There's a scene in L.A. Story where Steve Martin says "I couldn't be a woman. I'd just play with my breasts all the time and never get anything done" and like. Yeah. Sometimes it is like that.

"Dwarven women have beards and are nearly impossible for outsiders to tell apart from men" is obviously very good worldbuilding, and by and large and fantasy world that doesn't have hirsute dwarven women is cowardly. But consider instead a world in which almost all dwarves are men, but they still have an approximately 50/50 divide between dwarves with testes and dwarves with ovaries. Women are rare and largely independent of genitalia, but through some combination of custom and preference they generally shave their beards.

Bonus points if other races are super regressive about gender. "So you're a woman?" "No, look at my beard, I'm a man." "But you said you've borne three children..." "Aye, Stonehew, Hematite, and little Ore." "Surely you mean your wife bore them..." "Nae, but she's the one who knocked me up!"

The color on this ended up so intense that it kind of blew out my phone camera a bit. I'd previously made this with dry vermouth and it was not very good, but it's quite pleasant with the proper blanco, which is much sweeter than dry but not as rich and tannic as sweet vermouth. I'm pretty sure the grenadine is here mostly for color, so you'll either want to use Rose's for the bright red hue or else leave it out entirely, since nice homemade grenadine tends to be brown like the pomegranate molasses used to make it.

I had a lot of fun with Snake Farm, the old darling of the Cohost set, and I was prepared to have a lot of fun with its follow-up (more of a spiritual successor than a direct sequel). But Fish Fear Me, released yesterday, is so much more than just Snake Farm on a boat. While it shares the sardonically apocalyptic writing and the broad structure of hunting dangerous beasts across a week's time, it's also got a tremendous amount of depth that makes it feel immensely tantalizing to dive into over and over.

There are of course the most explicit ways in which the game draws you forward: unlike its predecessor, it has a persistent currency that allows you to become more powerful over time, as well as quests that unlock new build options and even new regions to explore. I haven't sailed to the end yet, but there are hints of an overarching metagame quest beyond just "play a bunch of games and pay off your life debt", which I'm very excited to see. And I don't want to downplay these—they're great additions and give the game a sense of exploration over time that Snake Farm never had.

But what interests me more are the emergent ways that it generates depth. The core mechanic is, hilariously, a use of the most standard fishing minigame in video games: hold a button as a line moves and release when it's in a particular region. But doing this consistently while also navigating your boat and murdering fish presents a serious challenge: if your eyes are on the fishing minigame, it's difficult to maneuver in more than the roughest strokes. If your eyes are on your boat, it's difficult to reliably succeed at the fishing minigame.

As a result, you end up shifting your own human skill allocation between different parts of the game, constantly adjusting how much you care about seeing more fish versus how much you care about killing those fish and collecting their remains (not to mention other concerns like where to fish, whether it's fished out, your own health, and so on). It's an astonishing amount of depth for such a simple mechanic, especially one that also works as a cute reference to so many fishing games of a different nature.

Fish Fear Me is out now, and as I write this it's even on sale for $8. You should go buy it, and play it, and tell all your friends.

thinking about how the seven deadly sins from everyone's favorite oppressive global religion are all just... feelings? they're not even actions you can take. like "sin" in the xtian sense is a horrible concept any way you slice it but specifically emphasizing occurrent emotions as damning your soul to an eternal torture realm is next level fucked up

What I love about Spike Buffythevampireslayer is that he perfectly encapsulated everything great and terrible about the series and Whedon's writing in general. He's a lot of fun and adds a tremendous amount to the main cast and also his character is given some incredibly rapey stuff that's absolutely never addressed at all. He has a really compelling character arc where he overcomes his vampiric evil and becomes a true friend and ally to the protagonists, an arc that also completely undermines the entire premise of the other major vampire character's arc. I have a lot of affectionate nostalgia for the Spike era of Buffy in particular but I will absolutely not ever go back and watch it because I just can't stand everything that comes with.

detailed image description

• Panel 1: A screen capture from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Julian Bashir and Miles O'Brien sit at a table on DS9 with mugs of liquid in front of them. They both look Worf, offscreen.
• Panel 2: Bashir stares straight ahead while O'Brien continues looking at Worf.
• Panel 3: Both Bashir and O'Brien are looking at Worf again.
• Panel 4: Reaction shot of Worf looking nonplussed.

Misericorde/White Wool and Snow mod that adds a little counter in the corner that goes up every time Hedwig is caught naked

I have more time recorded on Civilization VI than any other game in my library. It's been my go-to game to play with Liz since it launched. Before that, I played nearly endless amounts of Civilization II and III, and plenty of IV, Alpha Centauri, and Beyond Earth as well. This is probably the single series of games I have maintained the most interest in across my whole life.

So, naturally, we pounced on the opportunity to pay some extra money up-front for guaranteed access to the first two Civ VII DLCs as well as a chance to play the game a week ahead of its official launch. Of course, these games are always a bit shaky at the beginning, before patches balance out uneven mechanics and DLC adds depth to places that are shallow in the base game. We went into this knowing that we'd need to keep our patience close at hand.

But patience alone wasn't enough to get us through the game as shipped. Civ VII is direly underbaked, missing critical user interface affordances at every turn―most of which have been established standards for generations of Civilization games!—and in some cases being so opaque as to be nearly unplayable. At the same time, it's incredibly ambitious, making major overhauls to the formula that are aimed at addressing flaws that one might consider inextricable from the 4X genre. The result is something that was bound to be polarizing even if it worked.

Dramatic Changes in Civilization VII

The moment-to-moment mechanics of Civ VII look familiar to anyone familiar with the franchise. You still have cities and units on a game board, which still uses the hexagonal tiles introduced in Civ V. You can build buildings in your cities, explore the map, work your way through parallel trees of technology and civics, and pursue either diplomacy or war with other nations you encounter. But the details of almost all these systems have been changed dramatically.

Improvements Without Builders

One of the earliest things one notices upon starting a game of Civ VII is that there's no equivalent to the Builder or Worker unit from previous games. Instead, tiles are improved as part of a city's growth. Each time a city gains a population, it can improve one tile, also growing its borders to include the adjacent tiles (if they aren't too far from the city center). Gone is the choice between mining or farming a grassy hill; each terrain type has exactly one improvement which is automatically applied. Later in the game, you can unlock "unique improvements" which further enhance improved tiles, but these must be built or purchased like buildings.

This immediately gestures at one of the game's core design goals: to mitigate the micromanagement that blossoms as the game wears on. Civ VI already took a gentler stand on this, moving from immortal Workers to Builders that have limited charges. But doing away with this unit type entirely means that the mid- to…