Category: awesome

make sure to emphasize the first syllable in ‘papsi’ and ‘ravel’, and you are golden

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Honestly I cannot even really explain the reference in the first panel. It’s a shibboleth for Mennonites from in/around Winkler, Manitoba; it may have been a popular snack combination at one time, or is possibly just funny because it really gives one the opportunity to play up a particular characteristic of the “Mennonite Accent”.

I don’t naturally have a “Mennonite Accent” (having never learned to speak Low German properly) but I can switch it on to the delight and amusement of others. I’m actually a little baffled as to why it’s so funny. I slacken my jaw a little and start dead-panning my way through a story about Peter Heinrichs getting his tractor overturned out by Schoenwiese (pronounced sorta like “Shine-vays”) and people from my area are in stitches. Not that I don’t find it funny myself, but I’m the sort of person who likes to think about why things are funny and this sort of eludes me. [March 13, 2012]

the best plans always have phases

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Hindsight is a pretty interesting thing, isn’t it? The guy writing this comic doesn’t know that he’s in for some of the most stressful times in his life, but the guy in those stressful times also didn’t know he’d come out the other side in fine shape. And the guy writing this commentary right now has no idea what’s in store just around the corner, etc. etc.

The boss list in the 2nd panel is my actual boss order for Mega Man 2. (If you’re having trouble, it goes Air, Flash, Quick, Crash, Metal, Bubble, Heat, Wood which is also fun to say.) It is a bit unusual but I learned it from a master of the game. I think that the main reason for this particular order is to get Item-2 (the flying platform) as soon as possible, which makes a lot of later sections much easier. [February 13, 2012]

today: a tribute to potentially Indonesian stickman comics

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inspired by those comics I found yesterday,
which in turn, as near as I can tell,
are inspired by my comics.
It’s all a bit confusing.

Begin Commentary: Eventually I got an email that cleared everything up, although for the life of me I can of course no longer find it. “Unit 076” was a Malaysian teen named Sidharta who somehow came across my site and was inspired to start a comic of his own. His English, he explained, was pretty basic so he’d had his older brother compose the email.

I came across his site when encouraged by a friend to to poke around the referral logs for my own site — these, if you don’t know, are logs in which I can see all the sites that have recently linked to mine. My friend Andrew suggested that I re-draw his first comic as a sort of homage, which I thought was a delightful idea and which is what prompted Sidharta to email me and thank me.

The whole thing was very positive and fun and a bit baffling. It taught a small lesson about the way things get around when they’re online, and poked a tiny hole in my theory that Nobody Reads This Anyway.

Incidentally this is the only comic to use the “Ouroboros” tag. My site inspired a comic, which I copied and put on my site. The snake eats its own tail. [January 18, 2012]