I was talking to JP the other day about Path of Exile, because I knew that was one of his many fascinations and I wanted to get some advice from someone who was maybe a little nuts about this shit. I'd been playing a bit and having a good time, but when you see PoE's Skill Tree - which you might recognize instinctively as something like Final Fantasy's sphere grid - you might start to feel a little light headed.

Usually it's "Gabriel's Job" to offer this information, but this time the task has fallen to me. Hopefully I won't mess up Kiko's immaculate formatting too much! Without further ado:

All the cheers during the Overwatch League All-Star Weekend go to Child's Play. Really, though! Check it out!

When Grickle and I were at Mox Boarding House last week, the Bellevue one, I saw a copy of Disney's Villainous and felt that familiar shudder that accompanies surprise exposure to a pathogen.

Gabriel was asking me about a game called Legend of Soulgard, not anything to do with the game proper, but a word he saw constantly in the lexical mist that surrounds the launch of any modern product. He wanted to know what they meant by "mid-core." I will tell you what I told him: "mid-core" means "a videogame."

I was following some of the stuff around #DeactiDay, which is a hashtag you would see on Twitter about quitting Twitter. I liked that. I liked that the concept was so nested, so dense. That you needed Twitter, needed there to be such a Thing as Twitter, in order to mount a campaign against Twitter. I'm laughing right now. Gabriel is laughing over on the couch because I just read that sentence to him. But it's true.

There's times where I don't think about a purchase at all. It's bought the moment it's announced, already; there's been an allocation of resources. Sometimes, a game doesn't need to be announced in order for me to have prepared a place for it. Red Dead Redemption 2 fits into that category. The most recent trailer, offered for your use here:

After this Madden Ultimate Team shit, plus a Call of Duty beta I played with Keek and Glamdring every possible second, our descent into performative masculinity is complete. The only question now is whether or not this constitutes our final form, or if this is a kind of moist, pupal proto-bro scenario that ultimately results in something more firm. We'll see.

It's sorta like when World of Warcraft introduced Eternium Ore; it was like, hey. Don't paint yourself into a corner here. You gotta make a bunch more mystical ores! You don't want to get to Forever-ite until you absolutely have to.

I should emphasize for those of you reading this from out of town that University Bookstore is actually a very specific bookstore, and not more of a general concept as it might first appear. But! It's all true: At 5pm pn August 18th, I will be doing a reading at the aforementioned University Bookstore (this one) of my "if Shel Silverstein was your Dungeon Master" book of poetry Lexcalibur. We'll also have a small allotment of the physical book available there, if that's something you missed out on last time. There's also a Facebook event? Do you want that? I was told to link it.

Obviously, there has to be a way to digest the dSports you haven't consumed; some mechanism by which we may obtain chelated versions of these prized materials for easy absorption. That's DiceCenter.

I feel confident that the dSports league I inevitably found will suffer the same grim setbacks shared by every other attempt to yoke incredibly competitive young men toward some decorous, public expression. Don't these violent sociopaths know I'm trying to establish dominion?!?

Michael was headed to some primeval forest, and I was headed to Spokane, so we put together a couple strips furthering the whole "dSports" concept because we can't stop thinking about it. Then we sat down to write Monday's strip and it's all we wanted to write about. So there are a couple more strips on this theme, not bound into any particular storyline or anything, simply premised thus: that we live in a world nourished by something called "dSports," and even the drama surrounding this form of entertainment is sufficient to sustain a man. It also allowed us to engage in some Wish Fulfillment, because even after the expansion for some reason Seattle still doesn't won't have an OWL team.

When I got back into the game of No Man's Sky I was playing with Mulk, I thought it was very novel at first that there was an frozen-ass hell planet called Teeko. How novel, I thought. That's sort of like my handle! Everything else progressed precisely as it did in today's tender strip.

I was going to say that I don't know why a brand as massive as Blizzard would court the mainstream with this type of horseshit, but it's a dumb question with an obvious answer. Though I suspect there are two answers: the first one, that the mainstream has a lot of money, is relatively straightforward. The second, that there is something in the soul that cries out for recognition, for transmutation, to cease being the settled for wooden simulacrum of a boy and to instead be made real.

I think my first notes for the game that would eventually become Thornwatch are from 2011.