I got the idea for this one from my astro buddy Chris Lintott's excellent recent lecture "From Mars with Love", where he wrote postcards from several Mars missions. Most of them were very enthusiastic, but InSight was quite disgruntled at having been intentionally sent to the most boring place on the planet, and then its heat probe didn't even work. Can't win them all, I'm afraid.

 When this NPC says that about Team Rocket, it just makes me think that if Team Rocket doesn't have an adequate handle on what other people consider popular or useful Pokémon species, they're going to run into some issues.

Fun fact: I modeled the Rocket grunts in this one after my sister and brother-in-law. Little did I know that they would end up giving me a niece who would inspire even more video game comics!

 Another adorable anthropormophized spacecraft! The Venera landers have always been some of my favorite space missions. Let's engineer a machine that can survive long enough on the surface of of Venus to take and transmit pictures, because why not?

... So, when are we going back?

 I decided to do something I haven't really done in a while and just sit and sketch. I used to sketch prodigiously when I was a teenager and in college. Unfortunately, 99% of what I filled my sketchbooks with in high school was absolute rubbish, mostly janky anime-styled lame character designs from before I learned how to draw, and doodles from franchises I was largely into just to try to please a friend who frankly didn't care about me nearly as much. 

For a while I kept those sketchbooks because of the presumed importance of an artist keeping a thorough record of her work, but finally a few years back I decided I couldn't stand to look at them anymore, and I threw them all away. If that makes any of you cringe, you're honestly not missing much. I really doubt a pencil drawing of an awful Mega Man fan design with terrible anatomy is of any relevance to anyone. It makes me sort of sad that I spent day after day in high school churning out that sort of nonsense instead of actually taking the time to learn to draw and have better friends. Oh well, live and learn.

Right, about the sketches--these are some concept doodles for a novel manuscript I've been working on. I wanted the Plainsmen to have facial features reminiscent of the Middle East and southwest Asia. They're loosely based on the Rigvedic Indo-Aryans, but also take inspiration from the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin. Also a portrait of Jawwad because he's great. I really enjoyed writing the Quo Qu--they're intellectual, numbers-obsessed, and slightly unscrupulous, which is an entertaining combination. But Jawwad comes through for Arun's family in the end.

I was hanging out with my awesome paleo buddies Ashley Hall and MaggieJo Widdicombe at the Museum of the Rockies's Virtual Fossil Fridays, and MaggieJo, who loves Pachyrhinosaurus, pointed out that P. lakustai has a single horn on its forehead anterior to its frill, and she thought that made it look like a unicorn. She then said she'd love to see an actual P. lakustai unicorn, and I just had to draw that.

Man, I want an entire toy line of dinosaurs turned into fantasy creatures. I would have gone crazy for that as a kid. I was a strange child. While other girls my age were playing with dolls or crushing on boy bands, I was reading encyclopedias and building computers. And I turned out just fine(????).

One of my (many) paleo art pet peeves is when people under-muscle dinosaurs. I see this a lot with ceratopsians and hadrosaurs. Some reconstructions just give them these way twiggy limbs, which is ludicrous considering how much bulk those limbs are supposed to be holding up. You can't follow limb bones too closely when putting flesh on an animal--there's a lot of muscle and skin built around those things. If you look at the skeleton of a rhinoceros (a good modern equivalent to a ceratopsian), they actually have rather svelte limb bones--it's just that they're well-covered with thick muscle and tough hide. Let's make our dinosaurs adequately chonky, folks! Soft tissue is a thing!

 With the Pokémon Fan Club, I not-so-subtly commented on fandoms that are really scary and toxic. Like, I thought the whole point of getting together with other fans of a franchise was to enjoy it together, not to argue and bully and make other people feel bad for liking something differently than you do?

On a related note, I'm still playing through Legends: Z-A and Naveen is driving me up the wall. I understand what they were trying to do with his character, but he's so obnoxious with his arrogance, and making it clear he doesn't want anything to do with anyone, and obsession with a celebrity to the point of prioritizing watching her stream over lives in danger, it's not even funny. I just really, really hope he displays some sort of redeeming quality by the end of the game. And by that I mean character development that gives him likeable traits, not some sort of shallow "I showed up to help you save the day and that means we're best friends now" nonsense. I swear if the writers pull that stunt I'm going to have to dock the game points in the story department.

Fun fact: In the original Japanese version, the Pokémon Fan Club is called the Pokémon Daisuki ("We Love Pokémon") Club. In 2004, Nintendo created a real life Pokémon Daisuki Club in Japan whose members have access to exclusive merchandise and media. Its English-language equivalent is Pokémon Trainer Central. It's always fun when franchise creators sort of bring a part of the fictional universe to life like that.

 When this NPC says that, I always get really confused about whether he's referring to someone else's Pikachu, or your hypothetical Pikachu.

So if you don't have a hypothetical Pikachu, it's a very odd thing for him to say to you.