Hidden Mechanics

Mork was trying to tell me what we can and can't do strips about, and the long and the short of it is that he's wrong. It called to mind the Council of Elrond, where Boromir is just like, "We should obviously use this harmful and wicked thing in the prosecution of our duties." Don't think too hard about everything else that happens in that scene! Or in the rest of that book, or the next one, or the next one, or any of the cartoons and movies. My argument is gonna look super bad if you do look at any of that stuff. Anyway, what I told him is that - in a manner of speaking - his own situation and that powerful series both involve rings of one kind or another. He did not find this funny.

Our little comic strip here has always been a sort of diary for Jerry and I. When this comic strip started I was a 21 year old kid who had just moved out of his parents house and was living with his best friend in Spokane Washington. You saw me propose to my then girlfriend and you were there when my kids were born. I talked with you many times over the years about my struggles with anxiety and you were there when I went on medication. Well I am turning 49 years old this year and if you’ve been reading for a long time you might be around the same age. I’m sorry to say it but we gotta get our buttholes checked out and I am scheduled to have mine done this Wednesday.

It's a meme with a very particular clientele: there is always, always something fucked up with Gabe's setup when he tries to do the Make-A-Strip. During the Surface era, it would reliably try to do a system update as soon as we would start the panel. The setup has coalesced these days around a Framework laptop and the lower tier XPPen Artist Pro, but he forgot his dongle so the puck he brought - the little device he uses to perform the somatic components of the Art spell - was inert. The screen could be manipulated physically, a feature he never even knew about, but when you try to shift the art around on there your work slides around like it's on an air hockey table. It wasn't optimal, but there were dark chuckles and schadenfreudes out there, so it occurred to me: is there a way to leverage even greater torments? We also dish up a truly ancient reference in panel one for all of those newly traveling through the archive.

Mork had saved a whole section of Pokopia - I won't say which one, because I think technically it might be a spoiler - just for the trip. This caused a resumption of those affections which had been felt so keenly before, and I apologize for the character of that sentence but I just watched Pride and Prejudice again. It's gonna fuck up my language for days. In any case: every now and then, in the course of his duties as reclaimer of the Kanto region, he will remember some of the places Pokemon live and feel a way about it. Ivri has an amazing song on this topic.

It’s always something. At PAX East this year I had more time to draw the comic during Make a Strip but I forgot a very important piece of hardware, and not having it made drawing the comic a huge pain in my ass. I normally have a little handheld ”puck” with a bunch of buttons on it that my left hand holds and uses for short cut keys. I forgot the little dongle that makes that thing work so instead I attempted to use my drawing tablets touch controls... for the first time...live on stage. It did not go great but I was told over and over again during the show how much fun it was to watch me struggle. In fact a few people suggested that going forward there should always be some impediment to me drawing the strip at the show!

Gabriel's diet, always a fraught topic, degrades substantially on trips. Once he ate someone who came to the show! He felt bad, but because the attendee had been completely devoured there was no way to truly communicate the fact. Another time, fell upon a ruined pigeon he'd found in the street. Traffic stopped in both directions - sat back on his haunches, he gnawed on that rigid bird like it was corn on the cob. In comparison, this year's food policy was positively enlightened.

As something of a connected phenomenon - my instinct is to say "corollary," but I think that's not correct - as Penny Arcade was unearthed by the wily Zillenial, the many fruits of our enterprise became known. The true facts of the name PAX, for example - a name I came up with in five seconds at Costco because we got a call saying the show thing we were trying to do needed a name. I'm always delighted when someone finds the information I tucked in there. Never you mind that the next question is usually "what's a Penny Arcade" because that's not what this story is about!!!

This year's theme park has so many twists and turns, so many nice little Touches, that it would be tricky to call each of them out.  I merely saw how Gavin had done the S in "PAX East" on a jacket and had to sit down immediately.  First I'll show off everything you can get on our Official PAX Shop, from the comfort of your own phone:

Ronia is, in fact, on stage jumping around going fucking crazy in Mamma Mia, which is essentially like a jazzercize class with a lyric book. Like, on some Tae Bo shit. I would last part of one song before my lungs tried to crawl out of my mouth. Gabriel was under some misconceptions regarding the production that I was happy to correct by striking him repeatedly with one of those little ice fishing bats. Did you know that those little clubs are called "priests"? Gabriel didn't know either. I made sure he understood as it was coming down.

There has been a strange uptick in interest, worship, and… pornography, I guess you would say, related to my compatriot Gabriel and I. Poker Night At The Inventory, made by our Telltale friends of long ago and resuscitated by the redolent Skunkape, has unearthed a very particular era of the Internet. Tumblr has been stoked and self-described "gay autists" are roasting in the hot heat. I've got great news, you Goddamn perverts. To the elders, we haven't gone anywhere. To the new initiate - those untouch'd by years or, indeed, taste - there are nearly thirty years of indiscretions for you to tilt and turn in your hand. It may be the most robust archive of its kind, because it encodes with it the feelings present as they happened. And, yes. As you will learn: I talk like this all the time.

We warned of spoilers in the Project Hail Mary trailer, but having read the book now - and living in a world where The Martian exists as a book and a film - I understand why they needed to show everything in that trailer. You can't have a situation where people call the movie "The Martian On A Spaceship." Now that I know everything in the book - I'm literate!!! -I would say that they have not, in fact, spoiled the main thing. I can't wait to go see this shit - there's just so much interesting work that had to be done before they could even tell the story.

Enough time has passed since the initial DLSS5 detonation for us to have passed through the initial response (bad) to a coalition of contrarians, much-smarter-than-yous, and engineers who feel slighted by proxy. Digital Foundry most affected - you could have toasted marshmallows over their subreddit. They praised it like crazy and were subsequently exposed to solar heat, to the extent that they had to post a video called "We Should Have Waited," and now proponents of the technology are mad at them for that. Ah, yes. I remember the Internet.

There's no way to contextualize how ready Gabriel was to pawn something. That was just his bank, kinda. Anytime E3 rolled around he started foraging for anything made of silver colored plastic. He would have sold me if he could! I would have sold me too, I guess. Rented, at least. But panel three of this strip is a documentary.

If you like what you see, you can play it pretty much anywhere.  Next Friday I'm gonna teach Dabe how to play on some sponsored stuff - now he's wrapping up all the video walls for PAX East, so he's gonna have to watch the stream if he's gonna bone up.  Join me right here if you want to see what I am typically doing between miodnight and one in the morning.

(CW)TB

Something I forgot to mention yesterday was that our cautious lunch interrupter had purchased a Nintendo Switch 2 specifically for Pokopia. He said he was also goaded into buying it because he suspected RAM prices were gonna fuck him if he held off. Two things: one, I mean, system seller? Cozy system seller. I understand that it is at the nexus of several mechanical roads, executed by a trusted house with a freaky pedigree, and obviously people are fond of pocketable monsters, but a building game off the main series hitting like this? Yow. And two, having talks about RAM prices with the waiter at a bar is a communique from a dimension beyond reckoning. Just how badly have our masters fucked this up?

I've been trying to have a beer with Kim Swift for about five years now, and it finally happened. She suggested The Bine up in Bothell, and you should draft on that suggestion. I'm afraid I made a pun there without meaning to. But it's also real close to Zulu's, a place you might want to be anyway. Anywhoozle, the last half of the meetup was just her breaking down how Pokopia is a masterclass of game design. A little while later, a sheepish server came over and said, "I don't want to interrupt… but were you talking about Pokopia?"

She was.