grumblyman

One of the most remarkable things about Penny Arcade is that it's been running for nearly 20 years at this point, and for the bulk of that time you've rarely missed a day in your 3 comics a week schedule. I remember finding the comic as a young teenager in the early 2000's, and even then it felt both regular and long-established, with a consistent schedule at a time where most other webcomics were haphazard and irregular. It seems from interviews that this was a big factor in how you were able to grow the site and turn it into your jobs.

Have there been any occasions where you've wanted to do nothing less than sit in a room and hammer down a comic? Even if we love our jobs, we all have those moments where life is taking its toll. How do you power through those moments, considering it's your job to be funny?

Thank you very much for taking the time to do this AMA. It's important that people know about the things happening in the world, to human beings, right this moment. Too often people in the west believe that violent nationalist totalitarianism is something that stopped with the end of the cold war.

That said, what aspects of North Korean culture do you feel most proud of? Are there any cultural aspects you find yourself missing now you are in the USA?

Similarly, if people in North Korea were able to freely share their culture and expression with the rest of the world, what do you think would be the country's biggest cultural export?

Thank you very much for your response.

The USA has a very long history of voter suppression, usually along racial lines. It's important to note that this is rarely as simple or direct as someone standing in front of a polling booth with their arms folded - it has happened historically through layers of bureacracy, which is usually technically legal but practically impossible to navigate for lots of people, especially if those people are poorer, or uneducated. But obviously those are things that shoudln't inhibit someone from voting. A classic example would be insisting voters provide very specific forms of identification (which they may not have due to to poverty or other reasons). Historically, this has also involved things in the American south like literacy tests or other hoops to jump through - which have always been much harder for people of colour or poorer people to get through. It's important to note that in most free elections in the world, these measures (like needing to provide identification) are not put in place.

Honestly, this stuff is not only all there in the history books but continues to happen. Look it up!

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edit: the only other thing I'd add would be that it seems obvious that if you want to give people the right to vote, and do right by that promise, you should make voting as frictionless as possible. Again, most countries are on your side and make it as easy as possible for you to vote. Your right to vote shouldn't be contingent on how good you are at navigating meaningless bureacracy - especially when that bureucracy is designed to be misleading to poor people or people of colour. In fact, here are some other forms of voter suppresion happening right now:

- misinformation being spread on social media about where or how people can vote. This is often targeted towards black communities in the South with the aim of getting them to miss their window to vote

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- private companies linked to Republican organisations striking voter rolls from the record, forcing voters to reregister at a moments notice, the hope being that they wont have time to get their shit together and reregister (or that they won't know they've been purged from the voter roll).

It's a strange double standard to both complain about 'character assassinations' but to also make the impossible to prove claim that the reason a person had sex with another person was to advance their career.