In staunch opposition to all that is good and just, we were given yet another opportunity to instruct Mrs. Eriksen's class in the cartoonin' ways. You might recall the last time we did such a thing. It was an experience that quite endured, and I wondered if my second "dose" would retain that invigorating payload. It turns out that every time you help children it is basically awesome.

It's easy for us, though. We aren't crammed into that miserable, almost criminal hovel Mrs. Eriksen and her brave compatriots are. They used to have a soda machine in the teacher's lounge, but the power drain from this device was so intense that actually choosing a pop dimmed the lights, as though they were teaching out of some Soviet bunker.  It is not for us to bridle young men or confiscate private correspondence. No, in this scenario we represent the cool uncles. Zero responsibility, the "reasonable" entity they can contrast with those whose task it is to make them into excellent people.

In short: we are amusement personified.

We have hard data that suggests this demographic is not unfond of monkeys, a fact we have exploited now two years running. Peruse this example strip we offered, and know that it struck unerringly:

Frame 1:

Bob: Would you like to see my hat?

Frank: Oh, yes. I love hats!

Frame 2:

Frank: That is not a hat. It is a monkey!!!

Frame 3:

Bob (close-up): This is the last time I go hat shopping at the zoo!

We had template strips available (like the ones in Andrew Vestal's classic project), but it's extremely rare for grade school age children to constrain the possibilities of that space. Often they will use their panels to recreate, word for word, the strip we have made. This isn't really that weird: emulation is the first step to establishing your own creative tools. Think of it as a kind of calibration method. Where the result is known, the process can be refined. Some of them had leapt to the next stage, which we may call variation, where people had different kinds of animals on their heads or the dialogue was altered. One young man had chosen a cat instead of a monkey, because cat rhymes with hat: a statement of unassailable truth. Still others had graduated to synthesis, taking different parts of what we had done, combining it with other things they already knew about. One strip featured a "half-dragon, half shark" with the ability to produce "hot water." He was squared off against "The evil monkey from Crisis Room."

The tiny, almost illegible subtitle to this second panel read "wow is he evil."

(CW)TB out.

in some flip universe

Real quick I wanted to apologize for the way the site has been acting lately. I appreciate the mail you guys have been sending me and trust me when I say people are working on it as I type this. I think Tycho mentioned a while ago that we had to invest in a bunch of new hardware. When it comes to computer stuff I’m hardly an expert. I use mine to play WOW and draw. I can tell you what I was told though. We actually purchased five brand new servers and last week they were integrated into our cluster. That made things sort of wonky for a few days and when I suggested they reverse the polarity of the main deflector dish and flash wipe all our DNS proxys they said I was not helping. I know it seems like we have a lot of trouble with the site and your right. I know having a fuck ton of readers is no excuse but we do go through about 400 gigs of traffic every day. We’re creeping up on 2 million page views a day now and that sort of traffic really beat the shit out of our old equipment. Hopefully once this new gear is in place and all the bugs are worked out you’ll see an improvement in the sites performance. Fingers crossed.

Tycho and I talked about releasing some materials that teachers could download and use in their classes. I think it’s a good idea and as soon as I get some free time I’ll make that a priority. I should be able to get something out this summer that you can use when school starts up again in the fall.

-Gabe out

I am really excited to finally be able to tell you guys about one of the biggest projects we've ever done. Last year the ESRB came to us and asked if we could create a new advertising campaign for them. They'd been to multiple agencies and none of them were able to communicate the message the ESRB was trying to get out. See until now their advertising has been focused on trying to educate adults about the ESRB. That's obviously an important task but they wanted this new message to be directed at gamers, that is to say directed at us. They wanted a campaign that would communicate to gamers why the ESRB is important even if they don't think it directly affects them.

That's not an easy task but we took the job for a couple reasons. Number one Tycho and I are both fathers now. The discussion about the ESRB and its place in the gaming industry is no longer just academic for us. Our kids will be playing games before we know it. Second, we much prefer the ESRB to government regulation and let's all be honest here, that's the alternative.

So when given the opportunity to help the ESRB we jumped at the chance. We spent months creating a series of characters to represent each of the ESRB ratings. Then Tycho sat down and wrote a short narrative that accompanies each one and explains how the ESRB affects their life. Finally Kiko took all the pieces and designed a series of beautiful full page advertisements that you'll be seeing in gaming mags and all over the web very shortly. The ESRB created some teaser images to promote the new campaign at E3. If you were there you might have seen these big banners around with what looked like Penny Arcade artwork on them.

The response we got at E3 was really positive. Obviously some people want to get into an argument about the ESRB's intelligence given some of their recent moves and I can't blame them. I'll be the first to admit it's not a perfect system. It would be impossible for the ESRB to play through every game and see all the content. That would be true even if developers didn't insert hidden sex scenes or release tools that allowed players to modify the game after purchase. I think that as long as they are rating games based on footage put together by the publisher (a publisher who's desperately hungry for a "T" rating because it means more sales) there will always be problems.

Regardless of what they think about the ESRB I've never met anyone who doesn't agree that a rating system is important. No one wants little kids playing games designed for adults. The ESRB isn't perfect but it's all we've got and we as gamers can either bitch about it or try and help.

-Gabe out

If you’re looking for a fun/cheap way to get yourself to PAX this year you might want to consider one of the Supertrips. These are essentially massive geek caravans and this year you’ve got two to choose from. If you are west side for life you can hit up the site for the west coast supertrip. If you’re on the east coast or pretty much anyplace in between you should check out the cross country supertrip. These crazy muther fuckers are actually planning to drive from NYC to Bellevue and back.

-Gabe out