It is that time of year again. No I’m not talking about Christmas. I’m talking about Dickerdoodles!

I didn’t watch the VGX awards live but I checked out all the coverage online after the event. When it comes to awards you’re never going to get everyone to agree. Even knowing that, I have to say I was really surprised at some of their decisions. I’m not going to go category by category but I figured I’d talk about game of the year.

The Child's Play Charity Dinner & Auction balled out of control. Scott and Kris (yes, that Scott and Kris) handled the auction itself, and well; my customary princess wave was not required. I just talked to people, actually talked to them because I had the opportunity, and tried to deflect the greater part of their gratitude for Child's Play onto you.

The 18th of last month was Penny Arcade's 15th Anniversary.

I’m still trying to take care of all my Christmas shopping and you might be in the same boat. If you are looking to the Penny Arcade store for your Christmas gift needs I should point out that today is the cut off day for items shipped first class international to arrive before the 25th. You can see the rest of the shipping deadlines over on the front page of the PA store.

Once Assassin's Creed 3 entered canon, it became possible to have a pretty sophisticated philosophical conversation about the setting. That's the one people don't like, of course; the one with the best twist, the one that drops the mask. The one that makes you understand at the edge of a knife that your entire conception of the narrative is essentially propaganda.

I don’t beat most of the games I play. It’s partly because I play so many games. I’m usually jumping to a new game before I’ve completed the last. I also have a short attention span and it takes a lot for a game to hold my interest until the very end. I’m telling you this because I actually beat three games just in the last week or so. What are they and why did I stick with them?

We've had a lot of conversations about "privacy" as a cultural value, because we are staffed by huge dorks who have become cyborgs to some extent. Certainly, in the strip, we declare that concerns in this vein are the sole purview of unmedicated psychotics, but that's obviously not true. Issues of privacy today are incredibly complex, and speaking from my own experience, the more engineering knowledge you have the more freaked these kinds of things make you.

So a new game called Tiny Brains hit the PS4 today. It is apparently a puzzle game with some cool looking visuals. I'm going to fire it up tonight at 9:00pm PST. That's about a half hour from right now. This is my first time playing it or even seeing it and I'll go ahead and stream my session.

The Child’s play Charity dinner/auction is coming up on Thursday and I wanted to mention one of the items I donated this year.

It’s Cyber Monday! We’ve speculated that tomorrow could be Tech Tuesday followed by Web-sday, Internet Thursday and Wi-Friday.

I was surprised to learn that Gabriel's experience with Ghosts mirrored my own, because it's not like he was bad at it before, yet he's still feeling the energizing benefits of the platform shift. There are a couple things going on, though, and I know what the other ones are now.

The day after Thanksgiving means two things. One: It is legal to listen to Christmas music. Two: Black Friday deals! So what can you expect from PA on this blackest of Fridays?

We've had a few reports that Gabriel's "drivatar" has modelled him exquisitely, in every particular; that's been true in my own experience also. He tells me that he subscribes to the Days Of Thunder school of motorsport, where "rubbing IS racing." And then he flips down an imaginary visor…?

It looks like I’m probably the opposite of Tycho here. I find myself preferring the PS4 controller. He has spent his nights playing XBox One and I’ve spent mine on the Playstation. That’s not to say that I dislike the Xbox, I’m just having a better time on the PS4 right now.

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.