It was Noah’s 12th birthday yesterday and what he really wanted to do was take to the seas as a family and get some treasure! My oldest son Gabe offered to take us all on the Legend of the Veil voyage which is only available to players who have attained the rank of Pirate Legend. It’s a three part voyage with a cool story and a boat load of treasure.

Kara and I are hooked on the new Moon Knight series so I took a couple hours last week to do some fan art.

I got the in-flight Internet thing to take my mind off this lady next to me on the plane. Between incredibly productive coughs, she either

- Blows her nose into the same, singular tissue she's been blowing into for the last four hours and then literally gazes meaningfully at her fucking snot, like some tubercular haruspex, or

- Eats M&Ms out of a sock.

Even though I’m home this week, yesterday I was able to take control of the Ohmni Robot that is in the Child’s Play booth at PAX East. I had a great time driving it around and meeting people but the real reason it’s there is so that we can let kids in Children’s Hospitals explore PAX!

Today's strip relates a crime that is even now in progress. I hope that there's a frightfully specific arm of the constabulary I can call to resolve this quickly - one that specializes in damage done, by your friends, to your most yellow toys. I need pinpoint expertise here to bring this thing to a swift conclusion.

After fifteen years of going to PAX I had to take a little time off just for my own mental health. I am not a convention goer by nature and being around big groups of people takes a lot out of me. So I’m not physically at PAX East with you all this week but I will be there in robot form!

The Penny Arcade design team has been on fire lately! They have delivered unto us a beautiful new website, the incredible space theme for PAX and now this collaboration with Magic the Gathering!

I was sorta hoping the Playdate might materialize just before my trip out to PAX East, as this would be optimal, plus now my ardor has been stoked by all the reviews - the Eurogamer one is great, just… exactly what I want in a review, as is the IGN one. Shortly after I was sad online, I received a notification that it was being shipped which was just funny at that point. I'm way bullish on it and when I get back from East I'm gonna go hog fuckin' wild. Gabriel has been informed that he should not under any circumstances turn the crank while I'm gone. And if he simply must turn it, at least consult with a cranking professional beforehand, such as Soulja Boy Tell 'Em.

I only knew that D&D Beyond wasn't owned by Wizards of the Coast already because I'm a huge dork, and I've partnered with both companies in the past. Except… this isn't even the first time D&D Beyond has changed hands! That makes the fact that many, many people were surprised Wizards didn't already own it very surprising in and of itself.

PAX East is almost upon us and the opportunities for pin trading are abundant! 

As someone who came up in a radically different version of the Internet, one that wasn't really mobile let alone omnipresent, it's hard to imagine our particular origin story happening again. I mean, for good or ill: the pathways to an audience, and the monetization schema, even the idea that forms in a person's head when you imagine that notoriety and the life it might allow is already sequestered by the corporation that would enable it.

They've gotten Elden Ring down to a seven minute speedrun apparently, and I think we can all agree: that isn't a very long time. I regularly stare at a blank screen that long, sometimes between sentences, and I don't have anything to show for it. I certainly haven't been the culmination of a prophecy or anything. I haven't culminated shit!

I’ve managed to play about 12 hours of the new Gundam Evolution beta since last Friday and I really like it. Is it a lot like Overwatch? Yes, but it’s also like Team Fortress 2 and Paladins. It’s a Hero Shooter and so it’s going to feel very similar to those other games. The question is whether or not Gundam Evolution has enough of it’s own flavor to differentiate itself from those other games. It's hard to say for sure if that is the case after only a few hours with the beta, but personally I’m impressed and excited.

I think it's totally fine for Overwatch to be a genre, and it's even finer if it's all robots instead. That's essentially the premise of Gundam Evolution, whose robots are very large indeed, and which basically plays how you expect it to if you expect it to be Overwatch with Gundams.

I played D&D and got into huge trouble when I was a little kid, so the next time I played D&D was utterly in secret. It was also on the Commodore 64 - technically, on the Commodore 128 booted into C64 mode - and I would play it in the middle of the night with a pillow over the incredibly noisy drive. That particular game was called Curse of the Azure Bonds, and was essentially a digital sequel to a book I'd never read, which suggested to my thirteen-year-old self a vast, coherent space literally beyond my ability to conceive it. Thirty-three years later I still have not found the borders of it.

Thursday night is Race night for the Penny Arcade iRacing league!