The Kratzen 74th Article Spectacular!

Introduction

Finally, after months of sweat, blood, tears, and good, old – fashioned hard work and determination, I am proud to finally announce the MASSIVE update to this MASSIVE magazine that will take the time – honoured experience of reading some words on a page, and making it so you can read some words on a page in a slightly more obtuse way. There was no reason to change the website, nobody had any complaints about it, and the source code is like coding ambrosia compared to what 99.99% of websites exhibit, but rest assured, we’re unnecessarily running things into the ground one day at a time.

So without further ado, and without tempting you with any more lurid descriptions and teasers of what this massive User Experience update will do for you as a proud customer of Kratzen, The Degenerates, and the Your Boy Froge Experience, I present to you: Kratzen 2.0, to be renamed Kratzen 2.0.1 in twelve hours because the idea of releasing a finished product in 2017 would just be silly.

The Kratzen 2.0 Changelog:

• Fixed the double “060” on the archives.

• Removed the author tab from the archives.

• Removed age recommendations.

• Changed “license” to “licence”.

• Changed e – mail address on about page to froghand@protonmail.ch.

• Added footnote to about page.

• Added rabbit.html.

Wow! It’s made!

Now I know a lot of people are going to complain about this obvious layout change that breaks several critical functionalities of the site and which we refuse to acknowledge because we are delusional to the point where we think our customers will blindly accept whatever slag we shove down their throats in yet another example of corporate malpractice where any and all changes are made for the sole purpose of generating as much revenue as possible from our cash cow userbase who have no self – respect whatsoever and so blindly spend money on whatever works reasonably well and doesn’t personally offend them, but we honestly believe the new changes are so critical to the core experience of this website which has worked completely fine for the past six months without any major updates at all, that our customers are going to love them! After all, customers love what we tell them they love!

I know this is a lot to process, so let me just go through the rationale for each change, so that your primitive mind can glimpse into the beautiful brains of your rightful lords and lordesses.

Fixed the double “060” on the archives. It turns out assigning the same unique identifier to the same article is all sorts of bad practice for all sorts of reasons. Fortunately nobody gave a shit, so I was allowed to leave it up for a month before I noticed.

Removed the author tab from the archives. Seeing as 100% of articles were written by yours truly, and how within the entire six months of this website’s existence nobody ever solicited me to publish their work on my website, it felt redundant to have “Froge” appear seventy times in a row, no matter how much it boosted my ego. The authorship credit on articles and reviews remain, for instance this very article (spooky!), because if you ever forget who I am, I will come to your house with a spoon and ensure I am the last thing you ever see. Until I leave, of course, in which case you’ll probably see some pornography.

Removed age recommendations. Can we all agree this is a website for mature adults? Okay, how about immature adults? Teenagers? Kids? Toddlers with unsupervised Internet access? Look, I don’t care whether you agree, but this is a periodical designed for the type of people who can handle mature subject matter such as swear words, big words, political satire, anime, and The Implications therein. Ergo, adults and older teenagers. I have no obligation to be the parent or police officer of children who shouldn’t be on this website anyway, and parents should always have the obligation to monitor what their kids watch. The type of people who read my work don’t care one bit whether or not a game is designed for “everybody” or for “mature adults”; and given how I used those terms so vaguely, they were worthless content indications at the outset. If you’re worried about a game’s content, read the publisher’s page yourself, and decide whether or not it’s right for you. I can’t make that decision for you. I’m not even going to try.

Changed “license” to “licence”. Despite this mission – critical bug being on the issue tracker since the very first day, we couldn’t find anybody with the qualifications to automatically change the spelling across an entire website, despite the tools being available since 1967. Fortunately some naïve intern came along and decided to manually change all fifty reviews to the correct spelling (and the ONLY correct spelling), and since then he has been promoted to Head Maintainer and given a share of the Patreon rewards money.

Changed e – mail address on about page to froghand@protonmail.ch. This change doesn’t really matter, because you FUCKS never e – mail me anyway, but seeing as I told all my friends and whores to use the Froghand address in order to simplify my inbox, I might as well tell you. Yes, You! The man with his hand down his pants!

Added footnote to about page, so people can continue to assume I’ve misinterpreted my own opinion and ignore the well – established rationality I’ve made specifically for this website. To wit, it just adds in the Kratzen Manifesto (which now reads like blatant advertising copy, which is fortunate, because that’s exactly what it is) and the What Doth Stars Mean article, which is still the benchmark for how I rate games, and requires no updates or justification even after the four months since its release.

Added rabbit.html. Finally, the real star of this update! Where would Kratzen have been without the very same feature the New Yorker called “…like staring into a cheesecloth – cum – Hemingway with a dash of Tesla all sprinkled in the James Bond signature blend, stirring in how well it shakes, and topped off with the same smarmy zeitgeist the trends of the time tread so far against”? Ever since Kratzen was born, I always knew it was missing something. I’m proud to announce, after the the holes in our souls had gone unshoveled, that they can now be made whole again, and we can finally enjoy Kratzen for what it was meant to be: the first and final word in free culture. Also, if anyone knows what the hell the New Yorker said, call me.

I originally made rabbit.html for The 10kB Art Gallery as an easter egg in response to the former index page of the Neocities user “Strata”. I paired it up with the previous “Bune” entry at 10kB, and considered a few times to have a similar pairing at Kratzen, though I only got around to it now because I didn’t know how to properly introduce the thing. But still, I like the picture, I like Zootopia, and I like seeing Judy Hopps’ cute little bunny twat. As for Strata, I’m sad to say my relationship with him broke down some months later; you see, it was never meant to be. He was a German, I was a Canadian, he liked Underworld, I was a racist… it just wouldn’t work out.

And now for the FAQs

Oh, okay so, despite me making a call for questions five days in advance, none of you ingrates decided to ask one of the wisest living men for advice on how he runs one of the wisest living websites on Earth, but no. That’s alright. Just make me regress into an empty husk of a man some more, would you? Well, that’s not fair. One of you bothered to take the time to ask me a question. It comes from the wonderful gentlekind known as — kva? Who the heck is kva? I always had the suspicion all my views were coming from robots, but now they’ve copped e – mails with their serial numbers, and it’ll be an uphill battle to make some human contact. The e – mail reads:

hello froge, why do you mostly review itch games? why not do more newgrounds games reviews, or check out gamejolt, or rmn, or mobile games, or maybe homebrew stuff? Great question! It only took six months in order to come up with one of the most basic questions one could ask about a games review site, but then it took us ten thousand years to get past the religion meme, so progress takes time. I sent you an e – mail back with a rushed draft of an answer, so I’ll just paste it here:

“HOLY SHIT A QUESTION. Apparently from the year 1976, as your message rendered as a monospace font with some very aggressive commas.

“The simplest answer, and I must make this simple as I’m racing the clock this morning, is how diversifying the platforms I’m active on brings complications for both me and my audience. Itch.io is currently the best place available to publish and find games, and having that level of professionalism, which is usually absent from other publishing platforms, is an assurance of quality for me and those audiences I pander to.

“When someone is forced to hop from website to website, platform to platform, it forces one to learn new layouts and new ways of navigating each website every time they show interest in a game, which hinders the main purpose of providing a download link: which is, downloading and playing the game. It’s even harder for yours truly, who is forced to have a public presence on Itch, and it would take some amount of time for me to have that same presence on other platforms, which isn’t cost – effective given how little of my views actually come from Itch.

“There’s also the issue of platforms; I exclusively focus on PC titles because I consider the PC to have the best combination of security, usability, and homogeneity, allowing anybody to download a game and feel like they can easily and safely use many of the titles I recommend. This is why homebrew games would be too niche of a suggestion: not everybody has the games consoles, not everybody has homebrewed the games consoles, and not everybody will spend the time and effort setting up the homebrewed game. It’s a downwards cascade of minorities, and I would be essentially writing to nobody.

“This is also why I only recommend free games, with some rare exceptions like ‘A Good Gardener’: accessibility and the demolition of artificial scarcity. Mobile games are manipulative in their very construction, designed to screw you out of as much money as they can, and I feel it’s a disservice to recommend any mobile games in such a blatantly coercive environment.

“These reasons are also why I avoid ‘indie’ titles for console games, outside of a few compilations as what you might see in ‘Three Months with Kratzen’. Consoles are designed explicitly to remove your rights as a customer and your freedoms as a computer user, but beyond that, are also expensive, and I don’t believe any game is worthy of buying the console that it’s being produced on and made artificially scarce for.

“The exception would have to be the 3DS, because it’s a brilliant piece of hardware, it’s stupidly easy to pirate games, and those games are also fun and with a lot of hidden gems to appreciate. Add in back – compatibility with the DS — gaming’s biggest and best library, and the ease of homebrewing it for great profit, and it’s probably the best games console I could ever recommend.

“Thanks for taking an interest in me, and I will publish a more complete answer later today.”

Joke’s on me though: that was the most complete answer I could give! I could have gone on about the difference between the New 3DS and the original 3DS, and how Nintendo made some very questionable decisions in making the New 3DS XL the only available 3DS system in North America, apparently seeing how Statesians are lardasses and need extra large consoles for their fat fingers to handle, making me import some hardware for a far greater price than Nintendo had any business charging for a baby box. But the New 3DS is, essentially, better than the 3DS in almost every way, and I’m happy to have it. That’s really what kva was asking, right?

Conclusion

Well, this article wasn’t very spectacular. There weren’t any flashing lights or live girls or nothing, and there was only one rabbit added to the entire website. There was nobody to see this, nobody to care, and nobody to see a man break down in the public arena. That last part didn’t happen yet, but trust me, keep checking back.

I think I can safely say this update was an unmitigated disaster, and I’ll be happy to change it due to universally negative user feedback — hahaha, you wish. I wonder what would happen if more websites took the Degenerates example and made all their websites right the first time? Everything I’ve ever done only needed one design in order to be exceptional, and any updates to the style are extraordinarily simple due to the minimalist philosophy I imbue every one of my projects with. Or if they don’t trust me, the Neopets example of having the same damn design since 2005. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Also, don’t break it, either. Looking at you, syphilitic apes working for YouTube.

That’s enough small talk for me to declare this article an failure. Yes, all of you can go home now. Oh, you’re in your homes? Then go somewhere else. Christ, it’s almost like you spend all day online or something.