Two or three times a night in Overwatch I might undergo what I'll call a "Competency Spike," where I deliver a moment not incredible but merely… conscious. Performance above that which might be delivered were a cat to knock your gamepad off the pouf, generating wholly random inputs on the way down. Or a gentle zephyr which causes a branch to press the buttons of a controller inadvertently.

I talked to a man from NASA once who told me, just straight up, that space travel was going to require recreational drugs. It wasn't even a question. The whole conversation was Philip K. Dick as a motherfucker. I mention this because, whatever else the Australia flight may be, its prolonged unreality and bottled loops are made tolerable by their relentlessly positive flight attendants. I wonder if there isn't a test program for these drugs on those flights, at least for the crews. Flying to Mars and flying to Australia don't take exactly the same amount of time, but it's close.

Everybody on the Thornwatch team has been hammering away on the game and we have lots of new stuff to show/test at PAX South this week. I am in full on art production mode now. There's so much art that needs to be made for this game that I'm bringing in some very talented folks to help me out. Strip Search fans might remember Nick Trujillo from the show. He's on the Thornwatch team now and he's working on all the map tiles that need to be painted for the game. Each of these tiles is a little window into some strange part of the Eyrewood. When I sat down and talked with Nick about the direction for these I told him that each one of these tiles shouldn't just be random bits of forest. Each on needs to be a place in the Eyrewood that the Lookouts would have a name for. There is something about each one that is interesting or unique that would make it a point of interest in the wood. Ideally I want judges to be able to grab a handful of tiles and find in those paintings the inspiration to make up their own adventures. This tile Nick painted is a great example I think.

I had to change the title on this one, too; Ben Stone of The Twitterlands suggested Mad PAX and I gotta go that way. That's what's happening.

Pax South is just less than a week away now and already people are calling it the Pax South of the year. I will be in attendance although you might see me zipping around on a scooter sometimes. I'm feeling much better now but my doctor doesn't want me to push it and the scooter has already been rented. Let's talk pins!

Now that it seems like Gorobriel's stuff is staying in, and he can laugh without terror, he's back to his old haunts. He loves Symmetra's playstyle, and he loves her comic, which I love also. The moral dimension of Overwatch is deliciously robust, even before you broach the subject of erotic Tumblr comminglings.

Octavio Abea, who does the Welcome to PAX series, just delivered unto us this morsel:

I was trying to figure out why Gabriel would be playing Diablo III; I kept seeing his PSN account logged into it. If you're down with the D or whatever it's fine. Lots of people play Diorblo, specifically, lots of people not named Mike. Overwatch or Titanfall 2, certainly. I asked him about it, and he said that while his guts are still fucked up, playing "exciting" games hurts too much, and that playing Diablo - a game where you beat back unrelenting waves of hell monsters - is relaxing by comparison. Relaxing for the heroes, at least. It's less relaxing for everybody else.

So, did sitting up for the amount of time it took to draw the strip feel good, or bad? Some combination? Good enough to offset the rest of it? I'll ask him when we record the podcast today.

Did you find yourself fascinated by the Switch presentation last night? It's going to be at PAX South! There are still some tickets available for Saturday and Sunday.

I'll be calling Mike Krahulik here in a sec to write new strips; my suspicion is that he will like having something else to do besides writhe on the couch. Or, at least something to do while he writhes, just to leaven the anguish.

I can sense it - the Qs burn within you. Let them be RELEASED!

As you might have read, our own Gabriel - whose handle I will not corrupt this time, out of deference for his ruined state - got all fucked up over the weekend. He called me Monday on my way home from work; he sounded like shit, and it was very difficult to hear. I mean, he was perfectly audible, I just didn't like it. As soon as I found out he was ensconced firmly within the Bone Zone I called my friend and colleague Kris Straub, who had backed me up before when Gabriel's frail humanoform gave way a couple years ago. I brought him "back in," as it sometimes said, and we had a pretty good time. I had a good time, at any rate. Me and the Cloister of the Crimson Arc. Kris mostly mewled as his body was made the gate for the Comic Beast.

I ended up in the hospital on Sunday getting an emergency surgery to repair a nasty hernia. I went in the morning because I was in pain but did not expect to need an operation. It was a scary night but the folks at Evergreen hospital over in Kirkland were fantastic. Everything went well and they ended up sending me home the next day. I’m in bed now recovering and I’d like to thank Kris Straub for working with Tycho to make a couple strips for you guys this week and give me a little break. Just in the last three weeks I have had the flu, horrible food poisoning and now this. I am pretty sure that if I were to leave the house today, a piano would fall on me. 2016 was a rough year but I think 2017 might actually be trying to kill me.

It turns out that very, very soon after Christmas all the stuff that was impossible to get just before that material and psychological wall is fucking omnipresent. I always do feel a certain resentment toward that which is engineered to be loved; even as a love it, I feel the teeth of the trap on my calf. The resentment is never more than the love, though. It's a human flaw I would never remove.

Once I've seen a piece of clickbait a hundred or so times I'm gonna click on it. I just am. I want to know why they won't hire Alyson Hannigan anymore ("because she's really a witch in real life"). I legit want to know what is so great about this Goddamn hoodie ("it's a functioning Fremen stillsuit"). Honestly, anything a person writes on the Internet is probably written so that another person will read it; it's not weird to be desirous of the Click. The information environment out there shapes all the creatures within it, and sometimes they turn Strange. Then again, occasionally it's warranted. So who knows.