I always knew that people had misgivings about communists, but I never understood why until I was laid low, ravaged by one of their Red Colds. This is like watching someone's slides from their trip to Agony. There is the Great Gulf of Torment. There is the River of Unpleasant Moisture.

Still waiting on the strip, I did mention it might be a little late - this link will work fine once it hits the site. He had some cool ideas on how to represent certain things, and it might have taken longer, but when this is all done I want to go back through the archive and say that we did our God Damnedest on every page. Also, I would like to one day combine it with Over Easy, The Christmas Carol, and Fall of the House of Brahe along with extra stuff in a book maybe. I think we could do a good job on that.

I do, of course, appreciate your patience in this matter. A man came up to me at the San Diego Comic-Con and asked me what I think the most important element of an online strip is, and I told him "Punctuality," so obviously the situation makes me feel like a dumbass. It's still true, however. I told him that I felt punctuality trumped writing and art for long-term success, and I certainly hope that I am right because, well... Imagine the alternative.

I have tried act as a bulwark against insidious Continuity for a very, very long time. Indeed, I have railed on about it in the post virtually every time the notion of a storyline rears its scaly head. Part of the problem, as I have mentioned, is that we simply don't have the attention span for extended narratives. Couple that with the fact that we are not a daily strip, and the possibility of making readers slog on for, oh, three months through some poorly conceived storyline finds no purchase here. We tried for years to write storylines to no avail, and the moment we switched to strips five years ago things started to work better for us. I thought continuity just didn't like me, it's like in elementary school where deep down everyone is just terrified and there is a lot of projected enmity.

This is actually a good time to introduce our delectable RSS feed, as it will help notify you when the strip becomes available. It can be found at "http://www.penny-arcade.com/RSS.xml" - there are, no doubt, a plurality of options for parsing that file. The guy who wrote the feed made a reader for OSX called Kontent, which I mentioned before - the newest version, uploaded late last night, has support for ours. I'm not familiar with the Linux side of things, but I know that here on Windows the "Pro" version of Trillian has a cool little plug-in that will keep up with the site and notify you in an adorable little box. I believe programs of this type are called "Aggregators," if you do a search for that, you'll find riches beyond your wildest dreams. For example, Amphetadesk is free and cross platform, so there's a start. These are applications that can keep track of Penny Arcade and probably thousands of other sites. If you really like cats or something there's probably a cat one.

(CW)TB out.

put on your mittens for these sub-zero conditions