[TRENCHES] Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - He’s The Bomb
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
He’s The Bomb
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/hes-the-bomb
“Orders of magnitude” - O Brother, Where Art Thou
AnonymousI feel your pain, fellow tortured soul.
I also work for a Government You Might Know, and from your description, I gather we work for the same Government Everyone Knows.
I work somewhere, and my job title is best stated as ‘‘Only Guy Who Knows The Technical Details Around Here Because I Tend The Fucking Zoo”.
There’s not a significant IT project around my particular stretch of fantasy land that has not run to exactly the following script:
A new honcho arrives: He Who Must Prove His Worth By Changing The Entire World.
Naturally, this muthafucka’ can’t view source, let alone write hello world in BASIC, but hey - we’ll put him in charge of our primary hardware/software platforms.
As the only nuts and bolts guy on scene, I am immediately and decisively looped out. Practical concerns from the zookeeper have no place in Mr. Unqualified-pants’ Crazy New Plan.
Here There Be Meetings: an assumption on my part. I’m almost certain there are lots of meetings about things and stuff in my bailiwick every day, but marginalized from the start as I am, I have no direct evidence or experience with this phase. Something Wicked This Way Comes At Breakfast; I know that much.
Eventually: Grand Pronouncements are made. Paradigms Will Now Be Shifted. Throw every Internet related buzzword/phrase you ever heard into a run-on sentence here, and I’ll show you the powerpoint/memo for The Boss that tops it, I shit you not.
WAIT: I’m wrong: ‘standards’ and ‘best practice’ - simple deduction eliminates those as topics of discussion in any Meeting held around here.
Contracts will now be signed with questionable vendors and within days, a random set of obscure whims and ill-conceived concepts are handed to said vendors as technical specifications.
Another indeterminate timespan passes, and then:
A hideous monstrosity emerges from the depths of Hell as a ‘user acceptance testing’ ready ‘deliverable’ - nine or ninety or nine thousand foul heads; I have seen these, I know them well; they come as The Beast with the number 29A16 branded upon their many brows.
Naturally, whatever it is totally doesn’t fucking work and has dozens of deal-breaking fail/death flaws coded right into its unholy heart.
All of you horribly mistreated videogame QA mendicants? I’d go on a killing spree for two or three of you - not that we’d pay, we have an unending supply of college interns with no relevant skills and nothing to gain/lose to completely fail at all that, but a man can dream of working with competence, eh?
But LO! Now The Boss Is Angry. There Be More Meetings Here “Why doesn’t it work yet?! You said eight weeks!” reverberates through the halls. Nobody is happy, fear and terror wrack the kingdom.
At last, I enter the sordid tale.
Deliberately blinded from the get-go, the flaming bag of dogshit is thrown at my face, usually with the ‘should have been completed weeks ago OR ELSE’ brand of pressure.
TL;DR: solve for X where X=boogadaboogaboogyboo-filbberdy-gibberish.
Difficulty: impossible timeframe.
Bonus: Nobody above immediate supervisor level knows you exist until the blame game starts.
Posts
Repeat until entropy
> Way back in the early days of the 1990’s when, Quake mods seemed like they were weaseling their way into becoming an actual thing,
Quake came out in 1996. What is wrong with this person's memory.
> Well after about a year and a half it was down to just three of us working on this crazy mod but we were doing alright.
> Then Quake 2 came out in nearly the same week they said we need to switch to making a Quake 2 mod.
Quake came out less than a year and a half before Quake 2. This person claims to have only started the project "when quake mods seemed like they were weaseling their way into becoming a thing", which if you are older than 25 you should remember was not the very same week that Quake first came out. They could've been working on this project for at most a year. Again, what is wrong with this person's memory.
> So much so that we missed the release of Half-Life (among other things). The only game we were playing was the one we were making and by the end of ‘98 we had finally finished.
Oh no, Half Life came out a whole *month* before they finished, how tragic, that's like missing an entire generation of gaming, right?
The only both correct and verifiable thing about this post is that tactical shooters, and the more realistic weapons they come with, weren't a thing until 1998, after the quake 1 mod had already been scrapped.
Yes, same with the woman in panel 2. The art has really gone down hill.
It's the same woman both times. Maybe she had breast cancer, did you ever think of that? Now who's going downhill?
As noted earlier in this thread, the art is suffering. The update schedule is laughable (Tue/Thu? More like every other Wednesday, but we call it Tuesday). And frankly, neither the humor nor the story is interesting anymore.
If the PA team is putting any effort at all into Trenches, it doesn't show and it is wasted effort that could be going into a worthwhile project. And if they're not, then perhaps this might be a good time to cut ties with those who are sullying the PA name with this "comic"?