Gabriel is out of the office this week, bringing with him many, many models and also many questions, which of course I am happy to field. We had to learn this by slamming our heads repeatedly into books, and then remembering you can just use the app for rules questions, and then using a mixture of books and the app, and then playing so many wargames that the rules for them become a single sphere of unparallelled clarity with the density of a dwarf star.

I'm happy to short circuit this process.

Many, many things!

It's wild in some respects that Smash Bros. constitutes a genre, now - one of my favorite things to do at a PAX is to watch the Brawlhalla stage where mortals contend with the game's creators and are very frequently liquefied internally before reaching escape velocity.

Something you used to hear a lot - which means you'll begin hearing it again soon - is that videogames desensitize players to violence. It's a subset of a broader media critique, and it's leveraged perpetually on every axis whenever a cadre believes media might generate culture which is not fully synchronized with their political aims. I mean… we all know that, right? I don't have to explain that anymore than I already have?  Suppressing art is job one for any dogma; I grew up in that.  That said, that desensitization thesis never felt particularly seaworthy.

Wired Magazine has an excellent article about Child's Play up right now. It goes into detail on the new positions the charity has created inside hospitals called Gaming and Technology specialists. You can send all the cool stuff you want to a Children's Hospital but someone who works there has to know what to do with it all and CP is putting those people in there. It's a great example of the work Child's Play is doing thanks to the generosity of gamers! Hard to believe this all started almost 20 years ago when Jerry and I asked you guys to send games to my house so we could take them to the local Children's Hospital. 

-Gabe out

After much consideration I’ve decided to go with the Black Templars as my Space Marine Chapter. 

I take my role as Uncle very, very seriously, and that means making sure my socially-constructed nephews know that their Uncle-in-name-and-spirit thinks they are cool. Thinks they're doing okay. If the younger one should leap from the shadows, striking with paired blades, with my dying breath I make sure he knows the smaller of the two is called a wakizashi. Then - darkness.

What does that mean?  It certainly sounds very fancy.  But this person, whatever mortal form they might take, will be coming in to help Lidija and The Design Team make rad shit and sell it from our store and at PAX shows.  Some of that is our own stuff, but some of it - and you might get a preview if you're going to Gen Con - is from a suite of incredibly cool partners who have just begun to trust us to make artifacts of various kinds for them.  There is a ton of potential for us in that, enough that it's simply not a one person job anymore.  I would put our design team against anybody, and all we're missing is somebody who is way, way, maybe too into pivot tables.  Were you looking at a pivot table right before this?  Then please take a look at our new Merchandise Coordinator position.    

(CW)TB

We have had enough experience with a very specific type of person to know when we are seeing that type of person again. Maybe that's unfair, but if I'm overzealous when it comes to protecting myself from domination and abuse it's only because I have some knowledge of it. You'll have to make your peace with it.

I guess I always avoided Warhammer because I thought I knew what it was all about. In my mind it was a very complicated tabletop game for the hardest of the hardcore who want to roll fist fulls of dice and field massive armys with dozens of models. I had played a couple other miniature games like Warmachine back in the day and enjoyed but I never thought Warhammer was for me. Boy was I wrong. 

It's a bizarre and alien state of affairs.

I will be participating in an afternoon of fundraising for the Child’s Play Charity this coming Sunday the 17th. The Penny Arcade iRacing League has arranged a couple of fun races for your enjoyment that should make you laugh and will hopefully raise some money for a very good cause!

I'm out of town at the moment, my home utterly colonized by Genshin-addicted teens building their PAX West cosplay. I played it a million patches ago, so I don't even know who these hot boys they are trying to emulate even are. Tell me if this helps narrow it down: they have a novel hair color, an approachable androgyny, and radiate a safe sort of danger.

One of the things that’s so great about Penny Arcade is that it can be whatever Jerry and I want it to be. 24 years into the comic and sure it’s mostly about nerds doing nerd stuff but sometimes it’s an epic fantasy story about kids in a dangerous forest or a Sci-Fi western with heavy religious themes. Well it can also be a 1980’s cartoon about kids who unlock powerful “MECKS” through the use of music cassettes and a special tape deck. Check out Tape Mecks!

I don't even know what's going on with this Skull & Bones shit. Now that I'm a million years old, I try to comport myself with slightly more decorum than I did as a younger person. I was essentially one of those weird demons from Hellraiser. Now, I'm still a demon, but more like the kind of demon you might encounter if you call a service line for help with a networked printer.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is actually… very normal Star Trek, which shouldn't be startling in any way, except they stopped making it.