This is going to be a frail, sickly little update, but it's worth it.

It’s Friday and there is a new installment of Love and Hate available. We couldn’t find Batjew (sometimes he just wanders off) this week so Kara is pulling double duty. I think she did an admirable job of filling his psychotic shoes.

Today's comic concerns Eternal Darkness for the Cube, which appears to have stolen the hearts of the review industry. Gabe's spoken about the game a couple times already, so I might not need to.

I like the new guy we've got here - that is to say, Father Ward - a lot. I would never presume to tell you that Penny Arcade had scaled the sheer rock face of visual storytelling and returned to earth with wisdom for mankind. But I do think a strip like this one shows how we might have done something differently earlier in the site's history, and for some reason it is striking me as interesting at the moment.

Okay people, I have an important job for you today. One of our very own has made it all the way to the finals in the competition to become a Nintendo street team member. This young man’s name is Brian McGee and you can find him on the Seattle page along with the rest of the finalists for this fair city. Brian is a long time PA fan and many of you probably know him from the chat rooms and forums. I would like to ask that you all head over there and give our man Brian a couple votes.

As regards our newest strip, Harry Knowles is sort of an interesting phenomenon quite aside from his extraordinarily popular (not to mention populous) website. When we disagree with him on a movie, we breathe a sign of relief - it saves us the trouble of coming up with new opinions. When we do agree with him, it's gotten to the point where we feel vaguely uncomfortable about that, because no-one likes to share ideological space with known retards. We rather enjoyed Minority Report. He's not crazy about it. There's just something comforting about that.

Well I started out looking at news posts about Minority Report and through the magic of the internet, three hours later I’m looking at Scientology websites. It’s just about 1:00 am now and I am hooked on this site. I have watched a bunch of the videos this guy has to offer and they are fucking great. Be sure and check out the one were they actually send church members out to picket this dudes house.

Eternal Darkness continues to rock the body that rocks the party.

A selection of sizzling links.

I am of the opinion that Neverwinter Nights is something of a big deal, so if you don't want to read about Neverwinter Nights, you're going to have to go somewhere else. We do have a new strip as well, but it's also about Neverwinter Nights, if only tangentially.

Penny Arcade cult member Fatrick is setting up the con this year. Here is the latest word from him about how it’s gonna go down:

I was able to get my hands on an early copy of Nintendo's new horror game for the cube, Eternal Darkness yesterday. I am only about five hours into it but I wanted to give you all some quick impressions of the game so far since I know many of you have been waiting for this title for a while.

A few people have been telling me they can't access the site, and it was all pretty funny until I couldn't get in there to put up the new strip. We had everything all lined up to work the Neverwinter angle today, but then we started talking about freshwater lobsters. See, Gabe ordered some "cap kits" (I have no idea) from Louisiana, which is so far away I can't be sure if it's real or not, but anyhow it got me thinking about these crawdad things, which are also called crayfish, and are sometimes called crawfish, also (on occasion) referred to as mudbugs. In fact, I think that any word currently in circulation might also mean "crawdad."

I have always been interested in Japan. I don't think you can play videogames and not imagine yourself someday making a pilgrimage to that most holy of island nations. I was never weird about it though. I'm not one of those guys who sits around all day and draws pictures of sad girls with robot shit in their hair. The whole place just seems very magical to me. So when I play a game like Zettai Zetsumei Toshi it's almost like a little mini vacation. The same thing happened when we played Shenmue. These games have you moving through a relatively modern day Japan in all its bizarre glory. You get to see convenience stores and parks and whatnot. It's all so strange and cool. Half of the fun for me in a game like Zettai is just seeing Japan and imagining what it must be like to live there. I wonder if Japanese kids are playing Grand Theft Auto three and imaging what it must be like to live in the US. Hmmmm.

Although I was hot for the Land of the Rising Fun concept, I've definitely thought of it as a Gabe thing. An excuse to make his Neo fetish a more demonstrable facet of the site, perhaps. Maybe it is an attempt to kill me dead by writing an entire article without using a single comma. Fair enough. Really, anything that keeps him off the street and out of the public eye meets with my most vigorous applause.

After Wednesday's Wonder Twins adventures, we thought we'd do more comics that would be incomprehensible to half our readers. Evidence of the phenomenon seen in today's strip - and I don't mean the phenomenon where Gabe implies I might be a girl - is ubiquitous, unless you don't watch movies or read comics or play with toys or see anything at all ever. It was the new He-Man in particular that started our conversation about it, but there's another big Transformers push as well, along with other stuff I'm sure. I don't even have to look, I know it's there. For everything else we used to like, it's only a matter of time. It's a shame that their vile (but welcome!) machinations are limited only to toys and other merchandise, as it might be nice to recoup my optimism and potential while they're fucking around in the eighties. I mean, if they are taking requests, Marie from Bible Camp was pretty rad. Just see what you can do, I guess.