Now That We've Discovered The First-Ever Complaint Letter, Perhaps We Will Discover Other Firsts Among

rudolph the red nosed reindeer

~*1ll3qi*1blE bUll$?Hi*t-~

I was going to design and market a bumper sticker or decorative sign that looked like something written in an extremely hard-to-read fake-cursive font, but was in fact not actually lettering at all, just a bunch of random loops and squiggles.

Then I remembered pareidolia exists, and that people would "discover" offensive statements in the squiggles, and would NOT believe that they weren't really there or not intentional.

Every time I remember that nearly everyone, even people who have never heard of The Far Side, knows what a "thagomizer" is, my brain gets a little spritz of endorphins from the fact that something, that was part of my weirdness growing up, has breached containment and is here to stay.

My Dad: "The Melrose [apple tree] also has some massive pups."

Me: " . . . . . "

Me: "Just so you know, you should expect some... weird reactions... if you use the phrase 'has some massive pups' in public."

if i had a time machine and i wanted to absolutely destroy an ancient emperor or king, i would take them to the shark tunnel of an aquarium. giving them an ozymandias view of their legacy would do nothing, they can see that all empires rot just by looking around them. but the shark tunnel of an aquarium is something they haven’t seen before, something no one has seen before, something magnificent that they could build with technology only slightly out of their reach. they would bankrupt their nation trying to recreate that shark tunnel for themself. their dynasty would collapse within three generations, and, if heaven is on my side, they themself will be eaten by a shark to the delight of generations of historians to come

Oh, they know exactly what they're doing.

It's often not even the same crab. Can you recognize individual members of a species you've never seen before?

Why is the crab in danger? So you will keep watching. Creating mortal peril for your subjects is SOP for wildlife videography.

There's more awareness now, and you can't be certain that's what you're looking at nowadays, thank goodness, but there's still a lot of that. Because the networks pay for it.

Mainstream television has this weird superstition that everything has to follow one of a few specific plotlines very closely, or nobody will watch it.

That said, I miss the old school nature documentaries sometimes, because either they prioritized information over their narrative (Nature With George Page), or they went full send with an actually good narrative (Wild America).

@comicaurora

This Spring, I reserved a room online, at a Best Western motel, and received a pop-up message that said, "Thank you for submitting."

My apologies for not getting a screenshot.

Well, folks, I'm starting to realize that maybe Bartleby the Scrivener might not have been the best role model for me to emulate...

Note that this does NOT say, "If a person cares about you, they will drop whatever they're doing, RIGHT NOW, and rush to your side for any reason you deem sufficiently important, and if they don't, then they don't care about you at all."

“No matter how busy a person is, if they care, they’ll find time for you.”

— Unknown