I hope your weekend is girthy too 😄

If you’re wondering about the term itself, wiktionary has some background:

Not known with certainty. Two long-held hypotheses are as follows: One describes combat soldiers wistfully wishing to go back home, buy a farm, and live peacefully there; later, after they had been killed in combat, their fellow soldiers would say that they had bought the farm (compare the established metaphor pattern of having gone to that big [whatever sort of nice place] in the sky). Another links the phrase to the idea that governments compensate farmers whose land is damaged by a military aircraft crash; a deceased pilot was thus said to have bought the farm, and the term eventually entered wider use.

(idiomatic, US, informal, euphemistic) To die; generally, to die in battle or in a plane crash.

This idiom is most often found in its past tense and past participle form bought the farm.

Thanks! To be clear, I can’t take credit for these, I just repost the good ones from https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/

Listening to #3 from Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Aphex Twin as I scrolled past this post, which I think really fits with this screen

That’d be great! If you do, you should post it in the community

It just got “sharpened” a few weeks ago! There was a whole event for it:

https://lotipencil.wordpress.com/

I WANT TO BELIEVE

ENHANCE

Neat, looks like the author got a publishing deal and has a new version of it coming out later this year:

https://qntm.org/antimemetics

Here’s the author’s blurb about it, if it piques anyone else’s interest that hasn’t read it yet:

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…

But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

Good catch, thanks! It looks like the GoComics site has the wrong B&W comic up. I don’t have a better source for it, so here’s a rather pixelated version:

The first sketch vs final version of this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

Primitive humor

Output:

                                
           ######  ###          
          #####  #### ##        
          ######  ####  #       
      #   ##### #######  #      
    ## #  # #   ### ###   #     
      ##   # ####    # #  #     
    ###### ##   #####  #   #    
       #  #    #     #  #  #    
      #  #    #       # #  #  # 
    #####    #        ###  # #  
   #   #    #         #    # ###
  # # #    #          #     ##  
  #   #    #          ###  #####
  ## #    #           #  # ###  
  #  #    #           # # #  ## 
 # # #   #           #    #   # 
 # # # # #           #  # #    #
# #  # # # #        #    #    ##
# #  #   # #       #  # #    ###
# #   ####        #   #     ####
# #   #   #     ##   #       ###
## #  #   ######     #        ##
##  # ####          ##        # 
 #   #  #         ###       ### 
 ###     ##     #####     ####  
  ###      ##########     ####  
   ## #       ######      ###   
   #   #    # #####   ##  ##    
   #####     #####   #####      
   #   ##          ##### #      
  #                       #     

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (top left):

“Uh-oh…He’s using the thingy.”

Transcript (top right):

“So! Still won’t talk?..I guess it’s time to use a little device we like to call around there ‘the thingy.’”

Transcript (bottom left):

This cartoon developed as shown, and I was satisfied with the final—except to say I’m always worried some people will try to figure out what exactly it is that the “Mr. Thingy” does. (I’m sure this is a residual paranoia from the “Cow tools” cartoon, see page 156.)

The surprise is spoiled => the surprise is a cake => the cake is spoiled. It’s a pun on the meaning of “spoiled”

I copy it from the site, and I have no idea where they get it from. I doubt it’s AI though, they all read as outsourced human transcription.

A dog “turning on” someone means that they’ll bite the owner or something like that. Larson instead interprets “turning on” here as the dog testifying against the owner in a courtroom

Probably something like Tensor Processing Unit. That’s a specific Google product, but something along those lines

Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google for neural network machine learning, using Google’s own TensorFlow software. Google began using TPUs internally in 2015, and in 2018 made them available for third-party use, both as part of its cloud infrastructure and by offering a smaller version of the chip for sale.

Compared to a graphics processing unit, TPUs are designed for a high volume of low precision computation (e.g. as little as 8-bit precision)[3] with more input/output operations per joule, without hardware for rasterisation/texture mapping.

The text in the SRoMG strip encodes a hidden message. I had fun decoding it, so won’t spoil it for anyone else. If you want spoilers, the decoded message is here:

https://sromgexplained.shoutwiki.com/wiki/17:_The_Garfield_Code

It doesn’t quite explain everything, so here’s a Python snippet that decodes it if you’re stuck:

"".join(chr(((ord(c) - ord('A') - (ord(k) - ord('A')) - 1) % 26) + ord('A')) for c, k in zip(cipher, key))

Good catch, updated

Their profile was full of “God bless the troops” and “Joe Biden must resign”, so if it’s a joke, it’s a very involved one