I mean, I don't know why you would buy Bandcamp. I mean, not "you" specifically. And even if "you" wanted to buy Bandcamp, you couldn't! Epic already did. Actually, wait a second. PC Gamer is right, I'd just forgotten about it - they also bought ArtStation, which has very firm parallels in other media. They have a ton of acquisitions on the tools side of game development, and companies like this can be thought of as asset libraries or pipelines. I think of them as containing end products, of course, because that's where I exist in the food chain of global capital. That's what's eye level to me.

I feel a strange compulsion to read the messages in Souls type games, even though the actual utility of the practice is uneven at best. A kind of real-time information warfare, they're about a one to five admixture of crucial, timely, life-saving information and "Try fingers, but hole." I've seen this last one many, many times. I like to think it's all the same person, which is sorta what the strip is about; a dark fantasy Johnny Appleseed, but for fingers in your butt. What a sentence! 2022 is going great so far.

I just checked in another post and Elden Ring strip in the Club PA Patreon, but Elden Ring content is thick on the ground now and I am prepared to deploy it in abundance. Even though we managed to escape the time warp, apparently some GamePro vestiges remain.

I think we'll pause the experiment for now, but there's a lot of headroom in these ancient scrolls. We never even got to GamePro or Nintendo Power! Someone was saying that were we to stay this course, we would eventually get to comics about how long Sin takes to load, and I like that just for the internal loop. It calls to mind Pepsi's perimeter oscillations, and if it's sufficient to buoy that storied edifice we could probably make due with the occasional mystic whorl.

I did everything I could! Every legal thing, at least. God only knows when this will end! Although, if I had to hazard a guess, it’s gonna be once I get back into town.

When we were sitting down to make the strip… I don't need to contextualize any of this. Sorry! If your job is to type sometimes you just start typing. The strip (in the manner of a balanced breakfast) contains every nutrient.

As the sands of time rush faster and faster through the hourglass I have, like so many before me, begun to take solace in the trinkets and obsessions of my youth. Whereas a man of my father’s generation might have turned to model trains or the cars they dreamt of as a boy, I have hooked up my Genesis. 

I know he is having a good time with Horizon: Forbidden West because he keeps using the PS5's share capability to project mind-shreddingly beautiful clips of it on Twitter. He's simply trying to extend his time with it.

Late last year, as you might recall, Gabe had been sufficiently tantalized by Battlefield 2042 to pre-order for beta access. The practical outcome was that this beta convinced him that he shouldn't have bought it, but it was too late. There's an Alanis Morissette song about this I think. It's like one of those sci-fi novellas where the protagonist is assigned to kill themselves or some shit. There's a cosmic payload there and we're still unraveling it.

Obviously, one hesitates to engage in armchair psychology. That's sort of a joke: this is something literally everyone does all the time. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn? And also to ascribe troubling psychoses to people we've never met? I'm not sure if you've heard of Twitter. It happens on there sometimes.

The news that Nintendo is shutting down the 3DS and WiiU eShops comes at an interesting time because I’ve been thinking a lot about the games I own recently. For the last few weeks I’ve been going through old boxes in my garage and trying to sort out what games and consoles I actually own physical versions of. As it turns out I own more 3DS and DS games than anything else when it comes to real physical media. 

I haven't played Lost Ark. I bounced off Diablo III, for fuck's sake; it may be that the genre has simply lost its grip on me. Or I can't grip it, or something. It's a grip issue of some kind. Gabriel was able to determine that he wasn't interested anymore very quickly and told me so.

I was hoping this Nintendo Direct would have some Breath Of The Wild II shit, which in my house is known colloquially as "botwatu." But they've suggested that they can't even say the subtitle without spoilers, and since it sorta seems like it might be the closing parenthesis on the whole story… maybe they don't put it on the mantle unless they intend to fire it.

"Playstation Exclusive" often means "Available On Epic Game Store," which I appreciate. I grabbed Sifu because Gabe advocated for it at full volume, but also because I'd seen some streams of it, and in the hands of some of these dorks it streams better than any game I've ever seen.

The best, most entertaining, more productive way for Gabriel and I to "play" a game together is for me to just sit next to him on the couch. That's more or less the ethos of the site anyway, it's represented by an incalculable (that is to say, deeply and profoundly calculable) number of strips where we do just that. I have a lot of valuable opinions on when he should jump and he shouldn't be deprived of that. A lot of it depends on the game. I feel like this is basically how it would go.

(This is the last day I'm pushing this - consider supporting the vast network of people who make a living connected to events.  There are a lot of them.)