I’m still working hard on Thornwatch. We have been testing it here in the office every Monday night and it’s really getting good. Just this last week we implemented a character creation process that is working really well. As I’ve said before, each character is made up of a deck of cards. Similar to Pokemon you have a deck of skill cards as well as attacks and powers that rely on those skills. I needed a way to make players feel attached to this deck though and have some idea of how to behave in RP situations. So here’s a breakdown of how our character creation system is working right now.

"Halo Video Time" is a thing that happens, a real thing, and its importance is equal to the game itself. The more prolific "directors" - Gabriel, Kiko, and Robert - will often leave the evening early to go edit their films and get them up on the share. You can still see them on; you know what they're doing.

I thought it was best to ask Brenna for permission on this one, lest she come across it on one of the megatrawls she performs on the archive every few months. I said, "Michael and I want to make a comic about your vagina," a sentence which I believe is unprecedented. After a brief outline, the strip was authorized.

We were on Triangulation yesterday. If you're interested in hearing us talk about how PA got started you can watch a recording of the show right here.

It does strike us as a little odd that humanity's cybernetic knight-errant can just plug his double secret electronic woman into every starving alien hole. It works every time, and when it doesn't work it's because only because you haven't run from hell to breakfast trying to get this mission's alien hoobajoo. I've worked IT, enough to know that standards are porous things. There's usually a site or two out there that always seems to have last year's shit. It seems like Chief would get eventually someplace where he's trying to feed the chip into some polymorphic alloy which can't decide if it wants to be useful console or a rhinoceros, just sort of tapping Cortana on the steel horn or whatever, wondering where it all went wrong.

Halo 4 launched today and it's a fantastic game.Penny Arcade has a long history with Master Chief and so I thought I'd round up a selection of our Halo inspired comics.

We had intended to end season 2 of the Trenches with the current strip. However this ending was not well received by Trenches fans who cited a general lack of closure along with lore contradictions, as well as character and narrative inconsistencies. While we feel that our ending of Trenches season 2 was sufficient, we have decided to release an extended cut consisting of a few more comic strips. These will begin this Thursday and while we do not expect them to satisfy all Trenches fans, they should add value for those that appreciate it.

This is what is known internally as a "form" - internally being Gabriel and I, I doubt it's in wide use elsewhere. This is the "henchman" form, and there are many examples of it in the archive. It's simply too much fun to stretch a comic over this particular frame. It's a demographic with a ton of unrecognized problems.

We have always liked Assassin's Creed, even when you weren't supposed to - even everyone agreed it was a no-no. A huge part of that is that we did not make up a game we thought it was, and then scourge it based on how often it diverged from that fantasy. We play them in stages, where Gabriel gets us through the atmosphere and I typically take over because I want to see the story resolve. I'm not sure which part that is within the astronomy metaphor. Let's say it's the moon.

I know that it's supposed to be out, or out soon, but even even from my thrumming media roost I couldn't tell you with one hundred percent certainty whether or not Windows 8 has actually been released. There isn't a single copy of it installed anywhere in the office, and we're all massive dorks. No doubt I'll come into contact with one of its cilia at some point - Smart Glass, or something - but I don't upgrade software just to upgrade it anymore. Hardware's another story. But all my shit works, finally, and the computer is completely ascendant in my house as a leisure-time vessel.

It seems that my job now is just to post awesome songs created by our readers and based on stuff we make.

This comic is a word for word translation; that's what makes it acceptable for us to reference Human Centipede two years out of phase. Technically speaking, Scott should be in there somewhere - it occurred while we were writing The Trenches. He'd told us about the absolutely vital South Park documentary 6 Days To Air, which is what started us down that path.

When we arrived at Harry Potter world for the first time our little group made a beeline for Hogwarts in an effort to be the first on the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride. I was pulled along with them even though I don’t actually go on many rides. Erika shouted at us not to stop as we ran past Ollivander’s wand shop. None of us had ever been before and so we were all floored by Hogwarts. The line for the ride winds through the castle but it’s so cool that there is a separate line for people who just want to see the castle but not go on the ride. This is what I should have done.

The Harry Potter shit at Universal Studios is off the hook, I am told. It is, among other things, the place where viral wand videos are produced. There is also a "broom ride," which takes place in some kind of projected dome, whose potpourri of stimuli can ask hard questions of your equilibrium. These hard questions can have, as their answer, an eruption of whole milk and Fruit Loop paste with considerable force and range.

I got an email this morning pointing me towards a very cool Reddit thread. It seems Reddit user shmallowfish went ahead and recorded his own interpretation of a comic we made back in 2006. In the Open Mic Night strip Tycho plays a folksy ballad about DLC. Check out this take on it set to the tune of Bastion’s "The Pantheon (Ain't Gonna Catch You)"

It's three bucks for mobile, five bucks for Mac, and here's where you get it: