Category: Connections

The funniest people on Twitter

June 3, 2011 /

In no particular order. Some of the following use their streams purely to deliver high-wattage comedy beams straight to your swimsuit area, others are just general life tweeters who happen to be funnier than I will ever be in my wildest dreams even with other people helping and also the audience is on nitrous because they make poor life decisions.

  • Kelly Deal
    Apologies if I accidentally sexted you yesterday, I was just trying to clean some hot sauce off my phone’s screen with my mouth.

    Kelly Deal was in the Breeders but will only admit it if you ask her about it enough times.

  • Kat Snacks
    Can your uterus lining “drop a deuce”? I wonder how many followers I just lost.

    Kat is the only one of these people I could meet if I wanted to, specifically by driving a mile up MLK to her club and paying her twenty dollars. I would never do that. Where by “that” I mean “make it past the Mongolian BBQ place with a hot twenty in my pocket.”

  • What Happened
    “Hey sweet cheeks, howsabout you ride that bike down to the DQ and pick me up a banana nut whip?” I said, high-fiving myself in the mirror.

    Elisabeth really likes Jesse Thorn but look, we all have glaring flaws that will send us straight to Hell someday.

  • Annie W
    Just now, a ring totally deteriorated until it literally fell apart on my hand. These cleaning chemicals mmmay be too strong.

    I guess Annie Wu does art that makes Warren Ellis and James Urbaniak clutch their faces and weep with adulation or whatever? Anyway I like it when she makes sitting in her room and drawing sound like an Upton Sinclair book.

  • Shelby Fero
    Found a quarter stuck to my back. Everything’s coming up Shelby!

    Shelby Fero is not her real name, I hope, because she’s fucking seventeen years old for Christ’s sake I’m just gonna go learn how to drink alcohol now.

  • Boobs Radley
    I refuse to see movies that critics deem “fun for the whole family,” because most of our grandparents are pretty racist.

    Okay, this is a true story. There are, by some estimates, 200 million people on Twitter. One day I was talking to my friend Joe and he was like “so have you found anyone cool on Twitter recently?” and I was like “well, I found the funniest person on Twitter, yes.” And he was like “really? The funniest.” And I was like “yup.” And then there was a pause.

    And then he said “Boobs Radley?”

    And I said “Boobs Radley.”

    Anyway Joe and I are getting married now (it’s okay, he’s Canadian).

The joke was about a fish

May 24, 2011 /

I have been such a big fan of Kris Straub’s for a long time that, when I fondly reminisced about a joke of his from 2001 today, Stephen told me I was the creepiest person he knew. Anyway, I sort of assume you all know that as soon as Straub produces anything new, I want you to get it. But that is not how the Internet actually works! I have to keep reminding you fuckers!

First, he restarted F Chords! Like, five-days-a-week restarted it! While preparing to get married! I think he wants to kill himself with work, but I like it better in its new incarnation already.

Second, I read through my copy of Starslip 4 last night, and wow, it works way better on the page than on the screen. I’d forgotten how big a leap he took art-wise when he rebooted the strip, and almost perversely, the vector sharpness really looks excellent in ink. Being able to read through big chunks of the story sequentially makes it easier to get involved, too. Buy it!

While I’m talking about people who were already throwing off sparks like seven years ago when I started following them

May 22, 2011 /

Leigh Stein is very, very good at what she does:

ADDENDUM TO THE PREVIOUS DISPATCH

I just remembered every single thing I’ve ever done
and now I’m embarrassed. I want my afterlife

guaranteed, so I have ordered a tomb built at Giza

for my remains. They are as follows: all my clothes,
my harmonica, my body, letters to my enemies.

The dictionary says you can refer to everyone

who will be alive in the future as prosperity so
Dear Prosperity, I used to live in the future,

too, but I fear the past is a brushfire

and I am a prairie. Now that I have what I asked for
I see I should have been more specific.

How hot is that? Brushfire hot. It appears in the new book of hers I just got, The Future Comes to Those Who Wait, and you should get it too; it’s worth it for the poem on page 18 alone.

(Hillary Eason, can you read this in Mongolia? I hope you can, and are.)

“Nobody expects to be punched in the face by a man’s beard.”

May 22, 2011 /

This is linked on his guest post but it needs additional emphasis! After years of my pestering him about it, Bill O’Neil has FUCKING FINALLY gotten around to setting up a dedicated story blog. Bill/William/whoever was making me want to shred everything I ever wrote and set it on fire in a toilet while he was still in high school, so I’m (mostly) glad to finally be able to slot him into Google Reader. If you don’t do the same then you’ll just have to accept that you and I have different tastes!

The thematic similarities worry me

May 17, 2011 /

Longtime ommatidiadvocate Tikitu de Jager wrote a great signoff story that you should go read right now! And then there’s this metatextual gem, from Rachel Spitler:

I once had a dream about catching up on Anacrusis.

In the first story, some curiously dorky heroes went on safari. In the second, they all got captured by the black-skinned “King of the Amazon.”

The third was from the viewpoint of someone’s stripped and bare bones, watching the king lounge in his giant throne and gnaw thoughtfully on a comrade’s femur.

It was awesome, but I also remember going, geez, isn’t this a little racist? Random tribal cannibalism? You really went there?

Then I woke up and realized it was me all along, and thought these words: WHOA, TWIST ENDING.

The lower-case I is symbolic

March 1, 2011 /

There was a time when I liked romantic comedy films. Yes, it’s true! Despite my status as a burly exemplar of stoic masculinity, I once enjoyed the mixture of clever dialogue and bittersweet tension one might see employed by an early-period Bullock, Roberts or Ryan. Then, in the late nineties, romantic comedy went right down the shitter. In a mere five years, we went from While You were Sleeping and The Truth About Cats and Dogs to Legally Blonde and Kate and Leopold. Kate and Leopold, Liz Lemon.

Things have not improved since. The men are shrill, the women are boorish, the scripts are assembled from plot coupons and the banter is a nonsense collection of zero-liners. I saw The Proposal on an airplane a year and a half ago and I’m still angry about it.

But hey! Around the same time that came out, a lady named Jac Schaeffer triple-threatened an indie movie called (unfortunately) TiMER. It has the one girl from Buffy in it, it got a tiny distribution deal, nobody saw it and it holds a 58% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s also the best romantic comedy I’ve seen in over a decade. Kara found it streaming on Netflix, and I offer the following three reasons to watch it if you like this kind of thing:

  • It passes Bechdel
  • If stuck in an elevator with the characters, I would not murder all of them inside five minutes
  • It posits a semi-science-fictional plot mechanic and actually explores some of its ramifications

I realize those bars are low enough to skate over, but I am not trying to damn with faint praise: it’s a fun movie and I was still thinking about it two days later. Its premise is that you can get a timer implanted in your arm. If your One True Love also has a timer, the two will automagically calculate the day you meet and start counting down to it. This is a big honking metaphor for a dominant cultural narrative applied to women, but the movie has the grace to hang a lampshade on that and then pull the Asimov trick and wonder how this can go wrong: one character has a blank timer and is on a crusade to get other people implanted, one has twenty years of waiting to look forward to, one has a timer go off way too soon, one gets a fake timer on the Internet, one has it painfully removed. And the ending isn’t as easy as you’re thinking!

Basically, this is a movie with smart jokes and kissing and it does a better job of exploring the conflict between free will and predestination than the Wachowskis did. My only improvement would be to put more than one nonwhite character in it, and also feed everyone involved a damn sandwich. (And not have the main character be named Oona. Hey, maybe Jac Schaeffer is a Wachowski.) Doubly recommended if you’re one of the nerds who liked Machine of Death.

Tracermancy

February 15, 2011 /

If you’re enjoying the Ashlock stories, you will definitely want to follow along with Wolverton, a fantastic series in the same world and format that Ben Carson is posting on a matching schedule. He also keeps coming up with cooler and more exciting twists, which is great, not at all like he’s making me look bad and had better WATCH HIS ASS OR ANYTHING CARSON