Well, I have done it. I'm posting somebody else's artwork with all the skill and shrewdness that Deacon used to do it with. He's dead to us now, but let's try to remember the good times.

As usual (?), Penguinx drew this comic, so if you like it, you should mail him, and be sure to mention his superb artistic vision. There is nothing that works on that guy quite like flattery.

As some of you might be aware I've been quite busy for the past few months, and that's why I haven't been second fiddling around here as much as I used to do. With Deacon effectively out of the way, it's my time to shine, as I go faithfully down with the ship. I'm no stranger to going down with ships, I was vice-captain when Koala-Man rammed our ship into those god damned greenpeace terrorists 3 years ago. Now there was a man who knew about honour on the high seas. That was the day I found out that hovering works just as well on water.

So we finally got an xbox 360, and I have to say that despite looking lame and generating more noise than a generator, the thing is pretty slick. I hesitate to associate it with "fun" let alone "fun games", but geometry wars is definitely a fun game. Gotham 3 is good as well, but why no weather effects? The other games I have played (some were demos):

Perfect Dark 2: Haven't beaten it, but I played a good deal of the multiplayer and enough single player that I am comfortable complaining about some of its glaring faults. The first problem is that everything in this game looks like a shiny wet piece of plastic. It is literally like shooting oiled up Ken dolls. The animation is also pretty terrible, and as with any FPS that is controlled by a gamepad, it feels like you are retarded whenever you try to do anything at all. There were also some framerate issues, and stuttering is something that really, really chokes me up. I also encountered either a bug or a really stupid game mechanic in one mission, where I completed certain objectives that affected my capabilities in a subsequent objective, but died, and upon restarting from the checkpoint the objectives I previously had completed somehow got undone. It made finishing the level about twice as hard. Of course, I was able to overcome, because I am an overcomer. Overall this game was not as good and Beyond Good & Evil.

Kameo: Beat it. It's short and the story is very lame. Funnily enough I found that I wished there were more cutscenes. The game had some pretty fun and cool gameplay elements, and while it had some annoying sequences, there was never anything that made me want to quit playing. The variety offered by the various forms is pretty fun to mess around with, until you get the one form that is better than all the others by a wide margin. It's too bad that the game lacks that certain panache that you find in the more epic and enthralling games of this type, because I fear that these characters aren't personable enough to warrant a sequel, though the ending does hint at a Kameo 2. There were a lot of shiny wet plastic things in the game, too. I am really beginning to hate that god damn effect. The world is not made of shiny wet plastic! Beyond Good & Evil is better than this game.

On second thought, I will continue my xbox 360 editorial later this week. I am real tired.

If you're going to tell everyone that the people trapped in a mine were rescued, you'd better hope it actually happens. Otherwise you're going to get a lot of emails like "Dude, WTF?" And if you're the mine company trying to perform the rescue, you probably shouldn't walk around saying that you've found them, even if you're just kidding like "Wouldn't it be totally awesome if we found them alive? Not gonna happen though."

Because that sort of thing pisses people off and makes them wonder why you couldn't save them, is there something wrong with you? Pretty soon they're going through your old safety inspection records which maybe don't hold up so well. And then you're not just paying survivor's benefits to 12 families, you're facing a potential lawsuit from your non-dead employees as well, not to mention fines from the regulators who are having a spine forcibly grown for them by the media glow-lamp. Maybe they even shut down the mine for a while, which would be ironic because that's what you were trying to avoid by having all those safety violations in the first place.

And then you (the person, not the company) are probably out of a job and have to figure out some way to get work with "failed to not kill 12 people" on your resume. Unless you want to write a book about how you did save 12 people, sell it as non-fiction and con Oprah into making it a best seller. Good work if you can find it.

It would make more sense to announce that everyone is dead and the families should go home. Then you can keep looking (or not) without all those media types looking over your shoulder, and if you do happen to find someone alive or thereabouts it'll be a nice little surprise like when you give your girlfriend flowers for no reason, rather than a huge let-down like when you give your girlfriend flowers and she was expecting an engagement ring.

Heck, if you set the bar low enough from the beginning people might actually be happy that you just found the bodies and have a solemn little ceremony as they're carried out, like they did for the bodies of the firefighters and cops that were dug out of the huge pile of waste bodies at the World Trade Centre. Maybe Alan Jackson would write a song about it. Where were you when the Sago dozen were slowly suffocating in the silent black depths of the Earth?

If it's true that you reap what you sow, the news media is in for a world of hurt. In order to compete with the bloggers, it appears that once proud and skeptical reporters have decided to become more like bloggers. Any old thing they hear, whether from some guy shooting the shit outside a mine rescue operation or a corporate press release, gets repeated almost verbatim as quickly as possible. CNN now begins all their breaking news coverage with "Ohmygawd! Did you hear!?" Sometimes the road to hell is paved with laziness and a lack of any clear intentions what so ever.

The reason that today's rantenspiel is late is that I wasn't planning on doing one.  I was going on the assumption that since Penguin had failed to draw the comics he said he would by the end of the hiatus, that meant the hiatus wasn't over and I was still on holiday.  Fuzz disagreed, and posted a comic without telling me.  So now we're back to seat-of-the-pants time.  We have four comics already done, which means that anything Penguin gets drawn in the next two weeks will be posted.  But once we run out, we may just let the site die.

We had a plan for how to continue making comics without relying on Penguin.  Unfortunately the plan itself relied upon Penguin, and as such ganged predictably agley.  I will post some sort of rantenspiel to accompany the comic for as long as there is a comic to accompany.  After that, I guess it depends on whether Fuzz cares enough about the site to come up with filler, because I'm not doing both jobs again.  Unfortunately there is nothing you, our loyal fan, can do to "save the site."  Neither threats nor bribes nor flattery can inspire Penguin, so unless you are an artist in your own right there is nothing left to say except enjoy it while it lasts.