I'm heading down to Australia solo, well, not really solo but certainly without Mike. There is certainly an entourage associated with the journey, to say nothing of the dutiful constellation of technology I am bringing to mediate my experience of the world. I'll be chronicling the entirely factual, fact-based journey here on the site. Join me, won't you?

The task has fallen to me yet again, as Mork is in a plane or something. But I know my way around these now - I've developed techniques. There's some really fun inside jokes being made in pin form here, and I love it.

Gabe oscillates at two to three times my rate when it comes to a hunger for technological novelty. I'm not without the hunger entirely, it's just that I don't… Hm. I don't see it? I can read a comic book without ever looking at the pictures. It drives him nuts. I don't need them, though, and they're not why I was reading it. It's like this with tech also: I have a purpose, and the device enables the purpose, but the middle section is like the second step of a sequence that culminates in Profit. There are a lot of question marks and unless the process is truly excellent - the work of Panic comes to mind - I don't perceive it.

Once, when we were streaming the creation of the strip on The Tweatch, it came up that beaver assholes are a prized font of delicious vanilla flavor. Which is sort of true. Let's break it down:

I keep meaning to check what the percentages are of people who played through the Call of Duty campaigns, but I don't really have to, because I've bought a few of these and interacted with them in precisely the way Black Ops 4 suggests I did: by going directly to the multiplayer mode. Or pehaps more appropriately, "modes."

That's what it looks like, anyway. It's really a lot for me to take in. But, yeah: might be a good time to grab a copy, in the format of your choosing.

Making parties seemed to be all kindsa fucked up for me last night, at least on Xbox, and I don't know if it was some kinda NAT horseshit or launch day jitters or what, but I wasn't able to party up with people I played the beta ("beeta") with just fine. We were eventually able to hack the planet, so to speak, by joining the game the other person was in and then beating the odds several times over as it kept us in the same party all night.

So, my first volume of original poetry - full title, Lexcalibur: Useful Poetry For Adventurers Above And Below The World - sold out very quickly. The elevator pitch is "What If Shel Silverstein were your Dungeon Master" and it has thus far been apt. The reprint is in, hopefully enough to sate the apparently frenzied desire that accompanied the first one - there are a few ways to own it, so take a look at the official page. The designers really wanted to offer a kid's shirt to go along with it, and the chose the art from the poem Sword of My Fathers which is a very curatorial selection. Here are a few pictures that will inform and hopefully tantalize you:

Probably the most relaxing night of gaming I've encountered in recent memory was forming a Convoy - anywhere else but Forza Horizon, it would be called a Squad/Group/Fireteam - and just… driving around. Racing when we felt like it. Doing a seasonal Barn Find when it came up. As a template for winding down the day, it was almost flawless.

I haven't really played an Assassin's Creed game since Unity; I understand they've continued to make them. Syndicate predicated a pause in the franchise altogether, and when it returned, it was an RPG. More of one, anyway. It might be better to say that it returned as the kind of RPG where you want purple things more than you want blue things.

There is a new Mario Party, and apparently it's "good," but Mario Party is almost a genre unto itself and as a thus may be considered an exemplar in a self-defined context. Rhetorically, it's a sundered condition. But! It's fast and crazy, and bright, and gravitational in a way, like a Welcome Sign. People who are actually good at games don't necessarily like operating in contexts that don't recognize their virtues. Or, as sometimes happens, games simply arrive at the wrong time.

There is a lot about the Horizon Festival that probably seems very good at the time, but will eventually lead the kind of televised documentary with a lot of scary music that often flashes between full color and black and white very quickly.

I almost never play games on phones anymore, unless I'm on a plane and it's literally all I have with me. The last one I investigated deeply was Paladins Strike, which is not new by any means, and that was only because I happened to be into other Hi-Rez shit at the time and Michael can be very convincing. It was cool, but requires Internet, which makes the primary usage case questionable for me. A lot of phone games require Internet, even if you think they wouldn't, or shouldn't necessarily given the content, but here we are.

These fuckin' pets, man. I'm not even a regular player and I want to get a piece of this hound.

Gabriel hates Kell's Grave as a Gambit map. I mean, I have maps I'm scared of: Cathedral Of Stars, the one that got unlocked on the raid completion, is mostly a suite of opportunities for me to look at the underside of the map. But I don't carry motes unless I pick one up on accident and then have to get four more just to make it worth the trouble. Gabe carries motes. And, apparently - I'm getting all this second hand - falling into the acid with fifteen motes feels real bad.

Mike and I receive Tattoos very differently. This fact is discussed in today's strip, but there is another way you can become acquainted with it, and that is to watch the video embedded tastefully below these words. The tattoo artist terminology for someone who takes a tattoo in this way is "A Box Of Cats."