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.

Then, when he sent me the strip, the mail had the subject line "vicodin" and the word "vicodin" in the message body with a period after it. Last time I talked to him he admitted that, when he coughs, a spongy grey material not unlike oatmeal is the result. He's in incredible pain is being slowly colonized. But I like this strip, actually. Is there a way I can hurt him, over and over, and take his art on a kind of pharmacological tour? I can figure this out. I have Google.

I have a problem, a bad one, where I only play Nuclear Throne. Well, and League of Legends. Does League of Legends even count as a game anymore? I just realized that I don't even consider it in the continuum. I had to specifically focus on it - it's as though the light bends around it, making it invisible. LoL is what happens when you are making other plans.

This problem started when I got to a mission that most people seem to like a lot in Dragon Age: Inquisition and I don't like at all and legit wonder how it got in there. The mission seems good on paper, and it occasionally pays on its own high self-regard, but eventually it is just obsessed with itself, pawing at its groin with feverish need, and you're just sort of there waiting for it to be done. I got through that mission because I couldn't let the mission beat me but shit was pyrrhic because after sixty hours and then that I had no resolve left to move on. It's still installed, I suppose; perhaps "resolve" is a resource which accrues. And I suppose I'll feel like a failure if I don't, but I'm not the only one who failed here.

So I started playing Nuclear Throne instead. I got it over a year ago and I'm still playing it. It's like a hundred and sixteen megs but it casts a shadow over the entire computer and maybe even my life; it loads instantaneously and it never feels the same. I don't ever read what anyone writes about it, I only play it, so I'm probably repeating the Internet when I say that it is a roguelike except that it is really an action game that ate a roguelike and has added the roguelike's uniqueness to its own. But it offers an arc of play, every time you play it, that is very complete and refined. Which makes playing anything else a decision, which incurs psychic load. And why would you do that? Nuclear Throne is a made-decision, with a bow cinched on top; it is the decision that makes itself.

(CW)TB out.