This is another of those moments that has been a long time coming. It's been planned out practically from the beginning of the strip (in particular, the last panel), and it's taken us quite a while to get here. Don't worry, though--there are plenty more surprises in store for our...heroes? Heroines? Can we even call them that? Protagonists, let us say, and leave it at that. Our protagonists (and hopefully you) will continue to be surprised for quite some time to come. Not all the time, of course, but...when it would be surprising.

Also, I love the expression on Kent's face in that last panel. Just thought I'd toss that out there.

You'll have to excuse my sluggishness. It's past eleven thirty at night as I'm typing these words, and my brain does not operate well past a certain point in the evening. Regardless of how I lever my will against it, the firing of neurons simply...slows...down, occasionally leaving me with an entire sentence composed of gobbledegook that I must then go back and clean up to make presentable for public consumption.

That's something that most folk don't bother to do, I've noticed. And it really is an egregious thing, especially when your composition is being posted to the Internet. The Internet, as a medium, communicates information via text some absurdly high percentage of the time. To not take the extra few minutes to smooth over rough patches (in, say, a forum post) is the digital equivalent of walking out of your house with your fly unzipped while sporting a boner around which your Power Rangers boxers are draped like a flag in repose. People will listen to you, and may even understand you, but by God they are not going to take you seriously.

And on an even more fundamental level, why debase the medium by not paying attention to your writing? Capitalization, punctuation, grammar, syntax, all of these things are necessary to accurately communicate in a textual format. They are not necessary for basic comprehension, sure, but they help enormously in terms of clarity, which was why they were introduced in the first place. The Internet is an astounding vehicle for both shit-tonnes of raw information and generous volumes of pornography, so why erode its worth by subjecting it to poor form that could be easily avoided through use of a spelling/grammar checker? Or even (dare I say it), through use of your own goddamned eyes?

I think Kingdom of Loathing had the right idea when they decided that chatroom rights could only being earned after passing a compulsory grammar and spelling test. Perhaps the entire Internet ought to institute something of the sort.

Kind of like a CAPTCHA, but instead of distinguishing computers from humans, it filters out all the morons.