PolkOut.com is drunkenly mashing your number into its phone!

...shut up and like it.

Forum Update: Post in the new forum: www.PolkOut.com/forum.  It's hosted on my server, and if that starts getting laggy in the future I can just pay for more bandwidth.  Any artistic contribution to the forum would be terrific.  You can still check out the old forum, and older pages will still link to it for now, so... uh... do whatever with that intel.

Quick shit for newcomers: Forum (deviant bullshit), Feedback (fan art, comments, critiques), About (check it out and contribute).  Do you have a website of your own you want me to give a shout out to?  Want to do a crazy guest strip?  You can reach me through that email or on the forums. 

Upcoming Fan Art Showcase: Whenever I get a substantial amount of fan art (we've got a few submissions on the forum) I'll dedicate a whole update to fan submissions.  Go nuts, lets see some creativity and experimentation with style.  Guest comic guidelines are in the forum.

Guys, I started tossing up the whole PolkOut.com thing on every comic so you could share them on other websites, forums, emails, etc.  So go nuts!  If you want to toss a link up, maybe in your forum signatures, check out the banners in the Links section.

I spent the last three weeks desperately searching for somewhere awesome to be on New Year's but I couldn't find any cool parties to go to... so I went with my absolute last resort and spent it with my family.  To my surprise though, it ended up being a... well, a fucking awesome evening.  I got completely trashed, naturally, with an old friend of mine who happened to be just as fucking wasted.  There's something to be said about being trashed in familiar company... you're pretty free to just be blissful; there's no pressure to impress anyone, no fear of embarrassing yourself; your little bulb of drunkenness can blossom into a beautiful flower of shitfaceditude.  But of course there are those people you intensely wish you could be with, welcoming in the New Year, and although nothing can ever substitute their real, physical presence, at least we've got phones and computers, so the intoxicated merriment still finds its way around.  I was up until six-thirty in the morning, talking about falling guitar amps, vicious rain gutters, and the enormity of the night sky.  It was easily one of the best New Years I've ever celebrated.

I had a crazy fucking dream last night that I just remembered as I'm typing this now.  I was walking through a supermarket when I tripped.  Fortunately I regained my balance but not before I came really close to this father and son, walking side by side, discussing the latest PolkOut update.  I felt really good about it, that notoriety.  Speaking of dreams and weird things I see when I close my eyes, last week I hallucinated that the futon that I sleep in was half futon, half fat girl.  She was big spoon, pulling me into her soft warm chub.  It felt great!  If ever I come into the possession of an obscene amount of money, I'm going to buy me a whole army of fat people to be my furniture. 

Fat people... (sorry I'm a little out of it because I haven't really slept yet... but I figured, hey, you know, the whole ellipses thing can be a cool train-of-thought kind of transition) last night the Lifetime Movie Network had a fat people marathon.  Queen Sized followed by Fat Like Me followed by Queen Sized again.  LMN has fucking awesome movies... they're just all so consistent with their tone and their themes and their settings that they seem to occupy the same elevated reality.  LMN is like a fanciful dream world...

...I just closed my eyes and took that all in for a second.  I'm amused by the fact that in the last three weeks I've gone from Nickelodeon addict to MTV appreciator to Lifetime movie fan.  In less than half a month I've blossomed from an awkward adolescent girl into an awkward middle-aged woman. 

In case you were wondering, here's my Queen Sized movie review: F.  No, F isn't for FATTY FATTY FAT FAT but I guess it may as well be.  There's this one exchange in the movie that I think really summarizes the narrative's entire spine in one or two succinct lines of dialogue... I can't remember it verbatim, but here's my may-as-well-be-accurate version:

Fatty: I know you're probably asking yourself, "Doesn't she want to lose weight?  Isn't this dangerous?"  I know the health problems I've got in store, I know if I lose this weight I can greatly reduce my risk of becoming a diabetic, people would treat me better, I would be happier... but I can't accept that, you know?  I can't just let them win.

I couldn't follow this film's train of thought at all.  You have a preventable, treatable, medical condition that goes entirely unattended to because of some weird martyrdom delusion?  I know that there are a whole myriad of medical reasons why one could be obese and it not be their fault, but in every other scene she was downing ice cream and Twinkies and cookies and dogshit... goddamn.  Just handcuff her to a fucking radiator and leave the house for a week, PROBLEM SOLVED. 

No offense to my larger readers out there, I'm not trying to hate on you guys, but if you are extremely unhappy with your appearance and at least one doctor hasn't handed you some sort of certifiable diagnosis, do something about it.  To quote Walter, of The Big Lebowski, quoting Lenin, "If you will it, it is no dream."

On that note, here's my review of the new Prince of Persia game:

Pure fucking diarrhea.

Imagine playing Shadow of the Colossus and really loving the hell out of that game.  I know I did, and I could go on a whole rant about what that game did right.  But imagine that you never actually read books or watched a movie with critical cinematic eye or contemplated a work of art... imagine that you approached the game with a very primitive sort of frat boy perspective, "DUURRRRRRR GAME GOOD!"  And now you, trying oh so ineptly to mentally encapsulate just what you loved so much about that game decide to make one of your very own... welcome to Prince of Persia.

The problem with a lot of "innovative" new games is that they begin with a gameplay concept and not an overall artistic one.  Mirror's Edge, Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia; their narratives are built around a fairly shallow little gimmick that's ultimately fairly frivolous.  With Shadow of the Colossus, ICO, Psychonauts, Metal Gear Solid... (you know, good games) the creative teams clearly begin with some broader, overall concept, and the particulars that define the final product are the result of them challenging themselves to convey their various creative ambitions.  Ueda and Kaido, Schafer, Kojima; they have, in their minds, certain images they want you to see, certain sounds they want you to hear, but more importantly, certain emotions they want you to feel.  That's what makes their work innovative. 

Prince of Persia is a complete and utter failure in that it not only fails to convey any sort of real emotion, but it clearly wasn't created with one in mind.  It's soulless and typical.  The characters are shallow, boring, paper thin caricatures; the emotional stakes of their relationship (and thus the final plot twist) are completely unconvincing and undeserved because of their lack of any kind of fundamental humanity.

Wander never utters a single understandable word at any point in Shadow of the Colossus, yet his struggle isn't an alien one.  PoP's protagonist has more dialogue than he knows what to do with and all of it is wasted.  I don't want to make the claim that the creative talent just isn't there because I don't want to cast that sort of judgment upon the individuals who made this game, but passion was certainly absent.  Every phrase uttered by every character served only to fill some intellectual void left by the obligation to have a story.

I wouldn't focus so damn much on the plot of the game if the it didn't present it as something so fundamental to the experience.  Katamari had barely any story, yet it managed to strike all sorts of cords because of its original gameplay style.  PoP's gameplay was such a fucking atrocious effort that it could never come as close to justifying the overall product.  The same five boss fights again and again and again for no justifiable reason; you can't lose either, you can just keep going or win, so there's no real tension.  The platforming was atrocious; whether or not the Prince actually preformed the action you wanted (running up a wall, as opposed to across it, for instance) seemed to be all up to whatever he felt like doing.  The game also assumes that you, the player, are a total idiot who needs to have his hand held through every little fucking step of this adventure; when you need to wall run, the walls will have little scratches, when you need to double jump it'll go momentarily black and white, and so on.  The end result is the player just pressing buttons in time, like a very slow version of DDR.

Why was this game even made?  It brings absolutely nothing to the table.  It's just a waste of time for everyone involved; all those people spending countless hours designing those repetitious levels, writing that trite dialogue, programming the broken fucking gameplay, and, worst of all, those people who put good money down so they could put this piece of garbage into their PS3s and XBOX 360s.

And when I press triangle, BITCH YOU'D BEST USE YOUR GODDAMN MAGIC IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR YOU!  Why bother even having buttons on a fucking controller if you're not going to respond to them?

--End Transmission--

PolkOut Sells Out

The following are ads I've put up on the site to help pay for my advertising budget so I can make this site more popular.  I did not choose these ads, and have decided not to filter their content.  So if they go to smelly monkey doodies, well, all the better.