Lemmy used to hardcode it, and you would’ve needed to patch the code to remove it:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

It’s now editable in the admin settings of the site. I’m not sure if the Lemmy devs inserted a default value or if it was manually set by @jgrim@discuss.online, but right now it just filters that one word and variant spellings on discuss.online. So IMO not really censorship in the same way that lemmy.ml does it

Yeah, I copy/pasted the quote as-is, and Lemmy has a slur filter that automatically changes things to *removed*, which in this case made it more confusing.

I also don’t get why he’s old and she’s not 🤷

See glowie if you’re confused about the joke:

From glow +‎ -ie. Originated by Terry Davis, who stated in a 2017 video that “CIA removed glow in the dark”, implying that they are conspicuous. The term “glowie” would become popular on the 4chan /pol/ board around 2019.

We should start normalizing gifting potatoes again. Everyone could use more in their life.

dip is a mild insult meaning “a foolish person”. It’s a play on the term Big Dipper, aka the Ursa Major constellation. Larson drew what he thought represented a foolish person as the constellation.

I assume they’re talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nightmare_on_Elm_Street. That came out in 1984 and this comic’s date is 1985, so Larson would’ve been aware of the film. The joke in the comic seems to be just that repeating something in front of parrots means that they’ll repeat it to the cops, and doesn’t seem to be a reference to the horror film.

What a dork. Glad my instance is defederated from that hot mess

Not ruining the joke, I appreciate reading dissections like this! Makes me wonder if we would still be able to interbreed with Neanderthals or other hominids if they were still alive. There’s definitely people around that would be up for getting freaky with them.

Is that referencing something? Did the New Yorker write an article critical of them?

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

What kind of sordid, bizarre past a scientist and some duck could possibly have is for anyone to surmise, but I enjoyed the drama in suggesting that, once again, their lives have become entangled and a new chapter is about to be written. Personally, I enjoy cartoons of this type because they lack the obvious “cymbal crash” at the end of the punch line. The idea evolved as shown.

It’s riffing on anthropology books like Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes–The Yanamamö and the Anthropologists. That book is just what came up with a quick search, but it’s a common snowclone title. The humor comes from imagining the author of the book living life as an invertebrate, blending in and befriending them, and learning their culture.

Reminds me of this site, which includes the Stars Trek vs Wars debate:

https://neal.fun/lets-settle-this/

It’s funny that the internet got that one wrong on there

It’s there a tl;dr for anyone that hasn’t been following this?

Total Perspective Vortex

Yeah, I don’t quite get this one.

Yeah, that does improve it. He mentions a few times in the The Prehistory of The Far Side that he sometimes dithered on what was too much to kill the joke vs not enough to let people get the joke, and here he should’ve scaled it back. Sometimes it was his editors too.

EDIT: Example:

Transcript:

In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t included the title to this vampire cartoon. It’s obviously redundant and only distracted from the humor.

Matrix dev’s response:

sigh. If you want to play project pedigree games; Matrix was actually the result of two existing teams - one in the UK and one in France, which happened to get acquired by Amdocs and then subsequently spun out once we’d created Matrix.

That page in particular is a pile of FUD; it keeps banging on about “impressive collection of private data being sent to Matrix central servers, even when you use your own instance” which is simply categorically untrue; it looks like they misread the privacy policy of the Matrix.org server at https://github.com/element-hq/policies/blob/master/docs/matrix-org/privacy_notice.md and somehow assumed it applied to everyone’s server instances. It doesn’t, any more than https://www.w3.org/policies/privacy applies to a given random webserver on the internet :|

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40562084

Some more history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I've_Been_Working_on_the_Railroad

The “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah” section, with its noticeably different melody, is actually an older song that has been absorbed by “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”. It was published as “Old Joe, or Somebody in the House with Dinah” in London in the 1830s or '40s, with music credited to J.H. Cave. “Dinah” was a generic name for a slave woman and, by extension, any woman of African-American descent.

This extra verse confirms what I figured the lyrics were about:

Someone’s makin’ love to Dinah

Someone’s making love I know.

Someone’s making love to Dinah

'Cause I can’t hear the old banjo!

Don’t say that too quickly. Now that I’m posting the old comics again, we’ll see if it’s any darker now than the early comics 🙂

It’s not a great joke either way, but I read it as either “Fooled you! You thought I was hallucinating but I’m joking!” or “Oh shit, I’m hallucinating, better play it cool and act like I was just pretending”.