I spent most of the weekend watching the Rainbow 6: Siege invitational, like… a lot of it, I watched it a lot. I ran down the battery on my loyal, ancient Acer Chromebook a couple times while I was out in the garage trying to make it less appealing to rats.

I'd heard that the new stress test for Sea of Thieves was gonna be an actual stress test. As in, they were gonna let us come in and try to break it while they were actively trying to break the backend as well. Giving people an experience with your product you aren't completely in control of and which can literally fail in random ways creates novel rhetorical and business challenges, which is why "betas" are mostly marketing and why when we purchase entertainment software it's fucked a nontrivial percentage of the time.

I first saw the Wyrmwood crew out at PAX South, which was essentially "the tabletop focused show" before there was such a thing as PAX Unplugged. "Wood nerds" are real. I know about this from my stepfather: he was showing me some kind of "burl" or whatever, which I think is a wood word, and he was like "check this burl out" or something to that effect. No, it was Bird's Eye maple. His eyes glowed. That's the type of dorks these Wyrmwood people are.

When I'm playing pubji with Kiko, I take painkillers constantly. Like, in game. The inventory item. It helps me get my head right. In the state of preternatural clarity they create, do I occasionally shoot a bush that looks (at a certain LOD) like it might be a crouching man? I won't say it doesn't happen. Maybe the bush in question didn't deserve to be shot, per se - but let's be honest with one another.

This motherfucker can't stay out of the news. And because eSports and social media have transformed every human medium of communication into a tabloid, I can't look anywhere without seeing it. So now, even if you have scrupulously limited your Internet access to this specific site, you still have to put up with it.

So, without repeating myself too much, one of the reasons I like games is that I think - true or not - that somewhere in the experience of playing a game, I might be able to find some shadow of the person that made it. The game could also be the shadow, I suppose; they may be what casts the shadow. I'm not sold on any particular metaphor. It's very, very weird when I play a game that already seems to know me.

The Overwatch League is having at least one of its intended effects, that of putting Overwatch itself back into rotation for Garb. By which I mean Gabe. Garb might be a little too far. Plus, it's a word already. Garb is the Dark Souls of needless handle transforms.

I caught some OWL when I probably should have been preparing for my son's D&D game. They are now engaged in a live or death struggle with a race of featureless black cubes whose only weakness is candy. There are probably worse fathers but I can't think of one right now.

Gabriel and I have been playing Monster Hunter, yes, but only after he and his family get done playing pirate in Sea of Thieves. That game is some weird shit; I played on the stream once, and with he and Kara a few other nights. This feels indie as fuck, like a Steam survival darling in Early Access. In every possible way, the good and the bad. I think it works the kind of odd magic that I would have told you, straight up, Microsoft didn't have in its roster. I can't even imagine the fights they must have had to keep something like this alive.

There's this weird-ass bird in Monster Hunter called a Kulu-Ya-Ku that legitimately puts on airs. It's got this little tuft - the same tuft I have dangling from my weapon for good luck - and it's always digging up rocks like some captain of fucking industry. It likes to throw the rocks and it also likes to corner you and kill you with the rock. Well, it likes to try. I chin check a motherfucking bird from down low and they stop doing it.

Something can be the most humane iteration of itself yet and still be a rubber band ball of sorcerous density.

I can understand why not everyone would like Sea of Thieves. Technically it’s a video game but it’s really more like a hardcore pirate simulator. They have created an ocean and populated it with islands full of treasure. You’re given a boat and honestly not much else. There is no tutorial and no direction of any kind. When you spawn for the first time you’ll see your boat bobbing gently at the dock. You could hop on and get lost for hours in incredible pirate adventures... or you could stand there and wonder what the hell you’re supposed to do.

Hey! There's a job open to work on PAX - the technical term is "Content Marketing Lead." Would you like to be described in that way, while also making PAX kick even more ass than it already does? Take a peek at the offer.

There was an issue for some people trying to access the Sea of Thieves preview of the game where it said they were Too Early or some shit; eventually that started working for Gabe so it felt safe to enter. It was not. I had the same error and no recourse I could see, except for in the reeking warrens of Reddit, where I learned that you could cancel your preorder and then order it from somewhere else and it would work. And it does work. But routing sales of your first party title away from your own digital store over to Amazon must be considered a colossal eff fest.

I ended up with a few Subnautica codes, most of which I gave away via the Tweeter. But the role I enunciate for myself in the strip is true, I think Weird Uncles are completely vital. I don't have any non-weird uncles. But apparently Gabriel the Younger can only cling terrified to a laptop in a digital ocean that threatens to swallow him whole.

Gabe sent over the strip with the subject line "Is this too much?" and I told him it's virtually impossible to tell things like that. I didn't suggest, though I will suggest now, that I'm not the best person to ask for information of this kind. I'm something of an "advance scout" when it comes to conceptual territory. I'm not saying I'm right about things necessarily, just that I tend to range in the zone where the reproducible and the reliable give way to the untrammeled abstract. I mean, look at that sentence. It's like Exhibit A.