Comic for Monday, April 28th, 2025
At long last… comic.
To save you some time, there is not need to read the faint ghost text; it’s exactly the same as the visible text. This is basically relic of an earlier draft I couldn’t ‘fix’. Essentially, in the original draft of the page, one of the ‘jokes’ was that Frank’s translation would often not match what Fairway said (correcting his comments to be more diplomatic and professional). But I decided to drop it, because it was too hard to make the faint text legible with that much of it, and I felt that many people reading it wouldn’t realize what was happening, and would think Fairway sounded out of character (a problem I wouldn’t expect people to pick up since we’ve seen him so little his character is not well established).
But just deleting the ghost text wasn’t a great solution, since obviously Fairway wouldn’t speak Maslan, and the Consul doesn’t speak Central (at least, not that she would admit and not fluently).
So we ended up with this version, where the ghost text is basically pointless, but I thought if I deleted it people would forget that these people don’t technically speak the same language, since we deal with so many people that do speak both languages.
Anyway, I’m still in international shipping hell regarding my ‘day job’, but perhaps making progress. Not going to make any promises that things will resume as normal here though, given the dumpsters are actively flaming over there and I have a dozen people involved all of how manage to disagree on how anything works while reminding me that I’m legally liable for anything that goes wrong. The absolute joys of running a ‘business’.
EDIT: If anyone saw the original version written for ants, apparently WordPress added a feature that ‘helpfully’ limits the size of max size of images to 2560 pixels in their largest dimension… Well, obviously, my comics are way bigger than (this is ~5000 pixels), so it was halving the size. Apparently I made the mistake of clicking ‘update’; something we all know you should never, ever, do, because as a rule, that button means ‘make the thing worse’ for some reason in corporate software. Anyway… should be fixed now.
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I think the odds the Consul doesn’t understand Centrian are zero. The lack of difference in translation misses an opportunity for a later strip where she obviously acts on the original information not the sanitized, diplomatic version.
Plus of course the inherent humour of having wildly inappropriate things in the original and the contrast of the translated replies 😀
I so appreciate and enjoy the complexity and level of political intrigue displayed in FSoU. It is a major reason your universe seems so real and engaging. It is also indicative of such off-the-scale people observation skills that I strongly suspect are completely wasted in you day job. You really need a wider audience. You should be writing novels, screen plays or be a master diplomat.
I had to laugh at the poster child example of the exquisite subtle message that Peter sent to the Consul by specifically excluding Kally and Naomi from his capture and “escape”. A secret message sent in plain sight, dependent on awareness of his personal behavior and a trust that the recipient is smart enough to receive it! The last two panels where the Consul ” gets” it perfectly encapsulates the subtle essence and multifaceted complexity of the entire FSoU plot line. It is impossible to do better.
Looks grand to me. (Of course, I read the grayed text before I read the explanation.)
Thank you for the comic. Best of luck with the annoyances!