I think a lot of people must have this problem, at least, I hope they do, because it will make me stand out less: I have a tendency to to get infected by accents. It's not something I'm trying to do, I don't think it's, like… funny or something, I just have to do it. I just got back from PAX Aus, what I would describe as "the best PAX Aus of all time," and after a few days there it's almost impossible for me not to stretch a long O out way, way, too far. Criminally far. Like "if you could lace an O on the rods of a taffy puller" sort of vowell extension. It's decadent, in its way.

It's pretty rare that Gabe and I can just, like… sit down and play games. It's "the cobbler's son," right? But because I'm trying to be humane to myself after the Aus flight I ended up over at his place yesterday afternoon playing Red Dead, which is ridiculous. It's just a ridiculous game. I think they've internalized some troubling ideas about equine health. He asked me if I was gonna grab it when I got home, but I don't know yet. Maybe for the multi. Right now I'm doing something else.

Many people asked after Gabriel down in Aus, but I had more or less the same answer for all of them. Gabriel endeavored to snare the feeling in a lasso of words, but the distillation is that anxiety - the same all encompassing anxiety we have often had the need to discuss - becomes an insurmountable wall. Except a wall is high. Let's say that it becomes an inescapable pit.

I'm in line at the airport, and I'm either on my way through security or being digested by a wholly new form of life. Speaking of which...

Our epic adventure comes to a close in this, the third and fInal comic of the potent Australiana series. Indeed, the only scuff on its gleaming surface is the fact that he's got Double Coat Tim Tams in the strip and not the caramel kind. Double Coat is strictly for deviants - this is well understood. So… maybe it's the right one for the strip after all.

I always liked ol' J.D., so any opportunity to incorporate this erotic god serpent was gonna be seized.

I'm heading down to Australia solo, well, not really solo but certainly without Mike. There is certainly an entourage associated with the journey, to say nothing of the dutiful constellation of technology I am bringing to mediate my experience of the world. I'll be chronicling the entirely factual, fact-based journey here on the site. Join me, won't you?

The task has fallen to me yet again, as Mork is in a plane or something. But I know my way around these now - I've developed techniques. There's some really fun inside jokes being made in pin form here, and I love it.

Gabe oscillates at two to three times my rate when it comes to a hunger for technological novelty. I'm not without the hunger entirely, it's just that I don't… Hm. I don't see it? I can read a comic book without ever looking at the pictures. It drives him nuts. I don't need them, though, and they're not why I was reading it. It's like this with tech also: I have a purpose, and the device enables the purpose, but the middle section is like the second step of a sequence that culminates in Profit. There are a lot of question marks and unless the process is truly excellent - the work of Panic comes to mind - I don't perceive it.

Once, when we were streaming the creation of the strip on The Tweatch, it came up that beaver assholes are a prized font of delicious vanilla flavor. Which is sort of true. Let's break it down:

I keep meaning to check what the percentages are of people who played through the Call of Duty campaigns, but I don't really have to, because I've bought a few of these and interacted with them in precisely the way Black Ops 4 suggests I did: by going directly to the multiplayer mode. Or pehaps more appropriately, "modes."

That's what it looks like, anyway. It's really a lot for me to take in. But, yeah: might be a good time to grab a copy, in the format of your choosing.

Making parties seemed to be all kindsa fucked up for me last night, at least on Xbox, and I don't know if it was some kinda NAT horseshit or launch day jitters or what, but I wasn't able to party up with people I played the beta ("beeta") with just fine. We were eventually able to hack the planet, so to speak, by joining the game the other person was in and then beating the odds several times over as it kept us in the same party all night.

So, my first volume of original poetry - full title, Lexcalibur: Useful Poetry For Adventurers Above And Below The World - sold out very quickly. The elevator pitch is "What If Shel Silverstein were your Dungeon Master" and it has thus far been apt. The reprint is in, hopefully enough to sate the apparently frenzied desire that accompanied the first one - there are a few ways to own it, so take a look at the official page. The designers really wanted to offer a kid's shirt to go along with it, and the chose the art from the poem Sword of My Fathers which is a very curatorial selection. Here are a few pictures that will inform and hopefully tantalize you:

Probably the most relaxing night of gaming I've encountered in recent memory was forming a Convoy - anywhere else but Forza Horizon, it would be called a Squad/Group/Fireteam - and just… driving around. Racing when we felt like it. Doing a seasonal Barn Find when it came up. As a template for winding down the day, it was almost flawless.

I haven't really played an Assassin's Creed game since Unity; I understand they've continued to make them. Syndicate predicated a pause in the franchise altogether, and when it returned, it was an RPG. More of one, anyway. It might be better to say that it returned as the kind of RPG where you want purple things more than you want blue things.