Grand Theft Auto - like Gran Turismo - is a game that we have a difficult time integrating into our consciousness. Gran Turismo got this way by being an uncompromising simulation of something we don't care about, a blisteringly high-resolution image of a ketchup packet or a strip of bark. Ketchup fans and bark enthusiasts are going nuts, they'll pay forty dollars for part of the image. I played the second one a million years ago, earned enough money to wash my virtual car, and then quit the series forever.

A white box with a black skid mark appeared at the office on Wednesday, sharp with the ozone bite of innumerable blue sparks. I could go on like this for awhile, as you are probably quite aware. We could explore a whole range of olfactory stimuli. Let me slice through it: Playing the new Mario Kart online is a narcotic experience. We passed this Goddamned wheel around for an hour, shouting and laughing, watching a globe whirl on the screen to show us which wicked nations harbored our hated foes.

Readers asked that Gabriel construct a Twitter to let them know when he was starting up a new broadcast, and in the course of this he was exposed to the sort of thing that Twitter is often used for: identifying which condiment you have recently applied. We considered a universe where my cohort was addicted to Twitter's method of consciousness collection, and were horrified by the result.

I'll be turning on the live stream here in a couple minutes. If you'd like to watch me draw tomorrow's comic you can tune in here.

Everyone seems to like the PA TV idea. I still have some bugs to work out regarding the lag on my end but I have some ideas to fix that. Also the program doesn't seem to stream correctly on the PA page but it does work on the actual Ustream page. I'm not sure about that one yet but I'll do some research.

Review copies of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon arrived in the mail last Friday, but you needn't fear: it won't enslave the entire site as other franchise excursions have in the past. The games themselves (delivered in pairs, as is their mercenary way) conform to a roguelike + munchkins paradigm that we should be able to steel ourselves against. I suppose it should be noted that "steel" is one of the seventeen elemental types of Pokémon.

**Okay, the show is over and I think it went really well. I recorded this episode so if you could not watch it live you can see the entire thing here.

I'll be starting the comic at about 1:30 PST. I'm going to test out the record feature this time so I should be able to save the entire thing if you can't log on for the live stream. Sometimes the page I set up doesn't seem to stream correctly. If it's not working for you try the Ustream site for the show located here.

I finally ordered my figure print yesterday. When Tycho got me the print for Christmas I wasn't playing anymore and had actually been clean just over a year. I decided that I'd just do some battlegrounds with Dudefella to finish off his set of PvP gear then I'd print him and be done. Of course it didn't work that way. Tycho, Kiko and Kara all ended up coming back to the game with me. Tycho had left his character someplace around level 40 and so in order to play with him the rest of us played our alts. A couple more friends joined us and pretty soon we had a very dedicated crew of about 8 people playing. My druid ended up filling the role of main healer as we worked our way through all the five man content that most of us had never seen before. I really enjoyed my new job and spent a lot of time learning the intricacies of Tree of Life healing (stack + healing and spam lifebloom). Just this week I added a fourth purple to my collection of pretty decent gear. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal but Dudefella was my only other character with a purple and he only had one. This is easily the best geared character I've ever had and for a guild of 9 people that doesn't do anything but five man's I think I'm looking pretty sweet.

Early on, in the prosecution of our sacred contestatorial judgelating duties, we received the following entry from David Morgan:

So yesterday I tried a little experiment. Kurtz has been using a service called UStream to broadcast his desktop while he draws the comic. It sounded like a really cool idea so I decided to give it a shot. As a test I posted a link to the stream in the forums yesterday and ended up with about 130 people watching me draw today's comic. The service includes a built in chat room so that users can talk while watching the show. The response I got from theforumers was really positive. The only down sides seem to be that the chat room gets pretty crazy and the process does generate a little lag on my end. Normally a half second or so of lag for the person broadcasting is probably not even noticeable but when I'm using theWacom tablet to draw even a little bit of lag can be awkward.

The frustrating thing about Gabriel is... Alright, let me start over.

We've judged thousands of these today, our eyes are bone dry, and there's still many more to be judged. It's clear that we have bitten off more than we can chew, or you have provided too substantial a feast, or some kind of food analogy that deals with having too much of something and we can't chew it.

Our dark work now complete, we can return to our previous task - managing unwieldy, crisis-prone cores.

Here is a high res version of today's third panel. You could use it as a wallpaper if you like.