Then I saw Bitstrips on boingboing: “BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make ‘characters’ using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date.” Yarg, this is the perfect distraction from my thesis.

For example, I had this happen yesterday, because I did, as mentioned, watch all the “Get a Mac” ads at once. There are 30-35 of them on the site right now. I watched the first couple, thinking, “Sure, these are funny… ish.” But around when I finished the 15th one, I just couldn’t help but laugh out loud at every single one of them. I’m sure I was chuckling heartily for the last four that I watched, but I’m also pretty sure they weren’t any funnier than the first few. (My favorites were “Work Vs. Play”, “Choose a Vista”, and “Misprint”, btw.)

Other recent experiences with this phenomenon: Flight of the Conchords episodes and Cute Overload posts.

I need a name for that particular characteristic of amusing media that, with sufficient exposure, becomes exceedingly funny. All I can think of right now is “snowlol” …which may, as it happens, become much funnier if I had already made a similar joke 15 times.

I love Tony Millionaire’s comics because they are so pretty and clean, yet raw in the way that a detailed woodblock print is raw. And such magical language! …like something you might expect from a sophisticated pirate. Some words you would easily find in his Sock Monkey comic: delirium, syphilis, jaundice, anguish, furnace, curtailed, hideous spectre, jabbering, Blast!, doggedness, romantical.

I watched the first three episodes of Fruits Basket ((not to be confused with “fruit basket”. THANKS to the little bird who pointed out this connection to me.)) today. It’s an anime about a family with a curse that if they embrace someone of the opposite sex, they’ll turn into characters of the Chinese Zodiac. Of course!

My favorite part of the Wikipedia entry:

“She realizes that an onigiri can never belong in a Fruits Basket.”

So sad!

(Thank you, Ian, for taking this lovely picture of me!)

Here’s her book.

Also: Monster Glowing Squid Caught on Camera. Includes eerie video.

I’ve always liked Chris Ware’s drawings, have been a little ambivalent about his dejected attitude, but the hyper-connectedness of the four New Yorker covers he designed, and the incredible detail they contain, is just awesome. (I wish I’d taken the time to notice these things on my own.)

Highlights:

• inspirations from Google image searches (e.g. “what a teen looks like”)
• paranoid pigeons
• cartoons drawn in letters from soldiers at war

In addition:

THIS is the consistency of the Yoplait “Whips!® Creamy Latté YOGURT MOUSSE”, of which I had my first today:

It is the clumpy, cotton-candy version of yogurt. These actually weigh significantly less than the normal Yoplait® cups (4 oz instead of 6 oz. Would you say that is 50% less, or 33% less? haha, tricky tricky!).