Warmachine is a very rewarding wargame (in my opinion) that asks a lot from you at the beginning of a turn. Because your Warcaster - roughly analogous to a King in Chess - must apportion their mystic power to your forces, you need to arrange the turn in your head before you ever commit a single unit. It's that foundational edict - the distribution of your Focus - that has purpose-built a mind within me capable of playing this kind of game.

Over the break, Kiko and I ended up at Gabe's house where apparently the actual Gabe - the young man I will forever call Gabriel, fully unabridged, because this is the kind of uncle I am - has apparently taken up wargaming. As these games get simpler and more skirmishy either in rules or in model volume, I take that as a cue to get more people around the table simultaneously; to increase the scale of the game with those freed resources while the load on the individual remains low.  

I swear to God, every time I have made the mistake of reading somebody's review of The Witcher they compare it to Game of Thrones as though that comparison means fuck all. Why did you do that? I ask the burning, wholly unconscious screen. Did you say that it was like Game of Thrones because… somebody has a sword in it? Did you say that because they both have swords?

I think I'm gonna end up seeing Rise of Skywalker on an airplane at some point, on the back of the seat in front of me. That's about my interest level. There were inklings of it in the first movie, if you want to go back that far, but it really seems like the new trilogy wasn't conceived of as a trilogy at all. It's genuinely hard to believe. And not just because of what Disney managed to accomplish with their Marvel project, making an ecosystem of movies in different genres and then somehow crafting a kind of metamovie to conclude it. Obviously, they can do it. That they didn't - and that they expected us to go along with it - is incredible.

If a series switches genres, I mean… you get a feeling on your neck. It's not a good feeling. It's like if there's a show you enjoy and they're in high school or whatever and then they're in college or some shit. A cold wind blows. It's a dangerous time.

A fun game I like to play is to contextualize a work in such a way as to meaningfully alter the content without touching a stitch of it. It's like remixing except all you do is find a viewing angle that alchemizes its perceived payload. For example:

Sometimes you come back from a PAX and it seems like you got away clean but then a couple days later every free channel in your body runs with rivulets of hot mucus. In such times, the humble book may provide succor. And maybe it could also have provided succor back in 2004 or whatever but here we are. The most important thing is that someone is discovering Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel for the first time. This supersedes all other considerations, even murder, and is cause for celebration.

It seemed like there was a gift opportunity there, a strikingly rare window, but no because of who he is as a person.

I really did think my F: drive would last forever, in profound contradiction to… fact, I guess? And truth? And everything we know about everything. I had to kick a bunch of shit off there - had to pause Remnant, but I can come back anytime. Had to accept that maybe some betas for games whose release versions I don't even play probably don't need to be there. I didn't actually have Asheron's Call 2 on there, or Asheron's Call for that matter. I didn't actually see the C-Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. At some level they'll always be installed in my heart, though, a medium with the effortless capacity to contain both.

A couple weeks ago, very late at night, I started getting texts from Greef that followed a pattern like this:

Grabbing demos at PAX Unplugged - that is to say, learning complicated new things - is pretty much all I wanna do. Some of the trendlines in the industry are really going my way, and there's a lot of evidence for that. I meant to discuss it with Eric Lang when we were opening the show, but we didn't get around to it because he's too interesting. I'd been stressing out about that Keynote/Storytime for a couple weeks, which is kind of my thing, so I wanted to meet up with him before the show real quick to see if we'd be able to fill a stage together and then we talked for almost two hours with no pauses. So, it seemed like we were gonna be okay. But then I freaked out again and filled my phone with questions just in case there was ever a pause for more than two seconds. Then, when we did the talk, we didn't discuss any of the things we talked about the previous night or any of the shit I wrote in my phone. I worried and worried about it, and it was fine. Better than fine! But I forgot to fuckin' ask him about the boardgame he made with Rob "Legacy" Daviau called Cthulhu: Death May Die. I guess I have his mail.

We've been trying to figure out what kind of psychic whorl has seized Respawn Entertainment such that the work of their hands - the Titanfall series - hasn't found success in accordance with its manifest quality. We posit a possible theory in this, today's incomparable strip.

Gabe's kids got him back into Titanfall 2. I think they might already have moved on from it, but he and Kara are still in there. They added a whole Wave Based Horde Mode thing, there's a new Titan, it's wild. But there's a stalwart community that remained in there, and they've slavered for exactly the kind of prey that Gabriel represents. Somehow engaging in perpetual battle with this brutal new pantheon hasn't scared him off yet.

Being a parent is always fraught. There's always been a profundity of horseshit associated with the practice, but you can't forget in the prosecution of these duties that being terraformed by hormones is a lot to handle too. So while they're being remade at the molecular level and you're trying to explain to your son on the spectrum that, uh, yeah, basically all people lie fucking 24/7, you have to seek out, identify, and protect the moments where you can see each other clearly. And also you have to lie 24/7.

We'll see what today's episode of The Mandalorian brings us, I guess, but the first three episodes are essentially a trilogy of television length shows that constitute - in aggregate - the best Star Wars movie Disney has produced. Solo and Rogue One evoke certain genres - heist and war, respectively - nestled in yards upon yards of comforting, nostalgic fleece. The Mandalorian just feels like Star Wars, because Star Wars was already a Western. They resonate at the same frequency.