Basic Instructions is a hilarious, bitingly cynical comic strip by Scott Meyer. Recently he’s been working with Scott Adams of Dilbert fame to make his strip more syndication-friendly, but the four-panel webcomic-style strips are the real winners.
Speaking of dorky, I went to the xkcd meetup last weekend — here’s a bit of explanation — and it was indescribably awesome. Below are some highlights.
This was the first thing I saw when I got to the park:
There were a ton of inside jokes related to various xkcd strips. Here’s the sign from “Wikipedian Protester”:
And here’s the contest from “Tape Measure” in action:
My favorite was this poster that referenced “Cat Proximity”:
Another great sign, with an allusion to “Hyphen”:
Randall brought a bunch of giant posterboards and had the assembled masses write a new ending to the “Dream Girl” comic that inspired the meetup. He said he’d try to get them all scanned or photographed and put online at some point. (UPDATE: Here they are, and here are Randall’s thoughts on the meetup.) Here are some interim work-in-progress photos:
And lastly, me with the man himself. Maybe not the exact face I wanted to make (or Randall, probably), but what can you do?
There are tons more — see the rest of my pictures here, and over 1000 others in Flickr’s xkcd meetup group.
As a bonus, check out these crappy digital camera video clips I made! (Availability subject to my bandwidth getting raped, as I couldn’t be bothered to get them up on YouTube.)
1: The countdown
2: A bit of raptor dancing(sorry it’s sideways) (hey, it’s oriented properly now; thanks, xkcd forums!)
3: Wish You Were Here
4: Hotel California
5: “Bill Nye versus raptors!” (from item 62 on this list)
6: The “wah!” game
Wondering if there’s dorkier way to spend your Friday afternoon? There is! Check out Layer Tennis from Coudal Partners, a live one-on-one Photoshopping competition.
While browsing through the archives of The Sneeze, I came across this gem in an interview with Adam Savage of Mythbusters:
Well, I wouldn’t be crass enough to ask if Jamie is gay… but luckily a number of Sneeze readers asked me to ask you. So… umm… what’s Jamie’s deal?
Jamie has been married to a wonderful woman for nearly 20 years now. They met when he owned a sailboat diving charter business in the Virgin Islands.
Does he mind that people are often curious about his orientation?
When the show first started airing, Jamie and I both got a lot of gay fan mail. He got a little upset at first, and his wife pointed out “Jamie, take the compliment! Someone thinks you’re really hot! It’s okay if it’s a man.” And he was cool with that, and relaxed about it.
At some point in there, he got an email that said “I want to suck that mustache right off your face!” (LAUGHING)
“I want to suck that mustache right off your face” is, of course, the greatest pickup line of all time. Unquestionably. Almost makes me wish I had a mustache myself.
Twitter makes me slightly uncomfortable.
It’s not the concept that creeps me out. I can see the utility in a service that gives you real-time updates on what all of your friends are doing. It’s like an away message for real life, delivered to your cell phone or IM. It’s a fun idea that has the addictiveness of a full-fledged social network like Facebook.
The part that creeps me out is that I feel its pull without actually knowing people that use it. (Okay, to be fair, I know two — hi guys — but the bulk of my Twitter feed consists of updates from people I’ve never met.)
I’m interested in Macs, for example, so I read Cabel Sasser’s blog, Steven Frank’s blog, Mike Lee’s blog and Wil Shipley’s blog. I read John Gruber’s blog and listen to his podcast (three-month update: still funny). That’s normal enough, because all of those are written for a general audience.
The thing is, I follow most of those people on Twitter, where they talk about when they’re going to dinner or watching the game or going to the store. After a recent Daring Fireball post I even follow Gruber’s wife on Twitter. I get stories about their kid in my RSS reader. (And it’s not just me; there are hundreds of people following Cabel, and thousands following Gruber.)
Living vicariously through the minutiae of strangers’ daily lives: fun, but maybe a little squicky.
