Last week I got some new cables and I spent a large part of Thanksgiving Day wedged behind my television set stripping speaker wire and replacing cables. After I was done I sat back on my couch and took a look at my setup. While it's true that my wiring job was a work of art it was hidden behind the television set where no one could see it. What people could see was my ass ugly book shelf kind of thing holding all my equipment.

Well the Penny Arcade Internet Notification Tool or P.A.I.N.T is done. It's been tested and it appears to work great. For those of you who don't know about P.A.I.N.T, it is just a program that notifies you whenever PA gets updated. However due to it's size, 1.3 megs we aren't going to be able to host it on the PA server right away. The guys at Homelan anticipate a pretty big demand for the tool and I think they are probably right. Anyway, if you have the space and the bandwidth to host a file like this please contact Neil and let him know.

I come back to see if I've spelled things correctly, and he's found some way to turn a mea culpa regarding his own sloth into a personal insult against me. Yes, that's very convincing!

I think Alias Sketchbook is absolutely incredible. Feel free to take a look at the sketch below and decide for yourself.

Unless we hit our heads or something and completely lose it, this strip should represent the final chapter in our two-chapter, chapter thing.

Yes it's true I decided to get a credit card last week. Not just any credit card mind you. No, I have a lot of the same reservations about credit that Tycho does. So I got myself a comp USA card. I figured, how much trouble can I get myself into at one Goddamned store. The answer is quite a bit.

It's got nothing to do with Gabe, either - he got it to me yesterday well in advance of midnight. I was just watching that fabulous Buffy, then I finished Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, then I went out to get something to eat, then I leapt over a river of molten rock...

Though I am grieved to admit it, today's strip may mark a fumbling foray into perverse continuity. Brace yourselves.

I hope IGN won't be mad that I copied this bit from their Insider review, but Aaron Boulding said something very true and I want to recognize it.

Since posting the pictures of the GBA skins I have gotten over a dozen e-mails from people asking what the hell Over Easy is and why they have never heard of it. Sometimes I feel like I mention shit too much and that you guys are probably sick of hearing about it. It seems like no matter how often I talk about OE though there are still people who seem to miss it. So here is one more quick post about it.

There was this bowling alley on my way home from Salk middle school called Diamond Bowl, and they always had pretty good taste in games. over the years I played a lot of Xenophobe and Xybots there, as you can well imagine - the second Spy Hunter wasn't a bad way to spend an afternoon, either. But I always came back to their battered Black Tiger and Rygar machines, two action platformers with an insatiable thirst for my money.

Over the next couple of months a lot of you will probably be heading home to spend some time with your family. A lot of you will probably also be dragging a video game system along with you in order to dull the pain. I know I will be making the trip back to Spokane come December and my Xbox and my Cube will be making the trip with me. I wanted to point you towards LASR Accessories. They make these new backpacks for hauling your system around. I have a carrying case right now for my Cube but it only holds the Cube and one controller. These backpacks actually have space for all your games and cables and whatnot. The other really cool thing is that you don't have to take the system out of the backpack. The wires and everything just pop out the sides letting you play right out of the bag. Anyway I got one and it's pretty fucking cool. If you need to take a system someplace you should check them out.

I love to play video games and so I have invested a lot of time and money in making sure that I have a kick ass place to play these videogames. While working at Circuit City I had the ability to purchase all kinds of great stuff at an amazing discount. As I started to collect more and more components I realized that I enjoyed hooking up these devices nearly as much as I enjoyed actually using them. I can spend hours behind my television re-wiring speakers and untangling cables. When something stops working I get absolutely giddy because I know that it will require I get back there and start checking those connections. If it's a really bad problem I may even have to make a run to the store to purchase a new cable!

As media enthusiasts on the fringe of the sensible, we're all no doubt familiar with Monster Cable. They have crafted a niche for themselves as a producer of luxury wire, spooking consumers with grave proclamations regarding "attenuation" and "dirty power." The copy on the back always tends to lay it on a bit thick, conferring an almost totemic quality to these strands which are, it would appear, humanity's last bulwark versus nebulous evil. He was just starting to get into home theater when we lived together, and he'd assure me that he was sensitive to the minute fibrillations of audio purity provided by substandard cabling. When he picked up the Monster Cable surge protector yesterday, I had to act.

Reading Evil Avatar this morning I noticed that Gamespot tossed up a review of Steel Battalion. Obviously, we did not agree on many points. It seemed worthwhile to give you another perspective on the game, however.

I was going to respond to Tycho’s comment but I think this e-mail from Ken says it much better than I ever could: