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That made me curious about the etymology:
thwart (adv.)
late 14c., thwert, “from side to side, across, transversely; crosswise, across the grain,” earlier in the same sense thwertover (c. 1200), overthwert (c. 1300), from a Scandinavian source, probably Old Norse þvert “across,” originally neuter of thverr (adj.) “transverse, across,” from Proto-Germanic *thwerh- “twisted, oblique,” which according to Watkins is from PIE root *terkw- “to twist.”
It is thus cognate with Old English þweorh “transverse, perverse, angry, cross,” and the Proto-Germanic word also is the source of Middle Dutch dwers, Dutch dwars “cross-grained, contrary,” Old High German twerh, German quer, Gothic þwairhs “angry.”
The spelling shifted to -a- from 15c. From mid-13c. as an adjective, “contrary, stubborn, obstinate;” earlier overthwert, thwertover “blatant, outright” (c. 1200). As a preposition from early 15c., “across, athwart, from one side to the other.”
It’s always been a bit fuzzy, but in-universe, I think he’s reacting to Garfield’s body language. I could plausibly interpret that as “Me!”
1·1 day agoI assume this is a joke, but it’s also over my head if so. Or is that a serious view, that’s there’s only 7?
3·1 day agoBad color-to-alpha conversion, most likely. Here’s the upper left corner close up, with GIMP’s transparency checkerboard background:
It’s the sort of thing that can happen if you use the fuzzy select tool without being careful.
Do you know of an arrangement that has it like that? I don’t see any that have that measure, at least with a quick search online
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
The deer, I think, is any one of us caught in the situation where some maniac, having entered our home, is trying to hunt us down and kill us. (Pleasant thought―I wonder if Ernie Bushmiller ever worked with this theme in Nancy.) I started with the “horrible movie” idea but decided it didn’t make much sense compared to the deer simply trying to collect himself.
Transcript (sketch):
He’s trying to kill me, all right!… It’s like some horrible movie!
Do I know this guy?. I’ve got to think! Think.
5·8 days agoComic is too big to really fit as a picture here, you’ll have to go here to see the whole thing:
Sure, updated
That’s Lyman, a character from the early strips. I don’t know why exactly, but the “gag panel” was replaced with a stock panel. Normally the panel with Lyman would be a pre-joke, arranged so that some papers could cut it off and only show the bottom two rows.
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.
SMBC does that sometimes, but generally adds in a “Earlier” narration box to help clarify. This is one of the earlier comics, so maybe he just hadn’t started doing that yet.
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.
Sadly not a real link, missed opportunity for @exocomics@mastodon.world
I know I’m overthinking it and the comics sort of live in their own universe anyways, but it’s kind of weird to think of jewelry shops in Moominvalley. They don’t really show money being used very much, other than Aunt Jane coming in from out of town, or when they traveled to the Riviera. They also don’t really show stores. Is there a “downtown” Moominvalley, or is this someone’s house?
Moomin probably shouldn’t trust Stinky for a variety of reasons, but in particular here because he happens to have burglary tools on-hand.
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I don’t really find that argument useful. It reads to me the same as saying “You can’t make machines fly”. Airplanes and bees both fly, though the mechanisms are completely different.
Even taking the strongest anti-AI position, I think it’s great that LLMs are a real-world example of the Chinese Room thought experiment. Sure, they don’t think like humans, but why exactly? How can we define a better term to delineate the difference?