I always try my best to maintain Christmas Posture, to run along the authorized channels, but Christmas is dark time literally and also figuratively. It's dark. I looked out my window last night into the kind of darkness that would make a man invent God.

Gabriel "rides" books; he straps in and they take him places. He got in because he wanted to go somewhere and he's pretty determined to get there. I stopped being able to do that for some reason. Now, I read a book the way a contractor might walk through a house, trying to assess its stability. I'm looking at the joists. I put a laser level on the floor and scrunch up my chin. And then, while the owners look on, I click out the tip of my pen and drop some bleak science.

Prophetess Dran's mother had told her she was more tree than girl, when she was little; it was a compliment. If the child had any say in the matter, she rarely had two feet on the ground.

I wouldn't play a Bethesda open world game without mods; it's a truth universally acknowledged and so forth. I typically install mods before I start playing to make it so the inventory UI makes sense at all on a computer. I doubt this is even perceived as insulting to the people who made it. And even if it were, they're the ones who put all those Goddamn brooms everywhere. We gotta find a middle ground.

I had a great time at PAX Unplugged and like most folks who went, I came home with a sack of games. I picked up Pocket Madness because the cards are beautiful and I can’t help myself when confronted with great art. It turns out it’s actually a solid game too which is a nice bonus! Tycho described it correctly as a combination between Rummy and Uno. I brought it home and played it with Kara, and both boys so it’s great for the entire family.

The psychic voltage generated by a PAX show is always sufficient to catalyze another round - no matter how tired I might be, no matter how many Human Interactions Per Minute (HiPM) I may have sustained, I receive energy sufficient to manufacture an entirely new self capable of iterating another show the weekend after. This has been true of PAX Unplugged as well, but more than that, I feel like I've undergone some kind of a chemical peel on my spirit and that my freshest layer has been revealed.

I can recall years and years ago trying to get Grib into Oblivion, back on the 360. I prepared the scene the way one might craft a Date Night scenario. I considered candles but did not execute. I don't know if his literal arms were folded but his spirit arms, The Arms Within, were laced before him in a defensive posture.

I think Jeff Vogel lives pretty close to me. He's the Spiderweb Software guy; if you like RPGs that feel like instant classics, like something unearthed, if you like the idea that there exists a kind of Strategic RPG Reserve from which our nation releases games in a time of crisis, you should try and catch up with his work.

Jesus! I can't fucking get it together today. There is a tremendous amount of subconscious filing going on in the waxy, hive-like substructures of my consciousness and it's interfering with attempts to do anything but lie in bed and watch The Punisher. Is this a recognized condition? Maybe it's new.

I think it’s worth mentioning that Penny Arcade turned 19 years old on Saturday. All this started on November 18th 1998 which seems like ancient history at this point. I can still remember sitting in a chinese restaurant in Spokane with Kara and Jerry as he and I wrote that very first strip. Penny Arcade has changed a lot over the years but I have to say I have never been happier to go to work than in the last year or so. I’m not sure how many people can say that after working at a job for nearly 20 years but I feel incredibly fortunate that I get to do this every day.

Gabe had grabbed some kind of a Starter Pack for a game called Skyforge, he didn't know much about it but something about it had made him curious. He's been using the Xbox One X with some regularity, maybe it's that. If you have a new piece of hardware you're always trying to test it out.

I was never going to buy Star Wars: Battlefront II. First, the compliment: I honestly can't believe the graphics. In an era where good graphics are commonplace Battlefront has always been doing something nobody else was: a photorealistic take on the worlds and characters of the franchise. It's a stunning technical achievement which frosts a cake that I am not especially fond of.

Gabe wanted to know what I'd been playing lately, and I couldn't think of anything except Elder Scrolls: Legends. That's because I was formulating the query incorrectly. I was looking for memories where visual field was equal to computer desk, or perhaps vf=television, and not coming up with a whole lot. Then I thought about the Switch, and all the missing time spooled out. Picross. Odyssey. Has Been. Super Beat Sports with Ronia, because we gotta get those hats.

I would be pretty embarrassed if I tried to electroplate my populist credentials by railing against microtransactions, but then every time there's a new set of skins from one of the same fucking boxes I breathlessly worshipped it or did a gallery.

Working a sense of a larger world into single player experiences is always something I'm keen on, even if the ways it tends to happen fit into some very specific boxes. I still want to see it at least considered because eventually it's going to lead to something rad. Gabriel was telling me about how Assassin's Creed: Origins handles it and then we made a strip! This happens a lot, I would say. Twenty years, give or take.

The Xbox One did not win me over this console generation. I’ve said a lot of bad things about the console since it came out, although suggesting that playing an Xbox One during pregnancy is dangerous to the fetus, might be the worst. I’ve made no secret about the fact that I play all my games on the PS4, that I’ve really enjoyed the PS4 Pro and that I’ve actually outfitted my entire family with Playstations so that we can all play together. A few years earlier I was a huge Xbox 360 fan and refused to even touch a PS3 controller. I was ready to love the Xbox One but it ended up being a big clunky device that couldn’t tell if it wanted to be my cable box or my game system. It felt slow and unfriendly to use and I don’t think I played it more than a handful of times. It’s a testament to his character that in spite of all this, Major Nelson still wanted me to have an Xbox One X a few days before release. It has honestly been years since I even thought about the Xbox but I decided to see what they had done since I left and what the new hardware had to offer. Just to be 100% clear, this was a free review version of the hardware given to me by MS. It was the same package they sent out to the big review sites from what I understand.