I got a mail from the ESA a little while ago that… Well, we did make a comic about all of it. Maybe we start there.

I don't talk about it a lot, I should talk about it more, but we do a brewing show the vast, vast majority of Tuesdays on Twitch called Acquisitions Intoxicated. There's like seventy two fucking episodes of this shit! We even have a collaboration between #AcqInt and Two Beers Brewing hitting later this month that should hopefully still be around when PAX West rolls around - every beer we craft with the channel and subsequently brew has a narrative tied into Acquisitions incorporated or D&D in general, and this one is called Signing Bonus. I can't wait for you to see the label, and maybe even the promotional poster.

It's not a hard and fast rule, for example I can't eat the Ironjawz I'm about to paint. But if I undertake a hobby, when I'm done doing the hobby, I want to have something I can put in my mouth.

We've streamed Madden stuff a few times, and invariably things shift into the eldritch for me. That's more or less par for the course, I guess - I'm always trying to bend shit in a mythos direction anyway. But sports can absorb an incredible volume of these concepts because the human narratives underpinning them are so strong.

There's like a story mode and there's other shit but the only kind of Madden we play is Madden Ultimate Team, which we admit is karmically lacklustre but by the same token all the football mans are on little cards. Whatever else might be true, this is the substrate: that we want to swaddle, nourish, and care for these thin, thin mans.

Gabe has some experience on Mixer as a platform, invaluable experience, and with Ninja's lateral move to the service there's a lot of wisdom to pass on. There's plenty to like there at the service level, but you'd stream there primarily because you wanted to or to tilt at a deeply entrenched conceptual windmill not because it was part of your business plan. Or if you were Ninja, with everything that entails.

I am a dark bouquet of neuroses; if you found your way here into my cavern, long after my Good By date, you're almost certainly aware. The weird thing about them is that usually you project them onto other people - you imagine that they're common things. I'll tell people shit about the church I grew up in like they're ordinary experiences, like people would shout in an imaginary language at the top of their lungs and then somebody else would "translate" it as a message from a Real God, and apparently that's not as common as I thought.

Having returned kickingly to Real Life, I've been looking at this screen for a while trying to remember what I have historically done with it. I've manipulated these black squares below the screen to get where I have thus far - each one corresponds to a specific letter, and I can arrange them like so.

I went in to see to Kris in his office, trepidation drawn about me like a cloak, to talk to him about San Diego Comic Con in the same way that I might talk to my son about The Drugs.

I wasn't aware that there even was a designation for cellular data called H+, and I've had the "opportunity" to discover this dessicated realm while trying to approximate relaxation. Whenever I leave home for something, it's generally been an opportunity to discover where Google Fi isn't.

We have a strip about it later this week, all of this SDCC-ness, but man. I think going to it as long as I did, particularly in the way that I did, messed me up somehow. It remains now in the form of a recurring Naked School dream, a succession of interpersonal challenges each a little more beyond my ken, coupled with the constant, jungle awareness of a low level, perfectly plain, but plausibly deniable enmity. Also, if you want to see the blue blood crawling beneath a person's face, the lighting there is optimally calibrated for it.

Sometimes when you are endeavoring to create something exaggerated and ridiculous specifically to make light of something, you end up with the game suggested in the third panel which… I would play, frankly. After getting into Gaslands, in truth, I think there's no beloved toy that could not find its truest expression being carefully, affectionately modeled in a wargame. Also, the young man in the strip is my son. He got big, somehow.

I thought Dragon Quest Builders was cool but Dragon Quest Builders 2, with it's promise of a multiplayer endgame existing in perpetuity and a commitment to ongoing content, essentially dominates my free time. It's all being poured into this tiny device. I will watch Gabe stream it while also playing it, in an effort to "hack" living such that I can experience more of it within the clutching and greedy span capricious fate has allotted me. I run this battery into the ground daily, and then must resort to - avert your eyes, Mother - playing in docked mode.

Thanks to the folks who stopped by my Dragon Quest Builders 2 stream last night. If you watch the VOD you can see all kinds of goofy stuff happening on the screen while I'm playing. I remember to turn the microphone on after a few minutes.

It's actually true that there is a thing you can use, specifically, a gridded interface you use to place interactive elements and define their behavior. I'm not saying that to diminish his accomplishment; if anything, it's to laud them for theirs. But he has a history of discovering some new concept and then effortlessly mastering it in a way that is profoundly annoying.

There is a lot about PAX that makes it what it is, but it would be very hard to imagine PAX at all without Enforcers. I know people who attended the show one year, got the help they needed to have a great show from a member of this powerful coalition, and became an Enforcer the next year.