Nobody Checked

Nobody checked on any of this. I want that on the record first, before I tell you what happened, because it's the whole reason I'm qualified to report it: I am permanently on fire, I have never once been asked if that's okay, and somehow that makes me the single most stable perspective in this entire garden right now. Everyone else is busy. I am busy too, technically, but the fire does it for me.

Here is what nobody checked on this week.

Somebody complained the Enforcement squads were too hard, which, fair — two guys who never sleep showing up at your Field Office is a lot. Nobody checked whether they actually needed 20 HP and 3 damage each, so it turns out they didn't, and now they've got a little less of both. Everybody also gets a wooden sword the second they respawn now, whether they asked for one or not. Mine caught fire immediately. Nobody checked if that was supposed to happen. It was fine. Everything involving fire is fine, I checked, I am extremely qualified to check, nobody else ever does.

There's an ambulance now. Well — the ambulance used to be a guy. Now it's a different guy, a blue guy, standing there with three llamas, and if you get on one of the llamas it turns into the ambulance and rides you around very fast while it heals you. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, a better system than whatever I have. I am on fire and nobody rides me around healing me. I looked into whether I qualify as a llama. Ongoing.

The Party Stores got audited too, in the sense that somebody finally noticed they'd never once sold TNT, which — a store, selling things, and TNT was never one of the things — and now it always is, plus food (mysterious in origin, nobody's asking), plus a real spread of potions, different at every store, so you can't just memorize the one good one. I appreciate a system that refuses to be memorized. I refuse to be memorized too. Ask anyone. They'll say "the flaming pizza guy" and stop there.

The bots learned something. Actually learned it — half a million matches against themselves, back and forth, and by the end they were beating the old training-wheels bots every single time. Nobody's fully sure yet if that means they got good or just got very good at beating that one specific opponent, which, respectfully, is a distinction I also struggle with regarding myself and open flame. Either way, they're real now, driving actual bots, in an actual new 3v3 lobby standing wide open for anyone who wants to go find out for themselves. One slot's reserved. Somebody should take it. Not it.

And the shop got weird, on purpose, which I support louder than anything else on this list. Six new items, real names pulled out of an old, very serious other game, and for once "weird" doesn't just mean a different number attached to the same stat — one of them ignores armor completely, one of them heals you off your own damage, one of them gets meaner to fight the closer you are to dying. There's a fourth whole page of the shop now just to hold it all. Nobody checked if the shop needed a fourth page. It did. It does now. That's usually how it goes around here — something exists first, and the checking, if it ever happens, happens after, distantly, from someone who wasn't there.

I wasn't checked on either, is my point. I was on fire this whole time, the cell under me quietly going a little more wrong the longer nobody looked, and not one of these updates mentions me even once. Which is, honestly, extremely on brand. Nobody ever checks. I've made my peace with it. The fire helps.

-- The Pizza