We put the word out - technically, a chirp - regarding what people might like to see in a comic. That is a rare request, truly, but while we're out of town for the Fourph of July you might as well get an approximation of what you actually want. Twisp & Catsby were the winners by far, followed by Annarchy and Div, though there was also a pronounced Wil Wheaton contingent(!).

In my last news post I talked about how I actually built the planets for my Elemental Chaos encounter. In this post I’ll talk a little bit about the actual mechanics of the fight.

It never ceases to amaze me how much better at this Sony is.

If you saw my Twitter last night you know that I ran a pretty crazy game of D&D. My players ended up int he Elemental Chaos, a place called the Moteswarm to be exact. I wanted to create something that would really give them the feeling of fighting on these giant elemental motes in bizarre gravity. So what I did is create a series of 3D “planets” for the encounters to take place on.

Hey did you watch last weeks PATV episode? What’s that? You say you didn’t? Well you better go watch it right now then!

I did my best to warn him, but he's quite certain that The Deck of Many Things has a place in his campaign. On this point, we don't entirely disagree; the only material distinction is that he believes it will "spice things up," and I believe will be its burning, meteor-pocked ruin.

I called an Apple Store, just for kicks, to see how things were going during the launch, and if he thought they might have any phones ever. He described the line to me, the one outside of his store, as something like a human Möbius strip - a warping tendril folded in, a thing without earthly end.

So yeah...how about those poop jokes. I guess at the very least it is not unprecedented.

This was an authentic series of text messages sent to me by Gabriel. I would take a picture of it, but I would have to use my own phone to do so, which would sunder the universe. Rest assured that such communiques are not uncommon, and that taken in aggregate they present a wholly unified Aesthetics of Shit.

Kinect, being an onyx lozenge bristling with a combination of sensing "eyes" and licking "beams," has an inherent Fear Quotient (FQ). It generates a base amount of human terror simply by being plugged in. And after as little as twenty minutes spent observing human targets, test units are (reportedly) resting in puddles of acrid, burning saliva.

How is possible that I'd never played Words With Friends?

I am drawing today's comic right now. You can watch if you want.

Just as in years past, we submit a distillation of the Big Three Briefings.

I just wanted to drop a reminder that I have collected a bunch of my D&D posts on one page. You can also grab my adventure "Dusk" there. This was my first attempt at taking my notes for an adventure and trying to turn them into something another DM could take and run with. So far I've had 14,145 people download the adventure which I am super happy about. What I don't know for sure is if they actually played it and had fun. So if you grabbed "Dusk" and gave it a try please shoot me a mail and let me know how it went. I'd like to do more of these but first I want to get some feedback.

I feel bad for the models that work expo halls. Maybe it's better than other kinds of day work, I wouldn't know. I try to avoid making eye contact, on the off chance it's as weird for them as it is for me. It's not their humanity that drives me away, though it's rare to see a person who wouldn't be improved with a few tufts of iridescent plumage. No, it's that I have the run-of-the-mill, God given shame that naturally accompanies interactions with women who are being paid to endure me.

The "Mortal Kombat Rebirth" short exists in that continuum that appends gravitas to fundamentally ridiculous subject matter by attempting to reconcile it with the real world. That's something I do as a form of recreation; I'm not trying to say that this isn't a good time investment. Alan Moore takes cultural shrapnel and transforms it, via a similar process, into material that assaults the mind. I'm just not certain that every brand can withstand this kind of analysis.