I can't emphasize it enough: VR is real. I have a revolving door at my house of people from every demographic slice that I strap into "my realmz," and nobody can believe the power of these devices to hijack senses and provide presence. They emerge from these places slightly disoriented from the, you know, other false reality, but they aren't nauseous and they are almost always ready to go back in. I feel like there's opportunities to increase the stakes of these cyber glades, but that's a conversation for another time.

In what may well be the end of a School Camp Trilogy, today's strip is about school camp and is the third of its kind.

I’ll be chaperoning a 5th grade camp for the next couple of days. The kids are not allowed to bring any electronics but I’ll be packing some technology. Cigarettes might not be a currency at camp but I have a feeling access to Youtube might be. I’ll be a king!

Planning the PAX shows takes a lot of mental energy, spent by people much smarter than me, but one of the things I do understand is that it's much easier to plan it when we can get a good read - as early as possible - on attendance. There's a new system for PAX Aus where the sooner you register for a three day badge, the greater and more profound your rewards are in this life. Custom lanyard and badge, Pinny Arcade pin, that kind of stuff. You should check out the offer if you're down there because the cool stuff starts dropping off the closer we get to the show.

I wasn't kidding! Right now, we've got:

I feel fairly confident that you know about Jonathan Blow, because he has driven you nuts on precisely two occasions: once with Braid, and once more recently with The Witness. Within each game were many sub-opportunities to be driven mad, such are his dark emanations. He's going to open up the show for us at PAX East, and I'm very curious what he'll have to say.

There is a new Hitman! And there is also a new comic about the new Hitman.

I've tried unsuccessfully to get him into the Division thing; believe me, it's not for lack of trying. It's precisely what happened with Destiny, where I found his baseless enthusiasm despicable and indecipherable, and shamed him at every opportunity. Except I was wrong that time, it just took me a very long to figure out; I wonder how it will go in reverse. "Not well," is my guess.

Grab related to me his high highs and low lows when it came to Samsung Pay, which works vastly more often than it doesn't, but when it doesn't, you feel like an anachronism only in reverse. There is such a thing as the old fashioned person who hasn't caught up, but as the kind of early adopter technology we crave is becoming purpose built for social interactions, we now have an opportunity to be ridiculous in an entirely new way.

It's time for another Club PA strip preview, like so:

There was a time when you could use exaggeration to communicate - you could leverage dark imagery with the presumption that your audience would understand that you did not mean it literally, but were instead utilizing a rhetorical device to describe feelings outside the boundaries of the acceptable and potentially even amuse a person precisely with the extent of the disparity between reality and the metaphor. Weren't those cool times? That is what we must always keep in mind. Thus, we allow our enemies to disarm us.

Here's kind of a tour of our adventureth in thyberthpace, its bigger-on-the-inside dealio and its casual profundities.

Because Michael craves novelty, he is making the leap over to the Android side of the equation. I like novelty in some contexts, don't know if I crave it exactly, but God Damn if this motherfucker doesn't need to touch and swipe on an expensive new rectangle every few months.

The Division is what I'm waiting for now. I try not to do shit like this but believe me 100% when I say that I scammed a code for this game, and technically I could have started playing at five or so this morning when the servers went on, but I think I was still drunk from the night before.

Now that we've moved everything there's just this hole in the office where Virtual Reality will exist. It's strange in some respects that we're going to "fill" that volume with intangible places, overwriting the zone with a polymorphic suite of sensory data, but it's true. It has to stay empty so it can remain empty physically but be colonized by alien stimuli and the occasional whatever Gabe wants to do in there.

It's funny that at an event clearly designed to focus attention on Microsoft's unified Windows platform and their designs for the PC in general, an off the cuff remark from Phil Spencer about upgrading the hardware on the Xbox One became the takeaway. Not funny for them, I imagine! My suspicion is that news about unannounced and unavailable upgrades to another platform were not the intended payload. I unplugged the Xbox and spun it around in the air, trying to figure out where you would put it. Came up with nothing.