I spent the weekend in Spokane, which wise men call Ulk Shambol or "The Dream Grave." I usually get in trouble when I talk about the town my mom lives as though it is the sort of place Lord Sauron would amass his evil armies, which is, you know, an exaggeration for comic effect. In truth, I only felt his baleful, seeking eye once.

I’ve been working on the characters for our Nightlight story at the end of the month. Most of the time when I sit down to draw characters, it’s little boys or guys that come out. I can draw those characters and make them feel authentic because I know them. I can tell those stories because they are my story to some degree. When I sat down to make Grace I knew it would be a challenge.

We're both gonna try to get out of town to varying degrees at the end of July, ahead of the Six Month World Tour that is PAX, and we've thought of various ways to manage that span - we'll be gone maybe six strips or so, which is how we have come to reckon time.

He legitimately wanted to know what that shit tastes like. Not good, I would say. Not potable in the classic sense. Tangy in absolutely the wrong way. You can also get XP in Destiny by, like, doing bounties and stuff. No fluids are required. #Lifehax

There's a new DLC Podcast show up today and this one doesn't seem to be sped up much at all. Which means it took me almost the exact same amount of time to draw the strip, as it did for us to write it. So that's not a dumb statistic.

He's been feasting on this Dresden Files shit over here; heaps of Dresden Files books are arrayed about him at the five points of the pentacle, where he sits within a circle of what I'm pretty sure is Lik-M-Aid.

There is a new First 15 today that ended up being pretty funny I think. We played a game called Omega Quintet and I can tell you with 100% certainty, that Tycho and I are not the core demographic for this game.

Batman: Arkham Knight is overwhelming.

You might recall the name from the explosive Exploding Kittens Kickstarter, but he's been around: Industrial Light And Magic, Microsoft Game Studios, and 42 Entertainment just to get you started. He's seen a lot, and knows a lot, and he's coming to PAX Dev to tell you about it in his "Really Big Stories" panel. Tickets for that show are available, you know. Just by the by.

This news post should have gone up on Father's Day. Sorry it’s late.

Gabriel ("Makrak Khalilulelo") tried to finish this page Thursday Night, but he had to fly out to a wedding. We were both up very late as he tried to wrap it up, which had the character of our earliest efforts and I enjoyed it even though I felt bad that he had committed to the impossible. Ultimately the realization that certain properties of linear time made his task very frustrating (if not simply incompatible with reality) caused him to kill it, but when he got back into the office from his trip it was all he wanted to do. Occasionally, one must let one's artist tug a bit on the reins.

Since the first packet of Internet data swam over a wire, it has been a good time to be a fetishist.

I felt bad. Usually, when Microsoft brings Rare up it's to show something that I don't want. There's always a sinister aspect to it; a Winston Smith aspect, as they're forced to tell us the Kinect is great a second time. I am not in the market for a collection of old games from them, I can barely play the new games I'm obsessed with. And then they showed Sea of Thieves, and I felt like an asshole.

Are you still playing card games by placing your cards directly on the table like some kind of Goddamned animal? Well fucking stop it.

With the original comic we did, correctly entitled "Fan Fiction," I only polished up what Gabriel had written. What I call polishing up might not be what you call polishing up. I would never say what I wrote and what he did, because it would diminish the honor which should rightly accrue to him. It wouldn't exist at all if he hadn't been the crazypants Destiny addict that he is; I just wanted to help. When I wrote the new ones, I did it for him.

What was Black Tusk and is now The Coalition has a mandate to return Gears of War to its horror roots, which I'm okay with; something was definitely lost there. Horror games have a tendency to become Action Games once numbers start getting bolted to the end of the title. Part of the reason is that horror is a niche. Horror is also hard. It may even be at conceptual variance with the core interaction of a shooter, which tends to coalesce around shooting. They're also hard to write. Lots of reasons to focus on the gun and not the person holding it. Totally get it. Still.