2.11.2005

all about people like you



one of the greatest privileges employed americans enjoy is the ability to complain about their jobs and their lives. it could be a lot worse, right? we could be unemployed or even homeless. but raging against the machine has become so common as to have morphed into an inalienable right for generation x and beyond. some people have even turned this into an art form.

tristan a. farnon is one of those people. from 1999-2002 he painstakingly constructed a world called leisuretown. his stories are digitally-assembled photomontage, using background pictures of bland interiors or cityscapes.  the characters are brightly colored plastic toys, whose vacantly goofy expressions are contrasted with their hilariously caustic utterings. i learned of the site a few years ago while temping in various offices, and the peculiar type of anger, ennui, and off-the-wall, over-the-top humor was something that made perfect sense to someone enduring that experience. lest anyone think this is just some 3D-looking dilbert, i should mention that workplace humor accounts for less than 1/3 of the stories. a few are even unexpectedly serious and touching.

until today, i thought these brilliant but often lowbrow slices of life were lost, since the main page has been black for years. but a little digging turned up the "library" section, where all the episodes are archived. some of them are quite long, but worth it for the laughs. what else do you have to do at work, anyway? besides complain that is.


the title of this post comes from an episode of this comic.