PAX is just a week away and I have a few important bits of info.

The four we chose for the strip literally the first four that came to mind; in no way does this sample represent every savage threat trying to push its face through the rapidly thinning membrane. It’s true what "Tycho” says in the first panel: our ability to afford these free games is evaporating with great speed, and as the players start emerging from the ranks of Triple A brutes, the stigma this genre once had is being dismantled on the daily.

I don't mean that I just dug a new trench or something. Strip! It just occurred to me that there are new Trenches strips on every day that begins with T. If you'd like a less fanciful method of tracking updates, of course we do have a feed available.

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I’ve talked before about the way advertising works being a little different on PA. Tycho and I have to approve any ads that you see here on the site. For games that are still a long ways off we try and get early builds. For existing games one of us always checks it out first. We try very hard to make sure that we’re showing you stuff that’s actually worth checking out. We also do the Penny Arcade presents projects. That includes things like the Assassins Creed pre-order poster, or the Dragon Age comics. One thing we don’t do is sell space in the actual comic strip or the news post. That means that when you see a bunch of comics about League of Legends it is because we are playing it every night and having a blast, not because we got a check.

When discussing today’s digimal realms, and the dangers which lurk therein, the general response (and one we have relied upon with great frequency and considerable flourish) is to lay the task of pruning an increasingly horrifying world at the foot of the parent. I’m not saying that this is wrong; who else would do it? Who else could? But I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not possible to hermetically shield these organisms. For one thing, they need oxygen.

I love this kind of stuff.

I know you don’t come to this website for news about my spawn but I can’t help but share this. My eldest son Gabe is almost seven years old now. He is fixated on a few different things. Lego, Minecraft, Adventure Time, and (God help me) iCarly. Gabe plays Minecraft every single day and that’s no joke. For a while I thought maybe I should be limiting his time because that’s what parents do right? They limit “time”. Then I started looking at the shit my son was doing in this game and I could not ask him to stop.

Its been a long time coming but we have finally launched our new comic The Trenches. This comic is a collaboration between Tycho and I along with Scott Kurtz. Scott and I created the the characters and the look of the strip and he is handling the artwork for the actual comics. The three of us are writing it together and having a blast. The Trenches is much different from Penny Arcade in that it is has what the ladies call “continuity”.

The communities of DOTA, HoN, and LoL are notorious, even among gamer communities, for being noxious hellholes. It’s rare that I actually run afoul of these beasts; usually, they’re content to shiver and gasp in their rotting stumps. Every now and then, though, they do emerge, and I remember: oh, yes. You senseless things. Again!

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It's ready to be tested under load - you can find it at beta.penny-arcade.com, and any bugs or issues you have with it can be mailed to webmaster+beta@penny-arcade.com.

My friend Brian over at Kotaku posted a nice preview of Fruit Ninja for Kinect. In it he mentions the fact that the game will notify you when someone has beaten your score. Since he had the game early and so did I, he says he was competing with me. I hate to break it to you Brian but you were competing with my son. Lil’ Gabe is the Fruit Ninja in our house.

August Tenth - so, Wednesday? - is the last day to buy your ticket and have it sent to you.  Otherwise, you'll have to pick it up at the door.  Which is also fine!  Up to you.  

What is true, absolutely true, is that Blizzard does not allow people to play Diablo III while they are not connected live to their servers. It is at this point that interpretation, reason, and cynicism create a drifting mobile of warring, caustic realities.

We held a bachelor party for Levin night before last, a bachelor party that began with drunken kickball and culminated in drunken drinking. Gabriel attended the former, and I tagged in for the latter, each playing to our respective strengths. The drinking portion involved a Whisky Tasting, and I offered a series of tasting notes for the flight via Twitter, like so: