Anyhow, you deserve cool stuff. Here's one of my favorite gaming stories. An older couple join a Star Wars RPG. They don't know much about gaming. They don't know much about Star Wars. They do, however, know rather a lot about small-unit commando tactics.Hope you enjoy it.

We mainly gave away ribbons, like last year. We'd have a challenge or a game or a short quiz.

One of our ribbon quizzes was about what webcomics people read, and we learned something valuable - half the kids these days read comics on cellphones, usually via Tapas or Webtoons.

We had suspected that, but it is a very useful thing to know for certain. We've been doing this for a while. Back when we started in 1999, cellphones had a resolution of "Maybe it can show text". The internet has changed and perhaps we should do more to take those platforms into account.

We gave away the Magikarp ribbons again - the song has since been released in English which means a few more people knew it. I think it was up to six.

Occasionally, I'd ask if someone knew the Magikarp song and they'd say they didn't because there was no such thing. I'd take out my phone and...nobody would be able to hear anything because I didn't have speakers and it was slightly loud in there. So maybe next year I bring speakers.

We also had a Star Fox ribbon. I had a bunch of trivia questions prepared. After about the third person, I realized something: Isabel and I love the Star Fox series. The Star Fox comics that ran in Nintendo Power were a formative influence on her. Those comics ran in 1993, which makes them older than the average attendee.

So, asking people to name the characters on the ribbon was a bit much. (It was Fay and Miyu, who appeared in Star Fox 2 which was only officially released on the Super Nintendo Classic last year. In 1995, Isabel wrote to Nintendo asking if Star Fox 2 had been cancelled; they wrote back and reassured her that it was not and had merely been delayed a bit. 22 years later, it's a bonus game on a re-release of the console which makes that technically accurate).

So the questions got a little easier, like "Name a member of team Star Fox". One person pointed out that Pigma was a member of the original Star Fox, with James and Peppy. He got one each of all my ribbons for that.

I don't think anybody named Krystal, which surprises me very much. She apparently didn't show up in the last three games (two of which were both remakes of Star Fox 64...), but I'm sure if I had asked that question a dozen years ago she'd be top three at least.

By the end of things, we had given away several hundred ribbons and collected several hundred ourselves. We knew a bit more about potential readers and everyone else knew a bit more about the Magikarp song. I'd call that a win.

So, what did we do for Isabel's birthday? We got her a Mew.

Ever since the original Pokemon games came out, Isabel has wanted a Mew. We've downloaded them, been to Toys R Us events, and paid real cash money for My Pokemon Ranch. She's serious about this. Her Pokemon Go username is MewLife, which is also a reference to a before-they-got-depressing Depeche Mode song.

So for her birthday, she wanted a Mew in Pokemon Go. Yes, we still play it. It's the closest we'll get to having a Mew in real life.

To catch a Mew in Pokemon Go, there's a whole 22-step quest-line. After three months of leisurely playing, we were halfway through.

We had been stuck at needing to catch ghost-type Pokemon. If you're not familiar with the game, the important bits are that different Pokemon show up at different physical locations and that ghosts are rare. We needed ten and had run into two or three in the last few months. So we spent yesterday at a park thirty miles from home, where these things spawned intermittently and we could catch them if we got any cell signal.

We spent today doing Pokemon raids. The idea is that you get a large group together and fight really strong Pokemon. It was just the two of us. Fortunately, the goal was "participate in" rather than "win", because we lost. A lot. But we got points for showing up, and we did a whole lot of showing up.

And the final step in the questline - throw an excellent curveball. You catch Pokemon by throwing a ball inside a circle that gradually gets smaller. You get 'nice' if you hit inside that circle at its largest, 'great' if it's shrunk down halfway, and 'excellent' if it's at about 10% of the original size. And all the pokes we ran into had a really small circle to start with.

So 80 tries later, she hit it and we wrap this whole thing up. What's the plan for tomorrow? Enjoy living that Mew Life and probably not play much Pokemon Go for a few days.