By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
This has been my doom from the very beginning, all my life. Most of the words I know I got from books, which I thought were my friends, but they don’t necessarily have pronunciation keys and also the English language is a kaleidoscopic whorehouse.

It won’t surprise you to learn that my stunted, hairless translucence was borne of a largely solitary childhood that involved me learning words alone, and then saying them to myself, without the civilizing benefit of the social mirror. What follows is a brief list of these infractions.

rappel - RAPple

vagina - VaGEEna

melee - Mealy

Gabriel - Grob Grob

Indeed, I was talking to him about Mealy specifically, and I was like, “Yeah, but that’s one that everybody gets wrong.” And he was like, “No, they don’t” and then he was like, “Why would you say that? To make yourself feel better?” and I was like “Yes, you got me. I’m a human being. I knew you would find me out eventually.”

Anyway, I pronounce Blastoise in a super cool, cultured way that summons boys directly to the yard. And women are drawn to it, like moths to a… to, like, a… carefully manicured, but ultimately false mispronunciation…?
Anyway. Imagine my pleasure when, in an effort to make the my last hour of consciousness useful, I logged on to World of Tanks on Xbox One and saw Kiko on there, also playing World of Tanks</a>. I’d been trying to set it up without success for days, and then when I stopped trying to be a successful, competent person, I got what I wanted automatically. When I get home, I’m going to put some flour and eggs out on the counter somewhere, just pile them up, and have cake for <i>breakfast because that’s apparently how it fucking works.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
The full schedule for all your strategic planning needs can be found here. Of course, you can also grab the official Guidebook app for Android or iOS. You can even access a Web version. I don’t have a position on which one is the right one. I respect your decision.

I am also here to announce something new for the show: The PAX Arena! This “PAX Arena” can take different shapes at different shows, but here’s what it means this time: it’s at the famous Paramount Theatre, it’s 2v2 Rocket League, Daily Tournaments, tons of spectator seating, and the prize bangs like a brick in a dryer.
PAX Arena

- Daily 64 team 2v2 Rocket League tourney. Single Elimination. PS4.

- Held at the Paramount Theatre

- Friday, Saturday, Sunday

- Semis and Finals Livestreamed on Twitch.tv on the PAX Channel 1, every day, starting at 5:30p

- Each day the winning team will walk away with two custom Rocket League / PAX PS4s (no repeat winners though)

- If you don’t have a partner, we’re sure we can pair you up on site.

SCHEDULE:

- 10 AM - Noon, Registration

- Noon - 4:45p, Opening Rounds

- 5:30p - 8:30p, Semis and Finals

And here’s a shot of the PS4’s that you can win at this thing, customized expertly by Colorware off Gavin’s rad polygonal theme for this year’s shows.



I said God damn!

(CW)TB

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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
If you have a dream in your heart, and that dream is to enforce at PAX Australia. Then I hope you fill out and turn in your application today by midnight Melbourne time. If you are not sure what Melbourne time is I have a simple trick to figure it out. Look at the current time and then just add three kangaroos!

so simple.

-Gabe out

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
I’m not worried about Star Wars Overload in the slightest. I guess this is a problem for some people. I want to replace one or more of my limbs with sentient, crystallized Star Wars. Any Fucking Hennig is making a Star Wars game? I’ll take two. And you might think that such a position represents enthusiasm, and perhaps it does, but enthusiasm is a spectrum and there is apparently room on this diagram to the right of me.

There are Two PAXes between now and when the movie launches, and a PAX is sort of like a lock, or what a lock would be, but for time; I can’t see past them at all. But if I survive both of these, I think I would like to celebrate it by watching this movie.
I wrapped The Witcher 3 last night at just over sixty hours, which - as an index of that game’s buxom fullness - is basically no time at all. There will be people who claim I have eaten half of it, and thrown the rest of it away. I can see that. I didn’t beat it because I wanted to, I beat it so I could reclaim the processes I had dedicated to it. I was obsessed with it before it came out. I have to put it down. Well, until the DLC.
Something weird happens in The Witcher 3 when you progress the main quest to the endgame. I have played lots of “open world” games that didn’t feel like real places, or felt like parodies of places, which I would say is conceptually distinct. This place feels like itself. And even side content, which generally feels algorithmic in games like this, is something a real person gave a shit about and you can tell. For forty or fifty hours I felt like I was watching another world through a palantír.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
I have never been this excited to announce a new round of pins! So I’m just going to get right to it!




<click for the big version>

——PARTNER PINS——

Pit People Pins [The Behemoth]

Available at The Behemoth Booth #3004

Portal 2 Pins [We Love Fine]

Available at the Valve Store in the We Love Fine Booth #7411

Banner Saga Pins [Versus Evil]

Available at the Versus Evil Booth #6608

Rage of Demons Pin [WotC]

Available to all attendees of the Acquisitions Incorporated Panel or at the Wizards of the Coast Booth #1642

Gideon Pin [WotC]

Available on the Magic the Gathering Prize Wall as well as the Battle for Zendiker event on Saturday in the Annex. It will also be available at the PAX twitch panel and various social media opportunities.

Double Fine Logo and Raz Pins [Double Fine]

Available at the Double Fine Booth #117

Vault Boy and Doom Revenant Pins [Bethesda]

Available at the Bethesda Booth #2030

Co-Optional Podcast and Seattle Polaris Grand Prix Pins [Maker]

Available at the Maker Booth #3835

Minecraft Diamond Block Pin [Thinkgeek]

Available at the Thinkgeek Booth #SKY9

Kappa Pin [Twitch]

-Be one of the first 200 guests in line for Twitch Town Hall panel Friday, August 25,

4-5PM at the Streaming Theater.

-The first 50 people to play H1Z1 in the HP Omen gaming arena will walk away with one Kappa pin everyday at Twitch booth #3317.

-Follow us on Twitter to find out which Twitch staff member is playing treasure goblin and hoarding a bag of pins to give away. They’ll be on the show floor daily at 12PM and 4PM. Don’t forget the secret phrase!

Gigantic Tyto Pin [Motiga]

Available at the Motiga Booth #3827
</click>
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
How HBO has remained a thing of value from cable to VHS through the digital age is a topic worth investigating. By, like, a smart person. I’m not gonna do that.

I sure as shit never had HBO. In the same way that paying for Cable is starting to seem kinda of weird, there was a period before where paying for Cable was weird. A friend who had HBO and could record shows was worth their weight in gold, and it was worth putting up with a lot, even if they only liked hockey and hockey was the only acceptable topic of conversation. There are also hockey cards! Didn’t know about those. Having HBO and not having VHS (or, you know, some other mutant) was like having access to a continuously operating content factory with a gigantic hole at the end of the conveyor belt. HBO is now known primarily for globulous teats, though it must be said that these teats may be from any time period, so there’s sort of an educational thing happening there. But Jim Henson dropped some legendary children’s shit on there back in the day, I remember it well, because parents would leave you in front of one of these shows and then come back to collect you, and in the intervening period the content had become something very, very different.
In any case, teaching kids which one is “four” and what a square is has sorta been mined out. I think it’s time to teach our youth about malevolent oligarchs and their troubling meditations on impermanence or whatever.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Writing about depression isn’t like dancing about architecture, as the saying goes; it’s more like dancing about dancing inside a hologram derived from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Two people being depressed have as much in common as any other two people. We’ve spoken on a semi-regular basis about this creature, hunched in the corner, sussurating its observations. Gabriel and I entertain devils, but they aren’t the same devils. The devils don’t even like each other. Even our coping strategies for this shit are antisocial.

It’s one of the things that complicates the topic a lot. When I read writing about depression, it never seems true. I can already feel my teeth set against the piece of theoretical writing I have just described. There’s this bizarre competitive aspect to it, like I’m trying to find out if a person really likes Star Trek by interrogating them about the sixth season of Deep Space Nine.
Throwing your hat into that ring, as Will O’Neill has done with Actual Sunlight, is something I gotta recognize. I want to send him a mail of support. But I don’t know, man. If you suffer from depression, maybe releasing a game on the Vita isn’t the best idea…?
I finally had a chance to try out Card Hunter in co-op last night. It was late when Mike Fehlauer was able to get online, materializing there as Zarathustran - a venerable, I would say High School era moniker by its construction. It was so late enough so that memories of it were filed in a haphazard jumble, such that I am constantly remembering that it happened, and I am perpetually pleased by it. A version of Card Hunter has just hit the iPad, with a host of customizations and philosophical distinctions, so of course I’ve decided to double down on the more ancient vintage.
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By Gabe from Penny Arcade:
- THING ONE -

I’d like to thank everyone who supported the Automata Kickstarter that just wrapped up. It was a huge success and ended up bringing in $473,494 which I believe will make a pretty fucking bad ass Automata show. I got a text message from my very good friend Scott Kurtz congratulating us on the KS and he said it so well:

“Who gets to do this stuff? It’s amazing. We’re all so lucky.”

That about sums it up for me. Thank you for all of this.

- THING TWO -

Are you watching the new PATV shows we’re making? If you haven’t checked them out yet I think you should. Maybe I’m a little biased but I think they are super funny. Today is Wednesday which means we’ve posted a new episode of the DLC Podcast show. I’ll just stick it in right here:



This is our normal podcast but we include video now of me drawing the strip. So you can listen to the writing process while you watch the drawing process. I think that’s pretty cool. On Mondays we post new episodes of the First Fifteen which is just Tycho and I playing the first fifteen minutes of a game. Here’s my favorite one so far:



On Friday’s we post one of our “let’s play” style shows. These are just folks in the office here playing games..usually scary or shitty ones.



-Gabe out

- TOP SECRET THIRD THING -

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Or, by Saturday, because that’s when the deadline is. Submit them here. Or here! Those links are actually the same link.

(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
So, so much going on. Okay. Let’s start.

The Pinny Arcade Pin Trading Bag, with tasteful Orange or Blue accent, has arrived. You could put non-pins in this bag, but why:


As we have established, it is a very versatile bag. But! I have at least one idea about what to put in there. Behold: the new Core Set 2.0 which replaces the old Core Set. Which was apparently 1.0, but we didn’t know that yet. It looks like this. Also, feast your eyes on the new lanyard:


We also have Pin Backs up! Multicolored standard backs or the metal locking ones you have seen the pros use on Discovery Channel’s “Pin Masters” or The Learning Channel’s “Badge Wars.” Check them out here:


Last up, Double Secret boxes are BACK! Each one contains a pair of pins from the entire breadth of the collection, which is very broad indeed.


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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
There’s so much that you could say about “the time magazine cover,” and there is a cottage industry dedicated entirely to this purpose, gripping it firmly and rasping it on a rasper. I’ve seen like one paragraph of the article, and a couple of the images, because it doesn’t exist and isn’t important. It’s a Wild West facade; there is no Saloon here. If I tried to find the real article, I think it would just be a picture of Joel Stein with a sheepish downward gaze, hands in his pockets, saying “Aw, shucks” while wearing whatever the facial equivalent of a smiley emoticon is.

I want to make something very clear, though; when Time extolls my virtues, they’re completely on point and super relevant. In that case the beam is way coherent and arrives in the receptor port without attenuation of any kind.
This is but one of the topics managed so deftly in our incomparable strip. The other one is about Rocket League, which people practice here in the afternoons like… I don’t know what’s it’s like, because I’ve never seen it here. They practice like… like they’re trying to gain or improve a skill.
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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
Uh, I didn’t think I would be writing this post, but something fucking insane is happening on that Kickstarter and we can barely keep up with it.

So! All designers are asleep at this hour, all over the Earth, so if you want to see Robert’s visual stylings on the stretchgoal chart you can do so in his update. That should tell you something by itself: Robert did not have this chart done already because he thought we might not need it. Robert is rarely wrong about things like that. Anyway, what’s up next is a translation/subtitles package for the series that starts with Spanish, French, and German at a minimum. Technically, we already know what Automata is in Spanish thanks to Antonio Banderas, so we’re ahead of the game there. I should be able to handle the Scottish translation on my own.
(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
14 hours to go.

When I posted last time, the Kickstarter had just gone over 400k, and in my head I was thinking, “This is solid. Good job, everybody.” But then I forgot how strange things get when a Kickstarter gets near the end! Thirty-eight thousand dollars later, the exclusive making-of featurette - which Robert believed in, of course, but I never thought possible - now seems like it could be completely possible. I’m routinely surprised when things go well, I’m not really built for it, but we seem to be on the same page - Automata needs to be a real thing. So, thank you. The featurette is (at this moment) only seven thousand dollars away. Robert posted a final round-up at the official site that shows the state of play.

(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
We just crested 400k and change, so thank you very much. 69 hours left, and the next goal is a backer exclusive Behind the Scenes Featurette. What say you? I’d like to see that, too.

(CW)TB

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By Tycho from Penny Arcade:
When I was a child, my mother told me that woolly mammoths weren’t real, and that the devil - or God, I can’t remember - had placed tusks and dinosaur bones or whatever to test the faithful. So now that people are making dice from these things, I don’t know if my mom was wrong, or if Satan is just very committed to the joke.

If you are trying to find me at a PAX, for whatever reason, I mean, that’s up to you, hie ye to the place that dice are sold and we will cross paths eventually. I always liked dice, but the relationship remained platonic until I read about an intersection between dice, game playing, and famine that elevated the objects to near mystical status. Gabriel once wrote about the dice given to us by a soldier who, in the admixture of boredom and terror which is the unique province of that life, did carve dice from the very stones. That is, of course, a good start - though there are other paths, also.
The Automata Kickstarter ends on Monday at 10 AM, and we’re right on the edge (as in, like, a thousand dollars away) from a full 5.1 Surround Sound mix. I just finished the first end-to-end rewrite of the script yesterday, and storyboards are in production now; this shit is moving fast.
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