I think it’s worth mentioning that Penny Arcade turned 19 years old on Saturday. All this started on November 18th 1998 which seems like ancient history at this point. I can still remember sitting in a chinese restaurant in Spokane with Kara and Jerry as he and I wrote that very first strip. Penny Arcade has changed a lot over the years but I have to say I have never been happier to go to work than in the last year or so. I’m not sure how many people can say that after working at a job for nearly 20 years but I feel incredibly fortunate that I get to do this every day.

Gabe had grabbed some kind of a Starter Pack for a game called Skyforge, he didn't know much about it but something about it had made him curious. He's been using the Xbox One X with some regularity, maybe it's that. If you have a new piece of hardware you're always trying to test it out.

I was never going to buy Star Wars: Battlefront II. First, the compliment: I honestly can't believe the graphics. In an era where good graphics are commonplace Battlefront has always been doing something nobody else was: a photorealistic take on the worlds and characters of the franchise. It's a stunning technical achievement which frosts a cake that I am not especially fond of.

Gabe wanted to know what I'd been playing lately, and I couldn't think of anything except Elder Scrolls: Legends. That's because I was formulating the query incorrectly. I was looking for memories where visual field was equal to computer desk, or perhaps vf=television, and not coming up with a whole lot. Then I thought about the Switch, and all the missing time spooled out. Picross. Odyssey. Has Been. Super Beat Sports with Ronia, because we gotta get those hats.

I would be pretty embarrassed if I tried to electroplate my populist credentials by railing against microtransactions, but then every time there's a new set of skins from one of the same fucking boxes I breathlessly worshipped it or did a gallery.

Working a sense of a larger world into single player experiences is always something I'm keen on, even if the ways it tends to happen fit into some very specific boxes. I still want to see it at least considered because eventually it's going to lead to something rad. Gabriel was telling me about how Assassin's Creed: Origins handles it and then we made a strip! This happens a lot, I would say. Twenty years, give or take.

The Xbox One did not win me over this console generation. I’ve said a lot of bad things about the console since it came out, although suggesting that playing an Xbox One during pregnancy is dangerous to the fetus, might be the worst. I’ve made no secret about the fact that I play all my games on the PS4, that I’ve really enjoyed the PS4 Pro and that I’ve actually outfitted my entire family with Playstations so that we can all play together. A few years earlier I was a huge Xbox 360 fan and refused to even touch a PS3 controller. I was ready to love the Xbox One but it ended up being a big clunky device that couldn’t tell if it wanted to be my cable box or my game system. It felt slow and unfriendly to use and I don’t think I played it more than a handful of times. It’s a testament to his character that in spite of all this, Major Nelson still wanted me to have an Xbox One X a few days before release. It has honestly been years since I even thought about the Xbox but I decided to see what they had done since I left and what the new hardware had to offer. Just to be 100% clear, this was a free review version of the hardware given to me by MS. It was the same package they sent out to the big review sites from what I understand.

Monsieur Gabrille got home from Aus sooner than I did; he'd beaten Super Mario Odyssey by the time I'd even started it. I had a fantasy that I'd begin my journey on the way home, but I had Picross on there, and… I had Picross on there. If you have the sickness, I needn't say more. And if you don't, you might not see how a grid with some numbers by it could take precedence over a new Mario game.

He really spoke these words and then immediately started laughing. "That's probably a strip," he said.

One of the questions I heard a lot about PAX Unplugged was, "will Unplugged have its own pins?" and the answer of course is "shit yeah!"

Here's the comic.

Here's the comic Kris and I put together for the Make A Strip panel on Saturday, which in every way that tracks with my normal life was actually sometime Friday. I couldn't tell you when. I'm getting on a plane here in a second that - once they close the doors on me - is gonna fly for a real, real long time.

I woke up at five A.M. terrified that I had not put up the post, even though I thought I had done the math correctly about when the post needed to be executed and have been thinking about it constantly for two days. It's not a joke! Next you're gonna tell me it's Friday where you live. What? That's true?!?

I started taking Lexapro almost exactly 10 years ago and it has truly changed my life. Before medication I was dealing with crippling anxiety. I went back and found my post from 2008 where I tried to explain what chronic anxiety is like. I know it’s hard for folks who don’t have it to really understand. The things I worry/obsess about are trivial to most people. My wife might be concerned about something for a few minutes and then move on with her day but I would lose weeks to what is essentially a constant state of panic.

We rolled around and laughed the whole time we were writing these, just like old times, secure in the knowledge that we were probably the only ones that would.

Because of how the gears of the universe catch, pause, and clang, Morak is heading down to Australia on a solo flight. And, because we aren't allowed to overlap in any respect, this is an untenable, ghost-ridden scenario for him while it's a magic carpet ride for me.