I'll have to look into this new section of the website and see about adding that to the feed.
[0]: https://sphars.github.io/rss-feeds/feeds/the_far_side/feed.x...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Harmontown/comments/dsfqh7/the_far_...
https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
Not to mention palæontology!
https://unapologeticnerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/thag...
Looks at comic, (shrugs) it's weird but not funny in any way. Reads caption
"Art assignment: Paint a house on a hillside overlooking a bay or valley. Stay loose; play with color. Try to capture a mood. Think of something to add."
Literal spit take and laugh. Yep he still has the touch.
The caption reads like an AI prompt. The last instruction, "think of something to add" resulted in the AI adding a pterodactyl on the house, dropping bird poop on it. Probably not what the prompter meant, but technically correct.
When Meat Loaf died, I commented "His name was Robert Paulsen" (you know, because in death membersbof project mayhem do have names, his name was Robert Paulsen". Someone commented something to the effect of no it wasn't, meat loaf wasn't his real name it was Marvin Aday, and then someone else commented to their comment "It's literally a fucking line from the movie".
I dont know why these layers of weirdness delight me so, but they do.
Thanks for the pterodactyl shit commentary folks.
Reddit has been declining for a long time and even more so the way the algorithm works with the Front Page. Politics and activism there is super amplified
At least, that's how he presented it himself.
It’s a slightly odd, somewhat lonely feeling to see something so universally beloved and popular and feel nothing.
School for the Gifted
Dog Translator
It was an amazing therapy.
https://garfieldminusgarfield.net
https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/tagged/garfield%20minus%20...
Peter Arno is also another good ink painting cartoonist, although his subject matter has generally aged much more poorly…
Generally, I agree with you. But I do remember coming across Parking Lot Is Full one night and having to stifle my laughing so I didn't wake up my wife who was sleeping next to me while I was reading it.
Specifically on the London underground (or your local public transport) during morning rush hour, with a hangover. It's hard not to laugh out loud.
Still worth reading if you're a scruffy yank?
VIZ is crass, puerile in the extreme, casually (insert your red line here)-ist on many levels, and often repetitive. It uses common slang words, so somewhat culturally revealing. It's 'wrong' on many levels but done with style, albeit sometimes a repugnant style - So you inwardly 'gasp' in revulsion but outwardly stifle a giggle.
The fake small ads are often very very funny.
Lastly, like so many gags that use the 'shock' effect, the humour doesn't last forever; take a look at an early one on Archive...
The test:
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/390/the-chase
If given the choice, I would have the Viking ship with a kittens-in-a-basket flag.
Marry me.
I laughed out loud multiple times clicking on links in this very thread, reading comics I've read dozens (and dozens) of times before.
Don't feel that way. I can totally understand why some people wouldn't "get" (or I'd put it "appreciate") The Far Side. It's a very particular kind of humor, and it's fine that it's "not everyone's cup of tea". I, for example, absolutely loathe poetry. It's like the cilantro of literature of me, and I don't have the gene that makes it not taste like soap. ... Who cares!?!
I have this "joke" that I dearly love, that I've never met anyone who gets it. It is a bad joke, largely because nobody gets it. It doesn't imply something in me or something lacking in ... everyone else. Humor is just what you find in it. It is: "Well, I defended my thesis in comparative literature, but it seems like he's got a pretty healthy pulse to me..."
Definitely sounds like the kind of joke I'd like if I understood it.
"Is there a doctor on this plane???"
"Well yes, but I defended my thesis in comparative literature..."
Didn't come anywhere close to getting it on my own though!
And, if you want and if the Fates allow, you may have my favourite, completely unappreciated joke:
"A time traveller!" [wait a few seconds] "Knock knock."
“I can’t stand sitting, so I need a hand standing.”
Nobody ever finds that amusing but it kills me every time.
There is a famous one of 2 explorers in the jungle and the man is saying "Holy moly Loretta, not only is it still there, but look what it did to the end of my stick !"
So not really funny unless you can recall (or imagine) a moment when you had a bug on you and you ask someone to brush it off and you have that minute of like, did you get it or is it still there ? If that has actually happened to you, its a hilarious cartoon.
That said, you might not be as alone as you think. The far side has been the butt of many bits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjfkynJ4hbI
The humor "is" very weird, the normal flow is a strange image that is not funny and a simple caption that is also not funny. but coupled together there is something funny about the absurd connection that is made. sort of like a caption meme with better drawing. And honestly I think there are a lot of them that we just don't "get", too strange for comprehension, and we find this funny as well.
I don't think the joke itself is a bad idea. I remember The Simpsons doing the room full of monkeys on typewriters where one comes up with "it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times" which in a way is a similar joke, right? i.e. Not a good result, but funny because it's still much more than you'd ever expect in reality.
It is the infinite monkey theorem from the late 19th and early 20th century.
There's an additional layer to the Simpsons joke, with Burns dismissing what's really an incredible result (almost the opening line from A Tale of Two Cities) as useless just because of one small error. The Cow Tools equivalent might a farmer holding the saw, saying "This isn't even sharp."
Given that the monkey is sitting there smoking a cigarette, clearly stressed out, chained to the typewriter, I wonder if there's also a third or fourth layer to the Simpsons joke where the monkey represents the scriptwriter and Burns represents Fox. The equivalent for Cow Tools would be, er, Cow Comics, and it's just XKCD art quality comics on the Cow's table, and the farmer complains that the drawings aren't very good.
I think it's similar to the Cow Tools panel.
Specifically, the Far Side panel plays on the idea of the fact that cows would have a cow-centric view of the world and would likely develop tools that were alien to us. The other part of the 'joke' is that cows don't build tools (afaik). edit: I think the "3rd" part of the joke is that the tools look like shit, which is what you'd expect from even the most talented cows.
The humor of the space alien joke is similar in that it's pointing out the difficulty that everyone has in understanding how others (other people, other species, etc.) view and describe the world.
I don't, because I'm from the UK...
excellent meta-joke.
>like the proverbial tiger and its stripes, I’m pretty much stuck with my sense of humor. Aren’t we all?
https://youtu.be/LjfkynJ4hbI?si=rMrpX7VChQMX23_I
(Obviously not the only one if not getting Far Side comics made the Simpsons!)
Yay humans.
The series finale is one of the greatest T.V. finales of all time.
I think you're dramatically underestimating how big it was during its run.
Periodically, I'll go through one of Larson's cartoon books, laughing all the way. It's like housecleaning for my brain - afterwards everything is spic-and-span and in it's proper place.
The first Gary Larson cartoon I ever saw was "Freeze...OK now...who's the brains in this outfit?". When I saw it I had to see more:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c4/c4/75/c4c475c0a2fdc310a34c20722...
Joe Sarno: So, you the brains of this outfit, or is he? Longbaugh: Tell ya the truth, I don't think this is a brains kind of operation.
This one made me laugh out loud for the first time in a while: https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/387/house-on-hillside He's still got it!
EDIT: Ahh, it's very, very small. I was excited by the "387" in the slug, but that seems to be meaningless (?). There's 8 total comics in no clear order, and the caption system is completely broken (it says they were all posted this past Wednesday) :(
…but if you spend any time around artists it’s evident that the iPad/Pencil/Procreate trio is one of the most significant leaps in consumer tech for visual artists of the last decade.
[0] he never said that any and all styluses are bad - he said that 1) cell phones that 2) you can only interact with by using a stylus (not an uncommon paradigm back in 2007) were bad
I’m not much of a digital artist and views in this space probably vary wildly.. but if I steel man the pro iPad case I think it’s a few things 1. Screen quality. iPads look better than cintiq bc the display in the iPad is actually pretty awesome. Like recommended by the color nerds for being the best color you can get for the price, 2. Pen distance on iPad your pen is closer to the actual pixels. The cintiq had more space between the screen and the surface, feels like you draw above the page a little. 3. Biggest of all is portability. Artists love desks but they also love drawing everywhere all the time. iPad is just better at this because it’s designed as a tablet totally. The pre-apple pencil Wacom stuff existed as tablets but from what I remember was mostly just windows laptops. So software wasn’t built for touch and wanted keyboards and stuff. Responsive multitouch and the os(and drawing apps) built to integrate it tightly is a level of polish Wacom couldn’t do as just a pen input system. 4. Cost cintiqs always cost a ton and a lot of them don’t even have the computer part, iPads aren’t cheap but are way more accessible.
Maybe Wacom has caught up with newer offerings? it’s been a while since I looked at their stuff. There are also totally reasons why you’d wanna go that route for some digital pen stuff (eg high end digital sculpture or texture painting type stuff that really needs the power and integration you can get from a desktop and desktop os)
- hardware quality wise, already the 1st gen Apple Pencil had the specs of the higher end tablets (12-bit pressure sensitivity, orientation, azimuth, all in a sleek package)
- you can use your iPad for a bunch of other stuff too, and it's super portable - whereas for the high end tethered drawing tablets, they're pretty single purpose, and they take up a bunch of space on your desk. This all matters to broke artists living in dorm rooms/tiny apartments.
- the Procreate team designed a tool that was really focused on the digital drawing experience and managed to make a high quality, affordable product out of it. The standard for digital drawing on those tethered tablets is mostly Photoshop, which a) is meant for tons of stuff beyond drawing, making it quite complex and b) has 4 decades of interface cruft piled up at this point.
Honestly yeah, there truly are pre/post iPad+Pencil eras in consumer tech for anyone doing work that involves hand illustration/sketching.
[0] whereas their competitors struggle to sell low numbers of units at terrible margins
I think it's just a question of definition. The Apple pencil was introduced in 2016, since then about 500.000.000 iPads have been sold. If you compare that with the number of Thinkpad yogas or HP elite book 2760ps it's possible to come the conclusion that they are relatively less successful. But of course they can be "absolutely successful" depending on your definition.
Love that he took the time to honor Ms. Goodall one more time. What a class act.
https://www.kensandersbooks.com/pages/books/59859/gahan-wils...
I didn't do well in high school, generally speaking, I skipped a lot and had little appetite for doing homework. But I did really well in his class. The Far Side is fucking funny.
After we ordered our entrees the waiter left one of those coloring labyrinths. Well, I couldn't tell at the start of the sketch that it resembled a mandala.
As a comic book artist, his studies in a parapsychology were in the practice of comic strips.
Gary's work reminds me of that afternoon.
Nice cartoon for Jane Goodall!
