Being neither a black nor a white girl, I have no personal experience with this phenomenon so I can’t really comment as to its accuracy or frequency of occurrence. But chances are, if you have to preface what you are about to say with “Not to sound racist…” chances are you’re about to sound racist.

So of course, the question is, is this shit necessarily racist? I think it goes back to context. If these are questions your friend is asking you, a lot of this sounds like genuine curiosity. If you didn’t grow up as a Black girl, there are certain things you might not know. Now if a stranger just came up to you asked you these kinds of questions, there may certainly be a racial bias at play.

Whatever, this video is funny.

You don’t need a fancy LCD tablet or an expensive brush to create art. Sometimes, all you need is brown packaging tape.

Using only strips of brown packaging tape and a blade, Max Zorn some amazingly detailed works that are revealed when held up to light. He’s posted his works on lamps and windows throughout the world. And if you’ve got a great location that would be perfect for some tape art, he’ll send you a piece for you to up.

What amazes me most is that from the timelapse, it doesn’t look like he’s using any kind of sketch to work from. I’m always amazed when artists can do that. I mean, I kinda do that when I art fight. There’s no sketching involved. But if I want to create something more finished, I always start out with an underlying sketch.

You can check out more of Zorn’s stunning work at his website.

Found this tidbit from Fleen. Penny Arcade’s business man, Robert Khoo, answered a few questions from the reddit community about the business of Penny Arcade. You can almost hear the joy in his answers. It’s clear that he loves what he does. The one answer that really stood out for me was this:

And this may seem weird to everyone… but I don’t actually care about money all that much. Money isn’t a terribly interesting motivator for me – it’s a high score mechanism, but I see PA as a business simulator. It’s about tweaking inputs and maximizing output… some of that is revenue, sure, but there’s all sort of other parts to it. Customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, etc… So as appropriate as it is, seeing the whole thing as a game has probably helped me do this for… 10 years now? lord.

The fact that money isn’t really a factor in the business that Khoo has built and the fact that he mentions employee satisfaction in the same breath as customer satisfaction says quite a lot. I think if more businesses focused on their employees, corporate culture would be far less oppressively pedantic.

I think there are a lot of things that corporations can learn from what Khoo has done. Sure, Penny Arcade is a special case in many respects. But the underlying concepts behind what he’s built are ideas that can be adapted to businesses big and small.

Also, working like an insane man doesn’t hurt either:

Depending on if I swim in the morning, I am in the office at either 8:30 or 9:00 AM. I’ve already answered between 20-30 emails before I’ve left for the office, but by the time I get to the office I probably have another dozen or so that need attending to. (for reference, I get between 150-250 actionable emails a day)

From there it’s very liquid. I’ll be on conference calls, meetings with different teams at Penny Arcade (Mike/Jerry, Designers, Merch, Ad guys, Tech, Child’s Play, PAX, etc.), and then dealing with my own projects. Like I said in an earlier answer, I deal with a lot of the “new” and undefined business, so each and every day is different.

I’ll try to grab dinner with different folks here (at any time of the year, SOME PART of Penny Arcade is in crunch mode… PAX events, site launches, CP events, merch launches, etc… people work late), and continue to work into the night.

If there’s a game I’m playing actively with the office, I’ll hop onto one of the TVs here to play between 9-10PM… that seems to be the magic hour for most folks here when we’re playing on Live.

I’m usually out of here between midnight and 2 am.

A little review of some of the rapidographs I use to letter. I can’t really recommend rapidographs for the casual comicker because they’re so expensive, but if you’re looking for an excellent lettering tool, nothing beats the consistency of a rapidograph.

A technical note, the audio may sound a bit shouty. Trying a new microphone with my iPhone combined with a very echoey room equals LOUD. You may want to turn your volume a bit down.

Paul Christoforo has had the worst week of his life. And he fucking well deserved it.

Here’s the short version. Paul Christoforo was a marketing “genius” hired to promote the Avenger controller, a gaming peripheral that benefits disabled gamers. When a customer asked about shipping delays, Christoforo puffed up his chest and insulted the customer who forwarded the email chain to Mike Krahulik who in turn posted about Christoforo’s bullying on a little website known as Penny Arcade. With that, the internet hate machine engaged and made life very difficult for Christoforo.

You can read Mike’s initial post, Christoforo’s pathetic apology, Kotaku’s review of the madness, and a rather detailed investigation of the entire matter over at Examiner.com.

The lesson is simple. If you are in the business of marketing, which most of us web cartoonists are in some respect or another, don’t be an asshole, especially in an email chain documenting your asshatitude. It honestly costs you nothing but maybe a little pride to be gracious to a customer no matter how irate or unreasonable they be.

The other lesson is that in the age of internet marketing is that any press is no longer good press. Good press is good press. Bad press will ruin your day. Yelp ensures that restaurants keep an eye on grumpy waiters. Amazon reviews can make or break a product. And Mike Krahulik will remind you how the wwebsite works.