Last night I was a guest speaker during a PTA meeting at my son’s school. I spoke about video games, ratings and the importance of paying attention to what your kids are playing. I thought it went really well and I figured I’d break down my talk here in case anyone wanted to take some of my ideas and do something similar at their kid’s school.

The definitive "Mario Party Is A Shitshow" strip has already been written; indeed, it was written eight years ago. I know this because I wrote it, with my friend and associate Al-Gharib. But they keep making these things, which makes me think that someone must be playing them also. I mean, I can't one hundred percent prove that. But I bet it does happen. There are those who wring their hands at the "messages" games communicate to our greasy, unblinking larvae, and in this case they might be onto something.

Being a Destiny Problem, it doesn't overlap with my portion of the Great Diagram. I had seen it lamented, though, and heard of targeted salves applied by the developer, so I asked our resident Gabriel if logging in, joining a Strike, and then not playing Destiny was a common thing.

Automata is a project that we really love, and it’s something we've actually been pitching to folks in Hollywood for about five years now. Each time we put it out there we hear the same thing, which is “it’s too risky”, “it’s too expensive”, Not a big enough market”, “Robot films bomb at the box office” .

Here's some more stuff from my sketchbook:

I know that it would make Brian happy if I mentioned the first wave of our new, mug-oriented ventures. Other mugs coming soon! Don't drink anything until you've examined our full range.

I'm not mad at anyone I went to school with, but I don't ever want to go back there or see it or anything associated with it ever again. High School was essentially a series of tests that taught me how not to be. I don't think there's anything high schools can actually do to improve this state of affairs. Getting out was the prize for surviving it.

This year is my 20 year High School reunion. I have no desire to attend it but I did get out some of my old yearbooks. High School (along with Junior high and elementary school) was a real shit show for me. “Bullying” was not a thing people gave a shit about back then. They did not have PSA’s with movie stars. No one 20 years ago was “#takingthepledge”. When I got beat up and went to the office they asked me what I did to invoke such an ass kicking. I’ll never forget sitting in the office of Mr. Sharp my Junior High principal. I guess he was tired of seeing me in there with various injuries. his advice was “can’t you just try and act less odd?”

My cohort slash phylactery Mirsh Morshamasha maintains a policy of Maximum Adventure, and I do my God Damnedest to maintain precisely the opposite; such is the nature of the strange battery that produces "whatever you would call this site." In any case, he was telling me about the book he was reading, which has historically been a bad strategy for him.

Today’s comic is once again a true story. I picked up the first book in the Dresden Files series for a little trip I took down to L.A. this week. I picked it up because Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Kurtz both recommended it at a dinner we had back in Boston. I had avoided the series because it sounded sort of silly but Goddamnit this is a fun book!

I think Bloodborne is one of the best games I've ever played. I'm on a little trip right now and away from my PS4 which means I'm not exploring Old Yarnahm. I've never played any of the previous Souls games that preceded Bloodborne, so I decided to remedy that today. I grabbed Dark Souls 2 on Steam, plugged in a controller and started dying over and over again.

Helldivers was such a cool surprise. We didn't really know about it before it came out a couple days before PAX East, on pretty much every type of Playstation there is. On the earlier difficulties - the difficulty I crave, the difficulty that consistently reinforces my own godhood - there are periods where you're just waiting for a timer to tick down, and you may be sort of checking your watch, like, okay. I guess this is what I'm doing now. But those spaces completely evaporate on harder levels, and you will long for those Good Times, times when you had nothing going on and were not being sliced into useful parts in the manner of a stolen Maserati.

I'm about to get on another plane in a few hours but I wanted to get my Sketchdump posted real quick before I leave. Here's some stuff I was working on last week:

I picked up Bloodborne expecting not to like it. I've never played any of the Souls games and from what I’d heard, Bloodborne was the same sort of game. As I understood it, these were brutally hard games that seemed to generate equal amounts of frustration and joy. I’m not an especially skilled gamer and I don’t tend to play very difficult games. I get frustrated easy and I’m usually the first to read a game F.A.Q. when I get stuck. I just sort of assumed Bloodborne was not for me. Boy was I ever wrong.

The first day, he quit on two separate occasions. This is not weird in any way. It would be like if you had just gotten a job and your job was to be kicked over and over in places ill-suited to jostling. You would say, "Maybe this isn't for me." Then I got this text:

I was surprised that my cohort went in for something like Bloodborne - he's never accompanied me on any previous journeys into "From Software Bullshit," except in one instance, which I will detail later. The main thing that distinguishes the new one from the old cadre is that it allows (in a way) for a more traditional co-operative multiplayer, which is almost certainly what sold him a copy.