Some of my favorite memories of my youth were reading and re-reading some of the Larson books my uncle handed down to me - Far Side Gallery1, 2, 3 & 4 , It Came From The Far Side, and Tales From The Far Side. Some of the jokes I didn't understand until I was older, some I understood right away, and some of them I remember so fondly I could re-create them in my sleep.
Watching the second one is almost depressing, because there's some good jokes in there that are just ruined by the scene dragging out for way too long. Several of them got a smirk out of me but then it's like, "Oh...we're still going, are we?"
If they had just had a decent editor who could've shortened them to have the punch of a Family Guy cutaway gag, I think they would've worked better. Larson's comics certainly had that punch--I just don't think he was quite prepared for how to translate it successfully to the animation medium.
Thank you and tbh I could do even better if I re-did it today. This one is from 2020 and since then I've gotten into doing my DVD encodes at 540p for that sweet sweet integer-scaling to 1080, 2160, etc avoiding the shitty scalers built in to most modern displays.
Ah cool. I've been buying few various obscure movies in 4:3 PAL/NTSC and 16:9 DVDs in various regions and converting them to h.265 using slow processing. As I don't trust ffmpeg and handbrake to perpetually be superior, so I'm always keeping around at least unencrypted VOBs if not the DVD .iso. Including pristine source artifacts along with prettified ones is important for archival. (My inner archivist is a choosy beggar Karen.)
Same here — I always always keep the untouched DVD image and usually even keep the physical discs. I tend to leave CSS intact in the name of doing as exact a copy as possible since it’s so fully broken.
Decrypted VOBs are nice to have(tm) additional intermediate products because nearly all players and some transcoders are idiotically region locked but will generally accept decrypted VOBs (same field data) just fine.
One thing to note that don’t know, when “anonymously” uploading to IA, the email you use for the account will be visible in the archive manifest. Or something along those lines, it’s been a while.
So make sure to use a throwaway email for the throwaway account.
Before the internet any town I visited I would comb used record stores looking for songs, albums, or artists I had read about but never heard.
I would also comb used bookstores. Around 42nd in NYC there were huge used magazine stores. One could go looking for Jan. 7th 1954 Life magazine and find it. That was the early 90’s and I miss it.
I obviously went through a book ephemera collecting phase. Just getting to the point at looking at all the things I came across I once thought were important.
Information used to be hard to find and small magazines always developed around subcultures.
I'm surprised how ancient magazines in box have more intrigue and accessibility than archive.org's search box. Archive.org represents a much broader reach and depth of information.
I wonder what I would have done if I wasn't actively physically searching for something.
> even though I only understood maybe 30% of them.
My parents got me a Far Side collection when I was younger, and I understood maybe 15% of the comics tops.
But it's still a great read; as an adult I'm stupefied by how much mileage Larson squeezed out of single-pane comics. He was willing to run the gamut of sight gags to double-entendres even to the coming-of-age Calvin and Hobbes style comedy. There's also a pervasive disdain for humanity that lovingly graces most of his comics. Humans are portrayed as baser and stupid compared to talking cows and sapient insects. Children regularly endanger themselves in outrageous situations and their caretakers respond in even stupider ways. Scientists and doctors are portrayed as self-congratulating frauds that care too much about their work to notice or interact with the consequences.
Larson's cynicism is what connected me to his comics as a kid, even when I couldn't get the jokes about taxes and car maintenance. That, and his incredible knack for illustration.
I remember watching this on TV. It was a big deal at the time due to the massive popularity of the strip, but didn't translate well. The whole thing kinda fell flat.
I wonder if content on VHS tape can be read and/or post-processed better than the best Toshiba or Sony (PAL|NTSC) VCR in history using fancier techniques and modern technology.
I wonder if the newer reading technology offsets the degradation of the magnetic tape, or whether it's better to digitize X years ago, using the older digitizing technique, but with a stronger magnetic signal.
> Neither of the two specials, either in their original or editted forms, are online.
They are on The Pirate Bay and there are videos, but I guess they mean Netflix. The videos are kept alive off the torrents normally, as the video sites go down, torrents are quite the internets backbone.
Some of my favorite memories of my youth were reading and re-reading some of the Larson books my uncle handed down to me - Far Side Gallery1, 2, 3 & 4 , It Came From The Far Side, and Tales From The Far Side. Some of the jokes I didn't understand until I was older, some I understood right away, and some of them I remember so fondly I could re-create them in my sleep.
A genuine master of his craft, sheer brilliance.
My all-time favorite: https://i.redd.it/my-daily-farside-dump-caw-caw-v0-l7k98dab4...
Another gem: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/26/b4/21/26b421ae077069c6de1f2da18...