Of course, I sent this strip to Will before we posted it. He liked it and may even have been touched, independent of its horrors.

Thursday night is race night. The Penny Arcade league will hit the track tonight and the Pit Crew will open at 7:30PT. Tonight we're racing Road America for a multi class event. That means there will essentially be two races happening at once on the same track. Drivers have a choice between the Cadillac CTS and the Kia Otima with the Cadillac being quite a bit faster and harder to control. You're only racing the other cars in your class but both races are happening at the same time so you have a chaotic track. Tonight will be our 98th iRacing stream and I've got big plans for episode 100 which we should hit next week. I'll be giving away a set of Logitech G733 headphones as well as a Buttkicker and hopefully showing off some of the Gabir Motors merch we have on the way. I may also get a cake to eat on stream, we'll see.

Our experience with the Co-Op in Genshin Impact - something you don't unlock until Adventure Rank 16, a kind of "meta-level" independent of characters - is that it is very, very much unlike the game proper. Not necessarily in a bad way, but because you've played so much of the game solo at that point not being able to do the things you've done for the last twenty or so hours is quite a surprise.

About a week ago Gabriel sent me the cover of a book that attempted to snare the reader with its romantic tales of brothers who were dragons but also, somehow, Irish. I was going to use the term Inexplicable to describe it, but it's super, super explicable. It is deeply, profoundly explicable: it's a sex thing. The same author offers tales of Bears - a term I was already familiar with, but these are heterosexual bears, and also actual bear bears in some way. Like, the animal. You don't meet these bears through an app, like you typically would. You meet a bear like this because you are a cougar - literally and figuratively - and you're trying to find your parent's killers.

I'm playing it now too, trying to put in enough time to access the multiplayer, where I can only assume the trap is truly set. Because this whole first part is basically like somebody forgot to tell them they were making a freemium game - you see the lure so often you become inured to it. The elemental systems are old school JRPG brain snacks. He's played it for God knows how long at this point, not spending a dime, and Not Spending A Dime while Getting Maximum Time out of it seems to be the game for him.

It's sometimes the case that Jerry and I create jokes and then you guys help us embellish them. The greatest example of this I believe is the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. Jerry and I cooked up the name of this setting and gave a few examples such as Grimm Shado. We also claimed that this made up fantasy BS was a rich IP that spanned decades and included books, cartoons and all sorts of amazing stuff. The Penny Arcade audience then went completely bat shit and created a massive wiki that attempted to collect all the information there was about this non existent franchise. Jerry and I just watched as this thing grew by the hour and soon I was drawing fan art of my favorite Wizbit. I understand if you don’t remember Wizbits, it was a “re-imagining” of the Japanese anime ElamenSTAR which originally aired in Japan in 1996, as a cross promotion with the collectible card game ElemenSTAR Card Battle renamed Wizbits Elemenstor Battle for the US.  

I would love to tell you about Genshin Impact, a pretty, gacha MMO thing which I have seen called Breath of the Weeb. Well, one time. On my Twitter. Not by me! I don't have a special word for a person who likes long pillows.

The comic is true, I did switch phones because I wanted to try out Game Pass streaming. I bought a couple different controller options and my favorite is by far the Razer Kishi. 

I feel bad sometimes because I talk about Game Pass a lot. I think you're supposed to angle to get paid or something, to ply the Influencer's Trade, and there may be nothing more suckerian than shilling in a context where no schillings have changed hands.

One of the more elaborate ongoing genres of strip is the Mike's Birthday Strip, of which there are several examples. As today is his birthday in Truth, we have delivered what we hope will be a work of comfort for those who celebrate - wherever they may find themselves.

I did make an effort to secure an Xbox Series X, using a link Gabriel was turned on to later, and I could get all the way to the end of the process but attempting to make a purchase just made the top of the page turn yellow. It suggested a link I could click for more information, and I did so, learning that the reason I wasn't able to make the purchase was (a shifting, twenty character alphanumeric kaleidoscope).

Target was a real shit show yesterday along with every other store I tried to buy an Xbox Series X from. Target was especially frustrating in that it kept telling me I had one in my cart but wouldn’t let me buy it. I had pretty much given up when I got sent a link to the MS store via twitter that people claimed was working. I was skeptical and the site was a bit slow but all be damned if it didn’t work! So I did manage to score a Series X on launch day but looking around it seems like I was one of the lucky ones. I know they will make more and eventually they’ll be easy to get but I’ve always been a sucker for new hardware, it’s a weakness in my genes. 

A lot of dinners I had to eat much later because of the schedule, I just had something going on then, I was being beamed to various places and because I was not corporeal at that time I could not eat. Gotta have a mouth for that. But I still ate more than I would have at a regular PAX, which is basically nothing but whatever nuts and seeds are being pulverized at the bottom of my backpack. I did go to the Cheesecake Factory once, yes, my mom was there, and I think that is the kind of place you go with your mom. What they brought me to eat was an aggressive, fried sculpture that defied the diner to contend with it. It was a kind of martial challenge delivered in the dialectic of lunch.

Because "compatibility," broadly writ, is sort of an assumption for The Last Generation of Consoles the intensity with which one must seek out a platform's Exemplar is diluted somewhat. At least, for me. Gabriel craves a gadget, and so when he is denied one it is keenly felt. The PS4 Pro and the One X have more than enough beef to let me ride out these dessications of supply, caused - as I understand it - by a clan of nano-augmented raiders called "The Axiom." Any suffering it might engender will be of exceedingly short duration.

Monster Energy is a company that makes hummingbird food, and they are under the impression that this grants them primacy over a term whose etymological loam is Latin, causing them to spasmodically whip and gnash at completely reasonable uses of the word like Ubisoft's Gods and Monsters. Ubi did change the name, saying it was a creative decision, but it's hard to imagine an undisturbed creative process that results in the only name more pale and derivative than Gods And Monsters.

Had a blast with the Make A Strip panel yesterday, an ancient PAX tradition manifest this strip and also in the nearly twelve thousand dollars raised for Child's Play Charity in exchange for the application of an exclusive, show specific fairy. At a suggestion from the ineluctable Gavin Greco, said fairy is modeled after the humble Webcam, a device whose star has risen substantially in this incredibly haunted year.