Uh, so.

I often end up going to some kind of event at Elliot's school, some bullshit, not because the event itself is bullshit but because he never really has any intention of engaging with it. If they are having an Ice Cream Social, he is interested primarily in Ice Cream and the Social is right out. Even a "Game Night" is insufficient. What invariably happens - and I am not using the word Invariably simply for exaggeratory funtimes - is that I lose him at some point, but not really, because I know where he went. He is in the library, in a corner, reading a book. There is a pile of books next to him also. I can't really be mad, that's the son I wanted.

I know you are home sick today but I thought you would appreciate this. I was looking for a new book to read last night and saw this:

This is just a friendly reminder that the Child's Play invitational is coming up on June 22nd. We still have tickets available whether you want to play in the "real golf" scramble tournament, the putt putt mini golf tournament or just spectate from the sidelines. Remember that regardless of which ticket you purchase you'll be able to join in the awards ceremony and BBQ at the end of the day. You can get more details over on the official Child's Play site. Pretty much the entire PA crew will be down there so come join us for some golf and help support a great cause!

Gabriel is fucking hooked on Wolf, which is the absolute last thing I expected. You don't make shooters without multiplayer, I'm not sure what these mutants thought they were up to exactly, but it's simply not done. If you want to get away with that kind of thing, it has to take place in a quasi-historical society powered by whale oil. Although there is some weird science here, if you want to call it that.

"Watch_Dogs," like the original Assassin's Creed, was a game the press largely invented. So when it - like the original Assassin's Creed - deviated from the fantasy, I expected the same result. That is to say, I expected the hammer to come down. And it hasn't.

Well maybe not blow your mind but they are pretty cool. You might like them.

At PAX East, we had all of the Q's for our Q&A panel submitted ahead of time. Since we are only doing one of these big Q&A panels per PAX now, we wanted to make sure all the questions were awesome. The questions got sorted and put into white envelopes for easy questions and red envelopes for hard questions. Tycho and I had not seen any of them until we opened the envelopes on stage. You can watch the results right here:

Dreaded, reprehensible continuity raised one of its scaly heads without our notice, or intention, in the manner of an… that is to say, of a... scaly head-raiser(?). Like so many weaklings previously, we fell sway to the siren song of causality. And we have become less.

We have been talking about this for years but just last week we actually launched a major expansion to the Child’s Play program. Over the last year, it's been in a pilot form but as of Friday, Child’s Play is now in a position to support domestic violence shelters as well as Children’s Hospitals. Jamie has been working on this program for a while now and so I’m just going to share with you here the post she made over on the Child’s Play site:

People have been asking me, and then asking me again, when the tickets for PAX Prime would be going on sale. I was happy to tell them I didn't know, in the same way that there are things which each agent does not know when sent on a dangerous mission. When I came in this morning, though, I learned. They were launching now.

My iPad is essentially a digital card game playing device. Between SolForge, Hearthstone and Order and Chaos Duels I don't really use it for much else. O&C Duels actually just got a really big update that adds a bunch of new single player content. They have expanded the campaign mode significantly which is rad for me because that's my favorite way to play that game. They also added a Tower mode similar (identical?) to Hearthstone's Arena battles. Choose a hero then build a deck by choosing one of three cards offered until you have 40 cards. Then throw your new deck into battle with other humans and see how far you can go before you lose three times. Depending on how far you get you're rewarded with in game currency or rare cards. O&C Duels is a great game, closer to SolForge than Hearthstone in terms of gameplay. It's lane based but adds its own twist to some of the mechanics you expect. For me it's sort of a nice break after getting my ass handed to me again and again in Hearthstone. I can jump over and play the single player campaign in O&C for a bit without feeling the shame of loosing to human beings.

I am perched on the eave of his life like a gargoyle. One day I will be That Uncle, and I'll do for him the same thing I did for his father. There are rules of the road, but the rules aren't the road itself.

A while back I was asking about laptop advice and I got a lot of it. My needs are a little different because I wasn’t really looking for a portable computer in the sense that I needed a machine to haul around with me everywhere I go. The Surface Pro fills that role for me. I wanted a machine primarily for playing video games, that I could put out on my kitchen table when I wanted to play and then tuck away in a drawer when I wasn't using it. I don’t really have a dedicated space for a desktop computer anymore even though I know I could get more bang for my buck going that route.

The Surface Pro 3 does a lot of stuff right. The device is ridiculously light and thin. It still manages to feel sturdy and well built though. The new screen is absolutely beautiful and the extra couple of inches makes a big difference when using it. There will be plenty of great reviews of this machine from all different perspectives, but today I’m just going to talk about how the Surface Pro 3 works for artists.

It's all true, except for the reaction obviously. There is probably some weird thing they're going to do that we aren't prepared for, but having been tamped down so thoroughly by our own parents a lot of this stuff just doesn't seem like a big deal. I guess we'll see who was right.