I wasn't kidding! Right now, we've got:
PAX East Storytime: Jonathan Blow
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.
Enthusiasm
There is a new Hitman! And there is also a new comic about the new Hitman.
Pant, Singular
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.
Magnets
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.
Club PA Comic Preview
It's time for another Club PA strip preview, like so:
The Didactic Order
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.
VR Triptych
Here's kind of a tour of our adventureth in thyberthpace, its bigger-on-the-inside dealio and its casual profundities.
Membrane
Zone Theory
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.
Precautionary Tale
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.
Forgotten Sorceries
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.
PAX East Qs and/or As
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.
Permanence
SuperHOT bangs like Lester. Describing it succinctly without leveraging English euphemisms for temperature is basically Hard Mode for language. It may outstrip my power.
Child's Play Table Tennis Tourney?
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.
PPT
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.