Tales from the Far Side | Hacker News Reader

Tales from the Far Side

kleefeldoncomics.com

168 pointsnikbackm38 comments

Larson is an absolute national treasure.

Some of my favorite memories of my youth were reading and re-reading some of the Larson books my uncle handed down to me - Far Side Gallery1, 2, 3 & 4 , It Came From The Far Side, and Tales From The Far Side. Some of the jokes I didn't understand until I was older, some I understood right away, and some of them I remember so fondly I could re-create them in my sleep.

A genuine master of his craft, sheer brilliance.

My all-time favorite: https://i.redd.it/my-daily-farside-dump-caw-caw-v0-l7k98dab4...

Another gem: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/26/b4/21/26b421ae077069c6de1f2da18...

I wish I had never found out that these specials exist. Because now I need to see them and they're not available.

The second animated collection is the internet archive: https://archive.org/details/tales-from-the-far-side-ii_20240...

Good chance the first is kicking about there also.

Addendum: Yep - Books & both animated series https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Gary+Larson%22

If only the first video were archived, this is amazing! Thank you.

Uncertain about ripping and post-processing used, but both volumes can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/gary-larsons-tales-from-the-far-...

Lammy's seems like a super hi-fi rip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41326459

Thank you and tbh I could do even better if I re-did it today. This one is from 2020 and since then I've gotten into doing my DVD encodes at 540p for that sweet sweet integer-scaling to 1080, 2160, etc avoiding the shitty scalers built in to most modern displays.

Ah cool. I've been buying few various obscure movies in 4:3 PAL/NTSC and 16:9 DVDs in various regions and converting them to h.265 using slow processing. As I don't trust ffmpeg and handbrake to perpetually be superior, so I'm always keeping around at least unencrypted VOBs if not the DVD .iso. Including pristine source artifacts along with prettified ones is important for archival. (My inner archivist is a choosy beggar Karen.)

Same here — I always always keep the untouched DVD image and usually even keep the physical discs. I tend to leave CSS intact in the name of doing as exact a copy as possible since it’s so fully broken.

Decrypted VOBs are nice to have(tm) additional intermediate products because nearly all players and some transcoders are idiotically region locked but will generally accept decrypted VOBs (same field data) just fine.

thanks!

Thanks for the link.

Watching the second one is almost depressing, because there's some good jokes in there that are just ruined by the scene dragging out for way too long. Several of them got a smirk out of me but then it's like, "Oh...we're still going, are we?"

If they had just had a decent editor who could've shortened them to have the punch of a Family Guy cutaway gag, I think they would've worked better. Larson's comics certainly had that punch--I just don't think he was quite prepared for how to translate it successfully to the animation medium.

Here's my personal x265 encode: mega dot nz/folder/It0CwI6I#ty1ux-A9HDeGi8gkDbzjjw

t00lz:

— Pioneer DVR-108 (RPC-1) + DVDfab Passkey + MakeMKV

— Vapoursynth (crop, denoise, deinterlace, resize, colorspace conversion)

— x265 (custom SD tune) + FDK-AAC

— ScanMaker 9800XL + Photoshop CS3

— MKVToolNix

Thank you, kind human!

Suggestion: Anonymously mirror on archive.org with the original and decrypted VOBs.

One thing to note that don’t know, when “anonymously” uploading to IA, the email you use for the account will be visible in the archive manifest. Or something along those lines, it’s been a while.

So make sure to use a throwaway email for the throwaway account.

Exactly. Limits any possible DMCA claim to the one thingy.

Awesome

bless you sir

Thank you so much for helping to preserve this!

Not available, except on all of the major torrent sites.

Before the internet any town I visited I would comb used record stores looking for songs, albums, or artists I had read about but never heard.

I would also comb used bookstores. Around 42nd in NYC there were huge used magazine stores. One could go looking for Jan. 7th 1954 Life magazine and find it. That was the early 90’s and I miss it.

There’s an entire universe of small press books and magazines that it is even hard to find evidence existed - let alone a copy of them.

I know of a few from personal connections and there’s some really good stuff in them!

I obviously went through a book ephemera collecting phase. Just getting to the point at looking at all the things I came across I once thought were important.

Information used to be hard to find and small magazines always developed around subcultures.

I'm surprised how ancient magazines in box have more intrigue and accessibility than archive.org's search box. Archive.org represents a much broader reach and depth of information.

I wonder what I would have done if I wasn't actively physically searching for something.

I look forward to cataloging it.

My orthodontist growing up had these books in the waiting room and I found them hilarious as a kid even though I only understood maybe 30% of them.

> My orthodontist growing up had these books

When I first read that sentence, I thought you were talking about your orthodontist's upbringing.

I eagerly anticipated hearing about how that affected his work with you :)

Dentist eschewed traditional drills and explorers for handmade stuff that looked like Cow Tools.

> even though I only understood maybe 30% of them.

My parents got me a Far Side collection when I was younger, and I understood maybe 15% of the comics tops.

But it's still a great read; as an adult I'm stupefied by how much mileage Larson squeezed out of single-pane comics. He was willing to run the gamut of sight gags to double-entendres even to the coming-of-age Calvin and Hobbes style comedy. There's also a pervasive disdain for humanity that lovingly graces most of his comics. Humans are portrayed as baser and stupid compared to talking cows and sapient insects. Children regularly endanger themselves in outrageous situations and their caretakers respond in even stupider ways. Scientists and doctors are portrayed as self-congratulating frauds that care too much about their work to notice or interact with the consequences.

Larson's cynicism is what connected me to his comics as a kid, even when I couldn't get the jokes about taxes and car maintenance. That, and his incredible knack for illustration.

I remember watching this on TV. It was a big deal at the time due to the massive popularity of the strip, but didn't translate well. The whole thing kinda fell flat.

A VHS of this I taped from broadcast is bopping around my parents’ basement somewhere. I need to find that.

Awesome! Please share if you are able to recover it.

I wonder if content on VHS tape can be read and/or post-processed better than the best Toshiba or Sony (PAL|NTSC) VCR in history using fancier techniques and modern technology.

https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

Was about to say that.

Awesome, thanks. I guess one just needs benchmarks of the sensitivity of various compatible hardware solutions.

I wonder if the newer reading technology offsets the degradation of the magnetic tape, or whether it's better to digitize X years ago, using the older digitizing technique, but with a stronger magnetic signal.

Every time it's played, there is mechanical wear on the tape surface and mechanical stretching to place it under tension.

Probably always best to digitize it then because there's quite a bit that can happen to tape magnetically and to the plastic tape itself.

> Neither of the two specials, either in their original or editted forms, are online.

They are on The Pirate Bay and there are videos, but I guess they mean Netflix. The videos are kept alive off the torrents normally, as the video sites go down, torrents are quite the internets backbone.

Now that I know about it, I'm seeding this torrent forever.

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