Gabe and Kara entered the Skin Mines to… actually, let me generate another metaphor. I don't want the mental image of a "Skin Mine" sloshing around in my skull-zone.

Once you have been alive long enough, you begin to see the superstructure.

It sort of goes back to the podcast for this week, entitled "Medley." For me, games are novel models of phenomena, keyhole glimpses into a manifold and incomprehensible reality. For my longtime friend and ally Gurpy Grops, videogames are a visual medium, a novel way to experience art. I start at the abstract and work down, he does the opposite.

Hey, what are you doing November 17th through the 19th? You want to come out to Philly, PA - an auspiciously truncated state - and roll some motherfucking dice?!? Tickets for PAX Unplugged, our new tabletop themed show, are available for purchase!

I left my Switch at home yesterday for Brenna, and I really missed it. I have yet to play it au parc but I don't see a situation where that doesn't happen. Like Google Glass, there's going to be things about it that make the social fabric… taut, for lack of a better word. I played Mario Kart at a brewery and the novelty factor of this projected a small distance into what others perceived as rudeness, as though I had brought in a television from home or something and just started watching it. It's okay to watch the television installed in the bar, and it's okay to be at a table with other people looking and interacting exclusively with your phone. But if you and a friend are playing a game together, now it's rude.

We have a lot we want to accomplish in the next few years, and we need somebody to help us do that - the help we're looking for right now is in the "Graphic Design" realm, and it's somebody we'd like to have in-house. From Acquisitions Incorporated to the Eyrewood to Automata, I feel like it's time to really investigate what these things mean. I had Kiko put together a slab of text to explain the skills they're looking for in Design. Here he is:

Gabriel has failed again, and it's my duty to catalogue it.

Are we running up against the namespace limitations on game titles? "Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3" is practically fridge poetry. So, I lashed out. And I'm sorry.

Puyo Puyo Tetris dropped for the Switch this week and it's fantastic. I've been playing it on my own, with my family, online with strangers and just today I brought it in to play with Jerry. The amount of "game" here is just bonkers. Obviously you have both Puyo Puyo and Tetris but then you've got a bunch of different variations on those games as well. You can also play Swap mode which has you switching back and forth between both games during a round. There's even a mode called Fusion where you play both games at the same damn time! I ended up poking around online looking for some tips and found this incredible series of videos over on the Sega YouTube channel.

Even the demo of Puyo Puyo Tetris hit hard around here. Gavin had a literal Millennial Rooftop Party with this shit; it's nuts. When Mario Kart 8 Deluxe hits on Friday it's all gonna happen again. A portable with a little kickstand you always have two controllers for is… look. I've said it before. But when something actually works like it does in a commercial, a technology that projects into social space, I have to make a note.

Gabe was telling me about a terrifying event that he had witnessed on television, via a show which is ostensibly about children's toys but is also about adult ambitions. It was very difficult to watch. I felt like my teeth were trying to escape my gums and crawl to safety. We started to discuss the sorts of products we might offer in this context, which ultimately lead to the scoping, scripting, and ultimately the manufacture of this comical strip.

Thornwatch is in the home stretch now and the pace is picking up for me. This game needs a lot of artwork and I can’t do it all on my own. I wanted to introduce you to the other artists helping me out on this project and share some of their work with you.

I'm still on the prowl for a Switch, so I can't speak to it personally, but Grabe is having a premium experience with the new Wonder Boy. That just which just reinforces two things I thought already: one, I need to steal a Switch from one of the other people here, and two, that a lot of the stuff I'm going to like best for it isn't going to be on a cartridge. I guess this all leads into a corollary, or maybe even a Point Three, where if you don't have a plump SD card slotted in that thing it's entirely possible that ur doin it rong.

Grab has already waxed poetical about Overwatch: Uprising, and in private I have seen him wipe away those tears which demand release. When I look at the official page, that language doesn't strike me as being in the service of a one-off initiative. They can play with this forever, each time with a delectable new mess of crates, just continue driving in this potent spike of ambient narrative expression. I want to emphasize that Overwatch is what it looks like when Blizzard fails to release a product. Failing is a skill. Can you imagine how it must have felt to be waist deep in the ashes of Titan, and still find Overwatch in you? Would that we could all fail so well.

I mean, this is what happened. This is just a few frames of a documentary about Gabriel bleeding out in the desert. To be honest, I don't know if what came back from there is Gabriel at all: it could be one of those "cactus men" you hear about. The Walking Cactus, that gets a taste of blood from a dying man, and looks to takin' on his shape, just to drink more.

I like games in general, games of all kinds; that's sort of my thing. In the manner of a giant enemy crab, though, I do have a weak point that can be struck for massive damage.