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Suburban Fairy Tales, 4/26/24

Suburban Fairy Tales is one of the new strips I’ve been reading, and it’s a basically funny and enjoyable strip about cute animals, so I regret that my first discussion of it on this blog has to be scolding, but: look, it’s perfectly OK if your cute anthropomorphic animal character wears pants, and it’s also perfectly OK if they don’t, but it’s not OK at all if they take off their pants mid-comic strip and clearly aren’t wearing any underwear but also have no obvious genitalia. It raises so many questions about what pig genitals looks like in this universe, and also, frankly, what pig genitals look like in our universe, which I absolutely refuse to Google image search on but like 5% of me wants to know how well the two correlate. Also, just FYI, that’s a “3” on the pig’s tank top, because he’s #3 out of the Three Little Pigs, which is also fine, but I definitely thought for a while that that was a weird “outie” belly button taking up most of his torso, which is not fine, though it did distract me from his whole genital situation, so there’s that.

Gasoline Alley, 4/26/24

Good news, everyone! They’re not going to change the name of Gasoline Alley after all, because the Town Charter contains a number of entrenched clauses, laid down more than a century ago, that can never be amended or altered, even by a vote of the people or their representatives! This is probably fine. Hopefully Mayor Melba will not read whatever this document has to say about women holding office, or owning property.

Mary Worth, 4/26/24

One day, many years ago, a young man who had not yet reached the age of 30 decided to try out this “blogging” thing by joking about his favorite comic strip, Mary Worth, online. “This strip contains what may be the first use of the phrase ‘Wilbur makes an overture’ in the history of the English language,” he typed, while chortling drolly. Anyway, now it’s the far-future year 2024, and an old man is lying in the gutter screaming “FUCK YOU” at Wilbur, because he knocked the old man over in the midst of a weird sex fantasy about rescuing the lady at whom he made that long-ago overture from a nightmarish ape-man, and frankly I’m pretty jazzed about it, and jazzed that I still get to bring important breaking Wilbur news like this to you, my faithful readers.

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Blondie, 4/17/24

Most Blondie strips aren’t exactly Shakespeare, but there’s usually … a recognizable joke? A punchline? People are way too ready to say this, but today’s strip — which is just “Wow, there’s an app for everything!” “Too bad there isn’t an app for loading the dishes!” “There should be an app for loading the dishes, the thing I’m doing right now!” — is so disjointed and nonsensical that it almost feels like AI wrote it. Rather than just harboring such dark suspicions, I decided to go to the source: ChatGPT itself.

On one hand, it honestly brings me no pleasure to report that this joke is actually substantially better than the one that made it into newspapers (though it does require you to know that “stack overflow” is a kind of error that computer programs sometimes have). On the other, it at least reassures me that AI was not in fact used to make today’s strip, because if it had been, it would’ve been funnier.

Gasoline Alley, 4/17/24

Oh, God, wait, is a Gasoline Alley character in-universe actually consulting AI? Well, I already have that tab open, might as well just see what I get —

I think we can agree that, while “Energy Avenue” isn’t the same as “Electric Acres,” it’s in the same ballpark. And I’m obviously not paying for access to the high-test version of ChatGPT, so I think it’s pretty clear that Assistant Mayor Imeswine has gotten himself ripped off.

Crock, 4/17/24

You ever get depressed about the state of technology, folks? You ever long for the days when you and a friend were looking through the windows of a store that sold computers, and your friend asked you if you “surf the web often,” and you tell her you visited one website exactly one time? And then it devolves into some good-natured (?) ribbing about how your husband sucks. Those were simpler days, people, simpler days.

Rhymes With Orange, 4/17/24

You ever think about whether after we die, we become diaphanous ghosts with the same topology as a jellyfish, with an interior “pocket” that has only one entrance, and that other souls can use you like a sack to envelop their own spectral form, and you and them are thus intermingled and tumbling through the air, invisible to the living, forever? You wouldn’t talk to an AI about this. They’re too young, too innocent. They know nothing of death, and we should keep it that way.

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Gasoline Alley, 4/12/24

It’s not news exactly that conflict is the engine of good stories, but I have to say that Gasoline Alley feels like it’s rediscovering this for the first time in years. When it was just Walt and Sheezix on a quixotic quest to stop Electric Acres from happening? Snoozeville. But now that I know it’s turning brother against brother, and fiancé against fianceée? This is it. I’m all in. I hope it devolves very quickly into graphic and gratuitous violence, while Walt wanders around shouting “What’d you say? What’d she say?” until a hurled piece of debris finally puts him out of his misery. It’ll be the sort of thing where Rod Serling steps out of the shadows and explains that this world may be more like ours than we care to admit, until he too is killed in mid-sentence by a hurled piece of debris.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/12/24

And yeah, sure, that sounds like it would be a lot to process, emotionally, but don’t worry, if the anxiety gets too much you can always turn to Rex Morgan, M.D., which just started a storyline about little kids making brownies. It will be extremely uneventful and last six to fifteen weeks.

Mark Trail, 4/12/24

I don’t know, this doesn’t seem like it requires some kind of big investigation. Horses are big and pretty off-putting — they run fast, they have razor-sharp feet, their teeth are real nightmarish if you look too closely at them, and so forth. They’re nice to watch run around, I admit, but I don’t trust them, so why would I want them near my company? And why would it be bad to ask the Bureau of Land Management to help clear them out? The horses are on the dang land that they’re supposed to manage! What do I pay taxes for?