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.

In addition to being shredded five or six at a time, the doomed creeps in For Honor also have informative barks that they kick out - like, if your friend is perforated. It's nice to have a second or two to process the fact that it's about to be 4v1 and you are not on the "four" side of the V.

If Gabe is playing a game at home and then decides to play it at the office, there's usually a point at which you need to make absolutely certain the save has been copied up into the cloud from his PS4. And then you need to make sure that you've copied it back up after you play, which doesn't, you know… always happen. Since last Friday, he's been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on his Switch, and then… just bringing in the Switch. Like, the whole thing. It's still kind of a weird idea even though I've seen it happen multiple times. Obviously playing while in transit to and from isn't a great strategy. Y'know. Don't do that.

It wasn't quite this simple, but it was fairly simple.

I was able to pick up a Switch on Friday although I probably made it harder than it needed to be. I showed up at my local Fred Meyer around 5:30 in the morning and stood in the cold and the rain until they opened at 7am. Later that day a bunch of folks from the office went over to the local Amazon store and just walked right in and bought Switches. Of course if I had done that, I wouldn’t have this awesome cold I caught. Looks like I might be patient zero at PAX East this week!