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.

Thanks to everyone who has come by the booth here at Comic Con. We will be there all day again today. We will also being doing a special Lookouts signing tonight after the show at the Cryptozoic store in the Gaslamp District. 

We're at San Diego, booph 1334, so on and so forth. But we are ALSO schlepping hot jpegs and flopping them right onto your plate. Among other fabulous toys, you might have heard that there is a toy prized above all others. Well, as professional thing-sayers, we have things to say about that.

We have updated the Kickstarter FAQ with answers to a lot of the questions we've been getting. We've also revealed a couple of the stretch goal projects. Something that might not have been clear is that when we say no advertising that also means no PA Presents. I love working on comics for publishers but we spend a huge chunk of time every year on stuff that isn't ours. Working on things like comics to promote games and pre-sell bonuses fill in all the cracks between our Mon, Wed, Fri strips. I've been honored to work with some of these properties but I'd love to devote that time to our own projects. I feel like we have all these cool worlds that we're neglecting because we just don't have the time. This KS would change all that.

The San Diego Comic-Con has a dark side, certainly; a dark place, where fear is currency. Come to booth 1334 for succor.

About eleven years ago Penny Arcade was on the brink of collapse. We had recently recovered the rights to our own work after accidentally selling them to a shady internet aggregator. The good news was that we could keep making Penny Arcade but the bad news was we had quit our jobs and we were broke. We talked about giving up and begging for our jobs back but I convinced Tycho to try something first. The Wayback Machine has a couple priceless snapshots of the day we decided to ask you for donations. Going back and reading those posts today is really amazing. For almost two years we ran this website entirely on your generosity. You paid for our rent, food, video games and in return we made PA three times a week as well as a bunch of extra content. A lot has changed in eleven years. PA has fourteen employees now, we put on two massive conventions every year, we run a worldwide charity, we produce our own video games and web show. It’s a major operation now and running it off of donations again seems impossible. Or is it?

We have many tales of San Diego Comic-Con adventure in store for you, through the week and maybe just past. I am completely fascinated with it this year for some reason, even though we've gone every year since 2000 and such enthusiasm should be all but burned out. I fully expect to synchronize with readers on a variety of topics, some of them thoroughly surprising. I also expect to take megadoses of vitamins A and C to counteract fully six days of exposure to those enervating halogen rods.

We will be at Comic Con is next week and I’ve got all the details for you.

I'll talk about Theatrythm next week, when I can stop playing it long enough for the thoughts

We will be at Comic Con is next week and I’ve got all the details for you.

The first issue of our ongoing Lookouts comic book is available today on Comixology! This book has been a long time in the making and I’m incredibly proud of the result. Cryptozoic has put together and incredible creative team and they really nailed the Lookouts style. Tycho and I worked very closely with everyone involved to make sure this book feels like Lookouts. If you’re a fan of our fantasy boy scouts I think you’re in for a real treat.

Gabriel has been playing the newest Spider-Man, which - to hear him tell it - is actually a new Batman game, or something very much like it. He doesn't care at all! He doesn't think they're engaged in a barrel scraping operation, or that there's a paucity of inspiration at Beenox, or anything of the kind. He loves Batman: Arkham Whatever, and he simply thinks that all superhero games should be exactly like that. Essentially, he's arguing for the formulation of Batman a la Rocksteady as a kind of genre.

Knowing, as we do, that Gabriel plays games in order to be rewarded with "new art," the fact that Kingdom Hearts 2 ranks high for him - as high as it can, actually - probably isn't a surprise. I find the story fascinating, the sort of game one drains with a FAQ chaser; there are huge ideas all over the fucking place, when the fact their tangle of warring franchises works at all is surprising out the gate.

Try to follow the sequence of events:

I keep thinking I'm going to get back into Diablo 3, but it never seems to happen; they inspire new outrage on a weekly basis with everything that surrounds the clicking, but I'm not even running the executable! I'm safe altogether from these fresh horrors. And everyone else beat it and left. If I wanted to get back in, I'd be doing it alone. So that might not happen.