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1) Best overall web comic series of 2012. (Any web comic that produced content in 2012): Gunnerkrigg Court is a brilliant webcomic that has a compelling plot, interesting characters and art that has developed superbly since the comic's beginnings.

2) Funniest web comic of 2012. (This one represents the single funniest comic of any web comic series.): Evil Inc. got the most laughs out of me this year, even if a lot of the humour was a bit Dad-joke-ish. Runners up would include: Penny Arcade , XKCD , Scandinavia and the World and Overcompensating .

3) Best art in a web comic of 2012. (Web comic from 2012 with the most amazing art ever): Dresden Codak is, without any doubt, the repository of some of the most geekiest and beautiful artwork the web has ever seen. Runners up would include: Namesake , Lackadaisy Cats , Sore Thumbs and Avengelyne

4) Web comic that was most relevant to you in 2012: Real Life , because his adventures with Harper are roughly mirroring my adventures with my daughter Hailey.

Honorable Mentions (because they'd likely win categories if there were a couple more here): Bad Machinery (Best Story), Eerie Cuties (Best Black & White), Three Panel Soul (Best Drama) and Wapsi Square (Best Main Character), and Sinfest (Lifetime Achievement) among others.

Since Mars has essentially no magnetic field,

Well, it didn't have a magnetic field, but since it's mass recently increased 0.03% it now does.

Even Real Life Comics chimed in on the topic in their last two strips after it was announced that Square-Enix would be re-releasing Final Fantasy VII for the PC.

This month's RealLife webcomic story arc is strangely appropriate.

This month's RealLife webcomic story arc is strangely appropriate.

Or this: http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/100709.html

That's about two hours per day, for three years straight.

Obligatory.

Obviously you haven't yet heard about the ridiculously shitty 4.2 system updater nintendo pushed that tends to brick even PRISTINE consoles...

Oh wait. I recognize that name. You're the guy who rants his head off about the utilities people use to replace their icons with something more entertaining.

I use disc backups to keep my system working correctly. Yeah, my experience is anecdotal, but when you see a 60-year-old with a pristine Wii that plays nothing but Wii Play have the drive fail at 1 year, 2 weeks old, you get suspicious of the drive's quality. Am I sure there are people who use them to steal games? Yeah. Am I sure they're jerks? Yeah. Does that mean I want to ban hammers because some assholes will use them to break car windows and steal car stereos rather than just drive nails into wood? No.

Or, maybe someone was trying to hypnotize Norway... http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/091210.html ...or failed trying to blow it up.

Dude,

read Dilbert to get more insight into the Industry then you ever wanted.
Also you may want do have a look at Userfriendly, Hackles and early Reallifecomics.

Maybe all this wisdom can help you picture, where you are going.

For your Internship, be ready to be the *** of the Company.

Do not stop looking for more internship opportunities.

Your browser sucks. http://www.reallifecomics.com/ sets an ETag for every page.

Yes, but "ETags" have their own set of problems. And it's been my observation that if I haven't visited that site for more than a day, it has to reload _every_ _frigging_ page element. I haven't looked further into that, but figured that since there are so many web developers that don't understand caching, Greg was just one of them.

I suppose setting the "Expires" header could be even more cache-friendly

The huge advantage "Expires" has is that it allows the browser not to send any request at all.

1. Real Life Comics sucks, it's the king of "talking head" and "copy-paste" comics. Read better comics. But on to objective matters:

2. Your browser sucks. http://www.reallifecomics.com/ sets an ETag for every page. After loading the page once and reloading, Firebug shows a string of 304 Not Modified responses.

Since the site also supports Keep-Alive stringing along a bunch of "not modified" requests shouldn't be a big deal. Firebug shows a load time of about 200ms for every cached resource. (500ms for the main page which isn't cached, 200ms for everything else.)

I suppose setting the "Expires" header could be even more cache-friendly, but you may want to check your browser's cache settings.

If you take away all copyright then these people might stop producing work. Is this what you truly want?

If you take away all copyright then these people might stop producing work. Is this what you truly want?

Ohhh.... I don't know about that. Greg Dean seems to think otherwise as well as seen by this comic :P

http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/060810.html

Coincidentally, casual gaming is the topic of today's strip at real life comics.

Real Life introduces "Casual Gamers Anonymous".

fu$%ers

Perhaps they've discover this thing called "Real Life".

Ah, yes, Real Life... Great on-line comic.

Sorry, you didn't mean something else, did you?

Real Life is completely compatible with Linux alread.

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.

Everyone seems to have forgotten Steve Troop's Melonpool and Greg Dean's Real Life.

Mousewax has its moments too.

All things considered, I'm glad I got to go the first time, but it really is inefficient to have all the people with no purpose other than to 'experience E3' there.

To whit: Greg Dean goes to E3...Um, Why?

And so, here is my obligatory list of favorite webcomics that weren't mentioned: PhD, Real Life, Applegeeks.

Real Life

http://www.somethingpositive.net/index.html http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ http://www.gpf-comics.com/ http://www.reallifecomics.com/index.php http://www.crfh.net/ http://www.nuklearpower.com/ Random shameless plugs. Read them and enjoy.

Anyone else remember the Real Life storyline in which they went to the future to pick up a game before it was released, and all the major game stores had merged into one, with all the names mashed together?

To add to your list:

http://www.somethingpositive.net/
http://www.reallifecomics.com/
http://www.wapsisquare.com/
http://www.checkerboardnightmare.com/
http://www.scarygoround.com/
http://crap.jinwicked.com/

Interesting art, usually good writing, characters that are more than one-dimensional... something that most print comics are lacking, these days.

On the other hand, I believe having real comic books published online would be a boon for the industry.

They have for quite some time now. They're certainly nothing new (unless by "real" you meant the many rehashed comics from the 1930s.

If DC/Marvel had a decent online presence and started making original comics again, Keenspot and the rest of the webcomic industry would be hard-pressed.

I can see them having an online presence before they start actually make original comics. But even if they did do both, I just can't see them handling the sort of comics I've come to enjoy, so I doubt very much Keenspot would be threatened by them.

Awsome http://www.reallifecomics.com/ [reallife.com] joke xD

Here's Greg's rant. Personally I dropped Google's ads from the one site I had been running them on. They kept getting hung up on calendar ads because in my layout the word calendar appears on every page (as a link to, y'know, a calendar!). If it wasn't calendars it was computer/PHP security stuff because I had a link to, ya know, phpbb. And if it wasn't that it was, get this, the good ol' "free ipod" scams. All of that for a City of Heroes supergroup site. You'd think if these ads were targetted it would be pointing to something comic book related? Maybe? Nope. Pah!

FFXI while most find its boring and tedious after a few months (myself included) has a great deal of depth in the gameplay, as well as the mechanics (though not so much in the story arc.)

This is what pisses me off the most about FFXI. It had SOOOO much potential.

And it was completely wasted.

It could have been a game that was friendly to hardcore and casual alike. It could have added interesting new features to keep the game play fresh. There's so much more that they could have done.

But they didn't, and it seems like "the PS2 can't handle it" is the excuse for just about everything. Then they announce the XBox 360 release and make vague comments about a PS3 port. New features, finally?

Nope. Same game. Same graphics, but with a higher max resolution.

Yay.

So much wasted potential. Square-Enix could have done so much better, but they didn't. (Greg Dean says as much in his news post for this comic, too.)

So much potential, and yet... Nothing.

• Real life
• Phd (perhaps not as funny to non grad students)
• Applegeeks

> 1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.

they did in the privateer remake. some enemy ships shoot just as well as the player does, use the full capabilities of their ships, and fly in this really annoying sort of tight corkscrew that ruins autoleading.

of course, these are wing commander players, so they're masochists who enjoy reflying a mission 20+ times. (kurasawa 2, anyone?)

>6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.

(in short - save points bad. quicksave good.)

this i disagree with. quicksave leads to people playing the game like this: take two steps forward, save, see enemy, restore, take one step forward, ambush enemy, take 2% damage in ensuing fight, restore, take five steps back and launch rockets at enemy's general position.

i watched a friend of mine play through half-life like this - he said it was boring, too tedious, and never challenging. gee, i wonder why.

> points 9-11: immersion, immersion, immersion.

not being able to jump an obstacle - bad. invisible walls - bad. but they're both conventions to aid in two things. a) so you have some fucking clue where to go and b) so the game designers don't have to map every nook and cranny and can concentrate on the parts of the level you're actually supposed to play. as far as heads up displays and such overlays, again, the amount of immersion they break is directly compensated for by the gameplay benefits, as long as they're done well. a giant floating hand telling you where to go? bad. car radar in the 1930s (as in mafia)? good, because it compensates for not having mirrors or a realistic field of view. iff in crosshairs, hell, crosshairs themselves in FPSes (or even disabling the trigger when your gun is aimed at a friendly)
- good, compensating for the expertise and eyesight your character is supposed to have.

> 19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES

agreed. if i wanted jumping puzzles, i'd play mario. or i'd play a third person game that lets me see what the fuck i'm DOING - ie oni, jedi outcast/academy, prince of persia:sands of time...

for more, video game design cliches and video game design flaws [although that has more to do with the classic ones, like being killed by falling off the bottom of the screen to a place you just came from.]

Learn Japanese like in "Real Life".

Of Real Life Comics. I read that daily too along with PVP and Superosity. Personally I was hoping Piro would join in, he'd be first out :)

If you've been paying attention at all to your webcomics, you'd be noticing the number like this one discussing the fact that the boxes ran out weeks ago.

I'm sure Blizzard knows what kind of press they get from PA and have a pretty good idea of their influence on gamers. However, in this case, the decision was made a long time ago and they're just announcing it to the public.

Some of these mods are so fantastic, but the overwhelming dominance of CS, I suspect, destroys many a mod's chances of being recognized as such. Sure, not all need huge communities, but unfortunately some are so sparse it's hard to find other players.

I'm not the only one to have noted this phenomenon.
http://www.reallifecomics.com/daily.php?strip_id=1 201

There's not much that can be done about it, but it's a shame. Even Quake TF at the height of its dominance didn't have the kind of crushing popularity.

Wow... you mean people actually play and enjoy Katamari Damacy? Personally I think Greg Dean said it best...

"I thought my PS2 took a hit of acid or something."

Given the trend and push for low consumption, hence quieter PCs, I'm optimistic that problems like this will be a thing of the past

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.

http://www.reallifecomics.com/ for today (Thursday - September 30, 2004) explains the polical mess that Aust is in atm. this comic really does represent what some of the tv adverts have been like

That sounds a lot like another comic's quote from Real Life

Real Life Comic? You mean this?

Real Life is already a cartoon!

I thought Greg Dean was getting his own TV series.

check out real life comics Real Life - The Online Comic ©2004 Greg Dean specificly designed for firefox.