When we arrived at Harry Potter world for the first time our little group made a beeline for Hogwarts in an effort to be the first on the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride. I was pulled along with them even though I don’t actually go on many rides. Erika shouted at us not to stop as we ran past Ollivander’s wand shop. None of us had ever been before and so we were all floored by Hogwarts. The line for the ride winds through the castle but it’s so cool that there is a separate line for people who just want to see the castle but not go on the ride. This is what I should have done.

The Harry Potter shit at Universal Studios is off the hook, I am told. It is, among other things, the place where viral wand videos are produced. There is also a "broom ride," which takes place in some kind of projected dome, whose potpourri of stimuli can ask hard questions of your equilibrium. These hard questions can have, as their answer, an eruption of whole milk and Fruit Loop paste with considerable force and range.

I got an email this morning pointing me towards a very cool Reddit thread. It seems Reddit user shmallowfish went ahead and recorded his own interpretation of a comic we made back in 2006. In the Open Mic Night strip Tycho plays a folksy ballad about DLC. Check out this take on it set to the tune of Bastion’s "The Pantheon (Ain't Gonna Catch You)"

It's three bucks for mobile, five bucks for Mac, and here's where you get it:

Our vacation to Disney World included a day spent over at Universal Studios. I knew this was the home of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter but beyond that I had no idea what to expect. I was incredibly disappointed to discover that the Harry Potter zone is miniscule. Don’t get me wrong, what they have there is fucking amazing I just wish there was more of it. Kara and I decided to walk a loop around the rest of the park and both of us were really disappointed. There are rows of fair games like the ring toss and basket ball. Over all it just feels incredibly low rent.

I'll be honest; I had sort of forgotten that we make goofy comics. I'd gotten used to being a purveyor of dead boys, girls with nominal "blessings," and haunted-ass men! I'm genuinely confused right now that this kind of thing is what makes up the bulk of our archive. I like making those, too, I just... forgot.

I just got back from a five day vacation to Disney World. Kara and I had never been before and we had a great time. Every time I go to a Disney park I get the pin collecting bug. In fact it was about four years ago that I came back from a trip to Disney Land and told everyone here in the office that we needed to make Penny Arcade pins. I’m happy to say that Pinny Arcade is finally happening and (fingers crossed) we should have the first selection ready before the end of this year. The plan is to do tons of great PA pins but also pins for games and publishers. I’d love it if you could get an Assassins Creed pin at the Ubi booth during PAX or maybe sit in on a panel for the next Halo and walk out with a sweet pin. I really want pin trading to be big at future PAX shows!

So that's the basic idea of Thornwatch: weird bargains made under duress in the thick of a hostile wood. A "campaign" in Thornwatch is designed to be like a season of a show: you've got individual missions (b plots) all tied into an overarching story (a plot) that isn't entirely clear at first. They aren't mean to run long, they're mean to deliver discrete arcs. CSI: Eyrewood.

Okay, now we're getting into it. I could explain it now, but I think it would be more fun for you to learn in your first few adventures, or in a story. I don't really like it when people do that, either - that is to say "tease cocks or cock-equivalent manifolds" - but now I know why they do it. Some of them are simply bastards, some don't actually know, but occasionally it's about delivering intent and context in a tidy package. That's what I hope is happening here. Believe me, we have every intention of paying up.

If you play the Preview game like we do, that cut of today's Wolf/Bat thing in the upper right is pretty choice.

This is what we're thinking about all the time, the wayward (?) inheritors of the Lookouts' creed, so when we needed to get a few strips done ahead of time it was the first thing I thought of. It's three parts total, running until Monday.

We're overjoyed to have been invited in, but we wanted to remind people that the little arrow by "authors" can be clicked to reveal a more granular list. On this list, you can zero out our "cut" altogether and then scooch the funds over to Child's Play (or anybody else). That can happen automagically, based on percentages, or you can grip that little slider like you mean business and then GO CRAZY (with precision).

"Dating Tips For Geeks" is some intolerable new genre, malformed and asinine; there are no good examples of this ruse in existence. Well, there are good examples of how bad it is. I thank the black hole where a God would be EVERY DAY that I'm not in the market for this kind of bullshit. That in my desolation and loneliness there was no warped sexual vizier to whirl out of thin air and dispense the kind of wisdom which should be firmly contained within quotation marks.

I knew Gabriel when I was an X-Com enthusiast, certainly; I've known him since the Earth's crust was still warm to the touch. We hung out a lot then, but he didn't approve of my weekly spirit journeys and, if it is even possible, he approved of my tactics games even less.

Yesterday I had the chance to demo my Thornwatch game for some friends from Cryptozoic. In case you don’t know, these are the guys who make the World of Warcraft TCG, our Penny Arcade deck building games and are also responsible for the totally fucking amazing Lookouts comic book. Cryptozoic makes a lot of great games and I figured if I really wanted to know if Thornwatch had potential, I needed to show it to some professional game makers.

We were lucky enough to receive copies of Dishonored before release, but I am afraid we may not have been terribly good investments thereof; neither of us were particularly taken with it. For Gabriel, that's it. He's comfortable having opinions on things. Apparently every person on Earth loves the game except for the two of us, though, and that has made me incredibly curious.