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Somebody posted this somewhere on some blog I ran across.
Forever alone — the chair
(Source: The Good Jokes)
Researching this oddity led me to the "Forever Alone" page on Know Your Meme. This page confirmed what I had come to suspect, "Forever Alone is an exploitable rage comic character that is used to express loneliness and disappointment with life." It's considered a variation on "Rage Guy," and related to 28 others.
There's also This is Photobomb at MemeBase.
I lost additional precious minutes of my life looking through Señor Gif's collection of animated goods. Who can resist d'aawwing at Cutest Bear Attack Ever and Baby Bunny Eating Carrot Finger (warning: very high d'aw factor) and Red Pandas High Five and Cooking with Cats and the electric Bad Hair Day and Deer & Dog Lick Annoyed Kitty? (The kitty didn't look that annoyed to me.)
Who can resist wincing at the painful Tap It, Bro? Or marveling at the incredible Evasion Strategy? There's a nostalgic laugh in The Future of Medical Care, the disturbing suggestion that All Celebrities are the Same People (Person?), and the shocking raw footage from the Manchester Riots 2011: scenes from Whalley Range.
Here's a great Forever Alone riff: Forever Alone on a Dollar Bill One And if there's still any shred of cheer left in you, endure The Forever Alone Meme: A 21-Picture Tour Through Soul-Crushing Loneliness.
That's our meme lesson for the day. You are welcome.
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JJ, pretty funny to have you say Doonesboy "pioneered" words without balloons. Doones was retro. At least, that's what I remember thinking when Doonesbury started. (I remember thinking something like that while reading the first strips; was also amused that Doones himself arrived at college from my ol' home state just as I was about to head out-of-state to college.)
Cartoons, e.g. early editorial toons, moved from just illustrations with captions below (generally) to having the words inside the cartoons, and words in balloons was actually a quick but still later development, as I recall my toon history. (Yellow kid wore his words! Krazy Kat! Little Nemo! Now, them was comic strips. Okay, I'm not THAT old!) The balloon became the standard, especially in strips as opposed to editorials. In the early days the bubble or even just an underline with just a single line indicating the speaker battled the upstart modern comic-book standard balloon with open stem. Dashed lines for whispers became standard early-on, cloud-like thought balloons standardized a little later. Or I could just be making all that up. I hate the web. Ruins all my stories.
I found numerous links to "The Evolution of Speech Balloons" at http://bugpowder.com/andy/e.speechballoons.evolution.html, but unfortunately that's now a 404.
Meanwhile, I found a link to an article about obscenicons, including a panel from a 1909 Katzenjammer Kids with a mix of bubbled and unbubbled words.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2483
Speech balloon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_balloon
One of the earliest antecedents to the modern speech bubble were the “speech scrolls”, wispy lines that connected first person speech to the mouths of the speakers in Mesoamerican art.
Discussion about the origins of usage
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-82556.html
I've seen copies of cartoons from around the time of the American Revolution (and, I think, earlier) that depict speakers with "speech balloons."
http://www.ccgb.org.uk/lobby/index.php?/archives/11-Comics-A-Brief-Histo...
Early examples of comics include late 15th-century German woodcuts
Okay, never mind what I wrote at first.
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Mary Worth for the Comics Curmudgeon
Here's a Mary Worth alteration I indulged in when I should have been doing more important things today.
I've been enjoying the Comics Curmudgeon off and on for years, but more regularly lately. Here's a Mary Worth alteration I indulged in when I should have been doing more important things today.
After the Substitute Curmudgeon posted the Mary Worth cartoon for 2011 March 8 (click this link and scroll down the page a little), Curmudgeon Commenter Terryfic replied, noting (ahem!) some art problems. This led me to my version of the cartoon. (Original credits to the writer, artist, syndicate, their spouses and mothers.) Now, the second panel makes more sense in other ways, like how the girl went from happy to haggard due to her week of Dad's relentless hassling.
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Hollywood goes to the Oscars 2011
I don't care who won what awards, but this morning I couldn't resist hitting a link to the worst-dressed ladies at the Oscars...!
I come to HillBuzz for the politics, not for Boystown buzz. Yet here I am on the Oscar thread! Hunh!
Likewise I go to the blog of a great guy, writer Mark Evanier, for his many marvelous entertainment industry (especially animation and comics) insider tales and related links, and not so much for his unfortunate misguided liberal beliefs and links to the like.
Mark writes of the Oscars that he's "baffled by those who moan it's 3+ hours of rich, successful people stroking one another. Well, yeah. Those who have this complaint are unclear on the concept." HA!
Save for a very few of their actual products, I have a pretty much total disinterest in all Hollywood matters (other than Mark Evanier stories). Likewise I have only amused and distant interest in what's called fashion. I don't care who won what awards, but this morning I couldn't resist hitting a link to the worst-dressed ladies at the Oscars! Old "flannel-shirt blue-jeans straight guy no queer eye could help" as my tastes might be, even I am appalled by these fabric catastrophes. (One MORE good indication why one should never seriously consider the political opinions of most Hollywoodens.) I am practically FORCED to do that 
Jack Benny "Well!" pose and simper, DARLING! WHO let you out of the house in THAT?
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Digital Asteroid Clobbers Olde Media World
I sure hope folks like our pal JJ here (and me) can figure out how to make a living in this dead-trees-free world.
When it comes to public TVs, I have most enjoyed Mexican-language soap operas in a good Mexican restaurant. Cerveza helps.
For some time now, we have had no antenna, no cable TV, no satellite TV. (I listen to the radio in the car sometimes.) We're the Nielsens' worst nightmare. When we are at someone's home where the TV is on, or in public with TVs blaring (or at least glaring), we realize how removed from the broadcast culture we have become. "You know that commercial...?" No. "Have you seen that show...?" Probably not. They now have a channel just for that?
It's not that we don't like some of the shows and even good commercials (the world's greatest short-attention-span theater until YouTube). We see many of both, new and vintage, but not what MadAve or NBCBS or FOXWB wants us to see RIGHT NOW. No pushcasts. Not even talking news heads.
We get news, comics, TV, movies, even ads, and lots more videos and audios besides, all on-line. We see and hear and read what we want when we want, and watch TV without commercial interruptions. (Although, in truth, we've been doing this since we could first tape-delay and fast-forward, but you'd still see the commercials fly by.)
So, sometimes I just can't look away in restaurants. Ha ha! Funny commercial. (Others are inured to it; I'll look it up on YouTube.) But mostly, I'm astonished at the unbelievably tasteless, violent, frenetic, madness-inducing sensory assault (also the stuff that's not the news or sports k'chng). Worse, the realization that for most folks, this dreck, at home or elsewhere, is their normal mental background radiation.
Peripherally, relatedly, I sure hope folks like our pal JJ here (and me) can figure out how to make a living in this dead-trees-free world. Will newspapers and-or syndicates and-or whatever morph effectively? As strong as my surprise at the assault of broadcast TV is my surprise when I pick up print newspapers, full of 'news' I read at least yesterday, and especially I'm more horrified each time I encounter the squinty, colorless nightmare of forced choices that is the newspaper comics page!
On-line, space constraints of print become merely bandwidth questions, insignificant in this video-bandwidth age.
Those Non-Sequiturs and Funky Winkerbeans that make one turn one's newspaper (or computer monitor) sideways could (could but aren't) run in the right direction. Sundays need never cut the top tier. (Back to work on that extra strip a week, JJ. :)
Intentional color or not, at the artist's preference. (Thinking of the Fox Trot guy griping about coloring Coke cans in the dailies.) [CITATION NEEDED]
On and on.
The guy at Questionable Content says he makes a living off QC now, but I don't know what his living standards are. (If like his characters, minimal Bohemian--heh.)
In a comment responding to the current comics syndicate takeover, I just read that XKCD gets more hits per day than all the syndicated strips combined.
The web is a growing world-wide market which can reduce greatly the costs of getting from artist to audience, and cut the overhead of middlemen (but not eliminate -- few creators are good self-marketers, right, JJ?). Old media looks for secondary marketing, like the comics page. Old media looks for maximizing unit costs and cramming folks into the theater the first weekend, but more people will pay a dollar at the RedBox than will blow twenty on a new DVD. New media can be more direct, and while webvertising (ironically) will surely continue to be some support, I deem that new media can best survive by reducing direct consumer cost to seeming pittance and maximizing that "world wide" sales part. I can't say whether, much less how, this will work, but it seem t'me digital plus web hasn't just changed the game; it has clobbered the gameboard like an asteroid! Adapt or dino.
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