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SOMEONE TELL ME WHY PENNY ARCADE IS GETTING DRAGGED TODAY

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
I'M SURE THEY FUCKING DESERVE IT. THEY ALWAYS FUCKING DESERVE IT.

I JUST WANNA KNOW WHAT SPECIFIC THING CAUSED EVERYBODY TO QUOTE TYCHO'S DUMBFUCK UNDERTALE LINE ON TWITTER.

DON'T GET ME WRONG IT'S A STUPID LINE.

BUT LIKE.

IT'S NOT EVEN IN THE TOP 40 TIMES PENNY ARCADE WAS ACTUALLY FUCKING EVIL.

COME ON GUYS YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT.
 

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
BEAT now has me curious as well. I feel sick even thinking about PA after years of not.
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
Ben Kuchera was like "they are the news organization that exercised the most editorial control for the sake of advertisement -- despite their reputation for dragging everyone else for that".
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
I saw the above thread, but not any further dragging by anyone else.
 

LBD_Nytetrayn

..and his little cat, too
(He/him)
Was it a thread? I thought it was a series of separate, unconnected but related tweets?

Not to be pedantic, just so no one misses anything.
 

Trar

Grilling
(he | him)
The Epic Gamer comic that hasn't changed format since 1998 where the main characters are drawn like squirrel people was always shitty? Didn't see that coming
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
Didn’t Penny Arcade fire Ben Kuchera shortly after his article for them where he equated touching the then new PS4 controller to fondling breasts?

I do think if the people on the ever shrinking handful of gaming sites want to get mad at anyone, the host of terrible YouTube people yelling about some hentai game getting removed from Steam are the people driving them into the Patreon hinterlands and are more deserving of their ire. Not some comic that’s been irrelevant for over a decade.
 

jpfriction

(He, Him)
I'm sure he's right but some of the first comments I saw in response to his tweets are screenshots from forums where he talked about how funny rape is so not sure which of these terrible horses to back. I think I might just check out of this one.
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
I'm sure he's right but some of the first comments I saw in response to his tweets are screenshots from forums where he talked about how funny rape is so not sure which of these terrible horses to back. I think I might just check out of this one.
I mean I think at the end of the day there's a reason they all worked together. Shit sticks together as it rolls downhill, as they say
 

madhair60

Video games
Any editorial mandate that removes words from a Ben Kuchera piece is alright by me

Snark aside this practice remains exceptionally common.
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
I mean for me the real punchline is that Penny Arcade would be the one place Kuchera worked where he wasn't definitely the weakest link on the staff
 

SabreCat

Sabe, Inattentive Type
(he "Sabe" / she "Kali")
I'm sure he's right but some of the first comments I saw in response to his tweets are screenshots from forums where he talked about how funny rape is so not sure which of these terrible horses to back. I think I might just check out of this one.
I don't know much about the guy, but if they're having to go back as far as 2003 to find him saying awful things, that seems better than a lot of other Internet talking heads. How old would Kuchera have been at that point?

Would be good to see some public acknowledgment / repudiation / apology rather than radio silence on it, though.
 

ShakeWell

Slam Master
(he, etc.)
I'm sure he's right but some of the first comments I saw in response to his tweets are screenshots from forums where he talked about how funny rape is so not sure which of these terrible horses to back. I think I might just check out of this one.

You're on a forum whose tagline/slogan involved the r-slur for many years in the same timeframe as those forum posts. If forum posts that are old enough to vote qualify as compelling evidence that he's actually a shithead, I think a lot of people on this forum (myself included) are also actual shitheads.
 
Didn’t Penny Arcade fire Ben Kuchera shortly after his article for them where he equated touching the then new PS4 controller to fondling breasts?

That would maybe make narrative sense, but what happened was that they closed down their entire news operation and ended a bunch of other projects half a year after he wrote that article, so there's probably not a direct connection to that particular article.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
Also Ben is the "PS4 CONTROLLER IS LIKE THE FIRST TIME I TOUCHED A BOOB" guy.

Now and forevermore.
 

karzac

(he/him)
I don't know a ton about Ben Kuchera other than the PS4 controller thing, and I read the PA report a little bit at the time, but regardless, it's always important to remember that bad writers (or even bad people!) can have bad things happen to them and that doesn't make the bad things less bad. And for what it's worth, Kuchera's tweets don't read to me as "I was mistreated, woe is me", but rather "I was complicit in fucked up business practices, and I don't want to lie about it anymore". Your particular feelings about Kuchera shouldn't really colour your opinion of what he's accusing PA of, unless you think he's lying or misrepresenting what happened.
 
Your particular feelings about Kuchera shouldn't really colour your opinion of what he's accusing PA of, unless you think he's lying or misrepresenting what happened.

Yeah the bad article aside, I don't think there's any doubt that what he was saying is true. I remember this PA job posting explicitly asking for someone who doesn't care about work-life balance and who also doesn't expect to be paid well enough to make up for it either went viral during the time Kuchera was working there.

Given our audience and the job at hand, this could potentially be the most competitive position we ever hire for. We’re looking for a web developer / software developer / sys admin to join our small family. We’re a team of 15-20 people that essentially run Penny Arcade proper, the online store, our fulfillment center, the PAX shows, Child’s Play, PATV, and a bunch of other smaller things that no one ever hears about. We rely heavily on outside partners and vendors, but as far as managing and helping run/deploy the technical infrastructure to most of the things we do, we rely on one person. That person is you.

So yes, we run lean. Most of us would say maybe a little TOO lean, but being pushed to your limit is part of the job. I’m not saying that to try and scare you away OR impress you, but it’s in both of our best interests to understand and set expectations properly. If you have boundless energy and desire to work on both creative AND sometimes tedious work but in an environment that just might change your life, perhaps this is the opportunity for you.

We are quite literally looking for a person that can do four jobs: Web Development, Software Development, Sys Admin, and the (dreaded) GENERAL IT for us here that need help configuring a firewall for a dev kit, etc. Sorry, I know that’s the WORST, but it’s absolutely part of the gig.

So yeah, we know that’s a lot to ask of a person, but all of us here work tremendously hard to do a lot of things, and if you’d like to be at the technical epicenter of it all and don’t mind having a really bad sense of work-life balance, this is the job for you.

General Requirements

– You need to have a crazy-person level of attention to detail.

– Strong project management skills, organizational skills and time-management skills.

– A motivated self-starter who can overcome or workaround issues independently.

– Flexibility to travel up to 30% of the time.

– You should have no problems working in a creative and potentially offensive environment.

– Flexibility adapting to deadlines, changing schedules, priorities and unpredictable events in a fast paced environment.

– The ability to communicate and work well in a team environment as well as on an individual basis.

– Must have the ability to prioritize tasks and balance the immediate and long term needs.

– You should have no problem appearing on camera.

– It’s rarely we call on it, but if something breaks in the middle of the night, you are expected to be on call to address that issue 24/7.

Some things you should know about this job.

We’re terrible at work-life balance. Although work is pretty much your life, we do our absolute best to make sure that work is as awesome as possible so you at least enjoy each and every day here.

And here are some other things we’re using to weed people out. It’s not fair. I know. Life’s not fair.

– A BA/BS or greater degree in Computer Science or a related field

– A minimum of 3 years in development and project management, preferably in a professional workplace

– Strong experience in PHP, MySQL, Javascript (jQuery and AJAX), CSS, Apache

– Strong experience in one of Java, Python, Ruby, or other object-oriented language

– A history of running and configuring multiple-server environments, including load balancers, web accelerators/caching systems, and databases

– A history of running and configuring multiple server environments, load balancers, and varnish.

– You should probably be a fan of Penny Arcade. Probably. Yeah.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS:

– Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better.
 

karzac

(he/him)
Yeah I remember that, and it was ringing through my ears when reading Kuchara tweets. The add comes off even worse years later. Should have just written "We're looking for from somebody who's overqualified and looking to be overworked while listening to our shitty jokes for shittier pay"
 
Yeah I remember that, and it was ringing through my ears when reading Kuchara tweets. The add comes off even worse years later. Should have just written "We're looking for from somebody who's overqualified and looking to be overworked while listening to our shitty jokes for shittier pay"

This bit also really stuck out to me as completely absurd, although also not at all surprising given everything else about this incident:


I was someone who thought that the comic itself was funny (for obvious reasons, I understand why someone would not find it funny), but that their reaction to criticism about it was unhinged. So, I can easily imagine that, even if you were a fan of theirs and even if you thought the comic itself was funny, it would be incredibly uncomfortable for them to pressure you as an employee to join them in publicly denouncing people who thought that Dickwolves merchandise was tasteless or whatever.
 

ShakeWell

Slam Master
(he, etc.)
Yeah the bad article aside, I don't think there's any doubt that what he was saying is true. I remember this PA job posting explicitly asking for someone who doesn't care about work-life balance and who also doesn't expect to be paid well enough to make up for it either went viral during the time Kuchera was working there.

Oof. I forgot about that, but yeah, that posting was... real bad.
 
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