Mostly AI Sunday
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Blondie, 7/12/26
Back in early 2024, Dithers had to regretfully report that DithersCo wasn’t using AI tools to boost productivity, with his employees mostly using their computers to play dumb and possibly scammy games on Facebook. In the subsequent months, it appears that the company has adopted AI — but, sadly, primarily as an automated toady for the boss, who has become the latest CEO to succumb to AI psychosis. Ironically, Dagwood and his coworkers are immune, since they refuse to engage with their devices on any level deeper than “Renegade-Rhino-Rummy.”
Zits, 7/12/26
I hadn’t mentioned it here, but earlier this year Zits went into reruns on weekdays and is now only doing new strips on Sundays. But that doesn’t mean the strip is shying away from storylines relevant to today’s teens, including real dark ones like “Jeremy gets dumped for a computer.”
Mary Worth, 7/12/26
Man, I didn’t think you could beat “Wilbur Weston thinks I’m a druggie loser so I might as well do drugs” for sheer patheticness, but then today Mary Worth hit us with “I’m going to flush these perfectly good drugs that probably cost me a week’s worth of pay from my minimum wage job down the toilet so I can live up to the version of me that Dawn Weston believes in,” respect. It’s amazing to think about how much more embarrassing this is than if he had just put “local bald guy thinks im losser should i do drugs yes or no” into ChatGPT or Yahoo! Answers or whatever.
43 replies to “Mostly AI Sunday”
Oh come on, Tommy. You’re a “Former Felon Failure.” Fool!
Dothers then schooled Dagwood in Renegade Rhino Rummy, as ChatCEO cheered him on and belittled Dagwood’s penis size. Dagwood just CAN’T get a hold on Wednesdays!
If Rudyard Kipling had anything to say about it, whoever designed that bathroom in 1987 was clearly doing a lot of words.
My hatred of the Zits kid is well-trod, but I’m pretty sure his girlfriend LONG knew of the existence of cucumbers, and thus already did not need him.
MW:
“Just Maryed.”
— Traditional description given to people who have recently been subjected to Mary Worth’s bland aphotisms
Zits-“Eh. The popcorn trick just isn’t good when it’s just me.”
MW-“Wiblur, does restraining orders mean nothing to you,” Mary says.
MW:
“Alas, poor Bennie — I knew it, ingrate Reno, an upper of infinite zest, of most excellent fancy!”
MW: Welp, THAT was easy! Why can’t all addicts just do what Tommy does? Just think of a bland woman and then toss their drugs in the toilet! Then when the toilet backs up and floods they think ‘man, I wish I was high right now so I wouldn’t have to deal with this mess!’
RMMD: Wow, Unca Renimmy has had a *spectacular* recovery from his horrendous car accident that left him in a full body cast. He’s even healed the gap in his front teeth. I remember a time when it put Terry Thomas (RIP) to shame!
CS & S4th: Hey, you got your Ces in my Batiuk! Well, YOU got your Batiuk in my Ces!
[From late yesterthread]
@Chris Trey: The thing to keep in mind when Ces pulls his ‘unstuck in time’ shtick is that when it’s all over there is always a convenient lack of evidence that any actual time travel took place.
Just assume that they are currently sitting at a rest stop next to their normal 2026 rentals and passersby are giving them a wide berth and contemplating calling the Highway Patrol to check on the group babbling about being trapped in 1986.
@Anonymous: Woops, hit the button too soon. That last post was mine!
RMMD – Oh no, don’t start with the talking in unison crap like those Aussie sisters
Blondie:
I learned from math class that if you’re trying to understand what appears to be some kind of interconnectedness among things that’s being depicted, but can’t, it can sometimes be useful to draw Venn diagrams. So I tried that with today’s atrip, and, no luck.
MW: Tommy in his sober rage bursts into the Weston apartment. Points at Wilbur and Dawn and yells; “One of you owes me a hundred dollars!”
MW: At first glance, I thought that Wilbur’s pensive pose meant that maybe he regretted being such a hypocritical schmuck. I’m so silly.
RMMD: ” The bane of my existence” is a phrase we don’t hear often enough. Especially in prison.
MW:
Tommy’s steely resolve makes him flush with success.
MW:
“Turn on, tune in, drop out, plop!”
-‘ Dr. Timothy Leary
“Maybe Mary can offer some advice” is stitched into samplers that Mary gives out as Christmas presents.
Rudyard Kipling warns us that reading Mary Worth is a severely powerful sedative, except when it features Wilbur and functions as an emetic.
Tommy’s internal monologue kinda scans and has some assonance too.
I’m a former felon loser
a druggie without a future
if Dawn’s dad thinks I’m a hopeless addict
I may as well play the part.
Blondie: The saddest thig about this strip is that Mr Dithers has been conned into buying some kind of premium executive chatbot to praise him when obviously the basic model will do exactly the same thing. Actually, after reading that output, probably better!
Zits: I’m guessing that the original version of this strip had an extra couple of panels where Jeremy’s girlfriend asked her chatbot to order some kind of remoted controlled adult toy, before the editor stepped in. “Just make the final panel bigger. I don’t need that kinda headache…”
MW: Boy, it’s true what Rudyard Kipling definitely didn’t say: “Words are the most powerful drug used by humankind”. Especially powerful words like “If you want to stay clean and sober…you will!”. Profound stuff. To hell with 12 steps, just print that on business cards and hand them out at the methadone clinic.
If Dawn Weston showed up in my thought-bubbles I’d tear out my temporal lobe.
I could believe that Zits would find a reasonably satirical angle on AI (in China, women are even hiring people – usually other women! – to go on dates acting as their AI boyfriend), but Blondie? Blondie figured out that AI’s popularity comes in large part from its relentless optimisation towards flattery and obsequiousness, which is especially appealing to the rich and powerful who are used to this behaviour? Gotta be humiliating for anyone who hasn’t figured that out yet, that Blondie understands modern technological society better than you.
MW At least this answers how Wilbur (helpfully reminding us that he can’t even figure out how to talk seriously with his adult daughter and needs advice) keeps a *lucrative* job as an *advice columnist* – this world is inhabited by people who *really* only need the cheesiest reminder of a goal to gain the willpower necessary to face down temptation.
I don’t know what kind of brain-damage plague must have swept over the globe, but at least it’s no weirder than the must-see-roots-country infection in RMMD-Earth
Blondie: ChatCEO is secretly the creation of a worker collective aiming to overthrow the capitalist system’s overlords. Soon, the residents of C-suites nationwide will be trapped at their shrine-like desks, hopelessly addicted, while the proletariat will turn the companies into forces for good. Next step, ChatStock, aimed at private equity investors.
Have you tried Claude? ChatGPT is positively human-adjacent compared to Claude.
MW — “Maybe Mary can offer some advice.” And so as one addict overcomes his urge and flushes the temptation away, another stares at himself in a mirror and contemplates using. This time will be different, he thinks. This time I will just use her for this one problem, and then it’s over.
MW: On the bright side, wasting the money on drugs may make Tommy stop next time and think, “What would literally anyone other than Wilbur Weston say about this?”
Blondie: There’s the germ for an idea of a techno-thriller: The AI tools that are inducing “AI psychosis” are PSYOPS weapons meant to destroy both the managerial skills of America’s CEOs and any remaining shreds of worker morale. You’d have to place it in an alternate universe where those things still existed, of course.
Mary Worth Mashup: What if we delete Wilbur from the final panel?
Pluggers Mashup: I think this caption is more accurate.
MW – Don’t bother Mary right now, Wilbur. She’s busy writing a sternly-worded memo about the expensive damage caused by flushing plastic bags down the Charterstone toilets.
Zits – She still needs you, Jeremy. Who do you think is paying for all that stuff?
Don Abundio, translated:
“After you chewed out that waiter, he sure brought our salads in a hurry”
“That’s how it works!”
“What kind of lettuce is this?”
You’re a Plugger if it’s actually so long since you’ve been outside that you haven’t noticed that firefly populations have collapsed.
MW: Tommy hallucinates a miniature Dawn lecturing him from inside his head. He throws the rest of his drugs into the toilet.
Blondie: Now that Blondie understands the real danger of chatbots is their tendency to flatter the user and reinforce their pre-existing beliefs regardless of how false or harmful they are, the AI bubble will probably burst any day now.
MW: I guess basing your self-perception on what Dawn Weston thinks of you is slightly better than basing it on what Wilbur Weston thinks of you, but the distance between the two is so infinitesimal as to be measurable only on an atomic force microscope.
Wouldn’t it be great if Mary’s advice were along the lines of “Mind your own damn business”?
MW: A foggy brained Mary receives and replies to Wilbur’s message about drugs at three in the morning and thinks he’s looking to score.
“Try that guy Reno who hangs by the pawn shop. Good night.”
Today’s Blondie and Doonesbury are eerily similar.
JP: I’ve got to hand it to the artist in that throwaway panel. Most cartoonists depict food as shapeless lumps whose color (usually) resembles that of food. JP went the extra mile adding all the details…but it still kind of looks like Ronnie barfed all over the plate, probably from listening to all the crap Neddy spews out.
S4th: Man, what a pinhead on Sally’s shoulders in that first (non-throwaway) panel.
9CL: Yeah, I’ll juast stick with Watterson’s Stupendous Man. At least that was funny.
BB: I know a lot of our elected officials (typically the one who advocate for war) weaseled out of the draft in the ’70s, but Lt. Fuzz is an interesting antithesis to that. How in the world did this wuss survive basic training and make it all the way to Lieutenant?
MW: Saved by the power of (Dawn’s) friendship.
Hi and Lois – Comics Kingdom, The Crappiest Place on Earth™.
Well it’s about time Wilbur got Mary’s advice on how to stop his Mayonaise addiction
Wilbur offering up his daughter as a sacrificial meddle-ee brings to mind the old joke about two people being chased by a bear. “I don’t have to be faster than the bear, I just have to be faster than you”. As long as he keeps the bear fed, she won’t go after him.
Zits – Sara tells Jeremy
I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours,
Say things you can’t understand.
I can love me better than you can.
MW – The ghost of Stellan’s gettin’ high tonight!