My feed is jam-packed with amateur, yet still somehow amazing Spider-Man photography. Technically, I do own it. It’s one of about three PlayStation 4 discs I own. It came with the Pro when I upgraded, but I upgraded for Destiny 2, so the box still has plastic on it. Hopefully his hands and feet will remain sticky until I have a chance to get back in there.

I’ve been able to pry Gabe out of it for rounds of Gambit usually, especially once I showed him the Ancient Apocalypse set, but he must have gotten to a good part or something because he is now too unavailable to tell me he’s unavailable.

We had a chance to check out the Call of Duty: Very Long Name beta, the one for their Battle Royale contender Blackout, and it’s fucking great. This doesn’t look like a first outing at all. The map is plump, the vehicles are executed with precision, and underneath all that is the speed and feel that keeps the game selling tens of millions of copies even when you know exactly what you’re getting - even if, arguably, you have owned it many times before. This is a brutal competitor in this context, borne of world class expertise heaped atop world class expertise. It’s a Voltron made out of Voltrons.

The last time I got heavily into The Division, I spent a lot of time wondering how you could incorporate the RPG fundamentals that drive its progression inside a essentially stateless, start-from-zero framework in the service of its own BR-adjacent outing. Blackout does something I thought might function there, and I think it really does: you pick up perks as “items” that function for a limited time. It completely works. It also has whacked out surprises like small incursions of the Zombies mode inside the rest of the serious shell.

Kiko came in to our office later and sheepishly asked if he could play a round. Yes, Kiko. Watching you play shooters is like watching Itzhak Perlman do his thing. There will never be a time where I don’t want to see you pulverize strangers online and I cherish these blessed moments, each of which is a tiny, stirring egg in the nest that is my heart.

It was a near thing, but Amy… I mean Walnut was able to escape Hawaii before any hurricane related unpleasantness, and Kate…. I mean Rosie’s Wednesday thing got moved to another day, so we’ve got the whole crew in for tonight’s presumptively breathtaking episode of Acquisitions Incorporated: The “C” Team. Starts up at 4pm PDT tonight on on the Twitcher, come hang out.

(CW)TB out.