I am really excited to finally be able to tell you guys about one of the biggest projects we've ever done. Last year the ESRB came to us and asked if we could create a new advertising campaign for them. They'd been to multiple agencies and none of them were able to communicate the message the ESRB was trying to get out. See until now their advertising has been focused on trying to educate adults about the ESRB. That's obviously an important task but they wanted this new message to be directed at gamers, that is to say directed at us. They wanted a campaign that would communicate to gamers why the ESRB is important even if they don't think it directly affects them.

Real quick I wanted to apologize for the way the site has been acting lately. I appreciate the mail you guys have been sending me and trust me when I say people are working on it as I type this. I think Tycho mentioned a while ago that we had to invest in a bunch of new hardware. When it comes to computer stuff I’m hardly an expert. I use mine to play WOW and draw. I can tell you what I was told though. We actually purchased five brand new servers and last week they were integrated into our cluster. That made things sort of wonky for a few days and when I suggested they reverse the polarity of the main deflector dish and flash wipe all our DNS proxys they said I was not helping. I know it seems like we have a lot of trouble with the site and your right. I know having a fuck ton of readers is no excuse but we do go through about 400 gigs of traffic every day. We’re creeping up on 2 million page views a day now and that sort of traffic really beat the shit out of our old equipment. Hopefully once this new gear is in place and all the bugs are worked out you’ll see an improvement in the sites performance. Fingers crossed.

In staunch opposition to all that is good and just, we were given yet another opportunity to instruct Mrs. Eriksen's class in the cartoonin' ways. You might recall the last time we did such a thing. It was an experience that quite endured, and I wondered if my second "dose" would retain that invigorating payload. It turns out that every time you help children it is basically awesome.

In the words of Jesus upon the cross at Golgotha, it is finished.

I think I mentioned a while ago that I had been asked to do a couple cards for the WOW card game that Upper Deck is producing. At first it was just two cards based on one of their original characters. Then I was asked to do two more based on a couple characters that those of you on Dark Iron might be familiar with. Then just a couple weeks ago they asked if I was interested in doing the artwork for a Leeroy Jenkins card. What an awesome opportunity! So here are my inks for Leeroy:

When digesting recent events, it may help you to know that there are men and women for whom my epic works of fantasy serve as a kind of guide for living. One of the more potent manifestations is the furnie lifestyle, based as it is on furniliars - the ambulatory furniture which serves an Elemenstor. References to evil nightstands or King Ronard, The First Magic Sword King may also help you derive this installment's hidden nutrients.

I've been asked to speak at local lit-con Readiation, whose dangerous-sounding name belies a friendly, relatively tame event. At no point is a Geiger Counter required, unless it is used exclusively as an accessory for a futuristic costume. It caters to what you might call the "hardcore reader," a population scientists would study with intensity if they knew it existed. Dog-eared copies from Steven Brust's Taltos Cycle or signed offerings from Lois McMaster Bujold circulate like holy relics. Aficionados of the event - though they prefer to be called afictionados - suggest that the annual affair represents the true "Home Of The Tome," and I am inclined to believe them. I visited the event last year as part of my "Elemenstation Of The West" signing tour, and before I met these people I was under the impression that I liked books quite a lot.

Kara and I got ganked by four or five Horde last night out in Winterspring while we were trying to finish up a long quest chain. Thanks to everyone that showed up to help us. I'm not sure a 30 man raid was necessary, but we appreciate it.

People often ask me if they can come visit us at the Penny Arcade office. Some even make comments about how wonderful it must be to work in an environment like this one. I’m here to tell you this is no place you want to be. Let me show you what I see when I turn to my left.

I don't have time to enumerate for you every instance of L. H. Franzibald's bald "acquisitions" from my pure texts. Suffice it to say that I have found a fitting place for his creative output. So there is no confusion, it is the same place I might hurl a soiled tissue or perhaps the wrapper from a King Size Snickers, its noble work having already been accomplished.

I’ve had time to recover now from E3 and I’ll just give you a quick list of what I liked and didn’t like.

They wanted us to do a couple strips for their E3 site, and so we picked a few games we probably would have done comics about anyway.  You can find all that stuff here.

(CW)TB

You never really know what you're going to get out of a visit to Kentia Hall, but it's an adventure I make time for every year.  In a single moment, you will see simultaneously a rack of special gloves with patches on them (???), a plastic enclosure designed to contain a person and digitally change their gender, a shoe that contains an optical mouse, and some kind of space kung fu exhibition.  It's the sort of place you can make no assumptions about.  During one visit, I saw a company which was apparently very big in Korean MMOs trying to make a splash here giving away the client for free.  Nowadays, those guys are kind of a big deal. 

We started talking about some of the things we'd seen in years past, and it wasn't long before we had generated the Kentia All-Stars.

Typically, the spectacle of the Electronic Entertainment Expo is such that each sequential event compresses the one before it, leaving me with three compacted days that begin inflating on the plane ride back and leave me a drooling wretch by Monday.  This time is different; I have complete access to the entire week just as though I were lazily thumbing through a file drawer.  For example, I knew the moment that I gripped the controller for Gears of War that I was in front of the game of the show.  Nothing obscures that information.  Gears is really at a "Halo" level of platform definition, and when your hands close around the gamepad on "emergence day," please remember I said so. 

When we came out of the room where we had been playing it, a kind of illicit zone like an Opium Den, Kiko and I immediately began to discuss how profound the experience was.  At the same time, Mike and Gabe (two separate people!) felt like it was pretty good, but bemoaned its rough framerate and constant tearing.  It is our theory that perhaps some boxes were set to 1080i and some to 720p possibly creating performance disparities, because Keek and myself experienced no framerate abberations worth discussing.  We did briefly experience a vision of a future where we spend every night playing Gears of War online, but I'm not sure that's connected to the vertical resolution.

If I had to say what defines it, I would say that "everything in the game world feels unrelentingly massive."  This is a simulated environment that feels very confident, in that it is about huge armored men hiding behind sturdy cover while bursts of machinegun fire savage your solid fortifications.  Everything you do is made to "feel" large, and when you throw yourself against a hunk of ruined automobile you are not left to wonder whether or not you are a bad ass.  It is clear from the word "go."  A kind of brutal platformer, Gears of War is about leaping from safety to safety, and everything reinforces it.  It feels classic instantly.  Indeed, you could call it Frogger Plus Firearms and not get it wrong.

(CW)TB out.  

It's been a fairly interesting show so far, I don't know how it looks out there, but we made the mistake of seeing two things on the first day that resonated with such power that we haven't been able to top them.