Game of Thrones, at its apex, had the cultural torque of a global religion. It's hard to imagine that time, for a variety of reasons. I feel like its self-immolation was fairly complete; it had good bark, and a pronounced smoke ring. Trying to bite this particular apple again seems like the opium dream of a diseased and desperate mind.

In the sun-dappled Elysia of the before-times, Kiko and I used to go over to Gabe's house and play a game called Dust. One of the cleanest, most fun wargames of all time, it was a very solid place for Gabriel the Younger to start the hobby. The legibility of the system and the celerity of its resolution - for example, it's played on a massive grid instead of measuring arbitrary distances - means that you can go four player and play two games in an hour and a half. Maybe you haven't played a wargame. Just so it's clear: what I've just described is not a thing. I once played a game of Warhammer 40k with four people that lasted twelve hours. I didn't play again for about fourteen years.  I liken it to when one of those big snakes eats a gazelle.

Maybe if you make stuff yourself, things like the Scoob or Batgirl cancellations just hit harder. I wasn't out here pining for these films, not a lot of Scoob fans in my house; they'd tell me it was Boomer shit for sure, even though that construct has been surprisingly resilient and readily interpreted generationally for decades. It's Commedia dell'arte, plus dog. We've been rocking that shit for a minute.

I had to get a bunch of spraypaint for some terrain I'm working on, and I could certainly go to Mox Boarding House and get hobby branded paint for about twice as much I decided I was gonna be a recalcitrant coot and get the stuff your mom might put on her patio chairs instead. I don't know if it was a good idea! I guess we'll see.

When he calls to write the strip, the first let's say forty minutes is just him wanting to get stuff defined. And I'm happy to do it. Too happy, frankly. I have to tamp it down so I don't scare him off.

The current incarnation of the FTC is a little more prickly when it comes to rubber stamping this type of shit, so even if you were in the market for an Activision Blizzard King, you might not be able to have one.

If you could make a poison to kill a single person, and that person was Mike, it would be Visual Novels. This poison would enter his body through the ocular nerve, spreading to the most savory parts of his brain. Then, it would set up shop - liquefying the parts that determine whether he goes potty or not. But, because he's always peeing, wherever he is, just peeing and peeing, nobody would know about the attack until it was too late.

Gabriel is out of the office this week, bringing with him many, many models and also many questions, which of course I am happy to field. We had to learn this by slamming our heads repeatedly into books, and then remembering you can just use the app for rules questions, and then using a mixture of books and the app, and then playing so many wargames that the rules for them become a single sphere of unparallelled clarity with the density of a dwarf star.

I'm happy to short circuit this process.

Many, many things!

It's wild in some respects that Smash Bros. constitutes a genre, now - one of my favorite things to do at a PAX is to watch the Brawlhalla stage where mortals contend with the game's creators and are very frequently liquefied internally before reaching escape velocity.

Something you used to hear a lot - which means you'll begin hearing it again soon - is that videogames desensitize players to violence. It's a subset of a broader media critique, and it's leveraged perpetually on every axis whenever a cadre believes media might generate culture which is not fully synchronized with their political aims. I mean… we all know that, right? I don't have to explain that anymore than I already have?  Suppressing art is job one for any dogma; I grew up in that.  That said, that desensitization thesis never felt particularly seaworthy.

Wired Magazine has an excellent article about Child's Play up right now. It goes into detail on the new positions the charity has created inside hospitals called Gaming and Technology specialists. You can send all the cool stuff you want to a Children's Hospital but someone who works there has to know what to do with it all and CP is putting those people in there. It's a great example of the work Child's Play is doing thanks to the generosity of gamers! Hard to believe this all started almost 20 years ago when Jerry and I asked you guys to send games to my house so we could take them to the local Children's Hospital. 

-Gabe out

After much consideration I’ve decided to go with the Black Templars as my Space Marine Chapter. 

I take my role as Uncle very, very seriously, and that means making sure my socially-constructed nephews know that their Uncle-in-name-and-spirit thinks they are cool. Thinks they're doing okay. If the younger one should leap from the shadows, striking with paired blades, with my dying breath I make sure he knows the smaller of the two is called a wakizashi. Then - darkness.

What does that mean?  It certainly sounds very fancy.  But this person, whatever mortal form they might take, will be coming in to help Lidija and The Design Team make rad shit and sell it from our store and at PAX shows.  Some of that is our own stuff, but some of it - and you might get a preview if you're going to Gen Con - is from a suite of incredibly cool partners who have just begun to trust us to make artifacts of various kinds for them.  There is a ton of potential for us in that, enough that it's simply not a one person job anymore.  I would put our design team against anybody, and all we're missing is somebody who is way, way, maybe too into pivot tables.  Were you looking at a pivot table right before this?  Then please take a look at our new Merchandise Coordinator position.    

(CW)TB

We have had enough experience with a very specific type of person to know when we are seeing that type of person again. Maybe that's unfair, but if I'm overzealous when it comes to protecting myself from domination and abuse it's only because I have some knowledge of it. You'll have to make your peace with it.