Having returned kickingly to Real Life, I've been looking at this screen for a while trying to remember what I have historically done with it. I've manipulated these black squares below the screen to get where I have thus far - each one corresponds to a specific letter, and I can arrange them like so.

I went in to see to Kris in his office, trepidation drawn about me like a cloak, to talk to him about San Diego Comic Con in the same way that I might talk to my son about The Drugs.

I wasn't aware that there even was a designation for cellular data called H+, and I've had the "opportunity" to discover this dessicated realm while trying to approximate relaxation. Whenever I leave home for something, it's generally been an opportunity to discover where Google Fi isn't.

We have a strip about it later this week, all of this SDCC-ness, but man. I think going to it as long as I did, particularly in the way that I did, messed me up somehow. It remains now in the form of a recurring Naked School dream, a succession of interpersonal challenges each a little more beyond my ken, coupled with the constant, jungle awareness of a low level, perfectly plain, but plausibly deniable enmity. Also, if you want to see the blue blood crawling beneath a person's face, the lighting there is optimally calibrated for it.

Sometimes when you are endeavoring to create something exaggerated and ridiculous specifically to make light of something, you end up with the game suggested in the third panel which… I would play, frankly. After getting into Gaslands, in truth, I think there's no beloved toy that could not find its truest expression being carefully, affectionately modeled in a wargame. Also, the young man in the strip is my son. He got big, somehow.

I thought Dragon Quest Builders was cool but Dragon Quest Builders 2, with it's promise of a multiplayer endgame existing in perpetuity and a commitment to ongoing content, essentially dominates my free time. It's all being poured into this tiny device. I will watch Gabe stream it while also playing it, in an effort to "hack" living such that I can experience more of it within the clutching and greedy span capricious fate has allotted me. I run this battery into the ground daily, and then must resort to - avert your eyes, Mother - playing in docked mode.

Thanks to the folks who stopped by my Dragon Quest Builders 2 stream last night. If you watch the VOD you can see all kinds of goofy stuff happening on the screen while I'm playing. I remember to turn the microphone on after a few minutes.

It's actually true that there is a thing you can use, specifically, a gridded interface you use to place interactive elements and define their behavior. I'm not saying that to diminish his accomplishment; if anything, it's to laud them for theirs. But he has a history of discovering some new concept and then effortlessly mastering it in a way that is profoundly annoying.

There is a lot about PAX that makes it what it is, but it would be very hard to imagine PAX at all without Enforcers. I know people who attended the show one year, got the help they needed to have a great show from a member of this powerful coalition, and became an Enforcer the next year.

I felt like this after they rebooted Spider-Man for the third time. In that case, of course, I was wrong; the new Spider-Men, not all of whom are even Men, are so vital and real that the young people on my block live part of their lives ensconced within the fiction. They like Marvel stuff, it's important to be conversant in it, but to them it largely feels like it's for somebody else. Into The Spider-Verse and Holland's Spider-Man are theirs. I tried to interrogate this with them, tried to figure out which side of this coin represented the purest manifestation, and they looked at me as though I'd suggested we start holding crucifixions out on the lawn. They don't even see them as separate, because they're both wound around the same central idea: there's just things that young people understand better. And it's possible to find a mentor, someone with the capacity to bridge the gap, but even this is fraught with its own fresh perils.

I sort of thought I understood what Mixer was. In my mind it did the same stuff Twitch did but for Xbox since it was owned by Microsoft. I knew it was baked into the console and I just assumed that it was focused on MS games. With that in mind, I was content to dismiss it entirely as a service I didn’t need to worry about. Boy was I wrong.

This has got to be one of the best PAX 10 crops of all time, and we've been tending that field of indie excellence practically since the birth of the show. Here they are - your PAX 10:

I didn't actually entertain the idea presented in the strip, but when it was happening, I did apportion a very small part of my brain to consider the idea that my counterpart in the strip would absolutely do so.

I'm fucking losing it over here. This happened when I got really into Warmachine, and then life conspired to alter the level of enthusiasm I could invest in people who were less than two or three inches tall. But some of those limitations have evaporated and now the sort of competition and simulation… hang on. Let me go back. The kind of focus these games offer as a hobby is completely unlike anything else. It's akin to being able to craft an entirely custom god and then spend your leisure hours worshipping it. Oh! And you also get to set you god against somebody else's god without the usual problems associated with that sort of thing.

It's such a delight when people erupt in my Twitter feed with photographs of the official Acquisitions Incorporated book - either their own copy, or of the copies that have arrived in the faraway places they live, like Scotland or Australia. Obviously those places are not far away from those places. Scotland is (in fact) very close to Scotland - so close as to be indistinguishable. But they are very far from where the book was written, and printed, and a great journey was required to get them there.

Gabe hung out on Mixer for a bit this weekend, trying to figure out the deal. I think that we'd been content to say that it was "Another Twitch," whose utility used to be an edge case, but I'd like to know there's someplace else to go if they aren't gonna take shit seriously.