I felt like this after they rebooted Spider-Man for the third time. In that case, of course, I was wrong; the new Spider-Men, not all of whom are even Men, are so vital and real that the young people on my block live part of their lives ensconced within the fiction. They like Marvel stuff, it's important to be conversant in it, but to them it largely feels like it's for somebody else. Into The Spider-Verse and Holland's Spider-Man are theirs. I tried to interrogate this with them, tried to figure out which side of this coin represented the purest manifestation, and they looked at me as though I'd suggested we start holding crucifixions out on the lawn. They don't even see them as separate, because they're both wound around the same central idea: there's just things that young people understand better. And it's possible to find a mentor, someone with the capacity to bridge the gap, but even this is fraught with its own fresh perils.

I sort of thought I understood what Mixer was. In my mind it did the same stuff Twitch did but for Xbox since it was owned by Microsoft. I knew it was baked into the console and I just assumed that it was focused on MS games. With that in mind, I was content to dismiss it entirely as a service I didn’t need to worry about. Boy was I wrong.

This has got to be one of the best PAX 10 crops of all time, and we've been tending that field of indie excellence practically since the birth of the show. Here they are - your PAX 10:

I didn't actually entertain the idea presented in the strip, but when it was happening, I did apportion a very small part of my brain to consider the idea that my counterpart in the strip would absolutely do so.

I'm fucking losing it over here. This happened when I got really into Warmachine, and then life conspired to alter the level of enthusiasm I could invest in people who were less than two or three inches tall. But some of those limitations have evaporated and now the sort of competition and simulation… hang on. Let me go back. The kind of focus these games offer as a hobby is completely unlike anything else. It's akin to being able to craft an entirely custom god and then spend your leisure hours worshipping it. Oh! And you also get to set you god against somebody else's god without the usual problems associated with that sort of thing.

It's such a delight when people erupt in my Twitter feed with photographs of the official Acquisitions Incorporated book - either their own copy, or of the copies that have arrived in the faraway places they live, like Scotland or Australia. Obviously those places are not far away from those places. Scotland is (in fact) very close to Scotland - so close as to be indistinguishable. But they are very far from where the book was written, and printed, and a great journey was required to get them there.

Gabe hung out on Mixer for a bit this weekend, trying to figure out the deal. I think that we'd been content to say that it was "Another Twitch," whose utility used to be an edge case, but I'd like to know there's someplace else to go if they aren't gonna take shit seriously.

I have endeavored to fill the role of Weird Uncle for Gabriel The Younger wherever I can, including

Coming to grips with what Dota Urnderlerds (and by that token the Auto genre in general) represents is a fucking trip. I think we have been wrong on virtually every point fully twice over. Luckily, I have been there at every step to adjust Michael, to perfect him, like an orthodontist for the towers of his brain.

Look, it's not us: the verdict is in. By which I mean, I talked to the girls on my block and they say Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is done.

I’m not a streamer guy. I don’t like having a camera pointed at my drooling grimace for hours while I stumble through a game. With that said, I am very excited about a stream I have planned for tomorrow. Gabe (who is 14 now) has been learning Python at school and decided he wanted to try and re create Space Invaders as a summer project. He asked me if I could make some artwork for it and pretty soon we were designing a game. Our game is called Too Many Doves and features one Jim Darkmagic. Gabe went to work on the code and I drew him some placeholder artwork so he could test getting images into the game. After a night of work (almost all by him) we had what I’d call a functional prototype.

There is a very long but also very interesting session of Parliament where a person from EA talks about what it is they actually sell when they sell loot boxes.

Apparently they gave "the doc" a month's suspension, which is… illuminating? We ask the question in the strip: what, precisely, is required to see something akin to action. They couldn't make it a week, obviously. I think they recognized that would be the same as revelling with him in that reeking pisshole. There are surprisingly few levers with which to shape streamer behavior, though; it's either "hated exile" or Scion Seated At The Right Hand Of God. YouTube has a few knobs in this department, but YouTube has its own problems - I'd never recommend it as an alternative, and it's an incredibly turbulent place to even attempt business. I'm just saying they've been around longer and thus have invented other Rituals of Binding for the wracked and leathery creatures they summon from Beyond the Veil.

I've had a few people ask for a version of the AI book cover that they could use as a wallpaper. I've got just what you need!

There's a term called Programmer Art that generally elicits a chuckle when used in the proper context. It's not really an insult, but it does recognize and bring to the fore the idea that people who are good at one thing aren't necessarily good at other things, which is just… true. It's probably not worth getting too mad about that. I've met a lot of people who aren't even good at one thing; I've only been alive for forty years or so but in my own experience competence is not the norm.

Nintendo letting somebody have The Legend Of Zelda to just… play around in probably deserves its own rhetorical excursion, but this is of a piece with the Switch being such a natural home for indies anyway. On a couple recent releases, I've seen game launch on the Switch first - or launch on Switch and PC. It's a shocking result, but I think it tells you where indies are making money today.