Seal Said it Best
by Ryan Sproull
I started reading Penny Arcade in… 1998. Working on the ihug helpdesk, there were a few sites that kept us in good spirits in between telling elderly people to turn their computers off and then on again. Red Meat was one. The Onion was another, of course. And Sinfest and Penny Arcade.
It’s been years since it was the correct URL, but I still type in www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3 to get there. Mike’s online proposal to his girlfriend was one of my first lessons in how moving unexpected vulnerability can be. Just a comic, but also just about the sweetest goddam thing ever. She said yes, by the way.
I recently reconnected with a couple named Helen and Jamie. They had sort of become mythological to me, something like imaginary friends from childhood. I knew them in 2001 as they frequented the net cafe I was running, and I never thought to get their contact details, or even their surnames. They turned up in a Westpac ad a while back, and I tried a few Googlings to find them, but failed. Turns out we had half of Auckland in common, including my stepmother having lectured Helen at Auckland University of Technology University. Weird how things turn out – things turn out weird.
It was Helen who first delighted in telling me that the guys who wrote/drew Penny Arcade looked nothing like their comic personas. I felt a degree of disappointment, I think. I had forgotten about that.
Penny Arcade became an institution in the world of computer games, which despite my occasional addictions has never been my thing. They’re regulars at gaming conventions, got into an hilarious dispute with one Jack Thompson, and Mike came up with a law of the universe – the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which posits that given anonymity and an audience, anyone will become a total fuckwad. Half the internet explained, and porn accounts for the rest.
And they made the Time magazine 100.
Both Mike and Jerry suffer from forms of clinical depression, and have found relief through medication. Their candid discussion of it is interesting partly because of the contrast between their experience and what we tend to see on awaresness ads in New Zealand. As someone who has suffered from depression and been recommended medication in the past, I found their concerns about drugs taking away their “spark”, their good-crazy, particularly interesting.
You’ll have to watch through an ad first, and will have to disable your AdBlock to do so, but it’s worth the watch.
