Yesterday I had the chance to demo my Thornwatch game for some friends from Cryptozoic. In case you don’t know, these are the guys who make the World of Warcraft TCG, our Penny Arcade deck building games and are also responsible for the totally fucking amazing Lookouts comic book. Cryptozoic makes a lot of great games and I figured if I really wanted to know if Thornwatch had potential, I needed to show it to some professional game makers.

We were lucky enough to receive copies of Dishonored before release, but I am afraid we may not have been terribly good investments thereof; neither of us were particularly taken with it. For Gabriel, that's it. He's comfortable having opinions on things. Apparently every person on Earth loves the game except for the two of us, though, and that has made me incredibly curious.

Lots of single days left, but if you're looking to attend the whole show you should consider picking them up.

Working with Jerry is pretty great. I can say something like "how do people call the Thornwatch" and five minutes later he comes up with tying a wreath of thorns around a birch tree. He then cooks up a system of knots that tell the Thornwatch what the mission will be. Oh and a poem.

We were trying to figure out what "thing" we would be unable to process as society marched forward, what would possess some configuration which would render it unable to be absorbed by our aging brains, in the way that "rap" or "rock & roll" once found themselves in the twilight between exile and ubiquity.

I am a "good boy" when it comes to the vast majority of correct opinions. Some I believe because they are right, some I make peace with because they are inevitable, and some I honestly can't believe we're still arguing about, but that's what's it's like when you live in a world filled with evil people who will not, can not be wished away. They stay, defiantly, even when you've put in a firm request with natural law that they evanesce.

I honestly thought today’s comic would not appeal to people outside the target "people who are me" demographic. So I was pleasantly surprised to see my Twitter blow up with readers asking for larger versions of each panel.

If you like to read season by season, you can do that now. Now that we have a full-time artist, my guess is that the typical Season Hiatus won't last especially long. We'll get together next Wednesday and write up the arcs.

Namco Bandai is shopping around different looks for a new Pac-Man game, which is interesting, until you get to their fourth new look and you freak the fuck out. That shouldn't be real, but it is real. It's apparently for a "casual" game. Don't care. Gabriel flipped his shit and wanted to do nothing but render the iconic character in the manner of famous artists throughout history. His voice had a strange timbre; refusing him seemed... unwise.

Looking over the FAQ for the City of Heroes shutdown reminds me of the time I found (and subsequently consumed/obsessed over/used as the template for a grim new religion) the documents which obliterated my parents' marriage. It is an utterly, cruelly, unsentimental, unsparingly frank assessment of the things people never, ever talk about until it's time to close the store.

There's like three hours left on the Dreadball Kickstarter, and (as is the way with boardgames on the crowdfunding service) it's gone bananas. Gabe makes an appearance as an MVP in the game, and I was going to announce it, but stretch goals don't last long on this thing and I never had the chance.

I wasn't at the last Thornwatch playtest. I made the mistake of relaxing for one second last Friday, one Goddamn second, and PAX finally caught up with me and laid me out. I understand that it was... a thing.

Having received word a second time that his account had been pilfered, even though his password was now an alphanumeric goulash, Gabriel decided on a bold new strategy for dealing with this sort of thing. He was contacted later that day to find that it had all been some kind of internal mistake, but Guild Wars 2 has no monthly fee; he can get back in whenever he wants to and not be out any money. In the meantime, he gets a t-o-n of free labor. He can't actually lose.

In case you missed it we announced PAX Australia at PAX Prime this year. It’s scheduled to lauch next year and we’ll be announcing all the details in the next few weeks. If you want to stay up to date on the latest happenings with PAX Down Under there are a couple places to watch.

Last night I ran another Thornwatch play test. This time we worked on how deck advancement will function as well as testing out some new mechanics for skill test resolution.

We have referenced Linkin Park once before, in another strip, which resulted in the kind of hurt one typically associates with the butt. "LP" is like a test strip for age; I can put it in my mouth, take it out, compare it to the color chart, and it will say "YOU ARE TOO OLD." I was starting to think I had reclaimed some measure of my former vigor, in accordance with theory that age can fluctuate as it pertains to cultural product, but then I saw a sign someone had stapled to a telephone pole and the urge to tear it down was overwhelming. "Nope," I said. "Still old."