rubbercat.net

November 28, 2011
  • I updated the Links page – new links added, dead links removed. Some of the notable additions:
  • The Pictures page now has pictures! Seems like that should should’ve been a no-brainer, in retrospect.
  • Do me a favor, and go to the Misc page, and just hover over the links. PRETTY COOL, HUH??? I used OKHover from OKFocus.

*****THIS NOW CONCLUDES OUR REFURBISHMENT*****

November 26, 2011

I have decided to become a Betty X Jughead shipper. It seems pretty obvious they were meant to be together

November 25, 2011

The Archive section has been refurbished. As mentioned previously, every post now has its own page, and now every post is linked. Hooray! Also, now that every post has been migrated from The Blogger Years, I can do categories again.

I started backing up my tweets because I’m concerned that someday the tech bubble will burst and Biz Stone or whoever is just going call it quits and steal the server that has all my tweets on it and drive it down to Mexico or something. This guy (who happens to be the head design guy at Twitter) has a WordPress solution, but since I’m not using WordPress I had to do it myself, the stupid way. Here’s my first year of tweets, back when I decided I was going to use Twitter solely for tech-related posts for some reason. All this just so I can do a command-F search to find the time I tweeted about flexible straws.

AND THEN! About a week or two ago, @bug_deal was super-nice enough to roll out with a tweet archive that’s probably better and it’s all one page instead of split into years (which means easier command-Fing) and it updates regularly I think. So I might get rid of my own archives in favor of that but for now I’ll let them co-exist

November 23, 2011

I can’t remember who made this or why

November 21, 2011
MENU & SECTION CHANGES

jigglypuff spinning in an office chairI changed the menu/sidebar around a little bit and also messed around with some of the sections!

  • Comics is spun off from Pictures! I think including it in the menu, rather than burying it in another section, will give new visitors a better idea of what this site is “about.” Even though it’s not really “about” anything. Whatever!
  • Audio/Video is just Video now. It was so insanely tilted towards video that the “audio” part was pretty much superfluous. I don’t make music, I don’t do podcasts, and I don’t curate mixtapes, so there was no real point in having an audio section. Never fear, the MIDI Jamboree is still over here.
  • By the way, the titles of those two sections are using Google Web Fonts, which, uh, might not show up in some places (Internet Explorer, Camino, etc.)… not sure about smartphones.
  • “Elsewhere” has been merged into the About page, which has been rewritten to be friendlier and more informative than its predecessor.
  • The comment/catbox section is gone. It won’t be missed. There’s always Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and good old-fashioned e-mail if for some bizarre reason you wanna comment.
  • The link to the Donate page is now a different color, because it’s obviously the most important page. Maybe I will change the color every month??? Yes, that sounds like a plan.
  • The links are a little bit bigger and I put in a display: block rule so now they’re just a tiny bit easier to click on from a mobile device. It’s far from perfect but it’s a smidgen of progress.
  • I still need to re-do all the other sections!!! There’s gonna be some changes in the coming days/weeks/months so consider this area a “work in progress.”


November 20, 2011
Mallard Fillmore Watch

mallard fillmore 11/18/2011
November 18, 2011

Mallard Fillmore: Twilight fan. Who knew?

November 15, 2011
adventures of rubbercat

@extranapkins made this for me a couple months ago

Into the fanart pile it goes…

November 15, 2011
complete peanuts

Oh my goodness, I just looked over at my copy of The Complete Peanuts: 1950 to 1952 and I made a shocking discovery: if you turn the book upside-down, good ol’ Charlie Brown becomes…

charlie bro

CHARLIE BRO!!!

A smug, bearded frat bro, the very anti-thesis of Charlie Brown, lurking within him this whole time. His own worst enemy was… himself o_o

November 10, 2011
Mallard Fillmore Watch

mallard fillmore 11/05/2011
November 5, 2011

Hrm, yes, I agree, it is irresponsible for members of the media to caricature a mass populist movement based on the actions of a few outliers, and furthermore… *takes a big sip of Beverage*

mallard fillmore 11/02/2011
November 2, 2011

*spits out Beverage in a continuous stream for 30 minutes*

November 9, 2011
WEEKLY FONT ANNOUNCEMENT

OKFocus has released Pixel Comic Sans as an Open Type Font

November 9, 2011

ceoEvery post on this here thing now has its own individual page to facilitate easier sharing (NO BUTTONS THOUGH, I PROMISE)

As opposed to the clumsy monthly archive thing I had going on for the past eight years which I’d grown stubbornly accustomed to

Another technological breakthrough for rubbercat.net


November 9, 2011

family circus, 10/22/1960I feel like I’ve made hundreds of Family Circus parodies over the years. Even when I was a kid reading Garfield books, I found it banal. Its gentle wholesomeness was always bewildering to me. Whenever I draw a comics page, I always start with that one-panel circle, because it’s just so iconic.

The majority of Family Circus parodies are terrible – most people just throw in some violence or incest and call it a day. But there’s some real gems out there. There’s a particular strip that stands out in my mind – I think it was from Mad Magazine – where Billy is holding a turtle and he says something like “His skin’s all gnarled and wrinkly, like Grandma!” Perry Bible Fellowship’s “homage” is exquisite. My personal favorite is The Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a random strip with a random Nietzsche quote. It has an amazing hit ratio.

Mini-comics godfather Steve Willis used to have a feature in his “obscuro comix networking bi-weekly newsletter” City Limits Gazette called “The Bil Keane Watch,” where he and other contributors deconstructed and pontificated on The Family Circus, which raised the bar for Family Circus scholarship by putting out theories and observations, including the Single-Nostril Theory (each kid only has one nostril, for some reason) or the observation that telephone poles are always drawn without wires (an obvious crucifixion metaphor). I think he’s collected them all on his website. Here’s Volume 5 of “The Collected Bil Keane Watch,” featuring a panel drawn for him by “The Master” himself.

A couple days ago I was reading Will Pfeifer’s article “Family Circus of Horors” (collected in The Book of Zines) and it gave me newfound respect for Keane. There are indications that Keane was funnier and hipper than people give him credit for – the 1960’s version of the strip, where “Dad” looks like he wandered in from a bar napkin gag cartoon, for example, or a cameo from none other than Zippy the Pinhead. There was also an April Fool’s Day strip where he took over Dilbert – I can’t find it, but basically Dilbert is at his cubicle being Dilbert and then Billy runs in and makes a joke about him having three square meals a day (because Dilbert is three square panels a day, you see?).

And then there’s this strip from September 1990, as described by Pfeifer:

Billy and Dolly are standing in a field overrun with weeds. Flies buzz around their heads. The sky is dark. A factory and some nearby houses belch smoke. A pick-up in the distance spews more muck and blasts a loud “boom boom boom” music (rap?) as the driver tosses garbage from the window. A sickly green stream sits stagnant before the kids, filled with cans, tires, and rotting fish. A sign that reads “No Shooting” stands riddled with bullet holes. In the midst of all this desolation, there is no clever remark from Billy. No innocently humorous “Dolly-isms.” All Dolly, wearing a world-weary variation of the blasé expression can ask is this:

“Why do babies leave heaven to come here?”

I have no idea what to make of this strip. Did Jean-Paul Sartre write it? Is it a pro-abortion strip? A pro-birth control strip? It’s definitely the bleakest thing I’ve ever seen in the Sunday funnies, and that includes the glory days of Peanuts, when Charles Schulz examined the pain of childhood in excruciating detail. This is way beyond that.

RIP Bil Keane.

November 8, 2011

Casual Male XL Fan does an excellent Tumblr featuring screenshots of the most inane questions asked on Yahoo! Answers… check it out if you haven’t already

November 7, 2011
P101711PS-0577
P101711PS-0577 by The White House, on Flickr

hey man you gotta pay for that first

November 6, 2011

RIP Andy Rooney! It is always sad when TV legends die.

My friend Andy Bugay clued me in to a little something called the Andy Rooney Game, “where you take Andy Rooney’s segment on 60 Minutes and remove everything but his first sentence and last sentence.” Here it is:

November 3, 2011

Here’s the scene of Mickey Mouse dressing up like Minnie that I mentioned a couple weeks ago…

mickey dressed as minnie

November 1, 2011

New Anthropomorphic Republican Talking Duck

It is about CEOs