I remember when I first conceived the idea of stealing the idea of pin trading from Disney. I hoped that some day it would grow beyond just our Penny Arcade characters and cover all the things we love about games and comics and nerd shit. Never in my wildest imagination could I have foreseen someone at PAX West 2017 trading Garfield and Master Chief. This is seriously an incredible group of pins and I love that a few of them are for good causes. Speaking of which, I did draw the Take This pin. Gamers and mental health are very close to my heart, so I hope you'll go pick up the pin and support the work they do. Also I still can't believe we have a Mario pins! Here, check out all the pinsanity at PAX this year:

My oldest son Gabe is about to turn thirteen and already I can feel him emitting powerful teenager angst rays. One of the things he wanted for this momentous birthday was for me to run a D&D game for his group of friends. Well I ran it on Friday and I have to say that running D&D for twelve year olds is the absolute best thing ever. Especially when it’s everyone's first game and they have no fucking idea what to expect.

It's coming up fast - only an hour or so until noon PDT. Drop some Qs in here!

Sonic fandom is a robust and layered thing.

Hey! I had a couple requests for this on the Twitch channel, and here it is if you have any questions. We've been putting out a lot of new work lately, on various channels, so it's worth getting this in front of you if you're curious about one or more of our nefarious tendrils.

I love Housemarque - Super Stardust HD is one of my favorite games of all time, and defeating it with Kiko is one of my favorite gaming memories. I thought Resogun was very good also. Now they're dropping this Matterfall shit, and it's bonkers but I love it too.

My wife Kara planned a vacation to celebrate me turning forty next month. We just got back from eight glorious days in Maui and my sunburn has officially entered the “itchy as fuck” phase. I’m not good at vacationing and eight days is actually the longest I’ve ever allowed myself to take off. I really like my job and the work I do so sometimes it’s difficult to step away from it. I’m very glad I did though as I was starting to get a little burned out and I think the time away really helped. As Cypress Hill so aptly put it 17 years ago, “It’s a fun job, but it’s still a job.”

I always have a good time working with my friend Kris Straub; we've been working for years to find a project to do together, and it happened sort of without us realizing it - with AcqInc: The "C" Team. I didn't realize that's what we had done at first, but we have three solid hours or so a week to make a story together now, we just do it in real time and he doesn't know a hundred percent of it. His entire character is an ironic OC Self-Insert called "K'thriss Drow'b" that he tucked into his intro videos for Acquisitions Incorporated, and - as is the way of these things - it became a truth. It's a thing. I have been in at least three bands that started as jokes.

I had mentioned on the Twitch thing that I like hobbies that have a lot of custom language, that is to say Jargon; most hobbies are like this, but some are more dense than others. Someone bellowing from the depths of Twitor, The Truncated Realm, suggested that my hobby is actually learning new words, and the particular genuflections of these hobbies are essentially just the rind.

Like any subterranean cloister, our people have tooled a lot of custom language to depict our mysteries. Jargon serves many purposes, as a shibboleth it excels, but it's also a form of linguistic compression that saves an incredible amount of time.

He gave one of my favorite PAX West kickoffs, though it might technically have been a PAX Prime kickoff back then. It was about how art forms either go mainstream are or annihilated, and it was a timely medicine. When I say Warren Spector, of course, I mean this Warren Spector. I've never had an interaction with him where I didn't feel smarter for it afterward, so we're glad to have him leading things off at PAX Dev. He talks a little bit about his... well, talk, I guess, right here.

I love this fucker so much. Good God. What a butthole.

At least, that's the name we're going with for now. Myself and my friend Eric Benson are going to travel through the entire cast of Acquisitions Incorporated, making brews that act either as expressions of the character or as in-world artifacts of the setting, on Twitch, because we are fucking nerds. We're gonna try the 12:30pm PDT time slot for now. Stop by!

Pokémon GO is a game about seizing imaginary monsters. Pokémon GO Fest is, by many reports, a festival about not catching them.

In each case, our youngest children (featured in Panel Two) are indecipherable, almost-certainly-changeling paradoxes. And they get on like a house on fire. Noah is friendly and Ronia can draw. We don't know what's going on here.

There are two. The first is this amazing Super Mario Bros.™ World 1-2 Pin Set.