Monday, February 25, 2013

Irony, Thy Name Is Attention Boors

This post is about irony, comics, and man-crushes.

While considering ideas for a new post, I decided I wanted to write about my very favorite webcomic, ________. Don't worry, I'll tell you the name later, but other things are afoot.  

This thing, for example.


As soon as I settled on that topic, I experienced a crisis of relativity. What was I, a freshly-minted, devilishly almost-handsome, and recalcitrantly polemical budding blogger with a limited but rabidly loyal  fan-base (um, right?) doing promoting  what is quite possibly the cleverest, most followedest, bestest webcomic ever?  It seems more likely that anyone reading this blog has already heard of the comic.  Maybe they should be promoting me...Anyway, I just found it ironic that our small blog might try flexing its ability to advertise other web produce rather than trying to garner attention onto itself.

AND NOW! The big reveal! The webcomic which I love best, and I bet you will soon as well, IS...........

Written and illustrated by Zachary Weinersmith (A.K.A. Zach Weiner), this brilliant comic delves into science, philosophy, mathematics, and sometimes it just has funny jokes.  There is also a series of skits by him and his friends called SMBC Theater.  Friends, I hope you'll join me in supporting the fine gentlemen and ladies who produce these wonderful works and visit the link I gave above and any of their many youtube videos, such as this one (Video contains strong language, viewer discretion is advised):



The guy playing Thomas Jefferson is Zach.  He holds the dubious honor of being the one man who rivals current Kyle's Man-Crush champion Tim Minchin.  Neither of them is Brad Pitt, I grant you, but they arouse my intellect like few other humans.  The reason for this is that they are able to convey complicated concepts (and make them look ridiculous, often because they are) with mediums that appeal to everyone.  I love philosophy, but philosophy sometimes has the tendency of intentionally making itself inaccessible to people not trained in philosophy.  Convoluted language, terms that only trained philosophers can understand, and, though most people do this, the habit of viewing the world only through the lens of their own experience while discounting all others.  As the behavioral biologist Robert Sapolsky would say, they "get stuck in their own bucket."  Fortunately, we have people like Zach, who reach into many different buckets and hold their contents up to the critical light of comedy, where their pretenses are stripped away, leaving only the core idea.  Sometimes, we find that the core is rather silly, even though it's a widely held belief.  Now, don't get me wrong, I have disagreed with a few (very few) of his assessments.  Perhaps through no fault of his own, not being a trained philosopher, I've seen (two, I think) misunderstandings of a philosophical position. As I explained before, misunderstandings like these are often the fault of the philosophers' tendency to work within their own buckets to the point where they cannot divorce the concept itself from the specific language they've been trained to describe it in.

Anyway, I just thought I'd draw the magical creations of this man to your collective attention.  Have fun exploring the mind of Zach Weiner, and remember to check back here to see if we've rustled up anything else interesting!

1 comment:

  1. XKCD will probably always be the gold standard for me, but SMBC is great and I could not agree more that humor makes ideas immeasurably easier to spread. Webcomics, thoughtful standup comedians, and people like Bill Nye, David Pogue, and my personal favorite scientist Neil de Grasse Tyson all make it easier and more enjoyable to explore new concepts. Hell, even people who write textbooks with some amount of (usually terrible) humor make reading more tolerable. Nerds very often have very cheesy senses of humor, but it works better than no humor.

    Also words. Words are good for communicating.

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