Well it's certainly been a interesting week. First off , I wanted to say thanks to everyone who wrote me a email over my loss of employment, the emails made me feel a lot better. I haven't had the time to answer every email, though I hope to try to make it through them. I've never had this much email sent to me at once before - except for that time I posted to usenet a couple years ago with my real email address... ick - I still get spam to that address�

Perhaps I was a bit over the top in Monday's rant, I try not to take these things so personally, but regardless they always bite hard in the beginning. One advantage I always had is my skills are in demand - so finding new work isn't too hard, but it's still a pain and annoying to 'start over' with a new company every year or so. It's become impossible to find a 'home' within a company anymore. I'm in my mid 20s, so I can't say I know what it's like to work for one place for a long time. I suppose it's true that the era of lifetime employment is long dead.

Ah well - moving on - "sore wa sore, kore wa kore ja�" - "that was that, this is this�"

As you can see in today's strip, we introduced Erika finally. So those of you who have been emailing me asking 'when will you introduce the rest of the cast?' can now� stop.

Sometime soon I really need to go back and update the story and cast section, in truth I sorta threw those together last minute when we originally started the strip. Besides, if we don't at least update the cast section soon, I have a bad feeling Tycho Brahe is going to be emailing me once a week asking when it will be updated� (turn about is fair play, and my constant bugging him to update his cast section probably has not been forgotten)

For those unfortunate souls who still haven't downloaded the Mechwarrior 4 beta, do it! I've spent this week blowing up my fellow man in new and interesting ways. I even ran into a few MT fans while playing.

Personally I love to outfit my mech with as many missiles as it can hold, there is just something graceful about a volley of 50 missiles firing at one target. Another tactic I tried for the pure sake of annoying others was outfit a mech with nothing but flamers - which do next to no damage, but causes your target to heat up. Since most players custom build their mechs with 'just enough' heat sinks to handle the heat generated by their weapons, I caused several mechs to overheat and explode that way. All in all - a really cheesy tactic that if I catch any of you doing to me, I'll hit you on the head with a wet noodle.