this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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The Far Side
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Hello fellow Far Side fans!
About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!
Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:
Bello Bear
!BelloBear@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/bellobearofficial
Bloom County
!bloomcounty@lemm.ee
https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes
!calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness
!cyanideandhappiness
https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield
!garfield@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side
!thefarside@sh.itjust.works
https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works
Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.
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It's not exactly the same but plenty of people make a living playing video games on twitch
Elon musk pays people to pretend to be him online playing games I hear. Pathetic but I would take the job.
"Plenty of people" is how many people? I mean, how many millions gamers are there out there and how many of them are making a living out of it? A million? A few thousands? Less?
If my question is half trolling it is half trolling only: as an old and non-gamer dude myself, I often see that kind of ideas floating around with younger people, that they could 'just stream' or become an influencer and stuff like that to earn a living because Such and Such are doing it already. So, my question is serious if its tone was not: what proportion of the population does indeed manage to become, let's not even consider becoming rich and famous (which a lot of people seem to be willing to become) but manage to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage by doing that?
Ok but in fairness the ads in the comic imply they want the best of the best, and in modern times those players do actually make a decent living and even get cars etc.
How many millions/billions cook food vs how many are professional chefs? How many draw but are famous artists? How many play football but become a professional well paid athlete?
Technically your example applies to basically anything any human does.
And you know, those people are few even as states pour untold billions of subsidies to try and rescue naturally waning industries, subsidize sports in the pursuit of patriotic legacies, while the teams are owned by oligarchs who launder their money with untold billions in bogus art evaluations.
Did I say otherwise? I made a comment regarding this specific remark:
Insisting that 'plenty' was certainly not that highway to success I think too many people believe it is, based on watching a few successful streamers or influencers... Or, at least that it is not what those two parents in the comics are imagining it is and what quite a few of those youngsters I can hear talk around me about their own future imagine. Which is something that should be a lot more worrying to us, the adults (kids are more than welcome to entertain dreams).
Once again, I don't say otherwise. But now tell me this: how many of those amateur cooks (or whatever) do you think imagine they will become chefs (or whatever) just because they like to cook (or whatever)? Not many... which is about right: not many will become pro.
BTW, as an amateur painter and artist I never imagined becoming a pro. I could not care less about making a business out of something I simply enjoy doing ;)
Also, of those who do make a living, the tiny .1%, how many of THOSE are women, basically selling cleavage and "just chatting".
Not knocking, but Farside kid has an uphill climb unless he wants to do a Fin5ter or something.
For many Twitch streamers it isn't a full time job, but supplementary income.
There was no Twitch back then. There was no internet, in fact.
Comic is from 1990. The Internet was very much a thing.
If you liked gopher.
Instead of image macros and youtube videos, we traded monty python transcripts and buxom line printer art.
There was no widely available internet, which is what would matter in this context.
I mean it depends on what you mean by internet. There were BBSes but the world wide web didn't really start taking traffic from the general public until 93. HTML hadn't even been invented in 90.
The world wide web runs on top of the internet, but its not the same thing as the internet.
In the 1980s the internet existed, with forum-like things running on top it, but access to it wasn't widely distributed.
BBSes just used the preexisting telephone network. (Which, yes, dial up internet access later did too, but in the case of dial up you'd be calling the number of an ISP, and afterward your connection would run over net infrastructure. In the case of a BBS you'd be dialing the person running the server directly.)
EDIT: you probably already know this, but just clarifying for others.