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.

I just played through Episode One tonight. It was really much better than I thought it'd be. I lol'd about 5 times.

lol, 2400 dollars for the painting!
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180305733428

ok I irlolololed at the dickerdoodles post from yesterday + follow up

four grand for that painting!

this is hilarious:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080201.jpg

WTF with http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/10/
and the rapturous response on the bloggy bit? Do people actually want this kind of "Entertainment"?

hey you get two more non-funny strips on penny arcade this week! lucky you!

"Beginning today, projecting through Friday and culminating on Monday, we will offer you one page "treatments" of three comics which differ radically from our usual output. Next week, we'll get a poll up to determine which one you'd like to see us investigate further. Then, later this summer - during the San Diego Comic Con would be my guess - we'll upload a storyline based on what the metamind has chosen. ... On Friday, I expect we will deliver Automata: film noir, during the Prohibition on Machine Intellect. Monday should see a vehicle for Jim Darkmagic (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics)."

"beginning today, projecting through friday and culminating on monday"?

tycho is the worst writer known to man.

The majority of the time you can't understand what his blog posts are about without reading the comic. A lot of imprecision and opacity to his prose.

Wow, the response to Lookouts has been overwhelming so far. I've got people begging for Lookouts merit badges and a Lookouts patch.

This is because your readers are DORKS

i don't get that strip

There's nothing to get, is the thing.

It's part 1 of some seemingly bog-standard twee fantasy bullshit.

yeah, they do these genre things, and even though there's no humour and little story to it all their fans want high res screensavers and avatars from it.

Like honestly if they made "Legend of the Neverwolf" with the protagonist Blacktall Sabretooth in the realm of Infandalrock people would eat that shit up.

fans ruin everything

what was there to ruin

dick jokes

visually speaking that is a poorly thought-out last panel.

i do want to not begrudge the PA dudes for wanting to branch out — videogame and/or dick jokes for ten years i think maybe makes you need that

i think part of why it's so irritating to find on the penny arcade comic page is that: well, obviously i. a single, static internet page isn't the optimum way of showing much other than a gag strip panel-cartoon; but mainly ii., penny arcade's function is more like 'videogame criticism + dick jokes' than it is 'fiction with many dick jokes'

so it's a bit like finding the book review page dedicated to the first two-thirds-of-a-page of someone's TV pilot script, is the thing

u wouldnt say that if it was my tv pilot script - it has an effeminate robot!

cant believe u fags read penny arcade 4 shame no 5 shames

i don't think my bro even reads it anymore and he used to be big in to DDR and he cosplays as Snake.

i.e. their demographic.

The funniest thing I've ever read by one of the Penny Arcade dudes was when they were talking about Harlan Ellison being rude.

i read it. i kinda share their taste in DS/360 games so they're good for heads ups.
comics are um.

I still like their stuff, and Gabe's art skills are better in general, but I do think they've lost a bit of the energy/wit they used to have. Success tends to do that, though. Definitely good enough to stay in my webcomics RSS folder with the other dozens.

please to inform of the dozens

also:
http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/f/fa/Penny_retard.jpg

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/e/e6/WHY_AM_I_SO_BALD_PART_2.jpg

i don't know why but i still laugh at WHY I AM SO BALD

i dont know why either

I still like the art, but the writing is almost always oscillating like a meth head duct-taped to a chair between "meh" and "bleh"

This exchange btwn T and G: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/8/10/

tempted to change ilx name to "the dude who thinks it's okay to have sex with unconscious women";

aware this is probably a bad idea

ambien sex thread is o_O

oh wow

classy

http://debacle.tumblr.com/post/3041940865/the-pratfall-of-penny-arcade-a-timeline

dude on my fb posted that. i'd like to gently tell all involved that their problem is that they read penny arcade

HoodedMiracle twitter account contacts Courtney Stanton, demanding proof that she is a rape survivor. When none is forthcoming, HoodedMiracle begins telling others that she lied about it, and that she’s only causing a ruckus to make money on the Dickwolves Survivors Guild t-shirt.

DickWolvington twitter account engages in same.

Retweeted by teamrape and 4 others.

pretty sure she was involved in last years production of popular local burlesque show "the slutcracker."

people have interests i will never understand, among them burlesque and "gaming conventions," whatever the fuck those are

pfft why would u even know the name of a burlesque show - suspect

http://twitpic.com/3vczpu

absolutely amazing that's still continuing

i attended as a cultural anthropologist if u must know

but it will be a cold day in hell before i go to a "gaming convention"

hahahaha oh Sean you went to the Slutcracker? I was asked to go by two different friends this year but there was just no way.

eh L and i had talked abt going for a couple years every time we passed the sville theater in december. was basically a satisfying curiosity thing.

i had no idea what to expect but it was weirdly incoherent and i would never go again.

eh its prob like going to a big lan party or competitive gaming event or something - i know a girl who's been to a few PAXes and she loves em, only has one forearm so she cradles the controller against the stump and controls everything w/one hand

that's.....impressive?

it still kind blows my mind that those two were able to make an extremely decent living off of penny arcade

also see jonathan coulton

Wait I didn't realize until now one of these cartoon characters is named after my favorite alloy-nosed 16th c science guy! Real 16th c TB, you are my bro.

S - It's really popular I just feel like it is something that would go horribly wrong irl and be really cringe inducing. I'm just busting yr balls btw. If it were free I probably would have gone with but I wasn't going to pay for it.

i know u are!

it was pretty cringe-y at times--like, this is what happens to a certain subset of high school drama girls

hahaha I'm sure

have gotten mixed reviews of The Slutcracker from friends who have gone, i was never curious enough myself

i may be going to PAX but i don't really know what one does at such an event other than wander around and marvel at how many people are even more nerdy than yourself

ciderpress you need to fap with us sometime

I don't read Penny Arcade. I didn't think the comic was offensive, but the way they handled the aftermath was absolutely pathetic.

yeah thats p much how i feel - comic didnt bother me (tho i am sympathetic to those who were offended), but being dickheads about people objecting is nagl

its hard to believe a couple of giant nerds wld be sensitive to criticism

xxxp yeah i'd like to, i'll keep an eye on the boston thread for the next one

"feminazi sluts" - people really say things like this?! oh internetpaws

http://img148.exs.cx/img148/5624/2stupid6qf.jpg
http://img205.exs.cx/img205/1160/animehistory200309160hp.gif

http://img202.exs.cx/img202/231/206qb.jpg

must be interesting to them to be confronted with evidence that so many of their fans are total cretins, i guess

mike krahulik is like a far less humorous american karl pilkington

they really did not handle this well at all.

yeah 'lol rape survivors' jokes just don't seem like the best PR strategy? imo?

penny arcade... expo?

^ my thoughts exactly!!?

PAX is just a big all-purpose gaming convention now afaik, the name is because it began as a smaller event related to the comic

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/2/2/matter-dickwolves/

The other reason I didn’t speak about it is because I didn’t want to draw unwanted attention to the sources of complaint. Apparently, there are people who imagine they’re doing us some kind of a favor being jackasses and saying terrible things to critics of the site. Well, I’m a big boy, and I can handle my own shit. If you’re a reader, and not somebody just out for a scrap, if you love me at all you’ll put an end to that kind of bullshit. When someone believes something about you that isn’t true, the optimal strategy isn’t to prove to them time and time again that they were actually right all along - that you may be dismissed out of hand, that you have no merit. I assume that’s the opposite of what you want.
Can we all agree that threatening to kill someone’s wife and children, as happened yesterday, has no place in any fucking society? This is why I had to say something: because people who imagine themselves to be “agents” of each side have now graduated to threats of actual, physical violence.
I don’t expect to mollify anyone with this - I think we’re long past that. When I look at the state of play now, dialectically, I don’t even recognize it: in the absence of my participation, in the abdication of my responsibility to communicate, the entire dialogue is based on a sequence of assumptions about each party so long that it’s impossible to untangle. It’s entirely possible that we will have lost readership, or worse, we’ll acquire a unique new demographic hungry for rape material that will be profoundly disappointed by jokes about tabletop wargames or treatises on forks. As I said, so much of this happened because I assumed that a genuine dialogue was impossible. Maybe I was wrong. It’s certainly happened before.
But I am who I am, in the end; the comics I make are the result of my damage. I can’t put it any more succinctly than that.

http://jessicaisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/homer_facepalm.jpg

http://penny-arcade.smugmug.com/photos/i-DbLmtbR/0/M/i-DbLmtbR-M.jpg
http://penny-arcade.smugmug.com/photos/i-zGMm3KD/0/O/i-zGMm3KD.jpg
"""""""""""drawing from life"""""""""""""""""
there aren't enough quotation marks in the world

Aren't these guys, like, 50-years-old now?

They're born in 76/77, so 34/35 - which makes sense for them being early twenties when they started.

there aren't enough quotation marks in the world

... possibly because he didn't say it?

if you don't see the implication

idgi

what's the implication? that he used a model? it's not like he's doing photo realism and tracing it off the photograph...

thoughts in this order:
1. sweet I have the same build I should work as a swordmaiden/art model
2. ewww I would have to be around the dickwolves dudes nevermind

3. I would get to be immortalized without thigh biscuits
4. my immortalized version would have some surely costly congenital deformity of the hips and spine

I do like that drawing tho
it's like if Bill Watterson had a run at Red Sonja (in a plotline wherein R.S. was hindered by a congenital deformity of the hips and spine)

I feel like there is a grody but kind of hilarious tradition of drawing hottt sword ladies with way too much unnecessary business at the waist, like having four different sub-hourglass curves going on where they never happen in reality. AND that employing this tradition is really fun. It's what I was thinking about when I drew this pic (NSFW).

implication is that it's a lousy rendition of the photo that's stylized in such a way that it betrays a lack of understanding of basic anatomy. it's not good life drawing.

maybe she's in a desert and we are seeing her through a shimmering heat wave

dude has put an impossible eight inch gap between her thighs.

thigh gap is a thing

what... is the context for all of this?

i fucking hate this shit

i don't even know where this cartoon is from (not from the daily comic -- i'm gonna guess from some PR material they did for a company?), but i like PA's aesthetic style. generally i'd add, 'if you can even call it that' but in a world where xkcd is the most popular web comic on the planet i'm glad that they've at least made an effort beyond just drawing all their characters as hipster stick figures.

lol how do you get "hipster" out of xckd's stick figures

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/mtv_generation.png

i guess its the hat that tipped me off

can i just say that google image search for "fedora" is hilariously weird

I wish hipsters wore Buster Keaton hats!

BLEEP BLOOP

I MEAN WHATS AFTER GENERATION Z DO WE JUST START OVER AT GENERATION A

i asked microsoft excel & they said generation aa

This is the context - somebody did an app of a bunch of 'artists poses', Mike did a drawing of one one of them and thought he might as well put it up on the site because - well basically because there is no downside to doing so, people who like his style like his style and will attempt to give him money for it, it's a pretty sweet position to be in.

no argument there

from the guys that brought you dickwolves:
http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-M4NZ5Tk/0/L/i-M4NZ5Tk-X3.jpg

big Creeper penis poster

Used to love this comic back in the day, still check it from time to time out of finger-typing habit but I think it quietly fell off several years ago. Gabe is clearly still pushing himself on technique with the art, although the comics don't actually flow as well as comics, but it just is almost never funny anymore. Maybe they spread themselves too thin when they launched that other strip about the game developer office, or maybe it was doing the games, or having kids, or all the other things that get in the way. Or maybe I'm just even less up on the gamer scene so the references aren't as funny or something. Still think the best of the older strips hold up pretty damned well though.

Tales from the Trenches (the user-submitted stories of work as a games tester) >>> The Trenches.

they did another comic? i have not been following these guys

hey lol who in here remembers megatokyo

penny arcade is gradually morphing into Garfield

hahaha oh MAN megatokyo was awesome for like, the first storyline or two when it was a nerd gag strip, got terrrrrrrrrrible as it became like a serious soap and every other strip was the guy sharing his ashcan pencils or whatever, for no discernible reason.

it appears to still be ongoing which is just ...

wowww. I love that it was necessary to actually install filter buttons, so you can view only strips that are part of the story, as opposed to "Dead Piro Day," "Shirt Guy Dom," and "Guest."

Don't get me wrong though, I do sincerely dig that any of these people are still at it and trying to improve their craft and so on after 15+ years on some of these strips. Dunno how much money anybody makes off webcomics - I imagine PA does pretty well - but for some of these it has to be out of love for either the fans, the craft, the characters, or the rhythm of the hobby. Lord knows I'd never be able to stick with a regular project for that long.

tell me the story about the dickwolves, dad

fifteen years from now it's gonna be nonstop dad jokes and comments about cybering

basically more of the same

Haha I am await the days when the reins are passed on to the next generation.

Hard to believe I've been reading it for 14 years - the early selling point was some mindless violence towards User Friendly.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/03/18
Gabe is smoking weed for the first time. I admire his willingness to have the discussion but what a maroon.

"and u guys won't believe this - first i got really paranoid, and then later i was really hungry!"

he seems pretty forthright about it; what's the problem?

nothing really, just liveblogging your first toke in your thirties is a little herb-ish (pun pun pun)

WOHHH WOHHHHHHHHHH

Are the online slang dictionaries hiding a meaning from me, or have you just called the artist on Penny Arcade "a nerd, a wimp, a wuss"?

More like a cornball. Also slang for dope btw

wtf is this
http://penny-arcade.com/pinny-arcade
RULES

i'm starting to think that they have a really sharp business guy

Robert Khoo is extremely good at the job he invented for himself

an hour of this shit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=jLY7DpAgNbU

true hustlin', respect

http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-3W95rqn/0/950x10000/i-3W95rqn-950x10000.jpg
somehow this seems like the most penny arcade penny arcade that ever penny arcaded
like it has moved into satire unintentionally

the sitting on swings
the tortured oh-so-clever "holomouth materializes around my shaft"
faux-naivety of commercialism juxtaposed with insider commentary
chains and trees that look like they were drawn by a preschooler on a wacom tablet
"teevees and screens and controllers and what have you"

how is that... unintentional?

questionable quality of humor yes, but i think that's what they're actually going for

Do you go to the penny arcade website on purpose?

i don't even know anymore

^

now i know what nhex is looking for in a web comic

dick wolves?

whatever it is, it's not pornographic bieber fan fiction, i'll tell you that much

i think you might have misread the intent of that comic

did i?

well i don't want to foreclose on alternative interpretations...

dude is having some sort of transphobic twitter meltdown

cwgabriel
‏@cwgabriel
@juliepagano if thinking that all women have a vagina makes me a monster than yes I am a monster.

... do they share it, or

apparently he was going it a couple weeks ago too:

cwgabriel
@cwgabriel
@pikoeri for a man who is a woman or a woman who is a man. I think a boy has a penis and a girl has a vagania.

glad to see someone is standing up for stubbornly ignorant people on the internet

these guys are truly shitty individuals

they sort of exemplify the whole internet/gamer-dude thing of wrapping yourself in bullshit "but i'm such a nice dude"-ness as a way to never admit your privilege or that you're wrong

everyday assholes iow

can I have a minute to get over the typo "vagania" before we continue talking about how terrible this dude is

come on, come on down, sweet vagania

Castlevagania

Castlevagania II: Simon's Quim

etc

come on, come on down, sweet vagania

a+

why is this guy even engaging the topic of trans ppl

internet

Why does anyone think it's a good idea to follow Gabe on Twitter seems a better question.

http://thefullbrightcompany.com/2013/06/21/why-we-are-not-showing-gone-home-at-pax/

right on

... do they share it, or

lol

http://i.imgur.com/5BXSfm6.png

terrible human beings, terrible industry

mountain dew code white

lol at addition of "can we all just get along"
so so tone deaf

i can't bear to find one right now but yall should find a video of this guy talking and moving around, gargly nasal spit-retaining pedant voice, jerky baseball-ducking marionette movements, ugh just wanna shove him in a locker

This brought back another twitter argument from a week or so ago in which I defended a game about female masturbation. This game only included vaginas which I thought was reasonable given the point of the game was to teach women how to masturbate. It was pointed out to me that not all women have vaginas and I will admit right here in front of everyone that this came as a big shock to me. Some people called the game exclusionary because it did not take into account the existence of transexuals

tbf he does end it with this

I’m very sorry about yesterday. There are very few things that someone can say to me that will actually make me lose my temper. All my buttons got pushed yesterday though and I snapped. I doubt that will change anyone’s opinion but there you go. I’m not qualified to talk about the ambiguity of sexuality and frankly I don’t give a shit about it. I like drawing comics and playing video games. I’ll keep my mouth shut when it comes to all the other stuff.

that's not really an apology!

i was more referring to admitting he's kind of an ignorant idiot. actually that might not be intentional

uh

"i'm very sorry you're angry at me. i never expected actual criticism. some of it hit too close to home and i snapped. i doubt this apology will work, since you fuckers seem to feel like this shit matters, but there you go. i suck about talking about other people's experiences; that's fine, because i don't care about them. i'm not interested in moving beyond my narrow self-definition or seeing how it relates to other people. i'll shut up now so i can keep stacking bills."

i think this is the game in question: http://happyplaytime.com

i love how people who get called out on shit are always like "man, twitter sucks!"

the PAX Australia panel is like a giant version of that

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/06/22/going-one-step-further

I’ve spent the last few days trying to apologize to people I hurt. I’ve been doing it via email and I’ve given out my phone number a lot. I realize I was wrong and I’m genuinely sorry. I also realize I can’t possibly apologize on the phone to each and every person I hurt. I’m going to keep trying, but I’ve also decided to personally make a donation to the Trevor Project of $20,000.00. I also plan to keep interacting with people on a personal level and I understand that will be an ongoing process. In the meantime I’m hoping this donation will do some real good for a group that desperately needs it.

-Gabe

Good first step. Now stop being a douche in general.

To be fair, that is a good and reasonable response.

http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-NCzgQDx/0/950x10000/i-NCzgQDx-950x10000.jpg
comic is titled "larvae"
i have no idea why i keep checking these guys' site

there's a real vibe of "Video games remind me to love my child" in some of these comics that their kids are gonna be unpacking in therapy for years to come

Yeah, it's one of those sites that my fingers learned the muscle memory of checking, close to 15 years ago, and it's just hard to turn off that reflex sometimes.

tbf, they sometimes turn me on to games i'm unaware of

I don't like webcomics where you not only have to read the comic, but also read a long blog post before the comic makes any sense. PA is increasing like that.

"Video games remind me to love my child"

I get this feeling along the lines of "I'm a parent who loves their children, so if I'm a dick sometimes you have to give me a free pass".

yeah, that too

call me crazy but i think they genuinely love their children and are just affected by video games more strongly than other media like film?

i'm not really sure why i keep defending these guys to be honest, but i guess i still see them as being often foolish but with their heart in the right place generally?

i have to like stop writing sentences, like a question?

why?

I was driving in the car yesterday with my son who is currently 8. It was just the two of us and the song Same Love by Macklemore came on the radio. I like the song but I looked over and saw that Gabe was being really quiet. He was obviously thinking. You can always tell when an eight year old is working through something in their head. I listened to the lyrics and thought “wow here it comes. He’s gonna ask about what it means to be gay and I gotta have an answer ready,”

So I started working through my response in my head. “son” I’d say “sometimes boys love girls and girls love boys. But sometimes boys love boys and girls love girls. That’s what being gay means and there’s nothing wrong with it that’s just how some people are born. Some people might tell you that being gay is bad but that’s not true. In fact there are people we love, friends and even people in our family who are gay.” I felt like that was a pretty solid start. Obviously I’d need to go into the concept of gay marriage and try and explain why certain people don’t like it. I’d need to talk about religion and how that colors certain people’s views. I figured I would play by ear after that and field any follow up questions as they came. Sure enough he said “can I ask you something Dad?”

“Sure buddy” I responded

He turns to me and asks “do you think Master Chief could beat a Kaiju all by himself?”

Please be eight forever son.

Please be eight forever son because while I'll make a big deal about telling everyone else how ok I am with the concept of people being gay, there's still part of me that for some reason would prefer you not to need to know about it until you're older?

http://elizabethsampat.com/quit-fucking-going-to-pax-already-what-is-wrong-with-you/

i actually did consider going to Pax East but... naaaaaaaaaah

jimd otm. as far as i'm concerned that little anecdote is straight up homophobic.

these guys are truly shitty individuals

― we're up all night to get (s1ocki), Thursday, June 20, 2013 4:18 PM

All otm. Eff these guys.

So I started working through my response in my head. “son” I’d say "I am disappoint."

The problem is at a much higher level, though, so diddling what appears to be a bunch of nodulated clusters of disagreement looks useful but isn’t. They don’t form the lattice of the structure, they’re placed there after the fact to give the whole enterprise a patina of coherency. This isn’t me saying this about him, this is me saying this about most of our awesome philosophies. They are wild west movie sets. We are attempting to make pearls from grit.

yawn

you really love these guys

God, they've just gotten so bad, at every level. The cartoons long stopped having any sense of timing or rhythm and became just a series of stiff caricatures and showpieces of dude's latest coloring widgets, while the writing similarly ossified and basically nothing that's ever been pasted of their bloggery and general 'personas' has made them look good, at all. Should seriously have quit years and years ago.

yeah, even i had enough in the last couple of years and finally quit. it's hard to kick something you've been reading for a whole decade

what was ever good about it? there are so many comics out there you could read.

it was around back in the days where they were few enough webcomics where i read just about everything. and it was good enough for the gaming yuks for some time

tbh i still like Gabe's style, but the effort and jokes are long gone

They could be pretty funny back in the day. I always liked http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/01/19

explain what that paragraph means in english plz

They are overreacting to a smelly bowel movement.

Wait I can't read, what paragraph are you taking about?

"diddling what appears to be a bunch of nodulated clusters of disagreement looks useful but isn’t."

he's just saying very obnoxiously that him and Gabe have had this argument about what is a game vs. a non-game (about The Stanley Parable) a million times and going over it again in detail is meaningless

this point was made in the week's strip already, so this news post is even more unnecessary

yeah, i'm being facetious of course. it's just the layers of bad writing are reaching pathological levels. who reads that paragraph and considers the point well made?

true that

fuck me, imagine finding that strip funny in any way

what was ever good about it? there are so many comics out there you could read.
--(emphasis Treeship's) (Treeship)

Warming up to this kid.

http://readchallenger.com/2013/10/read-team-gold-force-4-now/

these fucking guys
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9887522

its a step up from when they asked people to pay them thousands of dollars to be an unpaid intern for PA

my fav bit is "Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better." i.e. we'd rather invest in our office than you, sucker.

- You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment.

Let's say you get this job and find the environment offensive (for any of the many, many reasons working for PA might be offensive). Presumably this line in the job spec wouldn't be sufficient to prevent you taking legal action if you thought the situation merited it, right?

Speaking of offensive:- You need to have a crazy-person level of attention to detail.

my fav bit is "Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better." i.e. we'd rather invest in our office than you, sucker.

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Tuesday, November 26, 2013 6:12 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Instead of paying you what you're worth we're gonna make sure the office is always stocked with Bawls and all 15 colors of Mountain Dew

Like those companies who think that spending a pittance on having a few beers in the fridge somehow makes up for the bad managers, lousy pay, excessive hours, unpaid overtime, shitty working conditions, abusive customers...

- You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment.

really sticking to their guns eh

http://cwbuecheler.tumblr.com/post/68163195864/on-penny-arcade-exploitation-and-the-myth-of-the

good post. fuck business.

Booming post, might forward to people I know in other creative fields (e.g. architecture) that also have a lot of small, 'cool' firms that are moving lots and lots of money around but effectively rely on underpaid or unpaid labor, specifically in order to stay cool (e.g. by sinking tons of non-billable hours into hip unpaid design competitions).

https://twitter.com/lazer_hugs/status/405453146371026946/photo/1

http://penny-arcade.com/2014/01/01/resolutions

And a summary:

http://m.joystiq.com/2014/01/02/pax-separates-from-penny-arcade-in-co-founders-new-year-resolut/?post=1&icid=joystiq_home_latest_art

i'm sure the fact that it was impacting business was just a happy coincidence

bully for you

http://hw1.pa-cdn.com/pa/assets/img/adfree/img_Gabe.png

all witedude posters on ilx should have to have some kind of icon next to their dn so we know who they are. like maybe a pale smiley face or something.

― Mordy , Thursday, January 2, 2014 7:32 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

At last, a back-pedalling non-apology done for business reasons that makes Microsoft's back-pedalling non-apology done for business reasons look almost saintly. What a way to start 2014.

in reference to peter molyneux's stance on the pay-to-play dungeon keeper

He might want to consider the material that constitutes the bulk of his domicile, I’m just saying. Even a cursory assessment reveals that it’s brittle and optically transparent.

dude has never met a metaphor he can't unpack further for less effect

why do you keep reading PA, lol

i have a problem

even a cursory assessment reveals that it's brittle and optically transparent

i smiled

http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-K4fk67g/0/1050x10000/i-K4fk67g-1050x10000.jpg

I just played through that first Penny Arcade game from back in 2008. It uses the Torque engine, looks a lot like indies of the time like the early Telltale games like Sam and Max Season 1 and Tales of Monkey Island. Paper Mario's a good RPG system to rip off, though.

I would pay money to watch Forks play this game and go into conniptions at how bad so much of it is. So much stuff in there that they clearly thought was funny just by sheer presence, like mimes, hobos and excessive swearing.

How much money are we talking here

They have this weird thing about mimes being evil which is very 1987 comedy

http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-7hMkQf3/0/1050x10000/i-7hMkQf3-1050x10000.jpg
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/13/gabbie-and-tyche
what this strip was really missing was the opportunity for these guys to explore being women because i think they've definitely shown the proper level of sophistication and empathy to pull that off
HA PULL THAT OFF GET IT

http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-z6pJHXF/0/1050x10000/i-z6pJHXF-1050x10000.jpg

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

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