I speak, naturally of Ngozi Ukazu, who is about to wrap up the Kickstart for the fourth Check, Please! collection, which has cleared the half-million damn dollar mark and which is going up each time I refresh. It’ll wrap about five and a half hours from now (as I write this) and has picked up (again, as I write this) more than US$40,000 today alone, which makes this the third-best day of the fundraising period.

At the launch of the campaign I noted that the traditional predictors (the FFF mk2, the McDonald Ratio) would likely be skewed, what with the atypically high per-backer average contribution (which has actually gone up), the stealth launch, the huge pent-up demand for the last item in a hot property, etc. I warned that the estimates would likely be high, but you know what? They’re not that far off.

Okay, the FFF mk2 having a +/- 5% tolerance leads to some excessively large ranges on high-value projects like this (a full US$300K range), and the lower bound of US$600K was always a stretch¹, but the McDonald Ratio predicted US$550K and it wouldn’t surprise me if we hit it at this point.

In the time it’s taken me to write the last three paragraphs, the total has gone up three grand, and Check, Please! Year Four has surpassed Ava’s Demon: Reborn and has become the most-funded webcomics project in Kickstarter history². The five Check, Please! projects will have between them raised at least US$1.45 million, and there’s still five and a half hours to go. Not bad for a comic about gay hockey bros with big feelings and also pie³.

(‘Nother fifteen hundo in the time it took to write and do the math in that last ‘graf, bee tee dubs.)

Anyways, I’m not waiting around until after 10:00pm EDT to see what the end total is, but I give it a 50/50 chance that today’s total becomes the second highest of the campaign, and and 80/20 chance it clears US$550K in total, thus validating Kel McDonald’s math. I’m sure I’ll mention it sometime next week, but remember: Monday is a holiday in the States, so probably no post. Enjoy your weekend, enjoy the holiday if you’re in a position to celebrate it, and the next time somebody suggests a seemingly-ludicrous story hook, we should all just say, Let’s give it a year and see.

Spam of the day:

Are you and your mate a good match? Find out with a Romantic Compatibility Report, your best resource for a romantic comparison.

Screw your astrology bullshit. We’ve been married for 28 years and I don’t give a damn what your made up report says.

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¹ The backer count and pledge total going up on day two really disturbs things … I’m thinking of looking at an average of the projections for days 1 and 3 in those cases, which would have given us US$637K +/- US$128K, or US$509K to US$765K in this case, which would be on the low end, but within range. Gonna keep adjusting this thing until it accounts for all the strange outliers as well as the typical cases.

² Plus the number three slot for Check, Please! Year Two.

³ Seriously, if you’d suggested to anybody back around 2012 or so that premise would catch fire, people would have suggested back that while gay bros and pie were pretty popular, hockey’s crippling unpopularity in the US would render it the whole thing moot. You can never tell what’s going to grab attention, except for the fact that it’s a damn good comic, and damn good comics will find their audience.