So I am the big two nine today. I guess I have one more year of youthful indiscretion before old age is upon me. It seems like birthdays are a good time for reflection and so I hope you’ll forgive me if this is a little mushy.

This November will mark eight years of doing Penny Arcade. When we started the comic strip I was 21, single and living in an apartment with Tycho back in Spokane. I was selling computers at circuit city all day and then drawing the comic strip in the middle of the night between marathon sessions of Tribes. We lived off Top Ramen and whatever leftovers my mom would drop off. I never went to college and so I had resigned myself to a career at Circuit City. It wasn’t a terrible job and in fact just before I quit I actually requested the manager training books. I figured I could work my way up in the company to a point where I was making a decent living and then I could do my artwork on the side.

Now eight years later I have a wife and a two year old son. I’ve got a house here in Seattle with a lawn and a slide in the backyard. I work nine to five at the Penny Arcade office drawing the comic, playing games and working on all our millions of extra projects. If you had told me ten years ago that this is what I’d be doing I wouldn’t have believed you. I literally have my dream job during the day and an incredible family to go home to every night. There are a lot of days it just seems too good to be true.

I guess the reason I’m telling you guys this is because it’s all thanks to you. You guys reading the strip and buying the shirts and telling your friends about it for eight years. You’re why I get to do this every day. Thank you seems sort of silly, but it’s all I’ve got.

Also the internets gave me the best birthday present ever today. A video of Lowtax getting the shit beat out of him. Oh intertron, how did you know!?

-Gabe out

Platinum Studios, whose chairman Scott Rosenberg has something of a history in the print comics industry, is now - according to the New York Times - going to dip his tip into the moist world of webcomics. The most savory quotable goes:

"We want to make a statement that it is safe to do this, that people can do this."

Good, because as it stands only rabid weasels are reaping the benefits of digital distribution - it's about time human beings got into the game. It's either a statement of profound naivete or profound hubris. Saying that you're going to make the web a place for comics is like suggesting that you plan to colonize the Earth. If they want to break down the walls that keep artists from publishing online, well, I hope they brought a wall with them, because we don't really have anything like that here. I suppose we could special order.

This definitely has a "gold rush" feeling to it, and it's far from over. There is so much excellent work being done online and then being parceled out for practically nothing that it was only a matter of time before the city slickers caught wind of our potent local sauce. When they - and Platinum may prove more benevolent than the shadow lords in their wake - when they come for your life's work, at least try to negotiate visiting rights.

You have most likely heard that Opera Software is offering their browsito on the Wii, just as they are for the DS. Neither product fills a need for me, as my phone retrieves web pages without complaint, like a faithful hound. I'd heard complaints about the fact that Nintendo was charging for the Wii version of the browser, especially from people who were already feeling singed by forty dollar controllers with twenty dollar attachments. This reaction might be part of the reason they've chosen to offer the product for free until next summer, but I'm not sure it was ever really Nintendo itself charging for it.

Much of the furor was over the fact that "Opera is free for desktops," so charging for it on the console was (like the higher than expected price) more evidence that we were at the behest of a mercenary organization. I can't really speak to a pervasive willingness to wring out the consumer, but I don't think this is a good example: Opera is only free on PCs because charging for it in that space (as they used to do) is howling, abject madness. Browsers be in-built, dog. In-built or free and awesome, which, I mean, wow. I'm glad I don't make alternative browsers.

Opera does charge, though, on platforms where it makes sense or they have an advantage: when the loyal phone I mentioned earlier brings me the page I requested, it does so via Opera Mobile, a product I purchased for twenty-four dollars. I simply prefer it. There was a browser on the phone already, but many of the pages I want to visit detest it, and the miniature version of Mozilla I would have preferred to use - MiniMo - doesn't actually, well, mo. Or whatever the verb would be. I honestly don't know.

It doesn't do it, and maybe that's the important thing.

(CW)TB out.

but wait 'til you meet his accomplices