of Star Wars Shatterpoint now and I feel comfortable giving you some initial impressions of the game. I’m playing this with my son Noah who is 13 and currently in the midst of an obsession with Star Wars that only a 13 year old is capable of.