This newspost delay was brought to you by AT&T's sterling Cable Internet service.

We were not especially struck by any of the news out there, at least, not in a comic way, so we took advantage of that fact and decided to do whatever we wanted. Technically we do whatever we want whether or not we have an excuse to, but it rarely reaches this threshold of elaboration when we're just messing around. Also, apparently the Japanese stuff at the top actually says what it is supposed to - so obviously, we had nothing to do with it. The strange characters that make up Japanese fill me with a vague unease. No, that's all Kiko, who apparently has some faculty with it. And he's not Japanese, either, that's the thing. In fact, if there is a name less Japanese than Francisco Villasenor I would be surprised to see it.

One piece of news did have a certain flavor, but at this point we were already done with the comic so it didn't have a chance to germinate. Courtesy of The Magicbox (compulsory daily reading) we have shots of the console specific characters for each version of Soul Calibur II. If you didn't already know, just go look and be overcome with emotion. By all available information, it sounds like we're in for the same luxurious treatment Namco has always given home conversions of this series. Soul Calibur for the DC remains a top contender in virtually every scoreable category, even categories you make up on the spot, like "Best, uh... Spelunking." The only thing you could fault it for, really, was that it did not include the exhilarating weapon collection of its prior iteration - and it's back for Soul Calibur II. Come to think of it, I've never even seen Soul Calibur II at a Seattle arcade, or anywhere else for that matter, so it seems likely that my first experience will be with the lavish home version on the console of my choice.

I started using ICQ again for some reason, I hadn't used it in maybe two years, and all these people I used to talk to apparently never pruned me from their lists. It's like opening a time capsule every time I connect to it, I don't know who half these people are, and I don't have the logs from back then but apparently I logged off in the middle of a conversation. I was talking to Soup last night, I guess he's made a dark pact with continuity of all things. People change, you know? I had a friend back in the day named Brad who ran a humor site called Lowpass.net, he was written up in Wired for promoting it via spoofed Eminem tracks. It turns out he's still alive, and when he's not maintaining his sites Strip Creator or In4mador he puts out some really catchy songs. You see, he's kind of a renaissance dork.

I wanted to thank Nexon for sponsoring Penny Arcade this month, they just moved from the front page to the strip page. Shattered Galaxy 1.5 has a really interesting take on Real-Time Strategy, and it's been doing things since version 1.0 that other games in the genre would do well to learn from. It has a free trial, and it only costs ten bucks to upgrade the demo to retail status if you find yourself hooked. Give it a try, see if it does it for you.

(CW)TB out.

all twisted up in wires