Two very good friends of mine happen to be teachers. When one of them told me that her kids don't get any art instruction I felt really bad for them. It's understandable, I mean she only gets so much time with these kids each day and she needs to teach them how to read and count. Teaching them how to draw silly pictures just isn't at the top of her list. Not to mention that in the words of her students "Mrs. Eriksen can't draw". So I told her that Tycho and I would love to come in one day and give the kids a lesson in cartooning. She liked the idea and on Monday that's exactly what we did.

I don't know how we were ever authorized to do it, but earlier this week we instructed the next generation in the construction of surprisingly inoffensive comic strips. Using Andrew Vestal's Penny Arcade Remix Project as a template, we wiped the text out of a few old strips and also made a blank set of frames to encourage their own trembling forays into the sometimes intimidating realm of raw potential.

I’ve mentioned before that PAX 05 will be crazy huge and it’s no lie. We need more volunteers this year to help us manage such an insane event. If you think you have what it takes I’d love for you to fire off an email to pax@penny-arcade.com.

So I’ve been back into WOW for a couple weeks now and I finally finished making my Stormshroud armor set. When I quit playing a few months ago I had just started it. Elemental leatherworking is a real bitch. The ingredients you need are either very rare or extremely expensive. I also needed help from high level alchemists to help me transmute materials. All in all it was quite an accomplishment to gather all the materials and patterns and get this armor made. The shitty thing is that when I left the game all those months ago the Stormshroud armor was one of the best sets a Rogue could get. Now that I’ve finally finished it I see all the high level rogues wearing the “invisible fucking murderer” armor set or whatever it is.

I do what I am told.

I think I speak for everyone when I say that this be tender for real.

I didn't quite remember any kung-fu roosters until Gabriel sang the theme song - but those plots of my physical brain untilled since youth began to turn, and that knowledge rushed upon me. I tasted forbidden "sugar cereals" on my tongue as I recalled his travails against the despotic General Tso, who floated from here to there on a kind of floating throne which was also an oven. He believed (for whatever reason) that Kung-Foo Rooster's dedication to the martial arts would create the most tender chicken the world had ever known, and put his considerable personal fortune toward discerning the truth of the matter. There were ninjas all in white with cleavers and chef hats in addition to a group of seven interchangeable hatchling sidekicks called, collectively, "The Chix."

I’m getting lots of mail about the new merchandise. I just wanted to make it clear that all that stuff will be in the online store after Comic Con. It’s still being printed right now and as soon as it’s done it’s being shipped down to San Diego. A couple weeks after the con you’ll be able to buy all of it online. I’m glad you guys seem to like the new stuff sorry if I wasn't clear about that before.

Speaking of the San Diego Comic Con let me show you some of the new stuff we'll have.

Given the recent conflagrations we've been party to, I thought you might be interested to see this diagram of the booth layout for San Diego Comic Con (provided by T Campbell):

Kara recently got into the scrap booking thing and so she’s been digging out all these old photographs. One of them I found particularly awesome.

So now I've gone from nothing I'm really playing consistently to trying to manage World of Goddamn Warcraft, Guild Wars, Freedom Force Vs The Third Reich, and now that Battlefield 2 demo. Like the mortar between them, any spare second is occupied by El Grande, which as you all know is the strategische Brettspiel von Wolfgang Kramer für den PC. I mean, obviously.

I had to wait two hours and forty-five minutes but I was finally able to get into the Alterac Battlegrounds the other night. I was having a blast with CTF but Alterac is an entirely different experience and just as fun.

They eventually came to an agreement, the specifics of which are covered in the article I'm about to link you to. But it's starting to look like the information we received initially - that actors wanted recurring percentages of profits, or something to that effect - isn't exactly correct.

Varsity over at EvilAvatar has few download options for getting the demo, if you haven't already. I started at a healthy hundred and twenty k or so from Gamespot, but by the next time I looked it said I could expect the demo around lunchtime on Tuesday.