Top Spin is pretty great, I don't know if you've played it. Gabriel tells me that - outside the inevitable domestic arguments - it's also highly amusing online. Two things about it you need to know, really.

One, the game really takes an unbelievably long time to load a level. Hyperbole about load times literally began our comic, so I need to distinguish the load times I'm talking about now from load times I might make a joke about. With Sin, they put a patch out right after our comic that resolved it. Load times in Top Spin, they'll always be bad, they aren't getting any better. How bad are they? From the moment you start to think "Damn, this is taking a while" there's still enough time to build an entire car. Once you're done, take it out for a spin. You've still got time.

Two, we went to high school with one of the selectable characters in the game, Jan-Michael Gambill. This is actually pretty weird. Sports Star was probably never in the cards for me, you know? It's not something I ever really wanted to do. Sports are virtually the polar opposite of my hobby, complete physical awareness compared to the active dismissal of it. But when you see somebody you used to know beat John Salmon and Herb Encrusted (I just made those up, I don't think they're tennis players. Also, I'm kind of hungry) you think, well, I was in the same physical place that person was and perhaps it could have been me instead. This doesn't make sense, I know. Life isn't some kind of cakewalk where the music stops and then they take the person on square 23 away to be a professional tennis player.

I don't really have any complaints about how things are going, at least, no legitimate complaints. I sometimes wish it were feasible to own a manatee. You make your peace with things like the manatee issue and you move on. But man, there is something about success in others that just kills a person.

(CW)TB out.

the waiting could crush my heart