I've been present for the aftermath of so many shows that it's very startling how gone it is and how quickly it is gone. You keep thinking, or… I guess, I keep thinking, that when something like this happens there's gonna be some kind of echo that blooms in physical space, some platinum tracery midair, some mark. As it is, it's like I like through five seasonally appropriate editions of A Christmas Carol a year, and then it all evaporates to the extent that I can hardly prove it was there.  I hope I'm learning whatever all these ghosts were trying to teach me.

This devil's hellthirst can only be quenched by novelty drinks - drinks whose vessels come included in the price of admission.  When I went to the elevator to hit the lobby, starved and feral, a boist'rous Gabriel emerged from the elevator I had, myself, summoned and told me to "drink margaritas" in all caps. And I did.

As someone who has been to more PAX shows than anyone else - only Kiko has been to as many, because it's the maximum number - I am privy to certain artisanal knowledges. I'm not saying this means we constitute a new pantheon or anything, but upon our Twinthrone we will sit in judgement over the affairs of men.

Today is my "Cake Day" over on Reddit. This is sort of like your Reddit birthday and it means I've been on the site for seven years. To celebrate, I'm doing a little AMA over on the rarely used Penny Arcade subreddit. Feel free to stop by and ask me anything! 

Drake of the 99 Dragons is a time capsule from a novel era; there was a lot of stuff that hit as Xbox exclusive which was inexplicable or troubling for various reasons. It also had bonkers shit like Splinter Cell, and credible multiplayer - graduating, ultimately, to Xbox Live, whose approach ultimately became definitional. But Drake is a whole thing and you should look at the video. You should also look at the Wikipedia page, specifically the credits to the right, and look those people up at MobyGames because a few of them went on to be associated with all kinds of stuff, some of it you might have enjoyed. So many little stories have been borne out of it.

Twitter is changing again, because it's fundamentally incompatible with human nature. If you're curious about some of the new options, we go into some of the particulars here.

Apparently, they can precision-shred your corneas but then enough time passes so that they need a good re-shreddin'. What's funny is that I remember being surprised that such a thing happened, that you would have to do it again, the first time I heard about it and then my mind shielded me from this information for years. I'm very defensive of the eye. I juke and sway like a leaf insect when something gets close. I also don't like needles; I will physically deflect a doctor who comes in with one, trying to get my juice, and it's not even a conscious act - I can see my own hand rising up to bat them away, over and over. They ain't getting in.  And a laser beam is just a needle made out of light - I feel like that's broadly understood. So this whole thing is not okay with me in any way, let alone two times. I'm happy - I'm honored - to just hang an object from my face every day for the rest of my life.

I guess this is how it works - it is said that the years start coming, and they don't stop coming. We have, in the manner of scrapple, assembled a kind of savory loaf of the last ten years' most sardonic nibblin's and have arranged them half-heartedly on a bakelite tray. We specialize in such loaves and have delivered them for literal decades.

I’m going to talk about the Witcher. If you haven’t seen the Netflix series and want to avoid spoilitos, I’d duck out now. 

I want to listen to records for some reason. I don't know why. Well… hm.

Warmachine is a very rewarding wargame (in my opinion) that asks a lot from you at the beginning of a turn. Because your Warcaster - roughly analogous to a King in Chess - must apportion their mystic power to your forces, you need to arrange the turn in your head before you ever commit a single unit. It's that foundational edict - the distribution of your Focus - that has purpose-built a mind within me capable of playing this kind of game.

Over the break, Kiko and I ended up at Gabe's house where apparently the actual Gabe - the young man I will forever call Gabriel, fully unabridged, because this is the kind of uncle I am - has apparently taken up wargaming. As these games get simpler and more skirmishy either in rules or in model volume, I take that as a cue to get more people around the table simultaneously; to increase the scale of the game with those freed resources while the load on the individual remains low.  

I swear to God, every time I have made the mistake of reading somebody's review of The Witcher they compare it to Game of Thrones as though that comparison means fuck all. Why did you do that? I ask the burning, wholly unconscious screen. Did you say that it was like Game of Thrones because… somebody has a sword in it? Did you say that because they both have swords?

I think I'm gonna end up seeing Rise of Skywalker on an airplane at some point, on the back of the seat in front of me. That's about my interest level. There were inklings of it in the first movie, if you want to go back that far, but it really seems like the new trilogy wasn't conceived of as a trilogy at all. It's genuinely hard to believe. And not just because of what Disney managed to accomplish with their Marvel project, making an ecosystem of movies in different genres and then somehow crafting a kind of metamovie to conclude it. Obviously, they can do it. That they didn't - and that they expected us to go along with it - is incredible.