Posts Tagged ‘penny arcade’
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This Penny Arcade Comic (warning, it has a cuss in it) filled in a hole in my vocabulary of which I was completely unaware. It brought me the delicious phrase ‘register biscuit’ to exactly and perfectly describe the minimum wage earning, incompetent teens who populate the behind-the-counter areas of the local electronics stores. Let me give you a for instance or two, if you have not immediately picked up on what I am laying down.
Before we got married, Amy and I were out shopping for a stereo for her to take to university. We arbitrarily picked Future Shop because they are kind of a big deal when it comes to consumer electronics at the quality and price point we were seeking. They are also apparently on commission though you’d never, ever be able to guess this from their behaviour toward people who are presumably helping pay their wage (more commonly known as “customers”). We walked through the stereo section (having done some research beforehand, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted) and tried to attract the interest of one of the what can only be called staff, due to the fact that they were all wearing matching shirts that had the name of the store emblazoned thereupon. To be fair, we may have happened upon the Future Shop bowling team making a visit to the sponsoring store and sort of huddling around talking to each other and ignoring all other lifeforms in a 30m radius around them. Such is the right and privilege of bowling teams, after all. Perhaps we were being too judgmental of them when we decided to walk through the store and give the sale to whomever made eye contact and/or spoke to us first. I think we ended up with somebody from the music area or possibly games but she was more than happy to ring us through while the bowling team… um… bowled? Maybe?
I’ve had a broadly similar experience to this in Home Depot stores. Similar in that I am getting no service but also different in that there is not an employee to be seen. Generally speaking, when I am headed into a home improvement store, I have a pretty clear idea of what I’m there for and some kind of clue where it is. This is a behaviour born of necessity because Home Depot in particular suffers from tragic underemployment. Rona (kind of a Canadian Home Depot or Lowe’s) is better staffed or has not yet equipped their employees with customer avoidance radar. Rona’s downfall is that their very helpful and friendly employees often don’t know which end of a lightbulb is intended to be screwed into the socket. I was absolutely shocked a couple weeks ago that, while at Home Depot, I was standing in the carpet section after having picked up some tile grout. I was trying to figure out where in the store I would find backer rod to seal up some of the more egregious failures of the bathroom tile and an employee, apropos of nothing whatsoever, asked me if he could help me find something. I was absolutely floored by his presence and willingness to be of assistance. Now, he didn’t know what the thing was I was looking for or even where to begin looking for it, but he seemed to genuinely be interested in helping me.
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Besides the aforementioned Wondermark, I have a whole bunch more webcomics accounting for roughly a quarter of the feeds I follow with Google Reader. I started reading them over a decade ago (oh and there go my old knees, again, get off my lawn you kids) when a friend in high school (hi, Kevin!) showed me Penny Arcade. I’m not sure when exactly I picked it up (I’m sure it wasn’t with the first one) but it would have been sometime in early 1999 and I have been a fan ever since. It is a very selectively targeted comic strip and you probably won’t find it funny if you don’t play games or at least know somebody who does. There are a few strips that are funny to a broader cross section of humanity. This one, for example, is funny to anybody who has ever tried to install any Windows product on anything, ever:
Please be aware, most of the strips have cussing, violence and World of Warcraft references. If these things offend you, read something different!
Via people that I ‘met’ through the Penny Arcade discussion forum, my eyes were opened to a vast world of comics that will almost certainly never appear in any paper anywhere near me. I mentioned Wondermark a while ago alongside Dinosaur Comics and Hark! A Vagrant, the creators of which I met at a comics convention in Toronto. Here are some more examples of various comics that I like to read:
Unshelved is all about things that happen in and around a library. This sounds very dull and might be, if you hate learning. It is updated just about every week day. I identify with the protagonist (and sometime anti-hero) Dewey, “the determinedly ironic young adult librarian who would rather read comic books or play games than work the reference desk, or indeed do any kind of work at all.” (from the primer).
I recently started reading Nedroid. It is the adventures of Reginald the bird and his best friend, Beartato. Sometimes it is the reverse! It is updated very infrequently but the artist updates his LiveJournal a bit more often and with a lot of additional content to the comic.
Anthony who draws Nedroid is also the current colourist for Dr. McNinja. Since the good doctor’s comics are all presented at episodic stories, it wouldn’t do much good to link just one image (though some of the individual comics are pretty funny). I had seen them posted around a couple places but didn’t really think it was funny until I read a couple whole storylines. They are about a doctor who is also a ninja. He’s sort of a ninja by heritage but has chosen to be a doctor (against his family’s wishes). Here is the most recent story arc’s beginning. The writing is pretty funny and the visuals often border on the amazing.
Here is a fun thing to know about a lot of webcomics (and about all the doodles I post): Very often there will be an additional joke or some sort of remark concealed in the picture’s alternate text. To read it, hover your mouse pointer over the picture for a little while without moving it too much. Most of the links I post have some kind of alternate text as well. Dinosaur Comics, Dr. McNinja, Wondermark and the most recent Nedroid comics have this (as well as almost all of Nedroid’s Livejournal drawings).
in the pouring rain (very strange)