Have a wee bit of a headache (understatement). I think I might lie down rather than blogging.
Have I said recently that you all are awesome? You all are awesome.
12/28/11 Shuar’s Love
Have a wee bit of a headache (understatement). I think I might lie down rather than blogging.
Have I said recently that you all are awesome? You all are awesome.
Err … uhh …
I’m not sure what to say.
Except this strip, in its own way, is more depressing than the previous one.
I feel sorry for Shuar — and a bit angry at Dmitri.
*sighs*
This is top-notch fiction, I’ll tell you that. Good art — and I do mean art, indeed, which I consider Spacetrawler to be — creates strong emotions.
Sometimes, though, those emotions are a bit uncomfortable.
You did good this week, Chris. Very good. Thank you.
Finishing off the holiday eggnog cause that headache? 😉 Dimitri can be cold blooded, but what bad boy isn’t? After all, killing off pink-tentacle girl did put him off his stroke, if only a small bit, so he is not invulnerable.
I’m a little confused, here. Didn’t he go to bed with Shuar AFTER faking his death and killing… pink trunks whose name I forget? So is this a bit of a flashback? Or did I miss something?
Dmitri is also awesome. Cruel, but awesome.
harsh words lady, harsh laying around Dimitri. Sharp plotting Chris. Sharp indeed.
I just love how Shuar holds the sheet to maintain her modesty.
@Eris_Lobo, Yeah, I really struggled with Dimitri’s last line. Whew!
@Dave, Shuar doesn’t know WHEN the ship blew up. So he kills Dal, goes to Shuar, stays with her a bit, then leaves with the keys. She doesn’t know WHEN the ship blew up, only that it did, and she is told with him in it. 🙂
I think that’s how Dimitri is supposed to make you feel, Eris.
Also, you’re awesome. Have a happy New Year!
Who’s awesome? You’re awesome!
Ah, thanks for the clarifying. 😀
Well, we all knew from the start that Dimitri was a love ’em and leave ’em kind of guy. This may or may not backfire on him eventually. Personally, Monday’s strip is far more tragic and disturbing than this one.
However, we should still be worried about Shuar now because, given their unbridled need for revenge, the newly freed Eebs will likely want to kill her as being complicit in the system the GOB set up to keep the Eebs enslaved. You work for the wrong side, sometimes just saying, “I was only following orders,” doesn’t cut it.
And I’m sure Dmitri will stop by the penthouse suite to recover his approxiscan.
Or will he just get a new one? Interesting question. Doesn’t he lose all his riches now that he’s “dead”? Hurmmmmmm…..
@Leland, I dunno, they’re clearly going down the stairs. But good point about his “dead” status. Shouldn’t his assets transfer to maybe his captain, or worse yet, to the GOB to sort out & tax?
@Christopher, I’m confused. Is Dimitri tossing the keys away (why?) or just tossing them up & down while going down the stairs?
@Leland, he’ll just get a new one. Left in case there was a tracer.
Banking stuff: I’ve been thinking of how I might clarify that in a bit of dialogue at some point. But basically the bank is pretty strongly independent of the G.O.B., something that will definitely be later clarified.
@Nomi, my thought was just tossing them in the air, but he could be tossing them down the stairs. The ship is blown up, so they’re useless and the only point of him taking them was so Shuar would think he was dead.
@Leland, at a certain point, banks stop asking for personally identifiable information (as in, “I’m sorry Mr. Taxman, we don’t know who owns that particular account, and digging that information out from our files will requires both an act from our Parliament and an invasion by your military.”) Setting the account up as a corporate account adds one more layer of obscurity.
These accounts are accessed by the combination of the account number and a passphrase. The downside is that anyone who knows the account number and the passphrase can access the account contents. So while Dimitri may be considered dead by the G.O.B. it’s going to take some time for that information to filter down to the bank (especially since the G.O.B. may not know that Dimitri has that particular account at that particular bank, the First Bank of Lakt, if I remember correctly.) In the meantime, the corporate account of “Mamushka’s Russian Tea Cookies” will continue to be accessed by the board of directors, Anton Antonovich, Boris Babinski, Valera Vasilevna, and Galina Gregorina, all through electronic fund transfers originating from a variety of anonymous approxiscans.
Ain’t technology grand!
Poor, poor heartbroken sexy* giant green isopod.
*For a given value of sexy.
I agree with JKCarroll, we have to assume that the approxiscan network and the galactic banking system is at least as sophisticated our our Internet and banks here on Earth. I’m pretty sure there are lots of ways to hack and crack them or exploit legal and technical loopholes.
Dimitri being a young Russian with possible former mob involvement has probably being thinking all this time, ever since he sold the rights to the tea cake recipe, about ways to exploit the system to squirrel away yet still have access to his money.
The other thing that might be working for him is that many of the aliens, perhaps conditioned by decades or centuries routine brain clamping and leaving all the tech to the Eebs have probably gotten kind of stupid and lazy about security. If they ever figure it out, he’ll have to run but, right now, they seem to still be in the dark about what he’s doing.
@Corpore, I think the important consideration is whether Lakt is like Switzerland or if it’s like the Cayman Islands. Switzerland is more upscale, more corporate, and a bit more respectable. The Caymans are just there — sand, sun, and drinks with little umbrellas paid for with your discrete bank accounts. You go to Switzerland when you have an international corporation that needs to deal in multiple currencies and do so with discretion; you go to the Caymans when you don’t care that it looks like you’re trying to hide large sums of money from your local law and tax police.
I guess it comes down to whether or not the Lakt’ians like umbrellas in their drinks or if they prefer smooth chocolates with a hint of orange essence. Maybe they like chocolate umbrellas in their Triple Sec.
funny thing, while Dimitri seems to showing a darkness
his treatment of the Eebs in his care is probly whats gonna save the galaxy as they know it
That’s what makes him fun. He’s got this wacky combo of pragmatism and lightheartedness that lets him do difficult things without losing his, ah… moral buoyancy.
I find it interesting how people are just running with the assumption that he’s ex mob, based on… well, nothing really. I don’t see that at all. Or more correctly, I see the possibility, but in no way the necessity. It’s just as plausible to me that he’s a used book dealer, or a photographer, or a bathtub designer, or whatever. I’ve known normal people who’d probably have reacted to killing Dal pretty much the same way… not because they’re experienced killers or sociopaths, but because a situation where they’d believe they were forced to kill someone would form a kind of moral tautology for them, or because they believe in digesting any bad emotions separately from the tasks/life they still have to get on with.
It is nice to know that our favorite galactic pan-sexual is still alive an kicking. For all we know he’s an ex oligarch who was never in the gov’t. Dimitri is an exciting and interesting person as are all the characters in this comic. Love to read it every week.
meh – i don’t feel sorry for her. i like Dimitri, i just question his taste in lovers..
12/28/11 Shuar’s Love http://t.co/ntyWgdAt
Also, on the subject of accessing his money, Dimitri merged accounts with Dal who the GOB do NOT know is dead (unless they have some sort of remote tracker/monitor on her).
I’d like to apologize in advance for this: I still can’t not think about butter pats.
I am so sorry, it’s like a song you can’t get out of your head, so you sing it to other people to try to get rid of it.
Butter.
Pats.
Please, please, Get Out Of My Mind!
I don’t feel sorry for Shuar. She’s basically a stalker, works for the bad guys, and complicit in Yuri’s quadruple amputation. Dmitri needs to get her off his trail.