Slashdot Mirror
Penny Arcade Holiday Strip Series #1
While normally we don't do this sort of thing, recent charity work with Child's Play has substantially increased
the bandwidth demands over at Penny Arcade. To assist Gabe & Tycho, and keep their site running slightly faster than a snails-pace, we're co-hosting their seasonal holiday strip series "The Last Christmas". The cover and the first page are attached to this story (future pages in coming days), so read on and enjoy until we hit our bandwidth limits! (Warning: Comic may contain Cthulhu)
I'd buy it for my kids.
I'm a little confused. We read this one page at a time? When does the next page come?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ah, how nice of slashdot to host the cover AND the first page.
thisnukes4u.net
Its slooooooooooow as hell even when hosted on /. ...
I guess its why Slashdot don't offer to mirror sites they're going to link to on the mainpage.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
The article is going a little slow, so heres the text:
a dept.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday December 17, @18:31
from the tis-the-season-to-writhe-and-scream-fa-la-la-la-l
While normally we don't do this sort of thing, recent charity work with Child's Play has substantially increased the bandwidth over at Penny Arcade. So to help Gabe & Tycho keep the site running slightly faster than snails-pace, we're helping host their seasonal holiday strip series "The Last Christmas". The cover and the first page are attached to this story, so read on and enjoy until we hit our bandwidth limits! (Warning: Comic may contain Cthulhu)
liqbase
PVP is a much better strip. Game industry insider jokes get tired VERY fast.
So Slashdot will host penny-arcade's strip because of bandwidth concerns, but they won't mirror the websites they hammer into the ground?
Could this be the first?
Umm... Judging by the time this has taken to load...
Did we manage to Slashdot Slashdot?
Freaky!
I think you are confusing Cthulhu with a giant squid.
Is it possible for Slashdot to Slashdot itself into oblivion?
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
I think the editors mean that the work with Child's Play has increased the bandwidth DEMAND on PA. I doubt they're using the proceeds of CP to enhance their own website.
It doesn't sound like they're paying for bandwidth with it, it sounds like they drive is causing more bandwidth USAGE that they can't afford.
"Their bandwidth" also includes the bandwidth to host the Childs Play website, not just pageviews of their own site. Both sites have been borderline slashdotted every day since the Childs Play drive started this year.
Penny Arcade seems to be down ATM. Could this be because of /. readers seeing the headline and running to it?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
I think you're misinterpreting it. I think bandwidth was used to refer not to page views * ad dollars (profit!), but to GB/month * numerous charitable gamers (loss!). Considering there's no advertising on the Child's Play part of their site, I think the intent was to offload some of the hosting cost onto Slashdot. Whether that'll have the desired effect (i.e. actually keep people from going to the site for these comics) I sincerely doubt.
A little quick on the draw I see?
Or maybe you hit your limits already? ;)
What do we call it when /. actually tries to help alleviate bandwidth shortage?
todhsalsing?
I don't think many people will take it the way you suggest. For those not in the know, penny arcade holds a season long charity called "child's play" that asks for donations for children's hospitals. This is the second year running for it. Child's play has been receiving much more media attention this year, thus driving up the bandwidth needed by the site.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It doesn't sound like they're paying for bandwidth with it, it sounds like they drive is causing more bandwidth USAGE that they can't afford.
Yes, that's my point, the way the editors phrased it conveys the exact opposite of what they meant to. Like I said, I don't think PA did anything wrong, I just think the slashdot crew, if they're going to call themselves "editors", should put some actual editorial effort into their work. When you get paid a nice salary to maybe write a few lines a day, at least do a good job.
Thank God /. gave another plug to Child's Play. It's a great cause and if you forgot about it after the initial ./ announcement, get out there and buy a gift or two for some sick kids who could really use the cheer.
Time's getting short!
Blaze a trail to the New World
Here's the Coral cache of this /. page.
(WTF??? Some kind of mobius hyperlink!)
Got bandwidth troubles? Well we're here to help by linking your site to the front page of /. three times a week.
Sheesh. Noone reads the summary and knows the strip is here, they just go clickity-click.
On a related note, where's suprnova.org? All I get from them is a blank page.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
PA is down or having difficulties at least and the images won't display here either.
for me. Just two nice red X's.
Has Slashdot Slashdotted itself? Is this even possible?
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
I think they meant it this way:
recent charity work with Child's Play has substantially increased the bandwidth usage over at Penny Aracade.
It makes perfect sense, once you add in the 'usage' word into the mix. Penny Arcade is getting many more hits than usual because of their chairty work. So slashdot is being charitable in return. Tis the season to be sharing (bandwidth)!
Taco just made an A Href= and pointed it to Penny Arcade's site ? Perhaps we should school him on the finer points of web traffic.
The power of Cthulhu compels you! The power of Cthulhu compels you! The power of Cthulhu compels you! (you get the idea, or at least, you will.... mwhahahahaha)
Got Sanity?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Slashdot is slowly eating itself tail first. This is the end of times, the internet cannot be far behind! I'm going to go grab my wind up radio and get a shotgun.
/.2K
Its
And you've been around long enough to know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your post pointing out that the news article was easily confused was actually more confusing that the original source of confusion, as evidenced by multiple responses along the lines of my post. However, as expected, my post pointing out the irony in the confusing nature of your confusion-oriented post, is more confusing that the sum total of confusion in this branch of discussion altogether.
Given how incredibly slow the images are loading, it just feels right somehow, knowing that slashdot just slashdotted itself. Over a penny-arcade comic about Cthulhu, no less.
Does this mean slashdot will think twice about some of their more idiotic links, like direct links to webservers running on a C-64 or Dreamcast? Will they give warning to smaller websites run by poor hobbyists who have to pay for their own bandwidth... nah, who am I kidding?
enjoy until we hit our bandwidth limits!
I didn't get to enjoy for very long. stick to text.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
Hey! Where's Harvey? :)_
I think you're misinterpreting it.
No, they just don't have very good writing skills. If a friend tells you "I have a lot of bandwidth" you're not going to assume that he means "I receive a lot of internet traffic", are you?
What are you talking about? /. in all its infinite wisdom and spelling mistakes has decided to help them out.
The fact that Childs Play is hosted on the same server (or behind the same network), is causing more traffic than they are used to, so rather than having both charity customers and PA customers hammering the server
I don't know how you could even see something vaguely seedy in the comment?
You're reading it wrong (thought it was written slightly incorrectly -- it should probably say substantially increased the bandwidth utiliziation). If PA's actual bandwidth had increased, there'd be no need for /. to host the images.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"While normally we don't do this sort of thing, this kid Billy is going to help host their seasonal holiday strip series on his 56.6K modem (Warning: Comic may contain Cthulhu)"
D'oh...bandwidth, gotcha.
Well it's friday, my brain is already shutting down for protection from the alcohol flood.
You got modded off topic for mentioning Cthulthu in a story not only about a Cthulthu comic, but containing a picture of Cthulthu on the same page. My hat goes off to you, sir.
Wouldn't it make sence to have the images posted here be the same size, what happens if I want to print out all the images when it's done and put the book together, the cover is far too large for that.
Golden book, eat your heart out.
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
Elwood P Dowd was the grand parent poster!
Even if he sounded mean-spirited compared to the way portrayed by Jimmy Stewart. (Harvey the movie about the 6' high Poca)
In Soviet Russia you Slashdot Slashdot!!
USE CORAL!
g
I mean honestly. Coral is precicesly what this situation was designed for. Penny-Arcade could significantly reduce their bandwidth usage by coralizing the comics. Heck, even Slashdot could get a major speedup on their hosting these christmas pages by using Coral for the links.
Here are the coralized versions of the Slashdot-hosted images... If a few people request them they should get cached and will load like greased lightning:
http://66.35.250.242.nyud.net:8090/cover_book.jpg
http://66.35.250.242.nyud.net:8090/page_1_book.jp
PVP is pretty dull 95% of the time so I can't read it regularly.
and the fact that they are hosting the strip on slashdot means PA will have less eyeballs on there advertisers. Also people using that bandwidth that PA PAYs FOR to get information on how to donate to help children
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
The "R" is for "ReallyFastLoad" it a secret feature *shhhhhhhhhh*
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
For 'thing', read 'sell out'.
On which note, I'd like to direct the honourable reader's attention to the various adverts on this site, particularly Microsoft's.
--
Thanks, folks, I'm here for the next five minutes. Please, tip your cow.
Yeah, right.
You got modded off topic for mentioning Cthulthu in a story not only about a Cthulthu comic, but containing a picture of Cthulthu on the same page. My hat goes off to you, sir.
Heh. Just more reason people should meta-moderate. It's really odd how people abuse the system for no known reason. Unless, of course, the moderator doesn't know what "off topic" really means.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It actually loaded faster for me off of the Penny Arcade site than it did off of slashdot.
I guess slashdot got pennyarcaded.
Dammit, I need more sleep, that made sense.
This crutch and vacant stool have become orphans, not unlike the now dead BSD. No longer will BSD hobble about on its cripple's crutch. Like the empty hearth, and the vacant stool, BSD lies cold and still. BSD's corpse, lifeless beneath frozen earth and December snows, will see no more Christmas cheer. No, there will be no Christmas ever again for BSD, for BSD is dead.
Goodbye, BSD. The pain of life forever stilled, sleep for all eternity in that long winter's nap. Fade gently into Earth's frozen bosom where in dreams even cripples walk and blind men see.
cover
page 1
-- Boycott Shell
it has the whole story pronto! enjoy:
http://www.pvponline.com/pvp4/
Page won't load. So everyone have a Terrifying Cthulhumas and an insane New Year!
Go figure.
Shitcock!
I think they can write the strip faster than any of us can load it!
http://www.cthulhulives.org/Solstice/
I listened, then hid.
I think my head just exploded...
Someone host a torrent people. This is an opportunity to show p2p is not just for infringing copyright. Maby torrents should become standard practice for slashdotted articles.
Now we have the secret to getting the almighty (5, Funny): simply repost the article text!
Yeah, right.
You're aware that by linking it here, you're helping the cause, but basically killing the site. :)
Just mentioning.
(It's a good cause btw, so EVERYBODY DONATE SOMETHING!)
- Brett
I'll keep a running, updated copy going at:
http://www.pecknology.net/thelastchristmas/
dep
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Wait, how is that possible? Your post pointing out the irony in the confusing nature of his confusion-oriented post is a part of this branch of discussion, so how could the amount of confusion in your post alone exceed the total amount of confusion in the superset of posts containing it? It's logically impossible!
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
*sniff* *sniff*
Something around here smells like burning plastic and metal...
PA's run afoul of some nasty twit who's locked up the IP rights to their published output, book-wise, a tangle that came from their first book publishing fiasco. It was something that came up during thier /. interview a while back. Damned shame, too...
I've been around since before the loss of the original users. I used to be "CaptEno". This was back when you could send Taco and e-mail and get a response from him within a day no matter what the subject was. I can safely say that they don't usually do this kind of thing. So STFU.
That sounds so familliar to Steve Ballmer.. DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
Why don't more people jump on the Coralize bandwagon? i.e. If they won't mirror, why not "Coralize" the links in the stories?
.nyud.net:8090 to the domain you're after, and presto, automagic load balancing.
Just append
http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/overview/
for more info.
why are nerds obsessed (midly?) with this mytho, I mean I still have my AD&D Dietes and Demigods stashed at my parents house (the original - with Elric of Melnibone), and remeber him from that - but other than that, and him being from a novel I believe (lovecraft?), what's the big deal?
Now the rest of you know how we surf the net. Slow loads and a lot of reloads until everything shows. No diff the most of the sites except for the 503 pages. Seriously though Enjoy the comic and don't forget the kids.
Now where is my Cloak of Invisibility
they wanted me to ask if anyone can think of anything that rhymes with Rl'yeh.
a merry Cthulhu F'taghn to you all.
Alright. So, a couple things happened.
One, the Sony Syndrome "story" is probably over. We're fond of this as an ending place for it, but we your comic masters are mercurial and delight in misdirection. One never really knows. We promise nothing, and you should expect nothing. Nothing!
The second thing is that the Spike event sort of put me off of awards for the time being. Just as a random comment, if your 2004 awards program does not include Metroid Prime 2 or World of Warcraft, it has no authority whatsoever to coronate the king of any genre. I'm not even saying that those games need to win. I'm simply stating that the games exist and are real, news which has not reached them out there on the ragged periphery of taste and intellect. It has been our annual tradition to list the twelve most delicious games of the year here at Penny Arcade, and though the odds of us telling you our favorites are actually quite high doing it the way we've done it for the last few years really sounds awful to me. To both of us, even. So we're not going to do that.
What we are going to do is present a very short children's book concerning a celestial alignment which awakens the doom that lies dead and dreaming in R'lyeh. The first page can be found here. Ia! I'm sure you'll agree that this will be a great deal more fun for everyone involved. It goes until the 27th of December, the Monday after next. This is the cover.
Child's Play: Kiko's Child's Play Shirt is, like his other work, a stunning act of design savvy. He still has a few left in the run, if you'd like to climb aboard. We're coming up on the end of this year's drive, and I have every faith that when we incorporate the gifts from the partner sites last year's high score will be defeated, and we will enter our initials.
Please consider what the games you enjoy could mean to a young person staring down a long-term illness. If you haven't given yet, it's possible you don't know: you're entirely capable of heroism. The barrier to entry is surprisingly low.
(CW)TB out.
mbbac
One page?????
/. asked me to notice.
If you wanted to sustain interest, maybe wait until you have two or even four pages to go begging the attention of millions of slashdot users. Looks like it might have been cool if there was anything of substance by the time
CKY24-Q8QRH-X3KMR-C6BCY-T847Y
Just in case slashdot gets slashdotted, here is google's cache of slashdot
The childsplay.org website has two levels of corporate giving: Unique for +$2000 donations, and Legendary for donating +$1000. While there's a lot of big name, and not so big name gaming companies that have contributed, I notice that Electronic Arts is noticeably absent.
If I wasn't paying my programmers O.T. and had been amassing loads of cash as a result, I think that I would want to give at least a little something back, no?
"We are all Children of Cthulhu -- especially the ones with lots of tentacles."
It's just like "Extreme Programming" -- release early, release often.
And just as with XP, the result is often so minimal as to be absolutely useless except to indicate that yes, some miniscule level of progress is occurring on a week-to-week basis.
For those who don't live for the sheer unmitigated adrenaline rush of reading one new sentence a week, my advice is to wait for the damn thing to be finished.
--
The technical term for getting slashdotted by penny arcade is being 'wanged'.
HTH, HAND
There's an XBox donation. There's a Gas Powered Games donation. In fact, there seems to be donations from most of the MS affiliated or owned gaming companies. Now, given that MS are evil corporate bastards, can someone show me the matching generousity from the kindhearted and loving OSS movement?
And thanks to the AC above for proving the point!
meta-moderate. It's really odd how people abuse the system for no known reason.
If you're not carefull, you can accidently change your moderation choice by pressing down or page down while the moderation selector is still, er, selected. You have to click out of it to navigate with the keyboard. I know I've accidently moderated wrongly that way at least twice. I got meta-whupped for it once (boy was I confused before I remembered this lil' bug).
Then again, I'm convinced that a bunch of trolls have managed to karma-whore their way into some moderation points and are abusing the system.
I wish there were a feedback option when you get meta moderated. Like, "agree" or "disagree" with it, so that when I agree that my moderation was indeed unfair I could say so, and when it's someone with some kind of dogma-metamoderating habit (you know, the people who always metamoderate certain flavours as unfair) I could object.
You can't take the sky from me...
But then someone told him the poor little bastards have suffered enough
Give yourself the perspective of a person who already goes to penny arcade regularly and it suddenly makes sense. This has nothing to do with capturing your interesting, and everything to do with helping them with recent bandwidth problems.
Wow, if there was ever a most retarded and juvenile term for a server being overloaded with hits, that one takes the cake.
hit ALT-F4. Hey I didn't say faster for YOU! Ho Ho Ho.
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
Since people get what they want.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
- meh
- feh
- death
- um...anything with an -eth suffix
I guess I'm not positive how it's pronounced, or for that matter if you're even serious. What the hell, it beat working."You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness." - My first recursive fortune cookie!
Buy plush Cthulhus online.
This link is highly amusing. Tales of the Plush Cthulhu
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
So much for not busting their bandwidth from /.
The cover and the first page are attached to this story (future pages in coming days)
It says right in the summary of the post that the future pages will be coming in a few days. All you had to do was read the tiny ass paragraph. For all of you who bitch about not reading the full article, what about those lazy asses that can't even read the full summary? And they get modded insightful on top of it? What does the parent offer insight to, his laziness and illiteracy?
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
My apologies. The elves are really getting on my nerves this year. They've decided to do grunge Christmas Carols.
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
Sounds like a job fer da Gummint ! Quick ! Somebody pass a law !
Erm, how does this help PA? They make money by people looking at the ads on their site when they some to view the comics. If they stay on Slashdot, doesn't that mean that Gabe and Tycho lose ad views to Slashdot? So, isn't this pretty much hurting PA's bottom line?
Personally, I love the Tabbrowser Preferences Extension.
It adds a lot of options, lot of customizations, etc... everything you mentioned and more.
check it out!
no, you're an idiot
The comic doesn't really do much good to people, other than make them laugh. Child's Play does a lot more good. So they want to off-load comic bandwidth, in order to get their whole site, including Child's Play, to run a bit faster.
Waiting for user with 3 digit UID to post...
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
My emachines is like a tiny God, Chuck. I've got FreeBSD running this thing, with windows on the other partition ready for WoW at 1280x800 with an overclocked Radeon 9600 card, running at 4 times the speed of a TiBook with a 9700 card in it. And I actually have shader effects, so it doesn't look like 1996 up in this bitch. I've got tabs too, Chuck, for free.
I'm going to Europe again this summer with the money I saved. How cool is that Genie effect now?
By the way, this page has an hscroll at 1024x768. While this is a direct consequence of the wider-than-normal article, it messes up the comments. Slashcode would benefit from the ability to deal with this. I suggest sizing the comments seperately from the article.
I don't know what you're talking about. Gabe has a problem with Sony products, and then everyone dies in a car crash. Seems like a perfectly consistent ending to a storyline to me. What were you waiting for, some kind of moral? How about don't get in a car that Tycho is driving.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
So does firefox... its called the bookmark toolbar... right click in the bookmarks toolbar, create new folder. Then drag all your bookmarks in there (drag the url icon into the folder), then click the folder in the nav bar and at the bottom it will say open in tabs. It's all right there, no looking in submenu hell.
Hey, thanks : )
Oh great, now I'm caught in an ethical quandry: To go or not to go to my beloved webcomics with adblock on?
You can't take the sky from me...
1. Ctrl-C
2. Ctrl-V
3. Karma!!!
Tycho's post on Wednesday implied that there would at least be a 3rd episode. Also, I wasn't really convinced that Gabe was dead in the 2nd part of that story, so there was definately more that could've been done there.
Really, I can think of many causes that would be more worthy of donation.
Basically any cause that actually does research into curing the maladies that put kids in the hospitals (and adults) could potentially do much more good than Child's Play.
It's a fun cause, and something gamers can relate to... I just think it's a shame that all this attention is being given to something so transitory as a few toys that will break or be outdated in a few short months.
I've heard it pronounced 'Rule-yay'. It's spelled R'lyeh.
Wikipedia says I was close: R'lyeh (pronounced Roo-lee-ah)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R'lyeh
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
Gabe and Tycho couldn't do a storyline from beginning to end if their lives depended on it. They keep promising this one is the one, but alas, it always turns out to be a cruel lie.
I expect this chtullu thing to run 'till wednesday, and then there will be a random penis joke on friday, as usual.
You can't take the sky from me...