The only way to really understand how the modern influencer superstructure functions is to understand how information used to work. There was "a media" and it was rigorously policed. There's simply too much information to be contiguous at this point; it must divide, partition, like a cell. People live in radically different worlds now, and the same information has a different valence in each of them. Engagement, devoid of context or meaning, is the coin of the realm where data has proliferated beyond our ability to meaningfully process it. This is how it came to be that two objectively abhorrent demons and a greasy, grinning mannequin have entered the business of feeding children.

I play Rainbow Six Siege every day. I’m absolutely hooked on this game. At first I was just playing it because I wanted to play with my boys and it was something we could all do together, but now I play alone while they're at school. There’s so much to learn between almost a hundred different operators and tons of unique maps with destructible walls which make them ridiculously mutable. I’d say that map awareness is the most important skill you can have in Rainbow Six Siege and that takes a lot of time to get a handle on. I’ve been playing for months now and I feel like I understand the various bomb sites in each map but I’m just starting to understand the connective tissue between sites and how everything connects. The game having so much to learn is part of the reason I think I’m still hooked. Every game I play I’m still learning and that’s rewarding. 

I've never installed cheats, not even to satisfy a morbid curiosity, in the same way that Gandalf feared the power of The Ring. The metaphor continues from there, because my era of cheats always had a dark nimbus; you were just rawdogging some mysterioso executable. God only knows what you're gonna catch. Matters are different now for cheats, to hear Mork's boys tell it, because they're essentially things you subscribe to. I'd never looked them up. I was curious how hard it would be to find, and they're, uh, not. They're not hard to find. I was startled at the professionalism - the 24/7 support line, the layout, and of course the fifty dollar a month price tag. Let me emphasize again: there is a support line for these game-shredding hacks. Kiko enunciated it well; in the era of service gaming, not just an assemblage of random hosts, it's a constant war like that of an immune system. The cheats, then, must be services also.

We’re just about one month away for this year’s Child’s Play Charity auction and dinner, on November 22nd! I’ll be there and I’d love it if you joined me. You can find more details and read up on what Child’s Play has been doing in my post right here or just go directly to the site and buy your tickets right here. It’s a super fun event so come help us raise money for a great cause!

-Gabe Out

The funniest thing about this is… well, maybe it's not funny broadly. The ironic thing about it is that the worst sort of abuse he could visit upon a miniature is beyond the apex of what I could ever achieve, and even he feels like this. So it must just be part of the Human Condition to find ourselves dwarfed by the immensity of The Task At Hand.

Last time Gabriel and his inheritors went wild on wargaming, part of the reason it fell apart was that they dug too greedily and too deep. Any one of the wargames that Games Workshop makes could be your entire life - they could certainly be your entire paycheck. They were playing Kill Team and Warhammer 40k 9th edition at the same time, and it didn't help that each of these games shares some language that doesn't actually mean the same thing in the different contexts. Plus, the 9th Edition of 40k just isn't as fun as the new one - they got a taste of 10 and they're sticking with it, despite my most fervent attempts.

It's hard to say goodbye. So Silent Hill, but maybe also to Australia, parts of which clearly overlap.

This is just a quick post to mention that the Darksiders II Deathinitive edition just dropped yesterday and so far I’m really impressed.  I love all the games in the Darksiders series but I think the second one is probably my favorite. It’s always been a beautiful game with excellent combat, fun traversal and awesome Zelda style puzzles. This new Deathinitive edition makes the game run in 4k at 60FPS, adds Raytracing, DuelSense controller integration and quicker load times. I’ve spent a few hours with the game so far and the upgrades are great! If you never played it I highly recommend grabbing this new version if you’re looking for a slick hack and slash action RPG. If you already played it like me these upgrades make going back totally worth it. These days it feels like a lot of games are trying to be an HBO series instead of a game and Darksiders II is simply a kick ass fucking videogame.  

-Gabe Out

After we did the last one, we couldn't stop. Anything as serious as Silent Hill is has seeds of silliness in it! That's just how it works.

I always do a couple of these ahead of time because I'm about to enter a Midnight Realm that I feel confident will prepare me for the mind-rending terrors of Friday Night's Arkham Horror game.

I had joined the Games Workshop fandom at the tail end of 9th edition. I started out learning standard Warhammer 40k and ended up choosing the Black Templars as my army. While attempting to learn that, I was shown Kill Team which of course I also bought a rule book for and tried to learn. Around this time I discovered they had a whole nother game called Age Of Sigmar with even more armies and so I had to check that out. Then they hit me with Boarding Actions and finally 10th edition. I think I blew some sort of fuse in my brain at that point and had to check out of all of it.  I never really felt like I had a firm grasp of the rules for any of those games. It was just too much too quickly. 

I don't know if Ambien is sleep, exactly, but it's definitely not lying in bed looking at the ceiling, or pressure-sealed into a Sky Coffin, and that can be a nice change of pace. Gabe had tried it once to great success on the Australian Flight, but the second time he tried it he entered a Devil Dream that lasted almost sixteen hours - one from which he could not wake. As per usual, we tried to shape and mould these horrors into something silly, an attempt at inoculation in the form of a feathered sky serpent called J.D. that at least I found enjoyable. We made a joke about me taking it, mostly just so we could see J.D. again, but until a couple weeks ago I'd never tried it at all. I only had a couple, I mostly ran out, and I'm glad. That's the kind of shit a witch would give you in a fairy tale. I have a little left, like a few crumbs of lembas wrapped in mallorn leaves, and I'll be using it to board one of the motherfucking White Ships to the motherfucking West. I apologize in advance - it would appear Dreaded Continuity has reared its wicked and serpentine head once again.

Josef Fares has carved out a crazy history in game dev - he was a filmmaker before, which makes sense I guess if you look at his work. He started with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons back at Starbreeze, who is making a D&D game now I guess? Brothers has a weird trick it pulls that I still think about ten years later, and I'm confident that it has the power to heal the rift.

Acquisitions Incorporated Returns To Aus - With the Brand New Arkham Horror RPG! I've been playing Arkham Horror stuff for decades at this point - and like the moist and shapeless creatures it depicts, the game itself has taken many forms over the years and has somehow, impossibly, remained good. A living card game? Absolutely. Dice, somehow? Great, incomprehensibly so, and I am forced by the disease I have to tell you that divination using dice is called "Astragalomancy." But they aren't done, they go wide with the mythos: social deduction? Also yes. Co-op adventure? This too. But!

But.

When my mom calls, I feel like it's because she has a preternatural ability to contact me right as I'm about to engage in a task. It's a skill, and she has mastered it. The moment a task is about to begin, as soon as the mise en place has been… you know, placed, a communique from my Creator bores into the proceedings. I think I have inherited her uncanny knack for auguring into otherwise useful moments, because when I call my own child - who is not a child, I must remind myself, but a legal adult - they act like I'm trying to sell them a timeshare.

A big part of reading reviews and coverage and discourse and whatever the fuck is squinting your eyes real tight and trying to divine what the actual motivation for writing something even is. There's been aggression of various kinds toward the movie from the jump, but there's some Dark River underneath the surface conversation. Even if "all" it ended up being was a hundred million dollar jobs program for a ton of weirdos on both sides of a camera, that's fine. Good, actually. It's plenty.