Try to imagine yourself going to Disney World. Only you weren’t going as a tourist but as a super-powered freedom fighter whose mission was to liberate the Magic Kingdom from the Disney corporation. You join up with other members of an underground resistance to Disney’s mercenaries, infiltrating heavily guarded areas, sneaking around and causing all sorts of mayhem. Maybe while hiding in the shadows you throw a piece of meat near one of the guards, which causes a panther to suddenly appear and maul the guard to death. Or you hack a power transformer to explode and kill him. Or you shoot an arrow at a conveniently placed construction crane’s hook and drop a bundle of steel girders on his head. Or you call in a mortar strike from other members of the resistance and blow him sky high. The world is your canvas and violence is your paintbrush.

If the guards find you and start shooting, you could die right away, or after getting hit by 25 bullets, depending on the difficulty level. Whatever happens, you wake up in your hotel room, all fresh and ready for more wanton destruction of life and property. Rinse and repeat, gaining new weapons and abilities, liberating Tomorrowland, Frontierland, etc, until you’ve worked your way up the chain, killing Goofy, Donald Duck, and Mickey Mouse, and finally the resurrected Zombie Walt Disney himself. Then a few months later, you pay an extra $30 to access the Epcot Center and Disney’s Hollywood Studios areas of the map to do the same stuff. The whole trip could take you about 30 or 40 hours, or maybe as much as 100 if you want to explore everywhere and collect all the secret weapons and data files hidden around Disney World.

If you don’t know much about modern video games, I hope that’s explained it well enough what it’s like playing one made by the French publisher Ubisoft and maybe given you an idea why the volume of stories here at National Zero is a bit lower than what it had been before the election.

First it was Watch Dogs Legion in October, a game about a resistance to an evil private military company taking over London in the near future. I managed to keep my playing to a minimum while covering the election. But then on November 10th Assassin’s Creed Valhalla hit. It is so much goddamned fun. Valhalla (pictured above, screenshot I took) puts the player in the shoes of a Viking during the 7th century Norse invasions of England and the reign of Alfred the Great. Far Cry 6 hasn’t been released yet, but it’ll be just as much of time-suck when it hits sometime in the next few months. Pictured below is my screenshot of the most recent installment of the series, 2019’s Far Cry New Dawn, which took place in post-apocalyptic Montana.

Maybe it’s the grind of covering the post-election period that’s wearing thin. There have been some really hilarious and outrageous moments these last two months that I covered here, and a few that Jack and I missed – or worse, got beaten to them by that fucking garbage site with the blue logo. More importantly, I had a good string of original essays that were well-received by you lot, managed a pretty healthy streak of getting up at least four or five a week for a while and I only picked it up again yesterday. Baby Spartan’s also fully on his feet and always finding interesting new ways to cause havoc around the house, so I think that’s a factor here too.

Anyway, not apologizing so much as explaining. Some of it is my fault for being a 36 year old man who still plays video games like a teenager, some of it is the news cycle – there’s definitely a lot of the same mental exhaustion going around that there was before the election, as in “let’s just get this the fuck over with already” – and some of it is fatherhood. I got bored with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and went back to Watch Dogs Legion, and I’ll get bored with that too and focus more time on National Zero. I’m planning our merch store, and a multi-part series The History of The Decline and Fall of The MAGA Empire, a definitive look back at the Trump years, scandal by scandal, shitshow by shitshow. It’ll all be drawn from Disqus comments, to get the proper zeitgeist at the time from our friends and foes in political internet time-wasting.

You can thank Cyberpunk 2077 turning out to be shit for that last one.