Gabe and Tycho and the Boy Who Cried Dickwolf

Well, my actual website is now fully operational. I assure you, it is quite deadly. A lot of the content from this blog has been copied over there already, not sure if I'll move the rest or not.

www.9to5.cc

Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.

Please... I beg of you. For the love of all that is good, visit my site. Now back to the old and out of date blog you've somehow found:

Who is that a picture of? It's Hollywood producer Dick Wolf! Get it? Yeah... good times.

I feel that I sort of need to do a "take two" on my previous article.

You see, I keep this blog as a sort of writing exercise, since eventually there will be a proper site here: http://www.9to5.cc/ (right now there's hypnotoad, but we're working on it). Until that site goes live I just try to keep the habit of occasionally writing. I don't really review what I write here, and there's next to no editing (as some of you have pointed out).

With that in mind, my thoughts yesterday may not have been as clear or concise as they could have been, I was also not fully informed about the insanity that was transpiring regarding the Dickwolf Debacle (I was personally leaning towards "Dickwolfgate" but Dickwolf Debacle does have a better ring to it). So in an effort to maintain brevity, I present the following in point form as a footnote to yesterday's article:

• A joke about rape does not mean you're a) a chauvinist or b) a rape apologist/advocate, see Sarah Silverman's take on the Aristocrats.
• The anonymous masses of the internet turning the term "Dickwolf" (either side of the debate is culpable here) into a synonym for rape doesn't make the creators of the term guilty of anything. How many times have idiots gone out and killed people listening to terrible heavy metal? See Drowning Pools 'Let The Bodies Hit the Floor' stupidly associated with shooting spree. The artist is not responsible for what people do with his art.
• The only reason this is an issue at all is that Penny Arcade's audience has expanded to the point that their strip is so widely read that it is now read by people who can't take a joke. As I mentioned yesterday, this is not the first time they've used something offensive for a laugh. Gabe points out they've used: violence, rape, aids, pedophilia, bestiality, drugs, cancer, homosexuality, and religion for laughs in the past, and the outrage was a fraction of this situation. A big audience means walking on eggshells, which is sort of sad.
• Gabe showed enormous hypocrisy when he said he would remove the shirt from the store to make people more comfortable at PAX here, but then tweeted that he would be wearing the shirt himself here. Wouldn't one of the organizers and main attractions of PAX wearing the shirt make people just as, if not more, uncomfortable? It seems like he wants to take a
  stand, showing us all that he supports his own comedy, but just, you know, not a really big stand.
• I went to PAX last year, and believe me, there were t-shirts, conversations, panels and tabletalk that was far FAR more offensive than all this. Geeks tend to speak their minds, even if it's offensive. If that sort of thing bothers you, a giant convention aimed at this subgroup might not be your thing in the first place. On this I agree with Gabe.
• Finally, I have a tremendous amount of respect for PA and their accomplishments, even if they have been slipping in terms of content in the past year or two. I may be wrong, but I really thought that they were better than caving under pressure regarding something that, at its core, is really so trivial. I'm scared of growing up.

To close off, I would like to leave you with today's Cyanide and Happiness, which of course, is a comic where rape is the joke about half the time. Good thing they don't have PA's readership.
-K