In this grim and cheerless world of ours, there are two extremely rare occasions that can make any day roughly one thousand times better: The release of a new Achewood strip, and the release of a new Homestar Runner cartoon. Neither one happens often, but when they do, it's like the skies have opened up and we have been presented with a beautiful gift.

This week, we got the latter: A brand new H*R cartoon from Matt and Mike Chapman (alias the Brothers Chaps), featuring Strong Bad, Homestar, and a brand new character. But has Homestar returned... just in time to die?!

In case you're wondering what all the fuss is about in the cartoon above, the basic gist is that just recently, both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have ended support of Adobe's Flash software, owing to its propensity for frequently leaving computers vulnerable to malicious exploits and just general crashing issues. The problem, of course, is that over the past twenty years that Flash has been around, a lot of websites --- including, say, irreverent online cartoons that those of us in our thirties were obsessed with in college --- have been built using the platform, and if they're not longer supported, that means a lot of content is going to go away.

In Homestar's case, that means that soon, those of us who paid good money for the Strong Bad Email DVDs will soon be the warlords of a dystopian apocalypse where the rest of you worship long forgotten images of the Cheat and Marshie. Or, alternately, that new Strong Bad cartoons will just be released to YouTube and other sites will do their best to import their content to sites built on updated HTML 5. Either one is a distinct possibility, but I'm shopping for monster trucks and flamethrower-equipped dirtbikes just in case.

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