We're doing another PAXAus in a month or so, Melbourne, and I'm ready to deliver a premium Q&A Experience. The only thing we're missing is The Questions, which you can stock us up with here.

I just happened to see this article over on Kotaku about the new Disney Infinity Marvel toys looking “a bit rough”. Just as a counterpoint I figured I would share my experience. Fahey suggests that perhaps he got a bad batch and I think he might be right. He posts his Nova as an example of the sloppy paint jobs. Here’s a shot of mine for comparison. I think he looks awesome.

I knew that once The Tracksuit had weighed in on Destiny, the conversation would get interesting. And it has.

I have to say that despite the garbage story and the horrible voice acting I’m not having a terrible time in Destiny. In fact I like it a lot more now than when I first played it. There was a very early alpha phase that we played and it was pretty disheartening. I went back through my email and found the mail I sent to Jerry at the time. This is right after I had played Destiny for the very first time.

I guess we'll find out to what extent this selling Minecraft stuff is real, or which parts of it are real, in the next few days. I saw Notch at PAX once, years ago, a fact that has cemented my role as Cool Dad for eternity with my son and his fellows. The last time I said anything to Notch was after he was dealing with the fallout from the EULA changes, to offer words of comfort from someone who has experience being Internet Satan. I think that had to get tiring for him. I think doing the best you can, the best that can be expected of any finite entity, and still getting fucked in the eye-hole is a hard business.

Titanfall had "hype" behind it, but I don't think it compares to the Destiny hype. The pitch to Activision must have been blissfully short: "We will make you a Halo MMO." I try to imagine the acquisitions manager opening their briefcase so fast that papers fly everywhere, and they're trying to read them in mid-air to find the right one, and they're swiping at them like a cat in a kind of slow motion, billion-dollar snowglobe.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday with Destiny. It’s definitely got some solid RPG hooks. The desire to go back in for one more mission is strong. Someone during my Twitch stream yesterday asked if it lived up to the hype and the honest answer is “no I don’t think so.” but to be fair what game could? I’ve been playing games a long time and I cannot remember a game with this much hype surrounding it. It is not the second coming of Christ. It’s just Halo by way of Phantasy Star Online and that’s pretty cool.

We refunded a few 3-Day passes for the show, which means that they're now available for purchase. A few other varietals are also available.

Earlier iterations of ourselves spent a lot of time worrying about this or that webcomic or the scenesterism which was (and perhaps continues to be) whatever the fuck it is. This sort of thing always made Robert exceedingly angry. "I don't care about that," he would say. "That's not where it's going." He said that if we ever felt like worrying about something that was actually substantial, just for a change of pace, we could worry about Rooster Teeth. He said this like ten years ago, and if you are looking at the actual world, Robert probably had it right.

I don't get many opportunities to play games at PAX. I'm not complaining about it, believe me. But I'm not gonna cut lines, or whatever. I lucked out once at the Dreadnought booth, though, because I had watched it in stunned silence for so long that the place I was standing had become the head of the line. No shit, that is a real thing. Pay attention to this game.

I guess I’m technically a game designer now since I am designing Thornwatch. It still felt very strange to be invited to speak on a panel at PAX Dev though. I’ve always avoided the show because the entire point of PAX Dev is to give developers a space to speak freely without fans and media around. We built a treehouse for them and I didn’t want to spoil that.

You might wonder what I do after PAX to unwind. Well the answer is I play games. After this show I took the next two days off. Yesterday was devoted to League of Legends. With only a handful of short breaks to eat food and interact with my family I played LoL from 10am to midnight. I drank soda and played games with my friends all damn day and it was the best.

I did a panel at PAX Prime with Mike Selinker last week. We talked about Thornwatch, where the game is now, how it got here and then I broke down some of the core mechanics. You can watch the entire thing on Twitch right here. If you have not been able to play it, this is the most complete look at the game and how it plays. Let me know what you think!

Being a public person is a strange business, particularly when you have spent the first part of your life being taught time and time again that you belong nowhere. I would not trade it for anything, of course, and I was a spectacularly "interesting" employee, so I'm not certain there's really an alternative for me anymore.

This year’s PAX Prime was the 17th PAX, which is pretty hard for me to believe. It also marks 10 years of PAX Prime here in Seattle. I can still remember my wife Kara, pregnant with Gabe during the very first PAX at the Meydenbauer convention center. He started 4th grade yesterday and will turn 10 years old on September 9th. It all happened so terrifyingly fast.

Making an update while PAX is ongoing still feels pretty weird. I mean, if you worked at a gaming news site, I guess this would be, like, your whole show. I suppose the reality is that everyone is updating constantly about the show, and everything else, professionally or otherwise. "Writing" and "Living" are two distinct gears for me. It's a big lever and it's hard to pull.