Gabriel wasn't able to get into SimCity last night to play, because the server wasn't working and single player games don't exist anymore, even if you are playing a private city and nobody can come in anyway. So I would remember it, because it was important, I said here in the post a long time ago that "EA games come with free misery." This is why I stopped being an annual purchaser of Tiger Woods games: because this company has a serious, serious problem with execution at launch. You would only fix it if it meant more sales. But it doesn't, because everybody already bought it. Well, except me.

We give the contestants a fun little game to warm up their drawing skills and get to know each other.

So, imagine that advertising and those who are made to look at advertising are locked in a constant struggle not unlike that between infectious organisms and organisms that don't want to get infected. They co-evolve in various ways; they circle each other in a tense orbit, until a development on either side alters the board. Susceptibility to traditional commercial messages has been almost completely bred out of the stock. You have to hide it now, like when you secret a massive pill in a glistening heap of Fancy Feast. It's entirely possible that when you think about our culture and all our entertainment as disease vectors you may become nauseous. Have you considered Pepto-Bismol, either as a chewable tablet, caplet, or classic liquid?

I am proud to give you all the very first episode of Strip Search! Meet the contestants, see the house, and get ready for the competition to begin! One of these artists will win $15,000 and the ability to work inside the PA office for one year.

We posit a grim future in today's strip, and you could be forgiven for thinking I was talking about the future, because I did say the literal word "future." But this is more or less the way things work now. If you said "energy" instead of "fuel" you'd be describing the same functional process.

I made this little doodle of Samus in my sketchbook last week and I really liked it.

I understood that Reddit was "the front page of the Internet," but I am not a Redditor and to be perfectly frank I don't know what's required to become one. I don't know if that refers to some Dark Conclave of supermods, or if it applies to people posting things, or if it can apply to a person who reads things but doesn't post them and also doesn't post on things other people have posted.

My post obliterated his, according to the old ritual, because that's how shit go. But he just reposted it above, and I'm glad, because it's great and human and useful. He has a very different relationship to hardware than most reviewers would, and he used it to write something cool.

I was aware of the Surface Pro but I wasn't especially interested in it until I heard it came with a stylus and supported pressure sensitivity. I love gadgets and drawing so it only makes sense that I’ve always been curious about gadgets you can draw on. Since the old Windows tablet computers I've been looking for a good way to draw digitally on the go. I gave the iPad a shot but I don’t like drawing with the “eraser tip” capacitive touch styluses. When I read that the Surface Pro uses Wacom tech I was interested. I went down to our local MS store to try one on the day they launched. The demo machine only had one drawing app on it called Fresh Paint which seems like it’s mostly for kids but it was enough to see that the pen felt good and the pressure sensitivity was solid. I came home and mentioned on Twitter that I was interested in the Surface Pro as a drawing platform and I was contacted by MS and offered a machine to test out (I love my job). A few days later I had a brand new 128gb Surface Pro to play with.

It's so funny; we just did a strip about how Riot's karma engine was upgrading humanity. But he was back in practically the next day, absorbing bioaccumulative abuse from brigands re: his plainly amateur shit. So, maybe it doesn't work on everybody. It's possible that if your brain is mostly pockets of dead fluid you don't benefit from these civilizing efforts.

The 24th (this Sunday!!!) is the last day to pre-order the set, which includes such delicacies as:

There were actually two separate presentations by Sony during the reveal of the Playstation 4: one for developers, which might have been better situated at a GDC, and a second presentation which showed incredibly high resolution videogames in various states of undress. Predictions were verified, or sundered, by virtue of their truth content. The bump to eight gigs of ram was clearly a recent addition, and there's a lot of gesticulation toward the more "wibbly-wobbly" and "timey-wimey" aspects of the backend. By the end, though, they showed a machine that was exquisitely tuned to this particular nanosecond.

is going at full blast pretty much, and you can see the blast - and its fullness - over at Zeboyd's site.

The weird thing is that if I actually wanted to hold to the idea that I only play tactics games where Men Long To Sweat Together Outside Of Combat, the only tactics games I'd be allowed to play would be earlier versions of Fire Emblem. Well, and XCOM. My XCOM headcanon states that the biomodifications which allow them unmatched battlefield prowess also flip the genetic switch that makes them want to get all the way up in that ass. In addition, potent "revigorator modules" allow soldiers to fuck for ten days without food (three without water).

John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, from the strip "Green Blackboards (And Other Anomalies)," has proven itself incredibly durable as a conceptual tool. I see it everywhere. It is beyond delicious that its natural truncation - GIFT - is both an actual word and an implication that it is something we have granted, in Promethean fashion, to the race of man.