If you are a nerd, or a dork, or a square, or a polygon, or a Porygon, or whatever the word is for people who fetishize this kind of stuff, Virtual Reality is approaching normalization. We have a fairly robust conception of it, pop cultural models of the form coupled with our own experience regarding state of the art entertainment simulations.

I borrowed an Oculus last night and decided to show it off to some friends and family. First I had my folks come over. My Dad was really curious about it. he doesn’t play games but he likes to read articles about them since he knows it’s such a big part of my life. He was aware of the Oculus but had never seen one in person much less used it.

They're going hard over there, I mean, like... Ke$ha hard, coming in at $53,635.02 at the time of this posting. I have to keep changing the post to account for the growth: strong showing, all. I'm gonna keep an eye on that total - if they end up cracking 75k this year, that brings their lifetime total (seven years!) up to a cool half million. Jamie's gonna give 'em a call today at 3:30, just to see what's up.

Playing games with us can be difficult. That sentence is true in multiple ways.

Sometimes people send me boxes full of cool shit. I don’t always end up talking about the stuff I get, but if it’s especially cool it will usually end up in the comic or a news post. A while back Razer sent me one of their incredible Blade Pro laptops. I’m playing Wildstar on this thing every day and I love it. They sent a second package a little later full of peripherals. I’m not generally a PC gamer so I was using a $5 mouse which has now been replaced with the Razer Naga. I did have a decent set of headphones but the Kraken 7.1’s they sent blow them out of the water.

So, maybe we don't think it's the best terminology ever. Or, maybe it's fine terminology, but it calls the very endeavor into question; it is The Hand Which Draws itself. But for some reason we can't stop saying it.

In 2007 - when the vast majority of American children got to school on the backs of herbivorous dinosaurs - Johnny Lee flipped motherfuckers out with his YouTube summer jam "Head Tracking For Virtual Reality Displays Using The Wii Remote." A thoroughly baller proof of concept, it conveyed the power of a deep display that retained its experiential vigor even when it was ostensibly only two dees.

When the folks at the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter asked if I was interested in contributing to their calendar I could not say yes fast enough. They hadn’t even told me what I was supposed to draw yet. “It should be a piece inspired by Reading Rainbow’s idea that a book can let you go anywhere and be anything.” I was told. Yes yes yes a million times yes!

It's called the Avarice Amulet, though it's been called lots of things over the course of its life - initially it was a Watchwork Golem, a traitorous creachoid that would flip allegiance on death. They thought it might be fun if it were an artifact, which fit the Penny Arcade reference better anyhow, and ultimately that's the genetic stock that survived testing. It's best for the weirdo, novel formats we tend to like - there's a cool piece with meta-level suggestions over at TouchArcade featuring the official art, which has a tasteful reference for you to savor.

There are too many games to name which conform to the brutal PVE/Survival model, and more coming out all the time; they spread like wildfire, they mass and hatch in people's extremities. Spintires, catalyzed by Kickstarter, has been making the rounds - and even though you don't brain spiders with pipes, or make shanties, I'm comfortable saying its situated in that storied continuum. You explore, and contend, and amass, and rarely, rarely succeed.

Her Wildstar house of course. I like to visit all my friends houses, help with their gardens or mines, check out any challenges they have and just poke around in their bedrooms. Anyway I was in Jamie's house and I noticed that she took a set of Granok furniture and she shrunk it way down to make a tiny room for her stuffed animals. She then placed her dolls on the furniture.

Grabiel and Kiko (who I haven't actually called Kiko since 2003, opting for either , Kikkorzord, Kierkogaard, Korkenwold, or Krizz Kaliko) are basically going non-stop on this Console Wars thing. They are careful not to give each other "spoilers," which seems odd, but there you have it. Some people don't like how it is a narrative account, that people have been made into "characters" that have "dialogue" or whatever, as opposed to something more clinical; who knows. The Historical Account version of the book probably doesn't get picked up by Sony for a movie as quick as it did.

The Child’s Play Golf Tournament is coming up this Sunday! That means you only have a few more days to buy your tickets. Ticket sales will actually close this Wednesday at 5:00pm. Remember this year we have three different options for you:

Last time I talked about the Surface Pro 3 I laid out some of the problems I had with the device. MS reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to come over to the campus and meet with some folks from the Surface team. Basically they wanted to get me in a room with the designers and engineers and just have them watch me draw for a while. I figured if watching me use the device could help them fix some of this stuff then it was worth giving them an afternoon.

Console-wise, what we need more than anything else - more than specific games, even - is a pair of gargantuans at each other's throats, their iridescent plumage fanned out, preening for tribute.

I wish I could take credit for the awesome designs in today’s comic strip but I can’t. They were actually created by Kismesister and she draws them much better than I do. You can hit her tumblr to see more of her awesome work.