Have we had this one before? I recall some discussion of “To Serve Man”. But not this trope of “The old surprise ending is so familiar and boring, we have to put in a different twist.”
And no, it shouldn’t be the other way around!
Sunday Funnies – LOLs, August 8th, 2021
Comics I Don't Understand 
The floor is lava!!
The Andertoons cartoon where the floor is lava is a hit for me.
I’ve seen other “the floor is lava”-themed cartoons, but this one was by far the funniest.
Does the “Poorly Drawn Lines” cartoon (the one with the mouse narrator) allude to “Alice In Wonderland”? I don’t know much about that book, but I think it had a mouse in it that loved to tell stories to the other animals, even if the stories were a bit incoherent.
I don’t get the “I think I’m turning into my parents” cartoon. Why is she saying that? Does she think she’s going to grow a second head for some reason?
Shouldn’t one of the emoticons by a winkie — 😉 — I don’t see you can type what is shown whose only reason I can see is to indicate eyelashes (and in old comic mechanics indicates female– which is sexist and I assume why the caption is “no, it shouldn’t be the other way around!” but … it shouldn’t be the way it is now either)
“Does the “Poorly Drawn Lines” cartoon (the one with the mouse narrator) allude to “Alice In Wonderland”? ” I don’t think so. In the book there was a mouse who told a story of a family that lived in a treacle well and lived on treacle but that’s not this. I think this is just a “someone has to be a narrator and if so that person will think they are the coolest of them all”. If anything, it might be based a bit on if you give a mouse a cookie.
“I don’t get the “I think I’m turning into my parents” cartoon. Why is she saying that? ” Um… because he is literally turning in his parents. ” Does she think she’s going to grow a second head for some reason” Um, he did grow a second head for some reason, and the process is likely to continue until he separates into two bodies and literally does become the two people who actually are his parents. (I assume it is a man and presumably the screaming woman’s husband.)
Well, I’m a bit reluctant to explain, since checking the comments threads on publication sites is frowned on, but the remark about “other way around” was in anticipation of someone here bringing up that idea which I saw proffered and refuted on the syndication site (Kingdom, or Go, don’t recall). The idea was that the plain yellow circular smiley face predated both typed emoticons and emoji. But the faces in the cartoon are emoji, not the older original smiley face. I agree that maybe it would have been better to include some non-face emoji to forestall this question. (But that might raise a different objection, about the emoji not all matching the typed emoticons.)
Woozy – You mean that it’s the creature in the doorway speaking,(despite the lack of an open mouth) not the screaming woman, yes?
The lava one triggered my literalism response. “Molten rock? It’s behaving like slightly warm water, not reducing the house to cinders in seconds!” Never know when the literalism response will strike.
Downpuppy, I think the male head of the pair does have a somewhat open mouth, enough to be the speaker of the caption.
The emoji one would be a lot clearer with one of the cat-face emoji in a corner.
That said, as far as I know the basic smiley-face emoji are the original yellow smiley-faces.
“You mean that it’s the creature in the doorway speaking,(despite the lack of an open mouth) not the screaming woman, yes?”
With absolute certainty. And the male head is speaking and does have an open mouth. The screaming woman is just screaming. The cartoon would have rendered better if she weren’t screaming.
If the smiley faces were the “have a nice day” buttons and tee-shirts we’d be having a case of ancient grandparents visiting their middle aged grand kids. Emoticons in no way can be interpreted as “kids”.
But I don’t think of “have a nice day” buttons and tee-shirts as precursors to emoticons. They weren’t meant for written communication at all. If emoticons have precursors it’d be dotting i’s with hearts and doodles of smiles in pen and ink.
And… clearly everyone recognizes smiley face emojis. And clearly the context of this makes it certain those are the new smiley face emojis. It’d be a deliberate contrarian who would think there’d be a confusion over the now ancient and entirely forgotten “have a nice day” icons which would, even among those who remember, not have any relevance or connection to the situation of communication symbols.
There is a mouse in chapter 2 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who almost drowns along with Alice in the pool of Alice’s tears. The mouse tells Alice his tale, which appears typographically looking somewhat like a mouse’s tail, but Alice isn’t really paying attention. “I think you had gotten to the second bend,” she says.
Hmmph…. I confused the mouse in the pool of tears with the dormouse in the mad tea party.
Time to review… whee… I forgot a lot.
Yes,… I’ll concede there was a mouse who liked telling tales. Still I don’t think this is a reference to that… unless it is.
The dormouse was asked to tell a story but he was tired and hungry for molasses so his story was about three sisters who live in a treacle well and eat treacle.
Many years ago, while a returning student at Washington U (STL), I started playing a MUD game [1]. I had noted people putting 🙂 or the like in the game conversations. After a while I figured out what they were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD
Oh, the WordPress software converted the text smiley to emoji and removed the footnote marker when it created the link.
“Oh, the WordPress software converted the text smiley to emoji and removed the footnote marker when it created the link.”
I never understood that concept. I always figured the whole point of doing an emiticon
was to cleverly put in more visual information under limited resources. If the text software can just toss in graphics… where’s the cleverness in that?
❤
Entered as < 3
❤ was entered a “less than 3” but how was “less than 3” entered?
I could only do it we “pre” tabs rendering is as
as 🙂 it will create it's own block area and separate my text.
Unless a back slash will make ❤ render as \<3…..
Oh wait…. HTML used forward slashes doesn’t it. So using pretags may render it as
. But if I want it one the same line do do /<3? or …. oh… yeah ampersand lt semicolon…. <3…. One forgets these things…..
Last two posts inspired by the Nancy 4th wall breaking….
One point is that it’s a lot easier to type : – ) than to fish around for a way to enter emoji, especially on a desktop keyboard where the latter aren’t accessible at a click.
Anyway, I believe the yellow (and not yellow) smiley faces supported by phpbb and similar tools were an intermediate step in the development of emoji, and like I said it’s not an accident that they’re the same yellow as the old yellow happy-faces.
(I remember at one point there was a small industry in creating small, often animated, smiley-faces for phpbb and similar software. Can’t remember exactly when that point was though.)
I’m not sure why you apparently think that using emoji in text means they can’t be partially descended from Have a Nice Day. The idea of putting attitude annotations in text originated in the 80s (not just smileys but also things like ) but once the use of smiley-faces in this context appeared it’s perfectly reasonable to get cross-fertilization from other cultural forms of smiley-faces.
Alice: “They can’t have lived on nothing but treacle. They would have been ill!”
Dormouse: “And so they were. Very, very, VERY ill!”
The way I initially interpreted the “I think I’m turning into my parents” cartoon was that the lady was reading an article in a magazine titled something like “How to Know if You’re Turning Into Your Parents.”
As she was reading the article, many of its points hit home, and she realized she was turning into her parents.
Usually, “turning into your parents” is meant in a figurative sense. But here in comics-land, we all know that it can also mean literally. And her parents are… um… a two-headed person, for some reason.
Alarmed, she tells her parents that she’s turning into them (figuratively or literally is unclear at this point, adding to my confusion). But they just look at her as if to say, “Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
Of course I misunderstood the cartoon. (This is the appropriate forum for not understanding cartoons, after all.) Now I agree with Woozy’s explanation that the woman is not the speaker (she’s just alarmed, or maybe silently yelling), but it’s her husband who’s doing the talking, and the one who’s turning into a two-headed person.
So it’s the husband who’s telling his wife that he’s turning into his parents, as he’s literally morphing into them. (And not the daughter telling her parent(s) that she’s turning into them.)
But J-L, apart from not getting the right characters in the right roles, your explanation seems to me quite right in taking up the idea that something like a magazine article has activated the worry about “turning into your parents” for the guy in the cartoon. But since it was phrased in the plural, the “literalizing demon” wouldn’t just make it his father or mother but came up with the “solution” of making him two-headed.
I think we’ve mentioned the insurance commercial about turning into your parents. I enjoy those, especially at the hardware store. “You don’t know these people . . . “
“I think we’ve mentioned the insurance commercial about turning into your parents.”
Yeah, but absolutely none of those traits do I attribute to parents.
Hmm. FWIW, “(… things like )” was supposed to be “(… things like <RBG>)”. Oops.
Dave in Boston, yep, when you have a LT and then shortly later a GT, in a configuration that might be an HTML tag, the input process will try to take it that way, and if it’s not in fact a meaningful (and permitted) tag, will just omit it.
That does not mean that you can’t use a > or a < without resorting to HTML Entity syntax (ampersand and semicolon). The ones in the previous sentence I just typed, plain. That worked because they didn’t seem to be paired. You can also try backslash escape, but then sometimes the backslashes get printed.
(And just to be clear, this has nothing to do with Markdown. It’s just the html-protection input filter.)
What? You can just type <span style=”color:red”>blue</span> and get blue?
I guess not. No fun.
It would have been amusing if WP had translated the <RBG> to an emoji on me. But I guess that particular idiom’s long dead. (I think it came from CompuServe? I forget… been a long time)