Making parties seemed to be all kindsa fucked up for me last night, at least on Xbox, and I don't know if it was some kinda NAT horseshit or launch day jitters or what, but I wasn't able to party up with people I played the beta ("beeta") with just fine. We were eventually able to hack the planet, so to speak, by joining the game the other person was in and then beating the odds several times over as it kept us in the same party all night.

So, my first volume of original poetry - full title, Lexcalibur: Useful Poetry For Adventurers Above And Below The World - sold out very quickly. The elevator pitch is "What If Shel Silverstein were your Dungeon Master" and it has thus far been apt. The reprint is in, hopefully enough to sate the apparently frenzied desire that accompanied the first one - there are a few ways to own it, so take a look at the official page. The designers really wanted to offer a kid's shirt to go along with it, and the chose the art from the poem Sword of My Fathers which is a very curatorial selection. Here are a few pictures that will inform and hopefully tantalize you:

Probably the most relaxing night of gaming I've encountered in recent memory was forming a Convoy - anywhere else but Forza Horizon, it would be called a Squad/Group/Fireteam - and just… driving around. Racing when we felt like it. Doing a seasonal Barn Find when it came up. As a template for winding down the day, it was almost flawless.

I haven't really played an Assassin's Creed game since Unity; I understand they've continued to make them. Syndicate predicated a pause in the franchise altogether, and when it returned, it was an RPG. More of one, anyway. It might be better to say that it returned as the kind of RPG where you want purple things more than you want blue things.

There is a new Mario Party, and apparently it's "good," but Mario Party is almost a genre unto itself and as a thus may be considered an exemplar in a self-defined context. Rhetorically, it's a sundered condition. But! It's fast and crazy, and bright, and gravitational in a way, like a Welcome Sign. People who are actually good at games don't necessarily like operating in contexts that don't recognize their virtues. Or, as sometimes happens, games simply arrive at the wrong time.

There is a lot about the Horizon Festival that probably seems very good at the time, but will eventually lead the kind of televised documentary with a lot of scary music that often flashes between full color and black and white very quickly.

I almost never play games on phones anymore, unless I'm on a plane and it's literally all I have with me. The last one I investigated deeply was Paladins Strike, which is not new by any means, and that was only because I happened to be into other Hi-Rez shit at the time and Michael can be very convincing. It was cool, but requires Internet, which makes the primary usage case questionable for me. A lot of phone games require Internet, even if you think they wouldn't, or shouldn't necessarily given the content, but here we are.

These fuckin' pets, man. I'm not even a regular player and I want to get a piece of this hound.

Gabriel hates Kell's Grave as a Gambit map. I mean, I have maps I'm scared of: Cathedral Of Stars, the one that got unlocked on the raid completion, is mostly a suite of opportunities for me to look at the underside of the map. But I don't carry motes unless I pick one up on accident and then have to get four more just to make it worth the trouble. Gabe carries motes. And, apparently - I'm getting all this second hand - falling into the acid with fifteen motes feels real bad.

Mike and I receive Tattoos very differently. This fact is discussed in today's strip, but there is another way you can become acquainted with it, and that is to watch the video embedded tastefully below these words. The tattoo artist terminology for someone who takes a tattoo in this way is "A Box Of Cats."

So much stuff going on today. Yeesh! Okay. Let's go.

I feel like a sweatshop that the worker willingly enters constitutes a kind of labor market endgame.

We knew that including the actual image I received in the comic would provide delight purely as a hidden object game, but I wasn't a hundred percent prepared for how viscerally people would feel it. In the past, I've either helped him build a computer or he's bought them online. This one isn't even technically for him, it's for Gabriel the Younger, and they put the whole thing together… together.

I've had a chance to check out Cody Blorpfor (esq.) on PS4 and Xbox One X now in Blackout mode, and I've had fun everywhere I've played it.

My feed is jam-packed with amateur, yet still somehow amazing Spider-Man photography. Technically, I do own it. It's one of about three PlayStation 4 discs I own. It came with the Pro when I upgraded, but I upgraded for Destiny 2, so the box still has plastic on it. Hopefully his hands and feet will remain sticky until I have a chance to get back in there.