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Sam and Silo, 10/22/22

Now, I’ve never claimed on here to be “hip” or “young” or “with it” or “not a 48-year-old comics blogger,” but I spend a certain amount of energy keeping tabs on matters linguistic, and I’ve been informed that the young people today use the word “talking” to cover a broad spectrum of the romantic experience, ranging from “exchanging flirtatious texts/DMs” to “having sex one another without any discussion of or agreement about exclusivity.” So this 1990s rerun of Sam and Silo is almost on the cutting edge! But then they go and ruin it in the last panel, because I’ve also been informed that leaving a voice mail is literally the worst thing you can do to a young person. Why would you murder this poor woman like this, Silo? Why you would you commit such a heinous deed?

Gil Thorp, 10/22/22

Oh no! Looks like Gil’s going to have to guide his kids through a mass shooting drill … en français! Will he have the élan to pull it off?

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Sam and Silo, 9/9/22

In their book Engineering Happiness, economists Rakesh Sarin and Manel Baucells define the “fundamental question” of wellbeing as Happiness = Reality – Expectations. Here, Sam and Silo illustrate the special case when you can’t do the math.

Six Chix, 9/9/22

This strip about a mess is the tidiest artwork we’ve seen in Six Chix all week.

Dick Tracy, 9/9/22

Dick Tracy babies enter the world under a cloud of schtick. “Attitude” here was named for Eddie Tude, a rando pizza delivery driver who drove mom Gertie to the maternity hospital in 2011. We’re informed he (Attitude) is ugly, but never see his face. He has an owl pet/mimic/familiar. He throws things at his dad B.O., though without enough force to actually kill the annoying old coot. He is a disappointment to Dick Tracy fans in every possible way.

Sally Forth, 9/9/22

Sally, you’re in H.R. You’ll be plenty busy once the restructuring gets rolling, followed by plenty of time off.

Well, time to pack things up around here and wipe the bourbon off the console for Josh’s triumphant return. Thanks for a delightful time!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Mary Worth, 3/4/22

Here’s a weird thing that happens sometimes in Our Dumb Dystopia: people will make storefronts on Amazon even though they don’t have anything to sell. Instead, they set bots up to find other stores that actually have things to sell, create listings for the same items the other stores sell, mark up the price by a dollar or two, and then use SEO trickery to try to make their store a higher ranking search result than the real one. When someone tries to buy an item from their store, they just order from the real store, who does all the work, and they pocket the difference, having done nothing. This can sometimes produce truly bizarre results, like when the bots that do this for two fake stores lock onto each other, each assuming the other is real, and each keeps raising its price to be just a little higher than the other, until someone notices that soap or toothbrushes are selling for more than a million dollars. I’m bringing this up because today’s Mary Worth shows what would happen in a similar situation, except instead of two Amazon storefronts, we have two robots who have been programmed to attempt to convince a real life human to have sex with them. “But not for initiating a ‘fling’ with you!” and “go sit in the corner, Cal!” give off very strong “we showed this AI 10,000 hours of people flirting and this is what it came up with” vibes, except it was more like 20 hours, tops.

Sam and Silo, 3/4/22

The internal worlds of newspaper comic strips are extremely resistant to change, which makes them great little time capsules of social mores that were quite different not that long ago and have changed in ways most of us don’t think much about. Just as Blondie still takes place in a world where suburbanites let their dogs roam freely at night, Sam and Silo in whatever year this rerun is from failed to move up into the world where most people’s housecats would be fixed as a matter of course. Because this cat? This cat fucks, everybody. He fucks a lot.

Gasoline Alley, 3/4/22

GASOLINE ALLEY ADMITS IT: LITERALLY ANYTHING ON TV OR IN THE MOVIES IS MORE EXCITING AND FUN THAN GASOLINE ALLEY