I really like the Nintendo Switch commercial, which places me at odds with Mr. Gob Dobolina, who derives from it only shame and the sense, the unavoidable sense, that the meat in his chest keeping him alive has a shelf date, like all other meat.

If you have not heard already, Microsoft just announced a new device called the Surface Studio. It’s essentially a Surface computer for your desktop. From what I understand, you can go to any Microsoft store today and actually play with one. It’s a big beautiful screen on this slick armature that lets you adjust it from a normal monitor to something more like a drafting table for drawing on. I get questions about Surface devices and drawing all the time and I am sure this one will be no different. In fact I can already see tweets coming in asking what I think. So If you’re curious what I think about the Surface Studio, you are in luck, because I have been drawing on one for the last week.

There is a quote from George R. R. Martin on the cover of Dinosaur Knights, which is the second volume of what may or may not be called the Dinosaur Lords trilogy. Here is the quote:

The first time I saw Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes must have been a couple years ago, when Virtual Reality gear was even more rarified than it was now: the presentation involved a card table and what must have been an Oculus DK2. In the real world this configuration wasn't much to look at, but the real world is a woven fabric consisting primarily of lies we have agreed to believe. I spent a very long time there watching other people play it because I'm obsessed with asymmetry. And Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is asymmetrical as fuck.

(My first iteration of this post was thoroughly dramatic on account of an open italics tag. Let's try this again.)

This is how I tried to explain to Gabriel how wrong he was, about Gears, certainly, but also about every other topic. Hummus. Cravats. There's simply a disconnect between him and the reality we experience. I'm fucking with him of course, but I also believe what I said. Anytime the environment is more than just occlusion, my proposal is that we're talking about something that isn't a straight shooter. It was when I realized that I thought of a Gears level not as a three dimensional space but as a 2D kind of maze that I thought there might be something else going on.

I was able to secure a PSVR at my local Fred Meyer yesterday morning and spent a good chunk of the day exploring the virtumal realms. I’ve had some bad experiences with VR in the past and so this time I decided to take some Dramamine before donning the headset. I wasn’t sure it would work but it did and I was able to play a bunch of games without any nausea.

I've told the story before, because it is very instructive, and bears retelling:

I absolutely one hundred percent installed Star Wars: The Old Republic again. That's canon. I quit when all my friends quit, back when I completed my main class arc and the game just sort of stalled out. They asked me to go back to base for some reason but nothing happened there, and it started to feel like a trick; there's a time-tested response to such things.

...if this year's PAX Aus pin set is the best pin set of all time (BPSOAT).

I could not be more excited to attend PAX Aus, and have already begun packing a supply of As. But what of the Qs? That's where you come in. Please deposit fresh Qs in this empty Q&A form, and we'll process them into amusement on-stage for your enjoyment.

The Halloween 2015 set has entered the Pin Vault, and a terrifying newcomer has arrived as though from a seasonally appropriate GRAVE:

In the same manner that Childe Roland must occasionally sidle up to a Dark Tower, sometimes you gotta go to a place you rarely go and see someone you haven't seen for awhile to get something you need.

At the very top of the Google Doc we write strips in rests a crown of potential comics, suitors who want only for you to love them. They want to be clasped; brought up the the big leagues.

So much about a given Sonic game turns on whether you accept that "Sonic Games" constitute their own space with their own relative scoring system, or if they are part of the overall body of work we call videogames. Context matters also; in the same way that a brackish puddle may provide some respite from the heat of the desert, there's things I'll play when there's nothing else, or shows I'll watch only on a plane. The flight to PAX Aus, for example, has a unique desperation around hour twelve that I'm willing to stuff literally any media into.