Surely this installment of Penny Arcade is a falsification of the worst sort! Friends, if only that were true. When he started telling me about Dust, as though it were a topic that was somehow alien to me, alien to the tens of thousands of people that play every day on "Dust Only" servers, I felt something pop inside my mind.

It's hard to believe, but PAX is less than two weeks away at this point. We've been planning and preparing for this event for so long now that I can't remember my life before PAX. What did I do before I was helping to throw the greatest video game party ever conceived by man? Probably nothing.

I put up a new sketch dump this morning. You can see it right here if you’re interested. Some people have asked what I draw with. I actually just use a regular ballpoint pen when drawing in my sketchbook. I like them because I never have to sharpen them. Plus using a pen forces me to keep sketching rather than spending thirty minutes erasing and redrawing the same thing over and over again.

One day we will learn the trick of making our bullets intersect with enemy models - at least, that's the hope - as apparently emptying a submchinegun at point-blank range is not up to the task. In the meantime, we can ponder Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow's deep mysteries.

If you will be attending the event, and it is starting to look like that will be a couple thousand of you, please send us questions for any panels you'd like to attend - State of the Industry, The Development Process, anything - and we'll get them on the list.

I picked up the most recent issue of Official Playstation Magazine yesterday. I grabbed it because I saw it had a demo of Burnout 3 on the disk. I’ll just say I was not disappointed. That game is shit hot and I highly recommend you go get a copy of it for yourself. My only complaint is that after the one race they allow you in the demo you are kicked all the way back out to the main menu of the disk. I guess this is because they want to remind you that there are other games and movies available there but the only thing you’re going to want to play is Burnout. I almost feel bad for the other racing game demos on the disk. Maybe they didn’t know their game would be featured alongside Burnout 3. As I drove one of their destruction derby cars around a crappy looking track at approximately five miles per hour I actually felt embarrassed for them.

People who think that we go "too far" would fall over dead if they heard the discussions that actually produce these comics. The one catalogued in the strip is (to my mind) fairly minor. I'd rather not go into any more detail than that, and besides - you've probably just eaten breakfast.

Okay, so it looks like the Child's Play Raffle is over, because in the space of 18 hours you guys and the Hypothermia crew bought up every ticket. Unbelievable.

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.