Thanks to everyone who showed up to play games with me over at Snapdoodle on Saturday. I ended up playing about five or six games of Forbidden Desert with a different group of people each time. I got to talk and trade pins with a bunch of folks and overall I’d say the night was a huge success. A few people asked if it was something I’d be doing again and I think I probably will. Also thanks to Snapdoodle for hosting us. They are a small store and we sort of took over the place. I saw people sitting on the little stools playing games on tables meant for toddlers. Everyone I talked to had fun though and I know the Snapdoodle folks were really happy with the whole thing.

I don't know what it is that makes me go for This Early Access game over That One. Independent of any philosophical considerations, Early Access as a business and cultural practice means different things, in just that way that a beta from Company X is more like an alpha, and a beta from GmbH ß is a relentless, rigorously polished marketing vehicle. So, I often give Early Access stuff a pass until it is closer to Regular Access just to give it room to breathe. Everybody is telling me Starbound is a thing, if not the thing, but just absorbing the rulebooks from all these skirmishy tabletop feasts rolling in lately has occupied most of my upstairs meat. Starbound isn't going anywhere, in any case. By the time I get in there, you'll be able to make croissants or whatever. It'll be fine.

They didn't actually cancel HBO, Game of Thrones is almost back on. But if you were carrying a sub to HBO specifically to watch people fuck in plate mail, it's an itch you could almost certainly scratch via these streams.

I'll be playing games and trading some pins this Saturday at Snapdoodle toys in Kenmore. Here are the details:

The first is "Account Manager for PAX Australia." You don't need to be from Australia to apply, but you should definitely understand if you apply for it that Australia is super far away. Check a map. B]

I was overjoyed to see it, too. It's a good match; it speaks well of both parties. I was curious what he'd think about something like Project Christine, that modular PC thing from Razer, and I don't have to wonder now because he just wrote about it.

For those who play the preview pane game, the snapshot for today's comic must certainly rank high; with no crass art gumming up the works, only my intention remains. But you can hardly parody these fucking names! Even so, people are probably more likely to take something called "lunesta" than they are to orally ingest (S)-6-(5-Chloro-2-pyridinyl)- 7-oxo-6,7-dihydro-5H-pyrrolo[3,4-b]pyrazin-5-yl-4-methyl-1-piperazinecarboxylate. At least, I would. It's a real mouthful. Where would you put the pill?

People have different thresholds about paying for for ostensibly free games. We did a comic about specifically withholding payment in some cases. In others, I've paid as I left the game for good; like they brought the check, and I paid on my way out. Typically though, I do it when it passes the Pinoccio Line, the one that marks its having become a real game. The point at which not paying begins to feel like theft. Gabriel tends to pay either when a game expresses itself with unique art, or it indulges his desire to become a Frost Wizard.

Gonna play some Skylanders Swap Force with my son and he wants to see how the streaming works. You can watch us right here:

I mentioned it yesterday but I just wanted to remind everyone about my board game night at Snapdoodle toys in Kenmore on the 11th. You can get all the details here.

It took me a while but I finally have your Dickerdoodle 2013 winners!

Even though they are supposedly "forbidden," there's no taboo against their ownership or use. You can purchase and play Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert without enduring stares or having an old Russian woman hiss and/or shield the eyes of her children. I always find out just how hardcore I am not when I go to Board Game Geek, but I always thought that Forbidden Island was a stripped down version of Pandemic, also by the same designer, and if we make a line between these two games that charts their relative complexity, there is a point on this line marked Forbidden Desert right between them. But it's not Pandemic Junior; I would say that it's more like Forbidden Island 2XX Hyper Gear Mega rev2.Y.

My evening streams have been a lot of fun. Last time I played I got a few requests to play Warframe and so that's what I'm gonna do tonight. I played a bit of it on the PC a while back but didn't really get it. I'll give it another shot tonight starting around 9pm pacific.

I’m not always a very good person. I’m mean and I recognize that. I know exactly where it comes from too. As a kid I moved schools a lot. I was always the new kid and I was a weird looking new kid which made it worse. There was no nationwide movement to stop bullying back then. The advice I got from teachers was to “ignore them” or “try and make friends with them”. It is hard to ignore or become friends with someone who literally sets your hair on fire on the bus. So what I did is decide at a young age that no one else’s opinion of me mattered. I had to in order not to kill myself. I had to flip a switch in my head and essentially decide that no one else could decide what I was or was not. I shut almost everyone out and decided that anyone who attacked me was an “enemy” and I began to attack back. I got very good at insulting people. Kids would come at me with some bullshit about my teeth or how goofy I looked and I would retaliate with insults I had custom built for them while lying awake at night and each one was a precision strike to their insecurities. This kid was short, that one had a hard time reading, this other one’s parents were getting a divorce. By 7th grade I could make someone hit me with a couple words.

I went to the Olive Garden last night and ended up getting probably the worst food poisoning I’ve ever had. By the time we got home I had to run upstairs and lock myself in the bathroom. I stumbled out an hour or so later and explained to my wife we would need to remodel it. There was simply nothing left that was salvageable and the entire bathroom would need to be taken down to the studs. I crawled into bed and half expected the police to show up. What I had done in there was a crime. I fell into a fitful sleep well before midnight and dreamt that not only had I shit out my Tour of Italy, but my soul as well. I woke up sweating and convinced that I was not a ghost but the shell that a ghost might leave. I feel hollow and hungry. I wonder if I will feel like this forever.

I've talked about this before, in more ephemeral contexts, but Amazon Prime exerts an incredibly bizarre force.