This week Penny Arcade is turning seven years old. We decided to celebrate by alienating our readers with a new website design. I’m kidding, we’ve actually had this design in the works for just over a year. Obviously we’re big fans of the look, I especially like how PAX, Child’s Play and PA all have a unified design now. Penny Arcade has something like four million readers though, and there’s no way we could ever come up with a site that would appeal to everyone. If you don’t like it I apologize, hopefully it will grow on you and you’ll be sending me hate mail in another three years when we change it.
Along with the slick new visuals the guts of the site also got a huge upgrade. Penny Arcade right now represents one of the largest implementations of “rails” on the intertron. I went and looked at a website about rails and then I got a headache. From what I gathered it’s either some kind of cutting edge programming language, or a way to liquefy a man’s brain inside his skull. I’m told that it means the site looks better and loads faster regardless of whatever hippy web browser you decide to use. Fuck M$!
For me, it feels like I was given the keys to a brand new hot rod.
Category: Webcomics
Return of the Macabre!
Yay! Something Positive author Randy Milholland has finally got his Midnight Macabre mojo back; three strips today after two months of downtime.
I would have been happy enough just with Something Positive continuing. Getting Midnight Macabre back is extra tasty gravy.
Midnight Macabre
Randy Milholland’s Midnight Macabre is set in the 80s, when locally produced low-budget horror TV shows still existed. Every so often you are reminded of this, as in this strip which mentions a dial-up BBS.
When I was in high school and college, dial-up BBSs were still the thing, at least among people at my level of geekery. Hell, my college didn’t even get on the internet till about my third year of college. Before that it was on “PRIMENET.”
BBS’s were where it was at. I understand that some people still run them, the same way some people still have gopher servers.
Did I mention I remember gopher being new and cool?
I am So. Damn. Old.
Oh, I also got a look at myself in some pictures taken at the beach the other day (I usually am the one taking pictures so I haven’t seen much of myself in pictures in a while). Let’s not even bring up realizing what I now look like in swim trunks. I found out I have a big ass bald spot. That I can’t see in the mirror cause it’s too far back. That nobody ever told me about. (My wife claims she told me about it a few years ago and I reacted so badly that she never brought it up again, but I have apparently repressed this memory.)
So. Damn. Old.
Oh well. I guess I can wheeze and cuss at the young whippersnappers.
And read more comics about aging, bitter Gen Xers.
Gossamer Commons
I’m adding a new webcomic to the small list of comics I read: Gossamer Commons. It’s written by Eric Burns, who writes the blog “Websnark,” which often critiques webcomics. It’s a fairly new project. I heard about it through Websnark. I read a couple of the “intro” comics, and then I read the big “splash page” comics — and I stopped. Man that was one ugly ass little fairy freak. I just couldn’t see reading any further if there was any chance I’d have to look at that big-eyed monstrosity again.
But I had put the strip’s RSS feed in my reader, and so, day by day, I kept seeing notifications of new strips. I ignored them for a while, but then finally I decided to go back and give it another chance.
I’m glad I did. It looks like it’s gonna be a good little story. I think I’d find the Trudy character annoying if I she didn’t totally remind me of someone I actually knew when I lived in a college town like that. It was kind of fun seeing a Brent and Francis (from PVP) cameo. The story setup is complete by now and it looks like it’s going to be a fun ride.
I don’t think I follow any other “story-only” as opposed to “punchline-oriented” webcomics. If this one can hold me it’ll be a first.
Sucked In To Something Positive
One of the webcomics everybody seems to like is Something Positive. I’d checked it out before and given it the “eh.” It’s smart, it seemed funny sometimes, but at the time I looked at it there was a lot of soap opera going on, to which I didn’t know the backstory, and as always it was just so damned bitter.
This was 2004, the year I spent obsessively watching the Democrats spend a year losing to the worst president in generations, while continuing to take it in the shorts in terms of congressional seats and governorships. I had more than enough bitterness in my own soul to go around, I didn’t need a webcomic that gave me more.
But now that I’ve achieved some relative peace by ceasing to have any hope whatsoever for our political process as it stands, and stuff like that, for some reason I went back to Something Positive. I guess it was all the links to it on the webcomics I *do* like. Or maybe there was a hole in my heart left from having gotten about a storyline and a half behind on Scary-Go-Round for some reason. Anyway, I came back to Something Positive and started reading it from the beginning, and ya know, I’m kinda getting into it. There’s some funny stuff. The characters are horribly bitter and mean, but they do have hearts hiding under there and if you read about ’em enough you start caring about ’em. And if you read the thing from the beginning, you get to see where Choo-Choo Bear, the creepy boneless cat, came from.
I’m afraid I might actually be hooked on S*P.