In three hours I’ll be back in a hospital bed somewhere in downtown Baltimore testing out experimental drugs. The clinical trial that I’m in now requires that I place my non-dominant hand in a small pool of lukewarm to hot water and, on a scale of 0 to 100, rate how pleasant or unpleasant the feeling is. Then I drink some lukewarm to hot water and do the same. Then they place a heat probe on my forearm and ask me how it feels. All of this takes roughly half an hour. I’m making two thousand dollars when all is said and done. No, the probe does not go up my ass. Stop asking, Mom.

Before I am to say goodbye to this world and its freedoms for two days, I’ve been doing some last-minute preparations; of course I’m speaking of this fine vessel we inhabit, and yes I’m speaking of octonaut. I’ve mentioned this before, but Lord knows that I’m in a summer lull: octonaut is being redesigned from the ground up. Well! I’m guessing you’ve heard me say this before. So I finally got fed up with spending 5 minutes out of the day trying to code the design I feverishly concocted upon returning from Tokyo all those months ago, so I hired some guy to do it. He’s a pretty nice guy, and he ends all of his emails with “Cheers”. I like that. The design will be finished next week, and if you’d like you can see the last and final build here and, uhh, over here. The second one just sort of exhibits how comments will be displayed. Yeah, I love Mega Man. Yeah, Mega Man 9 is going to be pretty damn awesome. I’ll review it when it comes out, I swear!

Truth to be told, I’ve actually been holding off on submitting a lot of the larger articles that I’ve written in anticipation of this so-called new design. I’ll go ahead and release those bad boys as soon as we get everything up and running. The only reason I went ahead and posted Goodbye Monster was because, hell, I couldn’t wait to get that thing online. After spending upwards of 30 or so hours editing that thing, I wasn’t about to wait around. But in terms of future content, well, Eric Lane is going to be working on a review of Weezer’s new Red Album, and we’re both going to be finishing the planned Mother series overview/review thing we started back on the actual Mother’s Day. You know, that day when you pretend to like your Mom or whatever. We were going to celebrate that day with a sort of rose-tinted-glasses look back on one of our favorite game series, though hell, I guess we ended up pretending to like our moms or something. I guess that’s just the way these things go.

So, back to the hospital. It beats the hell out of a day job, and this place actually has decent food. They cater! And by cater I mean they probably just buy a huge plastic tray of subs and cut them up. I’m not allowed to have hot food because the medication dulls my heat sensitivity for a few hours, so it’s mostly just sandwiches and, strangely enough, like, half of a chicken. That’s what I had last week, anyway. The guy in the bed next to me was in the last study I was in; he seems like a nice enough guy, but I can’t understand a damn word he says, so I just smile and laugh at his unintelligible babble. We watch Walker, Texas Ranger together at night. No words need to be spoken.

I’m leaving now; my eyelids are heavy, and I think I’m sinking again. It could be my temper, but then again, it’s probably just a side effect of the medication. Hell.