Just a reminder, tomorrow night is Pokemon night at the Comic Stop. We start at 6pm and go to 8pm. Bring your deck and any extra cards if you want to trade. New players are welcome, just pick up a starter deck.

-Gabe out

So I need to apologize her to Ted Mathot for a mistake I made with some concept art for our game. If that doesn't sound interesting to you feel free to stop reading now.

We started working on the game back in 2006 and at the beginning obviously I had no idea what it would like like. Whenever we start a new project I start by looking around for some kind of inspiration. In the case of our game it was one image. The cover to a comic book called Rose and Isabel. It had the exact pallet and "feel" that I though would be good for the game. So I sat down a did the very first piece of art with Gabe and Tycho and FF Prime in the background. I used the pallet and even the composition from the Rose and Isabel cover. When it came to do the ruble I couldn't get it right.  My rocks looked like shit and I loved the way he did his. So I used them. In my head this piece was just something to kick start the project, to supply a direction and help visualize the world.

It might not make sense but I had to do that piece before I could do my own pieces like the one below. I realise they are not very similar but in my head there is a direct connection between the two. I could not have gotten the one without first doing the other.

We were threshing GDC news when we came across a LEGO Universe article, and when I say "article" of course I mean "the most rudimentary kind of impressions," because I don't think they're ready to let people really see the guts of this thing. Flynn's interview at Kotaku has a few more details, I'm not sure how much there is to know - but none of this has stopped me from building a nest for it in my heart of hearts. The only advice I would give NetDevil at this point is to maybe beef up their stock of community managers.

We decided to try a few shirts in alternate color schemes.  People seem to like the black ones best, but who knows?  Maybe we just haven't made the right ones.  See if any of these do anything for ya. 

Fuck the shock mouse. Fuck him in hell, forever.

It's hard to imagine not having access to a deep reservoir of supernatural knowledge to enrich and inform my daily life. As early as age thirteen I was already curating a collection of incredible facts, highly granular assessments of wicked and ancient lizards, up to and including notes on their diet, sleep habits, and taste in home decor. From the demure to the diabolical, I have sought to build a robust profile of the hidden world. My very mind is an arsenal.

New one's up, for last week's "The Spore Cult."  Feed is here. 

(CW)TB
 

Sorry about that.  Kiko digests the audio files for that, and I forgot that there President's Day was a holiday that people took seriously.  Before today, I was not aware just how seriously Kiko took the concept of presidency. 

Also, I fixed an offensive and aggressively stupid typographical error in the post above.  Now, it's only aggressively stupid in the ways I originally intended.

(CW)TB

In case you were wondering, here is your comprehensive assessment of Gabriel's mental health. As someone who has endured him for many years, I believe I can continue to do so. The muscles in his face seem to tighten less often.  The only real trouble with his pharmaceutically enforced zen is that I feel much, much crazier by comparison.

I'm aware of Spore, but it's not a game I look around for in an active mode. Here is a preview of the game, for example, but I haven't read it so I don't know if it's good or not. I'm especially disinclined to read previews in particular, because I think it's a game that is likely to preview well. You aren't likely get past the novelty stage in am Official Press context - it's going to be pure discovery from beginning to end, wall to wall tendrils and eye stalks, ginning up hobbling quintapeds whose journey to the mailbox is difficult, if not impossible. The incredible outpourings of support for the game are themselves incredible to me, but what they've done is try to create a product whose potential is as raw as possible. We seem to value that ethereal quantity differently than most.

Unlike most "adventure" games, whose puzzle mechanics are heavily rooted in inventory management, Professor Layton's puzzles are more like... puzzles. It's more Myst than Maniac Mansion. It's true that I've only done about twenty puzzles, so I don't know the game in its entirety. Even so, I don't think you're ever going to be putting different fluids in balloons so you can put them in a mail tube so you can flood a communications room so you can etcetera.

We're playing Pokemon (the TCG) Tuesday the 12th at the Comic Stop. We got off schedule because of a Magic tournament last week but we're back at the regular time starting tomorrow. We'll start the matches as close to 6pm as possible. New players are always welcome.

The latest copy of EGM arrived at the office today. Apparently their adologists have finally broken the single cover barrier. It used to be that magazines only had one cover to sell but now EGM comes with a second cover pasted over the real cover like some kind of shell. It says "your favorite magazine starts inside" up at the top of this new cover cover. Unless you consider ads to be content this statement isn't very accurate. I guess "your favorite magazine starts in eleven pages" doesn't have the same ring to it.

-Gabe out

It is often the case that we are jumped by four or five horde ten levels higher than us. This is often because we've jumped a friend of theirs, ten levels lower than us, as retribution for some earlier act of aggression, in slavish iteration of a behavior that has - as its culmination - the end of all life, everywhere. Kara marveled that Gabriel and I were able to escape these confrontations with such regularity. What was our secret? "Fear," I said, bending the microphone closer. "Fear, and selfishness."

He came into work yesterday with a prescription for something that will alter his brain chemistry, which I thought was a big step for the man who refuses to take aspirin. We've long canonized our respective lunacies, believing it is like some artistic sacrament that makes our bizarre endeavor possible. We have relied upon them. Or, at any rate, we did.

I've talked a couple times here about my anxiety issues. I've said before that I never thought I could take any kind of medication for it. That's due to the fact that one of the things I was most paranoid about was drugs. It's true that I did finally see a doctor and I have started taking medicine. I felt a little weird about it at first but a friend of mine made a good point. He told me he takes four different pills for his allergies every morning. For some reason that really made sense to me.

So I've always worried about things. I also always knew that most of the time there was nothing to worry about. For me it wasn't even just worrying about something. I understand that everyone worries. The best way I can describe it is "Chain worrying." I'll try and give you an example. The medication I picked up today said it could cause dizziness. That might worry someone for a second and then they would take the pill. For me though I had to obsess over it all afternoon. It went something like this: But I drove to work today by myself, will I be able to drive home? What it I cant? How will I know if I can't? Should I call the doctor if I get dizzy? How dizzy is too dizzy? What if the doctor isn't there? Will I need to go to the hospital? Should I get a ride home? I can't leave my car here overnight. The garage closes at 6 what will I do with my car? What if Kara can't come get me? Should I ask Kiko for a ride home? If I get dizzy does that mean it's working? Does that mean it's not working? What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have anxiety disorder, what if I have a worm in my skull that eats brain and shits tumors. To use a term you might be familiar with, my anxiety "stacks".

It was almost impossible to go get help though because the very nature of the illness prevents you from getting it. So I worry alot, I know that. So I start to think maybe I worry too much. Maybe I have a real problem. Then I think, "no I'm just worrying too much". This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. It's fucking inescapable like some kind of brain trap. So I have to write off  this fear that I might actually be sick as another example of my needless worrying. Add to that the fact that I worry that if I do go to a doctor he'll tell me I have some kind of brain disease or I'm not treatable or maybe just as bad that there's nothing wrong with me. All this shit piles up and the result is that I'm 30 and I've never gone to the doctor about it until yesterday.

There were a lot of factors that contributed to me finally going. I've had a friend for a while now who had similar problems. He got help a while ago for it and has been trying to convince me to do the same for more than a year. Also, and this is a big one, I felt like it was getting worse. I had sort of resigned myself to living with it. I had managed it this far I figured there's no reason I can't keep it up. When I noticed that it was getting worse rather than staying the same I got scared. Not even for myself necessarily but for the people around me. I have a family now and that means I don't have the luxury of indulging my neurosis. I decided that if there really was another way of living, that if I really could get rid of this weight that I owed it to myself and the people around me to try.

I guess I could experience some sexual side effects but honestly I was never very good at that to begin with. The increased anxiety is a real concern (hah!) but if it happens at all I'm told it will go away within the first week or so. In the end I'm just crossing my fingers and staying hopeful. It couldn't hurt to try. Unless the medication liquefies my bones. That would hurt.


-Gabe out

Turbulence surrounding the compulsory installation of the PS3's Devil May Cry 4, a procedure which is epic in length, was eventually answered by the scuttling drones of the official Capcom Blog. Their response, only loosely interpreted, is that complaining about it is dumb - and if you complain about it, then you are dumb.