It’s 2020 and you’re in the future

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West Germany’s 1974 World Cup victory happened closer to the first World Cup in 1930 than to today.

The Wonder Years aired from 1988 and 1993 and depicted the years between 1968 and 1973. When I watched the show, it felt like it was set in a time long ago. If a new Wonder Years premiered today, it would cover the years between 2000 and 2005.

Also, remember when Jurassic Park, The Lion King, and Forrest Gump came out in theaters? Closer to the moon landing than today.

These things come around now and again, but I’m not sure of the universal validity of observing that a memorable event is now closer to another memorable event than it is to the present day. I don’t think that the relevance of events is as linear as that. Instead, perhaps, it looks something like this:

Graph showing that recent events matter a lot, but rapidly tail off for a while before levelling out again as they become long-ago events.
Recent events matter more than ancient events to the popular consciousness, all other things being equal, but relative to one another the ancient ones are less-relevant and there’s a steep drop-off somewhere between the two.

Where the drop-off in relevance occurs is hard to pinpoint and it probably varies a lot by the type of event that’s being remembered: nobody seems to care about what damn terrible thing Trump did last month or the month before when there’s some new terrible thing he did just this morning, for example (I haven’t looked at the news yet this morning, but honestly whenever you read this post he’ll probably have done something awful).

Nonetheless, this post on Wait But Why was a fun distraction, even if it’s been done before. Maybe the last time it happened was so long ago it’s irrelevant now?

XKCD 1393: Timeghost - 'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo'
Of course, there’s a relevant XKCD. And it was published closer to the theatrical releases of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Paranormal Activity than it was to today. OoooOOoooOOoh.
Graph showing that recent events matter a lot, but rapidly tail off for a while before levelling out again as they become long-ago events.×

Forward #100 – Gamification

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Forward Comic issue 100, frame 1

(It should be noted that I have now made 100 Forward strips. I’m not saying that I’ve earned myself a blowjob, but I’m also not not saying that.)

Sure: I think you’ve earned a blowjob, Tailsteak. I think we might need a spin-off of Patreon where you can offer content creators sexual favours in exchange for their work…

(In other news, I’ve said before that you should read Forward, and now’s a great time to start. You can catch up, don’t worry.)

LABS Comic RSS Archive

Yesterday I recommended that you go read Aaron Uglum‘s webcomic LABS which had just completed its final strip. I’m a big fan of “completed” webcomics – they feel binge-able in the same way as a complete Netflix series does! – but Spencer quickly pointed out that it’s annoying for we enlightened modern RSS users who hook RSS up to everything to have to binge completed comics in a different way to reading ongoing ones: what he wanted was an RSS feed covering the entire history of LABS.

LABS comic adapted to show The Robot literally "feeding" RSS
With apologies to Aaron Uglum who I hope won’t mind me adapting his comic in this way.

So naturally (after the intense heatwave woke me early this morning anyway) I made one: complete RSS feed of LABS. And, of course, I open-sourced the code I used to generate it so that others can jumpstart their projects to make static RSS feeds from completed webcomics, too.

Even if you’re not going to read it via this medium, you should go read LABS.

Escape Room [NSFW]

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Frame from Tailsteak's 20-page comic "Escape Room"

Regular readers will know already that I’ve been a huge fan of comic author Tailsteak, ever since Ruth, many years ago, introduced me to his work. I’m particularly enjoying Forward, his latest webcomic: so much so that in an effort to work around its lack of an RSS feed I accidentally stole unpublished work from him earlier this year (oops!).

He announced yesterday his new secondary Twitter account, @TailsteakAD (the “AD” is for “After Dark”) and was delighted from the very top tweet onwards:

TailsteakAD: For the record, just because an artist makes erotic work, or even has a dedicated adult-themed account, that in no way implies that they have any desire whatsoever to receive your unsolicited sexual messages or images. I mean, *I* want'em, but other artists might not.
That’s the spirit.

Anyway: a short while later I found a 20-page comic he’d made called The Escape Room: read it on Twitter or via Threadreader. It might be exactly the comic you’ve always been looking for, assuming that the comic you’ve always been looking for combines B/D, gay sex, and escape room puzzle mechanics. NSFW, obviously.

Suddenly I feel like the escape rooms I go to aren’t quite as good as I thought.

Vasectomy

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Oh Joy Sex Toy - Vasectomy

This comic from the fabulous Oh Joy Sex Toy folks gives a pretty good explanation of vasectomy that mirrors my experience (part one, part two)… except for the fact that I didn’t have this dude’s anxiety issue and was instead (according to the surgeon) “creepily interested” in the nitty-gritty of what he was up to!