Our Kickstarter will be closing here in just about two hours. As I type this we are nearing the $500k level. We’ve managed to raise a half million dollars towards the goal of an ad free Penny Arcade. That’s just incredible and I want to extend a sincere thank you to everyone who pledged. We got very close to all ads removed from the front page of the site. As it stands we’ve raised enough to remove the top banner advertisement next year. We will also be creating a new Automata comic. Tycho will be dressed as the Fruit Fucker at PAX and we will start filming the Strip Search web show this fall!

Mike Fehlauher, a man who literally a sword forged to wear at his wedding, stands astride this world and the next. This is an ennobling way to say that he is a huge dork. I called him over the weekend to see if he wanted to press on in our Orcs Must Die 2 campaign, but he didn't answer because he was drinking in the woods with someone literally dressed as an orc. The whole scenario makes me question his dedication, frankly.

D&D Next is a thing and we sat down with Mike Mearls, Senior Manager of D&D R&D at Wizards of the Coast to talk about it. If that actually sounds interesting to you then you’re in luck, because we recorded the entire thing. You can grab part one right here and part two (which just went up today) right here.

Once one o'clock hits, it's apparent that a malevolent alien race seizes our broadcast infrastructure and attempts to vend a manifestly dangerous suite of products, services, and ideas. There is no other explanation for the wholly xenogenic nature of these communiques. They show us black and white videos of women who cannot open jars without a custom apparatus; men for whom a hammer is an inconceivably complex device. To look at a hammer with confusion is a dead giveaway. It's a look that says they would be more comfortable "tamping in" a "spar" with a "kineto."

We have a repository for things we will never publish, under any circumstances, and we have a sub-vault for shirts which must not be printed; excerpts from the latter are presented in today's visual charcuterie. You may have seen these on our table at San Diego Comic-Con, alongside the inexplicable, reader-contributed vaginas and pictures of Finn from Adventure Time fucking some kind of snake. It's also possible that the snake was his dick; there were ambiguities.

We have just one week remaining on our Kickstarter and its been quite the experiment. We’ve raised nearly half a million dollars which is outstanding. Obviously the idea of an add free Penny Arcade appeals to some of you. I think we really underestimated how many of you actually like our ads though. I’d say the number one piece of feedback I got about the Kickstarter was “I love the ads, don’t get rid of them!”

Gabriel told me that I needed to see something, and so I did, but I couldn't believe what I was seeing. If you already know about Men's Sprint, which we have included in a comic which details a few other lesser known competitions, then what you see in that video won't surprise you. You will say, "Yes, that's Men's Sprint." Every other person will look at it and wonder why you would give a person some of your gold for doing that. At least, at first! You'll see.

It seems like you had it under control.

What the hell kind of news post was that? You could have at least double spaced it.

I play Outernauts everyday. Technically I play it twice a day. It’s one of these Facebook games that uses “energy” to keep you from having as much fun as you want. So I play it in the morning and then I let my energy build up and play it again before I leave the office. I am not a Facebook person. In fact I had to create an account just so I could play Outernauts. It’s an awesome game but being tied to Facebook only hurts it.

"Cloning" may not be cool, but it remains to be seen whether or not the specific example of The Sims Social and The Ville constitutes illegality as opposed to simply bad form. Given a timeline of sufficient length, eventually the increasingly brazen/desperate Zynga was always going to pick the wrong pocket.

I’ve put a good 13 hours into Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance now and so I feel comfortable telling you that it’s awesome. With that said, If you’re going to play it you need to put up with the wonky camera, the ridiculous story, the complicated nested menus, and systems piled on top of systems. Trust me though, buried under all that crap is a lot of gold. The combat system is fast and fun, the Pokemon style monster collection is great, the Flick Rush card battle game could be sold all by itself, and visually the entire game is just gorgeous.

I’ve gotten a lot of mail about my latest Daughter’s of the Eyrewood piece. Thank you very much to everyone who took the time to drop me an email. A lot of you went ahead and linked me back to the very first PA comic and wanted to know how I got from there to here. The answer is that you guys have essentially watched me learn to draw over the course of the last 14 years.

I was going to write about the phenomenon of Losing To Win, but Sirlin is way, way on it. I saw it on The Cut, as I see so many things now.

It is difficult to talk to Gabriel at the moment, as the lion's share of my conversational attempts are directed to "The Hand." His focus is on the 3DS, specifically on the game that is in the 3DS, even more specifically Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop. His relationship to that device is fraught, as I've desribed repeatedly - but it's the first time he hasn't complained about it and has found the 3D a boon. That feature is annoying when its implemented in a merely nominal way, but it's most annoying in a game that simply isn't enjoyable; a game that no amount of spatial wizardly could improve. Many such games exist.

Back in 2008 we were contacted by the Make A Wish foundation. We got to meet a young man whose wish was to spend a day with us at Penny Arcade. Nathan Burgess came out to the office and we ate pizza and played video games. He was an awesome kid and we ended up putting him in a comic strip the next day.