I'm just sort of inclined to mysticism when interpreting lyrics sometimes, I guess. Synchronicity is already sort of esoteric as albums go (the concept of synchronicity itself could be considered quasi-occult), so the interpretation seems of a piece to me with the second half. "Every Breath You Take" has this…

You know, I've heard that about Elfman a couple of times now, but I can never find anything on Google. I don't think anyone's done one of those big posts where they collect the comments in one place. If you have a moment, can you remember anything in specific that he said?

Lobsters capitalizes the beginnings of words more and has a different approach. That said, I wondered a bit too.

OK, I honestly can't tell whether or not that's a joke. Did someone actually say that?

It comes off like a bit to me, though. I don't know the comedian at all, but I think she's doing a character or something like it here. It doesn't become obvious until a little later on in the interview when she starts going on about the guy's taxes.

Just like Rob Zombie on MAD TV!

I always took "Every Breath You Take" as being from the point of view of a dead person. This is mainly because Synchronicity gets more and more concerned with ghosts as it goes on and partially just because stalkers aren't generally that interesting to me. If you take the bridge as being sung by a different person…

It's too bad that nobody did a gay parody of this back in the day. I read an article once about the 45s that were only available through direct order from ads found in the back of the magazines that were secretly aimed at gay men. They were like the music of the day, but really blatant. I have an mp3 of a song…

They did three of the previous writer/artist's strips, and this one's at four now, so that's a safe guess. It'd be kind of cool if they rotated back through after a few people, so that each person would have multiple cracks at it.

"Good" is a concept that gets ever more slippery as it gets more precise. One could argue from competence, saying that the comic's art is well-rendered enough to make the action clear and that the dialogue makes enough sense that the meaning isn't lost. That isn't much of a bar, though, so you'd probably want to be…

Why won't you notice Snarky, Dowd-senpai?

Ah, Ligotti, you wacky funster! Always with the jokes!

I think my first D&D character was made when I was about 8. He was a fighter named Balthazar. X or Z + "ar" ending = a kid's idea of a badass.

Having never LARPed, all I can say is that it's not like the source material treats mental illness much more seriously. It's pretty standard for people who haven't experienced it themselves to act like being incurably mentally ill is just a whimsical quirk for a delightfully unpredictable scamp.

The only vampire I ever played was a Malkavian, so, um, can't argue there.

I tend to think of YA as taking place primarily, in some sense, within a youthful world. If you go back to A Wrinkle In Time, it takes adults out of the picture for wide swaths of the book. The "adults" that are present are basically supernatural and not really like the adults that a kid would know. In the Harry…

That said, those aren't exactly bestsellers. It's not a bad thing to find a popular way to talk about hermeneutics. I just wish it had been something way better than this.

Watching some of the Da Vinci Code movie was completely hilarious for me, as I imagine that it would be for anyone who liked Foucault's Pendulum. The whole plot is exactly what that book was mocking a decade-and-a-half earlier. Templars! Fuzzy theories about Jesus! A version of history entirely composed of…

Wide-brimmed straw hats are an indispensable part of summer attire for me. I don't care if another busking comedy magician tells everybody not to listen if I invite them to Jurassic Park!

I'm guessing "cockamamie"?