Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q55,20

Main entries

5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Get Fuzzy [1] [2] -> comic strip that started in the early 2000s and stopped running new strips in about 2019

Books

5522. Q5522/Q52,22 The Dog Is Not a Toy (House Rule #4) [vol.1]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Fuzzy Logic [vol.2]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 The Get Fuzzy Experience: Are You Bucksperienced [vol.3]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Blueprint for Disaster [vol.4]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Say Cheesy [vol.5]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Scrum Bums [vol.6]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 I'm Ready for My Movie Contract [vol.7]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Take Our Cat, Please! [vol.8]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Ignorance, Thy Name Is Bucky [vol.9]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Dumbheart [vol.10]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Masters of the Nonsenseverse [vol.11]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Survival of the Filthiest [vol.12]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 The Birth of Canis [vol.13]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 The Fuzzy Bunch [vol.14]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 You Can't Fight Crazy [vol.15]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Clean Up On Aisle Stupid! [vol.16]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Catabunga! [vol.17]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Groovitude [vol.1-2]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Bucky Katt's Big Book of Fun [vol.3-4]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Loserpalooza [vol.5-6]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 The Potpourrific Great Big Grab Bag of Get Fuzzy [vol.7-8] / Grab Bag
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Treasury of the Lost Litter Box [vol.9-10]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 The Stinking [vol.11-12]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Jerktastic Park [vol.13-14]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 I'm Gluten Furious [vol.15-16]

Characters

5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Bucky Katt -> horror/villain/antagonist swatch. no bright green swatch for him.

Motifs (Groovitude)

1. Q5522-GV/Q52,22 Groovitude [vol.1-2]
618. Bucky can't define bourgeoisie / Bucky Katt does not know what bourgeois means (descriptive observation) / your boo-joy minds wouldn't understand it -> not surprising; I mean, he's a cat, not a human. but this becomes more interesting the more you contrast it with later instances across the strip of him constantly trying to create questionable businesses and scam people. over time it begins to look more and more like he doesn't know what the bourgeoisie is because it's the water he's immersed in. successful or failed, it's what he's chosen to be.
618. manual labor isn't really a cat thing
618. Bucky, you're why I try to eat vegetarian / "I'm too tough to care about issues" "a lot of people try to protect animals from that attitude" / "that's different from your leather jacket how?"
618. fine line separating genius and insanity / there's a fine line separating genius and insanity -> connect this to every time Bucky redefines words and attempts to use post-structuralism
618. things mean different things to different people / "we're gonna grow fish?!" "the eggs are for eating" -> there is something to be said here about the weird way the word "meaning" is used in philosophy and how things don't just mean whatever you want them to. because eggs are material objects. mao and the rock and the chicken.
618. I thought "don't stick forks in electrical sockets" was a figure of speech
618. combination of statements that fails to calculate correct result / "Bucky, you were named after a guy called Buck O'Neil ... You were named after a Monarch, too" "I was named after Buck O'Neil, too?"
     combination of statements that fails to calculate correct result + Idealism = 'pataphysics.

Motifs (Big Book of Fun)

1. Q5522-BB/Q52,22 Bucky Katt's Big Book of Fun [vol.3-4]
618. Q618/Q618 newly introducing Bucky to concept of feelings / To kill a mockingbird ... I thought it was a little off topic
618. Q618/Q618 fake smiles? the Good Morning Show must have some evil plan
618. Q618/Q618 I've been a Yankers fan since I was a kitten
618. Q618/Q618 movies about humans are so boring / people are so boring... movies shouldn't have people in them
618. Q618/Q618 digging up oil instead of using less oil -> rob turns the page over when his pets unknowingly start reading the news instead of the comics. I don't know what to say about that part of it.
618. Q618/Q618 Harry Potter isn't fictitious, he's British -> ok but, when this strip has rare cameos of other comic strip characters how would he know what is and isn't real. Charlie Brown is repeatedly mentioned as not real but Dilbert is implied to be real by showing up in one strip
618. Q618/Q618 tormenting him is my hobby
618. Q618/Q618 creative destruction (individual items) -> the motif of Bucky destroying collectible items because he doesn't recognize them as valuable but then deciding that if he makes a new product out of them that one must be valuable or in any event desirable to buy or have, by some kind of subjective value theory.
     this motif has come up in the strip many many times and it has never really clicked for me as inherently funny or interesting until I started asking what Bucky considers valuable and then it wrapped around to being interesting. I think he assigns some kind of economic value to specifically the act of one product displacing another product. on one hand you could make arguments that's vaguely accurate to real animals: they have no concept of value other than maybe the concept of controlling territories and thus 'value' only existing in the forms of 'mine' versus 'not mine (yet)' or how much trouble it is to take over something. on the other hand, if you read this motif through Bucky being not a cat but a repeatedly failed startup that's where it gets truly interesting. do startups actually create value or do they merely seek to destroy the value of other things so they can control value?
618. Q618/Q618 an old magazine? how does it know what's going on now?
618. Q618/Q618 literal object as representational art / object playing itself in art piece / turned off TV as reality show
618. Q618/Q618 did you know a bunch of blue jays won some baseball trophy? -> some motifs are not inherently all that good by themselves but get better if you overanalyze their origins out of boredom.
618. Q618/Q618 Harry Potter as perfect voodoo doll for putting curses on White suburbanite -> you know. probably.
618. Q618/Q618 you can't just say that you rock, someone else has to say it
618. Q618/Q618 Great spirits have always found opposition from mediocre minds
618. Q618/Q618 cat world leaders (Get Fuzzy) -> this arc was.... uninteresting versus what it claimed to be. I think the best thing you can say about it is that it's an unintentionally sick burn against BRICS. the claimed political alignment of the cat leaders doesn't matter to them at all as much as cats' asserted status as 'third world countries'.
618. Q618/Q618 we decided to live in a TV channel; this is the commercial
618. Q618/Q618 if cats can't run, pat buchanan is the most anti-people choice
618. Q618/Q618 a few buses blew up; we recommend pretending to be Canadian
618. Q618/Q618 if you can't kill your competition for food who can you / "it says that 5% of americans live in hunger" "they should eat some spotted owls or sea turtles or something" 'a proven track record of being an easy lunch'
6968. Q6968/Q69,68 other character than Garfield saying "I hate Mondays"
618. Q618/Q618 load-bearing idiot / "I am the foundation of that club" "a load-bearing idiot"
618. Q618/Q618 absorbing TV ads as truth / taking TV ads as literally true / you thought because an ad used the word "powerful" a TiVo would let you rule this house?
618. Q618/Q618 golden rule -> A) brought up in relation to biting dogs B) bucky uses it to ask for money
618. Q618/Q618 metallic rule describing Vegeta effect / Do unto cats and you'll get messed up (proposition) -> bucky invents exmat
618. Q618/Q618 iron rule / you have to eat animals or they'll just be up in our face all the time / I should object to ignorant little creatures imposing their will on me? / (9k) -> you know Animal Farm isn't canon because Bucky was the first one to say it

Motifs (Grab Bag)

1. Q5522-GB/Q52,22 The Potpourrific Great Big Grab Bag of Get Fuzzy [vol.7-8]
618. Q618/Q618

     assertion real place is fantastical

     / Hawaii is real? (Get Fuzzy) [3] [4]
618. method actor
618. you don't understand my genius / "That's more a reflection on your education than my script" / "He's not exactly playin' with a regulation deck" "he's playing Magic: the Gathering?"
618. dogs are like the Yangtze River
618. I'm not a cat Bucky, I'm a woman [5]
618. it's easier to ask for antacids than to ask for permission [6] [7]
618. The revolution will not be televised [8]

Motifs (Ignorance)

1. Q5522-GB/Q52,22 Ignorance, Thy Name Is Bucky [vol.9]
618. Q618/Q618 assertion real place is fantastical / assertion real place is fantasy worldbuilding / assertion real place is elaborate TV show script / England is made up (Get Fuzzy) 6-20 21 22 23 24 [9] / (9k) -> I don't think the claim the moon landing was a TV diorama is part of this motif even though it's conceptually similar. I think the real place has to be made up within the "writing" or "text" as opposed to the visuals or practical effects of the claimed fictional narrative

Motifs (Jerktastic Park)

Motifs (Birth of Canis)

5522. Q5522/Q52,22 Jerktastic Park [vol.13-14]
5522. Q5522/Q52,22 The Birth of Canis [vol.13]
618. dogs and cats as metaphor for contradictions of Liberal-republicanism -> I remember this theme vaguely being part of the central premise of CatDog, like that's why two wildly different animals are joined together. but the theme is much clearer here when the strip is sort of more 'allowed to have adult themes' and mention the existence of 'liberals' and 'conservatives'. the more the characters mention these concepts in a shallow way as non-sequiturs the more see-through the concept of cats in the strip becomes and you start to realize that the way characters respond to Bucky is actually supposed to be a political statement — although, no, not a very deep one. I'm not really here to say the treatment of political parties in a strip primarily about relatively literal interpretations of animals is more than the most surface-level observations. but I am here to say the portrayal of the characters is not neutral and is leaning into particular framings of what they each mean. the overall impression that you get from this strip is that it is telling people to ignore 'mean people' and hope they will all change, although in practice, that's telling people to ignore the most powerful people in society and hoping you'll pressure the most powerful people in society who are the most insulated from consequence and are more likely to take any attempt to change them as an evil and antisocial attempt to secede from their society. because every reactionary Community is in fact a Community, the concept that people are morally improved by 'sociality' or 'community' has some really really nasty consequences that you should not be so eager to mess with.
618. correction: I don't fear people, I hate people
618. Communists are center-Liberals / Communists are Democrats (United States) / The Democrats are Communists (statement implying speaker does not know what a Communist is) -> Bucky drew the pansy with a hammer and sickle, so this statement is not in there accidentally. I find it wild he can get all the way through drawing that without realizing these things are basically weapons and holding up something that is a weapon should not be a sign of weakness as much a sign of being somebody that could probably slay a house cat. there is a reason the grim reaper wields a scythe: those things are in fact somewhat dangerous.
     also in the other book he freaked out when he thought he saw a grim reaper
618. safety instructions can't tell me what to do
618. Travelogues are pointless because they are just a bunch of things that individual people experienced -> that's kind of wired actually. you'd need a different reason for saying it but yeah
618. why use infinite monkeys when you could use a few squirrels, set the bar low, sell the script and retire to hawaii -> one of those things that is shallow on the surface but gets more interesting the longer you look at it. first, the idea that infinite monkeys aren't just a math process but are a business, and so you have to optimize them. like, it's stupid enough it's almost smart. it realizes that whenever you make a statement about real-world objects they exist in a material world where things behave particular ways, including monkeys and including businesses. to see all of reality through the abstract Ideal of things being a business is stupid. but to treat businesses as material objects that can be understood actually isn't that bad. anarchists recently seem to hate it and have been busy trying to quietly program Liberal-capitalist academics to think capitalists exercising Materialism is the primary tool of their "domination". but outside that whole mess, Lenin was fine with the concept of applying Materialism to businesses.
     that said, the second thing to observe is the way capitalists love to sell a whole business like it was nothing more than a pile of money. the only actual value of a business is its ability to produce more things each week, but as it can easily lose that ability for various reasons, they're quick to let go of it and get rid of all responsibility for it as fast as they can. a capitalist's dream isn't actually owning a big swath of people and having to care about it, it's more like, making a big pile of money and checking out. getting paid to do the 'hard thing' of arranging people into a functioning society. but not actually having any obligation to that society, and getting handed social rank for being better at understanding how to arrange society than the people born later who come into a world which is already claimed and arranged and had no chance to learn. a capitalist asks for tribute to do the 'wonderful' task of being the guy that extorted gold out of the Indians, and then convincing everybody that it was absolutely necessary because if the capitalist hadn't laid out a new historical period on top of the other historical period nobody would be in the new one. you cannot counter that just by calling capitalism 'unjust'. whether you want to actually build the capitalist period or not, you have to show that capitalists are full of bullshit (pronounced censored) when they claim they're the only ones that could have done the task and demanded tribute. only then do you make them completely unnecessary to world history.

Motifs (Gluten Furious)

1. Q5522-GF/Q52,22 I'm Gluten Furious [vol.15-16]
618. if you can't kill your competition for food who can you
3172. Q3172/Q31,72 fruit flies like a banana / smells like cologne after Allied bombing / (9k)
618. Guerilla tactics are sneaky underhanded tricks / Che Guevara was a terrorist against world society because he led people into guerilla warfare, instead of conventional warfare, which is okay -> to be fair this comes out of bucky, but outside this comic strip it's a pretty standard position for people to have. this comic strip keeps pretending to be non-political all the time without realizing that inviting everyone in the world to come down judgingly on every particular oddly-specific individual for being inherently unlikeable as an individual actually is a political position and it's in cases like Che Guevara's battles in South America that you begin to see the consequences, if not in the huge moral panic over how "uniquely" bad Al Qaeda or whoever it will be supposedly is. Bucky's story is an attempt to make morality look harmless when in actually it causes wars and it's the reason rob ends up sitting there freaking out about the news. rob can't control Bucky by calling him immoral, they just fight. and that's basically how First World interventions work.
618. Canadians as stupid idiot garbage trash / a kilt-wearing socialist snowman who orders donuts in french -> bucky throws around the word "liberal" at completely bizarre times and the funny thing about is that like, if usage determines the correct definition of a word then he's using it correctly. this is exactly the kind of insane definition of political factions that large portions of normal people use every day. but as you can see here it's all just weird vibes-based definitions of who belongs to a countable culture and who does not, sorted on a continuum.
     this reminds me. I can't go into atheist forums, not because I have a problem with people being 'abrasive' or ostensibly 'mean to religion' but because they have the most mind-numbing pictures of what Liberal-republicanism is and what 'liberals' and 'conservatives' are. that I cannot stand. today while trying to search around to see if darkmatter2525 had completed his book I saw two rather stupid descriptions of Liberal-republicanism. one that claimed that "the culture" (what? who? how?) was leaving Tories behind. [10] another was an article quietly justifying businesses being able to fire whatever workers they want if the workers are 'mean' or 'unreliable', and implying that the physical structure and power relations of society really don't matter if they can successfully smash individuals inside structures who are 'mean'. [11] terrible framing. absolutely terrible. when you talk like that you're making me almost wonder if you actually have a moral high ground over the bigots.
618. What's the statute of limitations on a black cat crossing your path?
618. missing the point of Buddhism / missing the point of Hinduism -> it's not really Buddhism here but it really does remind me of the way Journey to the West started and the monkey king misinterpreted Buddhism
618. I am above you, that's what a plane of being is -> lol, this intentionally fake-deep plotline managed to be "deep" enough I had to read through it twice to figure out exactly what the joke is
618. reading biographies to understand what a genius is / vegetables clearly give you weird hair. let's find a normal genius -> wonderful demonstration of what Idealism is. he doesn't even care what the books say, he begins from his own idea of what 'a normal genius' should be
618. gold-plated bad idea / "[not] just another one of my bad ideas" "a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted bad idea"
     gold-plated bad idea + ?? = 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy
618. is there anything they won't do in moderation?? road trip!
618. how do you know if a reaper is grim?
618. "can't hold a candle to his writing" "I can hold a match to his notebook"
618. there was a void in the book market for books that criticize everyone but me
618. The clipboard didn't listen and obey commands, therefore it has free will -> ok, that's a legitimately interesting proposition
618. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound -> quite honestly. that's an easy answer because sound waves propagate as long as there's air. this question is only deep if you're asking about things like quantum particle exchanges where measuring the particle causes a different physical outcome than not hitting the particle. at that point it wraps around to being interesting again because it turns into a question about causality and who can have a causal effect or not
618. irrelevant. it still squashes the chipmunk
618. high-heeled farming -> the motif of somebody hearing a plan about improving farming and totally misinterpreting it / failing to understand what was said.

618. non-political book featuring Stalin

     / (9k)
618. intolerant of gluten
618. set it free = let go of it
618. an archy / the arkies
618. the opposite of a dinner party is empire
618. Baseball isn't a sport - they just stand around and do nothing
618. turning baseball off to watch a game of highlights
618. your self-help book is an instrument of your oppression / bees are man's best friend, you're man's cheapest butler
618. solving contradiction creates new contradictions / humans want to oppress you guys, but the official position of the conservative cat party is to imprison dogs; there is a difference
618. criticizing the concept of Batman -> this motif has come up weirdly a lot in these books.
618. what if batman was a bird, not a man? -> then he'd have echolocation
     of course like. if you're familiar with any Batman plotlines he doesn't really base himself on being a bat, he kind of becomes a superhero by being rich. what's the conceptual difference between Batman and Tony Stark, is the real question. no, they're both aerial, the robot probably flies better. no, I think they both have vehicles. no, they could both throw fancy knives if they really wanted to. like is Batman distinguished by his sidekick? god, Batman is a weirdly boring concept.
618. A superpower is something you aren't allowed to do -> okay, it depends on what "allowed/permitted" means. are we reducing all that is physically possible to "allowed"?
618. should have spent more time making yourself / should have spent more time making your ears -> so, in this comic there is a critical concept to understand of Bucky's personality being represented by his ears permanently drawn back. all the strips make a little more sense if you've seen the page explaining it. in this strip he is advised to "spend more time making his ears". this strip is left loosely but not too deeply implying that the term "self-made" can refer to character and to something resembling an "ethics adventure" narrative.
618. that hammer is no longer what I would consider findable
618. Can you have the high score at something you invented yesterday? -> it depends on what it is and how difficult it is for the second person to do.
618. If you don't know a thing's history it's prehistoric to you
618. Edgeworth's dialectic / Bucky versus ferrets
618. evil (arbitrary enemy) / so evil serves snacks
618. truly everyone is annoying to somebody... just as yin is to yang -> he wrapped all the way around to using the concept of yin and yang correctly
618. I don't know the meaning of the word inept
618. you can't fight crazy
618. chickens staging a coop

Motifs (Miscellaneous)

618. I'm dreaming that Bucky took my piggy bank [12] -> excellent example of why "you can't know anything but your own experience" is a deepity
618. a properly me-centric world / viewing the whole world through a proper me-centric frame / "I realized the world has never presented itself to me in anything other than a Bucky-centric way" (Get Fuzzy) [13] -> this 2008 comic strip has figured out a lesson that a lot of modern philosophers still haven't figured out
618. dollar dollar asterisk (Get Fuzzy) [14] -> the motif of somebody, usually young people, absorbing censored media and not learning about whatever word or concept was censored. this is one of the stated use cases for censorship. the other one is to visibly distinguish between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable even though everybody already knows what's being censored.

Motifs (Catabunga)

1. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 Catabunga! [vol.17]
2. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 switched your hammer with a lint roller
3. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 respect my intolerance, please
4. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 the forbidden secrets of bookbannedness -> the motif that all banned books are claimed to conceal the same kind of secrets
5. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 I choose to exercise free won't / I choose to exercise free won't and not get mad / my free will is about to determine that you love plum sauce
6. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 I choose to exercise free won't / apparently you have cheap will
7. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 catch 22 (rats) -> here I think there's something to be said about how books are usually full of symbols and not full of literal objects. because it would be crazy if they were full of objects
8. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 now is later than your now's later
9. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 he isn't gone, he's been occupying the same point in space he ever did -> this is like my scrap about how Sonic the hedgehog is technically a point in space so when they are objects points in space can move
10. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 abandoned by original Greek(s) / "I took it right from the original Greek" 'the original Greek(s) probably abandoned it intentionally'
11. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 Rocks are magic because the physical consequences you mentally attach to them are enchantments -> this one is... complicated to unpack actually. the consequence associated together with an object in someone's memory is a sign: image, meaning. an incantation is a sign inasmuch as it associates some sort of phrase or sound (or sigil, if 'incantation' wasn't the target idea here) with a consequence happening.
    in the end both incantations and physics have a similar structure to them. which I'm sure had some sort of role in historical events like jars containing copper cylinders and iron rods that were dug up later and thought to be "batteries" or elecroplating tools; one ancient person may have known that these metal objects had consequences associated with them (chemisty) and several others may have assumed those consequences were more vague than they actually were and that metal rods simply contained some sort of vague alchemical Ideals that could be used in spells. it's funny in retrospect but I don't really blame people for coming up with "metal mythologies" when they really didn't have easy ways of understanding what was actually going on.
12. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 Every experience of somebody else is an out-of-body experience / an out-of-Rob's-body experience -> I will mark this as existential materialism to be funny, because honestly, that's one possible nutshell summary of it
13. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 the Yuma suns are a force. they scored 107 / the Memphis forecast is 99 degrees and Grizzlies
14. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 nobody could market the iAmaTwitFace
15. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 dogs are pack oriented, with a preference for communal interaction; cats are evil; this is a ball of evil -> this is almost interesting as a depiction of how populations create culture based on the structure of the population
16. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 More households contain Democrats than dogs -> I don't have any idea what significance this statement has but I do know it's wonderful
17. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 brain size versus functionality
18. Q5522-CB/Q52,22 Garfield as election advice -> the strip wasn't mainly about this but this part unfortunately became real

Related

618. subjective theory of value (right-Liberalism)
618. Water in a desert proves the subjective theory of value -> Bucky's scams to sell dog toys back to Satchel weirdly remind me of this. like how is he defining what prices are and when things have a price tag? it has to be some crude idea like 'if I can successfully put a price tag on it it must be worth whatever I say it is' or 'if someone will pay a given price it's worth that'. and the latter is basically the subjective theory of value that some real economists unbelievably still stand by
618. claim that Animal Farm shares a universe with another piece of media -> I love these. honestly they are one of the funniest things to me
618. Animal Farm and Get Fuzzy take place in the same universe -> I find it odd that Stalin is mentioned by name in one of the books but there are never any jokes made about Animal Farm even as a piece of fiction. the characters are constantly shifting all discussions from people to animals, so, yeah. if there was ever an actual commentary on workers' states it would probably be with animals
     likelihood of this being true: low. I would sooner believe the one about Warriors or Kimba because of the more truly animal-centric feel of those stories where this strip is actually centered on humans even though things pets do take up most of the 'airtime' or panels or however you'd say it
618. Animal Farm and Get Fuzzy ... -> "there are never any jokes made about Animal Farm"
     that is not 100% true given the strip about 'chickens staging a coop'; it's the same general idea but not a deliberate reference
618. dogs and cats as metaphor for contradictions of Liberal-republicanism -> ... see this one as context for the one below
618. Lacanian discipline is imperialist / Because the assertion that people are morally improved by 'sociality' or 'community' cannot possibly exclude a sea of reactionary people who all form together into a community, it will in practice always allow seas of reactionary people to pressure individual progressive people into pleasing reactionaries rather than the other way around; Lacanian discipline ultimately legitimizes imperial kinds of republics and allows them to fully justify themselves as the "real" society of a particular population that other people who put pressure on them to try to change them are in fact committing anti-social acts against -> this one is so big it has ramifications for the fight between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism or various named Marxisms, not just Liberal-republicanism

Fields or ideologies

• Fy / fiction
• Fy / slice of life
• ES / Henri Bergson
• ES / anticommunism
• W / Western Marxism