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Yeah, I haven’t really heard the expression myself used for people like that, but it’s a play on “old man is buzzing about” -> “flies buzz about” -> “old man caught on flypaper like a fly”
Some context on this comic:
Transcript:
In my first year or so of drawing The Far Side, I was scared to death of making mistakes in the artwork. Incredibly, I had never heard of a product called “White Out” (for covering up mistakes) and the smallest screw-up meant starting over. So, as I’ve indicated under each of these cartoons, I sometimes left things out.
I hate drawing this type of rug because I can never seem to make the concentric circles come out right. I’d get halfway, as shown, and quit.
Here’s my best attempt:
Crap template:
It’s riffing on Westerns. You might see dialogue like that, talking about one cowboy riding another’s horse, leading some characters to surmise that something’s wrong. In Far Side fashion though, instead of a cowboy, it’s a chicken.
Here’s discussion about the comic:
No clear consensus over there either, but probably just “doing something that feels busy, but is actually ineffective”.
Love quines! Here’s the most impressive one I’ve seen, looping through 128 programming languages:
https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
An earlier version of this strip, published in his pre-The Far Side comic Nature’s Way:
Some background on this comic:
Transcript (sketch):
Working on the Beaten Path
Transcript (commentary):
This idea came in up above and came out on the bottom cartoon.
An early sketch of this comic:
Transcript (sketch):
“Did I say you could come up?.. Did I?”
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
Every time I do a cartoon about dungeons and torturing, etc., I get a letter from a group called Amnesty International. They feel cartoons on this subject are insensitive to the fact that torturing is something that continues to this day all over the world. And, although I feel my cartoons treat the subject in a mostly harmless way, this group has at least raised my consciousness to this problem.
But what I want to know is, does Wizard of Id get these letters?
Some context on this comic:
Transcript:
Drawing God in any context, let alone a cartoon, poses some obvious risks.
In the upper left cartoon, I was careful to do two things: First, I made God look the way I think most of us are pretty sure he looks. Secondly, I made sure he was really winning hands down. Even if Norman had only ten points it would have meant that he beat God to the buzzer at least once, and someone would have gotten mad.
“In God’s Kitchen” was fairly benign, since the emphasis was mostly on the earth and the suggestion that things aren’t quite normal here and why.
I was mostly worried about the last cartoon shown here. Not because of readers, who for the most part found it to be a light and silly drawing, but because I started to feel like I was bucking for a lightning bolt to come out of the sky and turn me into something like the kid here.
A related sketch that he appears to have never published:
4·2 months agoAs an artist? If so, do you have a link?
Some background on this comic:
I think the comics were colorized later, or at least not by him.
First panel should’ve been last, IMO
There’s no limit to predicting the weather that I’m aware of for an infinitely advanced intelligence, what do you mean exactly? For complexity, are you saying that the brain must be more complex than the weather to predict it?
Moreso weather than rock, but either one, really. Define “awareness” in an empirically testable manner first and then we can start applying it. Until then, it’s the same as arguing about souls or angels dancing on the head of a pin. Any common definition is circular and meaningless, e.g. “aware” - > “conscious” -> “aware”. Is a thermometer aware of the temperature? If not, why?
An earlier version of this comic, from his pre-Far Side strip called Nature’s Way:
It’s a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
Transcript (sketch):