I know intellectually that I like Splinter Cell. I always have. For your use, my favorite Splinter Cell games are Chaos Theory and Conviction. But I didn't remember being fucking insane about it, possibly because it's been gone so long. But I might be. I might be cuckoo for a very particular brand of Cocoa Puffs.

It was like five minutes into the start of this E3 shit that we found out about Battle Royale coming to Battlefield V, but it's like… Battlefield's inherent virtues mean that it has something to say here. Powerful vehicles, classes, and destruction are going to flip this thing on its head. For a Royale game, tech wise? DICE started on third base.

One day there may be an apparatus designed to fully articulate the moment a trend becomes a genre. Recall that shooters were called Doom Clones, for example. Until this machine is constructed, perhaps from a sliver of replicating extraterrestrial alloy, let's try this: a trend becomes a genre when the "clones" start getting really, really cool.

I've mentioned it before, but it's pertinent so you'll have to endure it again:

I'm as surprised as anybody: Solo is good. I wasn't even gonna go see it; I have shit to do, and after The Last Jedi watching a Star Wars movie during its theatrical run isn't a guarantee anymore. I've adopted something like the rigor of Cold War Deterrence when it comes to that: unless I get the okay from two friends, I'm not going. They aren't owed my money but more than that they aren't owed my time.

Gabriel has described this comic as a Public Service Announcement. It's a public service announcement from an alternate universe where people drink medicine out of magic holes. Look! I don't know about it yet. I just tried to help him.

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…?