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Penny Arcade Makes Time 100
Precision noticed that Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade fame have made the Time 100. The writeup talks about Child's Play and PAX and lavishes deserved adoration upon the pair. I've always envied their ability to maintain control over their brand and use it for appropriately portioned good and evil ;)
I'm a big fan of the brand and PAX, but I really have a hard time finding anything enjoyable about their writing.
Perhaps 1 out of 10 comics are interesting and most often the writing drones on like I'm reading Moby Dick
"I scrolled up and down my Steam library yesterday, listlessly, without so much as a remembered thrill; all I wanted to do was play Blur for some reason, something I hadn't picked up in weeks but whose thirsting fronds were reaching up through some mental fissure. After a few rounds to loosen up, quite organically I found myself in a Party discussing the events of the day. The conviviality and natural flow of the conversation began to disintegrate as the race progressed, slowing and then ceasing altogether, like the dwindling reports from a bag of microwave popcorn."
They are arguably among the most influential people in an industry bigger than Hollywood...I'd say they deserve a place on the list.
Not bad for two nerdy dweebs who probably got swirlied in middle school.
Living With a Nerd
Kudos to them, but sadly this was a popularity contest where the likes of Justin Bieber and such were receiving votes.
I'd rather a wide-range, rational panel try to offer their opinions rather than open up a massive internet vote.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I was impressed until I read the rest of the list, particularly this love letter to Glenn Beck........ written by none other than Sarah Palin herself.
Really, Time? Sure, he's pretty influential, and a demagogue to be certain. But casting him as an intellectual and a history buff? Have they ever even watched his program?
Jon Stewart had a great point last week: The Daily Show is as absurd and farcical as it's been since Day 1. However, the "real news" media are slowly inching their way toward the realm of absurdist comedy and entertainment.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
You can only write off what you actually donate. So unless they're donating enough to make their net income zero, they're paying taxes on their advertising income.
The vast majority of money for Child's Play comes from donations, donations that go completely into the charity, and are completely unnecessary for your It's Just A Tax Shelter theory.
They've raised literally millions of dollars for sick kids to have games to play in the hospital.
You're full of shit and an asshole to boot for trying to tear down something as great as Child's Play.
The enemies of Democracy are
I like to read PA from time to time. I could do without the sophomoric language that seems to be thrown in simply to 'identify with the youth', but sometimes I really find the comic funny. But the Child Play charity is primarily just a tax shelter for PA. They make a lot on money on advertising and PAX, and use CP to avoid (or at least defer) paying taxes on it. Not that that's anything unusual for a corporation, but I hate when companies portray their 'charitable giving' as some grand altruistic philanthropy, when it's just a way for them to dodge taxes.
If the laws that allowed this type of behavior went away, so would the giving.
You do not understand tax laws as well as you think you do if you believe the primary motivation for charitable contributions is to dodge taxes. It's a secondary motivation. You don't come out ahead.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Wow. It's hard to find the words. Yeah, there are reasons to be cynical about corporate charities, like how tobacco company Philip Morris spent tons more on advertising about how charitable it was than on actual charity...
But dude, you can't let that cynicism blind you to real charity. I don't think you have any idea how hard volunteers for Child's Play work every year. In the first year before they had any real logistics in place, a whole team of local volunteers worked night and day to physically process, store, load, move, and unload tons of toys for Seattle Children's Hospital. Even though now the toys go to hospitals directly, volunteers still help with the charity dinner, with various fund raising events around the country, with community efforts at PAX like the Cookie Brigade, etc.
Unless you have more evidence than a mere assumption, it is callous and insulting to all those volunteers to paint their hard work as nothing more than a 'tax dodge'. While I don't work for PA Inc, I know a lot of people who do, and I have heard nothing, not even a rumor, of any funds from PA revenues being somehow 'laundered' through CPC.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
You're right! Your "I don't think anybody finds it funny" argument is flawless. Now I realize that I only found their comics funny because I thought that, somewhere, SOMEBODY else thought they were funny. Eager to fit in, I quickly forced and tricked myself into enjoying it. THANK YOU for showing me the light.
I mean, why would I ever find awkward phrases like "Do you have snakes that come in sometimes? Don't stand for that shit!" hilarious?
All webcomics, hell all COMEDY is hit and miss. I cannot say that because one thing a person does is funny, everything else that that person does must necessarily be funny or else the first thing becomes unfunny. I find Penny-Arcade to be more often funny than not... so I like it. You might disagree.
Here are we have popular geeks who make a living making little pictures and writing little stories for. Everyone loves them. They are witty and funny and frequently have sex with actual women and are everything you are not. Do you know there's a guy who has a whole boring ass blog about how xkcd isn't funny? Nobody reads it, because we all think xkcd IS funny. Penny arcade IS funny. You and the other haters are either too stupid to find the humor, or too jealous to admit it. Once you have achieved something in your life, I doubt you will feel the need to put other achievers down. Maybe you should try, you know, doing something, rather than bitching about the people who do.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If the laws that allowed this type of behavior went away, so would the giving.
Yeah! It sucks that people get rewarded for helping people. If there were any justice in this world, we would severely punish charities. Only then could we be sure that the people were truly selfless.
OH NOES! TEH SWEARS!
I have never, and will never, understand this mindset. They're just words. Words are giving power and meaning only by the reader. To me, they're not a big deal, if anything they indicate that the authors are being honest and not filtering themselves just to fit in some moralist 'acceptable' box.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Oh great. So now you've gone from accusing them of using CP to dodge taxes on their advertising revenue to accusing them of laundering charitable donations into their own pockets.
Do you have any evidence for any of this? Do you have any proof that the two of them are paying themselves wages as CP's "administrators"? Do you have any proof that they have extracted "expenses" from the pool of donations that were not actually expenses of the Child's Play charity, but rather expenses of Penny Arcade or simply profit-taking?
Because that all would have to be spelled out on their tax returns, and if those "expenses" weren't really expenses then they can't be claimed and the IRS would be on them like flies on shit. So you're not just accusing them of cynically taking advantage of the tax code, you're actually accusing them of being tax cheats. The law is very specific on what can actually be counted as charity and what can't.
You're a real piece of work, you know that? People are out there making a real difference in children's lives, and all you have is baseless accusations founded on cynicism. Cynicism for its own sake is wrong and stupid. And it also doesn't help anyone, unlike Child's Play.
The enemies of Democracy are
As I have noted from your other armchair legal opinions, you do not understand the law. You do not know anything about Penny Arcade's corporate structure or how they pay their bills or Child's Play's bills. You are accusing a charitable organization of fraud without any basis in reality. Here is a quick sample from the FAQ on their website: Q. Does Child's Play charge administrative fees? A. We try our best to have every dollar that comes in go right back to the hospitals, but there is a slight administrative cost that does get paid for with donations (for example, shipping $200,000 worth of Nintendo DS' to dozens of hospitals worldwide is not free, sadly). Historically, these charges have not exceeded 2-3%. It's true that we're a non-profit, but unlike most non-profits, we're not in it to create a self-sustainable entity. We do it to give. Again, I ask you to please stop polluting the internet with misinformation. These people are doing good work to make the lives of sick children better. By defaming them you are taking trolling to a whole new level.
You've apparently missed all the heartfelt and often tearful thank-yous they get from parents with their kids in the hospital. I was in the room only a few yards away from the woman who broke down crying during PAX East thanking them for doing Child's Play because such things meant so much to her. It's on the episode of their reality show for PAX East that came out recently if you want to see it for yourself. Child's Play does make a real difference in people's lives and that shouldn't be discounted.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
If they wanted to help they would give food, clothing, shelter, or just money. Giving a shiny Nintendo DS to a kid with a three pound tumor in his abdomen, while his parents are slowing bankrupted by medical bills, does nothing...other than sooth the conscience of the giver.
This is quite simply not true. My oldest son was on treatment for leukemia for 3 years and 2 months, so I have spent quite a lot of time in the children's oncology clinic. The clinic we went to does not receive games from Child Play, but from other sources. The kids in the clinic love the games and they make it a lot easier to be stuck in a chair doing a six hour infusion. Yes, it's true, some of these kids need clothing or shelter, and a distressing number of the parents face bankruptcy. That doesn't make the games a conscience-soothing gift. They actually deliver a lot of value for the majority of kids stuck at the clinic.
Oh you mean PrincessRedDot (PRD) and maybe one or two others that in fact only make a living wage? I think you radically overestimate the financial scope of CPC's diabolical, faceless administration. You don't know anything other than your wild, baseless assumptions about CPC and its people. Whereas I have met and talked with PRD several times over many years. I have myself volunteered my time and with the help of my wife raised thousands for CPC through community events.
You want every charity to be run like a monastery that's your prerogative, but to act like CPC is some cabal of evil tax-dodging millionaire fat cats feeding off of an army of deluded rubes is so intellectually dishonest as to be disgusting and absurd. That is why your original post is rightly modded into oblivion.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I find about 70% of the xkcd I run into funny.
XKCD can be funny a lot of times, but I also find it frequently unbearably smug. Not old school nerd, more like the newer trendy hipster nerd thing that cropped up in the past few years.
Alright, I've lost it. As parent of a child who has benefited from Seattle Children's Hospital's care more than once, let me say you must truly be the most bitter, irredeemable, self-righteous, scum-sucking, ignorant, foolish, truculent, and repugnant bastards I have ever had the misfortune of wasting my time reading. If you can't understand the value of bringing a small amount of fun engagement into the lives of children who may very well die slowly in the most agonizing pain imaginable, then you yourself are worthless, inhumane excuse of a being.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
You can also write off the income of anyone designated at 'administrators' of the charitable organization.
Before today I was completely unaware of Child's Play, so I visited Guidestar to have a look at actual numbers. This information is from their 2007 form 990 (the latest I found at Guidestar and the one that probably looks worst for expenses). It fully discloses Penny Arcade's affiliation (gee, the IRS cares about people trying to wash salaries and actually checks this sort of thing).
I have questions as a result of that (very quick and limited) review, but none in the area of trying to wash salaries. I'm curious about where the Project Manager expense actually goes. I'm curious about the disaster of an auction - why they did it, what they learned, whether they plan to try again. I fail to see evidence of the sort of fraud you are claiming.
Corporations get into charity for multiple reasons: good public relations, donating to related interests, belief in the cause. That doesn't make promoting or giving to a charity a fundamentally bad thing. Unless you have evidence to back up your claims, the evidence I've seen suggests they are unfounded.
And why doesn't everyone here pretend to like Twilight? It's genre fiction and insanely popular. Maybe the Slashdot crowd likes XKCD because it is great, and they hate Twilight because it is crap.
maybe twihards like twilight because it's great and they hate xkcd because it's crap?
or perhaps it's just because different people enjoy different things? nah, couldn't be that.
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