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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/29/24

No. Sorry. Call me a coastal flatlander elitist if you must, but I do not buy today’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith on any level. First of all, Hootin’ Holler’s access to mass media is limited to the radio and Parson Tuttle’s TV set; there would simply not be any local demand for the superhero franchise characters who make up the bulk of store-bought Halloween costumes, and Silas, the only local storekeeper, would certainly not bother to stock them. And you’re trying to tell me that Jughaid would actually enjoy the idea of a costume that by its very nature transforms mocking laughter into chuckles of approval? Utter nonsense. I’m sorry, but nobody in this blighted community is operating on that level of semiotic sophistication.

Gasoline Alley, 10/29/24

The history of humankind’s quest to create thinking machines has repeatedly produced surprises, where we discover that the capabilities that we bundle together as “intelligence” are separable, and some of the ones that we previously thought of as “advanced” are easier to implement via computers than ones we thought of as “basic.” In the 20th century, for instance, we wrote programs that could perform complex mathematics and achieve grandmaster level in chess, but the ability to operate robotic legs or process simple visual input proved impossible on the hardware at the time. Today, we have so-called “AIs” whose ability to produce fully fluent speech in human languages has outpaced its ability to tell us anything useful or real, with chatbots like ChatGPT cheerfully providing bullshit answers and made-up references that nevertheless sound exactly like a person wrote them. What I’m trying to say is that, since Google’s Gemini AI told people to eat glue and ChatGPT got lawyers fined by a judge, I find it fully believable that Arty would tell these little children that they don’t have to wear a seatbelt, right before he throws a switch and accelerates so fast that he smears them all over the inside of the saucer, but I don’t think he’d use the weird, clunky phrase “You’ve been watching too many TV and sci-fi movies!” in the process.

Family Circus, 10/29/24

Honestly can’t believe Big Daddy Keane is so happy to be on the receiving end of this kind of adoration from Jeffy, who is objectively his worst child by every measure. If he could see the look of withering disgust Billy is dishing out right now, he’d be brought back down to earth right quick.

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Shoe, 10/19/24

To be sure, the human heart is a mystery, and nobody can say why anyone does anything, really, but that hasn’t stopped me from wondering why exactly Shoe brought back Muffy Hollandaise, a beloved (?) character from the ’80s or maybe the ’90s, couldn’t really tell you for sure but it’s been a long time, trust me. Anyway, since like 60% of Shoe strips are just characters saying generic gags to one another that don’t really pertain to them as distinct individuals, maybe the team decided they needed one more recurring character shape to be one of the gag-sayers, just to mix things up further. And, if that gag-saying character shape was a sexy bird-woman with a big juicy ass (as amply demonstrated in panel two), who’s going to complain? Certainly not all you perverts who read my website, that’s for sure.

Gasoline Alley, 10/19/24

Man, I kind of love how Ida Noe is losing it as she gets eclipsed by this fuckin’ robot. Arty’s all like, “Let’s go to space! I’m going to help you cheat in school,” and Ida Noe, who is literally a doll animated by some kind of evil spirit from the depths of hell, has to say “Uh, uh, let’s not be hasty! Have you talked to your parents? You don’t want them to worry!”

Family Circus, 10/19/24

I really enjoy how Billy is physically restraining Jeffy here. “No, you don’t understand, he’s grilling. It’s … too dangerous.”

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The Phantom, 10/16/24

The Avarice AI’s suicide attempt was actually a murder-suicide attempt, but it failed in both respects ignominiously, so now the poor robot has to sit there and listen to further lecturing from the Ghost Who Lectures, this time about how its declaration yesterday that it was “the unified sovereign of this planetary body” was wrong, since it thinks it’s on the moon, since the moon isn’t a planet. Far be it for me to chastise a guy for pausing his violent battle against a novel machine intelligence in order to smugly establish that he’s technically correct, the best kind of correct, but if you do that, you have to actually be technically correct, and I regret to report that the big purple guy is, in this case, not. In astronomy, a “planetary body” is an alternate term for a planetary mass object, which is defined as any body large enough to achieve achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (to hold together as a sphere or something close to it, in other words), but not large enough to sustain fusion like a star would. Plenty of objects in our solar system meet this definition, including a whole suite of natural satellites, of which our moon is one. So the score is now Avarice 1, The Phantom … well, several higher than 1, and we know he’s going to win eventually, but we gotta give this robot this one, it deserves it.

Gasoline Alley, 10/16/24

Ida Noe the evil magic doll has already tried to kill these children once, by taking them back in time to the horrors of the Civil War, but has now realized that it would be much more efficient to simply transport them beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will quickly asphyxiate.