I'm completely obsessed with Westworld. There are a lot of articles about Westworld, but I don't read them; I only talk to my friends about it. I know enough from the headlines out barking for their wares inside that HBO has essentially weaponized the thinkpiece as a modus of self-promotion. But how could you not write about it, is my question. We're constantly hearing about the eternal, whirling dangers of games aping cinema, or not being willing to accept that they exist in the continuum of storytelling and thus have much to learn from it, or being desirous of the cultural cache afforded other media, but here you have something quite odd: a show informed by games, but not in the gaudy, obvious way this tends to happen. A show informed by the fundamental ideas behind games, gamers, and gaming that - if you start getting into it - is a kind of game itself, by virtue of its folded mysteries.

Why am I awake at 2:43 in the morning, when I SHOULD be asleep? Ask fucking Firaxis, they'll tell you. They'll tell you that, in collaboration with Satan the Devil, they made an electronic prison for the mind. But I managed to escape long enough to deliver unto you a vision of incredible merchandise, all of which can be clicked to see larger versions:

I fly enough now that anything below five hours or so I don't even feel.

Halloween seems like the right day to push a game where you make monsters out of other monster parts and then use those monsters to fight another, weirder monster. I know these guys, but don't let that put you off: they're very reasonable, possibly even good people.

Civilization VI is out, which you might know already, because you have become fused with your computer over the last week or so and are reading this post as data shunted directly into your visual cortex.

I usually don't get to put up the Pin Quest, but Gabe is drawing like two weeks of comics to get ready for PAX Aus so I've got the tiller. I'm cranked, though, because this year is a bumper crop for Aus pins, alongside what might be the coolest show set yet, care of Camp Weedonwantcha's Katie Rice! Alright, let's get down to business.

It's a great time, as always; individual tickets for the event can be secured here, while full table sponsorships can be investigated here.

I don't know much about Titanfall 2 yet, other than the fact that it is clearly a romance. In my travels I often encounter subcultures or representatives of subcultures with unique avenues of titillation. I don't have the receptors for this, I literally feel nothing when I picture it, but I have to imagine that being enveloped inside a steel man is probably doin' something for somebody. I'm sure for them it's like, "God damn. Finally." And then they press and hold the Square or X button over and over and over.

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: