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Blondie, 6/5/24

The number one thing that makes me feel like an old person is my stiff right knee and hip, but number two, coming pretty close behind, is the fact that so many things, ranging from thoughtful essays to instruction manuals, that 10 years ago would’ve been written out as text now only exist in the form of YouTube videos. I don’t want to watch a video! I read very quickly and find videos that mostly consist of someone just talking to be annoying! Often I am in public and do not want to annoy everyone around me! Sometimes they’re good for real how-to instructional stuff but more often than not a written essay with some pictures would be just as good if not better and also would be easier to search through quickly to find the relevant bits. Anyway, my point is that I read today’s Blondie and immediately thought, “Finally, Blondie accurately depicts what young people are like for once — they all think you should learn everything from YouTube and it fucking sucks,” but then I instantly recoiled in horror. Is this what I’ve become? Someone who cheers when Blondie sticks it to the kids these days? My feeling of deep shame almost, but not quite, wiped all thoughts of how much I hate most internet video from my mind.

Intelligent Life, 6/5/24

I guess I haven’t talked about what Intelligent Life’s whole deal is in the few times I’ve posted it here, so: it’s whole deal is that it’s about a number of unpleasant people who are obsessed with “nerd” franchises (i.e., most of modern film and TV entertainment) in the most boring way possible. Anyway, today’s strip pissed me off because, yes, Meta’s use of user content for its dumb AI offerings is bad, and Emperor Palpatine is bad, but Emperor Palpatine never did anything like the real stuff Meta is doing that they’re talking about here. I saw those movies. He mostly did evil space wizard stuff and evil space politics stuff. He barely ever even used computers! Can we please be serious here.

Family Circus, 6/5/24

Without telling his wife, Big Daddy Keane has been taking Billy to one of those barbershops that hasn’t “gone woke” and starting obeying Big Government’s oppressive laws against trepanation, in an attempt reduce the internal pressure responsible for his eldest son’s grotesquely shaped head. The treatments are unpleasant, but they’re starting to show results!

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Slylock Fox, 6/4/24

I assume that the gentleman who’s been tied up is the victim here, some solid citizen who was simply walking around with burlap sacks full of cash, as one does, before being kidnapped by this nefarious pair of thieves. Now he’s watching the fisticuffs perpetrated by his rescuers, and we may note that in both versions of the panel, he looks on not with glee or even relief but with what appears to be wary trepidation. Sure, getting forcibly tied up, presumably under the threat of bodily harm, was harrowing, but he takes no pleasure in this orgy of retributive violence either, and seems unsure whether these costumed vigilantes, operating as they do outside the law, truly have his best interests in mind. And what about the fact that each opposing dyad includes one human and one animal who walks on hind legs and seems to have achieved human-scale intelligence? What’s that about, and what’s it going to lead to? Probably nowhere good!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/4/24

Shocking development: our pair of budding tween comedians are not regarded as the coolest kids in school despite their encyclopedic knowledge of vaudeville, and were in fact cruelly bullied last week! But don’t worry, they defeated their bully in the marketplace of ideas, and now in the aftermath of that encounter are reflecting on the fact that their misguided would-be tormentor is merely caught in a cycle of psychic violence that hopefully they can all break out of together. More on this story as developments warrant, or as they don’t warrant, if it’s on a slow day.

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Marvin, 6/3/24

The very first “real job” I ever had, after I quit grad school, way back in the long past and yet futuristic sounding year of 1999, was as a copy editor for a series of tech-focused websites, none of which exist any longer. This happened more or less accidentally — the recruiter at the agency I was temping for at the time mentioned that one of the sites this company put out was called “Lie-nux World,” and one my grad school buddies had been a Linux nerd so I knew enough to correct her pronunciation, and her eyes lit up — and that was the launching point for the non-comedy-writing aspects of my subsequent career, which, to be straight with you all, represent a significant majority of my lifetime earnings to date. Anyway, though I haven’t formally held the “copy editor” title in years, I still identify very strongly with the role, as working in it got me up to speed with tech publishing and editorial processes in general. That’s why I can say without hesitation or exaggeration that, thanks to the publication of this Marvin strip where we learn what Marvin’s terrible father does for a living, this is worst day of my entire life.

Hi and Lois, 6/3/24

I like how you can tell by everybody’s facial expression that nobody finds this cute. “Oh, she wants to interrupt our precious TV time just to experience a moment of human affection? Well, too bad! She can cry herself to sleep like the rest of us!”

Alice, 6/3/24

Alice has been kidnapped by aliens and has chased after her parrot but I gotta say this is the most not OK she’s ever been. The ducks aren’t talking about you, babe! Their intellects are cool and unsympathetic, but they do not assess your appearance against human standards!