Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Nov 1, 2006

StrongBad Emails are fairly surreal and never try to say much. They are usually just humorous nonsense, but the latest actually dabbles in satire with a brilliant lampooning of self-esteem driven education.

It made me laugh.

I usually take it for granted that everyone that gets HomestarRunner already reads HomestarRunner. The site was so huge at one point, with everyone telling everyone else about it, that it seemed useless to link it. Everyone that liked HSR was already checking that site every day.

That was a few years ago. The site has slowed down this year. Maybe the brothers who write this thing are getting tired of it. Maybe they went back to their day jobs. It’s hard to tell.

So, I don’t see HSR links much these days, but I can’t tell if that’s because the site is in decline or because people just don’t bother posting links. I think the site is as good as it ever was, although now that the style of humor is familiar (it was really different and innovative to me when I discovered the site years ago) it doesn’t make me laugh the way it used to. Actually, the site is arguably better, since the animations are much more varied and more sophisticated these days.

And now that I’ve gone off on this tangent and then painted myself into a corner, let me just circle back to the original point: This week’s StrongBad email is funny.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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6 comments

DM of the Rings XXIV:
Loot of the Rings

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Nov 1, 2006

Filed under: DM of the Rings 50 comments

 DM of the Rings XXIII:
Happy HalloweenPrevious Post

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Where Are We Again? 

Loot of the Rings, Horn of Gondor, Staff of Gandalf, Sting, Bow of Legolas, Mithril, Narsil, The One Ring

Is the loot valuable or not? The price tag is meaningless. It’s all in how you describe it. Take a page from the home shopping channel, where no item is too mundane to be praised.

It’s not a “small figurine”. It’s a “beautiful, hand-crafted figurine of a water nymph”. Yes, this seems silly. Of course it’s hand-crafted. Everything is in a pre-industrial world. I’m telling you: It doesn’t matter if it’s not worth two coppers and weighs as much as a brick, your players will fight over that figurine if you make it sound exciting.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings XXIII:
Happy HalloweenPrevious Post

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Where Are We Again? 

50 comments

Concerned, RIP

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Nov 1, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 3 comments

 Seanbaby vs Uwe BollPrevious Post

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Concered, the Half-Life 2 webcomic, has ended. It ran twice weekly for a year and a half, and managed to keep a good pace and a steady supply of laughs. Christopher Livingston did an outstanding job. This was a fantastic comic and I’m sorry to see it end.

I think my favorite gag was this one, which had a very obscure movie quote in it. Given that most readers are probably in their 20’s, and that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out in 1986, I wonder how many people even got the joke.

That’s brave. I’d probably chicken out of a gag like that, but it worked and it made me laugh.

Now that the run is over I discovered that there are notes from the author at the bottom of each comic. You have to click a link to see them, and my brain just filtered it out along with the rest of the banner ad noise at the bottom of the page. Now that I’ve noticed I’m going through again and reading these comments. It’s pretty interesting, as I can see him learning his craft as he goes.

Great work.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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3 comments

A Parent’s Guide to Halloween

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 31, 2006

Filed under: Random 12 comments

 The Site was Pulled OverPrevious Post

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Most towns have trick-or-treating end before nighfall, but don’t let that stop you from decking your kid out in reflective tape and glowsticks. Sure, it will ruin their Batman costume and make them look like a Christmas tree with a cape, but if you don’t then the other parents will glare at you and make you feel so guilty.
Explain to your kids: Never accept candy from strangers, unless it’s Halloween – when you should wander around the neighborhood begging for it.
Make sure your child has a nice, large sack or pillowcase for trick-or-treat, and avoid using hard containers like buckets. This makes it less obvious when you begin “skimming” their haul when they aren’t looking.
Don’t feel bad about dipping into your child’s candy when they aren’t around. You helped make the costume, after all. And even if you didn’t: all that candy isn’t good for them anyway.
You will see all levels of costumes. You’ll see one kid dressed as a shogun in authentic period garb, and another kid dressed as a ghost using a plaid sheet with a urine stain. For some reason, you’re supposed to give candy and compliments to both of them. I don’t know why either.
Just to mess with the trick or treaters who come to your door: Try dressing as Santa and giving out painted eggs.
It doesn’t matter if your kid is dressed up as Frankenstein, a zombie, or Idi Amin, the moment you hand them a flashlight they are going to start waving it around in everyone’s eyes and making lightsaber noises. Little brats.
To get revenge, make them wear their coats. Oh yeah. That will make their costume look real good.

Enjoy your Halloween. Save me a Zagnut.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 The Site was Pulled OverPrevious Post

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12 comments

The Site was Pulled Over

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 31, 2006

Filed under: Notices, Random 18 comments

 Friday SitRepPrevious Post

Next PostA Parent's Guide to Halloween 

Some of you may have noticed this site was down for most of the day today. I mentioned before that I was burning through the bandwidth this month. My provider is happy to let me do this, and just add the excess to my monthly bill as a sort of fine for not planning ahead. Apparently there is a point where they will stop doing this and – out of pity or mercy – shut the sucker down.

I hate the bandwidth exceeded message. It has a very ghetto, “GeoCities” vibe that just bugs me.

So the site is back up now. However, I need to take some steps or this thing is going to become an ongoing problem. I’m not looking to make money from this webcomic thing, but as things are, it’s going to start costing me some serious money and we can’t have that.

I’m enabling hotlink protection again. This will probably screw up the various site feeds people have set up for the express purpose of reading my comic. Sorry, but this is for the best. Hotlinking is a major drain at this point, and this is a quick way to slow the bleeding. This time the “no hotlink” image is very mild. Lots of nice people linked my comics on their blogs, and the last thing I want to do I blast them with the image of ocular affliction for their trouble.

If bandwidth is still an issue in November, I may scale back to publishing twice weekly on Tuesday & Thursday. This would suck, so I’m not going to do it unless I have to.

This webcomic thing is supposed to be fun. A lark. I don’t plan on turning it into anything more, and I don’t want it consuming the rest of the site. Someday it will end, and the blog will still be here. If the webcomic thing becomes too much of a pain then I will probably tire of it quickly, and it will no longer be fun. So let’s just see if we can avoid that.

Thanks again for reading.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Friday SitRepPrevious Post

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18 comments

Caring for your mutant child

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 31, 2006

Filed under: Movies 23 comments

 Silent Hill: Plot analysisPrevious Post

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Lileks nails my #1 gripe with X-Men:

[…] never really loved the franchise, to use that horrid word. The entire mutant-as-a-metaphor was insulting, anyway â€"if you know anything about kids you know that a teen with the ability to shoot fire out of his ears would not be shunned as a weirdo freak but elected class president on general principle: dude! Awesome! I can understand parents getting upset if their kid was blue and covered with hairy nodules, but the idea that parents would consider their kid “sick” if she had the telekinetic ability to raise every car in the neighborhood nine feet in the air â€" please. We have parents who will go across the ocean to adopt a Down's Syndrome baby; are we to believe that the majority of American parents reject their kids because they can levitate or cough up gold by the quart or exude perfectly formed Neapolitan Ice Cream bricks from their hindquarters? Far from persecuting them, they'd get their own reality shows. Storm would be a TV meteorologist in New York. As for your morning commute, I'll see what I can do. Stay classy, Manhattan.

The second movie made me nuts. In a movie with people who can turn into metal and control the weather, the most unrealistic part was when Bobby went home. His parents did not act like real people. They way they rejected him way very un-parent like.

It is in the nature of parent to claim that nothing is wrong with their kid, even when there obviously is. Once in a while you’ll see one of these stories about some sicko serial killer / mass murderer who gets caught killing / raping / eating young women, and their parent(s) will end up on the news saying they still love their kid and believe he’s a “good person”.

In the real world you’d see bumper stickers:

Proud parent of a mutant honor student

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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23 comments

Uwe Boll vs. The Movies

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 30, 2006

Filed under: Rants 8 comments

 The Harvard ManPrevious Post

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I tossed some insults at Uwe Boll the other day, but Cineris has a better idea than boxing Use Boll: Challenge him to a movie-making competition, which would be a contest where he could not possibly win.

He hasn’t made any movies about games that I care about. I’ve never seen BloodRayne before. I played Alone in the Dark, but I was never very attached to the game itself. Far Cry was already a stupid game when it came to the story and characters, so I don’t know how much worse he’ll be able to make it. Dungeon Siege was more or less a plotless game of stats building and loot harvesting, so I don’t know how anyone could make a movie based on the game in any meaningful way. If you can make a movie from that, then Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Movie can’t be far off. Postal is stupid on purpose for comedic effect. I wonder if he realizes that.

So he hasn’t wronged any titles that I care about. My real fear is that he will. Sooner or later he’ll get his grubby mitts on the rights to some game close to my heart, and there won’t be anything I can do but watch my beloved story get turned into a single-digit scoring movie on the Tomatometer. System Shock, Myst, Dues Ex, and The Longest Journey come to mind.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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8 comments

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