Gabriel and his clan, the Crewhuliks, have been dining on a choice slice of free expansion content for Sea of Thieves called "Tall Tales: Shores of Gold" which sounds piratical as all get-out. It makes it seem like some pirate shit is gonna happen - and fast.

I used to love playing with action figures as a kid and I was fortunate enough to grow up during what surely must have been their golden age. In the 80’s it seemed like we got a new world full of heroes and villains every Saturday. You had the big ones like G.I. Joe, He-Man and Transformers but then there were hundreds of smaller settings like M.A.S.K., Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Centurions, and Visionaries. Even as a kid I recognized on some level that these were simply commercials for toys but I loved them all anyways. I was obsessed with these worlds and the very first stories I ever told were with these larger than life characters. I used to spend hours by myself setting up my G.I. Joe guys and creating my own crazy adventures.

We get up to some shit in Days Gone. A lot of the time the shit we get up to involves something called a Freaker, from the French "friquer," meaning "to freak." They are very unhappy because they dwell in the twilit sliver between life and death. There are many challenges. You can get Prime, but not Netflix. That kind of stuff. The legal substrate is porous.

I think I could sit on the couch and watch Gabriel play Days Gone for an indefinite period of time. One of the things about it is that, like Alan Wake, it reveres the kind of terrain I grew up in - the particular kind of wild place we recognize in what is called the Pacific Northwest. I saw a ridge of snowcapped peaks, peaks whose jaunty caps would soon be a phalanx of clean, cold streams and cricks, and I was like, "Yeah. Things are going to be okay" in a way that only clean water and holy nature can make so.

I own all the SteamWorld games, on a variety of platforms, and the restless whimsy of developer Image & Form is always on display. SteamWorld is not a game but an idea; the idea is that cute robots are doing all the things. The era, the characters, and the genre all hang from that, in suspended multiplicity, as though gently swinging on a mobile.

I’m looking over at the pause screen for Days Gone right now and it says “758 DAYS GONE” which I think is very cool. It’s a running tally that tracks just how long you’ve spent in the zombie infested wilderness of Oregon. I’ve been playing it as much as I can every day since it came out and even now as I write this I am hungry to pick the controller back up. Open World game fatigue is certainly a real thing, and I don’t begrudge anyone who’s tired of running all over hell's half acre ticking of boxes. Days Gone has its hooks in me though and I wanted to share a few of the things I think make it stand out.

When Gabe came up with the name of the stupid show I shouted "Fuck you!" and left the office. Laura Stringer, affectionately known as Laura From Work, said in an email that "her hand slipped" and this was the result:

The type of D&D Gabriel runs is heavily salted with tropes tugged from videogames, and that ended up being a solution when the game he was running for his family left his youngest son, No-an The Usurper, cold and disengaged. If you're talking about Dragonlance, then you're talking about Raistlin, and I think Raistlin might connect better with an older kid whose very big feelings exist in the same fraught continuum.

My computer was, in fact, one hundred percent fucked. It was one of those things where you fix one obvious problem, a problem where when you see it you're like "How did this ever work at all," and then the entire fucking computer inexplicably falls to pieces. In this case, and I mean case in both senses, the CPU was trying to catch on fire because the impeller inside the liquid cooling solution had, through exhaustion or sheer laziness, either ceased to impel or whined throughout. The new Enermax cooler our engineer put on there is like a malevolent curl of alien impact shrapnel and is impervious to heat because it was born in a star.

I was over at Glorp's house last week, he wanted to show me HDR I assume because he owns stock in a company that produces high-end panels, and I had a chance to check out Darksiders 3 on PC.

The whole point of Game of Thrones is that you thought one thing was gonna happen but then another thing happens, and that works until it doesn't anymore.

Having come back from Spokane with more or less my full complement of hit points, it wasn't that bad really; Spokane was a kind of scorched lily pad that I made brief contact with on the way to Priest Lake. There's no reason you should know about Priest Lake! But that's where I went and I think I emerged with more sanity than I had when I went in.

We took our family Sea of Thieves game to Twitch this afternoon and although there were a few hiccups, overall it was pretty smooth! My home internet wasn't perfect and the stream ended up being cut into a few different parts. You can check out the start of our voyage here.

I had to repair this computer to even write this post - that's how fucked up shit is over in Spokane.

Gabe's been playing the original Darksiders on Switch and Darksiders 3 on PC, the PC of all things. I'm always going to be a partisan where gaming PCs are concerned, but even for me 3D action platformer type shit isn't something I prefer on there. The case he's made to me, and I think it is a good one, is that you have HDR and 4k on a console, which is being spread over a massive screen - all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. Then you have the same thing on a monitor right in front of you, a density of content coupled with the fact that everything else being equal the PC simply endures more effects, more ground cover, so that I can be impressed with what's happening on a television but I can be transported by a smaller screen.

There are certainly complexities around the Yoshian mythos, but the aesthetics are impeccable. It's as though you've been given access to a range of light that exclusively communicates joy, and now you can see it.