The top-line bit in any story about Fig - a Kickstart-alike from a gaggle of crowdfunding apex predators tired of paying Kickstarter's fees - is that there is a route here to get equity in the games produced. Eventually they'd like that to be broadly applicable, but for now, it turns out there are laws that govern this type of speculation. It requires that those who partake in the ritual be Accredited Investors, which means among other things that they have money to lose. It presents a scenario where you could lose your shirt funding a game where you play as a shirt in a world where shirts have been outlawed.

This has been my doom from the very beginning, all my life. Most of the words I know I got from books, which I thought were my friends, but they don't necessarily have pronunciation keys and also the English language is a kaleidoscopic whorehouse.

The full schedule for all your strategic planning needs can be found here. Of course, you can also grab the official Guidebook app for Android or iOS. You can even access a Web version. I don't have a position on which one is the right one. I respect your decision.

If you have a dream in your heart, and that dream is to enforce at PAX Australia. Then I hope you fill out and turn in your application today by midnight Melbourne time. If you are not sure what Melbourne time is I have a simple trick to figure it out. Look at the current time and then just add three kangaroos!

I'm not worried about Star Wars Overload in the slightest. I guess this is a problem for some people. I want to replace one or more of my limbs with sentient, crystallized Star Wars. Amy Fucking Hennig is making a Star Wars game? I'll take two. And you might think that such a position represents enthusiasm, and perhaps it does, but enthusiasm is a spectrum and there is apparently room on this diagram to the right of me.

I have never been this excited to announce a new round of pins! So I'm just going to get right to it!

How HBO has remained a thing of value from cable to VHS through the digital age is a topic worth investigating. By, like, a smart person. I'm not gonna do that.

Writing about depression isn't like dancing about architecture, as the saying goes; it's more like dancing about dancing inside a hologram derived from Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Two people being depressed have as much in common as any other two people. We've spoken on a semi-regular basis about this creature, hunched in the corner, sussurating its observations. Gabriel and I entertain devils, but they aren't the same devils. The devils don't even like each other. Even our coping strategies for this shit are antisocial.

- THING ONE -

Or, by Saturday, because that's when the deadline is. Submit them here. Or here! Those links are actually the same link.

So, so much going on. Okay. Let's start.

There's so much that you could say about "the time magazine cover," and there is a cottage industry dedicated entirely to this purpose, gripping it firmly and rasping it on a rasper. I've seen like one paragraph of the article, and a couple of the images, because it doesn't exist and isn't important. It's a Wild West facade; there is no Saloon here. If I tried to find the real article, I think it would just be a picture of Joel Stein with a sheepish downward gaze, hands in his pockets, saying "Aw, shucks" while wearing whatever the facial equivalent of a smiley emoticon is.

Uh, I didn't think I would be writing this post, but something fucking insane is happening on that Kickstarter and we can barely keep up with it.

14 hours to go.

We just crested 400k and change, so thank you very much. 69 hours left, and the next goal is a backer exclusive Behind the Scenes Featurette. What say you? I'd like to see that, too.

When I was a child, my mother told me that woolly mammoths weren't real, and that the devil - or God, I can't remember - had placed tusks and dinosaur bones or whatever to test the faithful. So now that people are making dice from these things, I don't know if my mom was wrong, or if Satan is just very committed to the joke.