In this space, we sometimes describe my party role: social tank. A week away from our regenerative pods here in Seattle offered many opportunities for interpersonal anguish, or even inconvenience, which for Gabriel is roughly synonymous. On at least one occasion, he leveraged a clearly preternatural ability to escape detection by disappearing completely - leaving a log in his place. Does he decide what is left behind, or is the log is an inextricable result of the process?  I will see if he can leave a cheese plate instead.

One of the high points of the New York leg of our trip (alongside meeting a steady stream of interesting new people and devouring forty eight xiao long bao) was attending the dress rehearsal for last week's Saturday Night Live.  Somehow, a reader had burrowed into the core of the organization, and we were able to follow in his bloody wake.

While we were in New York, I made a mental note each time my olfactory apparatus identified a disquieting new scent. Know that today's strip represents deeply abridged selection.  We made the mistake of

Now, it is complete - let us never speak of this again.  Come Friday, expect a sketch on New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, Food, or some other topic.  We're going to put this'a here Tablet PC through its paces.     

See what I mean?  This is more or less what I was talking about.  I would say that this series has not yet reached its weirdness zenith.  Gabriel would not allow me to continue with it, demanding that I cease production with Wednesday's strip.  Just know that my mind continued for some time down this narrow tunnel, jerkily, the way a living spider might juke through a sleeping person's esophagus.

I need to warn you that the next three strips - of which this is the first - are incredibly weird. We wanted to do a couple comics about going to New York, where we are at this very moment, and the chemicals in our brains were aligned in such a way that this was the result. I'm not apologizing, just... warning.

For NIS America's "Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?" recently, and they just put it up on their site.  I found this game incredibly difficult.  Funny!  But incredibly difficult.  

We suggested after an afternoon with the beta that Killzone 2 was a game owners of the PlayStation 3 could clutch to their chests like a babe and love without reservation. As a wholly owned studio, the Guerilla Games charter is concise: create a world-class shooter native to (and definitive of) the PlayStation 3. They were given the tools, and the time, and three years into the life of the system the only surprise would be if they hadn't delivered something noteworthy.

I just wanted to post another reminder that we'll be attending the New York Comic Con this week. If you live over on that side of the country you should come by and say hello. We'll be doing some panels while we're there. One will be our standard Q&A style event and the other will be a little more interesting. I've mentioned before that Tycho and I like to go to schools and teach kids how to draw cartoons. Well we're actually going to try and do that as a panel in New York. I'll be teaching the kids how to draw some simple cartoon characters while Tycho talks to them about writing jokes and telling stories. The few times we've done this locally it's been a real hit and I'm excited to try it out at the show. 

You may not be aware that both Fisher Price and Nintendo are colluding with Muslim terrorists to ensnare the young, which might make it difficult to understand today's comic. You may not think that unintelligible samples or scarves are an effective weapon for global jihad, but that just means you're a part of the problem, Mohammed.

The new MacBook Pro is incredible, that's what I hear from Gabriel at any rate, with the exception that it shuts itself off during ordinary use due to its infernal Goddamned heat. The laptop is perfectly capable of managing said heat, but for what I assume are aesthetic reasons they don't allow the internal fans to spin at the necessary speeds. Allowing a computer to fail for reasons of beauty is noble, I suppose. In its way.

I made no secret of my love for Defense Grid, and I'm overjoyed that we've got it up.  This version has all the updates, and is integrated with Greenhouse for achievements and leaderboards - by which I mean Triumphs and Standings.  It's been out for a while now, so getting a read on it shouldn't be tough - the (Windows only) demo is a great place to start as always.  I loved the voice acting, production values, pretty much everything about it.  I'm not in the habit of begging developers for early copies of a game, but I did so this time and felt no shame in it.  

This strip represents the culmination of Further Songs Of Sorcelation, but if you seek greater closure on the imaginary film itself, that is something I can provide.

I crave these things.

We stopped by Gameworks on Sunday night before heading over to the Video Games Live concert. We had heard that they had a Street Fighter 4 machine and we all wanted to check it out. They did have the machine and when I saw it I was instantly transported back to my youth. The arcade culture that surrounds a new machine like this was in full effect and it was something I hadn't witnessed since I was a kid playing fighting games like Virtua fighter and Killer Instinct. Chairs had been scrounged up and placed around the cabinet. There was a steady stream of people going up against one guy who had been running the machine for a while. It was like watching people being fed into a chipper shredder. He dismantled each new player without ever giving up a single win as long as I watched. I snapped this picture because I thought it was so awesome.