Once again we wish a Good Timezone to Never Say Dice fans, adventures in Aardia, TikTok and beyond. No, we’re still not the Roll for Sandwich guy (seriously, neither of us), and if your memory's a little crusty, you should go devour our f irst blog post on Roll for Sandwich . The social media show is hosted by Jacob Pauwels, and is exactly what it sounds like. Every episode (nearly), the host rolls dice to determine various items that will comprise a sandwich. The host then consumes his creations and determines a name and point value along with sharing his commentary. It'is a nerdly social media underground phenomenon that has spawned fans following creators, imitators, different mediums such as pizza, and plenty of homages to the original creator. If you enjoy food and gaming (yes, in that order), you might want to dig right into the feast of these short video collections . It still enthralls my children (when we can get ourselves to all focus and watch a few episodes) and my...

Given the choice, I probably wouldn't have  chosen  to play as a space bug at the time. But there were very, very few games available, let alone games with manuals , let  alone  games with high-quality full-color comic books explaining the story.  Yars' Revenge  had all of these, and it was a space game to boot, so, for perhaps the first time, I fully envisioned myself as something non-humnaoid in taking on the role of an electronic game protagonist. Maybe I could have ignored it, gone with an alternate interpretation that I was simply flying some kind of insect-shaped spacecraft , but the comic (and the map at the back) were simply too  cool  for that. It gave me a weird feeling, what I now know to be called "cognitive dissonance," but I accepted that slapping that cartridge into the Atari 2600 and flipping the "on" switch meant becoming, for however long I'd be playing, something very different. It's not like I wasn't already in love with the...

The post schedule around this blog hasn’t been the smoothest as of late. Between life’s pressures and unexpected tragedies such as rock legends (and personal heros) dying , it's not hard to imagine how that would impact a regular day. Unfortunately for our dear readers, one of the things that has kept me from writing over the past few weeks is vacation. Though, while one might expect they'd get more writing done on a vacation, the fact of the matter is that taking your whole family on a trip, even limited to those living in your own household, is something of a job in itself. Vacation is what I want to talk about this week, though, so perhaps it works out after all. While I may have previously talked about gaming while on vacation and finding inspirations in your trips , or even taking a vacation from your weekly gam e,  this week I want to look at something a bit different: giving the characters a vacation.  Time to Party Our characters in tabletop roleplaying ga...

There's something seriously, seriously wrong. You know it, I know it... but more than that, we all can  feel  it.  Anybody who consumes media, especially narrative media, feels it. Every round of layoffs, every cowardly kowtowing to censorious bigots, every work suddenly made unavailable, every creator screwed over... there's a  lot  and it's happening so constantly that it's easy to forget that  it didn't use to be like this . And it ain't like capitalism is anything new, but the system's never been so dead-set on eating itself like it has been the past few... I was going to say "years," but really, it's accelerated to an unfathomable degree over the past few  months . We're going to need to stop and take stock of what's going on and what we need to prepare for, as both consumers and creators. Did this whirlwind have a starting point, the flap of a butterfly's wing or the the first tightness in a coalmine canary's tiny chest? C...