I'm trying to figure out which rituals are meaningful to me. I did not catalog the year on the site proper, though we did contribute to the aggregated lists of others. I've read a lot of lists that purport to describe the year, but are instead communiques from an alternate universe where Kentucky Route Zero did not win this year and also win permanently in every category. Or maybe I am the one in the alternate universe. Here, let me subtly adjust the atomic weight of hydrogen. Are you picking up on that? How's your hydrogen doing.

As picked by me.

I am especially bad at gifts.

Last year I celebrated New Year's Eve in the bathroom after an especially toxic meal at the Olive Garden. This year it seems I'll spend it in bed thanks to the super virus I've contracted. I went back to the doctor yesterday and this time got four different prescriptions. I took a handful of pills this morning and once this post is done I'll crawl back into bed.

In real life, it was not I but Kara who demanded that he keep the fires of Mt. Doom stoked. But I can be much, much meaner than she can in the strip. Thus was Grabble made to suffer twice.

My kids are always coming home with some exciting new virus they picked up on the playground. This particular one is a real treat that sent me to the emergency room because it felt like I was swallowing shards of glass. Thanks son!

I suggested how it should go in the third panel, but the things I quote in the second panel are what he actually said to give someone that impression.

The principle enunciated in the strip is true, I suspect, for many lives. The solution may be unique. And I don't know how effective such techniques are long-term; one imagines this might get very expensive. And even then, there's no guarantee of success. A man may leer over a Virgin Mai Tai just as easily as he may leer over a hot cocoa.

I hope that if you celebrate Christmas you had a good one. Santa dropped off some cool stuff at my house. I mentioned the Anki DRIVE race set before Christmas and now that we’ve had some time to play with it I can confirm it’s pretty rad.

Aside from pruning and snipping Gabriel's prodigious output as you would a hedge, another task which devolves to me is the maintenance of our growing Library - the compilations of our "works" that will stand, like stone legs, to puzzle the next civilization.

I’m back from my vacation today and feeling pretty great. I spent a week with my family at Aulani which is a Disney resort in Hawaii. It was our second time there and it’s just amazing. We are all huge Disney fans in my family and even though it’s not a theme park, Aulani still delivers an incredible Disney experience. We relaxed in the pools, floated around the lazy river, played on the beach and spent way too much on souvenirs.

After we watched this unboxing video, I think that Gabriel was utterly convinced that he wanted to unbox Anki Drive, if nothing else.

So he didn't get it done. It was me; it was just me.

It's fun to sit on ice.

"Ripped from the headlines" is what we call a strip that actually deals with our own, real shit. Technically speaking, even when they're buried beneath irony and voiced by interlopers, it's still our shit. I suppose it depends on the mix of fact and embroidery of said fact. To mercifully bisect a short story threatening to be a long one, this is about as real as it gets.

We've got some new stuff in the store I wanted to point out.