Recent Comments

1. 2 days ago on Nest Heads

   At the time the strip was first published (note the 2007 copyright date) the media was hyping an obesity epidemic in children in the United States and fingering fast food as the culprit.

   In reality, actual scholars & experts noted that school lunch programs had more to do with obesity rates than fast food, and it was ultimately discovered that several parents who were on TV screaming about how fast food made their kids obese were feeding their kids fast food as many as 3 meals a day.

2. 2 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Could be he was just that exhausted after everything.

3. 2 days ago on Pickles

   In real life, many people – myself included – experience this. It’s an issue with the nervous system and the skin falsely registering sensations, and there are a great many things that can cause this.

4. 5 days ago on FurBabies

   Bill Watterson wrote in one of his Calvin & Hobbes collections that due to the way printing technology was at the time he had to have his Sundays turned in much further ahead of time than his dailies, as it took a fair bit of time to get the color plates and whatnot ready to print his Sundays. This played a part in his decision to not tie his Sundays into the daily story arcs if he could avoid it.

5. 7 days ago on Pickles

   Even though author Bryan Crane hasn’t been able to out-and-out say it in the strip, he’s found ways to make it clear that the characters are, like Crane himself, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

   On Sundays, most men who are adherents of the faith will wear white button-up shirts and neckties to services if plausible for them to do so, the classic old-school “Sunday best”.

   As part of it, young men are often encouraged from a young age to start wearing white shirts and ties like their dads and grandfathers. It can even be a bonding moment when dad teaches their kid how to tie that tie.

6. 11 days ago on Ziggy

   To me at least, this strip is actually a little bittersweet in hindsight.

   In 2004, 11 years after the strip was published, CBS News producer Mary Mapes would be in such a hurry to get a politically-sensitive story to air ahead of the election that she would fail to do her due diligence. If she had, she would have realized that there was reason to doubt the provenance of some documents she had been given as “evidence” of a sensational claim and that the story was a non-starter. Instead, she did such a devastating number on CBS News’ reputation that the “60 Minutes” program she was in charge of was cancelled and everyone involved either fired or forced into early retirement as a way to control the damage.

7. 12 days ago on Eric Allie

   Or… we could look to hire people based on their competence in their field, the solidness of their credentials, and their willingness to make sure that students understand the subject matter?

   That’s the present situation: too many professors feel that their classroom is their kingdom, not a place of learning.

8. 14 days ago on Thatababy

   In theory, the comic book industry should be a meritocracy.

   In prior practice, it used to be that writers and artists started out by cutting their teeth on lower-tier books, using those books to build their skills and their reputation before being promoted to working on higher-tier books.

   In current practice, however, an obsessive focus on “authenticity” has led to a number of editors at Marvel, DC, and a few other publishers only assigning writers to work on books whose characters are “just like” those writers. This has functionally destroyed the classic meritocracy approach, resulting in several good writers being pigeon-holed and several inexperienced writers being put on books that their otherwise thin resumes previously wouldn’t have permitted them to work on.

   Industry legend Christopher Priest called this out in an interview he did a few years ago when he explained why he chose to work with Dynamite on their then-current revival of “Vampirella” despite his resume being such that he could have demanded to work on any project he desired: Marvel and DC were only contacting him when they wanted him to work on characters of his same race, and he was sick of it.

   This is a big part of why we’re now seeing a great many would-be writers and artists going indie or resorting to crowd-funding, because they no longer trust the major publishers to judge them on their individual merits.

9. 15 days ago on Ted Rall

   It’s more than that.

   For example, there’s video circulating of protestors at one college literally forming a human wall to prevent Jewish students from entering one of the buildings on campus.

   It’s also been determined that many of the protests are being joined by people who aren’t students and thus have no business being on campus, raising concerns that these people are in fact outside agitators.

10. 17 days ago on Wizard of Id Classics

    I’m an entertainment writer IRL, and so I often have to deal with the stigma caused by these individuals.

    It’s rare for cash to actually have changed hands in these instances, which is what made the Rotten Tomatoes incident so startling.

    Instead, most “bribes” nowadays are paid with things other than cash, such as “exclusive access”, physical goods, “networking opportunities”, “junkets”, illicit substances (which, I understand, were relatively common pay-offs in the 1970s), and even worse if some allegations are to be believed.

    In other words, these are things that are either harder to trace back to the company or that society doesn’t understand as actually being a bribe.

    For example, when video game developer Bethesda did the pre-orders for the game “Fallout 76”, they offered a promotional tier in which people could get a canvas bag that was a replica of the bag the character in the game had. When the bag arrived, however, it was made of nylon. Bethesda responded by issuing a flimsy statement about a supply shortage, offered $5 in online store credit, and waffled from there. Well, it turns out that they’d given so many canvas replica bags as “gifts” to video game reporters that they were unable to fill the customer orders, and so they hastily commissioned the nylon bags in the hopes that no one would mind. Instead, Bethesda nearly got sued for false advertising and had to pay out of pocket to get everyone their canvas bag as promised.