penny arcade: c/d

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.