I absolutely love the Arcane series on Netflix. It’s one of the most beautiful animated productions I’ve ever seen but they don’t just nail the art. It also has incredible music, great writing and killer voice performances. It’s the complete package and it’s so good at making me love the League of Legends universe that I get the twinge to reinstall after each episode. So far I have managed to avoid getting back into LOL. I’ve been down that road enough times that I know how it ends. Spoiler warning, it ends with me uninstalling the game in a fit of rage. 

I think R6 is probably a top five game for me, if not top three. The most common rejoinder I hear from people who washed out of it has to do with the sheer number of champions - I mean heroes, I mean Operators - you have to contend with. It's coming up on something like eighty, but they are divided into Attackers and Defenders and I think the asymmetry helps a lot. Also, I'm a dessicated and ancient genetic doldrum and I managed to get it. It's worth a couple nights and some time on YouTube to gain entrance to the Inner Sanctum - to play a dynamic, aggressive social deduction game masquerading as a shooter. It's simultaneously still kickin' and profoundly slept on.

So I just finished reading the Warhammer 40k book A Thousand Sons, and now I’m reading Prospero Burns. Like Jerry said in his post it would be hard to explain what these books are about if you are not already neck deep in 40K lore. Just know that Magnus was a good boy who was just trying to warn his Dad about something very bad that was going to happen, but instead he ended up making his Dad super mad. Like…SUPER mad. There is a saying in the community that “Magnus did nothing wrong” and while I am not sure if that’s entirely true (he did after all destroy the magical wards that protected holy Terra from the Warp), I do think he had good intentions. 

Warhammer 40k is both very, very cool, and very, very dumb - it is the very specific combination of positive and negative factors we refer to as "sweet." Destiny is kinda sweet, right? You're catching air on your jetbike in view of a passel of weird-ass moons, and even though you are an immortal space warrior you have a machine gun and a bunch of feathers poking out. In 40k, people fly around in huge churches that are so big there are people in the belly of them that think the outside world is a myth. They have Space Vikings and Space Vampires. Acquisitions Incorporated can hit some real drama precisely because it's incredbly goof troop for the majority of the runtime. Somehow, being silly in some ways - unabashed - allows Games Workshop's cadre of writers to pull out some gruesome gut punches. Magnus the Red falls in that category.

My life is just sort of nonsense, generally. For the last twenty six years or so there's always something bizarre happening that you might be able to project, but a few of them just don't make any sense at all. We started putting comics online because it seemed clear to us that nobody in their right mind would publish them physically, and it ended up being a whole thing. In 2003 we started a donation drive called Child's Play in the most aggressive way a charity has ever been started I think, and its modern incarnation is an entity that is at the forefront of using VR and AR as therapeutic tools - one that is about to release a certification process for technicians who merge technology and child life. It seemed like more people should be able to go to E3, but they couldn't, and so we made another thing and that one is still going - we're coming up on PAX Unplugged, and the three-day badges just sold out. We made a D&D Podcast before podcasts were super a thing, and it's entirely possible we started Actual Play accidentally. In fact, that's how I came to know the Secretary of State, Steve Hobbs: He's a fan of Acquisitions Incorporated, somehow…?

For some reason, both of our youngest wanted to watch Scream on Halloween separately. Even from the jump, it might not scare them, but there is a… cruelty in some of these older horror movies that must have been surprising even if it's not jump-scare scary. Scream in particular is a weird movie; not in a bad way, but it's doing some genre examination while it executes a strong premise. I'm sort of a horror fan, if the last couple sentences didn't give it away. Gabriel is, well, not.

Pokemon Pocket, Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket, and Pokemon TCG Pocket are all the same game, so let the trainer within you breathe a sigh of relief. We have one suggestion that we think might improve things, but beyond that it's been a strong, even generous offering here at the start.

I’m opening up four more commission slots today. These will be my November commissions and anyone who grabs a spot today can expect their finished piece by the end of the month. I’ve been doing these for a few months now and I love it. Working directly with PA readers to craft something special for them has been incredibly cool. When you sign up for a commission I need you to send me all the information you can about the character you’re looking for as well as whether you want a background or not since I offer both options. I’m happy to draw characters from comics,games,movies, RPG’s or even original designs. I even drew someone’s family dog a couple months ago!  I use the site Artistree which allows us to communicate through the entire process and you’ll have multiple opportunities to give feedback and make adjustments as we work through sketches, inks and finally colors. Once we’re done I’ll send over the high res files that are suitable for printing. 

I've beaten all the Dragon Age games. I even came around on 2, and it had enemies that leapt out from a clear blue sky. Shit, man - we even did some work for hire, you can see some early Eyrewood ideas in there. It's not clear if Dragon Age: The Veilguard is for me, even though the other ones definitely were, and for some reason that is bad to say. It's not super clear how we came all the way around to compulsory capitalism, but man. We kinda did.

The annual Child’s Play Charity auction/dinner is coming up on November 22nd in Seattle and I’d love to see you there! Child’s Play has evolved so much in the last 21 years and we’re doing some really amazing work these days. One of my favorite things is game developers working with hospital staff and patients to develop therapeutic games. A great example of this is an experience called Gurney Journey and I’ve linked a video of it below.

This is just a heads up for those interested that I will be opening up my November commission slots Friday morning November 1st. Like the last few months there will be four spots available and I’ll be using my Atristree site to handle these commissions. I had a lot of fun with the four I did in October which included a couple D&D characters, a Pokemon and an original character. Here’s a little peek at the pieces I did in the last month.

They are in the thick of it over there, up to their asses in foetid muck, covered in preternatural sores - and that's just Noah! Everybody else has some other army appropriate condition they're suffering from. We might talk about a gently swinging censer, or the cool, sterile interior of an XV25 Stealth Suit. This is their second crack at the hobby, and it's taken root largely because they're focusing exclusively on Warhammer 40k and not splitting time between three or four Games Workshop systems at once. But already, in the manner of Wormtongue, I have begun to sow dissent.

The only way to really understand how the modern influencer superstructure functions is to understand how information used to work. There was "a media" and it was rigorously policed. There's simply too much information to be contiguous at this point; it must divide, partition, like a cell. People live in radically different worlds now, and the same information has a different valence in each of them. Engagement, devoid of context or meaning, is the coin of the realm where data has proliferated beyond our ability to meaningfully process it. This is how it came to be that two objectively abhorrent demons and a greasy, grinning mannequin have entered the business of feeding children.

I play Rainbow Six Siege every day. I’m absolutely hooked on this game. At first I was just playing it because I wanted to play with my boys and it was something we could all do together, but now I play alone while they're at school. There’s so much to learn between almost a hundred different operators and tons of unique maps with destructible walls which make them ridiculously mutable. I’d say that map awareness is the most important skill you can have in Rainbow Six Siege and that takes a lot of time to get a handle on. I’ve been playing for months now and I feel like I understand the various bomb sites in each map but I’m just starting to understand the connective tissue between sites and how everything connects. The game having so much to learn is part of the reason I think I’m still hooked. Every game I play I’m still learning and that’s rewarding. 

I've never installed cheats, not even to satisfy a morbid curiosity, in the same way that Gandalf feared the power of The Ring. The metaphor continues from there, because my era of cheats always had a dark nimbus; you were just rawdogging some mysterioso executable. God only knows what you're gonna catch. Matters are different now for cheats, to hear Mork's boys tell it, because they're essentially things you subscribe to. I'd never looked them up. I was curious how hard it would be to find, and they're, uh, not. They're not hard to find. I was startled at the professionalism - the 24/7 support line, the layout, and of course the fifty dollar a month price tag. Let me emphasize again: there is a support line for these game-shredding hacks. Kiko enunciated it well; in the era of service gaming, not just an assemblage of random hosts, it's a constant war like that of an immune system. The cheats, then, must be services also.

We’re just about one month away for this year’s Child’s Play Charity auction and dinner, on November 22nd! I’ll be there and I’d love it if you joined me. You can find more details and read up on what Child’s Play has been doing in my post right here or just go directly to the site and buy your tickets right here. It’s a super fun event so come help us raise money for a great cause!

-Gabe Out