A thousand years ago, Greazy-E and I used to frequent a weird-ass videogame store the name of which I cannot entirely remember, other than its fervent suggestion that their domain constituted some kind of zone. Or club? In any case.

August 31st through September first, right before the convention now known as PAX West, there is a mystical land called PAX Dev. In our climate controlled press-free environment, you can collaborate with friends and former enemies right before the big show. Tickets are available here, and if you've got an idea for a talk it can be submitted here; the deadline for such submissions is June 3rd.

We have some new video documentary stuff working for the shows, here's the first of several cool ones:

Clash Royale, a game from the Clash of Clans people, is really good even though I wanted it to be dumb so I could do something else. There's a lot to see out there right now. Like, a lot. Some of it is inside magic cyber glasses. But it's not dumb, it's a really smart active tower defence kinda thing and it's buffed to a gleam. It's way easy to beat your son, too, if you are deeply immoral.

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.