I wasn't there when it happened, but I'm told that Ronia and her incredibly smart friend Sarah cracked the case on this Santa shit, and Brenna folded quick. I might have done more to safeguard the tradition, but Brenna occupies a realm of perfect honesty - a realm so dedicated to the virtue that our son had an operating knowledge of prostitution when he was five.
I should say I don't have a problem with the policy. I'd much rather train them to hit us up before Google, even if they're going to Google eventually. Generally speaking whatever "parenting" meant when people were doing it to me, I want to do the opposite of it. I'm "parenting" when I'm nice to the waiter and not just when I'm reciting some catechism about fruit consumption.
There's a point where the utility of the true information eclipses the joy of the mystic template and maybe that's where we're at now. I'm down. I have zero nostalgia for adorable but mewling and useless larvae and deep anticipation for when they're gonna clean the fucking cat box.
So, like I was saying, The Division is better than we understood at the time and is now, with considered and even aggressive curation, even better. I'm playing that. Whenever I am not playing that myself and Acquisitions Intoxicated brewmaster Eric Benson are playing Minion Masters.
It's a free to play game in early access that costs fifty cents on sale. That's probably enough to scare most people away. I played it during our Card Game stream a few weeks ago, and as happens only very rarely I carried my fascination with it into the waking world. It's Clash Royale-y, if that's a Genre yet, or maybe it's Competitive Reverse Tower Defense with a LoL-style Champion metaphor. It's a "card game" insofar as you have a collection of units you have a "hand" of, you can summon them along one of two lanes, but the strategy is in what you summon, where, and when, because once they're down there they do whatever the fuck they want. Most of my initial play was solo, as it had been on the stream. Then I started playing Team Battles, and now I only play solo if I enter the wrong queue accidentally.
Playing the game as a Team essentially adds the meta-layer where just being on Discord talking about cards takes on a drama equivalent to the field of battle. Our decks are made up primarily of cards we got for free just in the levelling schedule, and my deck is decent solo but it's really good as a force multiplier.
There's an Expeditions thing that doesn't really feel like it's done yet even though Minion Masters is always giving you subcurrencies for them, but unlike most games of this type it understands that it's engaged in a fundamentally ridiculous effort. I can wait for that to firm up while I play the good game they made everywhere else.
(CW)TB out.
