From the sublime to the ridiculousHaving just praised some pretty terrific artists, here's a cartoon I love that, well, doesn't exactly rely on draftsmanship. And it's not always Safe For Work or Fun For The Whole Family. And it's often too geeky for me to understand.
And that's okay. I don't have to understand them all. This one captures absolutely one of my biggest, lifelong, ongoing, incurable perceptual problems, without a lot of elaborate artwork:
"xkcd:A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." Geez, how can you go wrong?
5 comments:
I like xkcd as well.
Kind of coincidental that you mentioned that second strip as I had written about half of a post about it for RACS before hitting the delete button.
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Regards,
Dann
I'm pretty sure that east-west thing goes back to early maps being centered on Germany...from which perspective they all make sense.
I'm not sure if that is true, but it was good enough to get me to stop trying to figure it out...
When I was growing up in Upstate New York, it got ingrained into my head that "East" meant "toward the ocean" and "West" meant "away from the ocean." To this day, honest to God, that causes me problems out here in California (where I've been since 1969.) Since I have a hard time with Oakland being on the "East" side of the Bay, I can't be bothered with whether abstract places like "China" are properly directionally appellated.
Of course - being the "geek" that I am - XKCD is one of my favorite web comics!
Whatever the origin, it's undeniably Eurocentric.
I grew up in LA, where the mountains are north and the water is west. When I moved to upstate NY it was to Ithaca, where the water is north and we lived at the base of East Hill. I was perpetually 90 degrees out of alignment.
That went away when we moved to Rochester; the water is still north but there *are* no hills, thus demonstrating that the latter was the problem.
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