I admit to being a huge fan of reality tv style game shows. I love shows like So You Think You Can Dance, Hell’s Kitchen, and Master Chef. I even watch shows like Ink Master and Shear Genius. It doesn’t matter if it’s singers, chefs, fashion designers or gardeners. I love watching groups of people pushed together to compete at something they are good at. I don’t know a thing about cooking or dancing but I can’t get enough of these game shows. I’m always amazed when the challenge is something like “make a fruit tart” and one guy says “shit I’ve never made a fruit tart before” and then he proceeds to make a fucking fruit tart. I could never do that and maybe that’s why I love watching it so much. Could you pull a theme out of a hat and then write and draw a comic strip about it? Probably not, but I’m guessing you might like to watch people who can.

The only thing that keeps my workday from being an unbroken stream of Outernauts' plinks and boinks is the fact that "energy" exists. My compatriot hurts for it, and it's made a beast of him.

Our next big Kickstarter stretch goal is the Strip Search web show. This will be like Master Chef for web cartoonists. We will be sharing lots more information about the show soon but right now we are about to hit a much goofier stretch goal. Tycho will cosplay at PAX dressed as a character that you all choose. We should hit this goal pretty soon so we went ahead and put up the voting page. Just hit this page and drop in the name of a character you’d like to see Tycho cosplay. We will let this run for a bit and then narrow it down to the top ten and have a vote.

With Part Four, The Proxy comes to a close. It will Prox no more. But! Gabriel must like you, you must have forged a connection somehow, perhaps at PAX; he went deeply, profoundly H.A.M. on today's strip. I mean, I wrote the words that are on there I guess, but I've got nothing to do with this thing.

Check it out, we added a bunch of new rewards to the Kickstarter. You can check out all the details right here but there are a couple highlights in my opinion:

The Proxy continues its proxification unabated, now in its third discrete lozenge. My son is younger than the boy we have included in the strip, and so is at an earlier point in this progression; the rules are interesting to him, insofar as they are a part of an individual card's overall fascination. He knows, because his dictionary has told him - the dictionary that was once mine - that words are not merely to be collected, and arranged, but befriended:

So I just posted this in our Kickstarter comments and I figured it would also be worth posting here.

So the current storyline is indeed taken straight from my life. My son attended his very first Pokemon League night on Tuesday. I played the game very seriously a few years ago but have not touched it recently. My son went in with a deck cobbled together from some of my old cards. It was comprised mostly of pokemon he really liked but had no synergies to speak of. I helped him a bit just making sure he had enough energy and talking to him about how many of each stage in an evolution you should have. He got to the league event and ended up losing all five of his games. Some of them after only a few turns.

My own son pulled a Zekrom in a booster pack, all shining foil, and he was confused about why you would use an attack that damages yourself until he noticed that, wait a second, dad does that mean yes, that is what it means! Yessss. It won't be hard for you to tell what is advantageous about it, particularly since every ten points of damage is a distinct "counter" in game terms. But the idea of trading temporary disadvantage for long-term advantage isn't entirely inbuilt. The ratio of hand-birds to bush-birds, and when you should choose between them, is something you have to learn. It might even have been your father who taught you.

These Kickstarter projects have me frothing at the mouth I'm so excited! I'm still working on the designs for the Daughters but I wanted to share my latest piece.

If anyone is ever wondering how not to go crazy, I have a small piece of advice: don't launch a game and sell your house and write a book and move and go to San Diego Comic-Con and launch a Kickstarter within, like two weeks. I'm running up against the theoretical limits of what stressors pharmaceutical science can effectively shield me from.

Our Kickstarter is very close to hitting the "New Automata Comic" goal. I'm so excited for this project! Here's some new artwork I just finished of detectives Sam and Carl:

The votes have been tallied, and Erika cracked out a slick page to display them. Lots of rad stuff in there, many of which you could try today, if you like.

The Kickstarter is really going great, thank you to everyone who has pledged. We’ve revealed a bunch of new goals that I’m very excited about. If you take a look at what we’ve proposed you can see this isn’t just about an ad free Penny Arcade. This is about what we can do if we are freed from that model. We will be going into all these various projects in greater detail as the month goes on but right now I want to talk about Strip Search.

I have survived; if there are any lingering effects vis a vis "the fucking plague" my body will (no doubt) make me aware of them soon. I need to go back and read my post from last year regarding the same show, and see if I found it as easy as this one. A five-day torrent of unrecognized and untreated social anxiety used to make the show a psychic cheese-grater, and each day there was less brain, until it had been processed completely. Such trips were also bookended with sky journeys which felt like dying in slow motion. It is difficult to imagine how a pill could resolve problems of this kind, but I didn't have to invent this pill; all I have to do is put it in my mouth.