Apologies for the connection problems that have shown up recently. It's being worked on and will be sorted out as soon as possible.

Yes, there's now ads on the left. They shouldn't be intrusive, I hope. :) I'm now officially a filthy filthy sellout to the Man... and I'm going to be making pennies per year! Maybe even (if I'm really lucky) a dollar every two years! :D

And since the ad's new, you can currently get it for free. Free advertising - you can't beat that :) Of course the person who wants to take it over will have to pay $0.01 a day for it :P

Note to self. When setting a comic to auto update at midnight, do not transpose the 0 and the 3.

This comic was set to appear on the 30th of October, not the 03rd as it should be. And thus it's late.

I've clearly been doing too much typing :S My fingers hate me.

Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologise for today's comic. I have valiantly resisted the temptation to do a comic including lolcats or other internet memes, but the photo of the adorable cat looking at my comic (apparently she's called Poppy) pushed me over the edge and I had to do this one.

I am so very very sorry and humbly promise never to do it again, even under threat of dismemberment. We will return to our normally cynical and bitter comics tomorrow.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was just sent this pic.

May I introduce you to my favourite fan of the comic, ever?

Isn't she lovely? She's looking at this strip

As some of you already know, I'm currently writing up my doctoral thesis. It is not a pleasant job in the slightest, in fact it's a thoroughly unpleasant one. While the three years of research I've done were quite cool, it turns out that turning them into report/thesis/book form is a torture. Especially the review of the existing literature.

It's hell on earth. If you ever do a doctorate, be prepared for torture.

Sorry, comic will be late due to various screwups my end.

Pardon the slightly late update. Had connection troubles.

Yes, we're having a guest variant for the next two weeks. ToME, as in Troubles of Middle Earth, a rather good variant that's diverged a lot from the original Angband.

OK, go get the new version of Angband, released at the end of July. Pardon the late announcement. It's obtainable from Rephial

OK, I am very very sorry.

As some of you may know, I'm a doctoral student working towards getting a PhD. And I'm approaching the end of my time when I'm funded, and thus finishing off my thesis becomes a priority. So I have lots of last minute labwork to do, writing papers, and writing up the thesis itself. Thus, I have less time to devote to outside activities. Going to the pub. Eating out. Playing games. Doing artwork. All that stuff.

Unfortunately, that includes this comic. The comic is NOT going on hiatus, but the release schedule will be decreasing from 5 days a week down to Mon-Wed-Fri releases, so there'll only be 3 comics a week.

Very sorry about that, but the thesis does come first. Once it's fully done and written up, I hope to be able to come back up to 5 strips a week.

If you don't know already... the next version of Angband has finally been released! 3.0.8 with some quite big changes is now out, and may be downloaded from the Angband homepage, here at Rephial.

There's a few little bugs in it, but a bugfix version should be out in a few weeks at most.

Yep, it's June again. Which means that Eidolos is running the 2007 June NetHack tournament. This isn't the devnull one that runs in November, it's second one. It's played at nethack.alt.org and all details are at the 2007 June NetHack tournament at nethack.alt.org

I'm not going to be playing as much this year as I did last year, thesis writeup is looming, but I did design the trophy art for people to win. So go participate, good luck, and make sure to spread Angband propoganda ;-)

Taking a break from comics next week. Fortunately, there's guest strips to fill the gap. Series of five by Martin Bazley. Paying tribute (or lovingly ripping off :) to several earlier comics.

Congratulations to him on being appointed the new maintainer of vanilla Angband. Long may the game prosper under his leadership! He's currently also trying to GPL Angband, so if you have worked on *any* aspect of Angband and contributed any code/stuff at all to it then contact him if you've not done so already.

The new official Angband page is here.