Category Archives: Cartoon

Dilbert Betabert Sucksbert

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I’ve been putting up with the new Dilbert website abomination for however long, a couple of months at least, and the fact that Scott Adams is a fellow Hartwick alum doesn’t mean I’m going to cut him any slack — the website breaks the first commandment of web design.

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.

Adobe’s (ADBE) popular Web animation technology powers everything from the much-vaunted Nike (NKE) Plus Web site for running diehards to many humdrum banner advertisements. But the technology can easily be abused—excessive, extemporaneous animations confuse usability and bog down users’ Web browsers.

What’s more, he’s admitted it. But it turns out that there’s a “fast Dilbert” web site.

This alternate site is a minor secret, mentioned only here and in the text footnote to the regular site as “Linux/Unix.”

So rejoice, go there instead (if you read Dilbert online) and pray that they look at web traffic statistics.

You're So Analytic

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Sometime you have to let art flow over you. But apparently, this is not one of those times. How To Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest

Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner’s e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is called a “theory of mind” caption, which requires the reader to project intents or beliefs into the minds of the cartoon’s characters.

I’ve entered this exactly once. To me, caption contests are backwards. I have an idea and draw a situation to match — the trick is distilling an allegedly funny idea into something that I can draw in a single-panel cartoon.

The “theory of mind” approach lets you take a single point in time — the utterance of the whatever’s in the caption — and force the reader to construct what has just happened (and sometimes the drawing does that anyway), but that and the common experience the reader must have is as much of a setup as you get. I’ve had people tell me a joke and suggest that it would make a funny cartoon, and I have to point out it took 45 seconds of talking to set up the punchline. It’s rare that that will lend itself to a single-panel cartoon.

via Cosmic Variance

Life Imitates Art

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Well, Art is busy, so life imitates a cartoon instead.

The other night on the Colbert Report, he interviewed George Johnson, author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (which I’ve mentioned before), and the idea for which was stolen from Chad. The interview was standard Colbert schtick, and Johnson doesn’t really explain what’s going on with the physics, but the last 30-45 seconds is great, and becomes the XKCD cartoon “The Difference,” about science and pain.

UPDATE: if you are getting frustrated with the Comedy Central player, there’s an embedded link here that seem worked better for me. (I can’t embed the video myself, alas)