We were trying out the multiplayer in Twisted Pixel’s Ms. Splosion Man on Monday, finding what we saw there considerably more clever than we expected (or, indeed, require!). I did fall into some acid so many times that I would have to remove a shoe to physically enumerate it. I can die in this way many, many times before becoming frustrated - that’s just how I’m put together. I’m “resilient” to certain kinds of failure (a term I learned from Jane McGonigal) and so when I am learning how to do something I use it to find the boundaries. At least, that’s how I would put it. There is, of course, another way.

I’m not going to lie to you guys, I sometimes use my minor Internet celebrity to get cool shit. Recently I was able to acquire tickets for my wife and I to the sold out Whedonesque Burlesque show here in Seattle this weekend. I was also able to get the Windows Phone guys over at Microsoft to send me a Samsung Focus. I’ve been getting bored with my iPhone and after playing with WP7 at an AT&T store I was interested in making a switch. So I’ve had the Focus for a little over a week now and I just wanted to share my thoughts.

I may have spoken too soon.  And when I say "may have," I mean "did absolutely." 

Erika, Brian, and Khoo will be rocking the booth with us, booth 1334, as suggested above.  We also have a panel (which I'm just learning about myself!) on Saturday, July 23 in room 25ABC.  This panel goes from 6:00 to 7:00 PM.

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It’s true. For some reason I cannot entirely grasp, Gabriel is using a Windows Phone.

I was never a DOTA player and so I don’t know to what extent LOL is or is not like that game. Coming into LOL it was hard for me to understand at first why there was only one map. Eventually I realized that it’s not that much different from a sport like football or baseball. The “field” is always the same and what makes the game interesting is the interaction of the teams. So when I jumped in and tried a game of Rise of Immortals I wasn't too surprised to see the same map. The rest of the similarities to LOL seem a bit strange to me but I guess I don’t really understand where the “genre” ends and the game begins.

DOTA’s strange heritage - that is to say, its origin as a non-profit knot of distributed design - has allowed this type of game to reproduce in a strange way. The known quantity of that map and the shared controls make it easy to flit from one manifestation of the concept to the another. This is what makes DOTA2 especially dangerous to this space: Valve polish, with no up front costs? Jesus Fucking Christ; it’s the sort of thing that makes you question your life choices.

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Just two quick things:

After doing the “calibration phase” for UFC Trainer, it ranked Gabriel at the beginner level. But Beginner for a mixed martial arts gladiator was not beginner enough to reflect his useless body, and he was punished.

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Recently I’ve been getting back into streaming while I draw the comic strip. I’ve messed around with a few different services and Ustream still seams to be the best overall. It’s fun to draw the strip live and watch people chatting in the social stream. I like seeing people guess what the strip is about just from the art and then laugh as I drop the text in at the end. The only problem I really have is really the quality of the video. Robert and I talked about a way to record the drawing at a higher quality and I think we may have a solution. We set up a camera over my shoulder last week while I was drawing and you can see the results on PATV today.

We're in Spokane for the Fourth of July, and presumably sometime after, as we wait for a break in the Bloodstorms to make our escape.

I wonder what the mix would be like at a convention devoted exclusively to Call of Duty. I got so good at muting the people who play that game that it became a kind of game in itself; I could mute more than one person per second at my apex, it was a point of pride. That shit is wall to wall brigands.

I’ve had a few people ask about the Alienware laptop in the strip. Some people want to know if I have one and if so, do I like it. A couple have even asked if I am getting some kind of payment for putting it in there. It’s probably worth mentioning that advertisers can not purchase space in the comic strip. That’s just not something we offer. The truth is I do have a couple Alienware machines and as far as my experience with them, it’s been sort of mixed.