Young Mork attended the Child's Play Dinner, a traditional haunt, and offered up an auction off the cuff - drawing your D&D character, that ended up bringing in twenty-thousand dollars. I was gonna type that with numbers, but stretched out it's such a fucking slab. It was a crafty play and it's the sort of thing he has done many times at the event - reading the room, then identifying and playing along to its energy. He wrote up a whole thingy about the night plus Child's Play in general, here twenty years in.

Now. Do these things always get drawn, you know, immediately? Maybe not! Maybe they don't get drawn, like, right away. And maybe when we do a comic about it six years later, you might need a little extra context. But in the fullness of time? Absolutely. And frankly, Mike is a way better artist in 2023 than he was in 2017. Rhetorically, it may be best to think of buying art from him as an investment that can appreciate. Certainly I think we would prefer that framing. That will make us seem cool, and not like wastrels.

Child's Play started in a Wastrel Place, from Pique about the monstrous creatures gamers supposedly were, but once it blew up to the tune of $230,000 or whatever it was a vital communique from the universe. In essence: that feeling might have catalyzed it, but it couldn't and shouldn't sustain it. It really wasn't important anymore, and now that it was in orbit that portion could fall away and burn up in the atmosphere.

We had the opportunity, in quotes, to meet with much larger charities and try to work with them but beyond a certain size they take on a number of dynamics that don't really seem to serve the principle they were organized for. So, most of the work we do is directly with hospitals. Once the traditional Child's Play wishlists were established and underway, we started trying to figure out what the step after that was. We think that stocking the Child Life departments will always have a place, but if there isn't someone with specialized knowledge to understand, deploy, and repair that technology the job is only half done. So we created and advocated for a position that does that, at multiple hospitals, proved the concept out by finding them at their inception, and universally the results are so great that they pick those contracts up. The next step was making sure those people are all talking to each other, establishing best practices so good ideas don't get bottled up. Now, as you can see in the video and in Mike's piece earlier today, they're now building custom software to soften some of the brutal edges of a scary experience.

I've been saying "we" a lot. You know you're part of that "we," right?

(CW)TB out.