penny arcade: c/d

did these guys ever run a hashtag gamergate comic/op-ed

against all odds, they steered clear of the whole damn thing

too deep on the collusion side anyway

Yeah, given their prominence, saying nothing is very very conspicuous. I guess the best you could hope for is that maybe they wanted to say something non-asinine but figured they would only muddy the waters given their horrible and divisive track record. That same track record also suggests other possible interpretations though.

yeah, that seems fairly cretinous frankly

http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/10/15/star-gourds

pretty badly worded (big surprise) but at least he's taking the sensible position of being against death threats
no #gamergate tag or mention explicitly

Ehhhhhhhh, yeah, that's something but it's also very clearly 'i side with the GG moderates and their legitimate gripes with the journalists' which is super fucking lame.

Whatever is required for you to have done yesterday correctly, I hope you succeeded; if it required that you do something with a hat, I pray that the hat did not resist overmuch and that your effects upon the hat were profound and lasting. If you engaged in the standard predation-upon-birds or the various Unbirds they have on offer these days, I pray that your “gains” were not diminished overmuch by the revelry. If it was just Thursday, I hope that it was as noteworthy or nominal, dependent entirely on your aims.

What are the gg moderates like? Isn't the whole thing about demanding "transparency" vis a vis women's sexual history? Seems pretty irredeemable.

"overmuch" is a pretty classic poetaster word

Moderates demand transparency vis a vis literally who's sexual history.

xp lol did not realize "poetaster" was a real word

http://www.zeldadungeon.net/Zelda05/Walkthrough/09/9_Poe4_Large.jpg

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