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I thought powering up Sony devices would be save, but you have to make a blood test for DNA clarification first. http://machall.com/view.php?date=2002-08-21

but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

But I unpacked most of them when I got there

To which I respond: "God is the greatest jelly doughnut in existance".

I actually showed that comic to my philosophy prof. He thought I was weird.

It really isn't very fun to get continually pwned by your opponent while you're still trying to figure out how to even hold the controller, much less which buttons do what. And the parent's aggravation will just aggravate the kid. "No, daddy, hit the X button! X BUTTON!" "Uh..." *looks down at the controller* "Which is the X button again?" *splat*

No offense, but... you underestimate adults, and seem to have forgotten your childhood days already too.

1. I've actually tried teaching grandma to play a Sierra empire building game, more for experiment sake than anything else. Bear in mind that she's not just old (as in, she's a great-grandma by now), but had been pretty much a luddite to that point. No computer, no email, no nothing. Closest she's been to doing anything with a computer was when she washed my old 486 and monitor in the bathtub. (Well, they were getting a bit stained by cigarette smoke.)

I'll admit, I wasn't expecting much.

To my surprise, though, she (A) was learning very fast for (what I expected about) her age, and (B) she was actually having fun. Sure, she did need a bit of coaching, but not half as much as you'd expect. She did seem to have a recurring problem with the left and right mouse buttons, though, so I guess Apple has a point. Still, we're talking about someone who, until an hour before, had never even touched a mouse. Ever.

Even console controllers aren't much harder to learn. I gave my parents an N64 and a Playstation when they were well in their 50's, and they took to them like a duck to water. Next thing I knew, they were only talking about Mario 64 for the next two months straight.

Plus, just a few months later dad handed both me and my brother our arses to us in Dead Or Alive. Not much to complain about the old man's use of controller buttons. And he seems to aim very well with a lightgun too in gun games.

2. Getting embarassed by your parents only comes _much_ later. Until puberty hits, kids are still wired in the standard cub mode of all mammals. Meaning that being near mommy and daddy and getting attention from them counts as good times by itself. Trust me, at that age, you won't mind it that horribly much if daddy is doing less than flawlessly.

3. Not all games are competitive, so you might not need to give the kid a challenge. There are a ton of cooperative games, and in fact I'd even recommend going the coop route instead of the cut-throat competitive ones.

In a lot of them, well, basically you've lost nothing by having an extra character with you, no matter how bad they play. E.g., try making a character and tagging along in NWN2. The game doesn't give any extra enemies or anything for it, so even if you're just arrow bait, you've still contributed something. E.g., in COH a force-field defender can turn someone else into almost god mode by just hanging around and remembering to re-cast the buffs occasionally. You don't even need to attack or anything.

4. About split screen... well, console games did often have that problem, but PC's have network play. And most consoles are going that route too nowadays.

5. _If_ your kid is that focused on what you're doing wrong... well, it _could_ be that you've given him a bad example. I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case, but you might want to at least re-evaluate the past approaches just in case.

Thing is, focusing on what someone did wrong and never on what they did right, is just a way to turn them into a neurotic and/or someone who never tries anything for fear of getting berated again.

I've actually had the mis-fortune of growing up with this kind of feedback on almost anything I ever did, and I can tell you first hand that the results are _exactly_ those stated in the comic. I still have to roll for will power to even chuck the laundry into the washing machine. There's a circuit somewhere in the back of my brain that goes "ya know, mom wouldn

I'm not sure, but it might be because schools suck.

Or, put a different way: Childish Things :)

The only dregs-of-the-internet style post I've ever seen modded up.

(I admit it, I laughed out loud.)

I believe this internet-joke all started with this and curiously taken to extremes by this.

ObMacHall:

http://machall.com/index.php?strip_id=327

lol yes: http://www.machall.com/index.php?strip_id=336

This particular bit of behavioral psychology has been covered by MacHall.

You know, that sounds like just what pushed me towards programming.

For whatever other qualities my parents had, and much as they did give me some good education too, they had two problems:

1. Between them and grandma, I had exactly zero privacy.

It may sound like "wtf, he'll have privacy when he's on his own, not in _my_ house", but seriously, please don't do that to your kid. Even the most affectionate cat needs its moments when it's alone.

It's not even just that _they_ were with me all the time (I couldn't even just go to a freaking summer camp, one of them had to come there to keep keeping an eye on me), the worst was that they told everyone every single detail I ever did. It's a freaking nightmare to live with your whole life posted on a public billboard, so to speak. Virtually _noone_ is _that_ extroverted. It gives everyone in town control over your life: e.g., you can't tell your friends "sorry, can't come now, I haven't finished homework" when you know they already know, or will find out, exactly at which hour you were already done with your homework. Or not without quickly losing every single friend you ever had.

Or to give an example that's still traumatic to think about, I had a girlfriend at some point in high school (yes, I wasn't that nerdy) which pretty quickly got addicted to my computer. Well, fairy 'nuff, I'm not even opposed to sharing the computer, but let's at least try to do something else too. So I pull a "let's go out today, mom doesn't let me use the computer today." (Right, I'm losing all nerd credibility here;) Mom actually called her to tell her that's not true. That was one relationship that went down hill very fast thereafter.

2. Their approach to "rewarding" any personal initiative was, well, best illustrated by Mac Hall Comics. (It's just a comic and safe for work.) Just about everything I did was most likely to be met with, literally, "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do that?" or "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" It was as good as a slap in the face, let me tell you.

You get the idea.

Thing is, programming was something that side-stepped both issues and put _me_ in control. Finally. Bloody finally.

Now they're both programmers and perfectly capable of understanding what I did there, but:

A) Anyone they _could_ tell stuff like "our little Moraelin used a goto instead of a loop today" (and have any hope they'd understand that) was usually way outside the circle of people I was in. Which was as good as having some privacy for a change.

B) They were actually pretty easy to satisfy in that domain. I suppose that when a kid writes machine code and it works, it's pretty hard to pull a "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" (And I really mean machine code: the 1K RAM in a ZX-81 wasn't enough for an assembler, so I had to convert it to hex by hand.) If nothing else, it works.

Ian McConville, the artist of the webcomic Mac Hall recently started working for Three Rings, the company who made these games.

And if you want to see Maxwell's Demon, You can do so here:

http://www.machall.com/index.php?strip_id=346

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned User Friendly. Also on my list are Queen of Wands (which finished its several-year run, and is now doing a rapid-fire rerun with commentary), Something Positive, Applegeeks (which just finished an uncharacteristic Batman parody and is now resuming its normal staples of inappropriate behavior and Ramadan jokes), and Mac Hall (unrelated, at least in name, to Apple Macs). For the grad students among us, may I recommend Piled Higher and Deeper; more so for those who are considering grad school.

Less traditionally, we also have Lore Brand Comics, which is pretty much standup in webcomic form. Alas, it hasn't been updated in months, but the archive is certainly worth looking through. Paradox Lost appears to be a comic book being written in webcomic form.

Other people mentioned them, but I have to say some of my favorites are Real Life and MegaTokyo.

First, you should link to PA's comic directly, or your commentary on the strip won't make sense in a couple days. Second, black and white is not necessarily bad (Megatokyo is mostly in black and white). The problem with Userfriendly's art is not so much that it's not in color as that it's drawn with all of the skill of a three year old child. If the story was good or the humor funny, it could make up for the bad artwork. Sadly, neither of those are the case.

For the record, I just pulled a couple comics at random. As has already been mentioned, Diesel Sweeties is also good, as well as many others (ctrl+alt+del, Mac Hall when they update, Angst Technology, etc). All of these are better than UF, in story, art, and humor. If UF could pull even one of those out of its rear, it might be worth browsing once a month or so. Until then it's nothing more than a reason to laugh at people that think it's good.

babies are free!

MacHall suggests a good book for attracting smart women :)

MacHall suggests a good book for attracting smart women :)

You seem to think everyone's favorite comic is PA.... which it's certainly not. I feel they've gotten lazier with their jokes (relying more on cliches and overdone punchlines) since they started making those pretty backgrounds. Sure they do funny strips sometimes, but only occasionally do I actually laugh at PA anymore.

IMO, the funniest strip today is Real Life, while artistically, I'd have to go for the likes of Mac Hall or Applegeeks.

I think it was the fear that characters were going a little funny being in the game for 24/7, as beautifully illustrated by a recent MacHall strip.

Every time I see that acronym, I keep thinking of this cartoon. Having never used VoIP (as far as I know), I prefer the second usage of the term :)

It looks like ... Don't want to give away the punchline.

There are reasons why Ultima Online isn't the #1 MMORPG. Those reasons are starting to apply to the current champ.

In other words, don't waste your time on EQ 1. Hop into some current open beta instead.

I read MegaTokyo, but some people might not think that counts...

On MacHall It's spans over about three strips, so make sure you view all of them. The cd player prods him and asks him analyzes his DNA.

If you want to compare it that way then you can do the same against other countries eg:

The british pound is worth more than the US dollar so getting a wage in pounds is worth so much more ... bla, bla, bla.

If the end WHO CARES? There are only two times most people care about the exchange rate:
1. When you buy something from another country.
2. When you go overseas.

You could also talk about how the Japanese get paid alot more than most people but that doesn't take into considertion the cost of living and lifestyle. Don't understand?

Mac Hall explains this one quite well:
Servay Says

Basically if you get paid less but can buy more and have a better lifestyle then who cares?

even white boys gotta shout...

So, which position is yours?

Megatokyo.com Machall.com

lest we forget how to use the <A> tag:

megatokyo.com
machall.com

and even /. sigs accept HTML:
www.ranttv.com - Educate yourself here. www.gp.org/platform.html - Read their platform here

Word on the street is that the expansions and mods won't be available on the Mac. It's nice that they're releasing it on OS X, but it would be much nicer if you could mod it.

Quidditch (which is a horrible game anyway)

You're obviously not playing it right. Watch out for hazards, though.

Kierthos

Quidditch (which is a horrible game anyway)

You're obviously not playing it right. Watch out for hazards, though.

Kierthos

MacHall

IIRC, it shows Micah (one of the characters in the comic) playing EQ, and his girlfriend Hellen coming up behind him, trying to coax him to "get some sleep." He declines, and she tries again in something "a bit more comfortable," and he turns her down again, and eventually she just gives up.

Methanol: Fuels some cars.
Caffeinol: Fuels IT personnel haunted by their decision to pursue the most mind-numbing profession on Earth.

When i wake up in the morning, I crack open the daily newspapaper and.... wait that's not true. Lets start again. When I wake up in the morning I turn on my computer, and check out... webcomics.

Angst Technology, Ctrl Alt Del, Dilbert, Errant Story, Force Monkeys, Fox Trot, goats, Life of Riley, Mac Hall, Megatokyo, Misfire, Penny Arcade!, Sinfest, Something Positive, and finally Wendy.

Then, after my daily webcomic barage (not to say that these all update on a daily basis. Some are good [ like ctrl alt del, and penny arcade ] and update regularly. others... well...) I frequent other sites, for information.

Slashdot of course (not linking it...)
Gamespot
Games workshop,
and
Unconventional Conformity.

Other than that, I have a few sites i goto every so often. Or ones which i check throughout the day. But they become less important than the comics.
-Gharbad

• Machall - best..webcomic...ever (updates: "tues, thurs, sat" but more like when he gets around to it)
• Penny Arcade - a very popular, and very funny gaming comic (M W F)
• Megatokyo - a well drawn comic with a strong story mangaish (M W F)
• Ctrl-Alt-Del - cut and paste, but always funny (Daily)
• Something Positive - kinda cut and paste, but often very funny (daily)
• Real Life - cut and paste, but still a pretty funny gaming comic (mostly daily)
• Calvin and Hobbes - rereleasing C+H online, 10 years delayed...my personal fav (daily)
• Errant Story - a well drawn, story based modernish fantasy comic (updates every other day or so)
• Angst Technology - a game software firm and their antics (updates almost daily)

• (as if you need the link)Slashdot
• CBC News Canadian news from the CBC
• Debian Planet good debian news
• Footnotes GNOME news
• Ars Technica another tech site, often has interesting projects too...
• Anime News Network exactly what the name implies.
• Unconventional Conformity a blog.
• The Weather Network - for my local weather
• 
  
  And well, thats about it. That I check frequently at least. I do like webcomics and strongly suggest that you check out Machall Megatokyo and Errant Story if you don't already though! And then there's also everything2 but its not news and I can't check it daily (or else I would do nothing all day but read!) its too good at just drawing you in. And the anime turnpike to go browsing through Anime fansites...

I am reminded of Mac Hall

This reminds me of the MacHall and Digimon porn debacle...

Give us our damn money or we send this guy after you!

It seems that prices are copyrighted. It's just a matter of time before someone like Walmart sues anyone whose prices end in .99.
An explanation of this .sig is beyond the scope of this text.

Kinda reminds me of... these Mac Hall strips:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Kinda reminds me of... these Mac Hall strips:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Kinda reminds me of... these Mac Hall strips:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

An important question was asked here... It's in the 4th panel, you'll understand when you see it.

Now, the fictional Shawn Fanning refused to answer the question, would you care to take a shot at it?

BTW, the second strip is out.

I was wondering what this might be refering to. I guess this may be it.

Series is quite strong a word for one single strip, but more power to you for pimping Mac Hall, it really does rule. :P

Series is quite strong a word for one single strip, but more power to you for pimping Mac Hall, it really does rule. :P

Series is quite strong a word for one single strip, but more power to you for pimping Mac Hall, it really does rule. :P

Series is quite strong a word for one single strip, but more power to you for pimping Mac Hall, it really does rule. :P

The excellent comic strip, Mac Hall, started a series of comics about this complete bullshit on monday. And I was just about to buy a new discman too..... What brands are "safe" to buy?

Today's MacHall