People tend to either really like PA or absolutely hate it. I've met very few people who are "on the fence" about what we do here. We're really just lucky that enough people enjoy fruit fuckers and deep crows to let us make a living off this. We always figured that this phenomenon would translate over to the game when review scores started to hit. The first few numbers are just now coming out and it looks like we were right.

This probably happens to everybody. Next time we're late for a date, I think we need to steal a vehicle that doesn't sport such a large, almost inescapable grill.

The live stream will be starting in 10 to 15 minutes.

Just a quick reminder that May 7th is the deadline for submitting your independent game to the PAX 10. Once we've got all the submissions we'll have our panel of 50 industry experts digest them until we're left with 10 stand out titles. Those ten will then be showcased at PAX 2008. For all the details hit the PAX 10 site located here.

I discovered yesterday that lunch is not a meal, as I had originally understood, but is in fact a form of currency.

Live stream starting up in about 10min. I'll record today's in case you can't catch the live show.

Grand Theft Auto - like Gran Turismo - is a game that we have a difficult time integrating into our consciousness. Gran Turismo got this way by being an uncompromising simulation of something we don't care about, a blisteringly high-resolution image of a ketchup packet or a strip of bark. Ketchup fans and bark enthusiasts are going nuts, they'll pay forty dollars for part of the image. I played the second one a million years ago, earned enough money to wash my virtual car, and then quit the series forever.

A white box with a black skid mark appeared at the office on Wednesday, sharp with the ozone bite of innumerable blue sparks. I could go on like this for awhile, as you are probably quite aware. We could explore a whole range of olfactory stimuli. Let me slice through it: Playing the new Mario Kart online is a narcotic experience. We passed this Goddamned wheel around for an hour, shouting and laughing, watching a globe whirl on the screen to show us which wicked nations harbored our hated foes.

Readers asked that Gabriel construct a Twitter to let them know when he was starting up a new broadcast, and in the course of this he was exposed to the sort of thing that Twitter is often used for: identifying which condiment you have recently applied. We considered a universe where my cohort was addicted to Twitter's method of consciousness collection, and were horrified by the result.

I'll be turning on the live stream here in a couple minutes. If you'd like to watch me draw tomorrow's comic you can tune in here.

Everyone seems to like the PA TV idea. I still have some bugs to work out regarding the lag on my end but I have some ideas to fix that. Also the program doesn't seem to stream correctly on the PA page but it does work on the actual Ustream page. I'm not sure about that one yet but I'll do some research.

Review copies of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon arrived in the mail last Friday, but you needn't fear: it won't enslave the entire site as other franchise excursions have in the past. The games themselves (delivered in pairs, as is their mercenary way) conform to a roguelike + munchkins paradigm that we should be able to steel ourselves against. I suppose it should be noted that "steel" is one of the seventeen elemental types of Pokémon.

**Okay, the show is over and I think it went really well. I recorded this episode so if you could not watch it live you can see the entire thing here.

I'll be starting the comic at about 1:30 PST. I'm going to test out the record feature this time so I should be able to save the entire thing if you can't log on for the live stream. Sometimes the page I set up doesn't seem to stream correctly. If it's not working for you try the Ustream site for the show located here.

I finally ordered my figure print yesterday. When Tycho got me the print for Christmas I wasn't playing anymore and had actually been clean just over a year. I decided that I'd just do some battlegrounds with Dudefella to finish off his set of PvP gear then I'd print him and be done. Of course it didn't work that way. Tycho, Kiko and Kara all ended up coming back to the game with me. Tycho had left his character someplace around level 40 and so in order to play with him the rest of us played our alts. A couple more friends joined us and pretty soon we had a very dedicated crew of about 8 people playing. My druid ended up filling the role of main healer as we worked our way through all the five man content that most of us had never seen before. I really enjoyed my new job and spent a lot of time learning the intricacies of Tree of Life healing (stack + healing and spam lifebloom). Just this week I added a fourth purple to my collection of pretty decent gear. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal but Dudefella was my only other character with a purple and he only had one. This is easily the best geared character I've ever had and for a guild of 9 people that doesn't do anything but five man's I think I'm looking pretty sweet.