I was there when the miracle happened. Indeed: I was the vessel that carried it.

Dear Australia, I am very sorry but I will not be at your PAX this year. You might remember that I had to cut my trip short last year due to my anxiety. I wrote a big post about it at the time and apologized for the inconvenience. You can still read it right here and it’s all still very true.

Most of the levels I've gained since the Forsaken expansion are from Gambit. It's early days for the mode, which is the part I like generally for new systems, where the continents have not yet cooled and it's possible to succeed with great communication as opposed to Raid-like mechanical rigor.

I don't know if he actually brought it home or not. I do know that he is a different person when he's wearing it. There's something about him raising up his left hand to tuck back an errant hair that is so out of place it doesn't even get filed like extra stimuli; it just coats the top of my brain unabsorbed.

It's always a novel experience to wake up on Monday and remember that a news post is required.

It's day one of PAX Prime as I tip-tap this post on the bed, get some kissy pins on my Lanyard, and make my way down to Benaroya Hall which is much, much too nice a place to have someone like me in it.

It's hard to project oneself beyond the dense, high wall of experiential variables PAX West represents, but we can try; maybe we can establish a conceptual base camp on the other side and work our way toward it.

I was talking to JP the other day about Path of Exile, because I knew that was one of his many fascinations and I wanted to get some advice from someone who was maybe a little nuts about this shit. I'd been playing a bit and having a good time, but when you see PoE's Skill Tree - which you might recognize instinctively as something like Final Fantasy's sphere grid - you might start to feel a little light headed.

Usually it's "Gabriel's Job" to offer this information, but this time the task has fallen to me. Hopefully I won't mess up Kiko's immaculate formatting too much! Without further ado:

All the cheers during the Overwatch League All-Star Weekend go to Child's Play. Really, though! Check it out!

When Grickle and I were at Mox Boarding House last week, the Bellevue one, I saw a copy of Disney's Villainous and felt that familiar shudder that accompanies surprise exposure to a pathogen.

Gabriel was asking me about a game called Legend of Soulgard, not anything to do with the game proper, but a word he saw constantly in the lexical mist that surrounds the launch of any modern product. He wanted to know what they meant by "mid-core." I will tell you what I told him: "mid-core" means "a videogame."

I was following some of the stuff around #DeactiDay, which is a hashtag you would see on Twitter about quitting Twitter. I liked that. I liked that the concept was so nested, so dense. That you needed Twitter, needed there to be such a Thing as Twitter, in order to mount a campaign against Twitter. I'm laughing right now. Gabriel is laughing over on the couch because I just read that sentence to him. But it's true.

There's times where I don't think about a purchase at all. It's bought the moment it's announced, already; there's been an allocation of resources. Sometimes, a game doesn't need to be announced in order for me to have prepared a place for it. Red Dead Redemption 2 fits into that category. The most recent trailer, offered for your use here:

After this Madden Ultimate Team shit, plus a Call of Duty beta I played with Keek and Glamdring every possible second, our descent into performative masculinity is complete. The only question now is whether or not this constitutes our final form, or if this is a kind of moist, pupal proto-bro scenario that ultimately results in something more firm. We'll see.

It's sorta like when World of Warcraft introduced Eternium Ore; it was like, hey. Don't paint yourself into a corner here. You gotta make a bunch more mystical ores! You don't want to get to Forever-ite until you absolutely have to.