Young Mork attended the Child's Play Dinner, a traditional haunt, and offered up an auction off the cuff - drawing your D&D character, that ended up bringing in twenty-thousand dollars. I was gonna type that with numbers, but stretched out it's such a fucking slab. It was a crafty play and it's the sort of thing he has done many times at the event - reading the room, then identifying and playing along to its energy. He wrote up a whole thingy about the night plus Child's Play in general, here twenty years in.

The Child’s Play charity reached its 20th anniversary last week and I had the pleasure of attending the celebratory dinner and auction!

There was a brief window where I was gonna go to college. Well, I was gonna try to. And it was community college - the same one that Gabriel attended, very briefly, until the N64 came out and he never went back.

A couple new gaming commentary collectives materialized over the past couple days. The first one I saw was Second Wind, which hatched from a firing at The Escapist that saw many others descend along with him - the whole thing is very Lucifer. Initially, I thought Second Wind might be named after Christian rock powerhouse Petra's seminal 1982 track - but it's more likely related to the rising phoenix they have taken as their sacred heraldry. Aftermath ex-Kotaku supergroup featuring writers from various taylorian Eras. In either case, it's the continuation of a trend. Centralization and Decentralization: welcome to the ladder. We were around long enough to see "blogging" born. These dynamics have been around.

I just couldn't look away from Silent Hill: Ascension apparently. Part of it may be that I keep typing it as Silent Hill: Ascencion, which I feel adds a little excitement. But also because the developer has already had to disable chat because they don't have a robust system for policing it. Apparently their chat was incredibly horny and racist simultaneously, too horny and racist to continue, so now chat consists exclusively (I believe) of stickers you purchase from them.

There's a whole video you need to watch to understand what is even happening in Silent Hill: Ascension, called "The Essentials." That's because it's a genuinely weird combination of livestream, choose your own adventure, FOMO pump, and pay to win. And that certainly sounds bad, but there are some whacked out, really cool ideas in here along with the rest of the Modernity that has gripped so much of the space. There is, in fact, a Silent Hill Battle Pass, which… well, just read the strip.

Gabe wanted to meet someplace in VR, but most of the stuff I play in VR are games like Demeo, where who you are is sorta defined by the game - there's no "you" out there really, just some hands and a mask. So when I popped in, I popped in as Ronia - a person for whom the Avatar Creator is an entire game in itself. I suspected that I might, but thought it would be complex psychologically for him, which was a reason to do it. Just know that everything happened exacty as you see it here.

Mr. Dobolina - specifically, Mr. Grob Dobolina - bounced hard off of Alan Wake. He didn't like The Mind Place. Or anything really! To compare and contrast, I spent four hours fixing my computer so I could play it as the developer intended. There's a delta there.

I’ve had the Meta Quest 3 for a few weeks now and I’m ready to deliver some initial thoughts on this new device. 

Mork is up to his ass in Spiderian delights, pausing only briefly to lament a curtailing of his alien bioweapons. I wondered if Alan Wake 2 might turn his head, but he feels the same way about Alan Wake 2 that he has always felt about Alan Wake. That's what Monday's strip is about.

Mork is up to his ass in Spiderian delights, pausing only briefly to lament a curtailing of his alien bioweapons. I wondered if Alan Wake 2 might turn his head, but he feels the same way about Alan Wake 2 that he has always felt about Alan Wake. That's what Monday's strip is about.

There's a lot of good stuff in the new offerings and the best way to get at it is just to show you:

Morak has been solving very sophisticated problems of great import by rotating hexagrams in Spider-Man 2. Understand that these are Full Rotations - and perhaps as an index of his skill, he tells me that when he rotates a hexagram it "stays rotated." I didn't have a lot of context to go on, but it sounds like in this specific scenario that's good.

Oh! Before we get into anything else, actual prostate doctors got hold of me and sent me a bunch of links - the main one being this, a recommendation from the incredibly important sounding U.S. Preventive Services Task Force which basically says that the decision to even do PSA screening is more trouble than it's worth. That's literally what it says - they say it should be a personal decision. And that's for people who are like ten years older than us! People our age, which I thought was quite advanced, aren't even on the chart for recommendations. Somebody needs to tell our fucking doctors this information, because it seems like they don't know. Mine lost his watch in there last time; I had to come back later.

When we were writing the strip, Gorbiriel revealed that he had a date with Destiny - specifically the part of his destiny where someone he barely knows rummages around inside his VIP area. The last comic we have about this - there is a nontrivial amount of content here under the "prostate" tag - is from February of this year, which indicates that he's waited seven full months to engage in this Satanic consummation. God only knows what's been going on in there since. With any luck, it's simply sprouted legs and run off.

The Meta Quest 3 is a really interesting device from a company whose primary footprint on the world is essentially a form of elder abuse. I've had to talk with my mom about a lot of the things she sees on there. Certainly, I could just offer her the equal and opposite political force - as a suburban Seattleite I am profoundly well versed in its various catechisms.  But she's only telling me those things to counter what she thinks I think. That torrent is something I had been combating in each discreet instance, so lately I've just been trying to explain how bad arguments are constructed and what the signs to look out for are. It seems like it might be saving me time? I guess we'll see.