Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
Hey, if it wasn’t for Peanuts, Garfield wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it was, and not least because Charles Schulz was a mentor of sorts to Jim Davis.
Based on the anecdote on Schulz’s Wikipedia page, Schulz may have been the first person to draw Garfield standing on two legs, as he (the cat) is best known, tacitly giving permission for Davis to steal that part of Snoopy’s design.
Life and reproduction are co-evolved emergent phenomena that sprang from a chemical accident where a molecule inadvertently found a way to replicate itself.
… but actually it might be more complicated than that. There might have been a set of molecules and chemical interactions that weren’t quite self-replicating but ultimately led to that self-replicating molecule. However, once that exists, you end up with a runaway chemical reaction that can last for literally billions of years.
TL;DR primordial soup is an ignition starter motor.
Fun fact: The Proto-Indo-European ancestor language has (or rather had) two words for a fart. One which is the ancestor of “fart” and another for which no descendant exists in English. That word was for silent farts. Curiously though, that word is the ancestor of the French word for fart, “pet”.
If it had made it to English, it would probably be something like “fast” - and it’s immediately obvious why it doesn’t exist, because there’s an important word with a completely different meaning occupying that niche.
Vowels are somewhat negotiable though, so we could opt for the next best, which is “fest”, which can’t have existed or else we probably wouldn’t have adopted the current meaning from French (and/or German).
“Fust” on the other hand, well, that’s interesting. It’s a word that means a musty smell and supposedly derives from a completely different root, but the similarity and onomatopoeia make me wonder…
Edit: Tense agreements. I grammar good
Dogs bark. Dogs pee on trees. Trees have bark. Coincidence? You can have that for free. (And to save you time, if you go back to Proto-Indo-European, the only difference between the root words is an extra laryngeal consonant, so they could quite easily be the same thing differentiated by some weird grammatical quirk. Or by watching a dog mark its territory.)
T-rex: “Aw dammit I could have come up with that”
Davis himself had already kind of put Garfield on his hind legs, but his legs and feet were one enormous mass because he was a chunky cat. Davis clearly hadn’t had the idea to make the legs spindly and Snoopy-like, or else he didn’t think he could do that and not be in trouble from people like Schulz.
When Schulz drew Garfield with Snoopy legs, Davis was able to take that idea and run with it.