Amy The Falcone, who you might remember from Strip Search's Team AmErika, is a monster. Not, like, a lycanthrope or something. But she absolutely has a mode labelled "beast."

First I was gone for San Diego Comic Con and then I had to take off again for Spokane. I’ve been out of the office for weeks and I’m just now back for real. I would like to give a huge thank you to the incredibly talented artists who have been holding down the fort while Tycho and I take a bit of a vacation. This is our 16th year making Penny Arcade and I can tell you that we’ve never had a guest series run this long. I sat down and made a list of all the artists I wanted to reach out to for guest comics assuming I’d get maybe half of them. When they all said they were in, I realised I had booked something like two and a half weeks of comic strips. I might feel bad about it if they weren’t all so amazing.

I’m finally back home after a bunch of traveling. Comic Con has changed a lot over the years. I think 2002 was the very first year we attended. We were guests at Kiko’s “Gameskin’s” booth. 2003 was the first year we actually had our own space. PA reader Nessa was one of the very first people to come see us and she snapped this picture.

I.

We just announced the talk that's getting the show off the ground, and it's by somebody who really had seen it all. There isn't a game released by Klei Entertainment that I don't own, and I know from e-mail threads going back more than a decade how hard some of these lessons were to learn.

Erika Moen is inextricable from San Diego Comic Con in my mind. I had originally written just Comic Con, because the vast preponderance of you would know which one I meant - it is only lesser Comic Cons which must bear the sigil of their low houses. But, just in case.

It was easy to see variations of ourselves in each Strip Search contestant, which is why kicking them off the show was so difficult. Like the scholarship we grant, it feels more like choosing losers than winners, because you do way, way more of the former. Tavis is a point much later in our continuum, much closer to now than most contestants, and I felt it way down.

A tradition almost as old as the show itself, we carve out free booth space for searing Indie heat each time. Every one has a different identity and mission, but the PAX 10 at Prime casts the broadest net. Anything goes - but then, not everything stays. Here's what our superpanel of industry veterans and Penny Arcade staff thought you needed to see. I updated the post with links to where you can grab some of this stuff now, if you want to:

I talked to probably a hundred people at The Con who were not aware of PAX South. They were not aware of it! They had not heard of it, they didn't know it was a show. I try not to physically strike you with our various pitches. But, people. PAX South. January 23-25th, plenty of time to plan. There are tickets available for all three days! It is real.

A fight long simmering at Comic Con was that between traditional cartoonists and the vile, sewer mutants of "online comics," who gave their work away for free in a spree of Oedipal father-killing that sought to reconstitute our old enemies The Soviet Union. Or something, it was a while ago. But Foxtrot's Bill Amend - himself a purveyor of geek lore - was one of the few who thought that the whole self-publishing thing was just… cool. We've been friends forever, and we thought he'd be a great match for The Talk.

Last call: come see us at Booth 1334 if you're headed to SDCC. If you aren't, or… if you are Croatian, I apologize. That information doesn't really help you at all. I hope everything is cool in, like... Zagreb.

Strip Search is still paying dividends, years after filming. Or, year. I have to be honest with you: I don't know how long ago it was. The actual filming and subsequent release of the show is is filed away as a four dimensional holomatrix. If I want to try and synchronize any part of it with actual time I have to probe the memory, pushing it this way or that, like a tongue on a loose molar.

In the real world, the realest one we have at any rate, Gabriel the Younger joined his friends in ridiculing a boy who did not understand procreation. Except he didn't understand it either. Understand that conversations like this happen in Minecraft, now. So he asked his Dad, who I know well. And his dad had no idea how he was going to do it, much like our own dads, who simply never told us anything. Except there's no way you can get away with that anymore.

San Diego Comic Con is this week and Tycho and I will be there holding down booth 1334.

It's been a long time since I actually stuck with an MMO, but whatever Wildstar is doing seems to be working on me. Succeeding in these requires, to my mind, some kind of obsession. Played in an ordinary way, the genre's tropes veritably ensure that it won't satisfy. Wildstar has more immediacy than most, in my opinion, but you gotta commit to this genre. I have discovered a level of obsession that is compatible with the rest of my life.

I mentioned Fates Forever last week and since then I’ve only gotten more into it. I’m playing it every single day and still loving it. I’m gonna drop the official gameplay trailer in here so you can get an idea of how pretty this game is: