In about 5 hours, Serahphim and I are driving south on what we've deemed a 'road trip'. Since my life has been pretty much dictated by schedules and deadlines for the past year (hell, past several years ^_^) we decided that a nice, meandering, deadline-free trip was a good idea. Of course, we have no idea how successful our exercise in unordered chaos will go, but what the hey - it's a vacation. ^_^

speaking of chaos... From now on, I have told largo that the next time i have some bright-assed idea, that he is to beat be over the head with a Louisville Slugger until the idea goes away. what the HELL was i thinking?? It was a simple idea, a guest strip contest, get a few dozen entries, pick the best ones, and an easy vacation for me. It's be easy, go thru the entries, pic the best, go away for a week.

You have to realize something... When i say I don't really have any concept of how many people read Megatokyo, i'm not joking. MT is just this silly personal website that largo and i run where we have this, like, comic, you know? I thought that we might get a couple dozen strips, maybe 50 or 60.

We had almost 400 entries.

Largo, Ed, Dom and myself have been going thru entries all day. I am rather... amazed, if you must know. Some of the strips had me chuckling, some were even touching. There is an amazing range of strips. The ones you are gonna see this week are the ones that Largo and I enjoyed the most. This contest has presented us with a problem we never considered - we had more than 5 faves. It was really hard to choose. In some respects, the choice of which of our faves to show was a little random - my brain is a little numb. Originally, I was going to list the winning strips in order, like counting down backwards to the best strip on Friday. That is not what we ended up doing. Every strip shown this week is one that we equally enjoyed. I also need to figure out what to do with the other 8 or 9 strips that SHOULD be shown this week. There are also many that deserve some sort of recognition. Over the next few weeks hopefully you will have a chance to see some of them. There is no 'winning strip'... they all win.

Y'know, after MT started rolling, and then started getting 'big' (well, people told me it was getting big), I started getting all this email day after day - it was neat. There was the growing webstats that we dont even bother checking anymore - cool beans. The surprising turnout at Anime Central - kind of mind boggling. But there's something about all these comics - all these people took time to sit down and create something that was influenced by Megatokyo. Maybe the fact that its in the same medium that i work in, i dunno, it's odd, but for the first time i seem to get a real sense of what people REALLY think of MT. It all seemed to get thru my thick skull today.

For everyone who sent a comic in - thank you.

Seraphim is telling me that i am now on vacation time, and it's time to get the hell off the computer and go to bed. I'm leaving things in largo's hands this week, so there are no guarantee that things will go smoothly. ^_^ I'll be back next week, refreshed and ready to start crankin out MT strips again.

One last thing. Please Please DO NOT EMAIL ME THIS WEEK! I will not have any access to computers, and i'll freak if i have to come back to 500 unread emails! ^^;; you wouldn't want to give me any reason to delete my in-box, would you? :P

See you folks next week, and enjoy the guest strips! we did. :)