I had quite a few requests for a large version of today's strip minus the text. Kara and I have been watching two episodes of Downton Abbey every night since we discovered it. I am so in love with the look of the show that I just had to drop Tycho and Gabe into Downton.

Seriously, though. Are you up for it? Grab the application here, and mail it to Kristin Lindsay at klindsay@penny-arcade.com.

Alright, so, now his Downton Abbey thing has found its way into the very bones of the strip. Nothing to worry about, I'm sure. I'll pay very close attention to him, I'll see if he takes "tea." I'll put myself on Sconewatch.

Cracker or Jeremy Brett's incredible run on Sherlock Holmes or Prime Suspect or Doctor Who or the good episodes of Torchwood and it doesn't penetrate the carapace eventually you decide to invest your energies elsewhere.

I finished my cover for the new Adventure Time comic. You can pick up issue one today at the Boom Studios site or your local comic book shop. My cover will be appearing on issue five.

It has become obvious by now that Moms crave games, they crave them; theirs is the hunger absolute. One of the games these ravenous moms crave is Words With Friends.

I ended up enjoying FF XIII by the time I got to hour thirty or so. My biggest problem with that game was how slow it was to start. Also the story didn’t make any fucking sense but I don’t really care about that. By the time I got the hang of the paradigm system I was bored with the game. FF XIII-2 gets rid of all the bullshit set up and throws you right into the fun stuff.

Gabriel played Final Fantasy XIII the requisite number of hours to know that he liked it, and so he was well prepared to like Final Fantasy XIII-2: the XIIIening. He was also well equipped by his previous experience to dominate the game's earliest chapters, as he'd already long mastered the Paradigm system. I never quite got there myself, because I quit too early, and also because I was playing a game that I'm not entirely sure even exists.

Readers are lashing out at William C. Deitz' addition to the Mass Effect ouvre, with his new novel "Deception." Indeed, they feel deceived! And they are cataloguing this beast-man's transgressions in an endlessly elaborated upon codex with such terrible granularity that I've begun to feel sympathy for the man. I was under the impression that I liked Mass Effect, maybe even liked it a lot, liked it more than most people. But, no. I'm not entirely certain I want to like Mass Effect this much.

Douglas Adams suggested in his opus that mice were not simply mice but rather the unassuming projections of a pan-dimensional race into our universe. I've met Daniel Cook before, wiry and lean, compact, an organism apparently designed for fold-up travel, and I wonder if there isn't something similar going on with him.

Gabriel the Younger expressed intense delight at the prospect of Minecraft Lego, a state of affairs his father could not entirely understand. A member of the forums awaits with great anticipation the inevitable Lego Minecraft videogame. This is the Circle of Life; one can very nearly hear Elton John.

We have just finalized the concert line up for PAX East. Check this shit out!

Once again I was able to beg an early copy of a game. This time I scored Kingdoms of Amalur. I’ve been playing it now for a few days and I am in love. I’m probably not supposed to talk about the game yet but I figured it would be much easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission as the old saying goes.

There are many games where box breaking is core to the experience, a cultural practice, a folkway, and this happens in Kingdoms of Amalur as well. Games are developing more robust approaches to assessing your moral coordinate with precision, but they're still several long miles from basic etiquette.

After playing so much SW:TOR and really enjoying it I decided to try a Star Wars book. I had given up them a while back after a series of extremely bad books. I ended up grabbing Darth Plagueis. If it had just been incredibly boring I might have stuck it out but it was also stupid. I was listening to an especially lame chapter when the narrator started talking about ancient Sith lords and their lost techniques. One such lord was a sort of ancient necromancer and his name was Darth Andeddu. I don't care what stupid space way you spell it, the name is pronounced Undead-u. The immortal Sith dude is called Darth Undead. I said "fuck you" out loud in my car and turned the stupid thing off.

The dialogue in the second panel isn't true, not exactly, but it might as well have been. Gabriel told me not to discuss the strip in any detail, and so I wont. Apparently he wants it all to himself, and being almost paralyzed by this novelty I was in no position to refuse him.