Wise.

Harvesting dirt on tech via Techdirt, I saw a story entitled "The Internet Wins: PIPA and SOPA delayed." Author Mike Masnick delivers a precisely calibrated mixture of triumph and bleak prophecy in his write-up, which seems like the proper tone. If you go deeper, say, to Harry Reid's official statement, you won't see anything to celebrate. It's delayed, to be sure, although remission might be a better term. The will hasn't gone anywhere.

Hero Academy is from Robot Entertainment, which I always think of being entertainment for robots as opposed to by them, but that's not important right now. What's important is that you download this ridiculously free app for your iOS device immediately so that you can begin waiting for people to send you their turns.

I’m in love with Star Wars the Old Republic. I love the class quests and the flashpoints and the companions and the crafting and the space missions and all that shit! I could go on and on about how great I think the game is but that’s no fun. Here are the things I hate:

When I make a character in a massively multiplayer game, I tend to "go hard" on the embroidery aspect. That is to say, I like to tart shit up on the narrative front, imbuing landmarks and even world geometry with increasingly fruity elaborations.

We were recently asked by Cliff Bleszinski and his soon to be wife Lauren if we would create the save the date card for their wedding. The answer was “Of course!”

A Fourth Panel, detailing the origin of The Conflux D&D series which people seemed to enjoy. Or, at least, enjoy more than we expected. Which is at all, really. I'm always a little surprised.

When I saw the headline

Gabriel's D&D group has never endured a full Edition War. There was that Essentials thing, which didn't really touch them; even if one or two of their players might have preferred a "cleaner" system, nobody ever really knew what an Essential was. "Essentials" sounds suspiciously like less. And we are a people engineered to demand more.

First Place!

Occasionally, my health insurance will forget that they did at one point authorize an antidepressant, or they'll decide that I can have it, but that I can't have it every day for some reason. I will talk to a person on the phone about it, and what becomes clear almost immediately is that they are trying to make two numbers add up correctly and I am wondering... well, I don't want to say.

PAX East (or as I like to call it, PAX Easter) is coming up on April 6th through the 8th. We recognize that this falls on a holiday for some of you. The problem, is that we are at the mercy of the convention center when it comes to dates. Trust me when I tell you we didn’t pick Easter just to be jerks. However, even with PAX falling on such a holy day, we are still 90% sold out of 3 day badges! Sinners.

Battleship Galaxies is a tactical boardgame, and it features hexes, which grants it an unassailable seven out of ten points straight out of the box. Things can only go up from there, and for the most part they do. Tom Vasel has a good review here, one that has it right in my opinion, which is another way of saying that he agrees with me: It's good. But I'm ready for advanced rules. Or ships. Anything.

I’m a big Disney fan. I love the theme parks and the movies and all of it. On our recent trip to the Aulani resort I saw all the kids getting autographs from the various characters in their little Disney autograph books. I’ve always felt sort of like a mascot at PAX. I’m not responsible for running the event. I’m out on the floor meeting people and taking pictures and stuff. I am very much like Mickey Mouse at Disney land. Or maybe one of the Princesses. So I thought what if we had a Penny Arcade autograph book.

When you put it like that - pitting the accrual of illusory accomplishments against the nurture of a being you have produced - it seems pretty crass. I'm sure it seems especially crass to people whose homes aren't infested with these larvae, who may still luxuriate in the luminous ideal of parenting as opposed to its immutable truths, which invariably involve shit and vomit.

DAS RIGHT MOTHAFUCKAS