Hey guys, miss me? I've been gone for a while, shuttling back and forth, drinking myself silly, working overtime and watching Undeclared. Anyway I see that everybody has given Mike some good advice, probably better than anything I can say... Mike, you're a smart guy with a lot of talent, don't worry too much and the rest should fall into place... that's really all I got.

My girlfriend is out of town for a while (doing a trade show in Vegas... man, Vegas is the place to go these days it seems) so I kind of have that little "I'm free" feeling. That feeling I need every few months so I can spend a couple days completely shaming myself by playing video games nonstop, painting miniatures for seven hours if I want to, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner and it being perfectly okay, not shaving, not showering, and drinking tons of espresso late into the night. Then in four days I'll be completely sick of idling away and ready to be part of an actual, adult couple again!

The first thing I did after work -- little bit of OT -- was do my taxes. Adding up those numbers off my multitude of W-2s was quite a revelation as it had not truly hit home how much of a non-earning bastard I was last year. Basically, the only reason I cleared $20k was unemployment. On the bright side, when I was working I was doing tons of overtime and therefore paying way more than my share of taxes, so I'm getting a decent refund. So I just tell myself "that was a year of transition dude, stay the course, victory is imminent" and then go make more espresso.

Um, so, without any kind of transition or anything... for those of you with DSes (only Eric? or have Denis/Ryan picked them up yet? Rudy you jumpin on that train?) I picked up Mario Kart and it is God damn fun. I mean, really super fun. I got a friend code sitting here just waiting to give to my online buddies!

D&D online... I hated the screenshots I saw. Good examples of overattention to detail with no attention to artistic flair. I imagine there are going to be a lot of gray and brown textures in that game. The gameplay sounds intriguing, but, eh, y'know, OS X. Hopefully now that Intel and Apple are in bed together, support for OS X in general will increase and someday in the future all these exciting games will be available to me as well!

Oh yeah. The next time there are at least four of us together, I'm running a role-playing game. Calling it. Done.