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.

I can remember when it started, truly started. Chits were no longer sufficient to really encompass the hitpoints of his most powerful Pokémon cards, so he began using a d10 for the first digit.

As a young man running games of TMNT after school, I wanted (desperately, like most young men) to be liked. This meant that every day was Christmas for the brutal emus, toads, and mutated serpents in my charge. I would spend my lunches in the library hatching well-appointed, poorly defended laboratories for my parties to scour and claim as their own. Like the earthly avatar of benevolence, I dispensed hovercrafts. I dispensed HE Washing Machines for efficient cleaning after daring operations. These first two were jokes, but I did in actual fact give them a dirigible at one point, with an armored balloon, mechanics shop, comfortable berths, clone vats, and over forty-five distinct hardpoints. It could also, um... travel through time. Time travel wasn't even its most noteworthy feature.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a shirt while I'm making a strip and I toss it in there to see if people like it. I'm getting a lot of positive mail about the "I'd tap that" shirt today so I think we'll go ahead and make it. Kiko's gonna see what he can do with the idea this week. I'm sure it will be awesome.

I wont apologize for it this time, or pretend to be taken off guard by some vile preternatural force, or say anything to suggest we were not entirely at the helm when it happened. We're going to see where this card thing goes.

This is an example of too many words:

We've had a couple questions, and since we're getting entries at a rate of about twenty a minute I thought I'd better satisfy them quickly. You can enter as many times as you like, but please try to contain all entries in the body of a single email. You aren't going to go to prison if you don't, but we're only two guys, and this is starting to get crazy. We do have a limit on shitty entries: we ask that you limit those to zero.

The new hoodies with all the words on them are back in stock, in both dark and light polarities. Assuming you have not purchased another hoodie in the interim, one of these might be a good option.

I'm surprised it hasn't taken up even more time in the post and strip, considering how many of our actual conversations revolve around it. I think we've tried to shield you (by and large) from the burning heart of our affection for it. When we set up for a game, and I'm at the head of the table, it's strange how quickly old ways return.

Tom Chick is just the Goddamned king of games writers. Just... wow.

So many surreal things happen at an Anime convention that it would be difficult to choose one item. Well, usually. This time it wasn't very hard at all.

So we got a lot of questions at Sakura-Con about the state of our game. Everyone seemed to want to know when it would be done. Well the truth is that episode 1 is done or at least what they call "content complete". We're actually hard at work on Episode 2 now and have been for a little while. Episode 1 is currently going through some hard core bug testing as well as Microsoft's own certification process. In the meantime we actually need your help to make sure that once the game is ready we'll be able to deliver it.

I don't have solid data, just my own year-to-year experience, but it feels like gaming cosplay has been on the rise since we first started attending Sakuracon. The Team Fortress 2 crews you've seen showcased on the gaming blogs are one of the newer ones, but Valve seemed to rule the crossover space this year: there were several Chells as well, as well as Aperture Science Technicians, their Weighted Companion Cubes in tow. These cubes were sometimes literally in tow, hoisted up on crates for easy transport. There was even a GlaDOS.

I apologize for the recent downtime. We were moving over to a new host and it seems like no matter how well you try and plan, a switch like that always ends up taking longer than you expected.

In a last ditch attempt to dissuade me from my righteous course, Gabriel tried to suggest that we would get in trouble for toasting up such unauthorized treats. Of course, the whole endeavor was designed to provoke just such an encounter: to create a situation where someone would approach us and demand that we "stop making waffles." I'm quite certain that no person has ever, in the long and shining strand of human events, had to ask this of another person.