Internet just came back at the office, which allowed me to see a typographical error that has apparently been festering up there all day.  I am suffering retroactively.

There was a point at which Gabriel and I decided we would be Mixed Martial Arts enthusiasts for some reason, and I don't recall exactly why. Fascination with "combat systems" is not out of the ordinary for boys of any age; and speaking personally, any new conceptual space is loaded with jargon, sparkling in rich seams, and fighting is particularly dense in this regard. I have an urge to begin simply listing the radical, mind-expanding lexicon of this space, but I wont.  Krav Maga! Okay, that one just slipped out. Glaive-Guisarme! I'd better get a new paragraph going, for real. 

When you come across two Gods creating universes from scratch, it can be worthwhile to compare their approaches.

I jumped into a live game of 1 vs. 100 on Friday night and had a really great time. Originally I was just going to jump in and take a look. Then Kara ended up joining me on the couch and before we knew it, two hours had passed. We had a blast and we never even made it into the "mob" much less got chosen as the "one". Playing from the crowd as they call it is still incredibly entertaining. You're still competing for real prizes and watching the action between the one and the mob. Cheering when they choose to battle the mob and booing when they take their money and run. I'm hooked now and plan on catching as many of the live shows as I can. The announcer was great but in my fantasy Microsoft comes to Tycho and I, and asks us to host a version of the game filled with only video game trivia. 

When Gabe told me that he and Kara had taken 1 vs 100 for a spin, enjoying it thoroughly, I asked him if he'd tried Extended Play - the relatively no-frills trivia offering - or a Live Show, which features a more robust ruleset, prizes, and living host who comments directly on the proceedings. He didn't know that was even a thing. He made the time, and came away impressed.

Immediately upon returning to my gloom-wrought domain, I cranked up my 360 and downloaded Battlefield 1943. I'd seen it at New York Comic Con, pulsing in some cluster of kiosks, and its familiarity was a comfort to me. I didn't really understand what it was at first, but it quickly became apparent that they'd made a subset of Battlefield 1942 on Bad Company's Frostbite Engine. I'm fundamentally alright with that. We were in the beta for the inaugural Battlefield title, and enjoyed it thoroughly - what's more, I think that console gamers need Wake Island, even if they don't know what that is. They are missing a critical vitamin, and when exposed to it for the first time, I am certain their bodies will respond.

With this, the fifth and final page, Lookouts comes to a close. Unless it gets optioned or something (!!!), it might be a while until we come back to it. On the other hand, with any luck at all, Automata will drop before the month is out - covering our absence during San Diego Comic-Con. We'd like to thank Becky Dreistadt and Oliver Grigsby once more for their investigation of the nascent Lookouts setting. Getting another take on it has educated us immensely, and I feel like we could really kick the shit out of a Lookouts comic right now. Of course, this scenario assumes we could collaborate with parallel versions of ourselves to complete it - mad doppelgangers, blessedly sequestered in discrete "columns" of space-time.

Guest Lookouts Page Four is now available, peeled hot from the griddle by the perpetually fluxing Dreistadt/Grigsby meta-entity. Their chemically complex state is dangerously unstable - I hope we'll be able to secure the fifth and final page before heretofore uncataloged forces burn, crush, boil, and freeze them simultaneously.

Guest Lookouts continues, with Becky Dreistadt and Oliver Grigsby at the reins. Things are certainly looking bad for our heroes. I'm tense, even though I already know what happens! Apparently they're doing a good job.

And here you go: Page Two of Lookouts, hand-painted by Becky Dreistadt and penned by Oliver Grigsby.  Works of this power and sophistication will run Friday, Monday, and Wednesday, at which point you'll be forced to endure our work once again.

This is something we consider quite often: how massively multiplayer online role-playing games create a vortex of social musts whose wicked gravities are almost impossible to avoid.

Sometimes Robert will come in and ask us to name things, all kinds of things, I assume as a kind of test. Usually this is the kind of exercise that I can really get behind, but in general I would rather name a pair of ancient blades than a "retail outlet," or a "line of organic socks."

The trailer for The Last Airbender materialized yesterday, and there isn't much to see there, but the commentary that surrounds the production has been surging steadily for months.

One of the players in Gabriel's ongoing campaign made the mistake of suggesting they did not feel sufficiently threatened, and they did so in earshot of me, which his entire party will come to regret. They have a game tonight, their last game ever if I have anything to say about it. Disintegrations for everybody. Resurrections impossible, or at the very least undesirable, as these revivified unfortunates could do naught but wail for the remainder of their natural lives, cocooned in a perfect, impenetrable agony.

With a flourish of trumpets, we swing open the doors to the Inner Sanctum of PAX - the hall where the Enforcers dwell.  Would you like to help us keep this thing running?  We're going to need some help with this year's show here on the west coast, and if you're curious about the kind of hallucinations one might see after they've been awake for five days straight, here's a form you can fill out.