I've finally started checking out Pragmata, and it's like the demo, but with a ton more stuff - exactly what you want from "product." It looks sick and for a game asking you to do some Cirque du Soleil shit with your hands it maps to a controller in a way that feels solid. Gabe is playing it on PS5 Pro, the secondary Hacking inputs just map to the face buttons - I figured it would just be an easy remap on PC, that would certainly help Walter, but the way these perverts are navigating the hacking board on PC is with the Goddamn mouse. Just imagine it - picture that shit. These fiends hold down a key or "the back button on your mouse," and then scoot a cursor thingy through the grid. I want to try it just because it seems naughty. Dodgy, like. Type of shit that gets you put on a list.

When I named the strip, I was thinking about how Athena burst from her father's head - considering the bedevilments we had proposed in the strip. As I woke, I feared that there was a vibrator company called Athena and I was Goddamn right. You know how you can have a party where you sell candles or something to your friends? Right. This is like that, except it's for things you… things you put. Things that are and can be put in, like… Anyway, they have different things. For a place.

I've taught him everything I know about Once Upon A Galaxy, and now it's time for Dabe to travel into that wilderness alone.  Well, not entirely alone.  You should go hang out!  Day One of this month's tournament just opened up.  I don't compete in tournaments generally, I find them scary, but I'm excited to explore this new part of myself. 

(CW)TB 

It sounds like there was some networking shit early on that plagued early adopters, but Windrose - part of a genre we attempt to name in the strip - is something I'd already played a bit during one of Steam's various "Fests." These fests are getting more and more baroque, more obscure, and a fest for fests ("Fest Fest") cannot be far behind.

I recently finished my side of a “sketch swap” with the incredible Bob Q after he had already completed his end. Bob and I have very different styles and I think he would agree that it was a difficult task trying to ink and color over the other person’s sketch. From his report, it sounds like he was probably more outside his comfort zone than I was. I grew up wanting to be a comic book artist like Bob is, but I was only good enough to be a cartoonist. So here are the results of our Acquisitions Inc. sketch swap!

I have now gotten him to talk about it twice when he wanted to talk about his colon zero or even fewer times. This accrues not to my capacity for manipulation, but rather to the fact that he has been so harrowed body and mind by the experience he is now essentially just a sausage casing with a t-shirt draped over it. I was able to extract more data in my most recent interrogation and what I learned will shock you.

I always preferred Forza Horizon to the traditional Forza, but I never thought that was a compliment to me.  I would love to say that I stopped going to church because I had unspun the fundamental philosophies inherent to it, and stood astride it, gleaming like a newly minted God.  It's a fiction I'd love to maintain.  In the end, I simply couldn't hack it - I was willing to engage in a multi-year campaign of gruesome self-recrimination, obviously. But once it became clear that it was utterly open-ended, a blank check I would perpetually cash against my own identity, I could burn myself alive or try to go on as a maimed and useless creature.  That's basically me and Forza Horizon.  I wish that I were hardcore enough for the progenitor - of the universe, or the racing franchise.  Take your pick.