The Child's Play Charity Dinner & Auction balled out of control. Scott and Kris (yes, that Scott and Kris) handled the auction itself, and well; my customary princess wave was not required. I just talked to people, actually talked to them because I had the opportunity, and tried to deflect the greater part of their gratitude for Child's Play onto you.

I set up an escalating, annual Hug Scenario with Rose; Christopher let me sit in a real Tesla Model S (!), touched base with my friend Dikla about the startling local beers she was able to secure for the evening. Then my mom and I ended up at some kinda Spring Break type bar where servers wear corsets for some reason, and she was perpetually trying (occasionally succeeding) to catalyze impromptus "dance parties" with them. I dunno. It worked, in a weird way.

I talked to a couple guys from Popcap for awhile, they wanted to know how things were going for me Warmachine-wise, though ultimately the conversation turned to the psychic toll drawn from the citizenry as a result of constant surveillance. But I still managed to inject several tasteful, marble-smooth entreaties re: Peggle 2 that were not in any way absorbed by the host. Ultimately, I was able to run a scam via other channels. But! It's out Today, and I'm not sure if it's the most powerful exemplar of the Next Generation or whatever but it's definitely something you want to be doing.

I was so excited for Kiko to get his Xbox One and haul me out of the isolation chamber that I asked him for his Tracking Number. It's completely anonymized data, all it really told me was when I could stop being alone, but everyone seemed very amused by it. So after having built it up, we were wholly unable to create a party which could let all of us talk.

The problem was my new cable modem; I had to have Comcast turn it into a bridge, and then since DMZ or UPnP wouldn't give me a clean bill of health I eventually poked all the holes I had memorized for Xbox Live access. This didn't work either. There are three more ports I hadn't heard of, which might be your problem also.

The first night we just pruned out other people via the surprisingly comprehensive smart muting features. The second night, we had a chance to use the actual Parties, which were used primarily by my cohorts to describe how cheap and nasty they feel the new gamepad is on the machine. The only unmitigated good conceded by all members was that the voice quality in parties is impeccable, weirdly good, and that the headset itself (mute light!) was far and away better than the PS4 pack in, which is the thickness of a human hair. You'll recall that the new Xbox wasn't supposed to have a pack-in headset at all, and only has one now as a result of public outcry. The build quality of the headset implies strongly that it was never meant to be free.

There were instances in which each of them used the voice command "Xbox, record that," which I wouldn't have called; I don't mind using voice commands, but for some reason projecting the voice command into the shared Party Chat space feels… rude? Maybe it's not. Gabe quit out early each night to play Killzone: Shadow Fall, which is - if not an outright betrayal - then certainly an abrogation of The Friendship Accords.

(CW)TB out.