A simple and straightforward introductory note: I missed the first Philly meet, which for argument's sake I will refer to as Philly 2 (because when I did the second annual Philly meet photoset, I didn't realize it was the second, so I called it Philly 1, but then for the third annual Philly meet I corrected it to Philly 3, so that just leaves Philly 2 for the name of the first Philly meet, unless we call it Philly 0, but that would just be confusing), but I have been to every one since. Those of you who followed what I wrote in the last sentence AND can do math will realize that this should be my fifth Philly photoset. However, it's only the fourth. The reason for that is much simpler than the Philly meet numbering issue explained above.

In short, I forgot to bring my camera to Philly 5.

I know, I know. I remembered it, but we were half an hour from home and already on the Turnpike, and I wasn't about to turn around for it. I considered doing sketches, but no one at the meet was willing to stand around for half an hour or more while I sketched them, so that didn't happen, and Philly 5 passed without a photoset from me, the first time that had happened at a Philly meet since Philly 2, aka Philly 0. The lack of a Varjak photoset for that meet was felt deeply by my vast readership, as evidenced by the number of emails, text messages, and other general contacts I received on the issue, that number being: zero. Really.

I'm not begging for feedback here. Attention whores annoy me and I'm not going to be one of them. Just explaining why there was no photoset last year, and why I'm not apologizing for that. That said, on to Philly 6, also known as the Third Annual Final Philly Meet. Karl's movin' to Boston any day now.

Having cleared my camera's memory card for the first time in over a year, I promptly took a picture of myself, pictured above, the first picture in any of my photosets to include the house I bought less than a year ago, woot! (We inherited the frilly curtains from the previous owner, who is to the best of my knowledge currently deceased.) Note the angel on my shoulder, Abraham the pig. On the left is a lamp. Yes, it's really a lamp, you pervert. (Let's see how many people completely miss that reference.)

Ah, to be back in Atlanta...

Neat how the snowfall pattern so perfectly matches the stonework pattern. What are the odds?

Today & Tomorrow may be a quarterly publication, but I expect they will have many, many, many copies left over when the Summer edition comes out.

Pennsylvania: Come for the potholes, stay for the plastic trees!

This is the worst Christmas tree farm ever.

PinkLady informs me we can get pie off this exit. If we can find somewhere we can get punch, we will be able to attract people to our rally to—FREE HAM!

Sorry, is that too many stacked references in too short a span to string together?

I can't tell if this is pro- or anti-religion, but either way, it's creepy.

I'm too secure to need your approval.

Is there a wind gap in your bath, or are you just happy to see me?

When I saw this, I immediately said, "Oooh! Industrial crap!" and started snapping pictures like mad.

I like this photo of a solitary bird on a streetlight, and am glad it came out as well as it did.

You can see the reflection of my jacket sleeve and wrist in this photo because the flash went off and reflected in the glass. Thank goodness the flash went off, or else the picture may not have come out because the sunset may have been too dim.

Our directions briefly took us off the grid and onto winding two-lane roads that snake down mountainsides. At the bottom of one of these hills, we encountered this vineyard, but didn't stop because we already had plans to get drunk elsewhere. You know why parents drink alcohol? Because of incidents like, just for example, a kid who refuses to get a drink at the restaurant, then complains ten minutes back on the road that she's thirsty, so her mother gives her drink to the kid, and at the very next stop the kid throws out her mother's 80% full drink, then at that same stop starts complaining again that she's thirsty. A full week of that and any plans for sobriety go right out the window. I'm reminded of a cartoon Mr Skullhead linked that said: One day with kids: "I can't hit a kid. That's reprehensible!" One week with kids: "I can't hit a kid. They throw you in jail for that, don't they?"

Dorsey repairs transmissions. Spread the word.

One thing about back roads: You see things that are more interesting than you can see on an Interstate.

And finally we get to Philly, where everyone piled into MrGreenSmiling's room for a while before all piling out upon request.

I suppose Sparemeister didn't find some comment I made about him in some random photoset to be very damn funny.

Visible in this photo are KoL meet regulars Nameless1, AlBassoon, Kitch Wing Of Angmar, and PinkLady. The person I'm sitting next to is not a regular KoL player but knows Sparemeister and was invited to the meet. At one point I decided to knight her with GeekRockGirl's magic wand. She said she wanted to be named after a font, any font.

"I dub you Sir Helvetica," I told her.

"Except Helvetica," she said. "I hate Helvetica."

So I tried to dub her Sir Wingdings, but couldn't remember the name of that font and ended up dubbing her Sir Winkydinks instead, which is funnier, actually, though I want to make it clear that at no point did I mean to imply she's a gay Teletubby, just in case that thought occurred to anyone.

Sparemeister drinks wine, or possibly urine, straight out of the box.

Sparemeister later added an entry to the index in the Book Of Mormon, passively referencing Lex Luthor. I fully approve. Sparemeister has been getting a lot of mileage out of this recently, and it hasn't stopped being funny.

Not yet, anyway.

Well, this changes things...

I carried this Book Of Mormon around for a while. I spent some time telling people that wisdom is best taken in small doses, then offering people a single page of the Book Of Mormon. I figured this would give me an excuse to rip pages out of it, but no one wanted a page from the Book Of Mormon, surprise surpise. Then I hit on the idea of letting people sign it like a yearbook, and everyone jumped at the opportunity. Haplo lent me a mechanical pencil, and I selected a page to sign—most of them had lots of writing on them, which made them bad for signing, but I found a mostly open page near the front and told people to sign it because "It's almost completely white, just like Mormons!" Many people signed it, and about half included the word "cock" in one context or another.

The term used at the time to describe this was "Ginger Scritches."

Our proud host Karl Dark, trying to get into a proper frame of mind to deal with the likes of us.

We should have drawn in our own floor plan. That didn't occur to me until now. A great opportunity missed.

God is powerful, but not as powerful as foreclosure.

You got a limo? Well, big deal! We've got...

Actually, we don't even have proper windows. Shit. Um, I guess you win on that front. But I bet we had WAY more fun than you this weekend, Mr. Limo Guy!

Got any receipes that call for BATLFLD 306 PANSY? I doubt it. I just Googled it and nothing at all came up. I think they made this flower up.

We took the short cart.

PinkLady said she wanted something sweet. I pointed this out. She suggested I was not being helpful. I don't understand what women expect from men sometimes.

These Easter Card shelves are empty ten months out of the year. Kind of a waste of space, really.

Yes, three boxes of Battlestar Galactica games. Two of them are genuine games. One is a Cylon. You have to figure out which.

Tealsac was so offended by Twitch's epic lack of rhythm that he took over and played the drum part so energetically that he actually broke a drumstick. The broken piece flew up and bounced off the ceiling before coming to rest on the floor behind the table of Battlestar Galactica games.

Electrical tape makes for a decent patch.

Asthmatic Cheetah hates it when people take pictures of her, so you have to catch her unaware. I also managed to catch Drunken "Snidely Whiplash" Irishman with an impromptu handlebar mustache.

MrGreenSmiling restrains Dazz so his daughter can attack him. She ended up hurting her head ramming it into his stomach. I don't think we can blame that one on him.

Side note: At the end of the meet Dazz agreed to share some recipes for lamb with PinkLady, who has pretty much exhausted her list of lamb recipes in the last few months. Now seriously, if you took a bunch of people who knew nothing about anyone in the Kingdom Of Loathing, and you lined up a bunch of Loathers, say me, PinkLady, Karl Dark, Tealsac, TechSmurf, Dazz, jezerfly, Xlyinia, Doc Trauma, Princess Sunshine, chibiknight, and so on, and you asked those people who knew nothing about us to rate us on how likely we would be to engage in a recipe exchange... Don't you think Dazz would be at the bottom of absolutely everyone's list?

Of course, we Loathers do defy expectations. Most people take one look at me with the hair and the tie-dye shirts and think "Stoner." And I honestly had no idea that a bunch of online gaming geeks could be so cool and consume so goddamn much alcohol. We all rock. Except Doc Trauma and Sweet Sarnia, who did not attend the meet because they were "on duty" for a "volunteer ambulance company" and needed to stay "available" in case they were called upon to "help save lives." And sprocket and TechSmurf, who were busy, I dunno, exchanging recipes or something. Missed you anyway, friends.

Drunk Apples To Apples. Always a great pasttime.

"I usually look like an asshole in photos, because cameras are accurate." —Dazz. Actual quote.

Me, shortly before crashing out Saturday night.

Having hit IHOP on Saturday, we forewent the normal IHOP Sunday and went to Cracker Barrel instead. What's the deal with chain restaurants and insane, wildly inappropriate crap on the walls, anyway?

I apologize for using the word "Forewent." There's just no excuse for that.

Sorry, but sometimes kids just aren't photogenic.

Me looking thoughtful. Probably thinking about captions for the photoset. Or wondering how I planned to pay for my meal with just a $1 bill and some random coins in my pocket.

This $5 bill was left by the people who sat at the table before us, and was not taken by the staff before we showed up, thereby making us appear to the staff to be $5 more generous than we actually were.

Read the fine print. It's not 100% pure maple syrup, it's 100% pure natural syrup, 55% maple and 45% cane.

And then we began with the long goodbyes, as always.

"If I have to spend one more moment around you people, I'm going to shoot myself in the head."

The kids had a brief but frenetic rock-off in the chairs here.

I am really disappointed that this came out blurry, because this was photographic proof that All Threes Luxury Sedan Service was cutting corners by not keeping their vehicles properly registered, as indicated by the February 2010 expiration date on the registration sticker.

MiniGreenSmiling.

We got the directions from there to here using the same program, but apparently all the roads are one-way, because you truly can't get there from here.

This looks legit.

This car was at a dead stop and had its turn signal on, but I'm pretty sure you can't turn either way here.

This is the next money-making marketing idea: Selling street names to corporations. Sure, Martin Luther King was nice and all, but he's not paying five figures to have the street named after him, so goodbye MLK Blvd, hello Taco Bell Drive!

If you walk in and announce in your best superhero voice, "I'm awesome! Hire me!", do you think they would hire you, or have security escort you out?

I can't figure out how to punctuate that last sentence. The lowercase D looks odd after the quotation mark, but a capital letter looks like a new sentence and makes the first part a fragment. Yet putting a ! and a , together is totally wrong. It's mind-bending conundrums like this that discourage most aspiring caption-writers.

If you encounter any aggressive drivers, run 'em over.

Subway has some creepy mascot thing. I assume he can only be there on Sundays because Citizens Bank is closed, and during the week they would have him arrested for scaring away their customers.

They have a store just for tomatoes? That's a new one.

To get to Easton, you have to go west here. Really.

These silhouettes would likely be more convincing if they clearly weren't on the outside of the bridge. I could only support this if it included Mr. Game & Watch.

This looks less like an intersection diagram than it does the result of kids playing with electrical tape.

If this was The Dukes Of Hazzard rather than real life, we'd have screamed around this corner at top speed, and then Roscoe and Flash would have crashed through the barn and ended up surrounded by chickens.

"This street is filthy again! And I varnished it just last week!"

So when it snows, where do they plow it? Or do they just turn into a luge course?

Many of these bridges struck me as, um, rickety.

Easton probably rivals Pittsburgh for wild bridges, per capita.

So both horses have the same nostril icicle disorder, and they have pierced hooves, which I bet drain sometimes, and they're owned by a man with, um, is that an oversized novelty wrench? And I'm not sure if that's a normal train or a nightmare train monster. This baffles and confuses me and I will spare it no more thought.

The wooden rail makes this road safe.

"Yes, the house is for sale. Yes, it's right by the river. Yes, it's on stilts. No, it never floods. Why would you even think such a thing?"

The Alpha Cement building is so large that looking at it in this picture full-screen, before I resized it, gives me just a touch of vertigo.

Oh boy! Corpse grove! In the event of zombie apocolypse, people in the area can seek shelter in the yellow house until just the black guy is left alive, and then he gets shot by rescue teams.

Referring to heroes emerging from a nuke plant on the same front page that Captain America appears on perhaps sends the wrong signal about what is happening in Japan...

And finally, exactly 300 photos after I started the phtoset (not all included), we wrap up back at home, where it was colder than Philly and the evil icicles wait for an unsuspecting person to try to enter the tiki lounge so they can leap down and skewer their unsuspecting prey. One icicle is not big deal, but these ones are in a pack. Perhaps they will make a good zombie defense.