I deeply love the dog who is excited to be going to the vet to be tutored:
The Far Side – By Gary Larson
141–150 of 162 posts
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#142The Boneless Chicken Ranch
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mother used to drag me to the Hallmark store as a kid and she'd spend unreasonable amounts of time chatting with the workers and browsing who knows what. I think this was before I had a Gameboy and my only salvation was reading those Farside books. I both enjoyed them and was seriously creeped out by them. They also had Calvin and Hobbes which I adored.
The creepiness is something nobody ever seems to mention about The Far Side and that's my biggest lasting impression of the comics. They're deeply unsettling and have a weird uncanny valley feeling to me. That's not to say they're bad. But something about them always has a tinge of horror to me.
Oh, yes - lots of unsettling, dark, and creepy. But within a kid-safe, G-rated context. And they're generally very cautionary (vs. any sort of pro-violence stuff).
And with how good humans suddenly become at learning, when they see someone else make a mistake and immediately suffer the consequences...I'd even call The Far Side educational.
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#144One of my favorite t-shirts was a "rusty makes his move" with dog breath spray - I wore it weekly until it had yellow pit stains and holes in it.
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#145Needs an API to pull the single cartoon of the day with a link to the full web site.
Assuming there is any real interest in expanding viewership.
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#146Worth noting is Gary Larson's original response to the WWW was an open letter asking fans not to post his cartoons online. Akin to the Bill Gates letter on copying software, but, perhaps, more understandable. This website is a reversal of that original position. He was thoughtful then, and is thoughtful now. The original letter: https://www.portmann.com/farside/index.html?home.html And the reversal: https://www.thefa…
As a kid in school, “Woah, wrong room” was my fav (says the alien who peeks into the classroom of small children).
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#147I grew up on Garfield when I was a child, then The Far Side, Bloom County, and Calvin & Hobbes as a teen. Gen X really hit the jackpot back then!
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#148Needs an API to pull the single cartoon of the day with a link to the full web site. Assuming there is any real interest in expanding viewership.
I'm sorta working on this, but as an RSS feed, since there is a dedicated page per day, with 1-5 comics each day, for example https://www.thefarside.com/2024/01/31
They try to prevent basic scraping but I found a way around it using Selenium. Just haven't published it anywhere. The notice at the bottom has given me pause so I'm thinking of the best way to do this
> No images or other content displayed on this Website may be reproduced, digitized, stored in a retrieval system, made available via any computer or wireless networks, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#149My favorite is the one where the Lone Ranger makes a startling discovery in his later years. He is reading an old Native American dictionary where he finds out 'kimosabe' means the backend of a horse.
Re: The Far Side – By Gary Larson
#150Hey - I've been wondering about this for a while: Does anyone have an explanation of the Farside/AI crap that has been flooding Facebook for the past few months? Generally, the punchline is that animals are turning the tide on humans, and hunting them instead; husbands and wives hate each other; old men like creeping on young women while their wives gets mad. The comics linked seem different.
Yeah, I can kind of explain that as much as anyone can I guess. Someone made a page called The Far Side as a content farm. Great nostalgic brand for Facebook's main demographics = easy engagement. There's only 4,337 actual The Far Side comics, so they also run typical "boomer humor" strips from about the same era or apparently make their own low-effort comics. Lots of content with lots of engagement means the algorithm is likely to show it in people's feeds even at the expense of posts from their friends and groups they joined.