Played a fine guitar, and some dirty basketball
Well, lots of readers have joined me in their confusion, but no one seems to have an answer to the mystery of Dell's unintelligible ad copy. I'm feeling a little mixed about that. On the one hand, I'm relieved to know that the problem was not on my end, and that my ability to read and understand English sentences is not horribly impaired. But on the other hand, I'm frightened that our society is lurching ever closer towards a grammatic wasteland where communication will consist largely of grunting and marketing buzzwords. Fortunately, these two conflicting feelings have averaged out into a kind of casual apathy. Is that a bad thing? Who cares! What's on television? I'll watch whatever.
Enjoy the long weekend! Hopefully I will be using it to get caught up on some long ignored site business, such as replying to emails, finishing up the "Can't Dance" tshirt and updating a couple of long-neglected sections of the Sam and Fuzzy website. Cheers!
Sam Logan
A party of polaroid friends
I recieved a perturbing piece of junkmail from Dell today. Normally I toss the stuff reflexively, but this time my eye was drawn to the baffling phrase emblazened on its front cover in large, bold letters:
"Get what you want without spending what you don't."
It almost slips by the first time. We are all sufficiently familiar with marketing schlock to know instinctively what they must be getting at. But this time, in the back of your head, you know something is not quite right. And so you read it again, and again, and again, but the more you look at it the more you realize there is something amazingly wrong with that sentence. No matter how hard you try, once you start breaking the structure down your brain just can't make that sentence mean what it was probably intended to mean. You want to add words to the end, but you can't... that would be cheating!
What exactly does the phrase mean? Let's be charitable and say that it does mean SOMETHING. As far as I can tell, Dell exists in some parallel universe where things you don't want are exchanged as currency in a sort of barter system. But you will not have to spend your precious unwanted items in order to buy a Dell. No, they just take money. How convinient! Thanks, Dell!
Andrew from CADNET wanted me to remind you all about the #samandfuzzy IRC chat channel! Once upon a time we had a reasonably active chat room, and after a while I stopped popping in. Now, apparently everyone has done the same. Whoops!
Sam Logan
400 and counting
Yes, today's Sam and Fuzzy comic is the 400th I have drawn for this website! Nothing hugely amazing is going on in the comic proper to line up with the milestone, so I thought I'd mark the occassion with a little self-indulgent behind-the-scenes stuff instead.
This, as far as I can tell, is the very first Sam and Fuzzy comic I ever drew. As a kid, whenever I went on vacation I kept a little journal of autobiographical cartoons. At some point, my teddy bear Fuzzy showed up as a character, and the duo was born. It's hard to tell which cartoon came first -- after inventing the Fuzzy character, I went back and worked him into all the older cartoons as well -- but I think it was probably this one.
A few years later, I decided I liked the Sam and Fuzzy characters enough to ditch the autobiographical format and spin them off into their own comic. All I lifted was the character designs: everything else was a blank slate. I worked through a lot of different concepts over the years. At one point Sam was a highschool student; at another he was a detective. Sometimes Fuzzy's existence was a big secret; other times he just wandered around freely like he does now. But eventually, the characters' appearances and personalities evolved to roughly resemble their current incarnations. This comic was the beginning, though it would be another few years before I began work on the version of Sam and Fuzzy that is chronicled on this website.
So there you go! You know, just in case you were wondering.
I've updated the gallery to include a new wallpaper section. There's nothing new in there, but if you were after either the 300th Strip or Skull Panda wallpapers I made before, you can find them in there!
Sam Logan
