I'm only testing something here. Don't mind meeeee!

I wanted to make a quick update this morning since I have been kind of quiet on the page recently. I can't even begin to describe how freaking tired I have been at night. We brought all kinds of video game equipment with us with the assumption that the evenings here would be spent gathering shines and dance dancing. I am here to tell you that this could not be further from the truth. Like the other guys above, I can't tell you why sitting on my ass for 10 hours takes such a toll on me physically but it does. We come home each night exhausted. Last night was especially bad as I decided that I would try and draw the comic on Kiko's Mac. Not only was I new to OSX but I had also never seen Photoshop 7.0. So just trying to navigate to the goddamned programs and files I wanted was a bitch. Then when I finally got into PS I couldn't find any of the tools I wanted and the ones I did find seemed to operate in new and unexpected ways. My first attempts at drawing the comic looked more like some excited kindergardner's finger paintings than a comic strip. The entire situation was aggravated by my inability to keep my eyes open for more than a few minutes at a time. In fact when I woke up this morning I was honestly surprised to see a comic strip there at all. I have only the vaguest memories of finishing it last night. It all seemed like some kind of terrible dream.

Just woke up, because two thirds of my body was covered in ants. I've been rubbing my legs and face with honey before I go to bed, which I now realize was ill-conceived. Tonight, I wholly expect these little bastards to pick me up and carry me away, Gulliver style.

We have made a new strip available, and, well, what can I say. We aim to please.

As much as I would like to meander as I promised, my head hurts like hell and I think I'm coming down with something. We'll talk again soon.

New strip. Just to head any questions off at the pass, yes, I am a weirdo.

Jesus Christ, this isn’t the fucking Bataan Death March. It’s just a two day Road Trip to San Diego. I am sorry that you had to purchase the repairs that your car needed anyway in order to make this trip Monkey, but I'm sure you'll be glad you did it when YOUR FUCKING CAR DOESN"T FALL APART ON THE FREEWAY. I personally think that a hundred bucks for gas and maybe eighty bucks for a hotel room split four ways seems quite a bit better than two hundred dollars per person to fly down there. That’s not including the fact that we would have had to pay to ship the two (very heavy) boxes of posters down there along with my tablet. You also cannot have an official Penny Arcade road trip in a GODDAMNED airplane. Now if you two pussies would be so kind as to shut you’re fucking cry holes and put on a happy face, MAYBE we can enjoy the next 22 hours. This is going to be the best road trip ever!

Will someone remind me why we are driving down there? They've got these plane things now that I guess are really cool.

If you're the owner of a modded GameCube, then it seems clear that you have a choice to make. As a game, Gabe will tell you this much, Japanese is really not required to enjoy it. Much of the plot is handled in cut scenes, and these cut scenes are in English, for God's sake. The freaky inhabitants one meets are probably saying something, hinting perhaps at bonus "shines" which are this game's coveted item, but we haven't run aground so much as once in the acquisition of forty such treasures. Of course, we have a crew of five or so when we play it, and someone typically has some startling new plan re: what to "squirt with water" or "crush with our ass." The strip communicates each of our positions on the import issue quite succinctly - really, it's the same position, we just chose to emphasize different words. Where Gabe is concerned, the glass is always half stupid.

Mario Sunshine came on Friday and we are about 12 hours into it now, with 32 Shines. You can read my impressions of the game so far in our Land of the Rising Fun section. You may find some minor spoilers. So those of you with bugs up your asses about that kind of shit might want to avoid it.

A couple items of interest.

Warcraft III is the game of choice around here, as I am sure it is elsewhere, and we lose virtually every time we play online. It's actually sort of a joke, now - asking someone if they want to "lose at Warcraft" is essentially inviting them to play at all - but we don't really mind it. The fact is that we are better at losing than most, we can be defeated more spectacularly and in less time than most, and we can parley our strong chain of early successes into fiery perdition. Like the young man who blames the controller, or the Brenna who blames the Dance Dance pad, we carry on the rich tradition of blaming the mechanism for our own ineptitude. As I said, it's no big deal. When you're as good at losing as we are, you're really a a part of the winning team anyhow, working together with your captor to ensure that his stay in your base is a pleasant one - and ensuring repeat business from his ravening and rapacious horde. How do we do it? It's easy.

It’s getting to the point were a guy can’t post a venomous one sided diatribe regarding a popular piece of consumer electronics on the front page of a community web site visited by nearly 70,000 people a day, without getting buried in hate mail. What a pain in the ass.

Jesus Herman Christ. Have you seen the latest screen shots at Gamespot for Panzer Dragoon Orta? You all know that I don't give two shits about the X-Box. Just when I start to think that maybe I should cut them some slack I read crap like this:

Before I get underway, I want to make something perfectly clear: The dreams one has after playing Dance Dance Revolution, Eternal Darkness, and Warcraft III in rapid succession are beyond harrowing. I thought I was losing my fucking mind.

If, unlike Gabe, you find discussions of your liberty invigorating, you might want to hit this thread over at Ars Technica. I've made it clear that I'm not a forum man by and large, but I'm a frequent lurker over at Ars.