It seems like the website for VGcats is down and has been since at least april 15th. If you trust some random anons who say they're on the patreon discord server talking about it, the word is that Scott lost a lot of login information and is slow to get it back, and the hosting company won't verify him.
Not sure if it's OVER over or not, but there is a nonzero chance that the last page of this comic will be this shit. (apparently basd on vrchat)
Guys I PROMISE this shit had a lot more soul to it back in my day
It seems like the website for VGcats is down and has been since at least april 15th. If you trust some random anons who say they're on the patreon discord server talking about it, the word is that Scott lost a lot of login information and is slow to get it back, and the hosting company won't verify him.
Majority of them are in a Zip file on Archive.org. It's weird looking through the archives and seeing how little he actually drew, and then he had these weird bursts where he'd actually get them out weekly for maybe a month. 21 years and he made less than 400 comics. Fucking Fred Gallagher got more out than that.
It seems like the website for VGcats is down and has been since at least april 15th. If you trust some random anons who say they're on the patreon discord server talking about it, the word is that Scott lost a lot of login information and is slow to get it back, and the hosting company won't verify him. View attachment 8911520
Not sure if it's OVER over or not, but there is a nonzero chance that the last page of this comic will be this shit. (apparently basd on vrchat) View attachment 8911463
Guys I PROMISE this shit had a lot more soul to it back in my day View attachment 8911469View attachment 8911481
Robert Nozick is a right libertarian philosopher who believe freedom would best be achieved with an extremely limited government whose only real role was enforcing contracts. Free contracts, even between extremely unequal members, were always perfect free, and any property could be maintained as long as it was acquired in an unbroken chain of consensual agreements. Private ownership of things like roads, and even the ocean, was encouraged. So one could expect, for example, that every road was a toll road and there would be no public land at all.
I consider this to be bad, in case you couldn't tell.
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While I assume he's too Kantian for your liking, I can guess that you have enough familiarity with Robert Nozick to explain if/how this is misrepresentative of his ideas. I only about his thought experiments against utilitarianism that everyone knows (and this author uses uncredited for other comics).
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While I assume he's too Kantian for your liking, I can guess that you have enough familiarity with Robert Nozick to explain if/how this is misrepresentative of his ideas.
Hi
I'm not too into Nozick, but I'm sufficiently familiar. If anyone is more in-the-know and finds a substantial flaw in this, please do point it out.
So, I probably don't need to go too in-depth on why claiming ownership of the ocean and enforcing contracts with private violence is clearly a satirical overextension.
Nozick's entitlement theory is centered on three principles: just acquisition, just transfer, and rectification of injustice.
Ownership depends on prior acquisition through legitimate means, so there is no such thing as one person unilaterally claiming entire oceans, roads, or arbitrary property and enforcing that through private violence. In terms of that, this artist portrays the exact opposite of Nozick's argument.
The claim in the rant that contracts are "always perfectly free" is also misleading. Nozick does not assert that all voluntary transfers are morally perfect or beyond scrutiny. Rather, he maintains that holdings are just if they are acquired and transferred according to his principles. The focus here is on whether property is historically just.
A particularly critical point in Nozick is the distinction between historical justice and patterned distributions. That is, this toll-road/ocean fantasy implies a "patterned" system where resources must be universally privatized or monetized, which is something Nozick explicitly rejects. His minimal state is not a proactive redistribution or universal privatization machine, rather it protects property and contracts within a framework of historical justice without granting arbitrary authority or endorsing predation.
regarding Kantianism, I agree that Kantians must be bullied relentlessly until their reasoning improves. But I wouldn't call Nozick one.
Nozick does frame rights as constraints that limit what can be done to individuals regardless of "aggregate utility", which may sound like Kantianism... but Nozick grounds these constraints in historical entitlement, not a priori moral law. That is, Nozick's approach is consequentially aware, yet rights-focused. The minimal state intervenes only to protect justly acquired holdings, and not to enforce some abstract universal duty. Nozick is more concerned with the justice of holdings, and not categorical moral duties.
Someone deep in the thread asked if people really read MegaTokyo back in the day.
Yes. Yes we did.
In 2000, 'geek' webcomics hadn't really evolved past User Friendly* in terms of art and storytelling:
Obviously there was no shortage of two-guys-on-a-couch gaming webcomics back then, but they tended to skew towards PC gaming, with most references to Japanese games still relying on the "Wow Japan is weird" punchline. Then MegaTokyo debuted:
For budding weebs (we proudly self-identified as 'otaku' back then), this was an unbelievable breath of fresh air. A comic that referenced l33t speak, with a unique style, centering around two geeks who made it to the promised land (Akihabara)? Something like it just simply didn't exist before. I know it probably doesn't seem like much more than a manga-style ripoff, but context is key here. The MT tagline, still at the top of the web page today, is "relax, we understand [you]". At the time, 90% of America was still on dialup. Getting the newest anime meant braving the local comic shop and or dealing with mailed VHS fansubs. Regular digisub groups wouldn't emerge for another few years. Even an ersatz peek across the pacific was exciting stuff.
Fred was a fucking rockstar back in the day, especially when he assumed creative control from Rodney. He wasn't a manga artist or a game developer. He was just some guy who tapped into a very early zeitgeist and had an above-average level of talent. Penny-Arcade even joked about his fame at the time:
I tapped out long before MegaTokyo really took off. But judging from the replies on Fred's 25th anniversary post on xitter, plenty of people only got into MT years afterwards via its print volumes. It even had translated collections published in Japan. As wapaneese and weeaboo became four letter words on chans/forums, Fred frequently caught strays but to his credit he never seemed to react. Just kept (slowly) cranking out the strips. Got married, had a kid. Seems happy. Holy shit I can't believe I'm actually getting maudlin over this...
*User Friendly was a fantastic example of how just putting in the work got you a fanbase back during the early days. JD "Illiad" Frazer had a 13 year run of basically releasing the same comic with the same joke over and over with zero attempt at improvement. It's not even interesting enough to warrant its own post and the archives went offline years ago with little fanfare. Like a lot of the golden age webcomics, I consumed it religiously, but literally the only thing I can remember about it is JD's hilariously shit illustration of Angelina Jolie as Laura Croft:
Truer words have not been spoken. I used to actually get a little mad at people I knew falling for his minimum-effort nerd pandering. I didn't know it disappeared! Good. It was just so bad and yet so inescapable if you were in tech forums at all.
I used to actually get a little mad at people I knew falling for his minimum-effort nerd pandering. I didn't know it disappeared! Good. It was just so bad and yet so inescapable if you were in tech forums at all.
I'm starting to wonder just how lower you could feasably go.
Maybe replace the art with stickfigures? Maybe just directly copy from reddit?
The worst part is that while you can immediately tell what I'm ribbing - more identical clones keep springing to mind.
Even the original end to this post is one of them:
True, though he occasionally puts effort in and the only joke isn't "Nerd is enjoying being a nerd and is excited for next nerding", compared to User Friendly.
True, though he occasionally puts effort in and the only joke isn't "Nerd is enjoying being a nerd and is excited for next nerding", compared to User Friendly.
All I remember about Illiad is he was very much a hobbist, didn't interact with fans much - hence not a lasting community. If I remember my lore right, UF was mostly a "UseNet Shit post" that it was suggested be shared outside of UseNet.
And I only saw UF comics posted by the most unwashed of the neckbeards, so I don't really think it had a wide reach.
Fred was a fucking rockstar back in the day, especially when he assumed creative control from Rodney. He wasn't a manga artist or a game developer. He was just some guy who tapped into a very early zeitgeist and had an above-average level of talent. Penny-Arcade even joked about his fame at the time:
We've gone over this before in the thread, but Fred assumed jack shit from Rodney. Any sort of bad blood or friction between the two is fan headcanon, both have confirmed this. Rodney NEVER had any creative input on MT, except essentially bullying Fred into drawing the first comics and offering pointers on early Largo. Rodney's main contribution was giving Fred hosting space on his server for a portion of revenue, and doing backend work. He had creative credit as a way of asserting rights on the business.
Both tell the same version of events of their "break up": Rodney graduated & got a real career, and didn't have time to webmaster MT, so at his prompting, Fred bought out his share and rights. Rodney gave him a real bargain on the sale, basically giving a former friend charity.
There is no bad blood, they just don't talk or interact much because they were never close and really didn't before.
The comic was originally written by Gallagher's friend Rodney "Largo" Caston, but soon after it started becoming mega-successful, Gallagher did some sort of weird hostile takeover thing where he basically assumed all rights to the project and "fired" Caston. I can't remember the details of this and I'm sure any retelling of the story will have some bias to it depending on whose take you read, but I remember it looking very much like Caston was suddenly and without apparent warning screwed over by Gallagher right when the real money started rolling in.
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