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Penny Arcade - Comic - Unready
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Unready
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Yeah, the author caught a break with RP1 because everybody loves nostalgia, and while it has its... moments... people like me enjoyed it as a guilty pleasure read.
Then I read Armada and I was instantly over his writing style.
Same, I was so over it. Honestly I was tired after reading RP1, like I had run a race, but instead it was because I kept trying to keep track of all the references.
That said, I admit my like bar is very low... though my love bar is very high.
For example, I can't think of a single movie release that I considered great since 'The Shawshank Redemption'
I do want to watch Black Mirror though, that's a newer show that has interested me. But the plots of most things anymore don't seem all that interesting, especially TV/movies which are more just an example of how we can flex our production budget on effects (I honestly do not care one bit - "old" effects were much better). Like in the horror genre, can someone name me one newer one that is actually good? I haven't heard of any iconic horror movies since The Ring or SAW (which isn't even to say of their quality, just that they're somewhat memorable where most are completely forgettable).
That sounds a lot like "Ignore the plot/writing on whatever you're consuming, as long as it's about X thing you like."
For all the criticism Ready Player One got (which is way higher now than when it came out), it got a massive pass compared to anything aimed at women.
To quote a classic tweet from 2017 “I arrived in my flying model of the Thelma & Louise car. I’d installed a Polly Pocket dashboard AI, and, to complete the look, slapped some Lisa Frank dolphins on the outside”
Which is not to say that it's shameful to eat fast food necessarily, because at this point I think it's widely acknowledged that this is sin, and sin that we mock *ourselves* for commiting before, during, and after we commit it.
The point is, this is junkfood, and we can consume junkfood as long as we don't deny that it's junkfood. It's not shaming the consumer, but a self-deprecation(in good fun or not)of our own world for having such junk in it.
Reminds me of a clip I saw from Big Bang Theory where they literally just spam references to things.
"hey I've seen those things they are talking to me!"
pleasepaypreacher.net
Also I've seen the referenced page. It not only namedrops it does it very, very badly. Hell a few weeks ago I got done reading about a zombie outbreak during Comic-Con. I'm not adverse to references. :P But this is just constant and it calls them out immediately afterwards. It's like this:
Hello, this is a reference (this is a parenthetical where I explain the reference in detail). Hello, this is another reference (another another parenthetical)
Yeah, I liked Ready Player One, but it was the same as liking a simple magic trick; seeing it again only reveals how it works and it's boring now.
If I reference something it's usually a one or two-word clue to an aspect of the world or character's past that sidesteps a paragraph-long infodump. Kinda like that inspirational iceberg poster your high school counselor had on their wall. Anything else is in service to or propels the story forward only.
Anything in the "'memba this?!" category is like using Carolina Reaper chilies in a recipe. You can, but dude, c'mon, seriously, it still has to be edible.
Horror movies are going through a bit of a renaissance actually, there has been plenty of great stuff recently: It Follows, The Witch, Hereditary, Midsommar, Get Out, and so much more.
Agreed. Throwing some more out there:
You can't parody that. It's already hit peak absurdity.
That is horrible. It requires a pop-culture reference of my own:
That writing makes my brain feel what Chekov must felt when Khan stuffed that worm in his ear. Sutekh the Destroyer has shredded my nervous system into a million fibers. Klytus has used the bore worms on my head. I am on Mustafar and Obi-wan has just told me that he has the high ground. Or, to quote Doctor Smith from Lost in Space:
"Oh, the pain, the pain of it all."
My wife has an opinion on the whole "80's guy nostalgia" thing - when we were kids, girl stuff SUCKED. Most of the shows were boring compared to "boy" shows, except for She-ra which was a spin-off of He-Man and she still liked He-Man better (and all the boys she went to school with considered She-ra a boy show anyway).
Boys had three whole aisles at Meijer and the whole left side of Toys R Us, girls had the back half of the aisle behind the video games at Meijer and two aisles that overlapped with baby toys at Toys R Us. And they didn't just have way more toys, they had way cooler ones and they weren't more expensive. He'll, the exact same thing routinely cost more in pink than blue just because (I still see this shopping for our kids).
My mother-in-law STILL gives her shit for watching Transformers (her little sister was allowed to watch Power Rangers without comment though) and wanting boy toys for Christmas.
I tried to find the PA comic showing this phenomenon ("It's a doll!" "What can it do?" "Be a doll!") But Pipe Four failed me.
Which it was, but I was still disappointed for two reasons. One, they used the Michael Bay Ninja Turtles, and two, it was really really REALLY dumb.
To say the plot is full of holes is too much of an understatement. It's more like it's a big mass of anti-plot, with pinholes of occasional coherence.
I give the movie more of a pass because at least Gundam fights Godzilla.
But seriously, while it leans heavily into the novelty of all these IPs clashing, it is impressive, at least, for the effort that clearly went into making this happen behind the scenes. None of which is needed to name drop things on the printed page.
To quote Penny Arcade: “ It's like trying to make fun of a clown. What, are you going to make fun of his tiny car? His floppy shoes? It just doesn't work.”
I could have enjoyed moments like that more if I wasn't trying to figure out if the bad guys were too competent to resort to brute force method at the third challenge, or too incompetent that there's no way they could have ever figured out the second.
I ended up leaning on the latter because the movie didn't even bother trying to explain how they managed it.
Don't worry, I'm sure this sequel is much better.
Well, dang.
Also, I really liked the closing statement of that video, which start at ~4:10:
Another thing. I learned people consume nostalgic media as a way to make themselves feel better. Reminding themselves of happier times. It makes me feel no small amount of empathy for Ernst Kline. I mean, not as much as the actually good writers who didn't get deals because he did, but I can't help but picture him as guy desperately trying to recreate the 80s as a way to avoid living today (which was going on well before 2020).