And today we’re back with another installment in Tom Batiuk’s “modern technology stinks” series. I really would like more details about what’s going on here. Did the five of them just record a podcast right there, while they were standing around? Why did Cory and Rocky wait until they were with their parents to do these things, which they didn’t need their parents for and they clearly had no input in?
I’m always amused by how petty Batiuk’s gripes with technology are. This is basically exactly what hashtags are meant for, and it’s a great use for them. To react “oh no, people uploading pictures of one of the best days in your life in a way that you can easily find them, Skynet has won, why couldn’t we have stopped with dial-up and Netscape” is a really weird take. (Not sure if it’s as weird as a week long rant against song suggestions, but it’s close).
This does not seem like a great hashtag, apart from just being way too long and using up most of your characters. I’m sure we can come up with better ideas. Mine is #mrandmrsrhodessincethereisnowayiambecomingrockywinkerbean.
#superlonghashtagsdefeatthewholepoint
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
Cory’s face doesn’t match the dialog at all. In fact, it doesn’t match any known human emotion at all, except for imbecilic glee, which I don’t think they were aiming for here.
Agreed. What’s with the jocular grin? He’s not adding anything funny or interesting. As usual.
He appears to be reacting to a hilarious comment, despite no such comment being made. Meanwhile, Carla looks like she just found out that Santa isn’t real. It’s like the strip was drawn with entirely different dialog in mind.
You’re right Epicus! I wonder what the original dialogue would have been?
How exactly is Cory so darn happy all the time? Early Act III Cory was an angry neglected kid surrounded by horrible people in a horribly small town, acted out as a result, and joined the Army of his own accord to get away from it all, especially Funky. (I think.) So not only is Cory glad to keep coming back to Westview, he’s back with all the scars and shadows of his past healed and forgotten instead of becoming Wally 2.0??? It makes no sense!
I wonder if Batiuk has ancestors who ranted against the printing press? If they’d seen this strip coming, who could blame them?
His great great great great great great grandfather was one of the original luddites, smashing textile machinery to preserve his precious cottage industry.
We have actual footage of this:
Oh my lord. That is glorious. I have a new YouTube channel to binge. THANK YOU.
Mitchell and Webb are terrific. They really should have gotten a following in the U.S. Their “post-apocalyptic quiz show” series of skits is a standout, especially after COVID hit. “Vectron”, “Come”, “Are We The Baddies” and “Bawdy 70s Hospital” are some of my other favorites. And course their other game show skit, “Numberwang!”
The wedding podcast and registering a domain name? Does Tom Batiuk have any clue what these words even mean?
He’s trying his hand at being a caller for “what the olds think the youngs talk about” bingo.
Honestly I’m a little surprised he didn’t throw out something like “ordered a crypto for each table”.
“Then we can Youtube it all on Facebook, once we Snapchat some more Bitcoin text apps!”
But if technology stopped with e-mail, Funky, you wouldn’t have a pizza app. Also, you wouldn’t have been able to talk to Cory while he was deployed, since there would be no video chat and the only thing Cory has ever been shown as being capable of writing is crib notes.
If technology stopped with e-mail, Son of Stuck Funky would still exist as a listserv.
[Anticipatory ducking] I’m roughly Funky’s age, height, and weight. I kind of agree with him. I just don’t care for all this “track everybody everywhere all the time” technology. Funky and I are just old men yelling at clouds. So never mind.
Oh, there are lots of things not to like about the modern internet. Social media is obnoxious. Data collection mechanisms are scary. But Tom Batiuk never once makes a valid criticism about it, or even a coherent one. He hates the Internet because it’s not the Give Tom Batiuk A Pulitzer and Free Comic Books Club. Its nature subjects him to criticism, and he can’t STAND that.
This is a guy who hates eBay. Who the hell hates eBay? It’s probably the most harmless, useful thing on the Internet. And a guy who bends over backwards to not look things up online, when that’s what the internet is best at.
1. Hey don’t go dissing Netscape… I never would have survived college without my 28.8 modem, my AOL v3.0 and my Netscape Navigator v3.1 **POWERED BY BELLSOUTH.NET**
2. Um… Shouldn’t they have already done this shit weeks ago? I know a proper wedding planner certainly would have. Lemme guess — They haven’t even decided who to invite or picked a church or a dress or bridesmaids or a caterer or a venue for the reception or any of that boring stuff that can wait to the last minute because creating cute #hashtags is much more important amirite?
3. You know, for a writer like TomBa who lives and dies with his moldy comedic tropes and stereotypes, I’m so very disappointed that he’s never given us an old fashioned ‘Bridezilla’ and it’s too much to hope laid-back Roxy will magically turn into one because by law Funkyverse women must be easygoing to a fault, forgiving to a fault, understanding to a fault, patient to a fault and have the bar set as low as humanly possible for the men in their lives…
4. Speaking of Funkyverse traditions, I can’t wait to see the reaction from Roxy’s mom, her friends and all her old comrades from the Ohio National Guard 559th Transportation Company when they attend her wedding and see the bride in FULL Wonder Woman cosplay (or Zatanna or Carol Ferris to Cory’s Hal Jordan or whatever)… The reverend of course will also be in full character as either Lex Luthor or Amanda Waller.
5. Speaking of Funkyverse traditions, OH GOD THEY’RE GOING TO GET THE BIG DINK AND HIS BAND TO PROVIDE MUSIC, AREN’T THEY?
4: You know they’re all going to cry and salute the happy couple while they run down the aisle. With or without the costumes.
2. Oh, that’s the tedious stuff this strip loves. We’ll spend weeks watching them order invitations, rent out a hall, and decide what’s on the menu. We’ll have to sit through every irrelevant decision for this irrelevant wedding between two irrelevant characters in an irrelevant comic strip.
3. Batiuk can’t have a bridezilla, because that would result in actual conflict. Everyone in Funky WInkerbean must be in total agreement at all times. Expect to see a lot of women smirking dumbly at whatever the men decide.
4. Yes, and this will take a whole week.
5. Yes, and this will take a whole week.
But you know what? That would be an improvement. Spending a lot of time on ‘wedding planning’ jokes is at least focusing on the characters and their relationships. Plenty of great movies have been about a single wedding. Father of the Bride, My Big Fat Greek Wedding…Batiuk SHOULD have spent a month on this, instead of spending a week preaching about climate change and two weeks preaching about racism.
If they cosplay anything it will be Starbuck Jones and Jupiter Moon.
The rest of the planning should be pretty much set:
The ceremony will be either in the Gazebo or in St Spires (with music from the St Spires Choir)
The reception will be catered by Montoni’s at the restaurant.
Music for the reception will be provided by the Bedside Manorisms
Lillian and Mort will get drunk and go off and have sex in the pantry
That’s right, Tom Batiuk’s real life [family member or friend]! He thought your modern internet wedding was shit, and now he’s calling you out!
I love how Holly is annoyed at the hashtag and not the podcast. I would rather crawl through broken glass than listen to a podcast about some random non-celebrity’s wedding. Most celebrity weddings, for that matter.
All today’s strip needs is Steve Buscemi dressed like a Geek Squad member saying “How do you do, fellow Internet users!”
Leave it to Batiuk to belittle “newfangled” technology while proving he knows nothing about it (Why on Earth do Cory and Rocky need a domain name? Are they building a website just for the wedding? Don’t either of them have Facebook, Twitter, or Tiktok accounts, or whatever their Funkyverse equivalents would be?).
Later This Year: Now that Cory is finally married off, Funky and Holly move to Intercourse, Penn., to begin new lives as Amish farmers and pizza makers.
No spoilers, but this arc is about to take a horrific, harrowing turn. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
So in other words it’s just another ordinary Funkyverse storyline?
Yes, but with a terrifying twist.
Les will attend the wedding and will talk nonstop about his wedding to Lisa.
Les: “That’s not the way Lisa and I did it. It’s not going to rain, is it? It didn’t rain at our wedding. The paper stock of these programs isn’t as nice as the ones Lisa and I ordered. The flowers at our wedding were much prettier.”
Didn’t Les and Lisa dress up as Batman and Robin and get married in the town square gazebo?
Well, I lose my Shiny Nickel ™ this week as Rocky has been allowed to actually plan something. This is still stupid, though.
As far as I’m concerned, technology could of just stopped with scraping Wooly Mammoth hides for protection against the inevitable late-epoch ice age chill.
Wow. Shock me. Rocky is setting up the wedding? An ACT III woman is accomplishing something without a guy mansplaining it to her? 😲🤯
Something that doesn’t involve shopping?
Is this an ACT III Funky Winkerbean first?
That being said, isn’t this kind of overkill for a contemporary wedding? Who has the time and skill to set up and administer this website? Won’t people have to register on the website before people can “post their pics” or sign a guestbook?
What’s wrong with using existing social media? Why bother creating a one-time-use website when platforms are readily available? How about posting the wedding video on YouTube?
Batty: (pouting with his arms folded) Me no like TwitterTot, FaceChat or LewdTube.
Who are these attendees Cory is talking about? Family? School classmates who most likely remember Cory as a moody jerk? How many people in their old military unit would make the trip to attend, or even care? Perhaps a bunch of nameless randos will happen to stumble across their website. Let’s post paper notices on telephone poles (sloppily taped and crooked). Come crash our wedding. There will be free food and alcohol!
If the wedding so big, you have to go through all this, who the hell is paying for it?
Cory: We’ll be in hock up to eyeballs for years, but you only get married once, right?
Holly and Funky: (looking at each other uncomfortably) … Umm.
#coryandrockyOVERBLOWNwedding
To be fair, it’s not unusual for a wedding to have it’s own web site these days, but they don’t normally need their own domain name. It’s usually some subdomain under a main domain – something like coryandrocky.mywedding.com or mywedding.com/coryandrocky
It’s usually a nice way to post photos and other little stories about the couple – how they met, photos/stories from the wedding proposal, etc. and of course a link to the gift registry. And having it on a web site means you don’t have to depend on all the guests being on social media.
As for a wedding podcast, that’s a pretty stupid idea. I don’t think anybody (even Cory and Rocky) would be interested in listening to that.
*sputter* You mean Batty actually performed some research?! 😲
I think I need to lie down for a while to process this. I may need some time.
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Seriously, thanks. I’m not surprised that online wedding website services exist. But when somebody says, “I registered a domain,” my first thought is they purchased a domain name from somebody like GoDaddy. Next, they establish a hosting account, set up a domain-specific email address, build the website, etc.
Is the process of starting a wedding website through one of these services referred to as “registering a domain?” I’d call it registering an account.
Dammit, @bobanero, I’m an accountant, not a web designer.
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Hearing a wedding ceremony without actually seeing it would lack the tenderness, warmth, and involvement.
We have a VCR copy of our wedding. The videographer was standing so far away from the ceremony, you can’t even hear what’s being said. It was one of the pivotal moments of my life, but I usually fast-forward to watch the reception.
Also, seeing my parents on the video is much more important to me than the ceremony. They’re both deceased now, and it’s marvelous to still be able to see and hear them.
We don’t need an audio recording of our vows. We have them on paper in our wedding album.
Cheers
Is the process of starting a wedding website through one of these services referred to as “registering a domain?”
Only if you want your wedding website to have its own standalone URL (web address). And even then, the web hosting service can handle domain registration for you.
To understand what that means, look at this page, SOSF itself. To get here, you requested sonofstuckfunky.com. Not sonofstuckfunky.wordpress.com (a subdomain) or wordpress.com/sonofstuckfunky (a folder). It still runs on the WordPress software, but its name downplays that fact. People who need a web presence for whatever reason prefer having their own domain name nowadays. It’s more professional. Subdomains and folders tend to be used for divisions of a large website only, like developer.microsoft.com or reuters.com/world.
So “registering a domain” is not something the Winkerbeans really need to do.
Thanks for the explanation, BJr6k. You rock.
Today feels like a good day to point out another Batiuk technology fail:
https://funkywinkerbean.com/wpblog/cover-me-129/
The comic book cover is missing! This is because the image is in .TIF format, which is not enabled by default in most browsers. Typically, web browsers will only display images in .PNG .GIF and .JPG format as part of a web page. And he didn’t write any words for it, so the entire blog post is blank. Browsers are more subtle about pointing out your HTML failures these days, but it’s basically this:
This post is five days old. Apparently Batiuk hasn’t noticed yet. And nobody bothered bringing it to his attention.
Cover him? With what? Rotten vegetables?
I think Holly’s actual reaction would be “Wedding hashtag? What the fuck is that?”