I wholly standardized my clothing options some indistinct period of time ago - thick black shirts, black shoes, dark jeans. The socks and underwear are black also, so that I can wash my life all at once if needs be. I tend to ensconce commentary regarding my reasons for doing so - or, indeed, any kind of self-assessment - in an impenetrable ironic bulwark. I don't think this makes me a statistical outlier, by any means. I hope you won't be surprised to learn that I'm kind of a dork.

Pin trading at PAX East and PAX Aus has been absolutely insane. Now it’s time to bring the Pinny Arcade madness to Pax Prime and it’s going to be even bigger. We’re launching more than 40 new pins at Prime! That’s a lot of pins so I’m going to break up the announcement into two parts. So today I’m just going to cover the new Penny Arcade related pins. Next week I’ll go over all the new third party pins from companies like Ubisoft, Sony and NCsoft.

Last week I showed you all of the Penny Arcade related Pinny Arcade pins that will be launching at PAX Prime. Now it’s time to show you all the awesome third party pins that will be making their debut at the show. I love the PA pins but my goal with Pinny Arcade was always to make it about games in general. The idea was really to take Disney Pin Trading and apply it to all of gaming. Well I’m happy to say that’s exactly what’s happening now. Check this out, and remember, it’s just the beginning!

Tabletop Games The last of our D&D podcasts went up today setting the stage for our live game at PAX Prime. If you missed it there are seven episodes available over on the WOTC site. Acquisitions Inc. has gained a new intern named Viari played by Patrick Rothfuss. We had a ton of fun playing with Pat, he’s a great role player and really brought a cool character to the table.

Kara burst onto the scene with a succession of handles, which is right and necessary: the first one I knew about was Angel Eyes, which I always assumed was a Steelheart reference but never asked. Her ability to kill men from an elevated position lead to her being dubb'd Orbital Strike, which stuck for awhile. Various groups have formed and dissolved since then, and when she wants to play there's always a spot, but competing against John Rando isn't really her thing these days.

I read Ben's thing about EVE: Valkyrie, and I saw something over at Joystiq about some spitballed VR shit for the Oculus Rift, and it occurred to me that somehow we've never made a comic about the thing. This is after having the Goddamned future strapped to our heads. I was even eaten by a shark at one point! No strip catalogues the event.

Deciding what to play with your leisure time, let alone deciding what to make a comic about, is a non-trivial matter at the moment. Shit's dense. And then a will-o-the-wisp like Hearthstone shoots off into a cave, and you pretty much have to follow it.

I'm working on our new Daughters of the Eyrewood story line.

Perhaps the only thing my father and I ever agreed on was that videogames were pretty cool.

The reviews for Disney Infinity are all over the place. You've got everything from 2 out of 5 to nine out of ten. Even Ben over at the Penny Arcade Report gave a pretty mixed review of it. I think it’s a strange sort of video game and it’s not for everyone. Personally I’m really enjoying it and I’ll tell you why.

We've been playing Splinter Cell: Blacklist, mostly independently but on occasion together, learning just how spectacularly it is possible to fail when attempting to sneak anywhere in tandem.

You might not know this about Penny Arcade because we don’t make a big deal out of it. Every year since 2007 we have given away a ten thousand dollar scholarship to a deserving young person interested in making an impact in the games industry.

We've been playing Payday 2; see if you can tell.

We use the word "betrayal" in the strip, mostly ironically, but there is a little heart-bound ice associated with it. When everyone - and around here, I do mean everyone - has a substantial investment on every investable axis in League of Legends, and then you start engaging in these sunny afternoon trysts with Defense of the Ancients 2, it's like... lips get pursed.

We used to do a lot more Penny Arcade Presents projects, but as the empire grew it got tougher to fit them in. But we know a lot of artists, and they also like to eat, so we started putting them in touch with people who needed projects. There's more stuff like this coming - I've got some stuff going with Katie Rice (from Strip Search) that's gonna be hot. But Kris' strip about Fetch came first, and Fetch is really great, so let's start there. You should grab it; it won't cost you nothin'. That goes for the strip and the game both.