I mean, this is what happened. This is just a few frames of a documentary about Gabriel bleeding out in the desert. To be honest, I don't know if what came back from there is Gabriel at all: it could be one of those "cactus men" you hear about. The Walking Cactus, that gets a taste of blood from a dying man, and looks to takin' on his shape, just to drink more.

I like games in general, games of all kinds; that's sort of my thing. In the manner of a giant enemy crab, though, I do have a weak point that can be struck for massive damage.

We have another strip on the topic of Gabriel's desertification, I think that's on Monday. His first day back in the office was yesterday, and his posture seemed to have been altered drastically. He was taller than usual and… I don't know how else to put this. He appeared to have a spine? I don't know what Arizona mineral he absorbed but whatever it was it seems to foster the wearing of hats.

I have to say that the new Overwatch mode Uprising is the most fun I have ever had with the game. Kara called it last night when she said is was basically a Destiny Strike but in Overwatch (and with 4 players yay!) . She is absolutely right and the reality is that I wish I could throw myself into a playlist of Uprising style encounters in OW just like I can enter the Strike playlist in Destiny. I enjoy PvP but Uprising is actually the game I want out of Overwatch.

I have had Rats, at one point the house I thought I was living in turned out to be a warm heap of mostly stationary rats. I have also had water that came into the house after it had fallen on the roof. This is super important: if water comes in, is that even a roof? Isn't it just a very expensive, tremendously inconvenient colander at that point? There was a discoloration in the ceiling at the center of the living room, and when I touched it, my finger went straight through. It had the consistently of oatmeal. People don't make houses out of oatmeal generally, and in that moment, I understood why.

Outside of the villain and a Krogan accomplice, I don't like the writing in Mass Effect: Andromeda. There's things they could do to create superior context, but there's simply too much of it for it to be an accident. They specifically chose this tone, an emotionally stunted, quasi-memetic cadence that often diminishes the reality of the game, and said "straight on 'til morning."

One of the more interesting things that happens in Dragon Age: Inquisition is that your actions all call back to the central quest; I liked the War Table way, way more than I can express with the human words. It was beautiful and had great writing, elevating some surface worker placement type shit into something I… well, believed. I thought it was really happening, on some level. I thought I was a woman moving important things on a real table. That's a good trick.

Teens, we were "kicking it" last Friday recording some First 15s when we started playing Snake Pass. I often leverage the Wednesday variety stream or the Friday stream to play games on the Switch, because I don't have one yet and I deeply crave its use. We played entirely through the two player campaign of Les Sneepaircleep, and I nearly wept at its conclusion. Snake Pass is not a game about transforming your friend into a tool made exclusively for your purpose, and thus loses points.

Gabriel the Ever-Helpful is always ready to drop some true dungeon science on me. My role in his game was essentially on the Grima Wormtongue tip; I run my own stuff by him to get his thoughts on it, but he's usually hunched over his tablet defining the Eyrewood for the Thornwatch adventure card game thingy. My understanding, though, is that Jim Darkmagic will occasionally need to commandeer The "C" Team for secret missions, missions Gabe himself would run. This is something he is very, very good at.

I’ve got well over a hundred hours invested in Zelda: Breath of the Wild now. I’ve dealt with all the divine beasts, found 72 of the 120 shrines, collected a couple hundred Korok seeds and reclaimed the Master sword. I am by all accounts ready to go in and beat the shit out of Ganon. I don’t want the game to be over though, so I’m still playing. I plan on finding all the shrines and completing some more quests before I wrap it up. I am not one of these 100% completion people, that’s not why I am doing this. I just love the world and the game too much to let it be over. I don’t think I’ve ever been so bummed at the prospect of beating a game. In fact I’ve already thought about what I would do if I were to play it again which is pretty much unheard of for me. I think it might just be the perfect video game.

I mean… it's true, to a certain extent. I certainly advocated for unrelenting brutality in his own campaign, I have references, but when I'm running a table I have my own objectives. And they don't all involve grinding parties into a nutrient-rich paste.

I spent some time yesterday teaching elementary school kids how to draw cartoons. I started doing this when my oldest son Gabe was in first grade. He’s in 6th now and I’ve gone into his class each year to work with the kids on drawing. My youngest son Noah is in first grade this year and so this was my first time going into his classroom. I really love working with kids of all ages but the little ones are the best because they don’t have any fear of drawing yet. Pretty much all kids love to draw and color but eventually most people think “I can’t draw” and so they give it up often never draw again. It’s a bummer but these kids haven’t reached that phase yet. One of my favorite quotes is from Pablo Picasso and it goes:

Because I believe that Interactivity is last artistic frontier, when new constructions of interactivity arise - even halting, incomplete, or flawed ones - I recognize them as larval stages of whatever Jenovan "final form" awaits generations hence. Counterpoint: If your game animates bears by having them flip and roll from their heads to their back to their ass, you've already lost Gabriel and he's not coming back.

One of the more interesting things about playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is that you feel all kinds of new feelings, or "feels." They come from a variety of places, but one of them is that you are actually having new experiences that effervesce through your trunk-zone.

I mean, it's all true. If some raucous, snouty beast-men want to cavort I've got my own priorities that don't intersect with them on the graph. But occasionally they take up inadvisable hobbies.