I showed Gabe the House Flipper trailer because I thought he would find it novel, but instead he was enraged. This sort of thing is the Anti-Gabe: it's almost completely about intrinsic motivations. That's not gonna cut it for him. People want different shit from their entertainment, this isn't some kind of a dig: if he gives someone twenty dollars, what he doesn't want is for them to give him a job earning his money back. He wants to get in the cart, pull down the heavy bar until it clicks, and ride.

I can't express to you the extent to which this isn't some kind of bit we're doing.

I've heard a bunch of really amazing shit about the new Warhammer 40k stuff; the last time I played my Necrons, games still took six hours. From friends, it sounds like it's hitting that ribald, skirmish scale that attracted me to Warmahordes and Infinity. And let me be clear: I feel like that was six hours well spent. I just don't have time like that all in a row these days. I'm willing to put up with a lot of horseshit when it comes to my tiny men, and I didn't mind how it comported itself mechanically. I was into it.

I didn't really live in the Eighties people lionize, let alone lion-o. I wasn't allowed to like the music and shows people recall with such fondness. I always mention this, but the extra part you should know is that I didn't feel hard-done by it generally. I didn't resent it. I believed in the mechanism that was being used to curate my mental diet: I understood that the Devil was using the culture to mainstream concepts like witchcraft and, yes, even premarital sex.

Gabriel's experience with RPGs is a smattering of potent imports from Japan, the occasional Dragon Age game, and Mass Effect. No Wizardry, no Ultima, no Bard's Tale, no Gold Box, and certainly no Baldur's Gate - the inheritor of that august fraternity. No classic Fallouts. And no Planescape.

My fever keeps riding a data set that, at its highest point, I think I can see; I'm traversing it on a kind of minecart. I don't mind. Sometimes the thinking is disordered, and sometimes it is oddly interactive and sometimes it is revelatory. I can see sages of the past from here, and they wave to me. I wave back.

We played a bit of Battle Chasers: Nightwar back when it hit on Big Machines, got to the point where we realized that we felt very good about what they were doing, found some bugs and then waited for the Switch version which just came out.

I mean, sometimes this rubric might work. Sometimes. Maybe. It's like if you choose your Pokemon based on your favorites. It works super well if all your favorites are also incredibly powerful and happen to create a harmonious symphony of types. That's a great scenario, and when it happens, look: it's something to celebrate.

Magic comes and goes around here. I mean Magic: The Gathering, specifically. Obviously the mystic winds shift as well, this way and that, toward, and - terrifyingly - away from the worldseed. Thus are the epochs of men defined.

Right as I'm about to jump ship, Gabriel is going back to Apple. Once he started drawing on the new iPad Pro, it wound a clock somewhere in the heart of the universe that would bring him back to the platform in other ways. He has sent me some animojis or whatever and it seems like he's having a good time…?

We weren't trying to write a strip about it, but Gabriel has thoughts and feelings about the way I manage my personal space and thus did a strip materialize.

Paladins Strike on phones and tablets is fun as hell.

One of my favorite things to do with D&D is shoehorn video game mechanics into it. When I heard I was going to get to run the game at PAX East this year my first thought was that I had to do something Battle Royale related. Generally when I run these sorts of games I build lots of elaborate props and I actually had a few ideas about how I could do this using poster board and pre-cut circles of green cellophane. I assembled a little team of people here at PA to help me plan and test the game including Mike Buland, Elyssa Grant, Dabe Alan and Kiko Villasenor but as soon as we started talking, this whole thing got way cooler than cardboard and cellophane.

I mostly fucked with Gabe about his obsession with Destiny for almost the first year of its operation. Then I got the bug from him just before House of Wolves, caught up, and then ended up doing weekly raids - something I haven't done since World of Warcraft.

In the upper right hand corner of the screen in Hogwarts Mystery you can see the three distinct currencies, the Satanic Anti-Trinity, that indicate we have entered the Arcade of the Damned. Harry Potter is for Ronia whatever Star Wars was for my generation, there's nothing she would want more than this game. But they're going to give her a choice between watching her character get choked out by a vine for a couple hours or asking her dad for money, which she will definitely get. I wish there were another way for her to check out this story, but they don't offer it.

It's possible that I saw it under the worst possible conditions - in the tiny screen on the back of the airplane seat in front of me - but the last Avengers movie is one of my least favorite films of all time. It also mostly annihilated Joss Whedon's career, apparently, so maybe I'm not alone in that assessment. I felt the same watching it as I do whenever I see somebody post something from Rich Russian Kids or something. You had all this money, and that's what you did with it?