PAX is keeping us pretty busy on its own to move on Child's Play just yet - but my friend Steve over at Hypothermia wanted to get the ball rolling, and who am I to stop him.

I saw quite a few of these at Comic-Con this year - Kiko's got his new 16 bit design up.

I'm almost certain I uploaded the strip last night, lord knows the post was up at the right time, which almost never happens. At any rate, it's up now.

I've written at length concerning the multiplayer in Pandora Tomorrow, and outside of some strange exploits - things I'd rather not discuss, lest they enter greater circulation - it's a very exciting game to watch or play. The people that are still playing that game on Live (or the PC version, I'd imagine) are so much better than I am that going online hasn't been a source of enjoyment for me in months. Gabe still plays (and succeeds) quite regularly, which should tell you something about his skill level. He and Doctor K can be seen most nights in there, choking or shooting men, depending. They would, anyway, provided they could find other players that actually wanted to play the game they bought and not some game they made up for the fuck of it right then and there.

If you'd like to check out the new Counter-Strike on the Half-Life 2 engine, they have it at the Bellevue Lanwerx. I'll try to get up there later this week and check it out. This is for you Seattle locals, now - if what I've been reading is correct, there might be a LAN center close to you that has it as well.

Have you guys heard about The Ship, for Half-Life? Gabe and I played a variant of this game called Assassin in high school. Of course, I doubt this is the sort of game you can get away with in the halls these days.

I told you all I’d post the drawing that Stan Sakai did for me at SC Comic Con and here it is.

Six boxes full of tiny Spider-Men clix just came from WizKids, one of these will get thrown the bag you get when you come in the door.

The parts of this Beyond3D "interview" that aren't absolutely unintelligible to me are very interesting.

I just uploaded my sketch dump for the week. You can see it right here if you’re interested.

Doom 3 is dark, etc. Also, an imp develops a unique method for dominating humanity and two zombies have a dialogue about respect.

I'm downloading Windows XP Service Pack 2 even as we speak, as it hates viruses and worms and buffer exploits and other issues that have sort of become synonymous with the OS. I've had an earlier version on this machine as well as the laptop Gabe and I share - one of the more overt changes is to the control panels for using Wi-Fi, I think you'll probably like that. Big Firewall changes, too. You can look at the release notes yourself while it downloads, but I found the review over at the Supersite for Windows to be more than adequate.

I was going to mention Kiko's new shirts when we got back from the Comic-Con, but they weren't available just yet - he's got a cool Gamer Girl baby tee, an RPG themed shirt, and his coin slot inspired 3up. Hot, hot, and hot.

I have some more PAX announcements to make.

I survived my week in the woods and I feel pretty good. It ended up raining almost the entire time we were there which meant that everyone was stuck indoors. Thankfully I had the wisdom to bring a Gamecube and a PS2. Much of my time at the lake was actually spent inside playing Warioware, Karaoke Revolution and Tales of Symphonia. Pretty much everyone in Kara’s family is an incredibly talented singer. Each and every one of them was born with the ability to hear a song once and then reproduce it almost perfectly. This is not something I can do. It’s not even something I can comprehend. They all got hooked on Karaoke Revolution and battled it out tournament style each night. Kara ended up winning the whole thing by nailing a 100% perfect score on a Nora Jones song. I did a rendition of “I hate everything about you” that I would describe as emotionally charged. It certainly got a laugh out of everyone present and I was asked to repeat it at various points during the week for the benefit of family members who had not heard it yet. This became my signature song and out of respect it was never performed by anyone else again.

Gabriel has returned - haunted and harrowed by woodland beasts to be sure, but otherwise ready to accomplish our noble endeavor. There's also an odd, stunted conversation between myself and Kara, so there really is something for everyone.