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What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

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Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#71

If anyone is interested why there is "Potrzebie" above "what, me worry?" on the drum: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie

"potrzebie" was the default password for Wizard(#1) on TinyMUD and its derivatives. If I recall correctly, that usage is traced all the way back to Jim Aspnes' original, minimal database.

https://www.tinymux.org/install.txt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Aspnes

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#72
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was pretty common to distribute code as "listing" like this. Typically it came with a checksum for every line and a small program to compute and print that for your own program that you had typed over, which you could then use to fairly quickly(-ish) spot any typos. All of this is how I learned to program by the way. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.

Huh, we used to type in BASIC programs from magazines back in the 1980s and I don’t ever recall seeing any kinds of checksum. We would often resort to printing out the code and visually comparing line by line against the magazine.

The first edition of MSX Computer Magazine from 1985 has them, and I doubt they were the first or invented it: https://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/archief/bladen/msx_comput...

Perhaps it was less common in other countries? Things were a lot less global back then and things operated more on a local level.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#73
post #4
post #2

Through my childhood, my mother always found a copy of MAD to give me for Christmas. Honestly, it'd be great to have more physical zine-style humor back in the US zeitgeist. It's important to laugh at the issues of the day, while also thinking and doing something about them. Satire and laughter is a critical antidote to the 24/7 BREAKING-NEWS panic-fear response that all-day news so often inspires. PS: Also, long liv…

Hah! Mad Magazine was one of the things my mother refused to allow me to checkout from the library.

Mad once caricatured the young Prince Charles with enormous ears. They got an anonymous letter on Buckingham Palace stationary informing them that they were a bunch of poopyheads.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you didn't know, The Onion is back in print: https://membership.theonion.com/

I am so glad to see things like this happening again. Im not saying "bring back all the magazines!" But some of them had a real place in the format. The one thing I loved about the old tech mags was because of the longer cadence they could really focus on long form and more indepth articles than what we usually get. Shout out to Atomic magazine in Australia during the early 2000s. Absolute peak of this stuff.

So much has shifted to "what is being announced *right now?" Who care what was new and notable last month? I get that the cadence is different but it's much more about hot takes than reflection.

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#75

n+1 once said McSweeny's ( https://www.mcsweeneys.net/ ) is just Mad Magazine for the literary set, and today is the right time to share that.

The whole take-down is great: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-1/the-intellectual-situati...

You know this is also satire, right?

Re: What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine

#79
post #2

Through my childhood, my mother always found a copy of MAD to give me for Christmas. Honestly, it'd be great to have more physical zine-style humor back in the US zeitgeist. It's important to laugh at the issues of the day, while also thinking and doing something about them. Satire and laughter is a critical antidote to the 24/7 BREAKING-NEWS panic-fear response that all-day news so often inspires. PS: Also, long liv…

There was a Spy vs. Spy game on the C64:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu2e866bEcM

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