One possible explanation for Frank's request in the last panel of today's strip: perhaps, in his own irrepressible way, he is attempting to get Gabriel to conform to the tenets of No Pants Day. I had originally submitted a Canadian origin for this most festive of days, when indeed the truth is quite different. No Pants Day, originally Non Pantus Dei, was inaugurated the same day pants were invented.

Something happened and I don't know what. It might have been the Cardboard and Steel miniseries. The long and the short of it is that, like the addict who performs "services" for crack rock, so too have I acquired a sweet tooth for continuity. The process was so insidious that I wasn't even aware as the healthy portions of my mind were carted out in the night and replaced with the seeds of a thousand stories. In any case, this strip not only includes Frank, but kicks off a series of indeterminate length. God help us all.

I saw over on that most mystical of boxes an interesting bit of Xbox "ive news:

I am sorry that I overreacted like that. You know I don’t want to hurt you. I think we both said some things that we don’t mean. I would like very much to go to your birthday party with two clowns.

I'm very sorry that I made fun of your secret treehouse club. I hope you can still come to my birthday party, which will include not one, but two clowns.

"All three of them."

What an upstanding bunch. I just got off the phone with their director, their slavering law dogs are already on the trail.

I think I've said my piece.

I have got some pretty exciting news. Drum roll please...I have an interview at E3 with Ben Herman, President of the newly revived SNK NEOGEO USA Consumer Corp.

Committing time-sensitive data to a format which only distributes once a month is already a harrowing proposition - it is not overstating the case to say that this method of dissemination is behind the curve roughly five hundred years. It certainly doesn't help that when these magazines do secure an exclusive of some kind, maintained artificially, Bob in the copy room or Bob at the printer has scans of the whole Goddamn thing available for absolutely every one, as many as three weeks before the periodical itself hits stores.

This has got to be the most exciting pre-E3 news I’ve read yet. SNK is back and they are going to be developing games for the current crop of systems. There is even mention of a 3D Metal Slug game in the article. If you would like to meet me at E3 I will be in booth # 3008, drooling all over myself and blubbering like a fan boy.

I have never been able to repress my affection for Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose verbosity is matched only by his ability to use a lot of words.

We are buying a new car today. Buying cars is always very stressful for me. Obviously the money thing is one side of it but it’s also just really confusing. I honestly understand very little about the process. There are always lots of papers to sign and lots of percentages get thrown around. Then you have to say "no" like twelve times when they try and get you to buy the extended warranty and the scotch guard and the life time oil change and the plasma injector and the special coating that keeps harmful gamma rays from boiling your brain inside your skull like a crock-pot full of bubbling chili.

I know we're being all dour today and pondering ramifications, so I'll make this quick: The new Phantasy Star Online game Sega just announced is a turn-based, cooperative, multiplayer card battle game!

We're thinking about a new running gag where we just get sued all the time and have to take the strip down.

After that Neo Geo rant I started feeling nostalgic so I hit Ebay and checked some auctions. My Neo-Geo collection is pretty much complete as far as I am concerned except for a few titles. I still would like to get my hands on Sengoku 3 and Metal Slug 3 home carts. I would also like a Mark of the Wolves MVS or AES cart. I can’t see myself getting these anytime soon as a couple hundred bucks is just way to much to spend on a videogame. I tried getting a MoTW cart a few years ago from NCSX and they sent me a defective one. I returned it and they sent another defective one. I finally just got my money back. Anyway I was looking at MVS carts and happened to see this auction. See MVS games never came with real boxes. They are for an arcade machine so they just came in cardboard boxes that arcade operators would throw away as soon as they could. Now that people are collecting these games though they wanted a nice way to store them and so a guy came up with Shock Boxes. All kinds of people make inserts for these boxes, there are hundreds and hundreds of inserts and a couple years ago I even made a couple for my own collection and posted them on a few Neo fan sites. Well if you look at the Shock Box that this MoTW MVS cart comes with the guy is using the insert I designed.