Romance (Part 3): A comic interlude (random comics and clips)

A lot of good speakers/preachers keep topical illustration and content files.  I have found that too complicated.  I have a single, huge, comics and illustration file.  At the beginning of each quarter I brouse it to see if there is anything useful for my upcoming talks.  It turns out that in the last few years I have collected more material on romance and relationships than any other single topic.  So I gave it its own folder.[1]  I chose a handful for the talk…and decided to put a few more up here.  Sources include NatileeDee, toothpastefordinner, xkcd, youtube, saturday morning breakfast cereal and a couple others I have forgotten.

Note: This one is not only hilarious but also really insightful.

For some reason this one reminds me of the presidential debate last night.

[1] Second place, it turns out, is existential dread.  Apparently sex and oblivion are either particularly funny or are topics I really resonate with.  So I have created two topical sub-folders and I’ll do a post like this in a couple months that highlights the comedic material from the second one.

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The World’s Nerdiest Bike Thief

Anyone who has followed this blog for a few months or heard[1] me preach more than, say, twice, knows I really enjoy xkcd.com. It is a perfect confluence of nerdy science/math/code humor and nerdy pop subculture references. I only ‘get it’ about 70% of the time, with ~10% failure due to not understanding the science and the other ~20% because I missed the cultural reference.[2] Anyway, just a really good example of how the web created pockets of niche excellence that were not previously sustainable.

So you can imagine my excitement when I came up with an idea for an xkcd comic. It fit the criteria. Nerdy, academic, legitimately amusing[3]. But I was disappointed to learn that he does not accept idea submissions. So here it is. My xkcd submission if xkcd accepted submissions.

The World’s Nerdiest Bike Thief

Feel free to propose a tool tip in the comments.

This post was written while listening to The Dear Hunter channel on Pandora.

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[1] I suppose hearing me preach would not be enough to appreciate the extent to which I make use of visual gags…but I have thoughts of the homiletic use of visual humor. Offbeat, single pane comics are preferable. Otherwise they take too long to play out. Hence my preference for getting my visual gags at xkcd, toothpastefordinner, or graphjam. I keep a folder of the best of these and review it periodically to see if there is something promising for an upcoming topic.
[2] You can read xkcd for a while before you realize that each one has a second punch line in the form of a ‘tool tip’ (if you hold your cursor over the image). Sometimes this will give a hint to the reference and, suddenly, the comic is hilarious.

[3] It should be noted, that if xkcd was to base a comic on an idea I submitted, I would not hesitate to list it on the 'publications' section of my CV.