You might have heard of D&D Essentials already; I don't really know what to think of it yet. Billed as a streamlined yet compatible version of Dungeons & Dragons, it makes a virtue of speed at every level of play. It's not hard to find thoughts out there on it, but I couldn't contextualize them because I don't know what's true.

Nobody likes artists, and who can blame them? When they aren't challenging your preconceptions or whatever, or renouncing the boundary between being and nonbeing, they're beating you at games with their nigh mystical bullshit.

As is often the case, you can read a truncated, insulting version of a story somewhere else or you can go to Ars Technica.

Colloquially, people either refer to it as Precipice or Rainslick.  Does that mean something, I wonder?  Is one of these types of people from Venus?  It's impossible to know.  

My son is a convicted Lego Maniac. This weekend we were at Toys R Us and saw a game called Creationary which looked pretty much like Pictionary but with Lego. We played it a few times this weekend and I still think that’s a good way to describe it.

Attempting to experience as broad a swath of the medium as I can - to maximize my usefulness to you, but also, you know, video games - it's still entirely possible for me to miss things. The worst part is that if I actually like any of the games I'm playing, which is a nice outcome, another game must inexorably lose. That's how it was with the original Mafia, considered something of a holy text by many PC enthusiasts, and something I skimmed at best. I don't intend to miss it on the second go 'round.

What surprised me most about some of the reactions to our Dickwolf joke was not that people were offended. But that this was the comic that offended them. In each case the emails I got started with something like “I’ve been a long time fan” or “Been reading the comic for years...” and then they go into how this particular comic really bothered them.

Reaction to Wednesday's comic fell, conveniently for my purpose, into two camps: those who found a phrase like "raped by dickwolves" a stunning return to form, and those who felt that we were somehow advocating the actual rape of human beings.  It sounds as though we've already satisfied the first camp, but an effort should certainly be made to assuage the latter.

Something that is discussed with some frequency around here is how the quickly an MMO reverts to its default state, ready for the next bus-full of level appropriate tourists to do whatever that zone desperately requires. Whenever something happens outside this cycle - like WoW's phasing (which gets fairly elaborate by the time Cataclysm rolls around) or a dynamic party matching up against a tough public quest in WAR - it's exhilarating. And then you go collect your hooves.

Episode 3 starts NOW.

There are multiple ways to watch Inception, just as there are multiple ways to see it. It has that "movie-as-game" process of narrative detangling that you get with Memento (also by Nolan) or Primer. Gabriel resisted investigating the ideas of the film initially, and while that isn't necessarily courageous Inception is a movie that can work under those conditions. It didn't last long: soon, my inbox was playing host to links of a spoilerian nature and lowercase treatises commingling lucid dreaming, Zoroastrian prophecy, and the secret menu from In-N-Out Burger.

Gabriel finished his last book during the San Diego trip, and so he's been on the prowl for a new one, which is always a dangerous time. The last one managed to combine:

Did you know that there was a time when our website played host to comics of a "humorous" nature, japes of a merry sort, which dealt with popular culture in general and electronic games in particular? Return with me, friends, to those ancient times. The truth is even more savage, and brutal, and savage: we're considering a bump to a single medium opponent. I have written a will.

And it can be found here.

We decided to get our own warehouse up here in Seattle, for lots of reasons, but primarily to have after-hours shootouts with The Triads.  Brian and Robert are heading down to Austin next week to pick up all the stuff and move it up, but while they are in transit, you can take advantage of INCREDIBLE SAVINGS!  The store closes down on the 6th - yes, in like four days - but if you enter the code mov1ng when you check out, you'll get ten percent off everything you buy.  I didn't mean for that second part to be bolded, that just happened in the editor somehow, but I might as well leave it because that's important information.  

The Blood and Oil have finally run out in this, the fifth chapter. What a tremendous amount of fun that was, and we must all thank Ben Caldwell for drawing it and Gary Whitta for writing it.