DirectInput

When I named the strip, I was thinking about how Athena burst from her father's head - considering the bedevilments we had proposed in the strip. As I woke, I feared that there was a vibrator company called Athena and I was Goddamn right. You know how you can have a party where you sell candles or something to your friends? Right. This is like that, except it's for things you… things you put. Things that are and can be put in, like… Anyway, they have different things. For a place.

I've taught him everything I know about Once Upon A Galaxy, and now it's time for Dabe to travel into that wilderness alone.  Well, not entirely alone.  You should go hang out!  Day One of this month's tournament just opened up.  I don't compete in tournaments generally, I find them scary, but I'm excited to explore this new part of myself. 

(CW)TB 

It sounds like there was some networking shit early on that plagued early adopters, but Windrose - part of a genre we attempt to name in the strip - is something I'd already played a bit during one of Steam's various "Fests." These fests are getting more and more baroque, more obscure, and a fest for fests ("Fest Fest") cannot be far behind.

I recently finished my side of a “sketch swap” with the incredible Bob Q after he had already completed his end. Bob and I have very different styles and I think he would agree that it was a difficult task trying to ink and color over the other person’s sketch. From his report, it sounds like he was probably more outside his comfort zone than I was. I grew up wanting to be a comic book artist like Bob is, but I was only good enough to be a cartoonist. So here are the results of our Acquisitions Inc. sketch swap!

I have now gotten him to talk about it twice when he wanted to talk about his colon zero or even fewer times. This accrues not to my capacity for manipulation, but rather to the fact that he has been so harrowed body and mind by the experience he is now essentially just a sausage casing with a t-shirt draped over it. I was able to extract more data in my most recent interrogation and what I learned will shock you.

I always preferred Forza Horizon to the traditional Forza, but I never thought that was a compliment to me.  I would love to say that I stopped going to church because I had unspun the fundamental philosophies inherent to it, and stood astride it, gleaming like a newly minted God.  It's a fiction I'd love to maintain.  In the end, I simply couldn't hack it - I was willing to engage in a multi-year campaign of gruesome self-recrimination, obviously. But once it became clear that it was utterly open-ended, a blank check I would perpetually cash against my own identity, I could burn myself alive or try to go on as a maimed and useless creature.  That's basically me and Forza Horizon.  I wish that I were hardcore enough for the progenitor - of the universe, or the racing franchise.  Take your pick.  

You could order your own Ryan Gosling Wolf Fox Sweater kit from Mary Maxim, I suppose, if any more of them existed. What you can do at this juncture is purchase a spot in line to order a kit. Gabriel had heard of at least one person experiencing the scenario in the strip, and we might think that is crazy, but the kits are ninety dollars and I think that a normal person can't really conceive of how much we spend on our hobbies. The implacable High Marshall Helbrecht costs like fifty bucks, and he's a single model. Actually, in terms of sudden and explosive scene drama, knitting may be one of few venues that can compare with gaming. Also, these motherfuckers program yarn. I've peeped their game for some time now.

He is risen indeed! I don't have any insight into the true ethical machinery of the universe, but if the things I read as a child were true then they're at once timeless and ineffable but also authored to our precise moment. I remember learning in church that God was a 27 Dimensional Entity, which gave the Sundays thereafter a potent, hard sci-fi kick. If He exists at a remove from causality, well, that explains a lot. I mean, it's no Kolob, but we lowly snake-handlers had to make due with what we had.

Mork was trying to tell me what we can and can't do strips about, and the long and the short of it is that he's wrong. It called to mind the Council of Elrond, where Boromir is just like, "We should obviously use this harmful and wicked thing in the prosecution of our duties." Don't think too hard about everything else that happens in that scene! Or in the rest of that book, or the next one, or the next one, or any of the cartoons and movies. My argument is gonna look super bad if you do look at any of that stuff. Anyway, what I told him is that - in a manner of speaking - his own situation and that powerful series both involve rings of one kind or another. He did not find this funny.

Our little comic strip here has always been a sort of diary for Jerry and I. When this comic strip started I was a 21 year old kid who had just moved out of his parents house and was living with his best friend in Spokane Washington. You saw me propose to my then girlfriend and you were there when my kids were born. I talked with you many times over the years about my struggles with anxiety and you were there when I went on medication. Well I am turning 49 years old this year and if you’ve been reading for a long time you might be around the same age. I’m sorry to say it but we gotta get our buttholes checked out and I am scheduled to have mine done this Wednesday.

It's a meme with a very particular clientele: there is always, always something fucked up with Gabe's setup when he tries to do the Make-A-Strip. During the Surface era, it would reliably try to do a system update as soon as we would start the panel. The setup has coalesced these days around a Framework laptop and the lower tier XPPen Artist Pro, but he forgot his dongle so the puck he brought - the little device he uses to perform the somatic components of the Art spell - was inert. The screen could be manipulated physically, a feature he never even knew about, but when you try to shift the art around on there your work slides around like it's on an air hockey table. It wasn't optimal, but there were dark chuckles and schadenfreudes out there, so it occurred to me: is there a way to leverage even greater torments? We also dish up a truly ancient reference in panel one for all of those newly traveling through the archive.

Mork had saved a whole section of Pokopia - I won't say which one, because I think technically it might be a spoiler - just for the trip. This caused a resumption of those affections which had been felt so keenly before, and I apologize for the character of that sentence but I just watched Pride and Prejudice again. It's gonna fuck up my language for days. In any case: every now and then, in the course of his duties as reclaimer of the Kanto region, he will remember some of the places Pokemon live and feel a way about it. Ivri has an amazing song on this topic.

It’s always something. At PAX East this year I had more time to draw the comic during Make a Strip but I forgot a very important piece of hardware, and not having it made drawing the comic a huge pain in my ass. I normally have a little handheld ”puck” with a bunch of buttons on it that my left hand holds and uses for short cut keys. I forgot the little dongle that makes that thing work so instead I attempted to use my drawing tablets touch controls... for the first time...live on stage. It did not go great but I was told over and over again during the show how much fun it was to watch me struggle. In fact a few people suggested that going forward there should always be some impediment to me drawing the strip at the show!

Gabriel's diet, always a fraught topic, degrades substantially on trips. Once he ate someone who came to the show! He felt bad, but because the attendee had been completely devoured there was no way to truly communicate the fact. Another time, fell upon a ruined pigeon he'd found in the street. Traffic stopped in both directions - sat back on his haunches, he gnawed on that rigid bird like it was corn on the cob. In comparison, this year's food policy was positively enlightened.

As something of a connected phenomenon - my instinct is to say "corollary," but I think that's not correct - as Penny Arcade was unearthed by the wily Zillenial, the many fruits of our enterprise became known. The true facts of the name PAX, for example - a name I came up with in five seconds at Costco because we got a call saying the show thing we were trying to do needed a name. I'm always delighted when someone finds the information I tucked in there. Never you mind that the next question is usually "what's a Penny Arcade" because that's not what this story is about!!!

This year's theme park has so many twists and turns, so many nice little Touches, that it would be tricky to call each of them out.  I merely saw how Gavin had done the S in "PAX East" on a jacket and had to sit down immediately.  First I'll show off everything you can get on our Official PAX Shop, from the comfort of your own phone: