I had a dentist appointment. First time in a while (due to finances etc). And they looked pretty good. Whaddya know! Guess it’s okay to eat the tremendously unhealthy amount of sugar I normally do to keep up my buzz (kids, don’t listen to me).
Just listened to Connie Willis‘s “Inside Job.” Dang, that woman can write.
My water soluble oil paints arrived. Do I paint quinces, a portrait, or the cover for my next novel? Or do i write instead? Or just make more fudge? So many questions!
My girlfriend is going to trim hair and tomorrow we drive to Lee to get a sofa. Oh, the exciting lives we lead. ;-)
If they’re picking bugs off him, are they grooming him for something?
You have to admit, Mihrrgoots are *very* well adapted to making smug, evil grins.
Maybe cut the text in the last-but-one frame that overlaps that in the last frame? I think that would make the reading smoother, and the redundancy doesn’t really add any value (for me).
You’ve got a typo. Should be “ExistEnce” in the ante-penultimate panel. Feel free to zap this comment after reading.
clacke, the redundancy actually makes it very clear that the king is listening in. Leaves no room for thinking the king might be referring to something else. There was a little bit in Scott McCloud’s _Understanding Comics_ that dealt with this, how to deal with things like this when telling a story in comic panels.
Make fudge, then paint psychedelic covers during the sugar rush
i really, really like this webcomic
Play with the paints while your bread is rising, after you investigate the tangzhong method of making it!
Fnordius, I think the suggestion was to leave the last panel alone, but to trim the overlap in the *previous* panel.
If they were really smart, they would have just told him to change his clothes!
this once again proves that the Mihrrgoots are the most awesome of awesome!
I thought you said “oil pants” and imagined something completely different before I re-read it.
Speaking of clothing, Dimitri’s have Captain Kirk’s color scheme.
It’s not about the bugs you _let_ them discover 🙂
I’m with clacke. Have the speech bubble overlap the two panels, getting transmission-jaggy in the last panel. It’s clear as is, but the repetition is a little jarring. Crowdsourced formatting! Every cartoonist’s dream! (not)
They should be in a Faraday cage then it wouldn’t matter the ones they missed.
Oh, and just to throw my two cents in on the “redundancy” debate, I actually like how it implies Mihrgoot bugging devices have a split-second of latency
Does the tall one remind anyone else of Qwahntoo?
I like the way they assume bugs stop working if you drop them in a bowl.
I like the way TB assumes it’s a bowl and not a highly advanced bug deactivator that just happens to be bowl-shaped. Each ‘plink’ sound in the strip is actually generated by a tightly aimed hypersonic/electromagnetic pulse that renders any monitoring device into a dormant state.
@Herander, intercourse putting the monitoring devices “into a dormant state”. The “plink” is the sound the devices make as they are returned to their natural molecular components.
@Frank, I agree re: the disrobing of Dimitri. (I’m thinking of the movie “Enemy of the State”.) My only concern would be this: what if the bugs were motile? I.e., what if they can move in order to make it harder to detect them? The places they’d go, the things they would hear!
you know, I don’t think anyone has commented on how awesome it is that Dimitri just sighs when kidnapped as if saying “here we go again”
@LordCircle: yes, but I was saving that for next week, when we might have more information on him/her
@Muzhik: that… that does sound like the kind of thing Mihrgoots would do, doesn’t it?
By the way, have I mentioned before how much I *love* the King’s smile? I don’t really think he’s evil but he comes across as a very clever and scary guy you don’t want to cross.
About the bugging technology–
First we have to understand this is a science fiction comic where a lot of physics defying technology exists–for example dark greased light drives. As such, it’s hard to discount something using arguments based in science as we know it.
The bugs could all be using tiny FTL transmitters that don’t even work by electromagnetic radiation. So maybe a faraday cage won’t work. We just have to take Chris’ word for it that dropping the bugs into this bowl deactivates them.
Additionally, we don’t know if just removing Dimitri’s clothes will work. The Mihrrgoots might have developed internal bugs, based around nanotech or MEMS, that attach themselves to Dimitri’s auditory nerves or even use the hairs on his skin to sense vibrations in the air.
I’m just saying could be very complicated and we’ll just have to accept the storyteller’s word that this has all been taken into account. When the hooded Illuminati guy says they’ve got them all, we have to assume he believes it. Also when King says they missed a few, we have to believe it.
Maybe if Chris were writting the hardest of hard SF, then we could argue about it but, he isn’t.
Sorry, but my sides hurt so much right now and I have tears rolling down my cheeks that are laughing as hard as I am right now. Those last two frames put me on the floor for nearly 5 minutes I was laughing so hard.
oOnes they missed are likely of the nanaotech level and planted in him via booze spiking.
Nice. A very intersting turn of events. King was being pretty boring, actually.
So….if they have the most advanced (Eeb-made) listening device, it’s not that weird that some of the are not found. After all, they do have the fastest spaceship in the universe.
When in doubt. Fudge. When not in doubt, get in doubt.
“Each ‘plink’ sound in the strip is actually generated by a tightly aimed hypersonic/electromagnetic pulse that renders any monitoring device into a dormant state.” – Herandar
Actually, the bowl contains a Maxwell’s Demon who catches each bug, rapidly unscrews the back, and removes the batteries. The “plink” is the sound of a very tiny battery being tossed into a very tiny recycling bin.
If you make fudge, don’t use the oil paint to do it.
Also, yes, I just discovered Connie Willis last year. I’m currently in the middle of “Blackout”.
Thank God, Dimitri was being so clever and reasonable I didn’t think there was going to be any more conflict to resolve in this story.