News - Somniocide
Posted by News Fetcher on July 17 '15 at 01:35 AM
By Tycho from
Penny Arcade:
Gabe’s dad is kinda like a Dad Dad. He’s like a diagram of a dad, with all the dad parts, all the… phalanges, that dads always have, and we can compare other dads to that dad in order to determine a kind of universal score.
Dads didn’t used to be allowed emotional range, by which I mean to say “emotions,” in the classic sense. Obviously they had them. Inside. I believe I have delineated the acceptable crying scenarios before: when their own father died, when their first son was born, and when they were forced to shoot their horse.
Those are the times. When I heard from Gabe that the man had a detective story knocking around in him, provided there was a convenient keyboard nearby, I was elated. Then again, it wouldn’t be me
dealing with the ramifications.
I have been trying to type Kickstarter many, many times to open up this paragraph, and it always seems to come out vaguely Nordic, like “Kiskatrter” or “Kiksaatir.” Let’s try again, with all of my reknowned vigor: The
Automata Kickstarter is plugging away, and I have traded the fear of running the campaign with a new fear, which is the fear of actually having to make it. I’ve got 24 or so days to come to terms. But! All 300 backer slots at what I am calling “The Hoodie Tier” are taken, but there are (at this juncture) a few hundred slots at the Pinny Arcade Pin tier. Last time we did a Pin for a Kickstarter, the DLC pin, it got kinda nuts. That pin has something of a legendary status, and we wanted to follow that up with something rad this time around and I think that’s what basically what happened. The design crew thinks it’s the best we’ve done yet:
</I>
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)
By Tycho from
Penny Arcade:
I am often surprised by things that aren’t that surprising. This is something that you have probably noticed if you spend any time around here. I am just trying to think my thoughts, and invariably I am interrupted by some kind of fucking nonsense.
Traffic or follows or retweets are proxies for status, which is itself an index of
how real you are, so it makes sense that you would have people trying to swap tips to max their tweet fols. Obviously some people just buy that, if it’s really important. I understand that offering the occasional free iPhone case can also ensconce one with epistemological certainty. But there’s a secondary kind of Kuiper Belt of psychos, weird-ass technocultists, and palmistry-tier wizards who claim to have access to the Internet’s secret rhythms and can deliver these love-equivalent
rays on command.
There are some basic things you do to generate traffic; my preferred method is to start almost twenty years ago, before many readers were born.
That’s planning, people. Don’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps:
invent the bootstrap. I’ve found that this is a very effective method and should be leveraged whenever possible. I
also groom a kind of topiary garden of hate-follows, and I like to keep ‘em on simmer with… you know, etymology questions, or observations about different prosciutti. Legit grotesque stuff that truly reveals the monster within.
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)
By Tycho from
Penny Arcade:
You will be hard pressed to exist on the Internet without seeing tons of that insane
Google ANN Shit. When I say Insane Shit, I’m talking about those piles of slimy, wet dogs people keep sending you. Specifically I’m referring to the greasy, omniscient dogs made of paisley slop worshipping birds that dwell in an infinity of jade pagodas.
Where does the synthetic brain
stop is my question. It’s not hard to imagine, very near to now, a weaponized variant of the Google Maps van with a thing like they have on the front of a bulldozer, except with a jagged split in the middle that opens up like a mouth, and articulated hands that extend from the mouth which can serve as tertiary mouths if necessary. And it is
always necessary, because somewhere in its hot cognitive lattice it has determined that all
not-dogs rank inaesthetic/th-10 and must be synchronized. Luckily for our misshapen husks, it thinks every Goddamn thing is a dog.
Something that is funny about
the strip - if you’re me - is that (as sometimes happens) we wrote the comic together, imagined that we agreed on its content, and then when he drew it Tycho literally sees the world in this way when I imagined that he was just fucking with his interlocutor. It’s fine. It’s
cool. We’ll make it through this somehow.
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)
By Tycho from
Penny Arcade:
In the same way that one may have a dream, or a series of dreams, or single dream which perforates the entirety of one’s life about being naked at school (which somehow manages to be horrifying every time), whenever I see the letters SDCC together I can feel my ribs start to squeeze my heart. I understand that these symptoms vary
from person to person.
I don’t doubt that it is cool to attend it. Well, maybe it’s cool. I wouldn’t know, because I never have! It seems like everyone else is having fun there. And when they come by the booth I seize a motherfucker and wring them out; I engage in vampirism. I was basically a zoo animal at these things, and not a cool zoo animal, like a great cat: it was like one of those small mammal enclosures, where you can look and look and never entirely know if there is an animal in there. There might not be.
I met so many cool people, though. Jhonen Vasquez(!) used to roll through, and we got along really well, even though he is an amethyst and obsidian sex idol and I am not any of those things. I met the lady who basically carries the modern Transformers mythology on her back; developers from every threshold of the industry were charted as they molted from QA to QA lead to Assistant Whatever and Associate Person, and the last year I went they’re showing me the mobile thing they made with a team of fellow exiles. I saw it the other way, too: I saw the veteran knocked sideways by industry trends, showing me no less than six genius level prototypes nobody even wants. I’m not even a person in these stories, I’m the crossroad. I am what they walk by, and through, in the pursuit of their own unassailable humanity.
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)
News - Friday Roundup!
Posted by News Fetcher on July 10 '15 at 09:02 AM
By Gabe from
Penny Arcade:
PATV got a new episode of Livescream today. I’ll just drop it in here:
Jamie, Kristin and Dabe are good sports for agreeing to this. I like that these new let’s play shows are giving you a look at the rest of the PA office. We have a lot of cool people here at Penny Arcade and I’m glad you’re getting to meet some of them.
Fun Facts!Jamie - Is obsessed with Sailor Moon, Writes really good Thornwatch fan fiction, Has something like a tail
Kristin - Is a bad influence on my wife, Is an amazing Mom, worships Megasatan
Dabe - Is a font of positive energy, Brings too many board games on vacation, has never seen a cat
Our Automata Kickstarter is going bonkers! I thought this was a cool idea but it feels so good to see I’m not the only one! Robert posted a
great update on the KS page that talks about how grateful we are. You guys are the best. Seriously, thanks for giving us this life.
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)
News - Rorification
Posted by News Fetcher on July 08 '15 at 10:51 AM
By Tycho from
Penny Arcade:
GOLF.
Generally I’m humoring my associate when we indulge in this kind of thing:
Bogey Golf, for example. Golgolfa is different, though. We touched on it
once before. Golgolfa is what happens when his obsession with actual golf overlaps with my need to make our conversations
about golf something that I can endure; something I can survive. Whenever we’re actually playing it, something that only happens
a couple times a year, the single thread of conversation that houses it resumes immediately. We embroider
this thing further every time.
When some of these pots stop boiling, or simmering, or whatever it is my metaphorical pots are getting up to, I need to see if somebody in my incredibly deep development roster is interested in making a
- Procedural Golf Game
- With Asymmetric Tournaments
- Classes
- RNG Equipment
- Cooperative Something or Other
- Dot Com
- Web
- With gruesome RMTs to maintain the Satanic theme
because I think that making it is the only thing that will give me back all this mental storage.
Gabriel keeps refreshing the
Automata Kickstarter, and then saying the number that appears, and I have suggested that this is the shortest, A to B style route directly to Crazytown. Kickstarter is a really scary place; if there was any other way to do it, I would do it that way instead! It’s very difficult not to feel as though one is pinned to an obsidian dias being assessed at the molecular level by an eternal, unknowable jury.
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)
By Gabe from
Penny Arcade:
We’re ready to launch
our latest Kickstarter and I’m really excited to finally tell you about it. I know I hinted at it a while back, but now you can finally see what we’ve been up to. Or I guess what our friend Van has been up to.
It might seem like this came out of nowhere, but in reality it’s been kicking around for a couple years. The first strip really resonated with a lot of folks and we even heard from some Hollywood types. We worked with our friend
Gary to “shop it around” and pretty much everyone who looked at it liked it, but they all agreed it was too risky to try and make. If it was JUST a period piece, or JUST a robot movie it would be a big risk but when you combine those things, movie people just shake their heads and walk away.
In the meantime we had Van in our offices filming us for the Penny Arcade web series. I remember him mentioning that he’d love to shoot an Automata show someday but I didn’t think much of it. He would bring it up occasionally over the years but then all of a sudden he had a video for us. Tycho and I watched the test footage he shot and we were blown away. First of all it looked fantastic and professional but more importantly for me, is that it felt like Automata. Van really got it. He got Sam and Carl, he got the world. We loved it.
Our first question after we saw the footage was “how can we make this a real show?”
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)
By Tycho from
Penny Arcade:
Yes, that’s correct: Kim Swift of Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Quantum Conundrum fame will
illuminate the gathered throng. She’s been over at Amazon for awhile now, working on “AAA PC Games,” but nobody knows
what that means yet. She also invented the Companion Cube, which all by itself places her in the Internet Pantheon. We’ve been trying to match schedules for years now,
years plural, and I’m glad we were finally able to work it out.
(CW)TB
Read Replies (0)
By Gabe from
Penny Arcade:
The Child’s Play Invitational is coming up quick and
we have created a contest to give away some tickets. This is a fun event with a
“real” golf tournament but it also has
mini golf ,
alcohol and barbecue. Here’s a pic of some Penny Arcade folks obviously taking my favorite sport very seriously.
We have a photo of Tycho and I from the Golf tournament last year.
We’d like you to Photoshop the absolute worst golf pants you can think of onto us. You can get all the details and submit your entry over here
on the official contest page. The winner will get a pair of tickets to either the regular golf,mini golf, or spectator portion of the event.
Good Luck!
-Gabe out
Read Replies (0)
By Tycho from
Penny Arcade:
I spent the weekend in Spokane, which wise men call
Ulk Shambol or “The Spirit Grave.” I usually get in trouble when I talk about the town my mom lives as though it is the sort of place Lord Sauron would amass his evil armies, which is, you know, an exaggeration for comic effect. In truth, I only felt his baleful, seeking eye
once.
Many of the things that I’ve said about Spokane don’t truly represent the town. The pustules? Imported! They aren’t even native pustules. A lot of the stuff I’ve talked about were actually hallucinations, no doubt brought on by the hot lash of the accursed Vision Frond. Now, there’s something that’s actually
from there. It’s worth noting that these whippings were directly administered by Spokane’s Hell Mayor,
Satan.
I can’t tell you how pleased I was to hear that our own Mr. Gribz had taken up The Witcher, and made a commitment to witch in earnest. On PS4, sure. But I don’t look a gift “friend doing what I want him to” in the mouth, indeed, I’ve never investigated his mouth for any substantial period of time. He
talked some shit about Roach, but… that’s fair. It occurred to me as he was explaining it that I didn’t think of Roach as a digital horse. I thought of him as a
real horse that I had a
real relationship with. Sometimes he pops up in, like, an inconvenient part of the bazaar. Sometimes he’s hanging out with other horses who are friends of his or whatever and he’s not where I need his horse ass to be. I cut him some slack because he’s a really real horse and I’m always bossing him around.
<
article continued at Penny Arcade >
Read Replies (0)