Happy Things
Wonderful things happening today. Best brace yourself.
- It’s been more than a dozen years — not much more than a month after this blog started, in fact — since I called for an illustrated guide to Warner Bros cartoon sight gags. Think of the very elaborate Rube Goldberg last minute of Bully For Bugs or the Friz Freleng Multidoor Gag¹. In fact, think of the Multidoor Gag now, because KC Green and Anthony Clark clearly did in today’s BACK and went further to provide the explanation we’ve been waiting for since 1944: room tunnels. Give ‘er a read and you’ll find yourself smiling.
- Unlooked for and yet very welcome: Randall Munroe is doing his third anciliary xkcd book², following up What If? and Thing Explainer. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems is described as:
[T]he world’s least useful self-help book. It describes how to cross a river by removing all the water, outlines some of the many uses for lava around the home, and teaches you how to use experimental military research to ensure that your friends will never again ask you to help them move.
Want.
I was worried that there might be overlap with Ryan North’s similarly-titled How To Invent Everything, but North’s book doesn’t feature even one method of messing with your friends. Here’s hoping How To includes advice on how to get out of holes. It will be available on 3 September in the US, Canada, UK, the Commonwealth, Germany, and Holland, and 20 October in Sweden, for US$28, CAN$37, €16, £17 (subject to Brexit upheaval), SEK141, and unknown amounts of Aussie [and Kiwi] Fun Bucks.
- Hey, you know who rules? Shing Yin Khor (shown here at the bottom margin). She does amazing art, amazing installations, amazing prints, amazing experiences, and knows more about Paul Bunyan Muffler Men than you, guaranteed. She’s also been named a Kickstarter Thought Leader for 2019, joining Zainab Akhtar³ as representatives of the world of comics to Kickstarter’s list of Official Smart People.
Keep an eye on Khor as she shares more of her special skills for building community; while you’re at it, her latest Kickstart — for art postcards of weird critters — runs another ten days. Time to hop on that.
Spam of the day:
Here’s why mental decline isn’t your fault
I know that I’m never serious in ripping on spammers, but this is completely serious: mental decline is never your fault, and fuck anybody that says that it is.
_______________
¹ Which I referred to back then as Five Doors, but I was mistaken. In my defense, there were not YouTube clips of the gag in question to check my memory against, and now there are
² xkcd: volume 0 being a collection of strips, not Munroe being Munroe in the wonderfully weird ways he does.
³ Oliver Sava at The AV Club is the only writer on comics that I think is as insightful and enjoyable to read as Akhtar, and there’s not a better curator anywhere in English language comics.
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