How to Cartoon for Comedy Comma Perfectly

OR:
Fair Use for Fun, for Fun Games, and for Absolutely No Profit

Cartooning is like sculpture: an art of subtraction. By ruthlessly but correctly removing all extraneous elements, this simple blend of text and image can be transcendent, can encompass and convey virtually anything a mind can conceive, with nothing more than lines on paper.

Best of all, cartooning can be very, very funny. Humor can be many things! Mostly humor is thought of as (a type of) an unexpected juxtaposition, though certainly not every juxtaposition is funny, nor are all surprises funny. (Nor is it entirely clear that all funny things will have an unexpected juxtaposition! Theory work is pretty difficult, it turns out.) Nevertheless, it's safe to say that we can expect most funny things to have an element of unexpected juxtaposition. Henri Bergson described humor as the "mechanical encrusted upon the living," which is my favorite definition, because it is so stoned that it is itself funny. Also "encrustation" is a pretty funny word / concept.

When seeking to surprise and delight and amuse—that is, to provide humor—by means of a cartoon, specifically, it is well to break the whole down to its constituent parts. If the cartoon be composed of text and image, then should both the text in isolation and the image as (a) standalone sans texty companion be funny.

Let's examine an example.

Here is a standard—indeed classic—format: three panels, read in order, left to right. Note here that I am using "read" in a metaphoric sense, as there are no words to be read at all! No, merely three images in sequence. Or, more accurately: three funny images in a funny sequence. Bask in the humor. This ... this is a funny cartoon, all by itself.

(When the images are this funny, you really don't even need any text.)

Imbibe the words, next. We see with no ambiguity or uncertainty that, just as with the images, these words are very, very funny words.

(Why even sully text this funny with images?)

We would expect the combination of these words and this text to be funny, even if that combination (read: juxtaposition) is not unexpected [mind-blown emoji]! Just for the sake of completeness, though, let's review the combination.

(Wallow in the perfected comedic whole.)

Remember: funny is as funny does. When you want to create and endure humor, attend to each aspect as though that aspect alone would to carry the entire success solamente, even as, when you attempt cookery, you ensure the flavor of the dish complete is in every ingredient separately. Or, if you have less time, just rip off this cartoon, because it's truly funny stuff.

Couple references: https://iep.utm.edu/humor/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humor_in_Freud
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/.

Just Another Calendarman-ic Monday

(Your author, coming at you with all the powers he gained after being bitten by a radioactive page-a-day Far Side calendar in middle school.)

I've been thinking on and off about calendars since about 2015. That was a busy year. I needed to juggle two big projects: one usually on alternate Sundays, one roughly every 10 days, all year long, these alongside all the other normal activities constituting everyday life (food, work, family, art, uprising, etc.), and it was difficult to do such juggling. What worked for me that year was to: print out Bram Moolenaar's fold-and-stand-up desk calendar and

1. Circle my alternating-Sunday deadlines in red
2. Circle the every-10-day deadlines in green
3. Put it on my desk where I could see it

(Bram's yearly calendar. I recently discovered that this is pretty much the output of the Unix utility ncal with the -w flag! Unix can be pretty cool.)

It worked well for me! Obviously, this is not a tool that accepts a great deal of information, but for helping visualize a cadence of more or less regularly occurring events, it served effectively.

Over the next few years, unfortunately, the events to coordinate got less regular, less predictable, and probably more numerous. Bram Moolenaar's calendar stopped helping me organize things. That's whenDavid Malki stepped up. He has several long, interesting posts on calendars, and the high-end calendar he makes he is a beautiful, funny, and probably useful object. But what really fired my soul was his devastatingly simple "continuous calendar" idea¹, just a year's worth of boxes organized by month, fitting on six pages of printer paper.

(Malki's simple calendar.)

One reason for my soul's resonance with this object is context: at my work, a very common activity to to grab a blank piece of butcher paper, sketch out a grid representing a month or so, and calendar out some events in / for / of / constituting a campaign. This simple template of Malki's saved the drawing-and-adding-dates steps, and I used it a few times in different campaigns to help visualize timelines, deadlines, and possible conflicts. It worked well.

What didn't work well was trying to use the template to help organize my life. I had a couple problems with what he had made:

1. Squares too small to add significant information (70 squares on one 8.5x11 piece of paper is a lot)
2. Shading to indicate a month makes it hard to to write on with, say, a black ballpoint pen, or a Sharpie®|Pen., or whatever
3. I really hated having Saturday and Sunday at the end of the week: this was confusing because it meant that this calendar didn't match any other calendar I'd look at ever

So eventually I decided to stop being frustrated with a tool that didn't work for me. I decided to try to brew my own. I wanted bigger squares, I wanted weeks to start with Sundays, and I didn't want any shading. The best way to attain bigger squares seemed to be to move from portrait to landscape. I really liked Malki's insight about making the months flow into each other, so I kept that layout. I made a couple three-month templates and tested them, and they seemed to work the way I want them to work.

(My calendar looks like this. I like to mark it up with bill due-dates in red, and other notable things in black.)

If you would like to see if this tool will serve your purposes, you can download it and print it out and play with it. (Right now it runs from October 2019 through February 2021, so I recommend judicious use of the "print selected pages" function so as to save our mother the Earth from additional abuse.) If you find that you like using this tool, why not send David Malki a couple bucks: it was all his idea anyway! If you find that this tool doesn't work well for you, why not spend a little time figuring out why not, thinking about what you need, and go try to make something that will help you?

¹ What's hilarious is that Malki uses a different term, not "continuous calendar":

progressive calendar

By that, I mean a calendar that doesn’t have any breaks between months. I think I invented the term? By that, I mean “nobody else has ever used this term.”

Evidently, he IS the only one to use the term. Since I use a different term, perhaps I ... invented the idea? (No, no clearly I didn't.) Anyway, this is a long digression prompted by my inability to remember what words he actually used.

(Your author's ambitions when it comes to calendars.)

(Bonus Venture Brothers content re: calendars.)

PEN 15 Club: rubbing one (competitor) out

It's come to our attention that other people are writing about pens. This is, clearly, completely unacceptable.

That said, the errors and failures of others can help us understand our theoretical contradictions and then revolutionize them in practice by eliminating the contradictions. So in that spirit, let us examine The Strategist's piece on ... the 100 Best Pens. JFC. That is a LOT of pens. To have opinions about, that's a lot of pens. Therefore, let us examine two things: their theoretical underpinnings / methodological preliminaries; the pens they talk about that we have already talked about.

What matters to The Strategist.

• Smoothness
• Smudging
• Bleed-through
• Feel (they mean hand feel)
• Looks

The first three of these make fairly little sense without considering the writing surface, of course, and their strategy for dealing with this is to wave their hands standardize what they're writing on to one single notebook (and not an inexpensive one at that). That this makes their testing a pernicious parody of what it's like to take one's pen(s) out into the world is an unintended, indeed, unacknowledged consequence of an obvious, and complete, failure of theory.

They discuss "Smudging" at a number of junctures, but never is waterproofness mentioned, an omission for which an appropriate epithet has yet to be discovered. I mean, writing a check? That's an important activity to me, yet nowhere in their 100 reviews is this prosaic activity present. And this is relevant, because if you follow the recommendations here, you're gonna need to write some serious checkage: there are at least three pens in the three-figure range here, which seems an odd juxtaposition against $13-for-50 Big Cristals. To say nothing of their catastrophic lack of notes on which pens can versus can not be spun, debate-kid-style, across one's thumb. Even to consider their rankings, founded on such an incoherent and incorrect mishmash of criterions, must be accorded no more, yet no less, than an act of charity.

Let's get down to it, boppers.

Our most compendious previous write-up included the following pens. I shall list them below, helpfully ordered from top to bottom, each pen annotated with our ranking, followed by The Strategist's placement in their list of a hundo, and finally, a brief disquisition on the relative amount of insanity displayed by the strategery reviewed.

1. Bic Cristal
   Reviewiera Ranking: 9/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 63/100
   Insanity Ranking: These clowns. These ridiculous, perverse clowns. I'm not saying everybody has to rank "Availability, reliability, incredibly cheap price" as highly as I do; nor am I claiming everybody ought to enjoy ballpoint pennery: but to rank by my count some twenty-two ballpoints as better than this one? is an act of actual depravity. And every character of the following passage makes me angrier than the last: "The angular, hard plastic body quickly becomes uncomfortable in the hand. It’s a reliable, affordable pen for jotting down quick notes, but not something you would want to write with for an extended period of time".
2. Pilot V5
   Reviewiera Ranking: 8.8/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 16/100
   Insanity Ranking: I'm now thinking I might have overrated this pen slightly: it's a good, even excellent, pen, but it writes a tiny bit too fast, contributing to my handwriting losing what little legibility it has to this point retained. But top-20-percent of all pens deffo sounds right. Into it.
3. Le Pen
   Reviewiera Ranking: 8/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 18/100
   Insanity Ranking: Everybody loves these! Everybody's right.
4. Micron ~art pen~
   Reviewiera Ranking: 7/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 34/100
   Insanity Ranking: Basic agreement here, but bonus points for the most insane thing I have read this week: "but because it’s shiny plastic I think it might make my hand sweat a little.". (Note that this is the third consecutive pen on my list that can correctly be described as "shiny plastic"; my hand sweating on my pen is ... not an issue at this time.)
5. Pilot G2
   Reviewiera Ranking: 6/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 31/100
   Insanity Ranking: Predictably, Strategist types, like the entire rest of the world, overrate this pen enormously. Typical.
6. Uniball Vision
   Reviewiera Ranking: 5.5/100
   The Strategist Ranking: 61/100
   Insanity Ranking: We seem to agree on this one.
7. Paper Mate
   Reviewiera Ranking: N/R
   The Strategist Ranking: 53/100
   Insanity Ranking: I didn't rank this one for complicated reasons having to do with the only one I have on hand dating back to my father's funeral, but, honestly, middle-of-the-road/pack seems about right for this extremely reliable but hardly fancy option. Plus, I think I just like ballpoints more than the next guy, which I have learned via this exercise.

But nobody, and I mean nobody, could like ballpoints enough to justify this ... monstrosity.

(Calling ... this an acceptable writing experience, let alone calling it the dozenth-best writing experience available is legitimately revolting. Feel: 4!? LOOKS five?? This ... is madness.)

Anyway, my current load-out is just: Bic Cristal; Sharpie®|Pen.; Pentel 205 .5 MM mechanical pencil. Total cost: somewhere under twenty Reviewieran yua (often known as (American) "wing-wangs"); total effectiveness: off the charts.

Anyway, The Strategist, welcome to the PEN 15 Club.