PolkOut.com is moist!

Moooooiiiiiiiiissssssst.

Forum Update: The forum looks awesome now!  Big thanks to my friend Alex!  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. 

It's not often that I think about a comic and giggle to myself... especially when most readers will think this one was just phoned in...  But then again, I'm one of the few people I know who finds shit like this funny:

...alternative humor, not an alternative to humor, as I guess some of you would argue.

Yeah, I'm hitting that summer slowdown when not interacting with a whole mess of random people starts to wear down on the amount of material I've got to work with... I really should polk out of this for a while... we remember that, right?  The whole polking out thing that I think I might've mentioned once or twice like a year ago... or three.  I'm just... so... lacking in... ideas...

Moist!  It's a word many women seem to hate--random, right?!  On at least three or four occasions, I've had ladies lecture me on how much they dislike the word, but really I don't think it's that bad, not when there's damp to compete with.  Moist is what you are when you piss yourself while wearing a bathing suit... it's kind of unpleasant but... eh, you can deal with it.  Damp's when you piss your pants in the back seat of your parents' car while on some endless drive into the heart of nowheresville to visit some decrepit old relative who'll rustle up your hair with their boney, slightly sticky in a this-should-be-weird-but-seems-fitting sort of way, fingers. 

Having nothing to do, I've been watching tween sitcoms all day... I've got to fill up my yearly quota, what with being in Prague for four months and all, deprived of such glory... so it's been... productive.  I've learned three things from today's TV watching experience:

1. Degrassi is a damn good show. 
It takes the personal struggles of every guest that's ever appeared on the Jerry Springer Show, strains out the unattractive redneck element (displacing it with lovely twenty-something-posing-as-teenage boobage), and presents it in a lovely, racially homogenous (save for that one black guy whose dad seems to be a solid five years older than him), Canadian package.  It's practically an instruction manual on being alive, which makes it one of the most valuable things to ever be on TV ever in the history of things on TV.

2. Disney Channel stars are like creased comic books.
"HOLY SHIT!" you exclaim, clutching a copy of Action Comics #1 that you pulled out of some dusty box at a garage sale you just happened to pass on your way home from the orthodontist.  "Oh..." the corners of your smile sink down towards your chin as your finger glides across a giant crease cutting across Superman's back, dividing the book into two, marginally devalued halves.  Selena Gomez and her forehead, Demi Lovato and her mouth, Miley Cyrus and her face, Billy Ray Cyrus and... his life.  Little flaws that, while not entirely devaluing the things they've been cast upon, remind you of what could have been every time you look upon them.  How so many slightly imperfect looking people could be gathered together on one network is almost mind boggling... like a Rubik's Cube you can jerk off to.

3. Polkster can has TV show?
I was watching an episode of iCarly that featured this bit by this guy named Fred who made internet videos where he talked in a high pitched voice while doing dumb shit, all the while thinking this was just more lame made up bullshit.  As good a show as iCarly is, thanks primarily to Jerry Trainor and that sassy kid who plays Gibby, the actual iCarly segments are total horse shit--just because something's random, doesn't mean it's funny; very few forms of entertainment can really hinge on random humor because once random becomes the crux of your act, it's not really all that random anymore... it's just senseless.  So I figured this Fred garbage was more of the same until he showed up in a scene and was cheered by the robo-audience, which prompted a Google search.  Holy fuck, this person is real.  So, uh... YouTube loves him, he makes a shit ton of money, and has met a fuckload of celebrities.  There really is no justice in this world... especially when we all know that there are internet personalities far more worthy of appearing on screen with Miranda Cosgrove...

Now I've never made any money off this site, never really tried to.  The effort's simply been to break even on advertising revenue and advertising costs... trickling away money on hosting fees, but whatever, it's only a few bucks a month.  But now... now I know I can achieve things with this website.  If I convince all those executives at Nickelodeon (who, mind you, chose not to interview me for an internship) or Disney that tweens fucking love me, that they eat my shit like it's Skittles falling out my asshole, I could be on TV!  I could high five Jerry Trainor and the whole WORLD could see it!  How epic would that be?!  So are you ready, internet pals?  To spread the gospel of Polkster, to put that word-of-mouth potential you've got to good use? 

Nerd time, people with real lives can tune out now...

So I beat Bionic Commando yesterday.  The new one, not the old school difficult one.  It's a solid B title; I didn't hate it, I had some fun, but it wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination.  I'd call it an average game, but nine out of ten games suck piss, so average is actually quite terrible.  The graphics are fairly bland, the writing's blander, but swinging is damn fun.  Combat is repetitive, and even though the game's like... six to eight hours long (based on an estimate I yanked out my ass, it could be 12 hours, I don't know), it still felt too long.  Three bosses, all of them fairly easy, but often frustrating--except the last one, which was cake--because of flawed hand-hookshot targeting, are the scant bits of variety you get between level after level of the same sets of enemies, in slightly augmented sets.  The environments are entertainingly varied, it can get challenging, and, really, it's a pretty not bad way to waste some time.  Especially if your local Blockbuster doesn't have inFamous in stock.

But the whole thing with this game being so purely adequate made me think about the state of games in general.  I would never pay $60 for Bionic Commando, maybe $15 or $20 if I really felt I had to have it.  In fact, there aren't many games I'd put $60 down for, unless it had the words Naughty Dog or Metal Gear on the cover (there once was a time when Squaresoft would do it, but alas, years of Hoover caliber sucking has made that a thing of the past), yet regardless of how much time and effort have been put into a game, that's how much you're going to pay if you want it new in its first few months on shelves (obvious exceptions being downloadable and budget titles).  Why?  The amount of effort, in terms of both development and advertising, put into Bionic Commando is no way comparable to MGS4 or Final Fantasy XIII. 

It's kind of like going to the movies; most people will go every now and again when there's something they really want to see (with the exception of some really bored folk who I can't judge because... I play videogames) because the cost of entry is pretty high--slumping ticket sales have shown that $10 just isn't really worth it to sit in some sticky seat as babies cry and douchebags scream at the screen.  More people have probably seen Entrapment when it's aired on TBS or TNT, or whateverthehell channel movies like that air on, than in theaters because it's practically free and they've got time to kill.  Imagine if it cost only five bucks to see it in theaters, that's way closer to fuck it money than TEN WHOLE DOLLARS.  Does my analogy make sense?  When Capcom gets their C-team to put a game like Bionic Commando together when they're not slaving away on some other random third person action game, doesn't spend too much cash on its development or marketing (because if they did, they really over paid), why the hell should I pay for it like a game whose developer did?  I think the game's poor sales reflect that I may just be onto something here...

--End Transmission--

PolkOut Sells Out

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