I’m opening up four more commission slots today. These will be my November commissions and anyone who grabs a spot today can expect their finished piece by the end of the month. I’ve been doing these for a few months now and I love it. Working directly with PA readers to craft something special for them has been incredibly cool. When you sign up for a commission I need you to send me all the information you can about the character you’re looking for as well as whether you want a background or not since I offer both options. I’m happy to draw characters from comics,games,movies, RPG’s or even original designs. I even drew someone’s family dog a couple months ago!  I use the site Artistree which allows us to communicate through the entire process and you’ll have multiple opportunities to give feedback and make adjustments as we work through sketches, inks and finally colors. Once we’re done I’ll send over the high res files that are suitable for printing. 

I've beaten all the Dragon Age games. I even came around on 2, and it had enemies that leapt out from a clear blue sky. Shit, man - we even did some work for hire, you can see some early Eyrewood ideas in there. It's not clear if Dragon Age: The Veilguard is for me, even though the other ones definitely were, and for some reason that is bad to say. It's not super clear how we came all the way around to compulsory capitalism, but man. We kinda did.

The annual Child’s Play Charity auction/dinner is coming up on November 22nd in Seattle and I’d love to see you there! Child’s Play has evolved so much in the last 21 years and we’re doing some really amazing work these days. One of my favorite things is game developers working with hospital staff and patients to develop therapeutic games. A great example of this is an experience called Gurney Journey and I’ve linked a video of it below.

This is just a heads up for those interested that I will be opening up my November commission slots Friday morning November 1st. Like the last few months there will be four spots available and I’ll be using my Atristree site to handle these commissions. I had a lot of fun with the four I did in October which included a couple D&D characters, a Pokemon and an original character. Here’s a little peek at the pieces I did in the last month.

They are in the thick of it over there, up to their asses in foetid muck, covered in preternatural sores - and that's just Noah! Everybody else has some other army appropriate condition they're suffering from. We might talk about a gently swinging censer, or the cool, sterile interior of an XV25 Stealth Suit. This is their second crack at the hobby, and it's taken root largely because they're focusing exclusively on Warhammer 40k and not splitting time between three or four Games Workshop systems at once. But already, in the manner of Wormtongue, I have begun to sow dissent.

The only way to really understand how the modern influencer superstructure functions is to understand how information used to work. There was "a media" and it was rigorously policed. There's simply too much information to be contiguous at this point; it must divide, partition, like a cell. People live in radically different worlds now, and the same information has a different valence in each of them. Engagement, devoid of context or meaning, is the coin of the realm where data has proliferated beyond our ability to meaningfully process it. This is how it came to be that two objectively abhorrent demons and a greasy, grinning mannequin have entered the business of feeding children.

I play Rainbow Six Siege every day. I’m absolutely hooked on this game. At first I was just playing it because I wanted to play with my boys and it was something we could all do together, but now I play alone while they're at school. There’s so much to learn between almost a hundred different operators and tons of unique maps with destructible walls which make them ridiculously mutable. I’d say that map awareness is the most important skill you can have in Rainbow Six Siege and that takes a lot of time to get a handle on. I’ve been playing for months now and I feel like I understand the various bomb sites in each map but I’m just starting to understand the connective tissue between sites and how everything connects. The game having so much to learn is part of the reason I think I’m still hooked. Every game I play I’m still learning and that’s rewarding. 

I've never installed cheats, not even to satisfy a morbid curiosity, in the same way that Gandalf feared the power of The Ring. The metaphor continues from there, because my era of cheats always had a dark nimbus; you were just rawdogging some mysterioso executable. God only knows what you're gonna catch. Matters are different now for cheats, to hear Mork's boys tell it, because they're essentially things you subscribe to. I'd never looked them up. I was curious how hard it would be to find, and they're, uh, not. They're not hard to find. I was startled at the professionalism - the 24/7 support line, the layout, and of course the fifty dollar a month price tag. Let me emphasize again: there is a support line for these game-shredding hacks. Kiko enunciated it well; in the era of service gaming, not just an assemblage of random hosts, it's a constant war like that of an immune system. The cheats, then, must be services also.

We’re just about one month away for this year’s Child’s Play Charity auction and dinner, on November 22nd! I’ll be there and I’d love it if you joined me. You can find more details and read up on what Child’s Play has been doing in my post right here or just go directly to the site and buy your tickets right here. It’s a super fun event so come help us raise money for a great cause!

-Gabe Out

The funniest thing about this is… well, maybe it's not funny broadly. The ironic thing about it is that the worst sort of abuse he could visit upon a miniature is beyond the apex of what I could ever achieve, and even he feels like this. So it must just be part of the Human Condition to find ourselves dwarfed by the immensity of The Task At Hand.

Last time Gabriel and his inheritors went wild on wargaming, part of the reason it fell apart was that they dug too greedily and too deep. Any one of the wargames that Games Workshop makes could be your entire life - they could certainly be your entire paycheck. They were playing Kill Team and Warhammer 40k 9th edition at the same time, and it didn't help that each of these games shares some language that doesn't actually mean the same thing in the different contexts. Plus, the 9th Edition of 40k just isn't as fun as the new one - they got a taste of 10 and they're sticking with it, despite my most fervent attempts.

It's hard to say goodbye. So Silent Hill, but maybe also to Australia, parts of which clearly overlap.

This is just a quick post to mention that the Darksiders II Deathinitive edition just dropped yesterday and so far I’m really impressed.  I love all the games in the Darksiders series but I think the second one is probably my favorite. It’s always been a beautiful game with excellent combat, fun traversal and awesome Zelda style puzzles. This new Deathinitive edition makes the game run in 4k at 60FPS, adds Raytracing, DuelSense controller integration and quicker load times. I’ve spent a few hours with the game so far and the upgrades are great! If you never played it I highly recommend grabbing this new version if you’re looking for a slick hack and slash action RPG. If you already played it like me these upgrades make going back totally worth it. These days it feels like a lot of games are trying to be an HBO series instead of a game and Darksiders II is simply a kick ass fucking videogame.  

-Gabe Out

After we did the last one, we couldn't stop. Anything as serious as Silent Hill is has seeds of silliness in it! That's just how it works.

I always do a couple of these ahead of time because I'm about to enter a Midnight Realm that I feel confident will prepare me for the mind-rending terrors of Friday Night's Arkham Horror game.

I had joined the Games Workshop fandom at the tail end of 9th edition. I started out learning standard Warhammer 40k and ended up choosing the Black Templars as my army. While attempting to learn that, I was shown Kill Team which of course I also bought a rule book for and tried to learn. Around this time I discovered they had a whole nother game called Age Of Sigmar with even more armies and so I had to check that out. Then they hit me with Boarding Actions and finally 10th edition. I think I blew some sort of fuse in my brain at that point and had to check out of all of it.  I never really felt like I had a firm grasp of the rules for any of those games. It was just too much too quickly.