Now that PAX is over and I am still alive, I can look at all the shit is coming out and actually let it nest in my mind. I've been excited for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, and apparently it's coming out in like ten days. Given the wide span between now and its original release, it seemed like a good time to stop and smell the technology.

One of the things that came out of our Q&A panel at PAX this year was that I’m making my own tabletop game. Someone asked what exactly was in the sketchbook I didn't want to show Tycho in this strip. I had not planned on talking about it for a while but the answer was notes for my tabletop RPG.

I came away from PAX this year with some pretty cool stuff. Here’s a quick rundown of what I picked up at the show:

People asked us many times how we chose Australia for the next PAX, and we didn't really; you chose it. We know how to run shows, that's it. "Where they should be" and "who will go to them" is your department, and thus far it's been an efficient division of labor.

It felt in some ways as though we had just done a PAX, and I guess it's technically true; I wonder if six months is actually enough time to recuperate. I'll have an opportunity to find out if I can spring back in even less time, as we're rolling out a whole PAX in Australia as well, and PAX Prime is moving to four days, and you may feel "con"-fident (!) that we aren't finished yet.

There is another Madden game out, a football simulator, and because I know you are starved for our incomparable insights into Sports we have done everything to encapsulate our crucial perspective in comic form.

I backed Zombicide and said so, and then they put the Cardboard Tube Samurai in there, which was banging. This time around, they wanted to know if they could use Tycho and Gabe, which generally we don't do, but they wanted to gussy them all up fiction and art-wise and I got curious. We let them go hog wild, and they worked crazy fast. Penny Arcade "cyphers" are their next stretch goal now, which is (at the time of this writing, at least) forty-eight hundred dollars away.

I loved working on Precipice with these guys, so I got to get their backs on this: they've got Cthulhu Saves The World and Breath of Death VII in a double pack (!) for a buck forty nine. THEY'VE GONE INSANE, etc.

Worms have historically been a boon to farmers, engineering the soil for greater efficiency. The worms in Guild Wars 2's human starter area are not these worms: their segmented bodies are seven feet of reeking, living sausage crammed into armored plates. Their matriarchs are like ravenous telephone poles. What do you you get for culling this demonic herd? The farmer will let you buy her shit, with a currency I didn't even know I was earning. Mysteries within mysteries!

I thought for sure they would not run this strip, and we would be asked to create a new one, but no! It's right here, if you're interested.

I never really understood what the point of putting Bing on the Xbox was, other than the fact that they have a Bing and they want you to Bing stuff. I avoided it because I felt it was manipulative, like introducing me to your "cute cousin" who is "really cool" and who you think I "might have a lot in common with" who only uses "meth" "occasionally." It's presumptive. But the rest of their "experience" is so deep in the usability weeds right now that Global Search is the only way to pan shit out.

We are one week away from PAX Prime people! ONE WEEK!

Doing things "together" is more or less our thing, here, Gabriel and I. Now, I had to horn in at the very beginning, but that's only because I could see very plainly that uploading jpegs to the Internet was a compelling, unassailable business model.

This isn’t official or anything, even though we have done a lot of work for Ubi in the past. This is just some fanart I did for a game I’m very excited to play.

As suggested previously, I backed some hot sauce on Kickstarter which I understood was bizarre even as I was doing it and I await these "fluids" with an admixture of curiosity and terror.

Readers have made it clear that the game was released in a sorry state. I get excited about stuff, too; this was my call, though, and it wasn't the right one. I'm sorry.