Comic for Friday, December 6th, 2019
So here’s the plan; since this is up so late, I’m going to delay the next comic to Wednesday to space them out, and than back to Monday’s like normal for a bit; the next comic should be up on Sunday to patreon.
The delay came from that I’d originally planned to truncate this scene so we’d only see the tailend of it, but I decided to expand it somewhat, because I think knowing more about who these people are (via their bickering, I suppose) may matter somewhat; I reread a good bit of the comic and my notes while traveling, and realized how little we have seen the Family powers so far.
It’s late and I’m pretty wiped out from the week, so I’ll spare you the ranting and complaining. Suffice to say that returning to work after traveling did… go smoothly. Dung heaps on fire. Everywhere. I’ll reconsider my employment options at the end of February.
Appreciate the patience, and sorry for the delays. Over the next day or so, I’ll fix any issues with this page and the issues I haven’t yet fixed from the last page or two, and the next page will be up on Patreon sunday, hopefully to catch w/e errors I make before it goes live here 😛
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I take it the next page is M. I. A., and PastUtopia checked himself into the funny farm?
Where life is beautiful all the time!
Don’t you mean the happy home? With trees and flowers and chirping birds and basket weavers who sit and smile and twiddle their thumbs and toes?
I’ve always wanted to go there and learn how they twiddle their toes. That’s one of those things I’ve never been able to do. I mean, I can twiddle my feet, which is sort of vaguely twiddling my toes, but that feels like cheating.
Yeah, so I’m thinking the flaming dung heaps thing isn’t panning out.
Poor Past. He’s probably still reading the history of that Corpse Synod.
It’s my understanding that you need you twiddling skill at least thirty to even start to practice twiddling your toes. Which explains why so few people achieve it.
Wait. You’re telling me that twiddling skill doesn’t cap out at 4????
Oh, man! I can’t even get to 5, I’m never going to get to 30.
Yeah; at this point we’ll aim for monday, and hope that everything goes back to normal.
“normal”
Normal is boring. Next week, let’s be awesome.
Or, you know, synergistically engaged.
Comic will be delayed till tomorrow probably. Not going to have any free time today (sorry; I know it was supposed to be up earlier, but juggling a few too many commitments at the moment between work, life, and other hobbies). I have about the next month and a half sketched out, but ever since I’ve gotten back from travel I have way too many pans in the fire (some are my fault, some are not – I think the saying is supposed to be pans “on” the fire, but I assure you, most of these are “in” the fire 😐 )
I figured out what it was I’m supposed to be demo’ing tonight at the end of my natural work day. Unfortunately the answer to that was utter insanity.
BRB while I descend into madness.
Past, you can take the time to descend into madness properly. Don’t rush it on our accounts, we’ll be here waiting.
Personally, I much prefer to have my pans on the shelf. If they’re not on the shelf, then either in the dishwasher or on the stove. There should not be fire in, around, or under my pans. More generally, my pans should be somewhere in my apartment, and fire shouldn’t be. To be quite honest, I would prefer if fire wasn’t in my apartment building, period. However, I don’t pay nearly enough money to be able to make a ruling to that effect.
I have seen people cook with pans in the fire; it generally requires a lid if one wants the food to be tasty in a good way afterwards. Something tells me you’re not cooking with a sufficient number of lids for all of your pans. Or maybe the lids are just not all the right size for the pans you have.
I can see it now: you have fifteen Sizzlesaurus pans in the fire, and 12 regular pan lids. Those lids are way too small to be useful for those pans. Also, that’s *way* too many pans for one cook to pay proper attention to, I don’t care what you’re cooking at what temperature. (Oh, right, you’re cooking at the temperature of burning. That generally takes extra care, rather than allowing for one to be so distracted. I’d recommend no more than one Sizzlesaurus pan per cook in the fire at any time. Those things are huge, so that’s a lot of space to pay attention to. OK, a master cook might be able to pay attention to two at once, but a master cook wouldn’t listen to my cooking advice anyway.)
Tgape’s response notwithstanding, the term at hand is, “too many irons in the fire.”
Those “pans” with lids in the fire are probably dutch ovens.
Pittsburgh has a good point though. Irons in the fire. Branding irons. Might help you with some of that mess.
As far as descending into madness, there really is only one way to do it. It involves some screaming.
Well, some of them were. But I have uncles who have been known to be inventive when they’re short on needed resources. Some of them were different. Some of them were very different.
I think the last two statements in the last paragraph are normally generally true, whether one is referring to pans, my uncles, people, or a great many other things.
As far as properly descending into madness, while I admit that there is generally some screaming involved, there are many ways to do it. Some of them have the screaming come from the person who is making the descent. Some of them have the screaming come from the people around that person. Some of them have the screaming coming from the rocks around the person. Some of them have the screaming from the air around the person.
I have heard of someone whose descent into madness was accompanied by screams from the spaces in between the air.
So, as it happens, there’s quite a bit of choice.
Technically not a term, but a phrase. “Too many brands in the fire.” Is the phrase. Not too many people know what a “branding iron” is these days. It doesn’t matter how many irons are in the fire, as long as, they are the same brand. But the phrase refers to improperly marking cattle due to pulling the wrong brand out of the fire.
With Past, it is probably not an issue with branding, but more of having multiple pans with stuff cooking in them of which he doesn’t want to remove said “stuff” with a chisel.
Hence, I argue the turn of phrase is correct as stated by Past.
The phrase originated with blacksmiths as a description of the smith being too busy.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around this.
I thought “to many irons in the fire”, and my brain mapped it correctly to “trying to do too many things”.
However the visual picture is a lot of cattle brands in the fire. I suppose that can still be the same thing. Marking more than 1 ranch’s cattle at once is too much. But there’s room for nefariousness there.
A blacksmith can have too many projects going on at once. Too few and he’s wasting time standing around waiting for something to heat.
But too many and something is going to end up melted, or the carbon burned out of it, or tempered incorrectly.
Honestly I’m not sure what cost me more time this week. Reading about a Corpse Synod, or internal debating about blacksmith versus rancher.
Of course I realize that there’s always stuff that Past doesn’t tell us. That said, I find Elmon’s implied assertion in his third word bubble to be odd. Malsa has two firm borders with other nations. It’s my understanding that there’s only war with Arpon at the moment. As far as I’m aware, Malsa is not at war with Resh. They may not be on great terms, but there’s been no indication of open hostilities going on.
Furthermore, it was my understanding that the Consul went to war on information that Arpon was building up to invade Malsa. Was that information not released to the family heads? Or does Elmon take extra issue with the Consul initiating a war with the country he was living in and planning to assist when they declared war on Malsa?
Alternatively, did Mium’s gambit of taking the Arpon president to Resh result in Resh and Arpon going to war? If so, did Elmon get confused by the country he’s residing in having a battle on multiple fronts?
I think part of the problem seems to be that they were fed reports of what would have happened at the front without ILA/Mium intervention.
Which I’d feel safe to say looks entirely different from reality at this point.
And they don’t know Peter fabricated the Consul’s death via hologram as well. Really they are making a number of completely understandable but horribly mistaken assumptions that are going to go badly for them. But given what they were up against that isn’t a surprise.
There’s also apparently a newly emergent war with Central, where as previously it was an uneasy peace.
I think that one is going to get interesting. The war is more with IDS than Central, and Peter’s offer of a home for 40K refugees in Malsa is going to mean Central has a vested interest in the opposite side of IDS’ war….
At this point, the war with IDS is mostly with IDS, if I’m not mistaken. So status quo, it’s just that it was more apparent to the Malsans for a bit.
That said, Jindra34 and Byzantine’s point applies to this: the rogue family heads basically have very little insight into this stuff. I’m sure they know a lot of stuff about the situation that we don’t. But I trust Past to give us all of the most pertinent details, which means I expect the details they know that we don’t to mostly not be very useful, due to the things they don’t know that we do know.
Oh, further comment on what the rogue family heads know about the war with the IDS: I suspect that most of what they know about it is from having talked to the other Sophie side of said war, without talking to anyone else from the IDS. As such, they don’t understand anything about the IDS infighting that it’s rather infamous for.
Just in case it’s not clear from this comment and the last: I understand now where Elmond is coming from, and I’m thankful to all of you for helping enlighten me on this point. My last post and the start of this one probably sound like I’m suddenly talking like I’ve been on the opposite side of my question the whole time, and I really do not mean it like that.
For a little bit, I was forgetting to look at the rogue family heads’ actual perspectives, because always keeping track of other people’s perspectives is difficult. It turns out there’s a lot of other people, and they *all* have a different perspective from both mine and seemingly everybody else. It’s like different people are all different, and some of them are very different.
Panel 2: Or do [you] mean to simply forget the accord?
“Suffice to say that returning to work after traveling did… go smoothly. Dung heaps on fire. Everywhere.”
I’m sold! Monday morning I’m lighting dung heaps on fire!
I’m surprised I didn’t think of it myself. It can’t make things worse, so it probably DOES make things go smoother.
If nothing else the fire alarm should empty out the building, resulting in comparatively fewer distractions.
I find it much more difficult to get sleep when fire alarms are ringing. Just saying, so you know.
I do find the sentiment of dung heaps on fire everywhere making things go smoothly reminds me of a situation my ex had on returning to work once. Everybody was so distracted by the various crises going on that they basically did whatever she said without question. They were also all crises that she’d predicted and had action plans on file for handling, so nothing was really unexpected to her, and shouldn’t have been to her coworkers. But unfortunately, none of them apparently read the documents that they reviewed together and had to all sign after the last time.
(That was, for the record, not something that happened at her current employer. She’s yet to return from vacation to find crises everywhere there. Sure, she’s gone on vacation, and returned to find problems, just not problems everywhere.)
After a very long conversation with HR I am convinced that I did something wrong. I assumed cow dung would be fine.
What am I missing here? Monday did NOT go smoothly.
Please understand: I am just guessing here. I’m not the expert on this. I’ve never once deliberately set dung on fire, ever. I’ve had nightmares of being burned at the stake, and I have actually been knocked over into a cooking fire during a camping trip once, so setting things on fire is something I generally try very hard to not do. I’m always on the side of putting these things out. The people I spend my free time with are always on the side of putting these things out. Most of my coworkers are generally on the side of putting these things out, and the ones that weren’t so much have all retired.
That having been said, my father had a work experience I think may be applicable here, and there’s also something I’ve noted from years of putting out burning dung.
My father went into work one day covered in cow dung. He had to meet his boss in the lobby that day, due to the first work activity scheduled for the day. His boss came out to the lobby when my dad showed up, arriving just as soon as somebody else arrived at work. The third person (fourth if you count the receptionist) said, “I don’t know who this guy is, but I don’t think you should hire him. He smells bad.” My dad’s boss replied, “I’d like you to meet your new boss.”
The thing I’ve noted about all of the dung fires I’ve helped put out is that none of them actually smell anything like fresh cow dung. I have personally not done any in depth composition analysis of the formerly burning dung to make any determination of what it was. I’ve always relied on the post mortem analysis team to even determine that it was dung. I don’t even know who exactly it is that makes this determination.
That said, I have lived in a rural enough area that my father could have plausibly fell into a massive pile of cow dung on his way to work if he stopped to help someone fix a flat tire at the wrong place, so I know quite a bit about what fresh cow dung smells like. I also know a fair amount about what week old cow dung smells like, and it wasn’t ever even that strong of a scent. It’s possible it could have been chicken excrement recently cleaned from the floor of a chicken house. However, I’ve never heard that stuff being referred to as dung, so I’m not certain that’s a definite possibility. It’s just another data point that I have from my experience that I could share.
So… Just to clarify…. Your father was NOT on fire, right?
And you’re recommending the use of burning chicken manure?
It all makes sense now!
I’m not recommending burning chicken manure. I would, in fact, go so far as to recommend not messing with chicken manure at all if you can help it, and wear a dust mask if you can’t avoid it. That stuff is nasty. Specifically the histoplasma that grows in it is nasty. I avoided the chicken manure as much as possible, and yet I still wound up with a condition vaguely like asthma. Note: this is not active histoplasmosis. It’s just that my lungs have a bunch of encapsulated nodules of histoplasma, and because of that I don’t breathe as effectively as normal people do. And according to my doctor, that’s just how it is for me now.
As far as I am aware, my father was not on fire at that time. He *has* been at other times, mind you. Just for the record, he’s not and has never been either a stunt man or a fireman. As far as I am aware, none of his time spent on fire coincided with his acting as a magician’s assistant. A small portion of the time when he was on fire happened while he was attempting stage magic, but that wasn’t the stage magic he was supposedly attempting. In fact, the mother whose child was having the birthday party had ruled that there was not to be any fire at the party, but that didn’t turn out to be what happened. (It was OK – none of the kids were burned.)
I love how the mention of it being illegal to bring dead people, strongly implies it’s been done before.
Hey, we let them vote here, in a magic charged society there’s all the more reason to include them.
I think the implication was it was not only been done before, but it was *just* done. Is Cadaver that person’s actual name, or is Ashvalt just attempting to bring his point home in a way that wouldn’t go over his head despite the target being a hunchback and all? (Not that height has anything to do with whether points actually miss people, but apparently when one wants to speak a language one has to follow the precedents set up by untold generations of … less than clever people.)
I read it as “cadaver” being an insult to his age, and implying he couldn’t really be that old, he must have died and been reanimated.
And of course the over riding theme being that the consul wouldn’t be welcome anymore, because she’s already dead.
That is sort of what I was saying. Although I think it’s less his age and more his health, and the amount to which he is handling his health problems with magic. At some point, you get to where you’re not really all that different from a magically animated corpse yourself – it’s just a matter of who is pulling the strings.
I don’t think that “Cadaver”‘s depiction looks that incredibly unhealthy. I’m just reminded of the three top magic users in Dave Duncan’s ‘Man of His Word’ series, and how much they resembled undead creatures when viewed with that world’s parallel to Eidos vision, despite looking like little kids to everybody else.
I can see exactly how that went over. “Yes, my mother is here. See? Here she is. She votes no. Yes, I know she’s dead. There isn’t a law against dead people voting.”
from RL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod
^_^
It’s probably a bit different when the guy in charge orders the dead to be brought to the meeting. Also, I’m pretty sure that Formosus did not vote on the winning side of that immediate meeting.
That said, thank you for providing my response for the next time someone is aggressively Catholic in my general direction.
I lost like 4 hours to that Wikipedia link is all I’m saying.