Recent Comments

1. about 16 hours ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   This is only true if you happen to live in one of the five or six states that’s actually at play in this election. Nobody seriously believes the disgraced (and more obviously deranged every day) ex-president will get more votes than Biden, even if third parties siphon a few hundred thousand away. Trouble is, our Founding Fathers made a deal with the devil (that is, the southern slave-owning states) in order to get the Constitution ratified, and as a result we have the absurdity known as the Electoral College. You win enough states (particularly small states, who are over-represented in the EC) to get 270 electoral votes, and it doesn’t matter if you got several million fewer votes from the actual public. This has become pretty much the only way a Republican has gotten into the White House in this century.

   Which means that in the 44 or so states that are solidly Blue or Red, tens of thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of people could vote third-party and it would have exactly no effect on the outcome of the election. Meanwhile, a few thousand (or a few hundred, or just a few) votes in a “swing” state can determine the election.

   I live in IL, which is solidly Democratic. I have on occasion voted for third-party candidates. I had no expectation that my vote would have any impact on the outcome of the election (and it did not), but hoped that if a few tens of thousands voted for somebody to the left of the party’s candidate, the party just might respond by slowing down its shift to the right.

2. about 17 hours ago on MythTickle

   Definitely picking up a Bodé vibe from this strip!

3. about 17 hours ago on Crankshaft

   There is a recognizable joke here, even if it’s a terribly old one and the set-up is remarkably awkward. This is why I disagreed with bwoeh and found this strip to be better than the 7/12/23 “random” strip.

   Still, the strip (and the last few weeks) remains more “strange or odd” than “laugh provoking.”

4. about 18 hours ago on Crankshaft

   “Copyright law” has been duly noted and added to the list of “Things Batiuk don’t know squat about.” We are soon going to have to get a bigger server to hold the list.

5. about 18 hours ago on Crankshaft

   “They” (the producers, director, studio, releasing company, critics, and general public) don’t. But Masoné Jar-Jarré is having one of his manic periods again.

6. about 18 hours ago on Crankshaft

   Does Batiuk understand what “passage of time” means? The current copyright law, the most generous to creators in history, says copyright expires 75 years after the death of the creator. No, the descendants do not have any right to extend the copyright further. So any copyright on Barlow’s work expired a minimum of 250 years ago (though copyright as we know it did not exist in those days). Unless, of course, TimeMop® (the Rather Elegant Solution™) brought him forward to the ’70s so he could learn about Heavy Metal music (referenced yesterday), and the courts take that to mean he lived that long…

   Which leads to a question: if the law says copyright expires 75 years after the creator’s death, and the creator is a time traveler who goes 60 years into the past and dies there, does this mean his copyright expired when he was 15 years old?

7. about 18 hours ago on Crankshaft

   彼は行方不明のままだ。

8. about 18 hours ago on Crankshaft

   I remember that “random” strip, and the arc it came from. Not sure I’d say today’s a draw. As ancient and poorly set-up as today’s “joke” is, it is at least a recognizable joke, something that can’t be said for the Rictus Homunculus strip.

9. about 18 hours ago on Crankshaft

   Obviously very busy, as anything copyrighted during Barlow’s supposed lifetime would be public domain by now. Unless TimeMop™ is nudging things again.

10. about 18 hours ago on Crankshaft

    “Funny” in the sense of “difficult to explain or understand; strange or odd.” Yep.