The "Intense Heat" generated by these PS4 streams isn't even predictable, per se. Predictability implies that we can look at the data and, spurred by their factual constellation, arrive at a certain conclusion. But we don't need to look that hard. We're talking about cameras and young people. We're not gonna need a graphing calculator.

Sony prioritized live streaming, and Microsoft prioritized the uploading of discrete clips; even having some kind of lead time though, I'm not entirely sure what can be done about it. You're fucking with some pretty ancient magic. Eventually they're gonna find a hole in your algorithm that detects the human peepee; they'll put a scarf and a hat on it ("Cocktor Who") or bind them in fanciful knots ("Schlongsman's Caper"). Ultimately the evolution of our species' prongs will be guided, like the bonsai, into multifarious configurations by these prohibitions. Bouyant spheroids, suspended on tensile roots of nerve cord. Ranged dongs, "launched" from what will be come to be known as "The Fifth Nipple." And then where will we be.

There has been substantially more "console-living-with," and I hope some of this stuff is vestigial. Games that install fully, take up "tens" of gigs, but still require discs to play them is a pretty goofy business. I don't know why it works this way - there would be a bifurcation of utility if one could choose "fully digital" or "physical copy with partial install" that might grant physical copies some kind of unique proposition. As I've said, there are incongruities in these nimble operating systems when what you want to do isn't actionable because you don't have your mystical disc totem situated correctly on the the fucking ley lines. If this is the way they want this to work, we need to be able to shed features and even campaigns a la carte. The weight of the game on the platter needs to conform to our actual usage, and given the way they download now - piecemeal, in some order they determine - it's completely possible.

Do you want to hear something funny, which isn't especially funny and is more sad and weird? I use my Xbox One every night, to play online games completely alone. That controller is my preference by a wide margin over the PS4, which is much better than its predecessor but doesn't feel like home yet. It'll only take one exclusive, played end to end, for that to happen. But it ain't happened yet. Also, the Xbox One was incredibly expensive. I need to do something with the Goddamned thing.

The actually funny part is that I've doubled and tripled my match scores in Call of Duty: Ghosts. I suspect the XB1 audience is a subset that didn't play the others quite as much, like myself, and unlike the double prestige rabid wolverines that careen around the servers on the 360. I don't get over twenty kills - that's not my role. My role is to run out and catch bullets in my torso and face that were intended for Kiko. Drawing a sickle across a public game is radically unlike my normal praxis. "Basic Competence" is a hell of a drug.

(CW)TB out.