this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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The Far Side

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Hello fellow Far Side fans!

About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.

The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side

Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!

Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:

Bello Bear !BelloBear@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/bellobearofficial

Bloom County !bloomcounty@lemm.ee https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty

Calvin and Hobbes !calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes

Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness

Garfield !garfield@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/garfield

The Far Side !thefarside@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works

Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.

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https://www.thefarside.com/2026/08/12/0

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WARNING - MAINTAIN - 200 F. / HEADS ONLY / FROZEN FRIENDS CRYOGENIC ENTERPRISES / BOB'S JANITORIAL SERVICES

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[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 53 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] W_itjust_works@sh.itjust.works 15 points 6 days ago

Not again. ..

[–] Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Giving Futurama my first watch and all of the memes are conveniently in season 1, so far

[–] Soulg@ani.social 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Enjoy it! But watch out for Seymour. Theres several surprise tear jerkers mixed in

[–] fake@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago

Argh I wasn't ready to remember those episodes

[–] finallymadeanaccount@lemmy.world 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Similar things have happened ...

Nelson went on holiday, and left a groundskeeper named Joe who barely spoke English in charge of refilling the liquid nitrogen in the capsule. While away, the pump stopped working, and the patients were allowed to decompose for several days after the liquid nitrogen had evaporated. Nelson initially refilled the capsule with liquid nitrogen but later came clean about what had happened and was sued. The patients in other capsules had also thawed out.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Those people were never waking up so what difference does it make?

[–] Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 days ago

Eh, going from "might come back some day" to "definitively gone forever" still hurts. (Yes, I do realize that the word "might" is being worked super hard here)

[–] tyranny@crazypeople.online 12 points 5 days ago

this comic gets at an important idea, that preserving something indefinitely means indefinite maintenance and energy, which not only has to be funded indefinitely but also is vulnerable to errors. and it gets at this idea through a fairly east-to-understand and humorous scenario. well played, Gary Larson

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 6 days ago (4 children)

A long time I haven't heard people ranting about cryopreservation, has it become mainstream or maybe forgotten?

[–] InnerScientist@lemmy.world 19 points 6 days ago (20 children)

Forgotten and most that were frozen had to be scraped out of the the cryo chamber for one reason or another.

[–] W_itjust_works@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Is Disney still in the vault??

[–] InnerScientist@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 days ago

I get my Disney history exclusively from the Venture Bros.

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[–] Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago (2 children)

My impression was that, much like AI, we made some cool stuff and then people realized the whole "Buy in now, we'll figure out the rest later" model is a scam.

Like, i vaguely remember someone saying to freeze yourself now, and by the time we need to thaw you out we'll have the technology.

[–] Blemgo@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

I think the biggest issue is that, at least quite a few years back, is that the methods of cryogenically preserve the bodies without ice crystals forming cause the arteries to weaken due to the chemicals used instead of blood. So if they were to thaw the body they would need a way to completely replace every artery in the body, or else they will rupture everywhere inside the body once they revive it. So basically the body is doomed to be unusable.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago

Yeah who can tell, not me. But the alternative is 100% guaranteed.

Also, it's not because someone tries to scam you, that it doesn't work (or will work in the future).

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I read an article about this a while ago. Apparently the main obstacle is the formation of destructive ice crystals. They can avoid this by cooling fast enough to extreme low temperatures, which is already used in practice on very small things:

This process is now routine for eggs, sperm, and embryos, which are cooled to −196 °C in less than two seconds and can be used even after decades in storage.

There have been recent breakthroughs in preserving whole organs, albeit not indefinitely so far:

In new research, one team has been able to supercool the kidneys of pigs—animals whose organs are of a similar size to human ones—and preserve them for days. The kidneys survived being stored at −4 °C (25 °F) and eventually reimplanted back into pigs.

There's also techniques that don't rely on cooling:

Another way to prolong the lifespan of an organ is to use a machine that perfuses it with nutrients, mimicking what happens inside the body. Machine perfusion devices have become more commonly used over the last decade or so and are typically used to maintain livers and kidneys for up to about 24 hours.

They're not close to bringing frozen people back from the dead though:

When Coles’s friend Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist, studied pieces of his brain years later, he found that the brain cells, which had shrunk, “bounced back” once they were rewarmed. But that doesn’t mean the cells are alive, or that it might one day be possible to reanimate the brain. As Matthew Powell Palm of Texas A&M [the guy who did the pig organ thing] told me at the time: “There are so many ways those neurons could be toast.”

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I don't know what the hold up is. A man was successfully flash frozen in carbonite and unfrozen several months later, with temporary blindness being the only side effect. This was around 1980, I think.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 days ago

Yeah, this is fantastic tech, nice examples! Another is that most donor organs are discarded but wouldn't be if we could cryopreserve them!

And yeah, those people already cryopreserved today will be the hardest to "get back", they were also already dead (because legislation, can't cryopreserve a living human being even if they're dying right now).

That shouldn't stop research though IMO.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 8 points 6 days ago (14 children)

has it become mainstream or maybe forgotten?

Last I remember reading, it seems to have largely revealed itself to be little more than a scam. Although, sure-- if you're rich enough, egotistical-enough, and desperate enough, you can give yourself some comfort in the delusion that you'll be both adequately stored and then later, someone will want to try to unfreeze you at some point and cure you / de-age you.

*shrug*

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god dammit bob

[–] Objection@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 days ago

Shout-out to the dude on the right going into cryosleep with a trans flag shirt in 1990.

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