Comic for Monday, October 13th, 2019
Somehow still sick. This is going on the third week and getting a bit ridiculous.
We haven’t run out of buffer, but I realize that I haven’t quite finished the next page that’ll go up (it’s drawn, but needs to go through the photoshop steps of adding bubbles and frames and what not. I have the next page after that mostly drawn to, so despite the whole sick thing it’s not like we are getting behind, just that I didn’t quite do the order of operations correctly and lost track of time. It’ll be up on patreon tomorrow when I get a chance after work to finish it. I will be missing away from my tablet 2ish weeks in November, and 2ish weeks in Feburary, so my plan is that I will only go back to 2 per week once I know that I have the buffer for those (4-8 comics depending the rate). My thought (after the schedule slippage mayham we had for a bit) is that I want to be able to post consistently above all else.
Despite being sick things are going okay. House troubles and car troubles are full sorted out. The job has no mercy for things like sick leave though – they say “you can take as much as you need”, but as soon as I head for the door I can see them prep’ing the shit catapult and pointing it right at the fan, and as we are at an important point of a project, I haven’t dared let them out of my sight for a full 24 hours.
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….did you not pretty much have Query as a social crutch because you sucked at actually talking to people that badly?
Still. Their banter is great. “Oh right, I forgot you’re not normal at all.” … “Of course, I forgot you’re what passes as “normal” around here.” … “No, you can’t go eat people.” ‘Not even the Korish guy?’ “…okay, maybe him.”
@PastUtopia:
Just idly wondering if you’ll be correcting the page-title later…?
…because Monday is the 14th, not the 13th.
Time runs funky for Past. Or he lives in an alternate reality. One of the two.
Not mutually exclusive.
ā¦& now I’m even more puzzled, because my computer’s clock says that while I’m typing here-&-now, this is currently Monday, Oct.14th, but your webpage says that my previous posting was made on Oct.15th.
Am I missing something, here?
—–
I Just saw [Jindra34]’s post, & now I suspect “Time-Zone” type hijinks.
The page is on GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) which is +0. It is still the 14th in US, but it’s the 15th in Europe already. Not sure where PastUtopia lives though, as their schedule is pretty incomprehensible.
We have seen Past do this “one day off on the title” thing numerous times. Likely just to confuse us and it’s clearly working.
For funzies i looked this up. The last Monday, October 13th occurred in 2014. The next ones are 2025, 2031, 2036, and 2042.
Also between 2010 and 2050 there are the same quantity of Monday the 13th as there are Friday the 13th — 70.
I was under the impression your job is kind of like one of my old jobs: Every day, three of my coworkers would load stuff onto the catapult, and I’d take it off. Most any day I didn’t show up to do my part of the job, they pulled the lever that launches it at the spinny thing. It didn’t matter much about who else might have been out, because there were three people doing the other job. This would also happen if I was too slow at the unloading bit.
It’s a big part of why, when I was asked to design a software development process for this job, the first thing I put in was a review process which required two people to review anything. I wanted to have more people, but didn’t think I could swing more. I did not, for what it’s worth, push for agile development, because while that works very well if you have a good team, it’s an amazing catapult if you don’t.
That’s part of my problem I think. I really, really like catapults. Every once in a while I find myself writing a sign that says “I did it”, taping it to the back of a catapult loader, and (quietly) cheering them on.
It never ends well, of course. And that’s enough to dissuade me. For a while.
My problem is, I like things to be working.
As far as I could tell, that wasn’t a particular goal of many of the coworkers I had on the job I described above. For most of the time I worked there, I didn’t know how things would continue working after I left.
Oddly enough, it turns out, I was supposedly the big problem keeping that system from working. That employer apparently only fixes problem employees that are successful in creating problems frequently enough. I was thwarting enough of these employees attempts at creating problems that the employer was unable to tell these employees were problems, despite my trying to explain that to the employer.
Which brings me back to giving people just enough rope.
The important thing is to make sure YOUR fingerprints are not on the catapult. Seriously, wipe it down after you unload it.
If you have the presence of mind to use fingerprint gloves, you not only don’t have to wipe it down, but also probably want to not wipe it down too much. (Maybe enough to look like you were thoughtful, but not so much as to look like you were competent.)
Two questions:
1. Did Fluffy make the ketchup joke on purpose or by accident?
2. Did PastUtopia make the ketchup joke just now…or has he been secretly planning this joke for years and made permanent constructs red just so he could hit us with the ketchup joke?
1. Pretty sure dragons just like ketchup. It’s instinctive more than deliberate.
2. Secretly planning for years. Even if he claims otherwise, I’ll know it’s because he his the joke from himself. Al la Zaphod Beeblebrox.
You know me. All about those long set ups. Everything has been leading up to the fact the Kor’s World Soldiers are pre-ketchup’d. It is the fatal flaw that leads to the downfall.
Who would have thought that ketchup-based technology would have such a fatal flaw.
…hmm. I suppose I shouldn’t laugh to hard. We’re currently fatally vulnerable to EMPs, lightning elementals, digimon, and telekinetics who can freely manipulate silicon or gold.
Sure, most of those don’t exist. But then Kor’s World probably thought the same about dragons.
I’ve been wanting to ask, if Fluffy eats a mage or more importantly an Kors world solder in in what appears to be solidified magic armor do the loose pisons get recycled. If so then the ketchup jokes become more relevant.
Recycled psion poop. It’s great for the garden!
“and as we are at an important point of a project,”
You have projects with unimportant parts? You know you don’t have to do the unimportant parts, right? They’re not important.
My experience is that they’re unimportant until the point where you decide to treat them as unimportant, then somehow they suddenly become important.
Unimportant parts of the project are the parts you believe your underlings can handle on their own….or parts that can’t be screwed up too badly.
But the problem is you should never underestimate the intelligence of fools. They can screw up anything in ways you never dreamed of.
The difference really boils down to how many people are going to sqwabble at me per hour until something is done. But it is almost never zero. I am pretty tired of people sqwabbling at me. Yes, sqwabble is made up word. Something like squabble + babble + warble. Needs that element of warble for the shrill keening pierce of it.
This reminds me of my favorite boss ever.
When there was a crisis, like other bosses, he’d ask me what was going on and what was needed to get it fixed.
Unlike all of my other bosses, he would then turn around in my doorway and stand there. He’d pull out his blackberry (as this was when those were new), type up an email to his boss and send it. And he’d continue standing there, barring access to my cubicle to anyone else coming by to find out what was wrong. He would instead tell them what I told him.
Thanks to this action by him, I generally had a much quicker time to resolve on major catastrophes than I’ve had before or since. Also, the number of people who would sqwabble at me per hour from the time he got wind of these things until they were resolved was generally around, well, him divided by the hours it would take to get it fixed. But the .25 sqwabble per hour issue I recall having had while he was my boss was certainly not something that I’d consider less important, considering it was an outage for something like 10% of everything in the company at the time.
This was, admittedly, before the company had a unified instant messenger program, so it was before there was a requirement to be on the company unified instant messenger.
…
Thinking more about that 4 hour to resolve issue… what about the sqwabbles per hour after something is done? As in, yes, it’s fixed, but now everybody wants to know what happened, why it happened, and what can be done to prevent it from happening again? And, much like in a Dilbert comic, they’re not likely to accept “it was the result of a one character bug, which has been fixed already.” We need a major meeting with the experts from all of the related organizations to get together in the same room and work out a ten or more step process, with a detailed timeline and an extensive mitigation strategy to handle everything until then.
This comment brought to you by the letter ‘!’.
I have a new one in the utter foolishness department. Our remote IT staff for some unknown reason will email you the text from a Skype conversation you had with them even though Business Skype is fully recorded 100% of the time.
Unless your computer happens to shut off between when the message came in and when it decides to save it, which tends to be a few minutes after the conversation pauses. I’m not certain, but it may also be possible to close the window during that time and lose it.
(Thanks to using vim as my editor of choice, I’ve hit escape in *so* many Skype windows. Sigh.)
:wq
:x!
:wqa!
I wish we could see more of Minus Years (though I know you have more than enough on your plate). Knowing more about Peter and Kally’s relationship would be interesting, considering that they both struggle with being any sort of normal.
It would be also interesting to see more of Naomi interacting with friends. It seems like that group could produce enough interesting content to be a comic themselves (Arkady, Mione, Lisa, and Naomi… each of them have quite a bit interesting going on with them).
Arkady has proven to both a more powerful and mage and more level headed person than most. Lisa has only shown up a few times, but obviously his more going on with her, with her likely being a spy, having representing some degree of the conflict between designer children and “normal” children, and Mione is almost as curious as Naomi herself in her power set, having almost Mium like powers.
The little pieces of this world we see always leave me wanting to know more.
I would like to make more stuff, but I struggle sometimes with making the stuff I already make. Unfortunately we leave in a world where pushing pointless projects along is better at paying ones bills that dubiously drawing comics š
Panel 1: She’d assume i was an impostor or had a concussion. Panel 7: -(Not even the one you don’t like? what about the one in red stuff?)-
Fixed; thanks š
I left the second one, as I think it’s on purpose (the difference); he’s being general with the first half of the statement (any human she doesn’t like he could sample) and then offering a specific in the second half of a human that maybe he could snack on without her minding. Unless I’m misunderstanding the correction š