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Guardian Angel [[The Alone Ranger sits on a bench in a park.]] / [[He is looking at a bar called "Enabler's."]] / [[Bad Decision is sitting on the bench beside the Alone Ranger.]] / [[The Alone Ranger considers.]] / [[Bad Decision Dinosaur stares.]] / [[The Alone Ranger is gone.]]
http://catandgirl.com/?p=191
Extreme Tourism Girl: A history of brutal exploitation. / [[Cat and Girl are in a rowboat, heading into a swamp.]] / Girl: Back when it was called THE BELGIAN WAFFLE - the personal property of King Leopold. / [[They walk into the marsh...]] / Girl: Managed for the personal gains of its overseas overlords - exporting sweets - importing diabetes. / [[...and past a forest of candy canes...]] / Girl: And TODAY Candyland faces the legacy of colonialism - / [[...past gingerbread houses...]] / Girl: The stable but repressive regime of Field Marshall Mallow - / [[...and to a candy cane security checkpoint.]] / Girl: The rigged elections - The jailed dissidents - / Soldier: Is that ASPARAGUS? / [[Cat removes stalks of asparagus from his mouth.]] / Cat: Yeah - / Soldier: Come with me. PLEASE. / [[Cat and Girl are taken down a candlelit stone staircase]] / [[They are locked in a cell]] / [[On the floor of the cell, beneath their feet, is a large black circle.]]
http://catandgirl.com/?p=193
Winners and Losers [[Girl and Grrrl are in a store talking to the lady behind the counter.]] / Lady: Can I help you with anything? / Grrrl: No. / Girl: Just looking. / Lady: You do need to buy something if you want your life validated. / Girl: OK. / [[Girl and Grrrl walk outside.]] / Grrrl: Well there goes that. / Girl: Did you WANT validation? / Grrrl: Is that a bad thing? / Girl: I thought we were in this together! / Girl: AGAINST life as the exchange of free will for a paycheck - SUCCESS as how much money you make and the status of objects and experiences you SPEND that money on - / Grrrl: If it's money - / Girl: It's not JUST money! / Girl: There are OTHER arbitrary hierarchies catering to our sick drive for VALIDITY in the eyes of society. / / Grrrl: I'm going into Academia!
http://catandgirl.com/?p=195
This Means War [[Cat and Girl sit in a car. Cat is driving. Girl turns on the radio.]] / <> / Radio: ...NPR business news starts with junking your electronic... / Radio: ...the EPA's latest figures show that Americans threw... / <> / [[Cat changes the station.]] / Radio: Badadadadaboop wuwuwu biboop-ba badada bip bip bipboop-ba / Radio: Badada wa woowawawa bipboo bop bop bop bee bee BOO / Girl: Moral superiority in any conflict is determined not by why you fight but how. / [[Girl changes the station.]] / <> / Radio: ...and the last world in business today is... / <> / Radio: Bip boop bap wawawa bip boop bap / [[They struggle.]] / <> / <> / Radio: ...playing games with the faces... / [[Cat and Girl grimace.]] / Radio: ...you said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy...
http://catandgirl.com/?p=210
A Cultural History of I Don't Own a Television [[Cat, holding a scythe, dressed in some kind of medieval peasant clothing outside of a castle.]] / Cat: I don't own a te-le-vision. / [[A vampire in a suit, hair slicked back, standing outside of a television store.]] / Vampire: I don't own a television. / [[Girl in a babushka, holding a basket of potatoes. She stands in front of a village with a radio tower in the background.]] / Girl: I don't own a television. / [[Boy stands on a city street, patches holding his clothes together.]] / Boy: I don't own a television! / [[Grrrl sits in a dark cafe. A man plays jazz bass behind her. A poster advertises "Howl."]] / Grrrl: I don't own a television. / [[Girl sits in an armchair in front of a bookcase clutching an NPR tote bag.]] / Girl: I don't own a television. / [[Boy sits at a laptop, two computers on the desk behind him.]] / Boy: I don't own a television. / [[The Beatnik Vampire stands in front of a large television set.]] / Vampire: I don't own a television set. I own a home entertainment system.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=213
 
Nature's Doomed Adolescents Grrrl: I can't wait for high school! / Girl: What? / Grrrl: That doomed transitional stage - / Grrrl: High school is our last chance! / Girl: To sell beach towels for the marching band? / Grrrl: To deal with all elements of society as equals. / Grrrl: Before being branded and shuffled off to the work and education society has deemed appropriate for us. / Girl: Maybe the doom is what's enticing. / Girl: One brief moment of strange inconsequential irrational beliefe. / Girl: Before careers and kids and compromise and the meteorite hits and the ceiling falls in. / [[Grrrl looks at the clouds that have gathered.]] / Girl: I think I'd rather be a dinosaur. / Grrrl: Either/Or.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=215
Proverbs and Plagues Cat: When life gives you lemons make lemonade. / Girl: When life gives you limes? / Cat: Gin and tonic! / Girl: When life hands you a pickle ask to substitute coleslaw. / Cat: When life gives margarine pray for butter. / Cat: When life gives you astronauts / Girl: insist on the futility of the shuttle program. When life gives you short shorts - / Cat: ask where they're from. / Girl: When life gives you a car / Cat: laugh at people on the bus. / Cat: When life gives you pudding / Girl: keep walking. / [[Cat and Girl are wading through waist-high pudding.]]
http://catandgirl.com/?p=217
Reincarnation Girl: LPs to CDs to mp3s - music continues to decorporealize. / Girl: But when I look at lists of mp3s I feel the same sense of ownership that I do when browsing my bookcase. / Grrrl: Scarcity. / Girl: What? / Grrrl: What if you delete an mp3 and you can never find it again? Without scarcity ownership makes no sense. / Grrrl: Scarcity. A lagging legacy of music's time as a physical object. Once upon a time music was something you made or saw made, something that lived in a moment and was gone. / Grrrl: And then people began recording music-shadows of real, live performances for those not fortunate enough to witness them. / Grrrl: But when we choose which moment to record we prioritize it - when we choose which moment to release as a physical object we prioritize that. / Grrrl: And the recording becomes reality, and the moments of performance or recitation or barroom singalong are its shadows. / Girl: But now everything is recorded - / Grrrl: And that priority is gone. / Girl: and the object is unnecessary. / Grrrl: And that priority is gone. / Grrrl: And so we say goodbye to 1957, when records first outsold sheet music - to the day before yesterday, when everyone's ex-roommate sold all her CDs on ebay - our rogue half-century of music as an object. / [[Girl and Grrrl stand before a grave marked "Scarcity".]] / [[They leave.]] / [[A hand emerges from the grave.]]
http://catandgirl.com/?p=219
Exponential Bloat Girl: We download music to own it. / Grrrl: We download music because it's easy! / Girl: Pointing - clicking - waiting - / Grrrl: Podcasts! / Girl: Uploading... waiting... / Girl: Downloading is inconvenient. / Girl: And very few things in life are strong enough to withstand the tidal forces of convenience. / Grrrl: It's not exactly cranking up the phonograph for two minutes of music. / Grrrl: It's not crossing the room to flip the record over for twenty minutes of music. / Grrrl: It's not searching for the remote for the five CD carousel for 200 minutes of music. It's pointing - clicking - waiting - / Grrrl: For 200 hours of music! More! / Girl: The next step isn't more downloading - more ownership - / Girl: It isn't 2000 hours or 20000 - it's streaming. It's infinite! / Grrrl: So ipods are an old technology. / Grrrl: That explains why I have one.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=221
Matters of Taste [[Girl and Grrrl walk from the graveyard into town.]] / [[Girl picks up a mango on a stick.]] / [[They enter a bodega.]] / Girl: Radio! / Girl: Radio is CONVENIENT and INFINITE. / Grrrl: The RADIO plays CRAP. / Girl: But - / Grrrl: And it's not MY crap!
http://catandgirl.com/?p=223
 
What Remains [[A graveyard. The tombstone reads "Scarcity." Arms emerge from the earth.]] / [[A zombie kicks his way out of the grave.]] / [[The zombie wears jeans, a striped shirt and a blazer with pins on the lapel. He walks away from his grave.]] / [[The zombie gazes up at the moon.]] / [[He looks down at the town on the hillside below him.]] / [[He stalks through the woods.]] / [[He emerges by the base of a water tower.]] / [[The zombie embraces the leg of a water tower.]] / [[And there he stays.]]
http://catandgirl.com/?p=225
Natural Law Girl: It's the ADVANTAGE of broadcast medium that you don't control what you get. / Grrrl: So instead / Grrrl: of choosing our own soundtrack, one is IMPOSED - is that the time? / Grrrl: I should get going. / Grrrl: It's just a it's a weekly thing. The old technology swapmeet. / Grrrl: Just a bunch of people, so... its mostly organizational. I should head. / Girl: Why wasn't I invited? / Grrrl: You were GONE for four months! / Grrrl: Very few things in life are strong enough to withstand the tidal forces of convenience.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=227
A Pirate's Life [[Cat and Girl are on board a ship. Cat is dressed like a pirate.]] / Cat: Some people are in it for the ADVENTURE. Some like the challenge of life on the sea. / Cat: Some people are in it for the money. Some people are ALWAYS in it for the money. / Cat: And some people join for the FREEDOM. / Cat: That rare life spent outside society's narrow bounds - the comradery of the fallen. Singing, looting, hollering, making your own hours. Working from home. / Cat: Some people just want to meet parrots.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=229
The Ruler [[Cat measures the top of a table.]] / [[Cat measures the height of a sandwich.]] / [[Cat carries the ruler down the hallway.]] / [[Cat measures a room.]] / [[Cat measures a chair.]] / [[Cat measures the width of the floor.]] / [[Cat measures the height of the floor.]] / [[Girl is outside with a croquet mallet.]] / Cat: A foot? / Cat: I say it's a stick.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=231
Model UN Girl: The halls - the benches - the potted plants - / Girl: The mall is a parody of public space. / Cat: A parody of a poem is still a poem. / Girl: A public square stripped of everything but commerce - / Girl: With private security enforcing the mores of commerce. / Cat: People just want a place to walk around and drink soda. / Girl: The same stores in every town - / Cat: Stores from everywhere - everywhere! Globalism! / Girl: A peculiar, house-trained globalism. / Cat: There are more things in the food court than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=233
 
Processor [[Grrrl stands in front of a curtain in a lab coat, lecturing Boy.]] / Grrrl: What is it that we do in our daily lives? / Boy: Suffer? / Grrrl: We take the raw material of the world around us / Grrrl: and process it into the finished material of our thoughts, our conversation, our art. / Grrrl: What do we do when we watch television? We choose to view a stream of material that has been finished for us. / Boy: I eat nachos. / Grrrl: Now what if we could convert this processed stream back to raw material? / <> / [[Grrrl pulls back the curtain revealing a television.]] / Grrrl: Like most televisions this allows you to adjust the brightness and saturation - plus it has separate controls for the audio and video - / Grrrl: and there's no channel display - making matching the audio and video difficult and time-consuming! / [[Boy raises his hand.]] / Grrrl: Question. / Boy: I think you're missing the point of television. / Grrrl: I am trying to save the world!
http://catandgirl.com/?p=241
Habitrail Heart [[Grrrl, wearing a lab coat, stands in front of a curtain pulled back to reveal a television behind it.]] / Grrrl: I want to encourage deliberate action - / Grrrl: The viewer taking an aggressive role in what is being viewed. / [[Boy raises his hand.]] / Grrrl: Converting a passive medium to an active one! / Boy: The internet is an active medium! / Boy: But - / Boy: We wake up - we check our email. We eat a sandwich - we read Ask Metafilter. / Boy: We habituate to anything. Only the unknown forces us into deliberate action. / Boy: Like when you're falling - and time stops - / Boy: And you see your every option lined up before you - and you deliberate - and you choose - / Boy: as you head towards the ground.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=243
Out [[The empty sky, and sand.]] / [[The empty sky, and sand.]] / <> / [[Cat and Girl appear, thrown from the right and heading for the ground.]]
http://catandgirl.com/?p=245
Expulsion [[Two wooden doors in the entrance past a tall stone wall lie open. A man is speaking from inside the wall.]] / Man: And stay out! / <> / [[The doors shut.]] / [[Cat and Girl stare back at the wall.]] / Girl: You couldn't talk politely about Whole Foods for half an hour? / Cat: Well / Cat: We'll never have to listen to Jens Lekman again. / [[They turn and start to walk away.]] / Man: You'll be back!
http://catandgirl.com/?p=247
Original Sin [[Cat and Girl are walking through the desert, away from Compromise.]] / Girl: I'm never going back. / Cat: But we could - / Girl: Of course we could - they need us! / Girl: Anyone living outside of Compromise delegitimizes everyone inside! / Girl: Citizens of Compromise don't want to believe there's a world outside - that would mean they made a choice to live there! / Girl: Well I choose to live outside! And I'm never going back. / Cat: I'm telling everyone you had an iphone. / Girl: Don't you dare!
http://catandgirl.com/?p=249
 
a class="searchlink" href="http://catandgirl.com/?p=251">http://catandgirl.com/?p=251 [untranscribed - please consider transcribing this comic!]
a class="searchlink" href="http://catandgirl.com/?p=253">http://catandgirl.com/?p=253 [untranscribed - please consider transcribing this comic!]
Obligations [[The Alone Ranger opens his window and looks out.]] / [[He walks down the street in a scarf and winter hat.]] / [[He sits in a park playing Parcheesi with Grrrl.]] / [[He buys a tofu dog from a street vendor.]] / [[He sits on a bench to eat his tofu dog, where he's joined by a little bird.]] / [[He arrives at home, carrying a bag of groceries.]] / [[He sits in front of his computer.]] / [[He changes into pajamas and flosses his teeth in the bathroom.]] / [[He is in bed, and turns out the light on his nightstand.]] / [[The room is dark.]] / [[The Alone Ranger's eyes open.]] / Ranger: I can't keep up with my RSS feeds anymore.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=255
Ladies and Gentlemen Dorothy:<> / Dorothy: So Cat and Girl are - / Dorothy: Well anyway I'm away this week. / Dorothy: Not this week for me - for me I'm going away next week. / Dorothy: As I write this I've been scrambling to finish two weeks of cartoons in four days while washing clothes and packing and sewing up the hole in my backpack and trying to leave the apartment in decent shape. / Dorothy: As you read this I'm due back at home in two days. / Dorothy: Or maybe you're reading this late. Maybe I'm already at my desk working on Monday's cartoons. I don't think we've come to a clear understanding of this past-present-future business. / Dorothy: Do we live in an infinite number of presents, each succeeding the last? Are past and future just ways of looking at this stream from the wrong ends? Or is it only the past and future that are certain - the present just a deliberate hallucination of free will - / Dorothy: Oh - So I've been asked to prepare a joke. / Dorothy: Here we are - let's see / Dorothy: What did the internet cartoonist say when they finished their comic fifteen minutes before deadline? / Dorothy: "What am I going to do with all this free time?"
http://catandgirl.com/?p=257
Mono [[Boy sits in front of the television.]] / <> / <> / [[Boy walks down the street with Grrrl.]] / Boy: It's easy to romanticize the past. / Boy: But still - I envy life in a time of just three channels. / Grrrl: Watching twelve dogs balance plates on their noses isn't any more entertaining than "Ace of Cakes." / Boy: Not because of the content - / Boy: But the idea of media that unifies a culture instead of dividing it. / Grrrl: Monoculture / Boy: Well yeah - / Grrrl: Culture that speaks with one language - / Boy: and a populace that can understand one another! / Boy: Everyone listened to the Beatles. / Grrrl: And it's a lot easier to unify a culture when the only valid choices are white, male and western! / Grrrl: Monoculture isn't just everyone watching the Ed Sullivan show - it's buying all your clothes at Sears. Eating microwaved Salisbury Steak for dinner every Tuesday and Thursday - the spiritual poverty of live before globalism! / Boy: The Beatles used a sitar. / Grrrl: That's giving ranch dressing credit for discovering pad thai.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=259
 
Beyond Reach [[Boy and Grrrl walk along a city street.]] / Grrrl: Globalism gives us new better different options - / Boy: So the whole world can look like America? / Grrrl: So America looks like the world! / [[Cat and Girl wander through the desert.]] / Boy: Cities maybe - but once you head into the world's countryside it's like going back in / Grrrl: Yes! / Grrrl: What seems more distant - five years ago or Japan? / Boy: That's apples and - and hand grenades. / Grrrl: The sedentary family - / Grrrl: Living as they've lived for generations - on their ancestor's land, among their ancestor's belongings, never traveling further than the nearest town - / Girl: If the world was unknown the past was close to them. / Grrrl: But now because culture changes so fast because there is so much of it from all over / Girl: Because of the speed of air travel, the ease of global communication - / Grrrl: The foreignness of place is supplanted / Girl: by the foreignness of time.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=261
Home [[Cat and Girl in the desert.]] / [[Cat looks back.]] / [[Tall buildings appear in the distance.]] / [[They are approaching a city.]] / [[Girl smiles.]] / [[They walk into the city.]] / [[Cat and Girl see Boy sitting on a bench, reading.]] / [[Boy looks up.]] / Girl: We're back! / Boy: You left?
http://catandgirl.com/?p=263
Teamwork <> / [[Boy is in bed, the covers puled over his face, when his alarm clock rings.]] / Boy: What's the POINT? / Boy: I sit around with these - feelings. / Boy: Other people sit around with CABLE. At least that's INTERESTING. / Boy: Feelings without ACTION are worth a fist full of SNOT! / Stuffed Bunny: Action without feeling is the cold domain of office drones and psychopaths. / Boy: So action and feeling FEED on each other. / Boy: Together meaning everything. Apart meaning nothing. / Boy: Laurel and Hardy. / Stuffed Bunny: Tony Orlando and Doom.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=266
Plate Byronics Boy: Do you ever want to be an artist? / Grrrl: What's the point? Everything's already been made. / Grrrl: The artist is the expired ideal of a dead age. / Grrrl: Some romantic figure standing outside of society speaking truth to power. / Grrrl: Well WELCOME to the MODERN WORLD! / Grrrl: That homogenous society is GONE - society has FRACTURED - and in the millions of shards is room for EVERYONE - whether they LIKE it or NOT. / Grrrl: There is no power. There is no truth. / Grrrl: We're consumers in niche markets assembling a self through choice. / [[Grrrl raises a fist]] / Grrrl: The artist is dead! The future is CURATORIAL! / Boy: Do you ever want to be an artist? / Beatnik Vampire: What's the point? I'm immortal anyway.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=268
Bad News Bear [[The Beatnik Vampire is sitting down in front of his television with a sandwich.]] / <> / [[Grrrl and Boy are at the door.]] / Grrrl: We're going to a movie! / Grrrl: Get your coat! / Vampire: What movie? / Boy: It's about - / Grrrl: It's about a group of plucky misfits - / Boy: Losers. Outsiders! / Boy: And - / Grrrl: And they take on this big rich disciplined CORPORATE team - / Boy: And no one thinks they can pull it off - / Grrrl: Everyone TOTALLY expects them to be CRUSHED, but - / Vampire: I'm not going to another documentary about the war in Iraq.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=270
 

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