The antlion in today's comic is named after one of the forum members who won a little G-Mod posing contest on the board a while back -- that was the lame prize I came up with. Congratulations! See, I didn't forget.

And, if all goes as planned, you should be able to start preloading Half-Life 2: Episode One today. Preloading via Steam is neat, because when the game is released, you get to play it more or less immediately. Not so neat is realizing that the game is sitting on your computer, more or less ready to play, for weeks before it's unlocked. It's like having a big Christmas present in November, just sitting on your desk, cloaked in some sort of tamper-proof wrapping paper, and about once a week the package gets a little bigger and more enticing. Anyone who preloaded the original HL2 knows what I'm talking about. Here we go again.