I just jumped on Mechassault to see if they had made liars out of us, but no, it's still true: the promised content for January is still missing. This is an example of a topic I want to be wrong on, and the moment I become wrong I'll mention it here.

Check out this ReadMe for the 1.3 Battlefield patch. It's like a completely other game, look at some of this stuff.

I mentioned a little while ago that we were going to finally kick the Penny Arcade merchandising machine into high gear and I have a bit more information on that for you. One of the things we always felt bad about is that we never have shirts and stuff in stock. We just suck when it comes to doing that sort of thing. People always asked us to use Café Press but their products are cheap ass. When we decided to make shirts we wanted them to be really nice shirts. That is why we went with Gameskins. Same thing with the poster we sold at last years Comic-Con. It was the kind of large high quality poster that you just don't get when you go with Café Press. So what we did is get our shit together and with the help of someone who went to college (Unlike us) we put together a plan for a Penny Arcade e-store or i-store…it's like a store but it's on the web, it's a web store I guess, for the e-generation.

Very often, names or corruptions of names make it into the lexicon.

Since Tycho was talking about our gaming slang I thought I would mention another one. Thursday night Halo has become a ritual now. Safety Monkey is especially good with the Jeep and he makes it his job to always be in the driver’s seat of one. He is like a very fast very reckless taxi cab. He spends the majority of any game ferrying us between bases. There is no better feeling then popping out the back door of the enemy base in Blood Gulch and seeing Monkey waiting there in the Flag Express. Anyway he occasionally has problems navigating the rocks scattered around the map. That led Tycho and I to suggest that he not be fooled by the rocks that they got, he’s still Monkey from the block. This got shortened eventually to being fooled by the rocks which eventually ended up being used for any kind of screw up. Say you grab the flag but don’t make it out of the base. You were fooled by the rocks. I just thought I’d share that with you all.

I got sick yesterday and I continue to be sick today. Kara is making me drink some kind of disgusting juice. It's got Cran in it which I guess she says is good for me but I think it tastes like ass.

Some new info and media for the game over at Gamespot, and probably other places, if you are so inclined. I've hungrily read the text on each screenshot that has it, and I'm starting to believe that my theory about this game's protagonist might be true. I wont write it here, in case I'm wrong, because then I'll look stupid. More stupid, rather.

To add insult to injury and near death, if I hadn't been gallivanting through the Goddamn stone age all over Washington state, I was going to bottle the mellow Fire Sale Ale. What is Fire Sale Ale, you ask? Or didn't ask? Please don't tell me about Fire Sale Ale? Well, if you insist.

Here's the strip. I'll get to it in a second.

Tycho’s wife took him out of the house today on some kind of adventure up to some mountain. The very thought terrifies me. He is able to stay in touch via his sidekick though and he sent me this e-mail from the road:

Here is a funny story. Every Year at E3 we always make an appointment to visit the Bioware booth and see their games on the first day of the show. We always make this appointment for exactly 12:00 in the afternoon. We do this because they always have sandwiches, beer, pop and brownies. Combined with looking at early builds of games like Knights of the Old Republic you can see why this is often our favorite appointment of the show.

This is one of the funniest things I have ever heard. Here is the email I got:

Yes, that is my stuff in the Sketchbook Gallery. I don’t think that there are a whole lot of artists using the software yet so I was happy to donate my stuff when they told me they needed work for the gallery section. I guess that is one of the benefits of being an early adopter.

There is a brand new Hook Up article available today. Home Theatre guru and ladies man Storm Shadow was at CES in Vegas and he gives us his report.

As many of you know Comp USA was stupid enough to give me a credit card a few months ago and I immediately used it to put myself a few thousand dollars in debt. What I got out of the deal was the Acer TravelMate C100 Tablet PC. They call it the TravelMate I assume, because it's designed to be taken around with you while you travel. Well I don't really "travel" unless you count the trip from the computer room to the kitchen. I doubt that this is what they had in mind though.

With humans in a mad rush to snap up movie licenses (an in some cases molest them), the acquisition of the Metroid movie rights seems like it could be a cause for celebration or alarm. As it happens, there's another license out there now that we think could be a real blockbuster. Get it? Blockbuster.