I’ve heard that Asian actors had it very tough. George Takei, for example, was very grateful to be on Star Trek because he wasn’t, for a change, playing a waiter.
But when you hear there’s a guy from Japan doing archery while showing off tricky riding skills… well, you’d HAVE to think ‘Ninja’, right?
No.
Not unless you’re Durnell. I figure he’s one of those guys who still calls sushi ‘Bait’ and thinks it’s funny.
One morning, around daybreak, I was riding my unicycle on the trails at a local park (It’s okay, it’s a mountain unicycle. I haven’t owned a street wheel in years) and I rounded a bend up a hill, startling a few deer.
The females ran like… well, like deer, of course.
But the Buck. The Buck just stood his ground and made a sound I’m not accustomed to deer making around me. He “wuffed”, or something like it. A lot of air moved through his head, that’s all I know about the sound.
It was then that I conceived of a unicycle (and the cheap, yet dangerous, spiked pedals I used) as a weapon.
I didn’t think I could outrun that buck, nor outride him. And maybe it was mating season, when bucks feel the need to protect their females, or just randomly kick somebody’s ass. I wanted to know what sort of weapon could hold off a buck. I decided that I could get enough work done with that unicycle, if wielded properly, to consider it a weapon, even if it wouldn’t be a unicycle any more once it had been a weapon for a minute or two.
The buck turned and left before anything was put to the test.
But you can thank him for the train of thought that led to today’s cartoon.
So. If you’re not a Patreon patron, then you haven’t seen this cartoon before the release date. Patrons, though, get all the cartoons a day or so early, and they get extra jabbering by me about the silly stuff I do to make these cartoons. Yeah, they gotta pony up five bucks a month, or two, or whatever, but… they get stuff, too. Every so often, I finally get batches of things mailed out. I’m getting better about it.
Be a patron, if you can. It’s much appreciated.
Ahhhhhh, Cartoon Physics.
The same universal laws that had Elmer Fudd pause, hanging off the edge of a cliff just long enough to wave to the audience, before plummeting down a canyon side are at work here.
Okay, guys who know all about this stuff (or who can merrily speculate upon it whether they know all about it or not) If body A is balanced above the ground with a contact point which is, let’s say, an oval measuring two inches on its long axis fires arrow B along trajectory C with a force of D… How many squeaky, sproingy sounds does the foley editor get to make as body A hurtles backward?
I’m sure this is the case in a lot of fields. There are probably really fine musicians who play in various symphony orchestras. And then there are the total hotdogs who garner more attention and whose names become known. There are probably genius code writers crafting wonderful programs who are overshadowed by other code writers with a flair for self-promotion or a knack for working on the high-visibility stuff. Kara, I think, expects to compete hard and be taken seriously. Paste, on the other hand, expects to compete stylishly and teach everyone his name.
But I could be wrong, couldn’t I?
So, there’s a webcomic called “Cyanide and Happiness” which has spawned a card game called “Joking Hazard”.
If you like “Cards Against Humanity”, and you like comic strips in general, and you don’t have any young children that want to play your new card game with you… You should get “Joking Hazard”. Play it with two or three, maybe four other people that you’re pretty relaxed around.
But not with, as stated before, your children. Or your clergy. Or probably your parents. Or with co-workers who could then sue you for making the workplace uncomfortable.
Some of those cards get pretty rude.
I’ve seen people become upset when learning skills.
I’ve watched a student hurl an expensive new airbrush into a concrete wall.
I’ve watched a young skater lie on the ground and explain to everything within shrieking distance that, and I quote, “I can’t DO it!”
I’ve watched more than a few people, sweaty and perplexed, assume that they never could and never will ride a unicycle.
The upset doesn’t come from trying to learn the skill.
I think the upset comes from thinking you were gonna be really, really amazing at it naturally (or supernaturally?), and then discovering that you’re a perfectly normal human who’s gonna need a minute to practice.
Ever get that sinking feeling? You know, where you missed something?
Not like when you guys point out my grammar and spelling mistakes, I mean when you’ve fallen victim to my favorite aphorism:
“It’s the assumptions you don’t know you’re making that do you the most harm.”
So it’s like when you show up at what was clearly meant to be a Halloween party by the calendar, except that you were assuming that your host didn’t have a birthday a few days before Halloween. You may also have assumed that a costume of an extremely elderly man in a grossly exaggerated adult diaper was going to be such fun that year, but it’s not a good look at a party where the guest of honor is trying desperately to remain young and hip while the age he’s required to admit to belies everything he’s fronting.
Or it’s like when Kara realizes that the rules don’t actually specify anything beyond “Unicycle” and “Bow”.
You hate to see your strategy come apart on you just because someone else cheats. I mean, really! If cheating is going to be allowed, then we should all get to cheat.
They did some kind of study years ago. I’ve seen video. When you let one lab monkey get away with something, you have to let all of the lab monkeys get away with it or they scream and fling poop. Even monkeys have a sense of fairness. Unfortunately, the one monkey who gets away with the one thing ALSO has another instinct we all share. That instinct says, “If I have an advantage, I’ll bite you in order to keep the advantage.”
So there you have the conundrum- we all have conflicting instincts. Kara, for instance, is conflicted because she respects Paste for his competitiveness, and she also respects the fact that he’s pulling a fast one and needs to have his hair parted. In the absence of hair, maybe he needs his scalp parted.
It’s what drives civilization. Into a tree.
Not everyone who sent in paperwork to be included in the ‘Fest said they wanted to be in Team US. (I maintain that we’re all sort of Team US anyhow, but in an existential way or something) Here’s Nebuchanezzar IV, riding for Mal’s team!
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