Something that I find delightful about this project is that Jim Davis approves of it!
From Wikipedia: "Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, approved of the project, and an official Garfield book (also called Garfield Minus Garfield) was published by his company. It was mainly edited comics by Walsh, with some comics contributed by Davis."
I don't think he's said, but he has written some shockingly creepy stories himself, like the Halloween special which suggests Jon died or moved out ages ago and Garfield is just hallucinating due to starvation and despair. He claimed he wrote it after a market survey indicating that loneliness is what people fear the most (this is a pattern with Davis - he always cheerfully claims he's just in it for the money whenever someone suggests he has any kind of artistic vision).
Or the one in "Garfield: his 9 lives" where a different incarnation of Garfield goes suddenly feral and kills the elderly woman owning him. Jim Davis didn't draw it, but he did script it!
The conclusion doesn't follow the premise. In fact, precisely the opposite arises from it. People who make things for money tend to be controlling about their thing, as it's the thing that makes them money. Others controlling the thing is a potential threat against the money-making capability of the thing, so they usually try to quell it. To not just let a remix be, but actively endorse it, is a notable and unusual event.
It's still notable that Jim Davis has that level of chill about it. Someone with a mercenary capitalist attitude toward their work can be just as much a control freak as Bill Watterson. (Not being judgmental; Watterson's position is completely valid too.)
The internet was never all goofy shit like this. The launch date of G-G is "February 13, 2008", and we already had the creepy Facebook, deplorable shit like jailbait was in full swing, gore was not just popular, it was old news. Internet advertising was already very toxic for many years, and its surveillance capabilities were also ever-increasing. Not to mention, the Eternal September lasted for 15 years now.
My point is, it changed, yes, but "The Internet" was always shit, and you can also always find good fun, as always. You can turn off the doom, and enjoy a good never-ending scroll of a myriad of fantastic hobbies and people sharing their human experience. It takes effort, just like it did back then.
We had "Altavista" and for a very short time it was OK, but then quickly decended into a ad-ridden "portal" This was 1997 or so.
The web was full of popups, and then popunders. It was not uncommon to close your browser in the computer-room, then have to close 20 popups that kept coming back. Some of which showing straight out porn. At least scams like viagra, "buy gold online" or "download more memory" malware.
Before Google, it was merely undoable to find anything useful between all the banners, gifs, "only readable in netscape" search-engines.
Before Mozilla/Firefox, popups made it almost impossible to browse the web for longer than half an hour before the browser crashed or the computer locked up.
Chat was insecure, scammers, groomers, malware injection, mitm was everywhere. There was no privacy.
Forums, BBSes and NNTP were full of "trolls" before this term was even known. Flamewars, flamebait, and again, scammers, groomers and malware everywhere.
I do have fond memories of this time. But also know these memories are distorted. It was a dark forest already.
The main difference, I believe, was that the majority of internet users back then were smart - mostly western - educated or young people. I.e. the "tech literate" folks. Those who know how to deal with malware, scams, groomers, privacy, hackers. Those who know how to navigate around popup-bombs, redirect-loops, illegal-content and criminals.
But the bad stuff was there from the early days. Today, the "bad stuff" has shifted, from criminals into monopolized big-tech tapping our attention and data, but it has always been there, this dark side.
I think this is a sentiment missing from lots of the rose glasses back watching. It took effort to find all these fun things, it still takes effort to find fun things. The only difference is that now the effort floor is in the icy pits of hell and its so easy to slide all the way down there. Things were different but you still had to work for it. Sites were smaller and there were less people, those things still exist, probably more so, there's just an ocean now. We have to learn how to swim maybe but we can still cross.
we had facebook, but things weren't centralized to only 5 websites yet. You are right though, there's a lot about the old internet that was better, but there was also stuff that was worse. It was more untamed perhaps. I certainly don't miss rotten.com or goatse or the absolute cesspit reddit was at the time (as you mention). We tend to forget about this and just think about the good, like individual weird blogs hosted on their own quirky websites actually being able to find an audience (which still exist to some extent but not to the same degree at all). Still, I think "the internet was always shit" is too cynical of a take. Some parts of the internet were always shit. Some of it changed for the better, some for the worse.
What you described in your first paragraph is still the old internet and it was way better than the post-truth/bot/AI hellscape of today. I’ll take “creepy” stuff over a complete separation from reality any day.
Garfield Minus Garfield is an iteration of a trend on SA and FYAD of editing Garfield comics by re-ordering panels, removing panels, removing characters/dialogue/etc, and shuffling panels from other Garfield strips to make humorous and/or unsettling mashups.
That is to say the trend predates the 2008 launch of the site.
Ok, maybe a more accurate statement would be that the ratio of goofy shit to angst-generating bullshit was much higher in 2008. Maybe it was 70/30 in favor of goofy shit and now it's 1/99 in favor of bullshit. We had Facebook and Twitter back then, but neither had been weaponized against us yet. Both had a very different flavor than they have today.
Waiting ages for basic serif pages to load over your 56k (or 128k connection if you were rich and had ISDN)? Nope.
Downloading tracks from KaZaa/WinMX/Limewire/Napster for a million hours only for them to be some warped shit that the studios planted? Nope.
Getting malware just for existing? Early software firewalls that burned CPU cycles/crashed your PC? That were the only option because hardware firewalls were stupid expensive and not at all practical for residential use? Nope.
Norton Antivirus? ABSOLUTELY NOPE.
Blue screens when you looked at IE or Navigator the wrong way? Nope.
Flash? Lol, nope.
WAP? The 2004 kind? Lol, hell nope.
"This page is best viewed on Internet Explorer", i.e. IE4/5/6 or it's basically unusable? Nope.
Having to actually go seven or eight o's into the Gooooooooooooooooooooooogle footer to find what you were looking for? Def nope.
Almost everything about using the Internet is better today IMO. Faster, prettier, more secure and more cross-platform.
You have to work hard to get hit with a virus these days, especially on iOS/macOS or Linux, though it's much harder on Android these days too. Also, I loved wasting my life on /., but Reddit is so much better, even after the API-pocalyse.
I definitely miss open messaging platforms though. AIM for life.
>Remember when the internet was all goofy shit like this instead of algorithmically optimized social media angst?
I first accessed the internet in 1998 through school. I still like it more how it was in those days. Most people didn't care about the Internet so the people lurking the Internet had a particular interest in it or were technically inclined.
Once some guys discovered they can make tons of money through the Internet, those good times are over.
It's like you travel to a beautiful place which is not popular. Once it starts becoming a major tourist attraction, it will be ruined for good in 20 years.
there was still angst then, it just was more targeted in single directions, not like now where the angst is aimlessly directed at society, sponsored by squarespace
If you had to encapsulate the vibe, it would be "people just post shit to see if other people are as weird as they are."
It was a whole era, folks. And I don't mean "does anyone else" Reddit crap that is absurdly naive. This was way more before and way more naive than that. You didn't have any expectation that you were normal (even if you were weird). You just did it to gauge how fucking weird you were.
All the big social media platforms were around when this started. The dominance wasn't in full swing yet but it only took a few years for vbulletin and everything else to dwindle.
There's a great YouTube documentary that ties all the Garfield subculture together, and it's absolutely worth your time: What The Internet Did To Garfield
I think Lex also has recycled some questions / topics across several guests. I'd enjoy a virtual panel supercut where we see only all the guests' responses to the same prompt.
Tim Ferriss minus Tim has long been a dream of mine
After discovering Dwarkesh, Lex and Rogan have struck me as tragic waste. At worst a laundromat for psychopathic distortions, and at best a lazy unguided exhibition of the guest’s choosing.
I love how this turns the comic into psychological horror.
Super Eyepatch Wolf actually did a really interesting analysis about how Garfield entered the horror genera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2C5R3FOWdE. I click on the video randomly out of curiosity, but I got really sucked in.
Maybe the Jan 27 entry, but the Nov 03 entry reads much the same if Garfield is present or not. What I mean is, the strips that focus on Jon talking to Garfield always had this element.
Remember, Jon is already talking to a cat who he assumes can't understand him & knows can't talk back. He might as well be talking into the abyss. Only we can read Garfield's inner monologue. Jon's actions are sometimes presupposed by Garfield's whims. This premise is already the basis of some horror or otherwise unsetting fiction.
If Garfield is there or not, if we focus on Jon as the main character of the strip, we might have to do some introspection, whether it's about expecting to have a conversation with cat as if he were your son, that our lives are as boring as his, etc. These are scary thoughts! Garfield's presence serves as a humorous distraction and allows us to forget these thoughts and laugh at Jon, even if briefly. In the same way, Freddy Krueger delivers funny one liners to break up the dread of realizing we're in some sort of living nightmare like people of Elm Street...
> Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.
Did not think I would be relating to Jon on a Thursday morning.
Its also pretty interesting given that the original title for the comic that would become Garfield was simply "Jon"
There was a small YouTube documentary about finding the old comics in libraries and scanning them in. I the description of the video there is links to scans of all the ones they were able to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxiwjaUSYJM
I don't think this came about by randomly deciding to take a character out of a strip. The creators of G-G recognized that Jon is a depressing character who has these one way discussions with Garfield. Garfield's inner monologue (that Jon is not aware of) provides all the humor, mostly at Jon's expense. Take the humor out of the comic, and you're left with the depression. It goes straight from a comedy to a tragedy.
This is what's interesting about G-G. The tragedy was always there. We kinda knew the tragedy was always there, but we'd rather laugh at Jon with Garfield than commiserate with Jon.
Taking superheroes out of a random movie would lead to silliness, yes, but nothing poignant.
Love GMG, glad to see it at number one here. It's really quite amazing how much funnier and yet more profound it is without Garfield. If you like this, you might also enjoy Nietzsche Family Circus: https://www.nietzschefamilycircus.com/
I used to have one stuck to the door of my doom room. No one laughed. :(
Readit News
From Wikipedia: "Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, approved of the project, and an official Garfield book (also called Garfield Minus Garfield) was published by his company. It was mainly edited comics by Walsh, with some comics contributed by Davis."
https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/private/61669516/fSymsOGXO...
Or the one in "Garfield: his 9 lives" where a different incarnation of Garfield goes suddenly feral and kills the elderly woman owning him. Jim Davis didn't draw it, but he did script it!
[1] Garfield was originally created by Davis with the intention to come up with a 'good, marketable character' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield
I'd say there are things which suggest he's not entirely sincere about that.
Newspaper comic artists aren't working for free. They all want money. That's why they work.
My point is, it changed, yes, but "The Internet" was always shit, and you can also always find good fun, as always. You can turn off the doom, and enjoy a good never-ending scroll of a myriad of fantastic hobbies and people sharing their human experience. It takes effort, just like it did back then.
We had "Altavista" and for a very short time it was OK, but then quickly decended into a ad-ridden "portal" This was 1997 or so.
The web was full of popups, and then popunders. It was not uncommon to close your browser in the computer-room, then have to close 20 popups that kept coming back. Some of which showing straight out porn. At least scams like viagra, "buy gold online" or "download more memory" malware.
Before Google, it was merely undoable to find anything useful between all the banners, gifs, "only readable in netscape" search-engines.
Before Mozilla/Firefox, popups made it almost impossible to browse the web for longer than half an hour before the browser crashed or the computer locked up.
Chat was insecure, scammers, groomers, malware injection, mitm was everywhere. There was no privacy.
Forums, BBSes and NNTP were full of "trolls" before this term was even known. Flamewars, flamebait, and again, scammers, groomers and malware everywhere.
I do have fond memories of this time. But also know these memories are distorted. It was a dark forest already.
The main difference, I believe, was that the majority of internet users back then were smart - mostly western - educated or young people. I.e. the "tech literate" folks. Those who know how to deal with malware, scams, groomers, privacy, hackers. Those who know how to navigate around popup-bombs, redirect-loops, illegal-content and criminals. But the bad stuff was there from the early days. Today, the "bad stuff" has shifted, from criminals into monopolized big-tech tapping our attention and data, but it has always been there, this dark side.
I think this is a sentiment missing from lots of the rose glasses back watching. It took effort to find all these fun things, it still takes effort to find fun things. The only difference is that now the effort floor is in the icy pits of hell and its so easy to slide all the way down there. Things were different but you still had to work for it. Sites were smaller and there were less people, those things still exist, probably more so, there's just an ocean now. We have to learn how to swim maybe but we can still cross.
That is to say the trend predates the 2008 launch of the site.
Waiting ages for basic serif pages to load over your 56k (or 128k connection if you were rich and had ISDN)? Nope.
Downloading tracks from KaZaa/WinMX/Limewire/Napster for a million hours only for them to be some warped shit that the studios planted? Nope.
Getting malware just for existing? Early software firewalls that burned CPU cycles/crashed your PC? That were the only option because hardware firewalls were stupid expensive and not at all practical for residential use? Nope.
Norton Antivirus? ABSOLUTELY NOPE.
Blue screens when you looked at IE or Navigator the wrong way? Nope.
Flash? Lol, nope.
WAP? The 2004 kind? Lol, hell nope.
"This page is best viewed on Internet Explorer", i.e. IE4/5/6 or it's basically unusable? Nope.
Having to actually go seven or eight o's into the Gooooooooooooooooooooooogle footer to find what you were looking for? Def nope.
Almost everything about using the Internet is better today IMO. Faster, prettier, more secure and more cross-platform.
You have to work hard to get hit with a virus these days, especially on iOS/macOS or Linux, though it's much harder on Android these days too. Also, I loved wasting my life on /., but Reddit is so much better, even after the API-pocalyse.
I definitely miss open messaging platforms though. AIM for life.
I first accessed the internet in 1998 through school. I still like it more how it was in those days. Most people didn't care about the Internet so the people lurking the Internet had a particular interest in it or were technically inclined.
Once some guys discovered they can make tons of money through the Internet, those good times are over.
It's like you travel to a beautiful place which is not popular. Once it starts becoming a major tourist attraction, it will be ruined for good in 20 years.
Angst, by Squarespace
It was a whole era, folks. And I don't mean "does anyone else" Reddit crap that is absurdly naive. This was way more before and way more naive than that. You didn't have any expectation that you were normal (even if you were weird). You just did it to gauge how fucking weird you were.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O2C5R3FOWdE
It is surprisingly good.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N8RDNd92sK0
I want to see Rogan Minus Rogan and Lex Minus Lex podcasts where all the host's speaking parts are cut out and you only hear the guest's replies.
Thanks in advance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFE2CCfAP1o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbLcY0XeVY4
After discovering Dwarkesh, Lex and Rogan have struck me as tragic waste. At worst a laundromat for psychopathic distortions, and at best a lazy unguided exhibition of the guest’s choosing.
https://qlymwesmrj.s3.amazonaws.com/temp/joe_without_joe.mp3
“Huhuhuhuhh.” “Wow.” “You wrote that?” “Who?” “Where is that from? What show is that from?”
Very interesting listening material I am sure
Super Eyepatch Wolf actually did a really interesting analysis about how Garfield entered the horror genera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2C5R3FOWdE. I click on the video randomly out of curiosity, but I got really sucked in.
Remember, Jon is already talking to a cat who he assumes can't understand him & knows can't talk back. He might as well be talking into the abyss. Only we can read Garfield's inner monologue. Jon's actions are sometimes presupposed by Garfield's whims. This premise is already the basis of some horror or otherwise unsetting fiction.
If Garfield is there or not, if we focus on Jon as the main character of the strip, we might have to do some introspection, whether it's about expecting to have a conversation with cat as if he were your son, that our lives are as boring as his, etc. These are scary thoughts! Garfield's presence serves as a humorous distraction and allows us to forget these thoughts and laugh at Jon, even if briefly. In the same way, Freddy Krueger delivers funny one liners to break up the dread of realizing we're in some sort of living nightmare like people of Elm Street...
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https://www.reddit.com/r/GarfieldMinusJon/
And if you want to get weird:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlzheimersGroup/top/?t=year
Full list:
https://www.reddit.com/r/garfieldminusgarfield/comments/gxl2...
Did not think I would be relating to Jon on a Thursday morning.
There was a small YouTube documentary about finding the old comics in libraries and scanning them in. I the description of the video there is links to scans of all the ones they were able to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxiwjaUSYJM
or took soem movies and made all the villains super-attractive and the heroes ugly and dressed in black.
https://youtu.be/jKS3MGriZcs?si=RRlSVL0jwi5sDl3f
Removing the laugh track from the big bang theory
This is what's interesting about G-G. The tragedy was always there. We kinda knew the tragedy was always there, but we'd rather laugh at Jon with Garfield than commiserate with Jon.
Taking superheroes out of a random movie would lead to silliness, yes, but nothing poignant.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9WVDvVd0E
Deleted Comment
I used to have one stuck to the door of my doom room. No one laughed. :(
https://www.tumblr.com/timeisaflatcircus