When I was tooling around the ‘Con a couple weeks ago, I managed to scam my way into a BioWare thingy where (much to my surprise) six massive Shepards stood vigil. The female Shepard that is, colloquially referred to as FemShep. It was all part of a contest designed to play up the distaff side of the equation, chosen by just under a fifth of the playerbase. You could go online and choose which one would be the default. Employees of the company were very excited about it, and all had their favorites; none of the ones I spoke to would have chosen the Shepard now known ignominiously as Shepard 5.

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Are you ready for more Acquisitions Inc.? I certainly hope so because we are getting the band back together for PAX prime. That’s right Jim, Omen, Binwin and Al will be going up against Dungeon Master extraordinaire Chris Perkins in another incredible adventure! Was that too much?

I’ve made no secret of my struggles to integrate the Nintendo 3DS into the contours of an entire life. The machine is literally my son’s Pokedex - that’s all it gets used for. It’s very good at being that; I don’t want to seem like that’s nothing. But, considering the lineage, it’s starting to look like the blanged-out wastrel heir of a once great house.

We’ve posted another of my live drawing sessions on PATV. We listened to the feedback we got last time and now you can watch it in real time or sped up. You can check out wither version right here.

The nasty bit about Summer of Arcade is its density; I’m in no way finished with Bastion, and now they want me to play Lord for some nomadic dudesmen. They aren’t finished with their claims on my time, either, with stuff from Signal Studios waiting in the wings and Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die(!) outside the blast radius of the promotion yet still colonizing my forebrain. I understand being able to purchase them all, like they want you to, but play them? Who can do this? Goro?

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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.

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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.