Something I wonder about Game Pass is what it means for the people who create games inside it. There's a lot to discuss when it comes to the service broadly; I'm not saying this is the main thing to consider, it's just the one that's closest to me personally. And I'm not talking about the third parties who sign on to the service for launch, or who join the service later as part of the catalog. I mean… the traditional metric for products is sales. We all sorta understand that part. For Game Pass, is it more of a Netflix thing - with "play time" swapped in for "watch" time? And what does that do to your thinking?

I’ll be doing two streams for the price of one today! Here's the schedule:

You can find a substantial body of doomsday cultists established particularly around the realm of Artificial Intelligence. That mythos isn't particularly interesting. I understand that might be seen an unserious position, but I find this type of anxiety about as compelling as "worship God just in case!!!" so you can potentially spare yourself annihilation. People want you to believe in their God - that would certainly be a huge plus for them - but they need you to believe in their devil. Then again, I do try to live my life according to an extended club remix of religious precepts, it's how my momma raised me, and it's been better for the people around me that I have. So maybe I'm just kind of a mess.

I don't really go in for the levels of idol worship considered normal among my people. When I see a toy still in a box, some part of me would rather see it destroyed through joyous play than sequestered in some airless cube, monastic and celibate. But… for paper goods? Like comics, or cards? Prophylactics, man. Every time.

We have detailed the life of the artist and their bizarre psychological texture before, though mostly as it relates to my associate Mr. Gribbz. I share similar dynamics, but they differ in a vital respect: the older a piece of work is for him, and "old" need only be a couple months, the more likely he is to hate it. I think it must have the unnerving feeling of a creature looking at its own dessicated molt. The work is, itself, the evidence of growth but it's also the evidence that you were once smaller upon some axis you endeavored to improve. For me, it's the opposite. Older work is the only way I can understand what I do at all.

Anyone interested in what I was drawing back around 1991? Well I found some old comic pages and I figured I should share.

I downloaded Diablo Immortal on my phone, but deleted it before I made a character. I put the PC version on my computer and then removed it from the folder before I installed. I'm playing lots of shit right now, and I like all of it. Then I was reading a list of all the currencies, subcurrencies, tertiary value slivers, orbs, dusts, and various agglomerations of same in DI, and then we had the conversation in the strip plus Gabriel's description of the last two panels.

I recently got a new Cintiq 16" and I have been doing a bunch of drawing to get used to it. 

I was looking at a very long thread of Kermit the Frogs, or… maybe Kermits the Frog, les grenouilles, and they had all been generated by DALL-E 2 to place the titular amphibian in a variety of films. They looked pretty fucking good. I asked Gabe what he thought about this type of shit, he had a lot of thoughts, and we ended up talking for about an hour.

I had to pause and rest my mind for a moment after he told me the form of his destroyer. I guess he spells it with an "i" in there somewhere, but still.

I grabbed Sniper Elite 5 off game pass to see if it might be fun to play through in co-op with Dabe on Fridays, now that we wrapped up Tunic with all endings. I didn't know if it was one of those games where you gotta do a buncha dumb shit first before they let you play with your friends, maybe not the best stream experience, but no - you're good from the jump. I was having so much fun that I made myself stop so I could just do it all with somebody else. I loved Splinter Cell co-op and you rarely get to sneak around with other people. Just… something about it.

I sort of get what he means; if I'm going to play videogames, I might as well play videogames. You know?

It is fucking weird! I was trying to explain this to Trystan, perhaps better known as Walnut or Prism in this case, yesterday on the phone. I just did a search for "AD&D" on Groogle, to verify a couple things, and the first search result was something called "Accidental Death & Dismemberment," which isn't exactly what I was looking for but is still kinda true and a thing that absolutely happens in this game. This game used maim motherfuckers right and left. Like… Cory Maim. You know what I'm saying?

We will be celebrating the two year anniversary of the Penny Arcade iRacing league tonight! 

One of the things that results from this level of industry consolidation is even more consolidation. It happens for all the same reasons that the original ones did, the preconditions still exist, but then when the FTC asks you why this merger is necessary, you just gesture out your window at the Kaiju Amalgams they've feted previously. You indicate their chimerical body plan, the gnarled tusks, the trail of smoking, emerald slime behind them, and you say there's no way for us to even exist in this place with those things running around. Look at its taut, distended belly, the trapped spirits swirling within, desperate for release. It doesn't even matter what we make, they will say, our industry is a feeding ground. We must become monsters, or we will be food for monsters.

Jerry is coming over this afternoon to continue our D&D adventures on the Genesis.