It's PAX! PAX is today.

It is incredibly strange to have something be true for the first thirty seven years of your life and then cease to be so. I found my parents' divorce at eighteen quite startling, but that was a Deeply Localized Fact that did not have an effect on incarceration rates. Remember that all of this hubbub is about a substance that has, as its primary effect, the not doing of anything.

Brian asked me to let everyone know what he’ll have in the merch booth at PAX this weekend.

I got a lot of interesting responses to my post on Monday. It sounds like I’m not the only one out there who avoids things because they are illegal. With the laws about Marijuana in Washington flipping I’ve heard from quite a few people in my position of being mid to late thirties, never having tried the stuff and curious what it’s all about. So I’ll go ahead and break down my first experience with it. Get ready for REAL TALK part 2.

EP. 6 PRESSING BUTTONS

One of the crazier things about marijuana prohibition is/was just how bad they have been at prohibiting marijuana. If I were walking through Seattle's University District, I think it would be difficult not to get some. This is the kind of trufact which can be ascertained just by going outside, by attending a concert, or (especially) by attending an outdoor concert. Gabriel used to complain about it at the Dave Matthews shows he'd end up at, and I was like, man. Listen.

I still have the KS bug pretty bad, I just try not to beat you over the head with it. I am a big fan of dice cup/push your luck type games, and this one tries to see where the frontier might be in that style of play. The deal has sweetened up pretty nice over the course of the campaign - the Kickstarter price is five bucks cheaper than retail, and has free shipping in the USA. The company also treated me right last time I backed something, so (for me, at least) it was a pretty easy call. As of three o'clock PST, there's about six hours left.

As you can see by the “part 1” in the title of today’s comic, we are kicking off a little storyline. It’s just three comics but it’s actually an idea we’ve been kicking around for a couple months. It touches on some pretty personal stuff for me and so I wanted to give you all a little setup if you’re interested.

We were going to tell you a story in the next few strips; as usual, it will be your half of the equation to determine what percentage of what we say at any given time is true. It's never been an especially hard game, because it always is. But that epistemic judder is what allows you to engage true topics. Sometimes you need a little space.

I think we can all agree that the previous episode of Strip Search was pretty intense. In today's episode we slow things down a bit with another social challenge and give you all some time to get to know the artists a bit better.

I have wanted to make a comic that used all these words in a single strip, that's the sort of thing I fantasize about, to the extent that I've had them all typed into the Cloud equivalent of strip.txt for coming up on a year and a half. Occasionally, one must do for oneself; occasionally, one must reclaim.

Strip Search episode 4 is up and we have our very first elimination.

We try to avoid all talk of politics here on PA. In general it's because neither of us is an especially political person, but also we want you to be able to come and laugh at our video game jokes regardless of who you voted for. The exception I guess is when video games end up mixing with politics and we feel like commenting.

The situation depicted in today's strip isn't confined to this Tomb Raider, or any previous Tomb Raiding excursion, which was one of the things that recommended it conceptually. That said, it's especially present here, with that combination of incredibly high graphical fidelity and physics puzzles that make the brain flip and roll inside the skull.

It took four years but Pinny Arcade is finally a reality! I came back from a trip to Disneyland totally hooked on Disney Pin Trading. I loved the experience of finding cool pins around the park and trading with cast members. I immediately started thinking about doing something similar with Penny Arcade. It’s taken a long time but Pinny Arcade is the result.

Deciding which Tomb Raider joke to do is actually very difficult. The game is such an exercise in extremity that it reads as parody very quickly, whenever it's not showing you something so incredibly gross you reach reflexively for your own throat while it says look what you just did.