I spent a good chunk of yesterday with Destiny. It’s definitely got some solid RPG hooks. The desire to go back in for one more mission is strong. Someone during my Twitch stream yesterday asked if it lived up to the hype and the honest answer is “no I don’t think so.” but to be fair what game could? I’ve been playing games a long time and I cannot remember a game with this much hype surrounding it. It is not the second coming of Christ. It’s just Halo by way of Phantasy Star Online and that’s pretty cool.

We refunded a few 3-Day passes for the show, which means that they're now available for purchase. A few other varietals are also available.

Earlier iterations of ourselves spent a lot of time worrying about this or that webcomic or the scenesterism which was (and perhaps continues to be) whatever the fuck it is. This sort of thing always made Robert exceedingly angry. "I don't care about that," he would say. "That's not where it's going." He said that if we ever felt like worrying about something that was actually substantial, just for a change of pace, we could worry about Rooster Teeth. He said this like ten years ago, and if you are looking at the actual world, Robert probably had it right.

I don't get many opportunities to play games at PAX. I'm not complaining about it, believe me. But I'm not gonna cut lines, or whatever. I lucked out once at the Dreadnought booth, though, because I had watched it in stunned silence for so long that the place I was standing had become the head of the line. No shit, that is a real thing. Pay attention to this game.

I guess I’m technically a game designer now since I am designing Thornwatch. It still felt very strange to be invited to speak on a panel at PAX Dev though. I’ve always avoided the show because the entire point of PAX Dev is to give developers a space to speak freely without fans and media around. We built a treehouse for them and I didn’t want to spoil that.

You might wonder what I do after PAX to unwind. Well the answer is I play games. After this show I took the next two days off. Yesterday was devoted to League of Legends. With only a handful of short breaks to eat food and interact with my family I played LoL from 10am to midnight. I drank soda and played games with my friends all damn day and it was the best.

I did a panel at PAX Prime with Mike Selinker last week. We talked about Thornwatch, where the game is now, how it got here and then I broke down some of the core mechanics. You can watch the entire thing on Twitch right here. If you have not been able to play it, this is the most complete look at the game and how it plays. Let me know what you think!

Being a public person is a strange business, particularly when you have spent the first part of your life being taught time and time again that you belong nowhere. I would not trade it for anything, of course, and I was a spectacularly "interesting" employee, so I'm not certain there's really an alternative for me anymore.

This year’s PAX Prime was the 17th PAX, which is pretty hard for me to believe. It also marks 10 years of PAX Prime here in Seattle. I can still remember my wife Kara, pregnant with Gabe during the very first PAX at the Meydenbauer convention center. He started 4th grade yesterday and will turn 10 years old on September 9th. It all happened so terrifyingly fast.

Making an update while PAX is ongoing still feels pretty weird. I mean, if you worked at a gaming news site, I guess this would be, like, your whole show. I suppose the reality is that everyone is updating constantly about the show, and everything else, professionally or otherwise. "Writing" and "Living" are two distinct gears for me. It's a big lever and it's hard to pull.

Gabriel is constantly impressing himself with what he calls his thinkin's, which are like little caltrops for the brain. He once posited that while it was technically true that each cock exists within its own "timeline," under certain rare conditions it would be possible for a cock to block itself.

I had assumed, largely because I was directly told, that the conglomeration known as Goo-Tube was purchasing Twitch. It certainly seemed to map out, what with Twitch cracking down on copyright in exactly the same way YouTube had. But that's apparently just hedge trimming now, work that must be done in advance of acquisition by any party. Amazon picked them up. On accident?

The most recent cinematic trailer for League of Legends got me thinking about the game again. I’ve played a lot of it over the years but I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten this into the strategy of it. I’ve always liked it, but I’m actually trying not to suck at it now and that’s new for me. I’ve been watching the LCS matches and I’m surprised just how much I enjoy watching other people play a video game.

We brought it back up for awhile so people could harvest their favorite stuff off of there, but we're gonna flip the big switch here in a couple days. I have a lot of favorites I'll be copying and then subsequently pasting: it was a great site, and a lot of people worked to make it so.

As you can see by Mike's posts, Thornwatch development continues! While the game is not quite ready for large-scale demoing, we will be conducting a limited playtest at PAX Prime 2014. Playtesters will be drawn from the Thornwatch email list: we'll mail that list Tuesday with a questionnaire (the most important question being, "Do you have a PAX badge"), and randomly select playtesters from qualified respondents on Wednesday.

Brian said people wanted to know what we were bringing to the show, so I got the banner image from Kiko. You can click it, and it will become larger as a result.