Dilbert - C or D?

the Curtis Kwanzaa strips rule

oooooh the gloves are off

https://i.ibb.co/WB5bSGx/lha9p10udzsa1.png

as a liberal, this makes me cry

Is the editorial line that the idiot boss is good now

by dilbert logic, boss must v soon agree w dave and make crt corporate policy/indoctrination rule right

Yes the boss has been recast as Always Right, Actually in recent years. And of course he is, otherwise how could he be the boss?

I know pointing out how lazy dilbert is aesthetically qualifies as 90s nostalgia, but that third panel with the utterly pointless exterior view is infuriating. I assume it's essentially a stock image he can use in any strip but ffs

published in 2020, now online: Incel Supernova: From a Single Comic Strip to the End of the Universe with Scott Adams

been staring at this for 15 mins, trying to decipher it like it's frigging hammurabi's code pic.twitter.com/wfX88QVdi4

— gg 🙊🙈🙉 (@gina_goldberg) May 24, 2023

this is how I find out I'm trans

it's somehow even worse in context! some men really only conceive of woman as accessories that display your social power. need more asexual acceptance or something

Not sure if this is his worst tweet ever, but it's in the top ten at least.

Imagine jailing an ex-president when lawyers can't agree on how to interpret the laws and the public is not allowed to see the secret documents to judge how important they are.

I think 40% of the public would stop paying taxes until that got fixed.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 17, 2023

Don’t be the last one to stop paying taxes you dilshit. no really, do it, just quit payin, in fact tell everyone.

I don't know much about information security but I am pretty sure "let everyone see the documents to decide how important they are" isn't a promising strategy

easy for him to say because he has no income

Behind the Bastards did a 2-parter on this guy recently. pretty fun listen. it mostly revolves around the idea that's been brought up here a bunch, that Scott Adams is basically a sociopath who can't comprehend there are people out there who know more than he does, so the bulk of his idiotic conspiracy theories are just him refusing to read or educate himself. also makes a compelling argument that his bout with spasmodic dysphonia was when his insanity really went into overdrive. it goes a bit into his fiction books, particularly "The Religion War", which the host credits for "at least finding a unique way of being racist"

also goes a bit into how every creative industry is packed with talented people and how there's often no logical reason why one person makes it while hundreds of more talented and tenacious people don't. and how that often causes the people who do make it to get real paranoid and weird. Scott's probably in a class of his own on this one though.

I had no idea that he had written books. My brief reading of the descriptions on Amazon makes me think I'd rather have an ice pick stabbed into my eye than read any of them.

you can order ice picks from Amazon too

LOL

n this frenetically paced sequel to Adams' best-selling "thought experiment," God's Debris, the smartest man in the world is on a mission to stop a cataclysmic war between Christian and Muslim forces and save civilization. The brilliantly crafted, thought-provoking fable raises questions about the nature of reality and just where our delusions are taking us.

I'm betting "the smartest man in the world" is named something like Scrott Babams.

you can order ice picks from Amazon too

― hardcore technician gimmicks are also another popular choice f (President Keyes), Wednesday, July 26, 2023 1:14 PM

"... These items are frequently bought together."

Behind the Bastards did a 2-parter on this guy recently. pretty fun listen. it mostly revolves around the idea that's been brought up here a bunch, that Scott Adams is basically a sociopath who can't comprehend there are people out there who know more than he does, so the bulk of his idiotic conspiracy theories are just him refusing to read or educate himself. also makes a compelling argument that his bout with spasmodic dysphonia was when his insanity really went into overdrive. it goes a bit into his fiction books, particularly "The Religion War", which the host credits for "at least finding a unique way of being racist"

― frogbs

i mean personally i'd say charles manson did that too, though i admit that i'm not completely familiar with all the different ways of being racist

I read God's Debris in high school, mostly because I just happened to spot it in the library. I remember thinking 10% of it was thought provoking and 90% of it was the dumbest shit you've ever heard. And I was like 15 at the time. If I read it now the split would probably be closer to 0/100.

Granted at the time I still kinda liked Scott Adams, but after reading that I wondered if he might actually be insane. Like it's one thing to do this sort of fun thought experiment as a lark but you can really tell that he thinks he's actually uncovered the secrets of the universe here. And in retrospect you can see exactly how these "deep thoughts" led him directly to shit like Holocaust denial. Even if he wasn't politically aligned with them back then he very much had that right-wing mentality of "I already know everything I need to know, and if I don't know something it's because they're trying to hide it from me"

Same experience with that book. Brutal.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6M4px9a0AAHd1-?format=jpg&name=small

Not sure how taking this guy out would further anyone’s agenda

A younger cartoonist like Olivia Jaimes could pick up a lot of experience points by doing so.

The Derp State is after him.

Genuinely can’t figure out if this is more likely to be a sexual assault allegation or just him looking for attention

I adore that his profile pic is an anatomically inaccurate brain

He also doesn't understand the physics of neckties, so

Aw shit, is he being "gang-stalked"?

https://keithstack.neocities.org/dilbert.png

Save the brains

the Dagwood Commission concluded that it was the PHB out of the window of the schoolbook depository, but rumors persist that Dogbert was seen on the grassy knoll that day...

Laugh now, but when Adams actually gets murked make sure you have some laughs left over.

That would be another example of addition by subtraction.

wtf is taking so long

https://i.ibb.co/98q0Jg7/F6-L-Z-ZWMAAq-Moi.png

https://i.imgur.com/VUxAMtz.png

I found out recently that the offensive for nearly all possible ways Dilbert parody from the 90s, "The Dilbert Hole," was 1. Originally on rotten.com 2. Still up on archive.org because Scott Adams lost a legal action against it due to it being fair use

sitting here laughing about the fact that "Gamer Dilbert" has more readers than the actual Dilbert strip now

still in awe that this "master of manipulation" threw away the only thing that made him relevant just to say some incredibly racist shit as a HYPOTHETICAL, like genuinely one of history's greatest self-owns

out of curiosity I looked at some of his "Dilbert Reborn" strips and they are so bad, like Elon reply guy level humor. I swear he used to know how to write a joke

It's been discussed upthread, but he never knew how to write a joke. His early strips were things that happened in his last cubicle job, while the strips after that were things that happened to his fans (who would email him).

see I disagree with that. it's true that he's terrible at coming up with ideas and he himself admitted that most of them come from readers but if you look at some of those 90s strips you can tell he's at least familiar with the mechanics of a joke - there are actual punchlines there, sometimes they're even funny! I'd find some examples but it appears all the old Dilberts have been scrubbed from the internet, lmao

I found it occasionally funny too back in the day.

I remember an ex-fan writing a blogpost about it, basically arguing that he'd lost his sense of irony somehow. I guess you see that in a lot of comedians who have been rich and famous for too long but what's happening with this dude seems different. it's not that they're bad jokes, it's that they don't resemble jokes at all.

I would guess his bout with spasmodic dysphonia might've had a lot to do with this. as much as I dislike him I wouldn't wish that on anyone. to a lesser extent I think getting humiliated with the whole sockpuppet thing a while ago was probably a factor. maybe the first time in his life as a famous person where his bullshit just stopped working and I don't think he knew how to handle getting made fun of. I say this because I believe Elon Musk's villain arc started the same way - he was always bad of course but I think he really started going off the rails when people started making fun of his dumb submarine

how many times has he been caught doing the sock puppet thing? I know he had a metafilter account for about five minutes before getting outed

All of these things can be true simultaneously. The early trips had some fresh stuff. The strip at its best was frequently entertaining, partly because he stole a lot of stuff from others. Then he slid downhill into Trumpy right-wing bullshit.

I don't think it's a mystery. I think it's just the journey of a man who started out with some promise, began to compromise when he ran out of easy material, then got mad and ugly when the well ran dry.

What would be more surprising is if he had been able to come up with 30+ years of fresh and interesting material. There are very few people who have been able to do that.

That said, good people whose work has run its course have the sense to bow out. He does not. Because he is not a good person. His wish to retain relevance has led him to be yet more terrible (as that gets a reaction, and any reaction is better than none).

oh there’s like 15 - 20 years of incredibly weird and questionable things before he got on the “Trump is a master persuader” wagon

the tiniest criticism, like “dilbert just normalizes unhealthy office dynamics and gives people an outlet to laugh at while accepting them” is something people brought up and a sane man would have said “well, you have a point but that’s what we’ve got” but noooooo

thats definitely true, again this is kind of like Elon Musk where he was clearly a thin-skinned weirdo all along but was a lot better at not making headlines for it

there was a good podcast on Scott Adams which pointed that out - back in 1998 the dude was on top of the world, Dilbert was the biggest comic strip in the country, he had a TV deal in the works, his books were selling a ton, he had structured his licensing deals in a way that was making him incredibly rich - and yet he couldn't get over that Norman Soloman book, one which as far as I understand isn't *really* about Dilbert anyway?

thats definitely true, again this is kind of like Elon Musk where he was clearly a thin-skinned weirdo all along but was a lot better at not making headlines for it

― frogbs

i'm pissy this morning

not making headlines for being weird when you're a cishet white man is pretty easy. you get a lot of benefit of the doubt. musk and adams had to really work to lose people's respect. if they weren't white men they never would have gotten to the levels of influence, power, authority, and respect they had

i don't think that dilbert was never _funny_. it was reasonably funny, in the early days. adams' draftsmanship was always poor. he was, you know, writing about his lived experience, and that kind of helps. i think someone upthread knocked that, that he was just telling jokes about his jobs, but i mean you gotta get your material somewhere.

That said, good people whose work has run its course have the sense to bow out. He does not. Because he is not a good person.

― CthulhuLululemon (Ye Mad Puffin)

i get lost when we start talking about whether "good people" or "bad people". that's just fundamentally not how i view the world. i don't think adams kept dilbert going because he was a "bad person". i think he kept dilbert going because he was a mediocre white man and he believed, probably correctly, that he was never going to do better than what he was doing

i mean is hank azaria a "good person"? fuck if i know. the simpsons has probably "run its course" four or five different times now. it's an easy job that he doesn't have to work very hard at and which pays reasonably well. i wouldn't say he's a "bad person" for not bowing out.

comic strip writers are weird. i mean. there's a long history of it. they do a lot of questionable shit. a lot of it finds its way into the comics. johnny hart, the last 20 years of bc, half the strips were just him evangelizing. i always found that super weird because "bc" literally stands for "before christ", as far as i know, and here are these cavemen talking about how amazing jesus is. i guess there's weirder things out there. but he was obviously a weirdo.

al capp, my god, al capp was this fucked up dude, like... just kind of monstrously bad. y'all wanna read that story sometime. after charles schulz introduced a minor black character into peanuts in the late '60s, hank ketcham decided to introduce a grossly offensive racial stereotype into "dennis the menace" and just went "What? What's the problem? I don't see the problem here", and it was apparently fine, as soon as he stopped drawing the grossly offensive racial caricature everybody acted like it'd never happened.

percy crosby, god, nobody today remembers percy crosby but his strip "skippy" was like peanuts before peanuts. just insanely popular. this cute little kid with wry philosophical observations about the world around him. there was a motion picture series based on it. some of the films in it won oscars. some company stole his comic strip's name and logo for their peanut butter. he sued them but lost.

anyway he started drinking more and more and the little kid started ranting about communism and how fdr was in league with stalin. they started becoming these huge walls of completely unhinged right-wing conspiracy rants. the strip went on for a surprisingly long time like that, people just pretending crosby wasn't a complete nutjob and hoping, i don't know, that he'd stop being a right-wing nutjob? this went on until december 1941, at which point fdr and the united states really _were_ in league with stalin and this guy going out here saying we'd made a terrible mistake and the person we really _should_ be in league with was hitler, well

whether any given person is a "good person" or a "bad person", i don't know, i don't care. what i do know is that it takes a _lot_ for a cishet white dude to face anything in the way of consequences for their behavior. a real, real lot.

Schulz would normally mention Crosby as a source of inspiration whenever he was interviewed.

The founding, popular American newspaper for this kind of right-wing editorialising is Little Orphan Annie of course, but it's part of a larger pattern of comics accommodating the (invariably reactionary) politics of the newspaper owners. Another means of persuasion.