I… okay. Okay… here we go. I can do this.
Here we see.. Okay. Here we see a male and a female attempting to end a phone conversation of the cliched “so in love neither one of them wants to be the first to hang up” variety. This kind of conversation can only happen between a female and a severely emasculated male (the Author), since in his mind he should be mimicking the female’s actions in order to please her. Essentially, he becomes a female and causes a deadlock of emotional neediness.
In addition, you will notice that the female character in this comic strip is the one to escalate the argument, with the male simply matching her aggression level in turn. This aggression, mixed with the emotional neediness from before and a lack of confidence, leads to the two people “breaking up” but continuing to stay on the phone with each other. This kind of breakup could only happen between two people with the emotional maturity of 14 year olds.
February 3, 2010 at 12:46am
4 notes
A space elevator is a conceptual structure that could carry things from Earth into space on a fixed track or cable. It has been proposed as a much cheaper method of traveling to and from the Moon.
In this comic, we see a hypothetical grand opening for a space elevator that utilizes tether propulsion, a system involving a very long, strong cable to propel a space craft rather than a rocket engine.
The joke here is that at a traditional “grand opening” a ribbon of some sort is cut to symbolize the opening, except in this case someone has cut the elevator’s tether rather than a ribbon. This would completely destroy the elevator, thus invalidating the grand opening.
The curse-word “fuck” is also used in the punch-line to add some more humor.
The premise of today’s strip is a brief and informal survey of popular group games and their likelihood to be used as a prelude to awkward group nudity and/or sex. But, you may ask, how did this comic strip come about? Why was it created? Let me tell you now.
While attending a small birthday party for an acquaintance, the Author and four other white young-adults were in the early rounds of a game of Settlers of Catan. During a lull in the fast-paced excitement of the game, one of the four males playing the game jokingly suggested they instead play “strip Settlers of Catan,” in the hopes that he would possibly get to see the bra of the female player. During the awkward and strained laughter, it dawned on the Author that this concept was humorous. “It is funny because you would normally not play a strip version of this complex game,” he thought. He immediately pulled the Nexus One from his cargo pocket and entered the web address “www.gooogle.com” into his phone’s web browser (he likes to use this lesser-known address for the popular search engine because it makes him laugh). Only a few searches in, he noticed a hilarious pattern forming that could be used in the creation of a new comic strip. With that idea and a half-bottle of Smirnoff Ice (Green Apple Bite flavor), he shot out the door and ran home to craft this magnificent web cartoon.
This comic strip attempts to project the insecurities and emotional fragility of a human (the Author) onto the Spirit rover, a robot that performed its data-collecting tasks on Mars over 20 times longer than planned (before getting stuck in soft sand).
Thankfully, the spirit rover could never have experienced these emotions, as it is simply a mechanical device whose motions and actions give it the perception of agency.
Having nothing of note in current geek culture to make observations about, various references to geek culture from seven years ago are made. These references include: Kazaa - a popular file sharing application, Friendster - a popular social network and Howard Dean - a presidential candidate for the 2004 election.
It is enjoyable to look at this comic strip because those are things that happened in the past to many of us readers and it makes us nostalgic.
Much of what the Author strives to accomplish with his comic strip is to answer the question, “but what if <geek fantasy/joke/concept> really happened?” It’s an important job, and one that he certainly does not take lightly. He stays awake until sunrise, scouring the web for your most crucial questions. Once found, he may spend weeks on end formulating the perfect answer. And he will find the answer. He toils for you, without payment or praise.
In this comic strip, the Author finally answers the question: “what happens after the child finishes his heroes journey in a far-away fantasy land, and is transported back home?” We have all begged for an answer to this question. We scream at our television sets as the credits roll after The Chronicles of Narnia or Peter Pan. “What happens next!?” we exclaim. Well the definitive answer is in: the child then leads a tortured, double life of denying the single greatest event of his existence or knowing those who love him do not believe him.
The first line is from the famous 1971 film Dirty Harry. It directly precedes the even more famous line, “”Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?” In that particular scene, Clint Eastwood’s character Harry Callahan has his gun on a bank robber and intimidates him by making him wonder if he has any bullets left. The robber doesn’t know the answer to this question, although to be safe he assumes (incorrectly) there is still one round of ammunition left.
However, in this strip, the Author has devised a comedic mash-up wherein the bank robber is replaced by Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant with near perfect memory from the film Rainman.
You see, the joke here is that “Rainman” wouldn’t have any problem remembering the number of bullets fired because he has an excellent memory.
One male (the Author) describes his fond reverence for modern digital storage devices, specifically a MicroSD card owned by his male companion. He even goes so far as to admit the device sexually arouses him. The owner then states that if the card becomes lodged in the aroused man’s anus, he will not aid in its removal.
Survey: what other computing devices do you think the Author has inserted into his rectum?
The “9/11 Truthers” are a group of individuals who believe the government was aware of, or even contributed to the attacks on September 11th, 2001. The popular belief is that these attacks were carried out by Al-Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group.
The Author presents a hypothetical situation wherein he proposes a merged theory that compromises between the truthers and that of popular belief - one tower was destroyed by the government and the other by Al-Qaeda. The hypothetical outcome is that the truthers are not pleased with this idea.
The setting for this comic strip is a FIRST Robotics Competition, a yearly event designed to inspire high school students to pursue careers in math and science. The competition pits teams of teenagers against each other by having each team build a robot within a given budget that will defeat their opponents robot in performing a set task. The task changes with each year’s competition, but generally requires the robot to carry and manipulate objects across varying terrain.
The competition portrayed in this comic, known as Breakaway, is scheduled to happen later this year. The game roughly consists of each team’s robot collecting soccer balls in a goal.
The Author has humorously created a fake design for a robot that would simply destroy the opponents robot by setting off the building’s sprinkler system.
Seeing as this competition is for high school students, it is likely that the Author has gone back and re-enrolled in high school in order to relive his glory days. It is also possible that this life changing decision was made in order to increase his chances of finding a girlfriend to love and have sex on. Or, perhaps, he simply needs to earn his GED.
Note: The title of this comic is a homographic pun.
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