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.

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.