If you'd like to check out the new Counter-Strike on the Half-Life 2 engine, they have it at the Bellevue Lanwerx. I'll try to get up there later this week and check it out. This is for you Seattle locals, now - if what I've been reading is correct, there might be a LAN center close to you that has it as well.

Have you guys heard about The Ship, for Half-Life? Gabe and I played a variant of this game called Assassin in high school. Of course, I doubt this is the sort of game you can get away with in the halls these days.

I told you all I’d post the drawing that Stan Sakai did for me at SC Comic Con and here it is.

Six boxes full of tiny Spider-Men clix just came from WizKids, one of these will get thrown the bag you get when you come in the door.

The parts of this Beyond3D "interview" that aren't absolutely unintelligible to me are very interesting.

I just uploaded my sketch dump for the week. You can see it right here if you’re interested.

Doom 3 is dark, etc. Also, an imp develops a unique method for dominating humanity and two zombies have a dialogue about respect.

I'm downloading Windows XP Service Pack 2 even as we speak, as it hates viruses and worms and buffer exploits and other issues that have sort of become synonymous with the OS. I've had an earlier version on this machine as well as the laptop Gabe and I share - one of the more overt changes is to the control panels for using Wi-Fi, I think you'll probably like that. Big Firewall changes, too. You can look at the release notes yourself while it downloads, but I found the review over at the Supersite for Windows to be more than adequate.

I was going to mention Kiko's new shirts when we got back from the Comic-Con, but they weren't available just yet - he's got a cool Gamer Girl baby tee, an RPG themed shirt, and his coin slot inspired 3up. Hot, hot, and hot.

I have some more PAX announcements to make.

I survived my week in the woods and I feel pretty good. It ended up raining almost the entire time we were there which meant that everyone was stuck indoors. Thankfully I had the wisdom to bring a Gamecube and a PS2. Much of my time at the lake was actually spent inside playing Warioware, Karaoke Revolution and Tales of Symphonia. Pretty much everyone in Kara’s family is an incredibly talented singer. Each and every one of them was born with the ability to hear a song once and then reproduce it almost perfectly. This is not something I can do. It’s not even something I can comprehend. They all got hooked on Karaoke Revolution and battled it out tournament style each night. Kara ended up winning the whole thing by nailing a 100% perfect score on a Nora Jones song. I did a rendition of “I hate everything about you” that I would describe as emotionally charged. It certainly got a laugh out of everyone present and I was asked to repeat it at various points during the week for the benefit of family members who had not heard it yet. This became my signature song and out of respect it was never performed by anyone else again.

Gabriel has returned - haunted and harrowed by woodland beasts to be sure, but otherwise ready to accomplish our noble endeavor. There's also an odd, stunted conversation between myself and Kara, so there really is something for everyone.

Okay, I have the final lists of the Microsoft and Ubisoft games you'll be able to check out at PAX. You will understand how a person could get excited:

While you are digesting today's comic, I have something that might give you a bit of context.

One of my big problems is that I will often say things that I don't really mean, simply because I can state whatever it is with precision. This tends to create a lot of problems for me socially, but at the same time creating a sentence with an undeniably clear purpose - regardless of the purpose itself - produces in me an elation which I find difficult to describe. I could try to do it now, and I bet it would feel really good, but I actually have a point I'm trying to get across.

A few new announcements regarding our big thing: