the boon

YOU HAVE PASSED THE TRIALS AND EARNED A BOON the voice intoned from above. Its power echoed through the grand pillars of the room.

Jacen walked forward three paces, looking up more in reverence than at something in particular. "Sir, uh, lord, or god-voice? What, uh, what kind of boon are we talking about?"

The voice was silent.

Stalven hissed at Jacen. "We talked about this, dude! You know what we want!"

Jacen glanced over his shoulder at his friend and companion. For just a moment, he considered whether to actually follow through. When confronted with the ineffable eternity of power, their agreed-upon request seemed a little silly. Still, he couldn't disappoint Stalven. They'd been through so much together. He nodded to Stalven and took another tentative step forward. "Great voice? I know what I want." He swallowed hard. There were so many things he could ask for in this moment: money, fame, power. But he made a promise, and he was going to keep it. "Can I get one of those sex demon girls? You know, if she wants to hang out with us. But uh, without her sexing people to death. Just the other stuff."

Nothing happened. Jacen imagined the Voice was rolling its eyes. Did it have eyes? Was this too stupid a- and then his thoughts fled from his mind completely.

The most beautiful woman he'd ever seen materialized in a flash of black light. She hovered in front and above him, lazily flapping her bat-like wings. Long black hair flowed down her nude form, softly undulating in the still air. She looked down at him, and when their gaze met, she smiled broadly, her lips parting enough for Jacen to see a hint of her fangs.

Both Stalven and Jacen were enraptured. After several very long seconds, Jacen reached up and offered his hand. The demon took it, and they left.

That night, as they made camp and sat around the fire, Stalven still hadn't spoken since she had appeared. Jacen looked to him, concerned. "You cool, bro?"

"Dude, the Voice offered you a boon and you were just like 'I want this mega-hot demon babe.'"

"Yeah, that was the plan. Your plan. That was the plan, right?"

"Yeah, but you said I want. She's yours." Stalven looked to his left. She was sitting on the ground cross-legged in front of the fire, silent as ever.

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't say we wanted her. You said 'I want her'."

"So?"

"So what if I want to get laid too?" Stalven couldn't help sounding pathetic now.

The demon woman smiled at that. Jacen buried his face in his hands.

"You can ask her whatever you want to, dude. She's not a succub-me; she's a succub-us."

another twitter classic

i’m really going to miss that site.

today’s game dev wisdom

however much you think you need good qa, however much you think you need a good editor to manage your game’s text (assuming it has text), you’re almost certainly underrating those roles.

a good editor elevates text, even when the strings are super short. especially when the strings are super short. and no, you are not a good editor of your own text. not enough to replace a real editor, at least.

good qa finds the edge and corner cases that you didn’t consider when implementing your game. we all know how easy it is for a game to get a reputation as buggy. qa is your best defense against that.

a vaguely related fact: i just reviewed some edits that were made to a bunch of quest text i wrote recently and was deeply grateful to have someone take the time to fix it up. the fixes ranged from a substantial change to a character-defining moment to putting in paragraph breaks where i really should have inserted them. tone issues got fixed. language got tightened up with unnecessary clauses removed. i’m a pretty decent writer and editor, but even if i were the best in the world it would still be better to get that second set of expert eyes.

the moral of the story here is that game development is a team sport.

why is it that health insurance companies don’t add a premium for employers who don’t require their employees to be vaccinated. we know for an absolute fact that vaccines don’t really reduce transmission but they significantly reduce the likelihood of hospitalizations, death, and even long covid.

so if you’re on the hook for paying health care costs, why would you not charge the group that’s higher risk by choice (dumb choice at that) more money?

last sleep before dracthyr.

just in case you thought that twitter was the only ridiculous place on the internet these days, my two cats are watching an eight-hour youtube video of birds being birds and they just got an unskippable ad for kahlua.

i like twitter, don't get me wrong. but i also like all of the vicious takedowns going on as it goes through what are likely to be its death throes.

really hope it somehow survives and would love to be wrong here, but i don't see it lasting another three months. even three months feels like a generous timeline.

after almost three years of remote work, i have finally reached good work/life balance: i am very excited about the things i am working on *and* i get told multiple times a day to take a vacation.

rip twitter. might be back now.

no idea where i’m going to actually hang out now that twitter is a little too musky for my taste. but it might be here. so 2022 allison took it over from 2014 allison. she wasn’t using it anymore anyway. (edit: apparently it was 2018 allison who used this last. either way, it’s been a while.)

{T}: Marry Target Player

Super loud up-front disclaimer: I’m #wotcstaff, but I’m saying that only because this is a post about Magic and company policy is that we need to put the hashtag in when we talk about our products on social media, even on personal accounts like this one. There is literally nothing here that is remotely official or relevant to Magic as a whole.

I’m marrying this woman next weekend.

My soon-to-be wife and I are Magic nerds. In fact, we met because of Magic. We matched on OKCupid, but that wasn’t a big deal. I had a lot of matches. What set her apart was that she said in her profile, in the “What I’m Doing On Friday Night” section, was that she played FNM.

Now I was an editor in R&D at the time. I had designed cards and I was definitely a Magic celebrity in my own mind. C-list, maybe D. I’m no Rosewater or Verhey. But my job gave me a certain amount of cachet all the same and I decided to use it. I messaged her, telling her that it was cool she played Magic because I helped make the game. I reasoned that it would get me a first date, and from there I could see if I wanted to keep seeing her.

Our second date, we played in a Conspiracy 1 & 2 two-headed giant draft event. This was years before Battlebond and in fact led directly to that set. The people running it were Shawn Main and Mel Li, the former of whom was the originator of the idea that became that product. Christine and I spent our draft building mono-black control(ish) and WU fliers. The draft itself took hours, and then we started our four-team game very far behind. We got safely ignored by the other three teams for a while... then Christine drew her ninth land. She played it and cast Expropriate. As we were so far behind, everyone decided to let us take bonus turns, so when that was over, we had four more to go. On the second bonus turn, I drew and cast Phage the Untouchable. On the third bonus turn, I activated Rogue’s Passage and one-shotted one of our enemy teams. On the last bonus turn, we one-shotted another. Then we died, but who cares because that was awesome.

We took a vacation together after two months of dating and Winston drafted a dozen times on the trip.

I can’t play in prereleases with the public, but she loves opening brand-new sets at midnight. So I usually bring her coffee for her midnight prerelease, look over her deck, then take off.

A few weeks after I proposed to her, just after handing her coffee at the Ixalan prerelease, she grabbed my hand and slid my engagement ring on the finger it’s stayed on for most of the last year.

And of the five people in my bridal party, I met all four women playing or working on Magic. (My bridesman plays Magic too, it’s just that I met him in college instead of through Magic.)

Magic is a huge part of our life and it’s brought us a ton of joy. So when it came time for my bridal shower, one of my bridesmaids made this small series of cards for me. I loved them so much that I just had to share.

Really she’s Gruul and not Jeskai, but this is fine. The card is great.

I’m probably mono-White or Selesnya. But Bant isn’t too far off.

Copy Artifact, by Magali Villeneuve