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Even Grues Get Full
To start, I didn't find the inside title page even worth a smile, the only joke 'Even Grues Get Full' had already been on the front cover and I'd noticed its repetition on the back one as well.
To investigate a little further I read the 'Foreword' by Wil Wheaton. OK, it did have one good Wesley joke but mostly it seemed to be saying how much he didn't mind Iliad making fun of him in the strip.
Then we get to the strips. Yeah, some are funny. I laughed a bit. Iliad certainly knows a good tech joke when he draws one - even if he does seem to make a lot of jokes at the expense of the Windows operating system -- which seems to be a combination of shooting fish in a barrel and politically incorrect making fun of the crippled and lame. However some things are just not funny, Mr Frazer.
What about those cartoons from page 78 to 83. To start off, no self respecting Lego geek with two hundred and seventy million dollars would buy two million sets of Lego Mindstorms. I'd only (sorry, I mean 'He'd only') buy one and a half million to leave cash left over for buying a couple of hundred thousand Lego models of the Millenium Falcon -- I mean, "D'uh!" Oh, and about the cartoon on page 82: missing a 16-wheel cog to complete your project is no laughing matter you know. I don't see what's so amusing about building a missile silo out of Lego either -- I'm going to build a carry box for my cat when I can get enough blue 12 x 1 bricks.
Then there's the series about the visiting MBA. No real geek would fall in love with a woman merely because her name, 'Pearl,' was a homonym for a scripting language - get real. If her name had been 'See' or 'Jarvah,' maybe. But not funny, Iliad.
Frankly, I think this book is full of the usual 'User Friendly' rubbish. Jokes at the expense of those poor users (hey, they don't know any better), clueless management (hey, they don't know any better) and socially disadvantaged and deprived geeks (hey, we don't know any better.) Joking about the outstanding, well-informed and upright citizens that work in the sales and marketing departments of our IT firms and ISPs? Shame on you J.D. Oh, and poking fun at poor Larry Ellison just cause he isn't as rich as Bill is just downright mean.
I think Tim O'Reilly should be ashamed to publish this book. I guess the only reason he does is that Iliad hasn't poked fun at him (yet).
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. It's just chock full of jokes that only a Linux-loving geek could find funny. Cartoons full of references that only a Perl programming geek would understand. I didn't learn a single thing about programming in C# for .NET ot the latest protocols used in Active Directories -- a totally useless tech book, really.
Look, just go to the User Friendly web site and see some more recent examples from this deeply disturbed cartoonist, or go to the O'Reilly book page and check out a few strips from the book itself and you will agree with me.
You can purchase Even Grues Get Full from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
He was not funny. It figures he loves User Friendly.
...that the book is funnier than the review.
/. review of RedHat that spends five paragraphs explaining what Linux is to us? Preacher, meet choir. Choir, preacher. Go get acquainted.
No, I'm not humor or sarcasm-impaired. I just think that was the most craptacular review I've ever read. Unfunny, heavy-handed sarcasm does not a review make.
What? Iliad writes about Linux? He makes fun of Windows? Say it isn't so! We NEVER would have known that without this insightful review.
What's next, a
.@.
But not funny, Iliad.
This should have been the review. It sums up my feelings about User Friendly nicely.
Well, that and this.
The artwork is sloppy, the stories repetitive, the characters mere sketches. But you could say the same about Dilbert. The difference is that back in the heady pre-crash days, User Friendly showed a more optimistic, happier, fuzzier world, populated by and aimed at college geeks that never really grew up. It provided an antidote to the cynicism of Dilbert, and in the days when money hoses got turned on ever nerd with a vision, it was going to be just the core of a huge multimedia empire, run by the forces of good.
But then the market tanked, and everything changed. The audience of User Friendly found themselves losing their jobs left right and centre. The company behind it - composed of one lousy artist, a web guy, and a bunch of marketing parasites - found that you can't pay ten mortgages if you're giving the goods away. Most of the staff got laid off, and User Friendly went bitter.
I don't just mean the strip, I mean the whole community around it. Illiad got real brittle, real fast. Posting constructive criticism on the discussion boards got your account wiped, no warnings. The remaining zealots on the boards went passive-aggressive, and savaged anything that didn't fit in with their self congratulatory circle jerking.
Worse, post 9-11, User Friendly went maudlin. It's bad enough when cartoonists try to cover serious issues, but when they do it with smug ABC style flag worshipping patriotism teamed with really crappy art, it just gets embarrassing.
User Friendly is now in its death throes. There are about two dozen characters drifting in and out of it (a new one was added this week), and none of them are particularly well realised. If you can't think of anything funny to do with the characters you've got, adding new ones probably isn't the solution.
It all looked so hopeful, but now a week of User Friendly might - on a good week - give you the same amount of smirk as one day of Dilbert. I guess Illiad has figured out by now that Dilbert shows the tech world as it really is, but he never figured out how to portray that in a funny way. It's sad really, but all childhood things must pass.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.