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.

Is there something you would like our opinion on? Something you'd like to know, something you could ask anyone, but you'd like ME to say the answer for some reason, bookended by scandalous f-words? Here is your opportunity - our form awaits your Qs.

SuperHOT bangs like Lester. Describing it succinctly without leveraging English euphemisms for temperature is basically Hard Mode for language. It may outstrip my power.

We're thinking about mixing up one of our annual events - what do you think? We used to do a more traditional format a long time ago, but there's a ton of incredible players around here and it would be cool to smash them against each other.

You might recall that our own Gabrak is set to volunteer at camp; counselor orientation just wrapped up and I am given to understand it was suffused with the ancient wisdom.

Because I liked The Division, aside from one or two things I'm perfectly able to live with because I'm aware of what it means to live in a finite universe, I had assumed that Gabriel would not like it. That's typically how this sort of thing shakes out. But not this time! Its starting to look like we might play (and potentially even enjoy) the same game at the same time.

As I have suggested previously, one of the supernatural benefits of Club PA membership is and exclusive comic and "postito" each month. I occasionally then preview that month's comic for you, like so:

My primary means of interacting with fighting games these days is watching the output of serious players. I feel like I understand what is happening in a round of LoL - I know the tiny part of a spiral that is writ large when the best players interact with it. The moment to moment aspects of a Fighting Game though, like an RTS, are opaque to me. That isn't to say I don't enjoy trying to even find those primary shapes, and to discover their colors and contours, but I'm one hundred percent on some preschool shit as the metaphor would suggest.

We have it downloading on the PS4 now, the one here in the office, and it is my intention to frown the entire time he plays it.

Gabriel and the other, actual Gabriel - The Gabriel currently contained within the parenthesis of the first - have been delighted by a game called ADIOS, which is the clever truncation of Amazing Discoveries In Outer Space.

There's another universe where XCOM2 is how they brought the franchise back; the long fallow period of XCOM's defeat bookended by the oral history of an underground war.