If you have not checked out the Penny Arcade store recently you should. I say that because, when you buy things from the store we get the money and we use it to buy stuff. Here are a few items of interest:

I played through Alan Wake prior to the actual release, before much was made of its fairly vigorous "promotional consideration." I've already said that as a writer in the Northwest, liking a game about a writer in the Northwest was probably a foregone conclusion. I never got tired of the way their technology manipulates light, and there are discussions to be had about the narrative itself that are worth having. I didn't notice the brands, or didn't care, because I was trying to keep my entire body contiguous, or I was busy looking at something else - but God damn, guys. God damn.

Gabriel thinks that he might be done with Red Dead Redemption already, and it won't be the first time I've taken a save we've created together and dragged it to completion. We pulled a very solid night of multi out of it, though; I should have recognized just how bright that candle was, and reverse-engineered the saying.

Here are some quick thoughts about the games I've been playing recently:

I just put Forgotten Sands to bed, last night around nine or so. It's strange, in a way, but maybe we shouldn't wonder when a series about time travel literally travels, itself, through time.

A PA reader and medic stationed just outside Baghdad sent me a mail this week asking about how I run my D&D games via Email. It just so happens that with the new baby I have not had time to run a proper game for my crew. What I decided to do instead is take them through a little adventure via Email until I'm able to get back to the table.

Red Dead Redemption sat next to my keyboard all day yesterday, face down, and I frequently stole glances at the screens printed on the back.  Soon, soon.

I am occasionally coaxed back into Azeroth, or into its battle-scarred adjunct The Outland, and each time I return to a bank full of mysterious garbage and elixir-maddened shrews. I don't know what half of that stuff is anymore, some of it is related to quests I've also forgotten, and some were almost certainly kept because they had "a cool icon." My bags are no better. They seem like someone else's bags, bulging with trinkets of questionable utility, baubles which steep in a puddle of alchemical reagents and alien produce.

We decided to put a few of packs together of the full-page storylines, in case you want to have ridiculously beautiful versions of stuff like Lookouts: A Boy Must Learn or Cardboard Tube Samurai: Seventh Spring.  Of course, virtually every strip can be printed out direct from the high-res file - that option can be found at the bottom of almost every strip.

We put together another Dungeons and Dragons podcast on Wednesday, this time devoted to the resurgent Dark Sun setting. This round saw me behind the DM's screen, doing my best to immolate, abrade, crush, and otherwise destroy our own Gabriel, Kris Straub, and Scott Kurtz. I spent two and half years invested in a Dark Sun campaign as a young man, and the opportunity to revel there again - if reveling is even possible in that blistered psychic wasteland - was an honor and a pleasure. I hope I was able to create in their minds the same deep curiosity about the setting that was, heretofore, my sole domain.

Well I'm back at the office after my paternity leave. It was great being home with the new baby for a couple of weeks. I have to say the second one is much easier. I don't know if he's a better baby of if I'm just a better dad. Either way there isn't nearly as much of the anxiety and uncertainty with this one. It's great because without worrying if every cry means he's dying I can really just enjoy having a little baby.

Scott lives up here now, and not just lives up here but works up here, and when I say "up here" I don't mean the Greater Seattle Metro Area but specifically right down the hall. If he gets hungry, and I am hungry at the same time, we can go eat lunch. Maybe that seems like some normal shit, but the stats prior to this state of affairs placed us at about one lunch per decade.

Only three panels? No beautiful colors by Steve Hamaker? No rad letters by Erica Greco? I suppose it will have to do. Strong topic, though. Like the content. Certainly, I can vouch for the writing.

It's true!  There's a whole episode about the Time 100 stuff, if you're interested.

The last page of Lookouts: A Boy Must Learn is here. At least, for now. Next time in, sooner than later I hope, we'll deal with The Daughters.

Just two more pages of Lookouts to go, and here is the first of them. This is the fantasy equivalent of the bonus round, where all points are doubled, and the penalties for failure become progressively more grim.