We saw something over at Game Politics that was too good to leave alone - the mayor of Las Vegas is angry because the next Rainbow Six game nestles its geopolitical storyline in his city. If you haven't seen how, I really recommend that you get your hands on the full version of the E3 trailer (in HD preferably, in convenient mov or wmv formats). It's pretty horrifying. I sort of understand why he wouldn't want someone to see that, even though he hasn't seen it himself, so he doesn't actually know what he's talking about.  When they've spent so much money giving the impression that the town is primarily a haven for frequent and anonymous sexing, you don't want to get that signal crossed with "seething cauldron of anti-American terror."

The Ship just dropped on Steam, and if it wasn't something you were already keeping an eye on I wanted to make mention of it.  It's sort of like an Agatha Christie book come to life in videogame form:  the players have all been invited to a cruise liner by the mysterious Mr. X, free of charge, only to find that the vessel itself is a kind of human hunting ground for his amusement. 

How that plays out in game form, how your targets are chosen and how you stalk them, all of that is covered here.  Anyway, it's out, twenty bucks, I'm grabbing it now.

(CW)TB

As is often the case for our kind, some derelict account on some forgotten website had suddenly become critical information, and Gabriel's long forgotten password forced him into a temporary crisis. It did not help that the "secret question" he had configured was an almost useless wisp of enigmatic text.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were going to start cleaning out the store. We retired a few of the older t-shirt designs and now we’re blowing out the old 8x10 Laser Cels. The price on these prints has been knocked down to $19.99 and just like the old shirts once they’re gone, they’re gone.

I haven't discovered a way to tell this story that is not highly uncomfortable, which is why I haven't told it. But when I saw that Too Human wasn't just my greatest disappointment of this year's E3 but actually a direct obstacle to new Eternal Darkness games like some kind of intestinal blockage I managed to find the strength.

The author's intent with this comic is something like this: 

The next two strips are from our adopted third grade class, in whom we endeavored to invest our most potent comic creation skills.  Today's comic was made as a gift for us by one of the students after we left, and we found the contest it presents hilarious.

Against my will, against my reason, and even against my character I agreed to be partner to (what was described as) A True Road Event, on the condition that it be

I go into why your terrestrial "road tripz" are not a natural state for me, on account of my painful history with the practice, which on more that one occasion involved pain that was not purely figurative or otherwise augmented for the tellin'.

We're going to be out of town next week, both of us, on "vacation." We're going to roughly the same place but we have no desire to see one another. During this time, I have secured the services of a kind of all-star developer supergroup, like a Menudo versed in Maya, to handle the newspost portions while our third-grade comic trainees have agreed to handle the strip. At some point during this week a viewing of Superman Returns is veritably assured. It is running at an exceptionally comfortable theater near my house, but beginning at nine o'clock each night I have a standing agreement to interfere with (virtual) terrorism. I don't know how grave the threat actually is from these simulated miscreants, but I must admit that the process does make me feel better.

I guess you guys like the new PAX program cover. Every time I refresh my mail I have another dozen emails asking for a wallpaper and a poster version. The actual image was for the book cover so it was only about eight inches high. In order to make a poster of it I had to re-draw some big chucks of it. I also had to extend the image vertically and horizontally to match the dimensions of our posters. But I did all that this morning and the poster will be on sale at San Diego Comic Con. Here's a little peak.

I finished the cover for the PAX 2006 program today. It still needs this year’s logo slapped on but here’s the original artwork.

If my earlier experiences with the co-operative campaign had not endured so, there would be no question - fifteen dollars is quite simply not a value that men of reason would associate with the GRAW Map Pack. But, drawing on that idea, let us move forward as though the powerful fraternal bonds forged in Campaign One were sufficient to assuage price related suffering to some degree. I realize that this moves our narrative into the realm of fiction.

So San Diego ComicCon is coming up next month and we will be there with stacks of shirts and books. Kiko just finished up our new booth banner that shows all the designs we’ll have as well as all the prices. Give it a click for the large version.

There was an article online which establishes our absolute primacy over all living things. Or, something like that. I haven't read it. It is my policy to continue living my life the way I have lived it: singing to orphans, sixteen hours a day. I must warn you that this is not the universal policy of our establishment.

If not, I really should have.

Listening Post was (in art world terms) an Installation, but the term installation has a lot of baggage for me.  Media Experiment sounds pretty silly, too.  Well, maybe you can tell me what it is:  a bank of LCD screens display random snips of text from the Internet at various intervals, presenting it in one of a few different ways.  One of them sounds like a men's choir, where the top thirty words starting with a particular letter are recited.  Seeing the Internet, an entity with which I have a more than passing familiarity, represented in a novel way - the cacophonous noise of fifty flamewars at once, presented as art - was something that remained with me.

I just found another site that plays with raw information in a similar way called We Feel Fine.  Culled from your Earth Blogs, it collects and presents text strings about "feelings" in various novel, interactive ways. 

(CW)TB