#Gary Larson

[gwalchmedi]

Larson just _knows_ family life.

my dad was outside feeding the slugs cucumber slices earlier

[everydaylouie]

More Far Side Blender Recreations

[quasi-normalcy]

I think that what's brilliant about The Far Side is how it can imply an entire narrative with only a single panel. It's sequential art without the sequence. Like this one

There's the obvious implication of what's going to happen in the future (there's going to be a hunt), but it also stretches into the past: what circumstances in the anthropology of this group of cavemen must have happened to establish a tradition of dancing with Woolly Mammoths? Why does it, in spite of it's obvious absurdity, feel kind of right that there should be a dance before the cavemen and the mammoths engage in mortal combat? The reluctant fearful expression on the caveman at the bottom; is this his first hunt? Are those his elders trying to reassure him? Does the one mammoth actually seem to fancy him? What about the one looking fearfully back at his friends? How does he feel that the others aren't there to reassure him? One of the mammoths in the upper right looks just as fearful as the cavemen; why? etc.

And all of this is purely evoked. There's only simple line-drawing and two sentences of text, but you see it and it reminds you of other sorts of narratives you've seen or experienced, and your brain constructs a whole temporal sequence; and any possible answer you could get to above the questions would never be as satisfying as what your brain fills in.

I could write an entire essay about this.

[miniyo]

Gary Larson  [web]

... vía antowilly

Gary Larson, 1984

[uinferno]

If you weren't aware, the MTG Circlejerk subreddit has been making fake Far Side Secret Lairs and it's probably one of my favorite things lately.

[ungoliantschilde]

“Trouble Brewing”, by Gary Larson

[tomoleary]

Gary Larson “Quack? Quack!” The Far Side Daily Comic Strip Original Art dated 10-31-83 (Chronicle Features, 1983) Source

[bretzkysbs]

[cobalt-the-noodle]

cow tools and Pattern recognition

so. I like old newspaper cartoons such as Calvin and Hobbes, or, for today’s rant, The Far Side. But aside from reading them, I also enjoy reading ABOUT them.

now, many already know of the Cow Tools comic, but if you don’t, here it is

Now, this comic, for those who don’t know, once caused mass confusion and panic due to one little detail. One of the Cow Tools happened to resemble a handsaw. This led to thousands of people across the US during the comic’s original printing to decide that this means all the other objects were supposed to be other human tools[ as built by cows].

now, unfortunately, this is not the case. The joke was that if cows made tools, this is what they’d look like.

but the fact so many came to this conclusion and spent months [yes, MONTHS] trying to piece together what the cow tools were “supposed” to be says a lot about the human mind’s pattern recognition and stubbornness. Once we decide a conclusion is the “correct” one, we stubbornly try to prove it with any evidence we can piece together, usually utilizing pattern recognition alone if that’s the only evidence we can find.

now there’s two things this reminds me of, and one is FNAF lore, so I’m not touching that with a forty-three and 7/8ths foot pole.

the other, of course, is pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology. How many of these theories rely on pattern recognition, like terrace farms actually being staircases for giants, or mountains being pyramids or treestumps?

Cow Tools provides a great microcosm of this phenomenon. The only difference is that Earth doesn’t have a cartoonist in charge who can explain that the joke isn’t that deep.

in conclusion, sometimes a cow tool is just a cow tool, no matter what your eyes are telling you.

[kurbiismind]

Oh hey, Slime tools.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[ozymandiasfoxmercury]

[everydaylouie]

Yeah, Sylvia...my set too...and in the middle of "Laverne and Shirley."

[a-book-of-creatures]

This particular Far Side comic always cracks me up

[curtvilescomic]

Gary Larson

[fionastrashheap]

i had a vision