I'm on my way to the Penny Arcade Expo (www.penny-arcade.com) for three days of nerdtacular fun!

This is my first time going to PAX. I'm so excited!

Well, here he is.

I always said I wasn't going to be one of those "unboxing" people, but that's before Apple started becoming so awesome.

Plus, it's a fun way to break up the working day.

The iPad is a great little device. I was worried I would have nothing to use it for, and yet in less than a day I've read Moby Dick on it on the bus home from work, looked up new movies and watched trailers with my wife on the couch while watching TV after dinner, streamed video from my Media Center using Air Video before I went to bed, and watched professional Starcraft (MSL Round of 8!) games on it while getting ready for work in the morning.

I think it's part of my life now.

Our hero meets a new friend!

It looks like we aren't in Kansas anymore, Toto....

This is the second strip (I always start counting at zero!) of the Star Gamer series.

This is the logo for my new comic strip, "The Star Gamer".

This is a new comic strip I am developing. Stay tuned!

In this episode, we get scared of the wind and venture inside Wick's Cafe, only to find ourselves face to face with eating and drinking noises, light reggae, and... ourselves.

We talk a little bit about creating art in 2D and 3D, the current state of smartphones, and then get into the history and future of programming, a subject we know virtually nothing about.

Links from the show:

Jeremy's new "Star Gamer" 2D comic, made on a Bamboo tablet:

http://www.jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/446

Malcom Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" book Outliers:

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html

Coders at Work - the most entertaining book about programming you'll ever read:

http://www.codersatwork.com/

The Dunning-Kruger effect, where you are too incompetent to know you are incompetent (maybe that's us?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

My long-awaited History of the Amiga Part 8 article is up on Ars Technica:

The Amiga was born a game machine, but it entered a world where the video game industry was well-established and changing rapidly. Long gone were the days where a lone coder would stay up all night in his basement for six weeks and bang out a hit for the Atari 2600. Even the younger and smaller computer game industry had moved far beyond Roberta Williams putting floppy disks into ziplock bags and answering phone calls from players in her kitchen. The success of the Commodore 64 (and on the other side of the pond, the Sinclair Spectrum) meant that more money was available for computer game development, and it was a good thing too, as the more powerful 16-bit machines were starting to seriously test the limits of a one-man development team.

For the first time, specialized careers were starting to emerge in game development. The Amiga's rich, 4096-color palette demanded people who were skilled artistically to create the sprites and backgrounds. The four-channel sampled sound chip cried out for musicians to make it sing. The larger size and complexity of the games required that someone other than the programmers be asked to test the games before they were released. Finally, new management positions were needed to oversee the work of these creative people.

Read the full article here:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/06/shadow-of-the-16-bit-beast-an...