“Sisqos” absolutely kills me.
I don’t even know what this is trying to say
Ok ok, I get that it can be a lot to dive into.
Stan Kelly is a fictitious cartoonist that has what can only be described as conservative boomer ass tendencies, and is published as if he writes for an audience of conservative American boomers with strong cultural and political opinions without even the slightest bit of media literacy.
So every symbol or allegory has to be spelled out in a painstakingly obvious way. He has several recurring characters: a crying statue of liberty, horrified at whatever is being depicted, and the opposite, someone who enjoys the depravity and needs to be labeled with the word “sickos” on his sweater, usually saying something like “yes, haha, YES!”
The joke is that it satirizes the type of political cartoons that sometimes become popular among the right wing (see Ben Garrison). More recently, the satire has often been focused on trivial, petty grievances being made out to be much more than they really should be. This particular comic is an example: that boomers hate being reminded that they don’t even have a monopoly on nostalgia, and that it’s been a long enough time since they were being cut out of the cultural zeitgeist that people are now nostalgic for things that they were too old to understand the first time around.
Stan Kelly is the creation of cartoonist Ben Ward, whose comics in his own name generally poke fun at conservatives more directly.
It’s making fun of people not realizing that time has passed and that the 90s are now long enough ago to be seen as retro to people.
I had a young colleague tell me that he loves retro games “like halo 2 and stuff”.
Not even Halo CE man, couldn’t even give me that. Straight for the fucking jugular.
Not even Halo CE man,
I mean, he’s right, though. It’s been a while.
Halo: Combat Evolved came out in 2001, 24 years ago.
Go back to 2001 and hack off 24 years, and you’re at 1977. In 1977 — late in 1977 — the Atari 2600 was released, so the equivalent would be an early Atari 2600 game. If you were playing Halo: Combat Evolved when it was new and someone proposed playing an early Atari 2600 game, it’d be hard to call it anything but retrogaming with a pretty hard emphasis on the “retro”.
EDIT: It also does kind of highlight, I think, how the rate of change of video games has kind of slowed a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_2600_games
It looks like only nine Atari 2600 games were out in 1977. I think the only game on there I have played is Combat. I remember having fun with it, but if you compare Combat and Halo: CE versus Halo: CE to a current video game, the rate of change has fallen way off.
My local game store had about fifty copies of Combat when I was a teen. They sold for 1USD each. They never sold.
Combat inflation is real.
We are 1 year out from a reboot of Austin powers with a time traveler from the 90s.
Let that sink in
In a typical newspaper, cartoons present satire on events.
In The Onion, a satirical newspaper, the cartoons are satire upon the follies of other satire.
But we have to go deeper…
