Post en route, obviously, but since there's only two hours left on this one it seemed worth a mention. I'd backed this before I knew there was an Enforcer working on it; once I found out, I was flush with arcing, eternal power like in Highlander. I say it is "ripe" because they have sufficiently overfunded to unlock an included minigame and the inevitable 5-6 player expansion for anyone pledging at $50 dollars, which is already cheaper than it will retail for. Of course, it's all contingent on your interest; I have a flashing "weak point" where hex-based, build-the-board games are concerned. They've got plenty of videos (and the by now expected Tom Vasel preview) all on the page.

Microsoft has some kind of mysterious something or other today; the rumor is that they're going to announce a tablet of some kind, and we are all by now aware that Microsoft Rumors are absolutely, one hundred percent always true. But in the event that this is the freaky edge case, we've got full coverage on each rhetorical base.

Gabriel's most recently hatched larvae is a brute, a yeti in miniature, whose knack for cataclysm is already refined after two quick solar revolutions. Neither of us have any experience with "boys," our own sons are nowhere to be found in any of the "accepted" young male archetypes, so it's fascinating. Well, fascinating for me. I suspect that for Gabriel and Kara it's more "aerobic."

The more time passes, the more I hate Prometheus. My theory is that I've wrung all the juice out of the Goddamn thing now, every touchpoint about The Pilot or Engineers or Xenomorphs or whatever, so all I have left is this hateful, spongy rind.

Still just generally sort of taken aback by the level of sophistication Ubisoft is bringing to their WiiU launch titles. It's not that I expect garbage from them or something, it's that almost as a rule Nintendo has to lead people around by the hand on their recent hardware, especially at launch. Even now, nearing the end of its run, there are games released for the Wii where you just do crazy shit with the controller and go wild. Rules are tempered by their exceptions, I suppose.

That there new Stur Wurrs game has incredible junk in its metaphorical trunk. A "long time ago," Shadows of the Empire spent time embroidering the setting's underworld, and here they are with a pair of new characters exploring that underworld's literal underworld.

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about the new Tomb Raider. Well, I know how they want me to feel about it, because they're monkeying around with some pretty fundamental socialization. You really have to wonder about these voiceover sessions.

Father’s day is on June 17th! Don’t worry though, if Dad happens to be a PA fan we’ve got you covered. We’ve packed our store with a bunch of cool shit for Dads.

I haven't "missed" E3 until this year. I went every year from '99 or so until it collapsed, and the last few years I've been fine; I have larvae at home which are molting constantly, and sometimes they need help writhing out of their dessicated sheaths. They need my mandibles. But it was nice to have an excuse to make full use of portables, a chance to leverage all those multiplayer features that were purchased but so rarely utilized.

I saw a single still used to promote a Hitman: Absolution trailer, a phalanx of leather-clad Battle-Nuns, and decided to skip it. I felt like I had probably seen something very similar at some point. But being mad at it is apparently a thing, a compulsory thing. Except I don't do compulsory, and I also don't do infantilizing chivalry. So I don't do well at these kinds of parties.

These last couple bundles have been fucking crazy, but this one is just balls out. Amnesia, AND Psychonauts, AND Limbo, AND Sword & Sworcery, and Bastion if you pay over the average? It does not compute.

Have you ever seen Art & Copy? It's by the rad guy who did Scratch and a bunch of other awesome shit. It's a documentary which is about Advertising, which is to say that it is about Mercenary Communication, which people have varying opinions about. My feeling is that once we are aware of its ubiquity, we may study it with greater safety; loss of containment is always a concern, but I find these weaponized memes fascinating beyond belief.

This past weekend we attended the Reubens down in Las Vegas. Tycho could not make it but I went down with Robert and our ladies to see what it was all about. On Friday the girls hung out on the strip while Robert and I went to check out the panels. The first one we walked into was something like “how I got two million dollars in free advertising!” Robert and I sat down and almost immediately we were uncomfortable. I’m not going to say the guy’s name because the entire focus of his talk was how he is able to get free publicity all over the place. I’d rather not give him anymore since I think he is a shameless monster. He showed some videos of himself on various local morning news shows circa 1989 and explained that you should always be trying to tie yourself to local news events in order to get on tv. He told us all a story about how “excited” he was when Elizabeth Taylor died because his wife’s family had some photos of the actress as a young girl. He ran to the papers with these on the day she died and used them to promote his animation business. It was at this point that Robert and I stood up and walked out.

John Carmack's bit about game stories, which are often porn stories, was controversial in the way that true things tend to be. It isn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be, but it often is.