The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Penny Arcade - Comic - Muskovites
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Muskovites
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
+8
Posts
Yeah it's going to accelerate until it catches fire. Or sends a racist tweet.
Definitely one of those, or both.
Or getting stuck in the Nantucket sand.
Or tearing off a side rolling over into a drainage ditch.
Or undergoing a 5 hour reboot after going through the car wash.
(Yes, these are all things that have happened to Incel Caminos in the wild.)
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/05/01/a-gentler-decapitation
It is fairly wordy, but there's definitely denser comics...
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/i-hope-you-like-text
Just insane people posting over and over again about "The left can't meme" because of this comic.
This sounds really good unless you remember the Dickwolves stuff, and how you both were absolutely bullied into completely backing down. And I mean, I get it - weren't people talking about coming to Mike's house and murdering his wife and children? Yeah. But the point is, they won - not only did PA back down and remove all the dickwolves merch and mention of it, but since then the "edginess" of the jokes absolutely tapered off. In fact, the only time the strip ever gets edgy anymore is when it gets political, and it only gets political when it's against "safe" targets - that is to say, when it's against the targets of the same people who attacked PA over dickwolves and threatened to kill Mike's family.
I get it - you both were in that unfortunate era when "liberal" had a sudden shift from free and expressive to spiteful and regressive. You're of my era, where being a liberal meant saying what you want, thinking what you want, flipping the bird to the establishment. And you were burned by that when the tribe you grew up in turned against you because there had been a subtle shifting of values that you didn't notice because you were too busy making fun of the church that oppressed you as a kid, or the popular jocks who bullied you in HS.
But please - spare me the "I'm immune to this" nonsense. You're immune to it because the "Muskovites" aren't using the same tactics as the people who threatened to murder your families. They're coming here and they're writing things. In other words, they're acting the way you yourselves act. Sure, it isn't as effective as the dickwolves people, who proved that they can get you to bend over for them. I find it funny, though, that you're essentially mocking them for being ineffective because they're playing within the old rules of decency rather than doing as your fellow travelers did.
Do we really need to bring this here? There's absolutely nothing noble about stirring up shit on Twitter, then bragging about how you're immune to all shit that gets thrown at you on Twitter. Or X. Or whatever it's called before it gets sold again, torn apart, and ends up being the MySpace of this generation.
It's entirely about a really weird demographic of people who get very upset because someone made fun of a dude that got really mad at some kids making fun of his truck. That's it.
It's also a demographic that somehow thought that saying "your comic is boring" is going to affect him, especially because they already went through many many things, Dickwolves included.
That's it. These last two posts seem to have gone way deeper than it really had to.
Yeah, sure, Muskovites wouldn't threaten someone.
They especially wouldn't threaten teenagers with ripping off their head and spitting down their throat. Never ever.
I'm going to respect your intelligence enough to assume you're deliberately misrepresenting what I said. I didn't say "Muskovites" (fuck, what a stupid term) can't be assholes, or the dipshit in the cybertruck wasn't an asshole. I said that the response to his post was tweets - that is, communication - and not misrepresenting boycott and smear campaigns and death threats to families. In fact, you can read it right here:
Did cybertruck guy come here and write things? No? Then I obviously wasn't talking about him, was I?
Don't rely on misrepresentation or intellectual dishonesty to make your points - if your points rely on these, then be better and make better points.
In both cases, we have a very small but very vocal minority of crazies, in a large group that kept it to words.
The reason the Muskovites are arguing on Twitter isn't because they're better people than those angry during the Dickwolves situation; it's because many of them at this point are terminally online and have fully bought in their silly mantras like "the left can't meme"; to them, the idea of "ratio-ing" Tycho is the same as destroying his ego and whole self, because that's all they have.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy your whole "intellectual honesty" spiel when your original message had thinly-veiled anger at the "liberals", and mischaracterized the response to the Dickwolves situations ("misrepresenting boycott", really?). You also leaned very heavily on the death threats suggesting that it alone is the reason P-A's tone shifted over time, and why the Dickwolves merch disappeared. Everyone changes over 20+ years, and while it's not unreasonable to suggest that the backlash to the Dickwolves situation accelerated a shift in tone at P-A, you have to remember that way back then, Mike himself had said that the most important (and perhaps sole) reason for removing all the Dickwolves stuff is because as much as he'd have liked P-A and PAX to be completely different and separate things, they were not, and he couldn't accept the idea that stuff happening with P-A (the site, the strip) could make PAX (the big gamer con) an unsafe, unwelcoming or inaccessible space. He would sooner change P-A for the benefit of PAX than change PAX for the benefit of P-A.
This is a hell of a way to join the forums.
I'm not new.
Haha, right. Rightfully upset.
I don't consider anyone who partakes in the kind of vitriol that's common now "liberal." Co-opting the term doesn't make it true. I'm liberal - hence, "You're of my era, where being a liberal meant saying what you want, thinking what you want, flipping the bird to the establishment." But that isn't here nor there, and you're attempt to politicize my post is just more proof that the dickwolves surrender was complete, and PA is held by those who tore it down. And just to clarify, what happened was that the people who attacked PA also went after PAX, with the usual smear tactics (ie, going after advertisers/sponsors/game companies and demanding that they pull out or else they would be "rape supporters" like J&M). Mike realized that PA could survive, but PAX couldn't, and so surrendered to save PAX. The bullies won.
You know we can see your profile, right? You joined 16 minutes before making that post up there
burner account
noun
plural: burner accounts
: an often temporary social media account that is created for the purpose of remaining anonymous.
I'm going with "caught out in an obvious lie so trying to brazen it out", myself
It's the Elon Musk way
Thank you, mods.
monkey's paw curls
Actually, every now and then the emergence of a LaserJesusBeard is kind of interesting. I've grown quite accustomed to the community here because it is a well moderated haven of reasonability...honestly the comic is a bit ancillary to my use of the site. In that experience it's easy to think, "wait, there are people who follow Penny Arcade that would defend Musk and Cybertrucks?" But then I have to remember that Penny Arcade is getting posted on Twitter and Facebook, where it's going to have a big audience and easy commenting without needing to make an account. And the Dickwolves reference has reminded me that Penny Arcade, once upon a time, was not so different from, say, CAD as I might like to think. And then I remember that I read quite a bit of CAD back in the day, myself...and if I really want to hate myself, I go back and read my posts on this forum from a decade ago...
Which makes me think a big reason the Cybertruck comment in particular got pushback may have been that, while many of us have grown up, and the writers have grown up, and even the characters of Gabe and Tycho have grown up...many who became fans of PA back in the day will not have grown up, and take it as a "betrayal" that the comic no longer provides a dose of rape jokes.
Also holy crap 1998...
Anyway, Elon Musk is my hero
I'm so, so sorry.
No it's the forum software being ever more flaky in various ways over the last few months. The skipping to last post instead of last unread has been happening on and off for months on mobile.
No, it is truly an impressive man who can muscle his way into control of seven different companies that weren't his original idea and somehow be the worst thing to happen to every one of them.
He's a lesson to us all, that failure is not the barrier to success. Generational wealth is!
You're really going for something here.
That's not true, there's also trump... oh.
What's unusual about Elon Musk in that capacity is that most rich failures you can look at their history and find that at least 30-50% of the time they accomplish nothing positive or negative, they are merely a presence in the occasional meeting and a very large paycheck as existing inertia carries the company around them. Musk is a rare example of somebody who is 7 for 7 in inflicting real quantifiable damage on companies and 5 and 2 for that damage being potentially existential. There's an argument for SpaceX being existential as well but as long as Falcon remains largely unchallenged the four year stall in Raptor development probably won't prove the downfall of anything except Artemis 3.
Perhaps more amazingly three of those he openly called intentional. Arguably four since Grok despite being its own company is clearly just Twitter wearing glasses.