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.

Another Necrowombicon update from Fatrick:

I don't really have much to say regarding the whole M$ thing that isn't already covered in the comic strip. I should tell you that if you want to talk to someone about that kind of shit, I am really not your man. I honestly don't care. I am sure it's bad and all but I don't worry about stuff like that because I don't really care about computers that much. The other day Tycho tried to tell me about my digital rights and how something bad is going to happen to them or whatever, but it was really boring so I started thinking about Mario Sunshine.

We've been getting mail imploring us to warn you about Palladium for a couple weeks now, and we would have done it sooner - but then we started playing with toys or something, it's kind of hazy but I think there were toys.

It is time to answerer more poster questions since that is all I get in my e-mail anymore.