I think the comics were colorized later, or at least not by him.

Fixed, sorry about that

An earlier version of this comic, from his pre-Far Side strip called Nature’s Way:

Looked it up and this one is marked as being published 1983-09-26, but there’s no good programmatic way to find that out. If I ever figure out a way to make that easy it’d be great to use the original dates as the post titles

https://windows93.net/ - Some mad lad implemented a custom parody version of Windows 95 that has a bunch of working applications and emulators. Also, check out !internetisawesome@sh.itjust.works for a lot of similar sites.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

I got lucky on this one. The first version seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, and very little had to be changed in the final. (I know most of those people behind the glass.)

That would be great! No platform has been set up yet, will get that set up soon.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Actually, I rejected the first version of this (on the left) myself. I knew my editor would ponder the good-taste quotient of this cartoon, so I decided not to risk it and closed the door a few more inches.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

“Oooooo!.. Mr. Van Horn!.. The duck is back–staring at your back.”

Raymond could feel it…First a tingling at the base of his neck and then a cold sweat would quickly engulf his body–yes, the duck was staring at him again."

Transcript (commentary):

Another example of perhaps overworking a cartoon. In hindsight, I wish I had used the final drawing but with the second caption in the sketch above, which begins, “Raymond could feel it…” It just seems a little more interesting to me.

In coming up with the name for the phobia, I played around with words like “quackaphobia” and “duckalookaphobia” and so on. But then I got the bright idea to look up the scientific name for ducks, and discovered their family name is Anatidae. Ad so, I ended up coining a word that twelve ornithologists understood and everyone else probably went, “Say what?”

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

THE WRONG NUMBER

Larry lived alone in his small inner-city apartment. He had no friends and most people ignored him at all costs.

Then one day, unexpectedly, the phone rang. And Larry was surprised to find himself talking to God.

“Is this 555-3178?” God asked.

“No, this is 555-7138.”

“Sorry.” And God hung up.

The chapter opened with:

Sometimes ideas have come out of short stories or ramblings I write just to shift gears once in a while. Cartoons are, after all, little stories themselves, frozen at an interesting point in time. What follows are several stories that either led to cartoons, could have led to cartoons, or were just ideas in and of themselves.

Interesting that this seems to have been published after its inclusion in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prehistory_of_The_Far_Side. Or maybe they just forgot to include the resulting comic. Some of the other short stories have the resulting comic included.

It’s a play on the term “La-Z-Boy”. The name comes from people being able to be lazy in it, but the joke is that the chair itself is no longer lazy.

There’s a quote I can’t find the source for, but is along the lines of “If you want to punish a cartoonist, give him daily syndication”

The coloring made it a little weird because it just looks unfinished. Here’s a B&W version that makes it IMO a little clearer:

I see now in the colored version that it’s supposed to be red at the end of the neck, but I thought that was the bottom part of the head. It looks like they redrew it a bit while coloring.

EDIT: Turned it into a comparison gif:

https://discuss.online/post/1907992

Some background on this comic:

Sketch Caption:

Mountain Businessmen

Transcript:

I just started thinking about mountain men and the wild frontier and Jeremiah Johnson and before long out came Seymour.

I think we generally agree with each other. The existence of an omniscient AI or deity doesn’t change the “experience” of free will. It doesn’t “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observed. It does “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observer, who can now say “This thing exhibits no unpredictable behavior to me”. You and I both think we have free will, because we can’t predict our own behavior. Our experience is unchanged, whether or not some other observer exists or could exist that could predict our behavior.

Agreeing on a frame of reference is exactly my point. “Does something have free will?” requires the follow-up question, “According to whom?”. Just like “I’m far from that rock” requires the followup question, “According to whom?”. The ant might think you’re far from the rock, something else might think you’re near the rock.

To boil it down a bit more, my point is just that you can always replace the phrase “free will” in speech with “unpredictable behavior” without loss of meaning, because that is what people actually mean when they say it, whether they realize that or not.

We’re not “relieved” of free will. It’s not an intrinsic property that one “has”. It would be like having “big” or “near”. You don’t “have” big, it’s a relative term.

It’s simply a description of observed behavior. That’s all it really is in the end, even though people treat it as this super mysterious thing.

Why not? It might seem absurd, but can you prove they don’t “choose” to flit about here or there? A super-intelligent AI might also be able to “pierce the veil” and determine the underlying mechanics, like a video game character determining the math behind the random number generator that powers their world.

That’s also only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, mechanistic interpretations aren’t ruled out (though a number of variants have been).

Free will is incompatible with omniscience. People really want it to work, but it doesn’t.

Free will is observer-dependent, and is short for “I can’t predict the behavior of this thing”. For an omniscient observer, there is no thing that it can say that about.

Free will is not an inherent property of a thing, and that’s what trips people up so much.

To ponder it a bit, does a rock have free will? A dog? A human? A super-intelligent AI that we can’t hope to comprehend? Why or why not for each step?

The definition above explains it all. Of course a rock doesn’t, we can predict its behavior with physics! Maybe a monkey does, people disagree on that. Of course human do though, because I do!

Now ponder what the super-intelligent AI would think. “Of course the first three don’t have free will, their behavior is entirely predictable with physics”