Acquisitions Incorporated Returns To Aus - With the Brand New Arkham Horror RPG! I've been playing Arkham Horror stuff for decades at this point - and like the moist and shapeless creatures it depicts, the game itself has taken many forms over the years and has somehow, impossibly, remained good. A living card game? Absolutely. Dice, somehow? Great, incomprehensibly so, and I am forced by the disease I have to tell you that divination using dice is called "Astragalomancy." But they aren't done, they go wide with the mythos: social deduction? Also yes. Co-op adventure? This too. But!

But.

When my mom calls, I feel like it's because she has a preternatural ability to contact me right as I'm about to engage in a task. It's a skill, and she has mastered it. The moment a task is about to begin, as soon as the mise en place has been… you know, placed, a communique from my Creator bores into the proceedings. I think I have inherited her uncanny knack for auguring into otherwise useful moments, because when I call my own child - who is not a child, I must remind myself, but a legal adult - they act like I'm trying to sell them a timeshare.

A big part of reading reviews and coverage and discourse and whatever the fuck is squinting your eyes real tight and trying to divine what the actual motivation for writing something even is. There's been aggression of various kinds toward the movie from the jump, but there's some Dark River underneath the surface conversation. Even if "all" it ended up being was a hundred million dollar jobs program for a ton of weirdos on both sides of a camera, that's fine. Good, actually. It's plenty.

I am opening up four commission slots for the month of October. I’ve been drawing some really fun stuff including D&D characters, MMO characters, X-men, the family dog but like in space and I even had a commission last month to redraw our old Strawberry Shortcake comic.

These things come in seasons, I guess; they've been through a couple rounds of intense Warhammer 40k interest at Chez Gabriel. This most recent fever is almost certainly the result of Space Marine II, and as I said before, the game is so ardent in its manifestation of the brand and its lore that I think it could mint new fans just as well as repel them. But the borderline? The person who owns models, many of whom are gray, or still lie flensed on their sprues? Those who are down to clown, but haven't prioritized the hobby recently? Their minds will be terraformed by this game. Those people are well and truly fucked.

The boys and I decided to try and learn how to play 40K 10th edition. There’s a lot to learn and I figured we’d start with the basics. In order to learn the core rules we avoided playing with objective markers we decided to keep it simple and just try to kill each other's army in a straight up fight. Jerry, Kiko and Eric came over yesterday to play some 40k and teach us the rules. What they told us is that the game is not really balanced for the way we were playing and actually needed the objectives to work. This made sense because I have to say it was damn near impossible to beat Noah’s Death Guard army in a fist fight. 

Right here!

Mormons used to call the house all the time, because my dad - and his nine brothers and sisters - grew up Mormon. Mormonism has always been very normalized for me, very ordinary stuff, but I just happened to come up in a place that has a unique relationship with the faith. Until you really get into the lore, it's essentially a Christian sect that shares a lot of what you might call "class features" with Bible Classic. But in one of the most incredible flexes of all time, their founder Joseph Smith literally wrote what is essentially a sequel to The Bible. And, well, yeah. You know what they say about sequels.