Mine All Mine moves into Phase Two, depicting the savage and repeated “key learnings” this game heaps on you with a quickness. Minecraft is possessed of so many truths, both inherent and user-defined, that people engage with it in very personal ways. Occasionally, engaging with it means being murdered in the dark.

Our webmaster set up a multiplayer server for the game (because setting up servers for things is something he does as a form of amusement), and the shift between the solitary, homesteading-type experience and shaping a word as a distributed electronic pantheon is marked. It happened to be in the middle of the virtual night when I logged in for the first time, and in the distance I could see light but not the source of that light. As I got closer, I could see that it was the light of torches, a hundred or more, illuminating a pair of castles - one of which wore a kind of floating, stone halo. I’d learn later that this was Scott‘s house, and the other one was Mike’s, though the second one was easy because there was a sign out front which read “Welcome to Mike’s House.”

In the end, I suspect my contributions will largely be the work of my Adam Complex: signs posted hither and yon, the name of this or that monument etched in. Geological notes on natural formations. Cryptic warnings for the unwary. Also, maybe a note on the etymology of “dumbbell.” You know? I gotta keep it ‘hood.

As I shifted the pointer o’er-top the icon for King’s Bounty: Crossworlds, I realized that I was smiling.

I do smile, on occasion, but I will generally make you work for it. People in general (and my wife in particular) tend to assume that I’m angry at something, quite probably them, because my default facial posture is indistinguishable from a frown. There’s also the problem where if I do find something deeply funny, the laughing part of my brain seizes up while analytical tendrils spin the idea this way and that in an attempt to know why. It is complicated, but the smile was there nonetheless. I noticed it because it felt like there was something on my face.

Via some methodology I am not entirely certain of, I received a working code for a review copy of Civilization V. I have played it enough to know that it is a game of clean lines and flawless ratios unbounded by the smooth corners of the world it simulates. It’s perfect and deathless and it isn’t going anywhere, ready the very moment I summon it to enclose me in its pure structures. It’s the maximized centerfold archetype when what I’m after is filthy, anonymous, alleyway rutting. That’s King’s Bounty.

You guys can use that on the box, if you want.

(CW)TB

listen to my hands