We launched a whole bunch of new stuff on Thursday. Pins, tees, hoodies, etc. I believe I made a decree to that effect.

He has different problems at his house than I do. It's funny, if you let it be. It is hard to. But you can see, with your physical eyes, the moment a person learns that what they say doesn't have to be connected with real events.

Kiko and Brian and given me this Alpha-Q level commerce communique. Let's dig in:

In another comic strip ripped from the headlines, our Gabriel has decided to involve a neutral third party in order to mediate between himself and another, different part of himself. I would never presume to tell you things he hadn't told you in a comic, or hadn't authorized in some other way - not unless I had performed a calculation and determined you would be more amused than he would be angry. But I have my own problems, certainly, and I can tell you that being an introvert who is constantly, violently thrust into the public eye is perhaps not an infinitely scalable state of affairs.

Brian is gearing up hard down in the warehouse. He asked me to post this, and I agreed, because he had the look of a deranged and dangerous animal:

I think it's fair to say that, on certain axes, my companion has exceeded me in his affection for Fallout. Specifically, I would say his obsession with Jangles The Moon Monkey. Also, uh, his bottomless appetite for chems.

Fallout 4 is the very first Fallout game I’ve ever played. I’ve talked a bit before about how these open world games tend to paralyze me. I wander around feeling like I’m missing tons of stuff. I worry that I’m missing some important thing because I went left instead of right. I used to feel like if I was not “progressing the story” I was wasting time. What I finally realized is that everytime I sit down to play, I’m progressing MY story. I stopped thinking about what the game wanted me to do and just did what I wanted to do. Now I’m having awesome adventures every night!

(I have been told that for several hours the entire post was a single, gigantic link. I did this as a radical UI concept, to maximize the surface area of the hypertext. Gabriel said it looked like a "broken link." Pearls before swine.)

Lightly paraphrased from the original.

My son Gabe is ten years old now. He is very much like me. He prefers reading to playing outside. He gives up his recess time at school to help in the library. I still remember doing the exact same thing when I was in fifth grade. Unfortunately he also got my anxiety. He has good days and bad, but recently he’s been having an especially hard time. I am able to understand what he’s going through and so I feel like I can provide some help but I also know just how hard it can be to change the way your brain works. He told me last night that they were having a discussion in class about diseases and kids were talking about the ones they were familiar with. Gabe raised his hand and brought up chronic anxiety. Many of the kids didn’t know what that even was. I asked how he handled that and he told me how he explained it to them.

We are occasionally ill-served by the One More Win policy; there are times when it compounds the shame and does not result in a reaffirmation of our victorious destiny. We will occasionally invoke the policy retroactively, even. There have been nights where the first round was so good, an exemplar, such a burning display of our martial vigor that we stop right then, immediately.

As of 10am this morning, the valiant Desert Bus just crossed into Day 3 of their harrowing journey - and, at over $173,000, they're already going nuts over there. I will be very surprised if last year's record can keep a grip on the belt.

I’ve been playing around with a Surface Book for a couple of weeks now and I wanted to share some thoughts. It’s an interesting device, that for me has been equal parts frustrating and awesome.

Tavis Maiden has always struck me as a very metal sort of name, and he has rocked you for a week, in a manner similar to that of a hurricane. Here is his last morsel; thanks, man. We needed the help.

Tavis Maiden (this, this, this, this) is congenitally predisposed to wolf. One more on Monday to wrap up.

So if you want to submit a panel for PAX South, this is an incredible opportunity. Individual day tickets are also available; if you want to attend the whole show, I'd make a run on them now before one of the days sells out.