If you begin to experience difficulties accessing the Megaphones Ahoy! Podcast in the next week or so as a result of these changes, please use the method described above to resubscribe manually.

Hopefully this process will result in our being relisted on the iTunes store soon. Thanks for understanding!

I rec’v'd an e-mail from iTunes today though that asks me to change the feed listing and relist it–then to change it back. This may result in your current iTunes subscription failing.

Bear with us (Apple, really) as we try to sort out what is wrong with their system from our end.

But anyway, this was probably one of the funniest shows you guys have ever done. I’ve never been so embarrassed to bust out laughing on the bus back to my dorm. And by the way, I’ve been getting the show through iTunes perfectly since day 1… maybe it’s because I’m already subscribed?

How long until you have to pay extra for the ending?

RE: Ramstein – I’ve always considered them metal, but maybe my definition of “metal” is off. Just chock that up in the “stupid crap I’ve said this week” category :F.

RE: Otherworld – This is one of the few Uematsu pieces where I prefer the original to the Black Mages version.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/6/

Ramnstein aren’t Metal …

These things are not done in an instant, by leaps and bounds, but bitwise. The changes are gradual, and people work hard to convince themselves that they aren’t chumps who are getting shafted a little more each year. But delude yourself as you may–you’re a chump, and so am I, and so are all of us. But again, what choice have you? “You can give up games entirely if you don’t like it.” Really, that’s not much of a choice, is it? So withold your sale, and see what good it does–because the reality is that (most!) other people will still buy it and the enlarged profits will more than make up for the loss of a few silly people who think their one-man boycott will change the world.

Let’s square it away: if you are paying $60 for a game today that has less content than a game you would have bought for $50 three years ago, then you may well comfort yourself by saying that you still think there is $60 of value there–but what does that say about your previous purchase? Was it overvalued? I’m not about to smile and say that paying $50 for PS2/GC games was a generous gift from benevolent Sonytendo just to avoid the possibility of cognitive dissonance.

The reality is that you can’t have it both ways. Either you are paying too much now, or you weren’t paying enough in the past. Personally, I think I was paying enough in the past. Will you tell me otherwise? Were you running about five years ago cheering about how awesome a deal it was to be getting games for $50 a pop plus tax?

Let us take your theory to the logical extreme. If the value of a game is purely set on the basis of the individual consumer, at what point will they stop? 70? 80? 90? How much would you pay for a Final Fantasy game regardless of the content? I know if they priced FFXIII at $100, I’d pay up. I’d probably pay up if it was $125. I bet a lot of other people would too. Are we to be told that gouging people is right just because they’ll grudgingly pay up?

Exploitative capitalism and rightness are clean different things. If you want to try and restore the balance, you can stop defending these practices and instead hold them up to the acrimony they richly deserve–and would have received if undertaken just a few years ago. That is the job of the media–indeed it is the responsibility of the media. More visible outlets have divested themselves of their responsibility to consumers of late, but that does not make the actions of corporations any more right. Neither does it free us, at this media outlet, of our obligation to resist to the ultimate limit attempts to condition consumers into believing that being shafted is ‘okay’ because somehow, getting less for more is still ‘getting your money’s worth’.

The fact is that if a year ago I got a hamburger for a dollar, and now I only get three-quarters of a hamburger for a dollar and a half, it does me no real good to say “well it is still tasty.” The fact is that I have less, I paid more, and I can expect that in future this trend will continue as long as people ardently defend it by saying “it’s so tasty that you should be GLAD you are getting as much as 3/4 of a burger! How generous the burgermeister is!”