penny arcade: c/d

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2005-03-25&res=l

Punchlines are unnecessary in modern life, I think. That's not a fair complaint.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20040820l.jpg

at least it isn't PvP.

i loved tycho's posts when i first started checking it out. but at some point i realized parsing his prose wasn't worth the effort to find out just how hyperbolic he could be about some new random game i'd never heard of or, if i'd heard of it, would never play. i mean sometimes he did make me wish i could check the thing out, but 'twas not to be. so.

Also, Pentasmal(on the same site) was good/weird most of the time...

see also:

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/

and

http://www.nothingnice.com/

http://www.leisuretown.com

There are actually loads that I read that are good and then, well let's just say that sometimes editors serve an important function when it comes to quality control.

PA I can take or leave and I prefer PVP, the idea of a meglomaniacal cat appeals to me...

http://www.userfriendly.org/

i think with the PA guys that it's the same process, only particularly exacerbated due to both the medium and presentation(i.e. a daily strip coupled with the blog posts and the immediate feedback from email, etc).

I am amused that the fans are basically a bunch of noise boarders, so when they're annoyed at someone now they have to say things like "Please don't destroy their site and mail them flaming bags of dog poop", or else don't, if that is the desired effect.

"noise boarders" wouldn't care enough to call the Florida Bar and try to get somebody's practice shut down. "mook gamers" apparently give millions of dollars to children's hospitals every Christmas.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/mf_pennyarcade

Krahulik agrees. "One time in high school, someone broke into my locker and stole my stuff, so I had to wear gym clothes for the rest of the day," he says, wincing at the memory. "I developed humor as a defense mechanism. Now I drive a fucking Mercedes."

nerd revenge should be sweet but it really isn't:-/

exhibit a: kanye

mediocrity sells

I hate Penny Arcade.

i like the art, the writing is bleah.

Hey, you drew Pac Man

there are a lot of shitty things in the world that the internet has made us all aware of, and even more stupid things that people seem to approve of that really don't deserve it, like I imagine this painting:
http://penny-arcade.com/uploads/2008/11/10/jim_framed.jpg
which is going to look absolutely dumbfoundingly terrible in somebody's house. But I think what it comes down to is that at Penny Arcade they sell this off for charity, where most of the rest of the semi-offensive dross on the internet is just to serve greedy untalented people, like ana marie cox begging for thousands of dollars because she can't do her job properly. so whatever I may occasionally think of penny arcade, I can't imagine that mike and jerry are anything but stand-up guys. even though one of them painted that.

I suppose, but they do consistently put out work three times a week - there's bound to be a lots of duds. I sure as hell wouldn't buy that painting, and Child's Play is a nice thing of course, but they've put out enough good quality and funny stuff that I don't think they still need to "prove" themselves. Don't see why it gets lumped in with all the generic internet hate, besides being broadly successful and inspiring shitty copycats. It's funny stuff with nicely produced art.

Then again, that painting does stretch the bounds of "giving to charity". But positive thoughts!

I wish they weren't all, "look at all the money gamers give to charity, look at us look at us we are awesome" whenever they do this shit.

this shit makes Achewood look like Chris Ware

They seem very "look at you, you are awesome" whenever I've read them talking about it. which has generally been in the context of "Jack Thompson thinks gamers are a wart of society. How many millions of dollars worth of good has Jack Thompson given to charity lately?".

I'm not saying they're ideal humans, but they're good representations of gamers.

I also agree with Whiney, but not in a way that would make him happy.

is that guy a poetaster? idk. poetasters are ppl gesturing to an ill-absorbed concept of literary value for an audience who also have a badly-defined concept of literary value. i think w tycho smth even worse is happening

Jesse Thorn of "Jordan, Jesse, Go" finally tells the story of what happened when the PA guys came on their podcast and we're dicks to everybody, then complained about it at length online.

I can't believe there are five PAX events a year.

I also have a hard time believing I ever stanned for these guys

I went to a couple days of the "main" one my first year in Seattle. It was crowded, like all fan cons, with the added unpleasantness of being darkened, extra-loud, and a for-profit enterprise run by unpleasant jerks.

It kind of seems like Child's Play was a calculated ploy by their business manager to give them a humanistic veneer. By kind of I mean I am totally convinced that's how it came about.

I mean, great, it raises millions of dollars (that incidentally all pretty much go right into the game industry, and not, for the sake of argument, into medical research, or helping defray patients' hospital bills), but it also seems like it's there so they can pat themselves on the back whenever they and their fanbase act like total dicks to random people

Could also just be that I'm even more cynical now and just don't have the energy for people who are too chickenshit to pick a side on anything that actually matters

^

I started getting emails, and forum trolls, and tweets - calling me every kind of awful name, talking about how shitty my work was, all kinds of awful stuff. It was literally the most unpleasant period of my online life. It went on for weeks. I was totally shocked that people wouldn’t look at a comic like the one they made and think, “Geez, what kind of unprofessional dick would do this?”

total Trump vibes

Also I find it hilarious that the guy who has himself drawn himself as

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/theinventory/images/8/82/Tycho-brahe.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20101123073834

actually looks like

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Jerryholkins20090209.jpg

always avoided the strip as I thought the artwork was incredibly ugly, up there with Family Guy and Key in my least fav comic style aesthetics

I sympathize w Jesse Thorn and have no time for PA but you have to admit that anybody who writes something like this could make a v v tempting target

http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2006/02/manifesto-for-new-sincerity.html

I don't want to live in a world where I can't hate both sides (though obv. 'lol fat nerd' is an interesting stance on ILX)

My point isn't so much "lol fat nerd" as "guy who writes disgusting webcomic portraying himself as handsome gamer who is disdainful of women turns out to look like a pair of glasses glued to an egg". It's more a question of hypocrisy than flattering my own devilish good looks.

or not so much hypocrisy as "your chosen avatar tells us so much about your self-loathing and how it drives your LOL RAPEWOLVES worldview"

this comic used to make me laugh on occasion but man, I haven't heard of a single interaction with these dudes (especially since they started profiting off it) that didn't make me like them a lot less.

Well, a) That's their house style, has been for a while and b) it's not his avatar and he's not portraying himself, he writes it and the other guy draws it.

Yeah it's a small thing but telling - if they were different people with different motives/priorities, one could easily imagine the Gabe and Tycho drawings aging/evolving to go alongside the having-kids material or whatever. Thinking here of the Scott McClouds of the world, giving themselves increasingly graying hair etc. But Penny Arcade the cool-guy dgaf dckwolf internet hardman brand wouldn't permit that (though I guess it permits the gradual uglifiication of everything about the art), and the commitment to that particular brand and its profits tells you a lot about who these guys really are.

Child's Play is a fine thing, and IMHO not more harmful to other forms of aid than Toys For Tots etc. But it's interesting that its form and sales pitch are calibrated exactly to reach internet gamerbros with chips on their shoulders about proving a point (recall its origins in a public squabble with some ''games are violent and harmful'' establishment type) and who accept buying power as the final arbiter of right and wrong. The REAL FANS have spoken through their debit cards! (I also imagine that far, far more people have invoked CP in shouting down PA's critcs than have ever donated themselves.)

This characterization isn't meant to denigrate everyone who's given to the thing over the years, cause I expect it has actually done a lot to cheer up some very sick, bored and lonely kids. Just I think it reveals, in a small, nice way, some things about ''gamer'' mentality that elsewhere come through in a big, ugly way.

Looks like Robert Khoo left the company this year. I got the sense that he was a big part of driving its expansion.

The Scott McClouds of the world is basically Scott McCloud - there aren't a lot of comic strips that have the same longevity as Penny Arcade, and changing your characters to reflect that is more of a gimmick than not - they don't reflect reality (obviously, in Tycho's case).

I agree that Child's Play is a good thing, it came about in a specific context, but that context did exist and it's an admirable way of fucking with it, of making the point that gamers are not some fundamentally twisted subculture. It would obviously be nice if there was less regular need to make the same point, which is obviously on a loud minority of gamers.

Their forums were the first place that I was surprised to hear described as a nest of SJW's when Gamergate started, and that helped as regards reassuring me that things generally run towards tolerance if you let people mingle long enough.

I think that's basically all the nice things I have to say about them? They'll occasionally stumble into a decent joke, but Jesus I would never read the text posts for enjoyment these days (in fact I only ever do it if I realise I'm far enough from core gaming that I don't understand the joke in the comic).

The Scott McClouds of the world is basically Scott McCloud

In Doc C's context, no. Alec MacGarry went grey, then white. Kim Deitch is bald and white-bearded in Alias The Cat. Chester Brown went from tit-length locks in Showing Helder to skullet in My Mother Was A Schizophrenic to bald in Paying For It. Crumb has a grey beard in his C21st strips. The Kyle Baker in Critics At Large is thin and curly-haired, the Kyle Baker in The Bakers is fat and dreadlocked. Seth wears glasses and a hat and a long coat in his modern comics that use a character based on himself.

I realise you're rejecting the entire notion that the Penny Arcade characters in any way represent their authors, contrary to Doctor Casino's view, but to say that cartoonists that use avatars to address the audience never change those to address the passage of time is completely mental.

You are completely correct and I meant webcomics.

my main issue with PA (outside of how ugly the strip looks) is how stupidly wordy the writing is. like it shouldn't take 400 words in 3 panels to get to a dumb punchline in because you want to shoehorn in all these dumb obscure references

my main issue with PA is that is sucks

grrr I hate typos

always thought these guys sucked. this story just confirms they are Prima Donnas too.

I'm not versed enough in webcomics to name examples but I'd be shocked if there were not tons and tons of more obscure, bloggish sorts of strips that feature some kind of aging/appearance change for the author analogue. Again, not to say PA's under any obligation to do that, just that it's a choice to maintain the stylized hepcat looks for their protagonists, and maybe that choice tells us something about what kind of strip it is and what they see as its role.

IIRC though the one dude signs (signed?) his unbelievably long, self-indulgent text posts as Tycho, and a variety of strips have involved in-strip Gabe as cartoonist, with Tycho dictating content to him or whatever. They're author stand-ins and that's a part of their personal brand identity etc.

Also DJP otm

not versed enough in webcomics to name examples but I'd be shocked if there were not tons and tons of more obscure, bloggish sorts of strips that feature some kind of aging/appearance change for the author analogue

James Kochalka's hair thinned out in American Elf but I don't follow a lot of webcomics either

so this is a real PA comic

https://photos.smugmug.com/Comics/Pa-comics/n-xmQS5/i-VbLTTth/0/2100x20000/i-VbLTTth-2100x20000.jpg

wtf has been happening with the character's faces, they're becoming more grotesque and aesthetically revolting over time

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_WIYhqGkhZiw/R7DA8alPFUI/AAAAAAAAADY/ydBhRlqhLo4/S1600-R/oops.png

the lack of self-awareness it must take for the penny arcade guy to write "incoherent rhetorical salad bar" about something anyone else has written or said is staggering

I'm not sure how you post that particular strip and have the first question be "what's going on with the faces"

lol i was gonna say... the content was much more stupefying

oh I didn't actually read it

wise move

you could literally replace every word in there with "WAAAAH WAAAAAH WAAAH I'M A BIG FUCKING BABY" and it would have the exact same rhetorical impact

this showy smart voice of extremely online nerds "incoherent rhetorical salad bar" is so distinctive, it pervades their scene which is almost total sealed from the rest of the world, ppl like this penny arcade and that very popular music vlogger who everyone was mad at for also being a nazis are their alternate reality reddit.com intellectual giants, its so weird and bad, prob mostly teens tho

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2017/10/23/second-opinion

his little blogpost which goes with the comic.

this showy smart voice of extremely online nerds "incoherent rhetorical salad bar" is so distinctive

yes

I try not to spend a hundred percent of my time thinking about the shambling chaos that gnaws at the periphery, but it’s hard not to notice the symptoms.

Look - we’re chasing the best writers out of this industry.

lol

I mean ... I do think EA sucks, and probably would have played that Star Wars game.

i opened this thread to figure out why ppl were mad at this comic on twitter the other day, some anti trans thing? i tried lord

ok now that I know what he's mad about, I don't disagree. (Didn't EA basically poach Hennig from Naughty Dog for this game?) but why make a comic in that form at all? just the blog post would be enough

the guy who made them rich quit last year so I assume the PA corporate culture is in serious decline

people dislike them because one of the dudes is incapable of taking any criticism and doubles down instinctively

I think one of the initial things was a comic with a rape joke, which was dumb. When someone clued them in that maybe they're not set up to navigate such things, I think they doubled down with RAPE IS GREAT

I am very sorry for typing that