Braces imminent, and Kairos meme: comic strips
It just hit me the other day that O is getting his braces put on THIS WEEK. We've stocked up on apple sauce and Odwalla juices and yogurt, and will buy ice cream and chocolate pudding as needed. Any last minute suggestions/words of warning? (I never wore braces myself, because i refused, and l had Invisalign, which come off for eating and so don't have the same constraints.) I'm worried about him not getting enough to eat, being that he's a teenage boy and already very thin (as ani_mama very aptly put it about her son, hugging him is like hugging Groot...), and also messing up the braces every other day, given his track record with anything not made of, like, cement and cast iron.
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More Kairos meme (the last for a while, probably, as I've caught up and these are getting (duh) longer.
Eleven favorite comic strips
Like perpetual, I'm combining webcomics and newspaper comics in a single category, which actually makes sense, as at least one of these I have encountered in both forms. So there!
11. Hark a Vagrant -- Kate Beaton's comics tend to be hit-or-miss for me, and her art style is actually mostly a miss, but the jokes that land for me are REALLY funny and memorable. The literature geekery ones tend to be my favorites:
10. Baby Blues -- OK, so this one is a bit of an outlier compared to the general nerdery/gekery of the rest. But I was mostly reading it in the days of my train commute when people still read newspapers on the train and I didn't have a Kindle, so I'd pick up the Datebook section of the Chronicle whenever I could find one, and read the funny pages. Besides the two other newspaper comics that are higher ranked on this list, Baby Blues was the other one that would almost always draw a smile from me -- especially in the days when the rodents were toddlers themselves. The bossy older girl, even-keeled but rambunctious younger boy dynamic especially appealed (look, I can't help it that my children have comic strip-conforming personalities. I encouraged L to play with cars and O with dolls!) Anyway, I find it to be a strip that amusing and heartwarming without being overly corny. (And I know
aome shares my fondness for it :)
(I don't really have favorite strips for this one, so these are just the first couple to come up that made me smile and/or sigh in recognition.)
9. DM of the Rings -- So, what happens when you combine something I adore (LotR the canon) with something I like very much but am occasionally exasperated by (LotR the movies) with something I've always amired from afar but never participated in directly (Dungeons & Dragons)? Something rather wonderful, actually. I forget how I was originally linked to this thing, but I read through it in one night, laughing rather a lot. The thing that impresses me is how taking an existing plot, and existing images (stills from the movies), and telling a new interstitial story with them, with characters that are completely distinct from their D&D/movie roles even though we never see them aside from that. Gimli the role-player and the long-suffering DM are my favorites, but I'm also quite fond of stoner!Aragorn :) And I liked the style enough to then also went on to read the same author's same concept Darths & Droids (which is still going, apparently, with Rogue One! Huh.) which features the immortal line, Jar Jar, you're a genius. But DMotR was first, and LotR is way dearer to my heart than Star Wars, so it's much more impressive that a parody of it was such a favorite, as I tend to be VERY picky about my LotR parodies.
8. Piled Higher and Deeper -- once upon a time, it would probably have been higher on the list, but I haven't been enjoying the more recent strips as much. I've never been in academia myself, never even went to grad school, but of course B is, and I have lots of friends who went through masters and PhDs, even if they ended up elsewhere, so the sort of stuff the strip deals with is very familiar to me, and very funny. This is also the stip that I mentioned above as one I'd read both in a newspaper -- my university's student-produced paper, The Daily Cal, which I'd pick up on my walk to campus from BART and mainly use to do the crossword in the back during boring lectures -- and later online. (Funnily enough, at the time they were published in the Daily Cal, they must've been reprints from the Stanford Daily from our rival university. I don't think that was ever mentioned in the paper, LOL.) Here's one of the early ones that made me remember this strip and look it up online later (because, so much truth, LOL), and one that I've dug up several times to share with B when he gets nonsensical referee comments and gets mad about them:
7. Order of the Stick -- Having two D&D comics on my favorites list when I never played D&D myself is a little weird, maybe, but there you go. I forget how I came across OotS, but I was hooked on the party dynamics, and one of the characters in particular: Vaarsuvius, the Elven wizard of indeterminate gender. But I'm also very fond of Belkar the homicidal halfling (who gets some surprising character growth!), and the comedic potential of Elan, the bard. I caught up on everything in a matter of days, then kept up for a while, but it's been years since I've followed up, and I'm several plotlines behind at this point. Oh, and as simple as the art is, I actually rather like it! For all that it's stick figures, they're very recognizable stick figures.
6. Foxtrot -- I'm sure a lot of people dismiss Foxtrot as being a sort of poor man's Calvin and Hobbes, but i've always been fond of it, and it, along with #5, 3, and 2 on the list, is the only comic strip collection I own in hard copy. Naturally, Jason, with his nerdy interests and his pet iguana, is my favorite (the iguana is awfully cute, too)
5. Calvin and Hobbes -- I like Calvin and Hobbes a lot, partly as a kid who played pretend a lot, including narrating things like my walk to school or taking a bath and spinning them as some sort of sci-fi adventure, or an interview on TV, and partly, these days, as a parent who tries to bring the same sense of humour to the endeavour as Calvin's dad. But I'm not *as* devoted to the comic as some of my nerdy/engineering friends; I think I was always too good of a student to identify with Calvin as fully as they do, for maximum adoration. Also, I have a nostalgic connection to Calvin and Hobbes: I associate it very strongly with my first year in college and my amazing Physics teacher, whose was the one class where I saw an entire large lecture hall (LeConte, for those familiar with Cal's campus) filled to capacity, even though it was a class meeting during lunch time -- he was just that good. Anyway, every lecture started with a cartoon he'd share on the overhead, and about 90% of them were Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.
4. lab-initio -- does anyone besides me even know this one? I was introduced to it freshman year in college by my friend W, and even more than XKCD, it's precisely my kind of humour: geeky puns (you can see that in the title, even) and general ridiculousness. I went through all the comics at the time, and printed out several, which are still gracing my corkboard at home.
(It's not all chemistry nerdery, but those are my favorites.)
And, yeah, I'm pretty sure his website has not changed since I discovered it in the 90s... It certainly has that look. XP
3. Dilbert -- OK, Scott Adams is kind of a jerk, reportedly, but Dilbert is really funny and on the money about a lot of things to do with working at the office in a hi-tech company. I've been fortunate enough never to work for a pointy-haired boss, but I do know some people who sound a lot like that, and a lot of the other archetypes, and Dilbert really does capture it very well. We own some books, I have some icons, B has a T-shirt and a stress toy, and I even watched the short-lived TV show. And if Calvin and Hobbes is sort of a cultural touchstone for smart kids with too much imagination (or maybe for all kids? IDK), Dilbert is definitely that sort of touchstone for people in the industry/adjacent industries. Walking around the cube farm, there are plenty that still have clipped comics on curling yellowed paper, or printouts from the web, and it's always neat to see what their favorites are when meeting a new person (my now-works-at-Genentech role model from early days at Company had a lot of Alice ones on hers, and I think my current manager had one with Wally before he moved cubes).
(We've been referencing that second one for the last 15+ years in our family.)
2. The Far Side -- Far Side has a special place on this list for a couple of reasons. First, it's the comic I've known the longest. While funny drawings and caricatures were, of course, part of the humour culture I grew up with, "the funnies" really weren't, so even after I came to the US, i didn't really know to look for them. At some point back in the dawn of time, B, who was a big fan of "Far Side", brought me a book of it. I still have it, actually, The Curse of Madame C, and judging by the copyright page, it must've been in 1995 or so, which sounds about right. Both he and I have a very clear memory of my parents reading through it without cracking a single smile -- they just really weren't getting it. But I found it funny, even though I couldn't always tell why. I read more Far Side comics, and started reading other comic strips as well, and thus discovered Calvin and Hobbes, Foxtrot, Dilbert, and all the rest. But Far Side is still one of the best, because it's amazing how a single-panel comic can convey whole stories, complete with character and plot, hell, whole bizarre little universes, in a sketch and a dozen words. Or sometimes even without any words at all.
(I think this is the one that started it all for me, because B made a reference to it when, as so often happens, I was pushing instead of pulling a door -- a friend of his at Caltech had this cartoon posted in his office with "Midvale School for the Gifted" crossed out and "Caltech" written in -- and then it turned out I didn't know Far Side, and the rest is history)
(There's a bunch of favorite ones I haven't been able to find online. That's the problem with pre-internet-era comics...)
1. xkcd -- I discovered xkcd via LiveJournal, though I no longer remember how/through whom, although I am pretty sure it was via the "Cat Proximity" cartoon below. It was another one of those "love at first sight" things where as soon as I'd tracked it down to the source, I read everything from beginning to end, and immediately had to share with various people. I don't get ALL the jokes -- the programming-intensive ones I usually only understand by inference. But this comic has a gift for taking jokes that have been done before, and somehow putting those ideas together with the minimalist art in a way that's especially hilarious and memorable. I mean, two of my favorite examples below are definitely the types of jokes I've heard/seen before, but it's the XKCD examples I keep coming back to. The other thing is, as weirdly funny as as the minimalist art/jokes are, xkcd is equally capable of being deeply poignant and profound with the same stick figures and handful of words (I'm not going to link/embed, but I'm thinking of the cancer survivor strip, for example). And, just, I recognize myself a lot in the dilemmas and approaches of the xkcd characters, because expressing human interaction (or whatever) in graphs and flowcharts is *exactly* what I tend to default to when I want to explain something or even understand it for myself. It was when I came across a cartoon that hit on that exact thing (you'll see a couple of them below) that I knew this comic was more than just something with geeky jokes to read for entertainment. And then, of course, there are the things that aren't comics/aren't just comics, like the idea of Up-Goer Five descriptions (I had so much fun describing my job in those terms!) and the maps and flowcharts and the various vast infographics.
And this is the most recent one to make me laugh out loud -- at work, on a day when I was contemplating making a table of all the things I needed to do:
P.S. While googling for images, I came across this xkcd wedding cake:
Now that's a wedding cake I could get behind!
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Trick-or-treat meme still open for requests here on LJ and here on DW. (Last call for Halloween itself!)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1060817.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
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More Kairos meme (the last for a while, probably, as I've caught up and these are getting (duh) longer.
Eleven favorite comic strips
Like perpetual, I'm combining webcomics and newspaper comics in a single category, which actually makes sense, as at least one of these I have encountered in both forms. So there!
11. Hark a Vagrant -- Kate Beaton's comics tend to be hit-or-miss for me, and her art style is actually mostly a miss, but the jokes that land for me are REALLY funny and memorable. The literature geekery ones tend to be my favorites:
10. Baby Blues -- OK, so this one is a bit of an outlier compared to the general nerdery/gekery of the rest. But I was mostly reading it in the days of my train commute when people still read newspapers on the train and I didn't have a Kindle, so I'd pick up the Datebook section of the Chronicle whenever I could find one, and read the funny pages. Besides the two other newspaper comics that are higher ranked on this list, Baby Blues was the other one that would almost always draw a smile from me -- especially in the days when the rodents were toddlers themselves. The bossy older girl, even-keeled but rambunctious younger boy dynamic especially appealed (look, I can't help it that my children have comic strip-conforming personalities. I encouraged L to play with cars and O with dolls!) Anyway, I find it to be a strip that amusing and heartwarming without being overly corny. (And I know
aome shares my fondness for it :)
(I don't really have favorite strips for this one, so these are just the first couple to come up that made me smile and/or sigh in recognition.)
9. DM of the Rings -- So, what happens when you combine something I adore (LotR the canon) with something I like very much but am occasionally exasperated by (LotR the movies) with something I've always amired from afar but never participated in directly (Dungeons & Dragons)? Something rather wonderful, actually. I forget how I was originally linked to this thing, but I read through it in one night, laughing rather a lot. The thing that impresses me is how taking an existing plot, and existing images (stills from the movies), and telling a new interstitial story with them, with characters that are completely distinct from their D&D/movie roles even though we never see them aside from that. Gimli the role-player and the long-suffering DM are my favorites, but I'm also quite fond of stoner!Aragorn :) And I liked the style enough to then also went on to read the same author's same concept Darths & Droids (which is still going, apparently, with Rogue One! Huh.) which features the immortal line, Jar Jar, you're a genius. But DMotR was first, and LotR is way dearer to my heart than Star Wars, so it's much more impressive that a parody of it was such a favorite, as I tend to be VERY picky about my LotR parodies.
8. Piled Higher and Deeper -- once upon a time, it would probably have been higher on the list, but I haven't been enjoying the more recent strips as much. I've never been in academia myself, never even went to grad school, but of course B is, and I have lots of friends who went through masters and PhDs, even if they ended up elsewhere, so the sort of stuff the strip deals with is very familiar to me, and very funny. This is also the stip that I mentioned above as one I'd read both in a newspaper -- my university's student-produced paper, The Daily Cal, which I'd pick up on my walk to campus from BART and mainly use to do the crossword in the back during boring lectures -- and later online. (Funnily enough, at the time they were published in the Daily Cal, they must've been reprints from the Stanford Daily from our rival university. I don't think that was ever mentioned in the paper, LOL.) Here's one of the early ones that made me remember this strip and look it up online later (because, so much truth, LOL), and one that I've dug up several times to share with B when he gets nonsensical referee comments and gets mad about them:
7. Order of the Stick -- Having two D&D comics on my favorites list when I never played D&D myself is a little weird, maybe, but there you go. I forget how I came across OotS, but I was hooked on the party dynamics, and one of the characters in particular: Vaarsuvius, the Elven wizard of indeterminate gender. But I'm also very fond of Belkar the homicidal halfling (who gets some surprising character growth!), and the comedic potential of Elan, the bard. I caught up on everything in a matter of days, then kept up for a while, but it's been years since I've followed up, and I'm several plotlines behind at this point. Oh, and as simple as the art is, I actually rather like it! For all that it's stick figures, they're very recognizable stick figures.
6. Foxtrot -- I'm sure a lot of people dismiss Foxtrot as being a sort of poor man's Calvin and Hobbes, but i've always been fond of it, and it, along with #5, 3, and 2 on the list, is the only comic strip collection I own in hard copy. Naturally, Jason, with his nerdy interests and his pet iguana, is my favorite (the iguana is awfully cute, too)
5. Calvin and Hobbes -- I like Calvin and Hobbes a lot, partly as a kid who played pretend a lot, including narrating things like my walk to school or taking a bath and spinning them as some sort of sci-fi adventure, or an interview on TV, and partly, these days, as a parent who tries to bring the same sense of humour to the endeavour as Calvin's dad. But I'm not *as* devoted to the comic as some of my nerdy/engineering friends; I think I was always too good of a student to identify with Calvin as fully as they do, for maximum adoration. Also, I have a nostalgic connection to Calvin and Hobbes: I associate it very strongly with my first year in college and my amazing Physics teacher, whose was the one class where I saw an entire large lecture hall (LeConte, for those familiar with Cal's campus) filled to capacity, even though it was a class meeting during lunch time -- he was just that good. Anyway, every lecture started with a cartoon he'd share on the overhead, and about 90% of them were Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.
4. lab-initio -- does anyone besides me even know this one? I was introduced to it freshman year in college by my friend W, and even more than XKCD, it's precisely my kind of humour: geeky puns (you can see that in the title, even) and general ridiculousness. I went through all the comics at the time, and printed out several, which are still gracing my corkboard at home.
(It's not all chemistry nerdery, but those are my favorites.)
And, yeah, I'm pretty sure his website has not changed since I discovered it in the 90s... It certainly has that look. XP
3. Dilbert -- OK, Scott Adams is kind of a jerk, reportedly, but Dilbert is really funny and on the money about a lot of things to do with working at the office in a hi-tech company. I've been fortunate enough never to work for a pointy-haired boss, but I do know some people who sound a lot like that, and a lot of the other archetypes, and Dilbert really does capture it very well. We own some books, I have some icons, B has a T-shirt and a stress toy, and I even watched the short-lived TV show. And if Calvin and Hobbes is sort of a cultural touchstone for smart kids with too much imagination (or maybe for all kids? IDK), Dilbert is definitely that sort of touchstone for people in the industry/adjacent industries. Walking around the cube farm, there are plenty that still have clipped comics on curling yellowed paper, or printouts from the web, and it's always neat to see what their favorites are when meeting a new person (my now-works-at-Genentech role model from early days at Company had a lot of Alice ones on hers, and I think my current manager had one with Wally before he moved cubes).
(We've been referencing that second one for the last 15+ years in our family.)
2. The Far Side -- Far Side has a special place on this list for a couple of reasons. First, it's the comic I've known the longest. While funny drawings and caricatures were, of course, part of the humour culture I grew up with, "the funnies" really weren't, so even after I came to the US, i didn't really know to look for them. At some point back in the dawn of time, B, who was a big fan of "Far Side", brought me a book of it. I still have it, actually, The Curse of Madame C, and judging by the copyright page, it must've been in 1995 or so, which sounds about right. Both he and I have a very clear memory of my parents reading through it without cracking a single smile -- they just really weren't getting it. But I found it funny, even though I couldn't always tell why. I read more Far Side comics, and started reading other comic strips as well, and thus discovered Calvin and Hobbes, Foxtrot, Dilbert, and all the rest. But Far Side is still one of the best, because it's amazing how a single-panel comic can convey whole stories, complete with character and plot, hell, whole bizarre little universes, in a sketch and a dozen words. Or sometimes even without any words at all.
(I think this is the one that started it all for me, because B made a reference to it when, as so often happens, I was pushing instead of pulling a door -- a friend of his at Caltech had this cartoon posted in his office with "Midvale School for the Gifted" crossed out and "Caltech" written in -- and then it turned out I didn't know Far Side, and the rest is history)
(There's a bunch of favorite ones I haven't been able to find online. That's the problem with pre-internet-era comics...)
1. xkcd -- I discovered xkcd via LiveJournal, though I no longer remember how/through whom, although I am pretty sure it was via the "Cat Proximity" cartoon below. It was another one of those "love at first sight" things where as soon as I'd tracked it down to the source, I read everything from beginning to end, and immediately had to share with various people. I don't get ALL the jokes -- the programming-intensive ones I usually only understand by inference. But this comic has a gift for taking jokes that have been done before, and somehow putting those ideas together with the minimalist art in a way that's especially hilarious and memorable. I mean, two of my favorite examples below are definitely the types of jokes I've heard/seen before, but it's the XKCD examples I keep coming back to. The other thing is, as weirdly funny as as the minimalist art/jokes are, xkcd is equally capable of being deeply poignant and profound with the same stick figures and handful of words (I'm not going to link/embed, but I'm thinking of the cancer survivor strip, for example). And, just, I recognize myself a lot in the dilemmas and approaches of the xkcd characters, because expressing human interaction (or whatever) in graphs and flowcharts is *exactly* what I tend to default to when I want to explain something or even understand it for myself. It was when I came across a cartoon that hit on that exact thing (you'll see a couple of them below) that I knew this comic was more than just something with geeky jokes to read for entertainment. And then, of course, there are the things that aren't comics/aren't just comics, like the idea of Up-Goer Five descriptions (I had so much fun describing my job in those terms!) and the maps and flowcharts and the various vast infographics.
And this is the most recent one to make me laugh out loud -- at work, on a day when I was contemplating making a table of all the things I needed to do:
P.S. While googling for images, I came across this xkcd wedding cake:
Now that's a wedding cake I could get behind!
*
Trick-or-treat meme still open for requests here on LJ and here on DW. (Last call for Halloween itself!)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1060817.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).