Archive for January 1st, 2008

Comics That Made Us Laugh Out Loud in the Waning Days of 2008

Cidu Bill on Jan 1st 2008

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Filed in comics that made us laugh out loud, xkcd | 20 responses so far

CIDU’s and Don’ts: The FAQ

Cidu Bill on Jan 1st 2008

We mostly discuss individual daily comics here. This is not a place for people to say “I hate this comic strip and its artist should never be allowed to work in this business again.” The CIDU page is a place for people who love comics, and the artists deserve respect. In the old format, when I chose which comments ended up on the page, it was easy for me to control this. Now I have to trust visitors to accept the rules.

Also: Whether a particular person understands a particular comic can sometimes be incredibly random. People send me an average of 2 or 3 comics a day, and I give them explanations to virtually all of them: These might seem glaringly obvious to me; and then I might come across a comic I simply won’t get (and I’ll put on the page), which will be glaringly obvious to everybody else. Sometimes when this happens, I get a comment such as “Hey, are you stupid or something?”

My response is generally along the lines of “No, I just didn’t get this particular comic. Leave and don’t come back.” I really hate to ban anybody, but I have no use for anybody who will come into my (virtual) home to insult me.

Actually, I’m not keen on my houseguests insulting one another either.

If you post a message that contains more than one link, it won’t appear until after I’ve okayed it — which generally happens very quickly, since I pretty much live online. The purpose of this, of course, is to keep spam from taking over the site.

For those of you who are very new here, or are new to the new format, we’ve moved a bit beyond just explaining comics: We also have special sections for the Arlo Page (comics you don’t want to explain to the kids) and the related Arlo Award (comics that appeared in mainstream newspaper syndication which obviously slipped by the censors — this being one of the more blatant examples).

By the way, the Arlo Page is named after Arlo Guthrie. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

Other special categories we have here are the Ewww Files (fairly self-explanatory), Comics That Made Us Laugh Out Loud (a weekly, noon-Monday hall of fame for comics we really, really got a kick out of) , and the ChadWatch. ChadWatch are comics that attempt to mine humor from the 2000 presidential elections, usually by making references to hanging chads. I began this section back in December of 2000 in order to try to pinpoint the very last chad-related gag (because seriously, the joke was well past played out by the time Bush took office). I never suspected that almost 8 years later, we’d still be collecting them.

Sometimes we’ll notice two comic strips using a nearly-identical gag on the same day for no apparent reason. When that happens I’ll post them both, noting the synchronicity. Just because. These rarely call out for explanation.

The site is updated with a new CIDU every day at 12:02AM Eastern Time — except for the two weeks or so following “spring forward” and “fall back,” when the server sometimes thinks it’s an hour earlier than it really is (though it’s a mystery why the same thing happens in the spring and the fall), and the update goes live an hour late.

Additional updates generally show up throughout the day, but the 12:02am update happens without exception.

We don’t encourage artists to explain their own comics, because they’ve already had their chance to make us understand. Also, it’s more fun this way.

Finally, if you have anything to send me — a comic you don’t understand, an Arlo or ChadWatch candidate, a suggestion, whatever — please e-mail me at comicsidontunderstand at gmail.com.

When you’re submitting a comic, it would be most helpful if you both give me a link to it, and attach it — because sometimes attachments don’t survive the trip, and sometimes links don’t work. Just for the record, if you send me a link that contains rbma.com, it will not work.

Thanks to Blinky the Wonder Wombat for providing a better definition for the Arlo Page than I’d been offering

Filed in Arlo Page, Bill Bickel, CIDU, ChadWatch, Ewww, FAQ, comics that made us laugh out loud, lol, synchronicity | 12 responses so far