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[TRENCHES] Thursday, April 17, 2014 - The Last Laugh
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
The Last Laugh
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/the-last-laugh
Short But Sweet.
AnonymousI started testing on the 360, but after some time was given a PS3 to test on with no cords to hook it up. I asked my lead where to find PS3 cords, but he told me to stay on the 360 for the rest of the week, and he would get them for me.
That Friday I was fired for not testing on PS3. I told them I was waiting on cords from my lead who told me to stay 360 until he found them for me. They told me there was an entire cabinet full of cords in the other room, and I should have gotten them myself, but now it was too late.
I heard later from a friend still there that the lead got drunk at a party and admitted it was his fault I was fired, but wouldn’t help me get my job back.
Geth on
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When did Isaac get a home?
Mixed feelings on that story. Probably should have pursued it a little harder, but maybe they did. Hopefully learned a lesson from that experience.
I do have to say that I appreciate the strip getting back to the main story though.
Yeah the seasons page on the site says "Nov 2013 - Apr 2014". It's very silly goose of them to not announce that anywhere.
I officially give up on this. I have been enthusiastic about Trenches from the beginning, if somebody was pathetically bored enough to go through my post history they'd see I've probably spent more time on this forum defending it than anyone. But after close to three years the people running/creating Trenches still don't act like they care about it...and I can't bring myself to care about it anymore either.
This is free content. I totally get that. But I feel like its a total lack of respect for the readers when we're not even kept in the loop at all.
It is a good premise, but it has only ever come together to be great briefly.
PS: This isn't meant to be some kind of fatalism re: this strip being essentially dead. I'm just wondering what else I could read.
I really like Cube Watermelon's (formerly of The Trenches!) Let's Speak English.
http://cubewatermelon.tumblr.com/tagged/Let's+Speak+English/page/2
Yeah guys. If you don't like it just go somewhere else. Wait, why isn't anyone here anymore?
This thing started great years ago. Sucks to see it decline and sputter along. Sucks more to see admins telling people to piss off when no one in this thread is being super-negative or just a jerk.
@michaelkdaw Well most of us would say you should read the main Penny Arcade comic if you weren't reading it already.
I would recommend any of John Allison's work. He doesn't get nearly enough recognition for being the creator (and sole creator, handling both writing and art, I might add) of one of the webcomic universe's longest runs, starting in 1998 with Bobbins, then Scary Go Round, and now his current project, Bad Machinery. All three comics (and most of his various side-projects) are generally set in the same fictional English town and there is a good amount of character overlap; unfortunately he is quirky about how he handles archiving his old stuff so finding all of it and understanding how it fits together can be a bit frustrating. But you can just start at the beginning of Bad Machinery and have a blast. It's about a small group of kids (junior high/high school age) who investigate (generally pretty light-hearted) paranormal mysteries around their town and face the struggles and confusions of adolescence.
Camp Weedonwantcha is the new comic by Katie Rice, winner of the Penny Arcade "strip search" reality web series competition. It's only been going a few months but I think it's off to a really strong start. It's about a summer camp where kids get basically abandoned by their parents forever...which sounds dark and it kind of is. It's a really quirky, surreal kind of humor. Ms. Rice also has an earlier comic called Skadi, about a female fantasy-setting barbarian, which she still updates, although only once a week. I personally haven't read it but I'm sure it's worth checking out.
Three Panel Soul is a (sort of) weekly comic about varied topics, many of them gaming related or using games as a commentary for other subjects. It doesn't have an ongoing plot but it returns to the same sets of characters off and on quite a bit. It has an interesting (mostly, usually) black and white art style. The creators previously did Mac Hall, which was a gaming and college slice-of-life comic that remains one of my personal all-time favorites. The Mac Hall website is still up but is missing a lot of functionality. You would be well-served to work through the OhNoRobot-hosted archive instead if you want to read Mac Hall.
Schlock Mercenary is a long-running, daily-updating (reliably) comedy space opera comic about an interstellar mercenary unit in the far future. Getting through the archive on this one will keep you busy for a long time. The art starts out quite rough but improves a lot over the years. Has a lot of cynical military-type humor, and some of the plotlines actually get quite well-developed and involved. The best way I can think of to describe it is Star Trek, crossed with the A-Team or Kelly's Heroes.
Starslip (formerly Starslip Crisis, formerly...you know what, don't ask) is another sci-fi comedy/drama epic, created by Kris Straub, a close associate of the Penny Arcade guys. You may know him as one of the guys (with Scott Kurtz) behind the Blamimations PA TV series. It's set aboard a semi-retired military starship which has been converted into a traveling art and cultural museum. It concluded in 2012 after a seven-year run. Straub's other projects are Chainsawsuit, a joke-a-day comic about various topics with a simple art style, and Broodhollow, which is about a stressed-out 1930's encyclopedia salesman who travels to a sinister small town.
The Order of the Stick is a fantasy comic set in a Dungeons & Dragons-esque universe. It uses stick-figure based art (which has become more and more elaborate, the stick figure characters are a deliberate artistic choice and not at all a reflection of a lack of ability on the part of the creator) and over the course of 11 years has gone from largely just making jokes about silly stuff in the D&D rules to having a complex and pretty heavy ongoing plot (though the characters are still aware they live in a world governed by "rules" and make reference to their stats, etc). The comic ran in the now-defunct Dragon magazine and now runs in Gygax magazine. Updates have become a little irregular in the past couple of years due to some health problems the creator, Rich Burlew, has had, but there are currently almost 1000 archived comics to get through (many of them huge multi-page installments), and updates have been pretty steady since the recent start of a new "chapter" of the story.
I could probably come up with a few more suggestions but these are the ones I check regularly or have enjoyed the most, and hopefully there is something in there to strike your interest. Don't want to derail the thread away from Trenches too much more, even if there's nothing much Trenches-related to talk about.
I really don't want to be a dick about this, but this is kind of weird to say all of a sudden in this topic after silence for the talk about the Snuffler strips. It's also a semi-valid question... the comic seems to have trouble making up its mind on whether it wants to be gag-a-day, pop culture based, or story driven.
... Or completely random, i.e. Snuffler strips.
And it's not like the guy was being extraordinarily abrasive about it. He doesn't find it funny. He mentioned one other comic, and that might not have even been a comparison so much as "so hey I started checking out this other creation by the PA guys..."
He criticized the comic. Not as nicely as he could've, perhaps, but still.
If I had to voice my own opinion, it'd be that I'm really just reading Trenches for the Tales at this point. Maybe it can be turned around but when a season ends without notice (yeah, I know this is normal for this series, not that I consider that a good thing) after being 10% Snuffler strips, which were dropped right in the middle of an ongoing storyline... nooot exactly hopeful.