This Rhymes with Orange strip might have worked perfectly back in early summer, but now it just seems awkward. The new corporate name just isn’t easy to adapt into usable slang, and even if it were, the political deadweight surrounding the takeover and renaming ruins any possible remaining humor.
In a curious instance of personal asynchronicity, it wasn’t until a couple of hours after I had written the text above (including the headline) that I saw Sunday’s Doonesbury, which needs no further commentary:
Comics I Don't Understand 
I like the suggestion that he could hurl down a hash symbol in place of a lightning bolt.
She left out the association with sex (because it doesn’t support her point).
@ Dana (1) – Sort of like an eight-pointed “shuriken” (throwing star): a nasty, but effective weapon.
P.P.S. @ Carl Fink – It took me a while to realize that you were talking about Alex in the Doonesbury strip; for a moment I thought that “she” meant Dana K. :-)
P.P.S. Re: Twitter: I almost regret that I was not able to cancel my account to protest Musk’s idiocies, because I had already done so after they doubled the maximum post length to 280 characters. Increasing the bandwidth of the (political) sewer was simply a bad idea.
The comments on Sunday were interesting. Big topics:
The shape of Alex’s nose from panel to panel.
They are a “Sally’s Pizza” family. Apparently that’s a big thing in, I think, Connecticut.
What? Trudeau just killed off Alex?!
Note, this is just what I recall from Sunday. I did not review the record to refresh my memory. I have been viewing a lot of court streams.
Never had a Twitter account. It is rare that I can say anything in that short a number of letters. I just run on and on and on and on… (Am I past the numbers of letters Twitter/X is limited to yet?)
@ Meryl A (5) – At 198 characters, your comment is comfortably under the (newer) limit (280) allowed for tweets. (You would have hit an even 200, but wordpress converted the three periods following “on and on…” to form a single character ellipsis.)
Thank you Kilby!
I thought that the Rhymes with Orange above was inexplicably anachronistic, and I had not expected that another strip would top it, but B.C. did just that:
P.S. On the other hand, Sunday’s B.C. seriously bends the fourth wall to play directly on the inherent anachronisms in the strip, even directly mentioning a popular fan explanation for them:
Perhaps these cartoonists are just ignoring the name change, and figuring that they should unload their remaining Twitter gags before the new (mis-)management grinds the whole system into oblivion:
Or perhaps “ignoring the name change” but not as a matter of inattention, rather as a pointed refusal to go along with the reality ….
While it’s name is officially X most people I know call it by it’s original.
I’m not on it, but I am on one of the original social media platforms, usenet. News has come down that Google Groups will soon cease usenet activity:
Starting on February 22, 2024, you can no longer use Google Groups (at
groups.google.com) to post content to Usenet groups, subscribe to Usenet
groups, or view new Usenet content. You can continue to view and search
for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google
Groups.
In addition, Google’s Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server and
associated peering will no longer be available, meaning Google will not
support serving new Usenet content or exchanging content with other NNTP
servers.
There have been increasing complaints about spam coming through GG, and calls to de-peer it, but they decided to commit suicide rather than wait around to be killed. I’m sure some of the complainers really realize how much legitimate traffic was coming through it, and this will only hasten the final demise of most newsgroups.
Oh, I used to be very active (though mostly as a reader) on Usenet, and went thru many iterations of what kind of reader software to use. But it was always a program (either in a terminal window, or a desktop application on my workstation or PC) that connected to our university NNTP server — so I didn’t even know Google Groups carried it.
A nice thing about Usenet, that some may regard as a drawback, was that it was asynchronous. Now when a forum or just a comments thread is on a single website, there is an ordering imposed on posted remarks. Even where people are polite, there can be a sense of competition (with people bothering to say “First!”); and along with that, you see people being polite and apologetic for appearing to repeat some other comment, or appearing to ignore an answer that they then pose a question for, etc, and they may add a remark along the lines of “Sorry, Joe’s #15 wasn’t there yet when I started typing my note”. But you still see them in an order!
With asynchronous Usenet, although in principle you could look at the timestamps in a post’s headers, functionally the posts will arrive and be displayable in different orders at different nodes. So everyone knows there is no firm claim of precedence for nearby posts; and you don’t need to explain.
One evening I was watching TV but also online messing around in mostly our local newsgroups. I was watching a show called “30 Something” and it was an episode where the storyline was like an adaptation of Joyce’s great novella “The Dead” . I jumped on [I forget what groups were around under what names, but maybe] rec.arts.tv.drama and posted something like “30 Something does ‘The Dead’!”. Within an hour I saw three others saying much the same — not as replies to mine or to each oher — and it was clear we had independently thought this and had wanted to share it, without the others having arrived at our nodes.
Another nice thing about Usenet was local groups. These could easily become social connectors.
Here at UChicago (a form we did not yet use), it was not the expected social-topic groups (like uchi.film and its rival uchi.movies, or uchi.chicagoeats) that became random socializing forums and even had IRL meetups, but the odd uchi.test.d. First there was uchi.test, which like any place’s local test group was for users to try out whether they were actually connecting, or if the next iteration of software was working for them, etc. But actual test messages would be greeted by replies and banter from a crowd of techies and established Usenet users. Eventually our Newsmistress thought new users should be protected from this, and established uchi.test.d following the widespread convention that a group foo.bar should not have a lot of meta traffic about what the group should be like, whether it should be split, what content should be discouraged or encouraged , etc, and that this sort of thing should go into a companion group foo.bar.d (for “discussion” I assume).
At one time, I was a heavy usenet participant. Such diverse groups as rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.sf.written, comp.lang.c, rec.arts.comics.strips, rec.food.cooking, alt.folklore.urban, alt.usage.english, and the always fun alt.fan.tom-servo.
Really the small newsgroups were some of the best. I really like alt.fan.letterman, for instance, or alt.food.barbecue.
Usenet has become like a mostly dead mall. A few big stores are kind of making a go of it for now, but all the little shops and kiosks are gone.
At one point Megacorp had a usenet group. Then they closed their server and blocked the port. That was one of the advantages of GG, because it was a web site you didn’t need the NNTP port, so anyone could access usenet.
@ Brian (15) – I never had any direct contact with Usenet (the systems I used in college and at work weren’t set up to provide easy access), but I do remember that for the few short years that I participated in a Fidonet BBS (three decades ago?), there was a junction there that provided a Usenet connection, at least to the groups that were “relevant” to that particular BBS.
I recall a few of those connections back in the BBS days. At the time, “retail” usenet services weren’t really a thing. Usually you had to use one from university or corporate access. It was the common joke that every September the new students would “discover” usenet and post lots of clueless or dumb stuff.
When AOL started providing usenet access, it became “Eternal September”. The free server I use these days is called that.
https://www.eternal-september.org/
I still think the news readers are the best forum management software. The problem is that it’s not that easy to port the functionality to a web page, even with client-side scripting. So systems like PhpBB and this one use a technique that is simpler but more robust across systems and browsers.