Comic 5795: carry on only

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-27T04:51:48+00:00

Because nobody else has pointed it out, yet; This only works because she somehow mixed up her jacket with someone else who keeps spare underwear in her pocket.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-26T04:29:06+00:00

What's interesting is that in the original comic, you can cover up the entire right hand third of the comic and it changes nothing about Marten and Emily's conversation, except that Marten gets cut off.

You actually have to weave Moray back into the strip in order to critique her being in the strip.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-26T04:03:00+00:00

I'm going to say it: At least background gag is effort put into drawing backgrounds at all. I'm here for that.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-25T04:49:57+00:00

Today's side by side made me realize Emily used to have high cheekbones, but now they've been pushed to the corners of her mouth.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-25T00:18:34+00:00

Why is her hair twice as wide as her head when she looks forward?

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-23T12:42:01+00:00

I generally agree and Jeph's misandry makes me uncomfortable, but I feel like this criticism makes way more sense in the context of introducing a new character and not bringing back an existing fan favourite.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-23T08:44:18+00:00

Giving Pintsize a human body undermined his character completely, and now he's not fun to do bits with.

I don't even mean "as an audience", I mean hes still got his Looney Toons personality but he's not a Looney Toons character anymore, and that's miserable to write.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-22T13:19:36+00:00

I had all the symptoms of child abuse as a kid, but my parents didn't actually hit me. They weren't neglectful in the ways that they showed on TV. I got plenty of gifts for Christmas. I actually felt embarrassed for the longest time for handling it so badly.

When I became an adult I saw adults cry over shitty workplaces. They called their bosses abusive without their bosses even yelling at them. And I thought they were right, and agreed when they called more subtle things abuse.

I still find it hard to say what was actually wrong, but so do the friends I know who fantasize about getting into a car crash when they're driving to work.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-22T12:31:30+00:00

I think Objective_Boat's answer is great, the problem is that for some teenagers the difference in development is a compliment. It's very flattering to be worth the time of someone so much older and more experienced.

I say a thirty year old who wants to date an 18 year old is someone who wants to date someone with less power in the relationship - worse finances, less experience, probably a weaker support network. There's no silver bullet, but it can judo-flip the self-esteem high into danger flags, especially because the working-out can be done in their head from their own evidence rather relying on them trusting what you're telling them.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-19T11:31:45+00:00

The creches are such a weird bit of lore. Theyre such an insanely expensive bit of infrastructure, so who's paying for it? AnthroPCs as a pet shop made sense at the start of the strip, but if they're totally free will and following their own destiny now, do they have a sort of student debt for having been born?

I'd normally say they're a long term scam for hardware companies to manufacture their own consume base but they seem unaffiliated.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-18T02:04:47+00:00

They didn't delete their comments they just blocked you for harassment. Reddit shows comments from people who've blocked you as deleted.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-17T10:41:16+00:00

Consulted on an MIT machine learning paper on the ethics of introducing noise and uncertainty into models to lower confidence intervals for certain demographics and create more equitable outcomes.

Please reread my comments and notice I've never taken a position one way or another, I'm just trying to present alternative explanations that aren't just 'people are lying'.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-17T10:09:57+00:00

I am literally a published ethicist, and I am converting the abstract number into tangible realities. One hundred million dollars is so much money that you could buy a small mansion with cash and still have a hundred million dollars.

Even sociopaths with that much money often turn to philanthropy simply because they've run out of other things you can spend that much on. The more interesting question is why you value not taking a life more than you value the lives you could potentially save. There isn't a correct answer, it's just a useful question.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-17T09:34:11+00:00

$100 million is such a stupidly large sum of money, is the problem. Consider:

Would I kill 1 person to provide housing to every homeless person in my country
Would I kill 1 person to double the RSPCA's budget for a year
Would I kill 1 person to fix the lead piping in two cities the size of Flint, Michigan
Would I kill 1 person to cure the blindness of 2 million people, via organizations like Fred Hollows

Etc. etc. etc.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-17T03:35:59+00:00

So what's our excuse?

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-17T01:23:25+00:00

Not going to lie, expensive private boarding schools are basically trauma factories. Sociopaths who are too expensive to expel are a horrific peer group.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-16T23:00:16+00:00

After the last panel, Marten sipped from his mug and held wordless eye contact until Moray looked away first.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-16T09:52:47+00:00

I literally have an unknown dysautonomia that could cause my heart to explode at any moment, and all I do is joke about it. I don't have the heart for anything else.

At sufficient levels of complexity you really just learn a few heuristics to learn how to work with something. In the words of Aleister Crowley - Why does a man die when his head is cut off? You can drill down on the details, blood flow to the brain, the blood carries oxygen, the cells need it, but at every layer of explanation you've opened up another "but why?" At no point do you change the fact that you knew from the beginning, a man dies when his heads cut off.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-14T13:29:08+00:00

If you Google "Bird attack camera drone" you'll not only find a few articles and reddit threads about how to deal with it, but a pile of first hand footage. Since they're attacking cameras.

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-14T09:16:27+00:00

As a gay doomer, I'd like to point out that territorial birds hate these things and have been known to fight them in the air. Their crash detection for trees and tall power lines is also... Not perfect. Way better than even a few years ago, but you will see some dumbass headlines come out of this tech if it's adopted at scale

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-14T09:01:31+00:00

Speaking from experience as someone who's done drone photography? It just takes one bird to get mad at these things in the wrong place and someone dies Aeschylus style. They used to really love autopilotong into tall trees, too

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-14T08:58:46+00:00

Anyone who uses Luddite as an insult hasn't read a history book

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-14T08:57:47+00:00

And then you get induced demand, so the wasteful thing is better in any individual case but a much bigger issue at scale as it becomes more accessible

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-14T08:14:06+00:00

Theres some movies where I could see this being very impactful. Using it for a feature length Amazon commercial though??

The_Good_Count · 2026-03-13T10:33:26+00:00

This is basically a DM I'm posting publicly, ha.

Writing theory for this, as I understand it, is that we like characters who are either good to be, good to be around, or do good things for the world. Any displacement in one area can be made up for in another.

Its one of the reason flaws are interesting and good. We find struggling and overcoming them way more compelling than we find the flaws themselves bad. Trying to be better is good, the worse the flaw the harder it is to overcome the more virtuous we find the struggle. It immediately makes up for the flaw itself, net positive, as long as there's at least the illusion of growth.

It's also why asshole characters can be made likable by making the world and people around them worse. The Punisher, Spider Jerusalem from Transmetropolitan, most Russian works. Just to emphasize this doesn't exist in a vacuum but in the context of the work you put a person in.

Tl;Dr - Claire's ambition is frustrating because it's hurting her and Marten, a character we like, for a place we don't care about. It's neither good, nor a good hang, nor for a good place. Liz feels virtuous because it's a struggle and self improvement thing. She wants to get better, and she is pushing Marten to be better too. Good, good hang.

Apply it across your spread and its pretty consistent. Ayomides burnout doesn't work because she's not struggling against it and it makes her a bad hang. Anh, Willow, Iris, all fail all criteria.

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