It’s not for everybody, I understand that; but if you’re gonna cosplay, man, fucking do it. Go for the brass ring. That’s a real costume we saw, and his golden hoop gleamed not only with light, but with heat.

Watch live video from Penny Arcade on www.justin.tv

Another Comic Con has come and gone. I think that makes ten years in a row for us now. Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth and bought some stuff or just said hi. We did a Q&A panel this year on Saturday night and it turns out it was recorded by Gamespot. The camera work is a bit crazy but if you want to check it out you can do so right here.

I am not very good at social networking.

Now you know why the series is called Annservice. I begged Gabriel to end the series this way, because I felt confident it would be awesome, even though it’s a fairly naked supplication of the reader somewhat outside the Gag Strip Milieu.  I especially appreciate him letting me have Panel 3, particularly since he isn’t a fan in the least and may even be the opposite of a fan. Usually that term would mean something like “opponent,” but in this case I think it clearly means villain.

Tonight is Preview Night at the San Diego Comic Con, a very particular sort of environ, the very moment when the scab is ripped off the show and it begins to suppurate.

Opinions may differ; in fact, that's kind of their thing. But Ann’s effortless aura transforms the strip into something else, and the people in the strip into other people altogether. Imagine Tycho Brahe, craven psyops malefactor, as bulwark against the world and you’ve got it. People sometimes wonder if we ever get tired of making the same strip, and don’t we want to do X, where X equals absolutely anything else. But we have so many knobs, and levers, and ways to change the gravity, that it’s very difficult to get bored with it because it is not discrete.

Occasionally, when must leave town for this reason or that, we leverage base causality to ease the process. We thought it might be novel to solicit a catalyst for these events, and did so with a poll on Gabriel’s Fassbork.

We were trying out the multiplayer in Twisted Pixel’s Ms. Splosion Man on Monday, finding what we saw there considerably more clever than we expected (or, indeed, require!). I did fall into some acid so many times that I would have to remove a shoe to physically enumerate it. I can die in this way many, many times before becoming frustrated - that’s just how I’m put together. I’m “resilient” to certain kinds of failure (a term I learned from Jane McGonigal) and so when I am learning how to do something I use it to find the boundaries. At least, that’s how I would put it. There is, of course, another way.

I’m not going to lie to you guys, I sometimes use my minor Internet celebrity to get cool shit. Recently I was able to acquire tickets for my wife and I to the sold out Whedonesque Burlesque show here in Seattle this weekend. I was also able to get the Windows Phone guys over at Microsoft to send me a Samsung Focus. I’ve been getting bored with my iPhone and after playing with WP7 at an AT&T store I was interested in making a switch. So I’ve had the Focus for a little over a week now and I just wanted to share my thoughts.

I may have spoken too soon.  And when I say "may have," I mean "did absolutely." 

Erika, Brian, and Khoo will be rocking the booth with us, booth 1334, as suggested above.  We also have a panel (which I'm just learning about myself!) on Saturday, July 23 in room 25ABC.  This panel goes from 6:00 to 7:00 PM.

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It’s true. For some reason I cannot entirely grasp, Gabriel is using a Windows Phone.

I was never a DOTA player and so I don’t know to what extent LOL is or is not like that game. Coming into LOL it was hard for me to understand at first why there was only one map. Eventually I realized that it’s not that much different from a sport like football or baseball. The “field” is always the same and what makes the game interesting is the interaction of the teams. So when I jumped in and tried a game of Rise of Immortals I wasn't too surprised to see the same map. The rest of the similarities to LOL seem a bit strange to me but I guess I don’t really understand where the “genre” ends and the game begins.

DOTA’s strange heritage - that is to say, its origin as a non-profit knot of distributed design - has allowed this type of game to reproduce in a strange way. The known quantity of that map and the shared controls make it easy to flit from one manifestation of the concept to the another. This is what makes DOTA2 especially dangerous to this space: Valve polish, with no up front costs? Jesus Fucking Christ; it’s the sort of thing that makes you question your life choices.