m_‮f

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2024

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  • m_‮fOPAtoThe Far Side@sh.itjust.works2026-04-07
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    2 days ago

    Some background on this comic:

    Transcript:

    Actually, I rejected the first version of this (on the left) myself. I knew my editor would ponder the good-taste quotient of this cartoon, so I decided not to risk it and closed the door a few more inches.




  • m_‮fOPAtoThe Far Side@sh.itjust.works2026-04-06
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    3 days ago

    Some background on this comic:

    Transcript (sketch):

    “Oooooo!.. Mr. Van Horn!.. The duck is back–staring at your back.”

    Raymond could feel it…First a tingling at the base of his neck and then a cold sweat would quickly engulf his body–yes, the duck was staring at him again."

    Transcript (commentary):

    Another example of perhaps overworking a cartoon. In hindsight, I wish I had used the final drawing but with the second caption in the sketch above, which begins, “Raymond could feel it…” It just seems a little more interesting to me.

    In coming up with the name for the phobia, I played around with words like “quackaphobia” and “duckalookaphobia” and so on. But then I got the bright idea to look up the scientific name for ducks, and discovered their family name is Anatidae. Ad so, I ended up coining a word that twelve ornithologists understood and everyone else probably went, “Say what?”


  • m_‮fOPAtoThe Far Side@sh.itjust.works2026-04-06
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    3 days ago

    Some background on this comic:

    Transcript:

    THE WRONG NUMBER

    Larry lived alone in his small inner-city apartment. He had no friends and most people ignored him at all costs.

    Then one day, unexpectedly, the phone rang. And Larry was surprised to find himself talking to God.

    “Is this 555-3178?” God asked.

    “No, this is 555-7138.”

    “Sorry.” And God hung up.

    The chapter opened with:

    Sometimes ideas have come out of short stories or ramblings I write just to shift gears once in a while. Cartoons are, after all, little stories themselves, frozen at an interesting point in time. What follows are several stories that either led to cartoons, could have led to cartoons, or were just ideas in and of themselves.

    Interesting that this seems to have been published after its inclusion in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prehistory_of_The_Far_Side. Or maybe they just forgot to include the resulting comic. Some of the other short stories have the resulting comic included.



  • m_‮fOPMAtoPeanuts1952-04-03
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    4 days ago

    Someone else already confirmed it, but here’s a page with some trivia like that:

    https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Annotations_of_The_Complete_Peanuts/Print_version

    It’s kind of hit-or-miss, but does list this one:

    Charlie Brown is delivering the traditional whistle of appreciation for feminine beauty (though it usually has two notes: WEEEET-WOOO), and Patty takes offense. Schroeder, being more musical, delivers a mini-concert to Violet and gets to walk off with her. It is the melody to “Traumerei” from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” for piano.



  • m_‮fOPAtoThe Far Side@sh.itjust.works2026-04-03
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    4 days ago

    The coloring made it a little weird because it just looks unfinished. Here’s a B&W version that makes it IMO a little clearer:

    I see now in the colored version that it’s supposed to be red at the end of the neck, but I thought that was the bottom part of the head. It looks like they redrew it a bit while coloring.

    EDIT: Turned it into a comparison gif:


  • m_‮fOPMAtoSaturday Morning Breakfast Cereal2008-03-03
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    5 days ago

    I think it’s also a little thrown off by the phrasing. “That’s my last day in this second-rate lab!” is kind of a setup for a punchline where they don’t get to advance and are stuck in the same lab, but that doesn’t seem to be the joke here. It would probably work better with the second panel first, and then an “Earlier” narrative box, and just “Behold! An instant sex change pill!”







  • I think we generally agree with each other. The existence of an omniscient AI or deity doesn’t change the “experience” of free will. It doesn’t “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observed. It does “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observer, who can now say “This thing exhibits no unpredictable behavior to me”. You and I both think we have free will, because we can’t predict our own behavior. Our experience is unchanged, whether or not some other observer exists or could exist that could predict our behavior.

    Agreeing on a frame of reference is exactly my point. “Does something have free will?” requires the follow-up question, “According to whom?”. Just like “I’m far from that rock” requires the followup question, “According to whom?”. The ant might think you’re far from the rock, something else might think you’re near the rock.

    To boil it down a bit more, my point is just that you can always replace the phrase “free will” in speech with “unpredictable behavior” without loss of meaning, because that is what people actually mean when they say it, whether they realize that or not.