(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.

Puttin' it back up, to see if anybody missed it. Here's what you know:

I don't know; once we started writing about it, it was hard to stop. And then it got into some PKD type shit about digital consciousness…? This is basically what I want to do all the time.

Here's what you know:

This is exactly how I play these games, in general. I'm not, you know, proud of it, that's just the pattern. But Horizon might break me out of it, just because it doesn't have the same segmented arc at all. It's not race/menu/race/menu. It's an open world game where your body is a car, and what they've got me doing in there is far, far more varied than I was expecting. I also wasn't aware of developer Playground Games' pedigree - take a look at the Wikipedia page, which is essentially a spreadsheet of every racing game developer you've ever loved. I learned that from somebody in the channel of the stream we did, actually. We played some on "the Twitch," which gave me a chance to see how much farther along in this CarPG continuum Gabriel was than myself.