Gabriel the Ever-Helpful is always ready to drop some true dungeon science on me. My role in his game was essentially on the Grima Wormtongue tip; I run my own stuff by him to get his thoughts on it, but he's usually hunched over his tablet defining the Eyrewood for the Thornwatch adventure card game thingy. My understanding, though, is that Jim Darkmagic will occasionally need to commandeer The "C" Team for secret missions, missions Gabe himself would run. This is something he is very, very good at.

I’ve got well over a hundred hours invested in Zelda: Breath of the Wild now. I’ve dealt with all the divine beasts, found 72 of the 120 shrines, collected a couple hundred Korok seeds and reclaimed the Master sword. I am by all accounts ready to go in and beat the shit out of Ganon. I don’t want the game to be over though, so I’m still playing. I plan on finding all the shrines and completing some more quests before I wrap it up. I am not one of these 100% completion people, that’s not why I am doing this. I just love the world and the game too much to let it be over. I don’t think I’ve ever been so bummed at the prospect of beating a game. In fact I’ve already thought about what I would do if I were to play it again which is pretty much unheard of for me. I think it might just be the perfect video game.

I mean… it's true, to a certain extent. I certainly advocated for unrelenting brutality in his own campaign, I have references, but when I'm running a table I have my own objectives. And they don't all involve grinding parties into a nutrient-rich paste.

I spent some time yesterday teaching elementary school kids how to draw cartoons. I started doing this when my oldest son Gabe was in first grade. He’s in 6th now and I’ve gone into his class each year to work with the kids on drawing. My youngest son Noah is in first grade this year and so this was my first time going into his classroom. I really love working with kids of all ages but the little ones are the best because they don’t have any fear of drawing yet. Pretty much all kids love to draw and color but eventually most people think “I can’t draw” and so they give it up often never draw again. It’s a bummer but these kids haven’t reached that phase yet. One of my favorite quotes is from Pablo Picasso and it goes:

Because I believe that Interactivity is last artistic frontier, when new constructions of interactivity arise - even halting, incomplete, or flawed ones - I recognize them as larval stages of whatever Jenovan "final form" awaits generations hence. Counterpoint: If your game animates bears by having them flip and roll from their heads to their back to their ass, you've already lost Gabriel and he's not coming back.

One of the more interesting things about playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is that you feel all kinds of new feelings, or "feels." They come from a variety of places, but one of them is that you are actually having new experiences that effervesce through your trunk-zone.

I mean, it's all true. If some raucous, snouty beast-men want to cavort I've got my own priorities that don't intersect with them on the graph. But occasionally they take up inadvisable hobbies.

The Thornwatch Kickstarter was a huge success but it’s possible that you missed the opportunity to back it. Don’t worry, If you missed the campaign you’ve got another opportunity to get in on all the cool stuff we offered. We’ve got a PledgeManager page set up for Thornwatch that will allow you to preorder the game from now until April 21st. You can get the base set, the Dark of the Wood expansion, the acrylic pawns for both sets, and the deluxe wood box from Dapper Devil.

I haven't had sex with any "entities" in Andromeda yet, but, you know, I've got my eye on a sextupedal "physical dream" called the Bright Cogitant and some kind of crab with time-travelling genitalia. I'm keeping my options open.

When I talked about Snipperclips before - culminating in our powerful Snipperstrip - I said that my mission was to make the attach rate for Snipperclips 1 to 1. Does that constitute advocacy? Probably! Here's some more: the strip itself was drawn from our play session with it, which was - if anything - even more erotical.

Hell yes I joined EA Access to play Mass Effect: Andromeda over the weekend. I don't hate it.

I’ve had a few weeks now with my Switch and that included a trip over to Boston. It is hard for me to separate my feelings about the console from Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So far the Switch has really just been a Zelda machine for me. With that said I still feel like the Switch might end up being the ultimate console for me. I don’t know how your house is set up, but we have a family room where we spend most of our time. It’s got the big comfy couch, all the video game consoles and the nice TV. It also has all the boy’s Legos and toys so it’s where we all hand out. If my wife is watching shows or the boys are playing a game I can still be in there playing Zelda on my Switch. I’m not playing a portable game or a different game. I am playing the real deal and when it’s my turn for the TV I can just pop the Switch into the dock and pick up right where I left off. This was already awesome even before I took my trip to Boston.

In strips like Apophenia and Potential Thingness, we go into the type of puzzle that The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild has wedged in literally every crevice: puzzles you must recognize are puzzles. The distinction I would make is that every time we think something is a puzzle in Zelda, it has been. That might also be true in The Witness, but I simply wasn't smart enough to perceive it.

We made a snipperstrip about Snipperclips.

Having discussed it with Gabriel, he says that Jim Darkmagic is more "magician" than "wizard," but not in the synonym way. He thinks of him as a performer at root, one that occasionally becomes a piece of bipedal mystical artillery. So finally hitting 9th level with him unlocked some fairly bonkers stuff in that vein, things for his growing toolkit of battlefield manipulation over direct damage strategy, and he made some cool stuff happen at PAX East. We did have to have a conversation about when a magical person gets what shit. I should talk to him about THAC0 sometime.