Quote of the Day

This must be the week of webcomic QotDs...

From Starslip Crisis:

Enjoy it while you can. It may be your Final Soup.

Quote of the Day

From Diesel Sweeties:

You'll always have fan fic.

At least until the F.B.I. seizes your laptop as evidence.

Quote of the Day

Sigh.

Was your dog raped this morning?

-Eric Burns, in a rather sad and disgraceful (and low locked) comments thread at Websnark. Not surprisingly, William G. was involved, though atmittedly he has promised to stab himself in the eye with a fork (because he got involved in "drama" not because he was trashing Penny Arcade's charity, kind of sad...).

Thought #1: I don't think I'll ever understand how the mere mention of Penny Arcade seems to bring out the worst in people. I mean, you mention to someone how an online charity effort has raised hundreds of thousands for sick children and people generally have good thoughts...But mention that Gabe and Tycho were behind it, and the teeth come out. "They must have some hidden agenda", they spit. "Do they really mean it?", they wheeze. I cannot see where someone can object to Penny Arcade running a charity, on any grounds, unless they have an irrational hate of Penny Arcade. That goes way, way beyond any actual criticism of what Penny Arcade is and steps into catfight territory.

Thought #2: When it comes to the policing of online communities, I tend to like the places that allow the balls to the wall, dirty as hell kind of online flaming/cage match drama that you could see building in that thread. Eric Burns does not stand for that sort of thing. However, there is such an acidic side to the webcomics community (moreso than even videogame console wars, I think) that I can see why Mr. Burns does what he does. He wants Websnark to be a place full of well thought-out discussion and characterized by generally good feelings. He wants his place to be a candle in the darkness forcing back the kind of acidic idiocy and hate that (at least I think) William G. regularly dips into.

Let It Be Known...

If I were rich, I most certainly would own a Nixie Clock. Sweet jesus that is cool. It's like the ultimate in Dr. Strangelove styling.

Quote of the Day

Today's Quote of the Day goes to Kristofer Straub, creator of the Checkerboard Nightmare and Starslip Crisis webcomics. Over at Websnark, he posted a comment concerning Ctrl+Alt+Delete:

The way I described it in my forums (where we had a much more literate discussion about CAD than the bitter-sounding snipefest I posted at CxN) is that gaming humor, or any genre for that matter, is like Legos. There's only so many things you can build with the kinds of pieces given. You'll never escape the 2x4 brick (two friends playing games on a couch). You need the little rubber wheels for the car (funny violence). So it's understandable that gaming comics are going to have similar elements.

Penny Arcade took its pieces and built an M-Tron Magna-Rover. PVP took the same pieces and built a Buccaneers playset. CAD pulled the curtain back and showed us an M-Tron Magna-Rover sitting on top of a Buccaneers playset. The pieces are all there, as they have to be, but CAD doesn't do anything new with them.

Late 80s-Early 90s Lego lovers represent!

Imagine

Occasionally, I have the crazy idea that perhaps, in a multiverse of parallel universes, we're the evil universe. December 8th is one of those days. Here was a mind with so much left to give, robbed from us three and a half years before I was born. I got robbed, you got robbed. We got robbed, and for what? Like I said, maybe this is the evil universe.

William G: Part 3

Back in October, I wrote a nasty little post about webcomics pariah William G.

Today, I get a little "comment notification" email, and guess who's name I see...

William G.

It would seem that he found my little post. And he decided to leave a nice little post of his own.

So I just followed my referres back and I find some retard fanboy talking out his ass.

Oh well, I expect it from you clowns now. Keep up the mental masturbation, idiot.

I'm not at all sure if he realizes this, but knowing that the actual William G read my little post (which I never expected...hell, I was surprised when I got any comments about that post, nevermind one from the man himself) and actually felt the urge to leave a note is one of the coolest things that's ever happened to my Internet-self in the roughly 7 years of online-selfdom I've had. And in some small way, it does pleasure me to know that William G knows that I think he's a "scum-sucking pig", a "webcomic asshat", a "sewer rat", and most importantly, the "Richard Hogland of webcomics".

However, on another level, I think that when I posted that insult-laden entry I missed an opportunity to really say what I thought instead of going for the brief high one achieves by splatting a rant onto one's blog.

My problem with William G is precisely this: William G is not actually a "sewer-rat" or a "scum-sucking-pig" or any of that. William G is Indie Rock Pete*. This is a person who has become a pariah because he told several hundred thousand people they had bad taste. He hates anything that is remotely popular, that's why he "reviewed" PA and PvP and Megatokyo first on his late comic review blog. He named one of his subsequent blogs "doyourowndamnedcheerleading.blogspot.com" His Blogger profile actually says: Rest assured that my tastes are better than yours. Maybe that's a joke...Maybe not. Comics assembled from templates, no matter how brilliant they are, are simply not good enough for him. He compared Penny Arcade to pro-wrestling. He once listed a list of comics you should read simply because no one has heard about them.

William G, in his quest to destroy unoriginality and cliche has become a cliche. And his problem is, like Indie Rock Pete, he doesn't want to comes to terms with what he is.

*William G analogous to a sprite comic character? Muhahahaha.

Another Idiotic BGNews Columnist

Danielle Winters. She makes D.J. Johnson (almost) look positively sane.

I have the feeling that D.J. Johnson is just one of these libertarians who wants to remake the world in some sort of Randian image. The world they want to live in might make a good subject for a dystopian sci-fi novel but since these guys are basically the Right's little sidekicks (always sucking up, but they'll never actually run the show), you have the satisfaction of knowing that the D.J. Johnson's of the world are mostly harmless.

The people who really scare me are the lockstep conservative types who have no real thoughts, just talking points. These people have "We report, you decide" burned into their retinas. The easiest way to identify one of these people these days are these tell-tale signs:

1. Won't shut up about Communists.
2. Says the ACLU is trying to destroy America.
3. Actually believes that there is a liberal "War On Christmas".

So, here's three paragraphs from Danielle Winters's Tuesday column in the BGNews:

But the sad thing is, this whole issue is not even about religion. It is about morality. The liberal culture has made a concerted effort destroy the most important fiber of our country’s makeup — our traditions. Chiefly involved in this destruction: the ACLU and the secular left.

Communists realized early on that the way to get to the population was to destroy their morality by taking away religion and tradition. People stripped of morality are easiest to brainwash.

My fear is that if I make that unconscionable slip, saying, “Christmas tree” instead of “holiday tree,” the mechanical hound from the novel Fahrenheit 451 (you all remember his savagery) will attack me for my politically incorrect slip.

*Ding*Ding*Ding*Ding* We have a winner!

Last semester, after the Horowitz thing, I wrote about the campus Communists who basically acted like clowns in and around the event. That column is same type of sordid, embarrassing display with a polarity flip. Have a look at that column and you'll find a case study concerning what happens when a Wingnut passes from annoying asshat to certified clown. It's like she's playing Ann Coulter dressup.

Quote of the Day

Today's quote of the day comes from a reader comment left on Carl Zimmer's most excellent science blog The Loom:

FoxNews is singular among news organizations in that it has a 'junk science' section, but no science section.

Sadly, the quote is also untrue*...If you scroll down** far enough (a good 1500-2000 pixels or so on my new 1680x1050 display), you'll find Fox News's "Science" section...However, the Science section is marked "new", while Fox News has been posting Steven Milloy's "Junk Science" bat guano for years now.

*Sadly, a lot of great quotes are probably on the shady side of true. For example, can we really say that the only traditions of the Royal Navy are "rum, sodomy, and the lash"?

**As one of my CS professors likes to say "people don't scroll".