sweasel.com

Here in the hinterland, small town America, there has always been the neighborhood cafe/diner/hash-house/combination that opens before sunrise and closes at 2:00 PM. (At least its been that way in my 60+ years) It serves bottomless mugs of coffee, has a stack of the local daily or weekly newsprint fish wrap, a community bulletin board and plenty of cheap, decent food and conversation.

I used to go to one here. All the locals stopped in including my barber, the owner of the hardware store, the one time Mayor (who also owns the local tire and alignment/tune up garage) and the elderly curmudgeon who owns what is left of the once prosperous grain elevator/feed store and stock supply house.

Politics, weather, crops, hunting and fishing were discussed and debated.

Now it has become a boutique breakfast house.

The old Ben Franklin “Five and Dime” and the auto parts store have been replaced by a acupuncture/chiropractor and a bunch of art gallery and girly boutiques.

Only the barber and hardware remain.

Chuck, my barber, broke his hip last fall. He is damn near 70, bent over and twisted….he still cuts hair.

He is the only shop that is not internet connected on the old street.

THAT, dear S’Weasel, is what has happened. AND that is why the internet is so damn important as a free and open beacon (or cesspool) of communication.

BTW, great pics of the hongry foxette.

Hiding in the huge dung heap that represents ‘net humor there are some true pearls.

Although quite well-known now, if you haven’t enjoyed
Randall Munroe’s xkcd then give it a look. He does stick figures but with remarkable sensitivity but his main strength is ability to meld science / math / tech / romance successfully. Be sure to enable mouseover display of image associated text – you’ll see second punch lines and sometime nice insightful commentary. http://xkcd.com .

My own guilty secret is that I am hooked on Sinfest by Tatsuya Ishida. Don’t let his name fool you, he’s thoroughly American in outlook but with a nice Japanese overlay that shows up only occasionally. As is all too common, I think his older stuff is better than today’s but the good news here is the archive starts in December 2000 so there is *a* *lot* to go through at http://www.sinfest.net .

To be fair, National Lampoon used to run stuff like this. Which is a direct descendent of the New Yorker cartoons (I mean, this guy totally could have done “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog”).

Sorry about your diner, Sven. That sucks all kinds of ass.

Yup, XKCD is the last link in the lefthand sidebar. Hadn’t found sinfest, though.

I’ve thought of doing a webcomic many times, but I just don’t have a sequential story in me.

Then there was MAD magazine and CRACKED….in the early daze.

Fishwrap all….but funny and irreverent as Aunty Betty’s pink silk knickers.

If’n you like XKCD then you’ll like Abstruse Goose.

xkcd was good at first, but now sucks. I stopped reading shortly after the TGI Friday’s comic, in which Munroe’s creepiness became undeniable. Yuck.

I miss The Far Side….. 🙁

Outstanding find, Stoaty! Bookmarked!

Ah, I miss The Far Side too Scubafreak. Absolutely the best one-panel strip ever. I wonder what Gary Larson is doing these days. And as long as we’re missing great paper comics…Calvin & Hobbes.

“I just don’t have a sequential story in me.”

Ahem… Have I missed something, or isn’t an American Weasel in Darkest England a sequential story? In fact haven’t you been telling that same story these many years?

Well, you could do a webcomic that doesn’t have a sequential story in it…

Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap (or crud, whatever.) But when you multiply the ‘everything’ by a hundred million times, you get a hundred million times as much stuff that isn’t crap into the bargain. Yes, it’s still a needle in a haystack, but when you find it, it’s a giant. gleaming, USS Nimitz-sized needle in a very big haystack.

Eric Seymour wrote a seminal essay on the subject called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. What the Internet does best is disintermediation. It has no editor, except at the consumer level. If your blog is shit, no-one will read it, though your opinions be ever so high-brow and bien-pensant (code for hideously boring Leftist bilge.) If it’s good, but full of fart jokes and girls in tank-tops (which is what bien-pensant Lefties think rednecks are all about) it will go gangbusters. Talk radio was an early example of editorial disintermediation. It’s why Opie and Anthony have a show, and Randi Rhodes doesn’t. They both say ‘fuck’ a lot, but when Opie and Anthony do it, it’s funny‡.

It’s uplifting, too. It brings power to the masses. It goes beyond the Internet. I just learnt how to use the open-source Firmata* protocol to talk serial comms with my playing-card-sized Arduino† microcontroller board (another open-source project) but without the Internet I’d have needed a six-month fee-paying course in mechatronics to get in the door.

*, † — I’d link, but Weasel’s spam filter is mean.
‡ not a huge fan, but it beats Al Franken

No, David, what the Internet demonstrates is that (1) Gatekeepers are as subject to Sturgeon’s Law as everything else and (2) the Law is recursive.

Ninety percent of editors and other prescreeners are incompetent. This has been hidden in the past by the fact that only the stuff that they did pass had any chance of success.

If you toss out the ninety percent that’s crap, ninety percent of the remainder is dross. If you toss out the dross, ninety percent of what’s left is merely ordinary. If you toss out what’s merely ordinary, ninety percent of what’s left is excellent and only ten percent is outstanding — but if you don’t get to look at all thousand possibilities, you’re virtually certain to miss the jewel.

Regards,
Ric

Nice, I likes the one where Wonka drops the key and Charlie returns to living in squalor. Good times…

I can personally (and sometime professionally) vouch for the absolute truth of Ric Locke’s second paragraph.

“I want this because of reasons” made me laugh, too. 😀

“I want this because of reasons” sounds like something out of the online comic Achewood…

Absolutely brilliant. Amazed nobody linked it?!

http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF208-Eggnancy.jpg

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