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The Pizzaman - a lil comic based on a dream I had.

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Piss me Out of the bearded barley...

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You may argue that it is not really a tardigrade, but, really

it looks very much the hell like one

it does not match anything in the subatomic realm, which is to say, any elementary particles

I know this is a very unreasonable thing to be pissed off by, but I am extremely pissed off at this Penny Arcade comic because tardigrades are obviously not subatomic. They're animals, for god's sake.

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I also need to report that since I haven't been following PA at all in about a decade (the comic I referenced in my last post was posted in a Slack thread about AAA graphics in the context of the Witcher 4 trailer/teaser/tech demo) so I did not know that the comic is now posted as its constituent panels separated and you can't reference the whole thing as a single URI in any simple way. Downloading the comic involves having a subscription, which may be the most baffling business decision I've ever seen in the realm of webcomics (so far)

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I know this is a very unreasonable thing to be pissed off by, but I am extremely pissed off at this Penny Arcade comic because tardigrades are obviously not subatomic. They're animals, for god's sake.

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I feel it also comes from a place of attempting to satirize CAD by channeling its ostensibly more illustrious contender, Penny Arcade, a comic that certainly contributed to the overt flowery writing as a shortcut to intellectuality that somehow has overshadowed the fact that it has very much the same sort of humor than its contemporaries of genre.

What fascinates me about those shitty CTRL+ALT+DEL edits that keep circulating on Tumblr is that a lot of them are legitimately better examples of two-dipshits-on-a-couch gamer humour than the actual CTRL+ALT+DEL. Like, the "you have lived an illustrious life – may none recall it" bit is a dead perfect execution of a punchline that could have come from a two-dipshits-on-a-couch gamer comic circa 2005, in a way that its source material, which actually is a product of that era, never achieved. I won't say that this is an example of parody that comes from a place of love for its genre, but at the very least it's coming from a place of understanding.

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Nothing's fine I'm Jones I'm all out of faith This is how I feel I'm cold and I am shamed Lying naked on the floor Illusion never changed Into something real I'm wide awake and I can see The night sky and myself You're a little late I'm already Jones

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How dare you not accept the challenge of Dave, Accounter of Finances!

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I'm having a hard time picking a favorite among the now properly introduced coven of witches, but if I'll be honest I cannot resist the charms of Noa

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I had a whole tirade in my head that started with "TFW you meet your boyfriend's ex" and then I realized mid paragraph that this is not Zimmy, it's Omega, who is a totally different entity.

...although maybe I'm just jumping the gun here, with the way things are turning. We'll just have to wait and see...

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I am very pleased with the how gothic/dork the witches are in Gunnerkrigg

I am also starting to worry about the nature of our Best Girl Jenny's work...

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Oh, I see... that, uh, that explains a lot, yea

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Darn! A wild Jenny appears!

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I misunderstood "odious excess" as being "too much media", because otherwise I do recall a boom of gag webcomics in the 2010s, usually starring two guys (self inserts of the writer and the artist), usually gamer adjacent, usually with an obtuse two-word title which would start out raunchy and somehow only give in more and more to excess of edge

Heck, I had a website commenting on those regularly. It is dead, thankfully. Most of the comics are probably dead, too, I hope.

You can tell that a person has been terribly sheltered when they try to come up with an example of the most odious excesses of web media and the worst thing they can think of is Homestuck.

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"Anja, what do you have there?"

"A knife!"

"No!"

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Ah, yea, I remember being there and in fact writing a few essays on the subject (which are, certainly, not very good, but I have reposted them to this tumblog for reasons that elude me at the moment reasons of intellectual honesty), but I admit I never quite explored the (in hindsight, obvious) angle of edgy comedian getting pushback when trying to get on with the times and throwing themselves onto the arms of the alt-right because 'if you will call me racist/sexist/transphobic/fascist then I might as well become one' is the kind of thing that comes through your mind when you're used to get praise for being edgy...

...you know, the Chappelle Event Horizon.

Anyway, I never revisited the comic post Trump election (the first one) except briefly a few months ago and it did not get any better. In fact, it's been getting worse, and I only wish to imagine what Sinfest is talking about after the shameless display that was the inauguration this monday.

As someone who follows a lot of webcomics, including some very long running ones, I'm suddenly curious: have you any thoughts on the decline and fall of Sinfest?

I was there when Sinfest went off the rails, and it's kind of hilarious because it didn't go at all the way most folks assume it did. A lot of people have only seen the comic's early days and what it's doing this week and conclude it must have been a straight line from the former to the latter – which honestly isn't a bad guess! – but it actually went through a milquetoast liberal feminist phase somewhere in the middle, if you can believe it.

The trouble is, the comic's author had this whole Grand Philosopher of the Internet shtick going, and this was back when just having a regularly updating website made you kind of a big deal, so they were accustomed to being treated as an authority on whatever subject they saw fit to shoot their mouth off about. However, when the comic took a turn from edgy T&A pop culture parody to didactic feminist allegory, practically no one was prepared to take it seriously; the comic's established readership was broadly unreceptive, and whatever new readership the comic was trying to court found the idea of suddenly treating the Calvin-and-Hobbes-with-tiddies guy as an authority on the topic of feminism laughable.

Of course, I said practically no one. There was, in fact, one notable group who were perfectly willing to kiss the Calvin-and-Hobbes-with-tiddies guy's ass. I'm sure you can guess who.

(To be 100% clear, I'm not saying "oh, Sinfest's author was forced to go down the transphobic radfem pipeline because we nasty leftists were mean to them". They're a colossally entitled twerp who voluntarily got in bed with fascists because couldn't deal with not being taken seriously as an authority figure, and they made their own choices. I'm just remarking on the particulars of that trajectory!)

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I know in practical terms that's not going to happen but now I am very much here for a whole tangent where we find out how culture has been dramatically changed by the fact that magical girls (and, by consequence, magic) actually exists.