CSotD: Filling in the Funnies
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Time for our weekly trip to Arcamax. Monotonous, isn’t it?
Well, it sure gets old, given that somebody keeps forgetting to load the black plate for Barney & Clyde on Sundays, but, then again, if all they loaded were the black plate, that would be monotonous. What they’re doing instead is polytonous.
However, today it seems to fit, because not only did Counterpoint fail to post the black plate for Barney & Clyde, but Creators Syndicate failed to post anything at all on GoComics, at least as of 5:30 this morning, EDT.
It’s possible that someone will wake up and correct things, but when you miss the market, make-good efforts are of limited value, and the time for daily comics is first thing in the morning. Not everyone reads them then, but correcting them later is like delivering the morning paper after most people have left for work.
Not to worry: Here’s the Creators Syndicate website and you can go there and find all the strips that didn’t appear on GoComics this morning.
But wit all doo respeck, if I were about to nearly double my subscription rate, I might appoint some bright young intern to check out the website after midnight each morning and make sure everything is hunky-dory. This isn’t the time to let readers find the work-arounds.
Fortunately, several comics did land intact and on time.
Speaking of the changing and somewhat dire world of syndicated comics, Scott Hilburn offers this example of how they could win by combining forces. He’s done a nice job of parroting other cartoonists’ styles, but I’m mostly impressed that he offers five examples that are each pretty funny.
There aren’t a lot of cartoonists who manage to pull that off, including some for whom it is their standard format.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I don’t worry too much about AI listening in, because, first of all, I think it’s a fallacy and that people attribute marketing coincidences to eavesdropping much as they believe that washing your car makes it rain.
Or, more likely, it’s like the way when you’re pregnant that you see pregnant people everywhere: It’s not that there are more of them, but you notice them because it’s on your mind.
I can’t prove that Alexa isn’t listening in on my conversations because I don’t talk a lot in front of her anyway. It’s just me and the dog, and I haven’t been getting any ads in response to “You wanna go out?” unless you count Carnival Cruise Lines.
I do worry about AI taking all the entry-level semi-creative jobs, however, because stupid repetitive tasks used to be what future creatives did until they got promoted. And while the ones who are going to be superstars could pick up skills in school and start at a higher level, what about the ones who were going to keep doing those stupid repetitive tasks forever?
However, while it worries me, I’m not like the Luddite grandfather in Buckets, because most of the skills he lists are genuinely stupid, unnecessary tasks. I write maybe 15 checks a year and a dozen of those are to my landlord who prefers them to direct deposit, while I don’t really see a difference between keeping records on paper versus on my computer. Computers crash, yes, but papers get misfiled.
I worry more about kids walking around with headphones or staring at their phones because I fear they won’t sing as they walk home at night or ever learn to whistle through their fingers.
I worry that, unlike the cheerful old gaffer in this William Gunning King classic from Punch, they’ll never know how to sit and think. Or just sit.
My own bottom line is that, while I take my phone when I walk the dog, that’s only in case someone calls (nobody does) or I fall and break my leg (so far so good).
As for my use of Alexa, she operates mostly as a hands-free clock radio. Sometimes I’ll ask her a quick question I don’t want to bother looking up, like the population of a particular place. But I’m glad Amazon isn’t (currently) planning to disable the older models because I don’t want all the bells and whistles and surveillance of the new, improved, intrusive Alexa.
I’d move to the country, if I could live in the second to the last house on the road, where the last house belongs to the fellow who drives the town plow.
But as the cartoon suggests, I’d still have access and access would still have me.
I think he should be writing “my grandchild’s paper,” maybe “great-grandchild,” because even grandchild ought to be a stretch in a sane world.
I’ve got a granddaughter who is 28, and I remember when her dad was a sophomore in high school in 1987, when we moved East. We were touring his new school and I was appalled to see typewriters on the desks in the business classroom, though they converted to computers before he graduated.
Word processers made double-spacing after a sentence unnecessary and archaic. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it, of course. You can also capitalize all the Nouns like They did 300 Years ago.
Times change. When I was in the first grade, our desks had holes for inkwells, and I remember thinking that if only we still used them, I could dunk girls’ pigtails in them like they did on the Little Rascals.
As for the Oxford comma, I’ve been reading The Years With Ross, James Thurber’s memoir of New Yorker editor Harold Ross, who died in 1951 and thought his writers used too many commas. As Thurber remembered it
Ross often summoned Hobart Weekes when a comma had popped up to worry him, and he would ask Weekes, “What is the rule?” Then he would run into Weekes later in the hall and say, “There isn’t any rule.”
I’m with Ross. I use an Oxford comma when it is necessary and, when it is not, I don’t.
And a double-space following a sentence has not been necessary since I got my first computer in 1983.
Here’s a song about someone who only uses commas for appearances’ sake:
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