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Kickstarter is a fairly noble idea: aspiring creatives pitch their ideas to the internet, and people can invest their own money in exchange for varying levels of reward based on how much they pay. It's been used for great things like funding adventure gaming darling Tim Schafer, but by and larger it's a wasteland of stupid ideas and nerd pandering where people with zero qualifications and nothing more than a poorly-editied video pitch panhandle for money. With more and more legitimate businesses and creators jumping on the Kickstarter bandwagon, what better time to dig up all the awful crap that slips through the cracks? B4U: Hipster Battle Game  A wise man once said: "A hipster is someone who likes something that I don't like, a sperglord is someone who doesn't like something that I like." Nothing embodies this quite like Andy Erickson's Hipster Battle Game. A proud tabletop gaming enthusiast and owner of "independent web concept and design company" Eloquent Zombie he has the stones to call out people who, er...wear cowboy hats? Skinny jeans? Glasses? Erickson is a brave voice of reason willing to call out any vaguely popular fashion trend from the past decade.  Bonobo Chat has sadly expired without meeting its goal, so your dreams of monkeys with iPads has sadly been dashed upon the rocks.  Penny arcades and peep shows may be dead but a young entrepreneur wants to bring back "old time 3d burlesque" now that he's single-handedly saved the handlebar mustache.  Ellwood "Bunky" Bartlett may have won $42 million from the lottery but that's not going to stop him from getting other people to pay for his dream MMO! Your World promises the MMO experience that gamers want: namely, hooker bots. So Goons, what other laughable projects have you seen on Kickstarter?
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 02:20 |
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| # ¿ May 24, 2013 20:26 |
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Bieeardo posted:I can't remember the title, but it was a generic JRPG that was going to be 'old school' according to the Platonic nerd addressing the prompter, with no explanation given for what 'old school' might have meant. I don't know about that, but I do know of Thera: a computer game of the bullet hell genre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_rSSOFRviE
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 02:45 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:I can't remember the title, but there was a Kickstarter for this RPG whose only point was to push the LGBT agenda, and they had nothing to show for it except a bunch of concept art, then the developer raged out at Double Fine because of all the support they were making compared to the noble gesture of their own game. The Arkh Project, which failed because The Man was conspiring to keep queer people of color down and not because it's being run by someone with zero experience making games and nothing but some vague promises and commissioned concept art to back it up. Raere posted:What's wrong with a game with the only point of pushing the agenda of a minority? There are lots of edutainment games. It's not so much that a person is trying to make a game with a message as it is that they've written pages and pages of backstory for their Mary Sue characters and then for the actual gameplay there's two sentences about how it's a linear action-RPG. It's a classic case of an "idea person" trying to get their totally yooneek game idea made by other people. Farbtoner fucked around with this message at Apr 26, 2012 around 03:07 |
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 03:03 |
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Frog posted:The first sentence on his kickstarter page: That kind of sloppiness is pretty pervasive throughout. You have a lot of people who are shooting their pitch videos with their cell phones* while simultaneously asking for tens of thousands of dollars in cash. *For more fun check out his writing samples. Anyways, to move away from all the bad videogames:  When even your footprints have to tell people to deal with it  Twee nerdporn
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 04:38 |
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coldplay chiptunes posted:Was BarkleySUAJ a RPGMaker game? It was originally made for RPGMaker but they scrapped it and re-did it in GameMaker with a custom engine.
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 05:45 |
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Aussie Dingbat posted:Ladies, have you ever thought whilst walking down the street, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if I had a portable wardrobe with me right now?" This actually seems pretty useful, but the egregious use of "team" to describe one lady and her friend tickles me. It's like when a highschooler who draws a comic strip refers to himself as a "studio" to sound more professional. kuddles posted:Except it's working as expected? Seriously, there is a lot of complaining in this thread about how developers with no care or planning into their ideas are raking in the cash and yet virtually all the examples being presented here have turned out to be complete failures on kickstarter. It is literally impossible to make fun of awful Kickstarters and the people and attitudes behind them without being angry at the entire system and wanting to tear it to the ground.
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 16:17 |
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Internet meme products, because everything on the internet is free and profiting off of other people's artwork and photography is A-OK!
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 20:54 |
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T. Couchfucker posted:That dude is a goon and made a CineD thread about it, it's pretty remarkable Yup. Getting 4 times as much money as he had hoped was pretty great, Ben Solo is a good Goon. http://vimeo.com/35354214
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 22:58 |
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Saint Darwin posted:Because I really doubt it actually works? From what I understand having lights on a timer is actually one of the main techniques that people use to wake themselves up just enough to dream lucidly without it being enough to wake them up completely. It's still kind of goofy in a New Age-y way but since they're offering an actual physical product as a reward for investing it's easier to think of it as an extended pre-order.
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2012 04:59 |
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Nat posted:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...e-game?ref=live That guy registered an account to shill his game here, because if there's one thing SA is known for it's our love of ragefaces.
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2012 13:12 |
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Miss-Bomarc posted:There's actually a huge hobbyist market in adapters that let you hook a digital camera to a telescope. Can we please not turn this thread into a "my kickstarter > your kickstarter" argument? If you want to explain why a seemingly-useless or superfluous product is actually useful that's fine, but don't get indignant if people think that using a cell phone as a substitute for a "real" camera is funny.
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2012 05:07 |
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Tars Tarkas posted:Hey, peeps, do you like movies? Knowing the evangelical Christian propensity to take whatever's popular, file the serial numbers off, and throw in a bunch of JEEZUS it makes me wonder how long it will be before they decide to make Christstarter so they can raise funds away from all the heathen humanist artists and musicians.
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| # ¿ May 1, 2012 20:16 |
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gnarlyhotep posted:Yeah people who make little girls cry by insulting them are awesome. You know what else is awesome? Not derailing a thread with inane arguments about whose anecdote is better than everyone else's. Nobody cares if your hipster pop princess is a great person or totally punchable.
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| # ¿ May 3, 2012 01:54 |
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Undeclared Eggplant posted:It's a shame we just missed out on this chance to invest sending Picard, Kirk, Riker, and Data action figures into near space: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...picard-to-space Nearly every other hobbyist I've seen send a camera into space on a balloon has said it only cost a couple hundred dollars.
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| # ¿ May 3, 2012 18:44 |
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Virgins Assemble is yet another one of those shows about nerds nerding it up in nerdland, but the pitch video...well, I won't spoil anything.Cemetry Gator posted:Honestly, what is with people and their dedication to disposable childhood pop culture of the 80s. Like, I saw this video on Youtube of some guy bitching about the Angry Video Game Nerd's movie funding, and all the while he was wearing a "Turtles Don't do Drugs" t-shirt. And it's like, what grown man thinks that is an acceptable shirt to wear? People have always had an attachment to the things they enjoyed during their childhood, it's just that now we have an entire juggernaut of marketing and consumption that capitalizes on it. You have to remember that Transformers et al were literally 30-minute commercials for toys and the only reason they existed in the 80s is because that was when the laws against advertising to children and mandatory children's education programming were overturned. The fact that people look back so fondly on what were objectively terrible cartoons says a lot about how effective that advertising was.
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| # ¿ May 4, 2012 11:04 |
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Devil Wears Wings posted:"Hey guys, you know that cool smartphone sci-fi game you paid for? Well um that money is actually going to finance some new iPads for  Braid actually paid several hundred thousand dollars to license its music
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| # ¿ May 4, 2012 18:46 |
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coldplay chiptunes posted:lol, how do you go from "A couple thousand dollars" to "Several HUNDRED thousand dollars"? Yeah, whoops. The entire budget was two hundred thousand dollars including licensing the music and getting Braid's graphics re-painted by that one webcomic guy. Back when the game first came out people tracked down the website he licensed the music from and the prices were listed at $50,000 a track and I guess the fuzzy math stayed with me 
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| # ¿ May 4, 2012 19:40 |
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This is two years old but making fun of Libertarians is timeless:quote:I've outlined and began writing a novel called, tentatively, "Live Free or Die Trying," about a man who comes out of a near-fatal bout of depression to become involved in the Free State Project, find love and, of course, himself. (You can Google the FSP, an effort to get 20,000 liberty-loving people to move to New Hampshire.) From what little experience I have with self-publishing, wish-fulfillment fiction by carazies and fringe groups occupy the half of the industry that isn't vampire erotica. Only it sells even worse. MotoMind posted:Dials to track your carbon/fossil fuel savings over bottled water from using a really expensive bottle that required lots of fossil fuels to produce. I hope the bottle comes at negative 200. Also, their idiotic iPhone app confuses "gallons of oil" (for production of bottles) with "gallons of gas" (for driving a car). Since you're like the 8th person to say this, using a re-usable bottle instead of buying bottled water and then recycling the bottle is definitely a net good, if only because you're not wasting oil transporting water that is indistinguishable from the water in your tap. Saying that using a re-usable bottle is bad because it took oil to make is like saying that being a vegetarian is bad because insects and bunnies die when vegetables are harvested.
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| # ¿ May 8, 2012 21:21 |
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Young Freud posted:Dude, sue me. Wrist Watch in the Dominic Deegan thread claimed it was porn and I was just reposting. I've (sadly) read a little of it, it's not outright porn but there is an uncomfortable amount of fanservice and will-they-won't-they. To the point where it would be better if it was a bunch of straight-up loving instead of "tee-hee, since I'm a cat I don't need to wear pants =  =" titillation just because it would be honest and up-front with its appeal.
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| # ¿ May 13, 2012 22:26 |
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Violen posted:http://twitter.com/#!/cwgabriel/sta...799326186053632 They're sucking up to the Kickstarter community so they can crowd-fund the next entry of their crappy cancelled steampunk RPG. That and they're pretty gross dudes. Dickwolves
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| # ¿ May 16, 2012 17:44 |
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miscellaneous14 posted:Literally the most childish reaction. I actually feel kinda bad for reading their comics right now. He's taking a stand against censorship...by censoring anyone who disagrees with him 
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| # ¿ May 17, 2012 04:16 |
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Sometimes you get to parody creepy stuff, sometimes you get to make jokes about things people find offensive. surprise sex is a terrible thing, but I think its depressing as hell that there exists a giant posse of people who's goal is to punish anyone on the internet who ever makes a joke about surprise sex, even if its about a fictional being who exists only to surprise sex fictional people (tentacle monsters in this case). I think it's less that somebody made a joke about surprise sex as it is that somebody made an entire card game about surprise sex and that in the anime community surprise sex (of  college-aged schoolgirls nonetheless) is so normalized that they're genuinely surprised when people are grossed out by it.quote:What pisses me off is that I do a lot of community service work and volunteering for Women's shelters, women's support groups and support groups and organizations for the disabled and the homeless and I find these jokes hilarious. This is the gendered equivalent of going "I'm not racist, all my best friends are black!" quote:So it makes me wonder if these people aren't in it for the women, the poor or the disabled but are instead in it because they like to start poo poo and wallow in drama from their homes while other people actually try and do something good. Even if this was the case (and it isn't) that wouldn't make the point that they were arguing any less valid. quote:Also I believe in free speech, and while that game may be skeevy as hell, I think that people should be allowed to buy anything legal they can come up with the money for, even if it is creepy as gently caress. A commercial fundraising website cancelling a project that violates the rules they agreed to when they signed up for it isn't censorship.
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| # ¿ May 18, 2012 02:45 |
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Someone linked me to the blog Your Kickstarter Sucks, it started the day after this thread ( ) and has some stuff that wasn't covered on here.
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| # ¿ May 30, 2012 11:24 |
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SovietSpyGuy posted:I wouldn't say we live in an "era," people who responds to criticism that way have been around for ages, I'm sure. Someone intelligent and realistic about their project would take the same criticism seriously. This guy just has an inflated ego and thinks his ideas are all the best ideas and everyone else can shove it. Which is great and all but doesn't work when you're trying to get people to buy into a product. Rather than trying to make sure his game has enough public appeal to get funding, he's adopted the "well I don't have to explain myself to YOU, and if you don't love the game and everything about the game then it's not for you anyway! HATERZ!" In a way I find people insisting that this era/country/culture is the worst ever is just another facet of that same dismissiveness and willful ignorance.
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| # ¿ Jun 4, 2012 20:10 |
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TetsuoTW posted:So do terrible IndieGoGos count for this thread too? This reminds me of when that professor published a version of Huck Finn with the word "friend of the family" replaced with the word "slave" so schools could avoid controversy, and a bunch of people got indignant to the point where they Kickstarted a version of the book where "friend of the family" was replaced with "robot".
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| # ¿ Jun 15, 2012 06:41 |
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Babe Magnet posted:You're terrible at not engaging discussion. PYF actually has a thread for good Kickstarters. Snowglobe of Doom posted:And finally, our old buddy the 'weather rock' guy has launched a new project: Help Texas Hobbits This guy is awesome. Giving local eccentrics a platform to show off and make money off of their crafts is one of the things that Kickstarter seems really good for.
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| # ¿ Jul 6, 2012 19:56 |
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B-b-but...Apple, you guys! Apple and it's retarded users! It's comedy gold!
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| # ¿ Jul 9, 2012 01:35 |
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theflyingorc posted:Except that Kickstarter lets you assume the risk, and that's totally reasonable. The only place it gets obnoxious is that they've tacitly allowed it to turn into a pre-order system through the various tiers, and there's no guarantee on those, even though the company basically promised. That and, as Penny Arcade shows, they seem to be ignoring their own rules and regulations and letting the site shift away from actually kickstarting new projects to giving people with an existing product and revenue stream a way of bypassing traditional investing in favor of fleecing their fans or acting like a preorder system.
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| # ¿ Jul 15, 2012 05:49 |
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Greggy posted:Somehow they always get actual decent rappers along with their assortment of random white guys rapping about killer klowns from outer space. There's also Tech 9, Raekwon, Rahzel, and Mack 10. Last year they had Busta Rhymes, Ice Cube, and Xzibit. I wonder how the actually talented people do with those crowds. From what I understand their secret with both their music and their wrestling is that they pay well and are easy to work with. It's funny how treating artists like human beings and not trying to jerk them around and rip them off can have that effect! lil mortimer posted:Hideous, hideous original artwork. Now they're back tracking and claiming it was always meant to have a retro 8-bit look. These guys seem deceitful as gently caress. I hope they don't get funded. How can you go ahead and put your first Kickstarter project on hiatus (a project that looks awful) and expect to get your next pie-in-the-sky idea funded? I hope it doesn't happen... it's such a bad idea, though. So, so lame. The sad thing is that I think their heart is in the right place: They're absolutely right that the market is oversaturated with faux-retro pixel graphics and it is kind of lazy. But their sub-Newgrounds illustrations aren't the answer.
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| # ¿ Jul 15, 2012 21:44 |
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inklesspen posted:This was always the impression I got from the very beginning and I'm unable to grasp why other people didn't also get this impression. (Perhaps it is because I am a regular PA reader and thus might have a better grasp of when they're joking and when they're not? I dunno.) Because their Kickstarter pitch was "We're trying to raise $250,000 to get rid of one ad banner on our front page, but if you guys go above and beyond that amount by several orders of magnitude then you might get actual new content" And even then, they're a business with a seven-figure income and a dedicated staff so they're still going completely against the spirit of Kickstarter even if you pretend that making their internet reality show was the goal from the beginning.
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| # ¿ Jul 16, 2012 20:36 |
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Cicero posted:You don't actually know what "order of magnitude" means, do you? You don't know what hyperbole is, do you? Cicero posted:It's pretty much the same, actually. No it's not. Double Fine is at the mercy of publishers and they don't even own all their IPs or have their own source of revenue, if they want to make a game they have to get approval from a publisher and the game they're kickstarting is one that publishers ahve refused point-blank to make yet gamers have been clamoring for. Dan Harmon and Charlie Kaufman's kickstarter is the same way, they've both worked on successful projects in the past but if they want to get a movie made they'd need to go to a studio for funding and their entire pitch is that they're making a movie that they wouldn't be able to make in the studio system. Penny Arcade is all in-house, they own all their IPs and their own business so they don't have to answer to a higher power. If they wanted to make an internet reality show there's nothing stopping them from using their own business' income or to seek out a corporate sponsor.
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| # ¿ Jul 16, 2012 21:17 |
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Atasi posted:It is when the loving Penny Arcade guys, darlings of the internet, can barely get above their initial goal when they ask for more than traffic to the site. The thing is that they've already gone through this before with their RPG trilogy, which petered out hugely after the first installment and was only cancelled only to be "finished" earlier this year when they squeezed out a budget-priced faux-retro pixel RPG just so they could say they completed it. Cicero posted:You do realize they have 29 days left, right? Like has been said a million times already*, Kickstarters follow a predictable pattern where they get a ton of donations in the first few days and then plateau until the very end when there's one last big rush. Everyone that's even vaguely involved in the circles that Penny Arcade belongs to has already heard of it so its highly unlikely that there will be a huge rush of new donors. *This is also hyperbole. Farbtoner fucked around with this message at Jul 16, 2012 around 21:42 |
| # ¿ Jul 16, 2012 21:39 |
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zandert33 posted:I know Brandon Hardesty is a goon (or at least was at one point), but I'm not sure what to think about this: How full of yourself do you have to be to think that people would be willing to waste the time watching you re-enact a movie, let alone pay for it? I mean, even with one of the most creative directors in Hollywood at the helm and gimmick of doing Sweded re-enactments Be Kind, Rewind cut its re-enactments down to like a minute. Even Epic/Disaster/Date/Scary movie only do their re-enactments for a few minutes at a time, because anything else puts people to sleep.
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| # ¿ Jul 24, 2012 15:54 |
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SquareDog posted:In the brief time this kickstarter was up he got over $1,500 in pledges. Jack and Jill made $150 million, it must be really good to have so many people paying for it! 
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| # ¿ Aug 2, 2012 13:49 |
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Necron Vs. World posted:Gaymercon It's OK dudes, we can laugh at awkward unfunny internet nerds for being awkward and unfunny no matter who or what they gently caress. That said, I'm sure that as far as nerd cons go a QUILTBAG one would be a lot of fun. The hard part would be keeping it that way, it seems like all those shrill "Yaoi glomp noni desu~ ^.^" fat chicks would flood the place trying to scope some hot guy-on-guy action. And considering that the Venn diagram of nerds, homosexuals, and furries is practically just a circle I wonder how (or if) they would stop it from being taken over; anime nerds and furries can be surprisingly at odds, for example Y-Gallery (a site for gay anime art) banned furries entirely. This also reminds me one of my favorite Daily Show bits when they went to a gay science fiction convention.
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| # ¿ Aug 3, 2012 14:32 |
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AxeManiac posted:I usually make fun of all gamer conventions, including E3 and just the idea it is called gaymer is enough to goof on it I'd imagine. I'm bringing my GaymeCube and pLEZstation 3. Buttsexbox 360
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| # ¿ Aug 3, 2012 18:28 |
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slogsdon posted:In what universe would "Retro 3D Graphics" ever be a positive? Whenever I think of old 3D graphics I just get kind of embarrassed. The Real Texas managed to be pretty charming, if anything it stood out amongst the ocean of pixels and hand-drawn Newgrounds art that's saturating the indie market right now.
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| # ¿ Aug 8, 2012 10:26 |
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Not to mention it could be misused to identify porn stars based on photos from outside the industry, making it even easier for creepy fans and religious nuts alike to stalk and harass them.
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| # ¿ Aug 12, 2012 23:59 |
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I was probated at the time and I know the topic has moved on, but one thing I feel the need to mention regarding the furry megatits guy is that he isn't the first person to be deluded enough to pay a production company to animate his furry wank fantasies for him:quote:Greetings and welcome to Zoo U! Zoo U is a half-hour adult animated sitcom about two college freshmen, Chad and Alan, who decide to follow Chad's newly discovered anthropomorphic vixen half-sister to college at New Helmeak University, just north of Houston. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HidMe5jzebk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTDoUQ51FgI So that's what those thousands of dollars are going to go for.
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| # ¿ Aug 24, 2012 19:08 |
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| # ¿ May 24, 2013 20:26 |
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Penny Arcade complaining about other people using forumites to harass people they don't like and breaking the Kickstarter rules? That's rich.
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| # ¿ Aug 28, 2012 09:23 |
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