As we suggest in the strip, bad contracts and professional myopia are phenomena we know something about. Let me start with the first part, which is to say that you straight up, flat-out don't know how to read contracts. This is just what I was thinking about when it comes to something like the Tfue stuff, but he's already a multimillionaire and this was all pretext anyway. Social media enables a kind of mystical, extrajudicial space and there's no guarantee that's going to be extended to you in any way you're gonna like. Better to make sure your wards are in place ahead of time.

I can remember when Gabe was telling me about Dauntless, a game we'd never heard of in a booth we'd never seen before at PAX South. Gabe spent most of his time there, and the promise seemed to be a free to play Monster Hunter. And that's more or less what they did.

Gabriel and I tend to approach things so differently that we can often accurately predict how the other will feel about something, simply by modeling our own position at a high level of detail and then inverting it. One thing we do agree on is that, if we are really enjoying a game, we will often stop somewhere near the end.

I was all kindsa ready to get down on this Rage 2 stuff, the id Software/Avalanche combo has the texture of a summer mixtape, and every video up until now was deeply weird in a way that made me appreciate whoever had decided to pay for all this - a sequel to something that felt more like Engine than Game, for which I bear them no ill will. Why you would do it, and then how it could then manifest this kind of manic energy, is the kind of impossible horseshit that I naturally gravitate toward. It had that indie, auteur patina. We loved Mad Max, even when stupid people said it was bad.

I'm typing this on Thursday because I am getting up at eff o'clock on Friday to pick up Amy and go the Airport so I go down - literally down, on a map - to The Descent. Which is a D&D Event celebrating the new campaign stuff! Our own book comes out next month (!!!), June 18th, but the Multiverse has continued to spin in the meantime, and down seems like a scary direction. Let's see where they end up taking us.

I disagree man.

Giving Star Wars to the Game Of Thrones people is a fascinating choice, particularly as these creators grow more spent and villainous in perception with every passing episode. I would have given it to Deadwood's David Milch, but that's just me. As Star Wars is largely about Lineage, of course, Carnivale's Daniel Knauf would also work. I mean, while we're giving it to HBO people. What we need in truth is an HBO Star Wars series, not another Trilogy. But anyway.

There's an article on Venture Beat, which is a website, about how a proposed anti-loot box bill has zero chance of passing. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it didn't pass. Like most legislation, I suspect it constitutes a kind of opportunistic fan-fiction. Also, nobody has any idea what they're fucking talking about.

My version of hell is one where my mind operates incorrectly. It's one thing to just be more "enthusiastic" than usual about adjectives; for me, any increase over my already taut baseline shoves the whole operation into space. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a fever-borne state of mind where every physical act is coupled with an imaginary purpose in a dreamscape based on rural Oregon, such that needing to cough correlates to placing a fencepost and actually coughing is digging a hole. It went on like this for ten sleepless hours, and I say ten hours because that is what the clock told me, for that evil place had no relationship to time. I sweated through three pillows. Even under the best circumstances, this is not the body you would choose. Being super wet does not elevate its virtues.

I have been seized by a terrible illness, unfortunately not the kind of illness that would lend vigor to my upcoming mixtape. No, it's more the kind of illness associated with disease. You might note that at the bottom of the strip, in the lower right hand corner, the name Amy is visible - this is a reference to Amy T Falcone, Strip Search alum and repper of the natural world, but also our good friend. So good a friend, in fact, that she colored the strip on stream while Gabriel stuffed his mouth with hot chicken. Thus was the credit earned.

Gabriel and his clan, the Crewhuliks, have been dining on a choice slice of free expansion content for Sea of Thieves called "Tall Tales: Shores of Gold" which sounds piratical as all get-out. It makes it seem like some pirate shit is gonna happen - and fast.

I used to love playing with action figures as a kid and I was fortunate enough to grow up during what surely must have been their golden age. In the 80’s it seemed like we got a new world full of heroes and villains every Saturday. You had the big ones like G.I. Joe, He-Man and Transformers but then there were hundreds of smaller settings like M.A.S.K., Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Centurions, and Visionaries. Even as a kid I recognized on some level that these were simply commercials for toys but I loved them all anyways. I was obsessed with these worlds and the very first stories I ever told were with these larger than life characters. I used to spend hours by myself setting up my G.I. Joe guys and creating my own crazy adventures.

We get up to some shit in Days Gone. A lot of the time the shit we get up to involves something called a Freaker, from the French "friquer," meaning "to freak." They are very unhappy because they dwell in the twilit sliver between life and death. There are many challenges. You can get Prime, but not Netflix. That kind of stuff. The legal substrate is porous.

I think I could sit on the couch and watch Gabriel play Days Gone for an indefinite period of time. One of the things about it is that, like Alan Wake, it reveres the kind of terrain I grew up in - the particular kind of wild place we recognize in what is called the Pacific Northwest. I saw a ridge of snowcapped peaks, peaks whose jaunty caps would soon be a phalanx of clean, cold streams and cricks, and I was like, "Yeah. Things are going to be okay" in a way that only clean water and holy nature can make so.

I own all the SteamWorld games, on a variety of platforms, and the restless whimsy of developer Image & Form is always on display. SteamWorld is not a game but an idea; the idea is that cute robots are doing all the things. The era, the characters, and the genre all hang from that, in suspended multiplicity, as though gently swinging on a mobile.

I’m looking over at the pause screen for Days Gone right now and it says “758 DAYS GONE” which I think is very cool. It’s a running tally that tracks just how long you’ve spent in the zombie infested wilderness of Oregon. I’ve been playing it as much as I can every day since it came out and even now as I write this I am hungry to pick the controller back up. Open World game fatigue is certainly a real thing, and I don’t begrudge anyone who’s tired of running all over hell's half acre ticking of boxes. Days Gone has its hooks in me though and I wanted to share a few of the things I think make it stand out.