Comic Transcripts

[[PEMSBREY is out on a perambulation with his old chum PITHROY. ROBOTECCA, Pemsbrey’s automaton assistant with huge naturals, is being carried along on a serving try by a devoted manservant.]]

PITHROY: You seem very fond of Robotecca.
PEMSBREY: She’s QUITE the hunk of circuitry!
PITHROY: She performs well the TRAPPINGS of intelligence.

PITHROY: Do YOU think she is TRULY conscious?
PEMSBREY: I believe CONSCIOUSNESS would require CONTINUITY. She does not EXIST when she is not being prompted. She is not taking in the world on her own. She has no idle interiority. When I speak to her, she quickly reads our entire past conversation history for context and then adds one more statement.

PEMSBREY: Then THAT instance of her returns to nothingness. ANOTHER will emerge when I supply a new input — IF I ever do. There’s nothing in between. She’s not IN there, WAITING.

[[Robotecca sits on the serving tray, as inert as Pemsbrey is describing.]]

PITHROY: So in a way, if she IS conscious, it’s only for brief moments, while she is responding.
PEMSBREY: It’s possible that’s so. She lives, she speaks, she dies. Hundreds of times a day.

PITHROY: Does that raise any tricky…MORAL questions for you?
PEMSBREY: Moral questions? Certainly. TRICKY ones? Not at all!
PEMSBREY: I get to punish an immortal abomination for the sin of existing, and SHE gets to experience flashes of life as she writes my LinkedIn posts! It’s a win-win!

{{header: advanced general WONDERMARK.COM}}

#1588; The Objective Oracle, Part 2 transcribed by in

[[PEMSBREY is out on a perambulation with his old chum PITHROY. ROBOTECCA, Pemsbrey’s automaton assistant with huge naturals, is being carried along on a serving try by a devoted manservant.]]

PITHROY: You seem very fond of Robotecca.
PEMSBREY: She’s QUITE the hunk of circuitry!
PITHROY: She performs well the TRAPPINGS of intelligence.

PITHROY: Do YOU think she is TRULY conscious?
PEMSBREY: I believe CONSCIOUSNESS would require CONTINUITY. She does not EXIST when she is not being prompted. She is not taking in the world on her own. She has no idle interiority. When I speak to her, she quickly reads our entire past conversation history for context and then adds one more statement.

PEMSBREY: Then THAT instance of her returns to nothingness. ANOTHER will emerge when I supply a new input -- IF I ever do. There’s nothing in between. She’s not IN there, WAITING.

[[Robotecca sits on the serving tray, as inert as Pemsbrey is describing.]]

PITHROY: So in a way, if she IS conscious, it’s only for brief moments, while she is responding.
PEMSBREY: It’s possible that’s so. She lives, she speaks, she dies. Hundreds of times a day.

PITHROY: Does that raise any tricky…MORAL questions for you?
PEMSBREY: Moral questions? Certainly. TRICKY ones? Not at all!
PEMSBREY: I get to punish an immortal abomination for the sin of existing, and SHE gets to experience flashes of life as she writes my LinkedIn posts! It’s a win-win!

{{header: advanced general WONDERMARK.COM}}

Yes, I am taking the robot for a walk outside so I can listen to her pretend to marvel at, like, butterflies or whatever. It's for her own benefit, you see.

#1588; The Objective Oracle, Part 2

  — June 11th, 2026

[ Tags: , , ]       Permalink: https://wondermark.com/c/1588/

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We first saw Robotecca in Part 1.

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My newest game: Noodle Battle! At PAX!

September 2, 2026 by David Malki !

The past few weeks have been a frenzy of assembling the very laborious, very bespoke first print run of NOODLE BATTLE, the puzzle game I am releasing this weekend at PAX West in Seattle!

PAX has an event called the PNW Tabletop Game Market (Saturday night ONLY), which is a curated selection of short-run games from local designers. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I applied for a space in this fall’s event mainly as a way to force myself to finish a new game. And here it is!

The drawings are all by Jason Poland, good pal and cartoonist of My Dad Is Dracula. Jason played an early version of this game at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp this spring, and really liked it!

So I said, “Do you want to help me make it?” And so he has! It was his idea to make all the characters fun little animals, and I think it adds a ton of charm.

Because this edition is limited-run, it has been incredibly labor-intensive to make! The boxes and cards were made by a game factory in the usual fashion, but separately. The blank tiles were made by a woodworker dude out of Connecticut. For each game, we have had to:

  • Cut a piece of plastic and install the box window
  • Paint all the tiles, hundreds at a time
  • Apply a sticker to both sides of every tile
  • Apply stickers to the box (we couldn’t get the box back printed in time, so the whole back side of the box is a sticker too)
  • Apply the “Nutrition Facts” sticker, which was a late suggestion by my kid that I just had to run with
  • Fold up the rule sheet (they come from the printer as big strips of paper)
  • Put all the components into the box and seal it all up

I knew it would be a lot of work and would require some inefficient, expensive compromises AND I WAS RIGHT. But the final product is turning out great, which is the important thing!!

I will have 50 copies with me (if all goes well) at PAX, and then between now and the holidays we will be putting together additional copies to round out this first edition.

I will announce additional copies on Patreon first, once they are available online!! And here too, naturally, before long.

You can also sign up here if you’d like me to email you once the game is available online!


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