GREEN BAY, Wis. — A flyer was slipped under doors at Glenbrook Health this week, reminding residents that the upcoming Firefly reunion would be properly broadcast on the big TV in the common room.

“Good morning, Friends of Glenbrook!” read the flyer, in large type. “We have been getting LOTS of questions (which is good!) about an upcoming voyage on the U.S.S. Firefly. So we will be having a P~A~R~T~Y! Please wear your best ‘Brown Coat’ (or ANYTHING brown!), and gather around the big TV Friday at 1PM. Be there, or be a Reaver!”  

The flyer, featuring a photo of the first search result for “Firefly classic TV show cast,” was confirmed to be authored by Wellness Director Gina Serrano, a thirteen-year employee who thinks of the show more as “her parents’ thing.” 

“We haven’t seen residents this excited since King of the Hill returned,” said Serrano, who will likely never earn enough to live at Glenbrook herself. “So we’re overcommunicating: flyers, texts, big reminders on the welcome screens…we’ve even ordered a Cameo from Alan Tudyk!”

Firefly, which ran on FOX from 2002 to 2002, is fondly remembered by America’s aging population—particularly former bloggers, video store clerks, and Realplayer web DJ’s. 

“Buh…blue hands, bad guys had…” said Glenbrook resident Arturo Fuente, excitedly explaining the classic show’s lore to a staff nurse. “The Alliance… rough customers, them. Not all bad… not all good. Complexity… hallmark of Whedon’s stuh …storytelling…” 

Experts were quick to offer explanations about the show’s special place in the hearts of “The Computer Generation.” 

“What can we say? Old people love westerns,” said Eric “Spooky” Simmons, pop-culture expert and former wraparound-segment host for Canada’s The Space Channel. “Guns, fistfights, pretty dames like Christina Hendricks and Gina Torres… you can see how it was a welcome escape from 9/11!”

At press time, loud cheers were heard around the big TV, unfortunately drowning out cries for help from several heart attack victims.

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LOS ANGELES — Hasbro Entertainment, the production company behind the upcoming HBO series based on Baldur’s Gate 3, has posted a casting call for actors with unshaven and uncircumcised penises, sources confirm.

“I’ve worked with HBO before, so I understand and appreciate their process,” said executive producer Craig Mazin. “They always start with the genitalia and work backwards. It may seem strange, but you can’t argue with the results. They make hits. Even on The Last of Us, where we had extensive source material to work with, they wanted us to diagram every P and V in the show. You wouldn’t believe the late night arguments Neil Druckmann and I got into about whether Joel leaned left or right, but it ultimately informed his character. I’m grateful that Baldur’s Gate has templates for us to use.”

Some actors said they were willing to take drastic measures to secure a part on the highly-anticipated series.

“I actually just scheduled my adult circumcision today,” said Cameron Steele, 26, an aspiring actor. “My family thinks I’m crazy, but this is a competitive industry. Besides, it isn’t the craziest thing I’ve done for a part. Hell, I had my ears surgically modified into points when I auditioned for The Legend of Zelda, and I still didn’t get that part. I’m desperate. If they said the role required castration, I’d consider it.”

Swen Vincke, founder and CEO of Larian Studios and director of the Baldur’s Gate 3 video game, said he was happy to have a development partner who was taking the project so seriously.

“It just tells me that they’re fans,” said Vincke. “They pay attention to the lore. Sure, everyone’s Tav is different. There is no canonical race or class. But whether Tav is a halfling rogue or a tiefling sorcerer, they one-hundred-percent have a bush. That was our vision for the character, and I’m thrilled that it’s being preserved for the show.”

At press time, Hasbro had altered certain details of the posting after discovering they had accidentally installed a “Big Penis” mod.

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CHICAGO — McDonald’s had unfortunate news for fans anticipating its Big Arch, with the company revealing this morning that the new product had failed to reach 5,000 concurrent eaters.

“I know our fans around the world were refreshing RestaurantDB over the weekend, but unfortunately, we’ve failed to reach our target,” CEO Chris Kempczinski said. “Even at its peak hours over the weekend, we failed to cross 5,000 CCEs, when we’re usually floating around 3,500 by lunchtime. We’re very sorry to the fans who, more than a good burger, wanted a popular one.”

Armchair analysts on social media were quick to pile on the fast food giant.

“What are they doing over there?” one Bluesky post said. “They didn’t even advertise this anywhere. There’s so many good burgers out there, and they’ve even made some of them. Yet they put this out there and expect us to flood the drive-thrus and make their stats look good? Yeah, right. They had less concurrent eaters than the Arby’s Meat Mountain, but I’ve heard it’s just a crypto scam affecting the numbers or something.”

At press time, an AI-generated LinkedIn post beginning with “Is McDonald’s Dying? Their Burger Lost The War To a Restaurant Made By A Guy in His Basement” was becoming the most viewed post on the platform for the day.

The post McDonald’s Big Arch Launches to Disappointing 5,000 Concurrent Eaters appeared first on Palette Swap.

As a busy person, and also as someone who frequently opens their Steam library and then spends most of their available game-playing time trying to decide what to play, I’m a fan of roguelikes. I love a game I can play whenever I have a free moment, without having to remember a plot or keep learning new mechanics. So I really enjoyed the Wanderburg demo, a game where you play as a mobile building battling it out against increasingly terrifying fortress foes.

You start off as a pretty simple castle, with some auto-attacks like archers who fire small volleys of arrows and some basic cannons. At first you just rampage around the game’s arena, crushing sheep and fields and tiny soldiers. As you do, you get gold that lets you upgrade your auto-abilities or choose special ones that you trigger with a button press. I was particularly fond of the ability to drop a cluster of mines, given my favored strategy of running away once the enemies started getting bigger and tougher. 

At a point during a run there’ll be a “swarm,” where a ton of enemies fill the screen, and there will also be a particularly nasty boss. Things start to get frantic, as your once-powerful building is now dwarfed by the even bigger, more powerful buildings coming to get you. Your building isn’t terribly fast, and your cannons and arrows fire from the side, so as a round ramped up in intensity I often found myself thinking most about my positioning, staying out of harm’s way while still getting some shots off, all while trying to roll over the smaller enemies to get the gold needed to get more abilities. 

If you beat the boss, you’re rewarded with your castle getting bigger and more powerful, but of course the enemies and bosses get bigger and more powerful too. You keep going like that until you’re bested; it’s all a pretty simple idea, but there’s plenty of strategy to dig into based on which upgrades and abilities you choose. 

What I like best about Wanderburg is how ridiculous the whole thing feels: rumbling around as a castle covered in tiny guys, fleeing from the gaping maw of an oncoming fortress while sucking up a flock of sheep that are just doing their sheep thing in the middle of the battlefield, as rolling houses and windmills amble around. The way a round shifted from me being the biggest thing in sight to the smallest always kept me on my toes, and gave the game a comedic undertone that meshes nicely with its cartoonish art style. Wanderburg is set to come out in 2026.

Look Out, I’m The Bus - Aftermath

The Bus Bound demo is pretty fun

AftermathRiley MacLeod

Some weeks feel like a decade. This one sure did! At least I made time for some games. Let's share some stories.

Although this weekend I anticipate that I’ll be trying out some Marathon with buddies, this week I took some time to try out Esoteric Ebb. It’s a game very clearly inspired by Disco Elysium, making it yet another successor to the influential socialist role playing game to throw on the pile.

What differentiates Esoteric Ebb from the other Disco successors is that it has no connection to the original developers of the game, and also takes more inspiration from the mechanics than the radical politics. That’s not to say that politics play no part in Esoteric Ebb—the main conceit of the game is that you have five days before the region's first election to finish a quest—just that they are not as immediately and overbearingly present in the game’s opening moments as they are in Disco.

Esoteric Ebb is a love letter to classic role playing games in general—Chris Person has likened it to Planescape: Torment, and yeah, the opening moments where you wake up on a slab seem like an obvious homage to that game. But it’s the way it folds in the narrative mechanic of Disco Elysium, where the various traits of your character argue with each other while your character makes decisions, that really excites me. 

The strength of Disco’s narrative and politics sometimes takes precedence over the fact that the game was also so creative and interesting in its gameplay. I’ve been waiting for a game that made the smart move to adopt some of those flourishes, and I’m glad that Esoteric Ebb has taken those ideas and run with them.

Have any of you tried Esoteric Ebb? Is it a worthy successor to Disco Elysium? And what else have you all been playing this week?

KYOTO — Nintendo’s upcoming film based on The Legend of Zelda series has suddenly shifted gears to become an animated production, sources confirm.

“The images that have been released were created solely for marketing purposes,” said series creator Shigeru Miyamoto. “We never intended to pursue a gritty, realistic vision for this title. When I look at those photographs of Bo Bragason and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, I am not inspired. To me, Link will always be an adorable little boy with a giant, round head and big beady eyes—not a handsome, British teenager. We’re going through the painstaking process of casting the Japanese voice cast right now, then, I don’t know—we’ll probably give the English-language roles to some YouTubers.”

Some fans of the series were unhappy with the film’s new direction.

“What the fuck are they doing?” said Steve Duncan, 35, who added that Link was his hero and role model. “They give us these pictures of a brooding, adult Link, and now they’re gonna turn him into a kid again? He already grew up by spending seven years in the Chamber of the Sages! Then again after leaving the Great Sea and founding New Hyrule. And again after defeating Vaati with the Four Sword. And probably after Spirit Tracks, too. But he’s a fully-grown, seventeen-year-old man, now!”

“This just isn’t what the fans want,” Duncan continued. “We love this franchise for its mature themes, like buying maps from a grown man in a green onesie who thinks he’s a fairy, or accidentally getting engaged to a fish princess. Everyone I know was excited to see Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf in real life. Zelda fans don’t sit around watching cartoons—that’s for babies. We are not babies. We are adults who write fan theories about how Termina is actually purgatory.”

Some entertainment industry analysts were not surprised by the development.

“Nintendo is not known for taking the expected path,” said Sam Thunnisen, an entertainment and new media journalist. “They’re always trying new things, and it’s not unusual for them to change directions suddenly. Miyamoto was excited about the fresh possibilities that the franchise could explore in a different medium. Modern gaming hardware is capable of creating images at least as realistic as Ben and Bo. However, try as they might, Nintendo hasn’t been able to replicate the visual charm of The Legend of Zelda sequences from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. They see this as their chance to return to that glory.”

At press time, Nintendo was reportedly guarding against the film’s potential failure by beginning pre-production on a separate, live-action version of the film, starring Henry Cavill as Link.

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