mcity

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2012/04/10/my-big-pax-post?

Last year we were given all kinds of [poo-poo] for the Duke Nukem booth babes. How could we allow women to be used as sex symbols just to sell a game? How could we allow them on the show floor in their school girl outfits while children and families were walking around? We were vilified for not kicking them off the show floor on the very first day. Now, exactly one year later I am also a monster, but now it’s because I am “punishing women” by asking them to cover up. I’ve been asked why I find the female body to be “obscene” and told that I must really hate women.

Hopefully you can see now why I find this so [gently caressing] ridiculous.

How about all of you that hate me get together and have your own conference. I need you to decide if half naked girls are empowered or exploited because I’m doing my [gently caressing] best here and it’s apparently always wrong. I swear to God I don’t understand how I’m supposed to know if I’m promoting the patriarchy or criminalizing the female body.

Incidentally, this was the same comic that was incorrectly accused of condoning rape, even long after they categorically denied that they condoned rape. They were also said to be ignoring complaints about the strip in question, when they specifically stopped selling t-shirts based on it because it would make people uncomfortable at PAX.

Everything you do is wrong? This is what it's like being famous, Mike. Get used to it.

I Have the Worst Dog by *hellcorpceo on deviantART

This is why I'm a cat person.

>implying cats don't do this

I've heard that one way to have confidence in social situations is to imagine the people you're talking to in their underwear.

I've also heard that you can imagine how, if needed, you would kill any given person in the room.

No one has ever recommended combining the two.

Shortpacked! - Math

FOREVER REBLOG

Dear bestselling author John Ringo,

So I've reached chapter 24 of "When the Devil Dances",(spoilers) and there's a tank named after a Sluggy Freelance character, Bun-Bun.

I'm always ranting about how intrusive shout-outs often are in fanfics. I've relaxed my stance on that a little. There's a time and a place, folks, a time and a place. And I've noticed your habit, Mr. Ringo, of having characters make references to movies and stuff. This is backed up by your own afterword stating that you found Kipling was popular among the doughboys while you were still serving, and the fact that people occasionally look at the character making the reference and having no idea what they're talking about. They're mimetic references, rather than fanfic's usual diegetic ones.

seriousfic has some stories taking place after Tron: Legacy when Sam occasionally makes a few references to pop-culture stuff. The story is tight-third person, so it makes sense when the narrative makes these references as well. Fanfics that are lighter in tone can "get away" with larger amounts of it, such as my own Fila Derrouge, though even those can sink under the weight of "wacky injoke lol".

In the chapter I linked to, there is a piece of...artillery, to understate,that has recently been decorated with a picture of SF's Bun-Bun with a switchblade and the phrase "Let's Rock, Posleen-boy!"

I know your target audience is, well, geeks, but expecting all--or even most--of them to get a reference to a then-five year old comic strip seems...unprofessional. As does the idea of the crew
drawing the thing in the first place. As does the series of other wacky injokes (lol) that follow. You mention that they were going to clear it with the higher-ups, but hadn't got a chance to.

Uh-huh.

The closest thing something like this has come to happening in the real world, AFAIK, is a bunch of Boy Scouts with a Dr. McNinja patch.

This is not helped by the fact that I have only a vague idea what the references they're making are. I know very little about SF; it's part of the general geekery background noise, like Monty Python or Warhammer 40K. I was completely lost. At least with the poetical stuff, the reader can generally grok that it's poetical stuff. Same with pop-culture references. This is just...irritating. and I've really been liking the series so far.

Sigh
-Jonathan

EDIT: One of the characters mentioned "Bun-Bun" to a random officer, who not only knew what he was talking about, and he happened to be a big fan. So we have two people, in the middle of the apocalypse, who happen to have read the same webcomic. Most fanfics wouldn't try to get us to believe that.

And chainsawsuit's "parody".

Nice job, Straub. You only managed to completely miss the point of the strip. The original specifies a particular IRC channel, at a particular time. Given that Black Hat often represents Randall's wish-fulfilment dark side, strawmanning it out to "girls on the Internet at some unspecified point in time" is kinda cheap. You have to completely misrepresent the comic to make a Take That. And the type of guys who make "make me a sandwich" jokes on Youtube videos? If they had the self-awareness to argue like that, they likely wouldn't be making the joke in the first place. Don't you talk about "white-knighting". There are perfectly valid reasons to call someone on the internet out on being a dick, and the primary one is the fact that they're being a dick.

Sincerely,
Jonn

One of the webcomics I follow just smacked its readers about the head with large anvils, including entirely unironic use of the word "consumerist"

I'm have the sneaking suspicion he's wrong about pretty much everything in the comic, but I'm juuust a little too lazy to Google.