National Tabletop Day was a blast. Kiko took some great photos of the event.

I had some requests for a version of today's comic minus the text. I'm happy to deliver.

There was a period of time in which I attended so many weddings that I had to struggle to remain in the moment at them. I have this problem anyway, my head is like a balloon with only the suggestion of a tether to the neck. Eventually, as I suggested at the time, I couldn't see individuals at these things. Every time the ritual was performed, and performed hence, I only see the underlying interplay of immortal symbols.

Tomorrow is National Tabletop Day and we will be celebrating down at Card Kingdom all day. We’ll have a few tables and some GM’s running Thornwatch for folks. Sign ups will be handled on a first-come, first-served basis. So come down early and get yourself signed up.

Gabriel is fairly aggressive in his gleaning of the iOS App Store, in a way I never was. He'd been using a Windows Phone so long that when he switched back, he was parched. I didn't know that the store updated on Thursdays until he told me. It's been fun, though, because where typically I have to present him with things for him to dismiss with maximal cruelty, being in the "exhausted, begone" position myself is Goddamned fantastic.

Last time I talked about Pinny Arcade pins at PAX East I mentioned there were a few more that I couldn't talk about. Well I can talk about them now!

I’ve probably put more hours into Fairway solitaire than any other game. It has always just sort of filled in the cracks of my life. Waiting for a match to start or a level to load in another game? I can get a couple turns in on Fairway Solitaire. Bored while sitting at the doctors office or waiting for a movie to start? Fairway Solitaire is the answer. Well after years of playing the first one, Fairway Solitaire Blast has finally come out! It's free and you can grab it for iOS or get it on Android right now.

I don't think that's what they're actually called, they might not even have an actual name. But Gorbiriel and I have pins nobody else has, brand new ones for this year, and they're fresh for real. If you can find us at PAX East this year, which should be easier than ever, you can trade any Pinny Arcade pin for one of these.

Shit is officially fucked over here, with PAX East fat upon the horizon, and both of us committed to disappearing completely the week immediately following. We're lining up tons of strips, and I'm trying to accompany them with a strange kind of post. Strangeposts. You'll see, I guess. Expect anarchy.

Robert just posted this on Twitter. What could it mean!!??

We lived together very well, back when we did, because we knew when to be together and when to be apart. It was a trick we could pull off even in the same room, in adjacent chairs. We knew how to "give space" under conditions where giving space wasn't technically possible. Most of the time we spend together, nobody is talking. That's why I have generally said that we are not friends; I think of a friend as being someone who is present. What we offer each other is solitude without loneliness.

So yeah, I managed to score a couple Heroes of the Storm invites. I’ve been playing it a few days now and I’m in love. I like playing League of Legends. It’s more humane that DOTA which I just can’t get into. LOL strips out some of the fiddly bits like killing your own minions and messengers that bring you your gear from the store. Well HOS gets rid of even more fiddly shit and the result in my opinion at least is more fun. It's possible that what you like is fiddly shit though.

Because Gabriel is far more tenacious than I am, his scams succeed to a far greater degree than mine. Maybe they aren't even scams, I don't know. Maybe they are completely legitimate requests. But because I think of them as fundamentally tawdry, it probably comes through in my mealy, plausibly deniable demi-asks. Long story short, we have Heroes of the Storm.

PAX East is coming up fast and we’re working hard to get Thornwatch ready for the show. It’s going to be a VERY limited playtest on Friday and Saturday night but it’s still much bigger than anything we’ve done so far. Right now we’re working on getting a small group of GM’s trained on how to actually run the game. The first challenge was actually constructing more sets.

A million billion years ago, I used to play a game called Pox Nora that was just way before its time on a couple fronts. When I heard some of the original crew were cooking up a new thing called Conquest of Champions, and I got curious; I finagled my way into the beta, and was rewarded. It's what I like: a CCG where played cards become units on a tactical board. They gave us some codes for earlier than Early Access, with a "deluxe" card pack if you want to give it a spin. Said codes can be secured here.

When I look at most definitions of Apophenia, I can't tell if the word has any opinion on whether or not the data derived from the random stimuli is actually there or not. But then, I think words have opinions. So. There was a time - not that long ago - where we saw lightning, and assumed someone threw it. Probably a dude. This shit is in the firmware. And it's there because occasionally, sometimes, every now and then, it pays dividends.