At hashtag PAX West, since it starts on Thursday, Monday rolls around and the show is over. It's a new week. Because PAX West (though I suspect we know its true name) extends, yea, into the Monday after, it creates a very peculiar annual moment where I rise unsteadily on the last day of the show, my mind whipping and writhing like a wavy tube man. It is that precise moment that I greet you here.

Hey! I've got incredible news: you've still got time to shotgun the first season of Seattle By Night in preparation for Sunday's Vampire: The Masquerade game, which picks up immediately thereafter. It's one of the coolest stories I've ever been part of, and unless you're familiar with other Vampire streams I can guarantee you've never seen somebody run a table like Jason Carl. This is what mastery looks like. His meticulously curated filth commingled with the dark energy of the world, its system, and its legacy . These days, D&D is sort of the default - but this creature, and its wicked ways, are from a much more primordial era where the future hadn't been decided yet. Let's hang out there, this Sunday at 11:30am PST on Main Stage - which you can watch from anywhere at twitch.tv/pax.

Years in the making, Ziply Fiber has made the necessary municipal genuflections and now Gabriel is sending me screenshots of his Speed Tests. I assume this is something that frequently occurs on Dating Apps, also; incredible throughput must be seen as a tantalizing inducement.

PAX West 2023 arrives this week and unlike the last few PAX shows, I’ll be at this one!

I think that's what the designers would call it.  It's dangerous for me to even be messing around with terminology outside my ken; this is almost certainly called a Photo-Looky.  But, in any case: Lidija sent me these images to send to you, and I'm fucken doin' it!!!  It's all good, I love all of it, but those keycaps are happening. Like, on my own keyboard after the show. Bet on it.  As always, tremendous love and praise to the team on these.   

Mork was able to grab some Lorcana up by his place. I thought maybe he'd snatched it up at Over The Brick, largely a card/wargame shop, but I think that like a lot of small locals their entire allotment was sold alongside their first in-store play event. He ended up finding it at Snapdoodle, which is kinda fancy and features mostly toys and boardgames, which is probably why he was able to grab them off the shelf. I never would have considered Snapdoodle for a game like this; it probably has to do with the fact that they also carry a crazy allotment of Ravensburger shit generally.

We saw that our good friend Kris Straub, whose profundities defy easy categorization, had just set up shop on Cameo, which we saw as an excellent opportunity to make an impromptus commercial to bolster his ascent.

It's really fun to have a kid whose intellectual trajectory you recognize - like, at all. I'm also glad that they have somebody to talk to about these things, because I didn't. The vector might have changed in the modern era, but the principle hasn't: you can install entire belief structures at the root of your mind, fully baked, pre-approved. It's easy to find a context where the deployment of shibboleths can allow access to the sanctity of a hermetic cabal. As they have had the opportunity to discover, it gets dark fast when you deviate from whatever the local sacred writ is. I didn't have Reddit or whatever, because nobody had Reddit. There wasn't a Reddit yet. But when a friend asked me if I was ready to pick up a gun and kill in order to create the just society we had been discussing, I wasn't! I wasn't ready. And that was bad, in an apparently unforgivable way.

The terminology changed recently, I don't remember a memo going out. But I don't consider something that has commercials "free" to watch. I'm not trying to be churlish; I just recognize that I'm paying with something. And they know I'm paying with it too, which is why they have the commercials there. You used to be able to buy most content online with this currency - attention - but it's depreciated over time, to the point where you now pay a service to show you ads.

I grew up playing World of Darkness stuff: Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, and some of the weirder ones.  So having a chance to play in a Vampire Chronicle with the inestimable Jason Carl in Seattle By Night is something I still think about a lot.  We occasionally get asked if we'll ever be able to do it again, and I have the most incredible news.  At PAX West  -On Sunday, September 3rd at 11:30am - Seattle By Night returns with new guest, Luis Carazo!  This would be an incredible opportunity for a rewatch, or even a first time through the show.  It's one of the best things we've done.  Check out the description, before it's even added to the schedule:

The beloved Vampire: The Masquerade actual play chronicle Seattle by Night returns! Join our Kindred cast Jerry Holkins, Mike Kruhalik, Jasmine Bhullar, and Luis Carazo live on stage as their vampires attempt to navigate the treacherous undead politics of the Camarilla. The coterie has finally made contact with the Camarilla, but how will they prove their loyalty? Storyteller Jason Carl presides over this new chapter in the undead drama.  

So, AAAAAAAAHHHH!

(CW)TB

Lorcana game seems really cool. The app is also handy, and is a great way to look at all this fucking rad art in the first set and get your head around some of the concepts with its built-in rulebook. But it seems like they no make enough card :(((

It's entirely possible I've taught you a new word with the title of the strip, Gabriel certainly hadn't heard of it. I don't know why I know this word, which sounds like something a person would say when they do know it, and know it very well, and are a paypig. But I really don't remember! I just like words, specifically what might be called jargon: language internal to a given context. The need for specific language leads to words with an incredible amount of conceptual freight. I used to have one of the "apps" installed, not to interact, but because a person's bio on a dating app has so much data encoded into it that it compares favorably with holographic storage.

I just realized that explaining it in this level of detail just makes me seem more like a paypig. And it's supposed to be private! The Serpent Queen's gonna be on my fucking ass.

Here's the last of our bonus Tuesday strips, courtesy of Games Workshop!  It's been a while since we had bonus strips running, and we had a great time with them.  It's always nice to get a project lined up right at the moment it's your 24/7 obsession.

We have a rule suggestion for Games Workshop now that the shiny new 10th edition is out. Let's see how it goes. Oh, and this is the last of the Tuesday @warhammer strips! I hope you had fun, and thanks to GW for the opportunity!#WarhammerCommunity #New40kt pic.twitter.com/b8EzGwpPn7

— Tycho Brahe (@TychoBrahe) August 15, 2023

(CW)TB

We did a few Ziply comics, each expressing various levels of distress or even the rare glint of hope, twinkling underwater. We had considered the whole thing something of a lost cause, and - as is our way - we made comics to get something out of it, anything at all.

I have had a lot of different phones over the years. I’ve tried Android and Apple and even had a Windows phone when that was a thing. I had settled back into iOS and for the last few years I was happy with my iPhone but after seeing a friends foldable, I decided to make the switch.  

Ryan has a foldy phone, a Samsung I think, that opens the way a book does. A very futuristic book to be sure, but yeah. He fucking loves that thing. And now Gorbiriel has a phone which is compact on fully two axes - physically, but also naming… -ly, with the razr+. I remember when the Motorola Razr was the elite apex of cool phones, but it was like… six hundred dollars? For a phone?! That'll never catch on.

Anyway, I have a folding phone too. So do you. It's about fucking mindset.