I have endeavored to fill the role of Weird Uncle for Gabriel The Younger wherever I can, including

Coming to grips with what Dota Urnderlerds (and by that token the Auto genre in general) represents is a fucking trip. I think we have been wrong on virtually every point fully twice over. Luckily, I have been there at every step to adjust Michael, to perfect him, like an orthodontist for the towers of his brain.

Look, it's not us: the verdict is in. By which I mean, I talked to the girls on my block and they say Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is done.

I’m not a streamer guy. I don’t like having a camera pointed at my drooling grimace for hours while I stumble through a game. With that said, I am very excited about a stream I have planned for tomorrow. Gabe (who is 14 now) has been learning Python at school and decided he wanted to try and re create Space Invaders as a summer project. He asked me if I could make some artwork for it and pretty soon we were designing a game. Our game is called Too Many Doves and features one Jim Darkmagic. Gabe went to work on the code and I drew him some placeholder artwork so he could test getting images into the game. After a night of work (almost all by him) we had what I’d call a functional prototype.

There is a very long but also very interesting session of Parliament where a person from EA talks about what it is they actually sell when they sell loot boxes.

Apparently they gave "the doc" a month's suspension, which is… illuminating? We ask the question in the strip: what, precisely, is required to see something akin to action. They couldn't make it a week, obviously. I think they recognized that would be the same as revelling with him in that reeking pisshole. There are surprisingly few levers with which to shape streamer behavior, though; it's either "hated exile" or Scion Seated At The Right Hand Of God. YouTube has a few knobs in this department, but YouTube has its own problems - I'd never recommend it as an alternative, and it's an incredibly turbulent place to even attempt business. I'm just saying they've been around longer and thus have invented other Rituals of Binding for the wracked and leathery creatures they summon from Beyond the Veil.

I've had a few people ask for a version of the AI book cover that they could use as a wallpaper. I've got just what you need!

There's a term called Programmer Art that generally elicits a chuckle when used in the proper context. It's not really an insult, but it does recognize and bring to the fore the idea that people who are good at one thing aren't necessarily good at other things, which is just… true. It's probably not worth getting too mad about that. I've met a lot of people who aren't even good at one thing; I've only been alive for forty years or so but in my own experience competence is not the norm.

Nintendo letting somebody have The Legend Of Zelda to just… play around in probably deserves its own rhetorical excursion, but this is of a piece with the Switch being such a natural home for indies anyway. On a couple recent releases, I've seen game launch on the Switch first - or launch on Switch and PC. It's a shocking result, but I think it tells you where indies are making money today.

There is a streamer who goes by the name DrDisrespect and if you follow this sort of thing at all you know his deal. As a professional asshole myself, I see the waves of opprobrium generated by this cadre perhaps in a unique context.

Reposting, for the reasons outlined in the first paragraph. Also: it fucking comes out next week! Order NOW, as they say on television.

The first quarter, round March - the period this website has referred to as Gamer Christmas - has become so suffused with content it may be impossible to reach minimum safe distance. Ultimately it's about science, which for most modern people is about science fiction, which is itself about balls of flame and ships drawn inexorably toward their expanding maw - the cosmic inverse of creation.

I completely understand why publishers and platform holders like streaming - they'd love it if you couldn't own anything. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a freemium game played on a streaming platform forever. Eventually one of these Beasts Spoken Of In The Book Of Revelation is going to coin the term "Streamium" and it will be like horn that signals the Earth's final hour.

Whenever I see a "leaked video" with "confidential" across it filmed shakily a couple feet from the screen, especially around E3 I think a very specific thing. I think that if they turned the phone around, or simply changed to the front facing camera, we would see the lead designer.

Gabriel is stocking up for an increasingly elaborate Stream Excursion, having recently found the serrated edge where streaming from the same box you're playing on ceases to be an authentic option. What's more, he'd been using the Very Small Stream Deck from El Gato, which I think they officially call the Stream Deck Mini, and determined that once he was trying to run a stream with multiple overlays designed to incorporate the whole family Six Buttons was perilously close to No Buttons. I suggested that perhaps the Stream Deck Mobile app might give him some breathing room, creating a kind of virtual configurable deck, but I knew deep down that this rhetoric was not a good time investment. Eric Benson, brewmaster for Acquisitions Intoxicated, put forward that you can make nested menus on the Deck itself, virtually extending its payload, but I have spent enough time with Gruber to know that only a larger deck with more buttons would be acceptable. He currently has the one with fifteen buttons. I'll let you know if he jumps to the thirty-two.

You can preorder the Sea of Thieves RPG, which is a real thing, from Mongoose right here if you think that might be something you're interested in; such preorders come with access to a PDF of the same content so we had a chance to dig around in there.