Saw a reference to Odie originally being called Spot and read about there being a prequel comic to Garfield, which I thought was pretty interesting

Second this 😀

@jgrim@discuss.online has been doing an awesome job of running it, and also created Sublinks as a Lemmy alternative

Snakes are able to fit into tight places, so they’d be able to easily retrieve keys that are e.g. dropped into a sewer grate. Kind of the reverse of what rescue animals tend to do though. Beetles with pencils because the teacher won’t notice them delivering you a pencil? They could also just be a bit of absurdism, but it’s kind of weird that the other ones are themed.

First appearance of Odie (née Spot). Fun trivia:

Odie was going to be named Spot until Jim Davis found out this name was being used for another character. This was shown in the original Jon comics and referenced in the August 15th 1978 strip, when Lyman swats Odie for what he “did on the floor”. Garfield looks on in amusement and says “They should have named him Spot”.

I like that they bother to transcribe it lol:

Garfield: a oo a e o e i e e i a e

Jon: a e o ou, a ie?

Garfield: a o e o ou u i e

Wouldn’t be surprised if a future SRMG strip turns that into a Witch Doctor reference

Thought it’d be interesting to post some of the Square Root of Minus Garfield comics, which were inspired by garfield minus garfield, but more experimental. Not sure if I’ll keep posting these, but if you like them and think they’d be a good addition, let me know!

According to Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt, this is what happened to him:

It was an official flash game, so take that as you will for canonicity.

This is one of his newer comics, he started drawing them digitally and that’s why it looks differently:

https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff

So a few years ago—finally fed up with my once-loyal but now reliably traitorous pen—I decided to try a digital tablet. I knew nothing about these devices but hoped it would just get me through my annual Christmas card ordeal. I got one, fired it up, and lo and behold, something totally unexpected happened: within moments, I was having fun drawing again. I was stunned at all the tools the thing offered, all the creative potential it contained. I simply had no idea how far these things had evolved. Perhaps fittingly, the first thing I drew was a caveman.

Yeah, it’s a moth. I’m sure there’s some other small flying insect attracted to lamps that starts with “M”, but The Far Side was written with your average newspaper reader in mind so generally isn’t that obscure

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (draft):

I work for this scientist… I dig up graves, fetch brains, mop the floor-general stuff… you wanna see the lab?

blah blah blah… and you?

Looks like they updated the comic at some point to make it more clear. Today’s post has a little strip of white that’s not there in the original.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

A few days after this cartoon was published, I started getting a considerable amount of reaction from people who enjoyed it. But I found it interesting that, without exception, they were enjoying it from a different standpoint from the one I had intended. If you look at the enlargement of the two little calves, you’ll see that one of them is doing the old hoof-behind-the-head trick to its sibling. Apparently, it was just too subtle in the original. (In fact, it sort of looks like the one calf is just wearing a ribbon.) I wish now I had developed this into a series of places the Holsteins had visited. (“The Holsteins visit Three Mile Island” would have been interesting.)

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (comic draft):

“Look at that… Man, in our day, Bernie, we could skeletonize a cow in less than two minutes.”

Transcript (commentary):

Just about every time I’ve heard or read anything about piranhas (as you might imagine, I’m drawn to the subject), it’s always mentioned how quickly a school of them can skeletonize a cow. I’m not sure why a cow is always the standard unit of measurement for this sort of thing, but pondering it eventually led to this cartoon.

Neat, are you involved in activitypub.rocks? What sort of updates can we look forward to?

The biggest reason is that @jgrim@discuss.online runs it really well. It’s stable, updated frequently as Lemmy is updated, and he’s really responsive to issues like trouble uploading images. I’m also a Lemmy admin on here, and since lemm.ee is going down in large part because of not enough admins, I think it’s good to rehome the community to somewhere that I can help fix that issue if it crops up again.

Where were you looking?

Are you maybe looking for flohmarkt?

The name flohmarkt is a german word and translates to flea market or garage sale in english. This is a symbol for each flohmarkt being meant to be a small place for a somehow connected group of people. All the flohmarkts willing to federate make up one big place for small advertisements about exchange of goods and services.

https://lemm.ee/post/65824884

I’ll plug my home instance of discuss.online. The admin is great, and we’ve got several discussion communities already, one of which I’ve been posting to recently:

!discuss@discuss.online

And another one for casual US-based discussion:

!AskUSA@discuss.online

My inclination is moving it to discuss.online, since that’s my home instance. Does anyone have opinions?