Shit is officially fucked over here, with PAX East fat upon the horizon, and both of us committed to disappearing completely the week immediately following. We're lining up tons of strips, and I'm trying to accompany them with a strange kind of post. Strangeposts. You'll see, I guess. Expect anarchy.

Robert just posted this on Twitter. What could it mean!!??

We lived together very well, back when we did, because we knew when to be together and when to be apart. It was a trick we could pull off even in the same room, in adjacent chairs. We knew how to "give space" under conditions where giving space wasn't technically possible. Most of the time we spend together, nobody is talking. That's why I have generally said that we are not friends; I think of a friend as being someone who is present. What we offer each other is solitude without loneliness.

So yeah, I managed to score a couple Heroes of the Storm invites. I’ve been playing it a few days now and I’m in love. I like playing League of Legends. It’s more humane that DOTA which I just can’t get into. LOL strips out some of the fiddly bits like killing your own minions and messengers that bring you your gear from the store. Well HOS gets rid of even more fiddly shit and the result in my opinion at least is more fun. It's possible that what you like is fiddly shit though.

Because Gabriel is far more tenacious than I am, his scams succeed to a far greater degree than mine. Maybe they aren't even scams, I don't know. Maybe they are completely legitimate requests. But because I think of them as fundamentally tawdry, it probably comes through in my mealy, plausibly deniable demi-asks. Long story short, we have Heroes of the Storm.

PAX East is coming up fast and we’re working hard to get Thornwatch ready for the show. It’s going to be a VERY limited playtest on Friday and Saturday night but it’s still much bigger than anything we’ve done so far. Right now we’re working on getting a small group of GM’s trained on how to actually run the game. The first challenge was actually constructing more sets.

A million billion years ago, I used to play a game called Pox Nora that was just way before its time on a couple fronts. When I heard some of the original crew were cooking up a new thing called Conquest of Champions, and I got curious; I finagled my way into the beta, and was rewarded. It's what I like: a CCG where played cards become units on a tactical board. They gave us some codes for earlier than Early Access, with a "deluxe" card pack if you want to give it a spin. Said codes can be secured here.

When I look at most definitions of Apophenia, I can't tell if the word has any opinion on whether or not the data derived from the random stimuli is actually there or not. But then, I think words have opinions. So. There was a time - not that long ago - where we saw lightning, and assumed someone threw it. Probably a dude. This shit is in the firmware. And it's there because occasionally, sometimes, every now and then, it pays dividends.

Kara decided that Frozen was her favorite Disney movie. This was not a decision she took lightly. My wife has called the Little Mermaid her favorite Disney movie for 24 years. Switching to Frozen was done only after seeing the movie many times and hours upon hours of quiet deliberation. She sent me a text message this afternoon:

We will be playing our very first Acquisitions Inc live game at PAX East this year. This by itself is pretty exciting in my book but it gets even cooler. We have a brand new intern this time and it is none other than Morgan Webb! Tycho and I have known Morgan for years now. There was a time when we used to do tons of interviews at PAX. There was usually an entire day given over to sitting in a room as various news organizations cycled through asking us questions about PA and PAX. Neither of us liked this very much and so we don't do it anymore, but Morgan was always awesome. She came in with the G4 crew and we always spent more time talking off camera than on. I’m sure she’ll be a great addition to the AI team.

I'm not "from" Seattle. I'm from Sumner, which you did not know was even a town. Then I was from Spokane, which we moved to because my father was working out of a train yard over there. After we moved, he started "getting stationed" near Sumner. So the facts were all there, if you were conscious; if you could perceive them as being facts.

PAX East is coming up pretty quick and we have an awesome selection of Pinny Arcade pins for you this year. We’ve already showed you some of the Penny Arcade offering for East so now I want to break down all the great 3rd party Pinny Arcade pins and give you details on how you can get them.

All attempts to scam a copy of Infamous: Second Son early failed miserably, even though Kiko made an awesome coat for the game. I don't know where all you get to go in the game Seattle-wise, how far out into the places I'd know well, but I loved Keek's expert insertion of our old stomping grounds - specifically leveraging our actual Lenin statue to reinforce themes of revolutionary fervor.

I gotta keep an eye on this kid. There's a lot of regular old imaginative play that goes on at my house, but sometimes it ranges a little off the map. She told me a couple days ago that we were going to be two numbers. I thought she meant ages, like we were "that many" years, but no: to her, these numbers have human characteristics that are so obvious to her she can't even explain them. She understands "twelve" in a way I don't, and maybe can't. But I can try. You know? I can try to be the best, you know… twelve… that I can.

Today’s comic was a lot of fun to draw. When people ask me what I want to do after Penny Arcade I always say “draw children’s books”. It’s a chance to try some new stuff and loosen up in a way that I just don’t feel comfortable doing with Gabe and Tycho.

There are a couple things that make me especially bad as a Twitcher. Though, I think they're generally called Streamers? Twitcher is not an ennobling term. I did a Google search with the keywords "What do you call a person who Twitches?" and was not illuminated as a result.