This comic is more properly the end fo my first year. I first put a comic on my website on New Year’s Even, 2017, which is tomorrow.
Yeah, it’s pretty ugly.
I didn’t remember that. I was really pleased that I could come up with four panels that fit together with dialog that kind of worked that rolled across the four panels. It took advantage of the medium in a way I don’t often manage.
So it’s not crucial that you, gentle reader, know why the centaurs spout nonsense. Here is a longer explanation that I can’t really fit.
We do a lot of things where electronics communicate with us. They tend to do it in a monotonous way that we completely ignore. I’ve got a thing on my phone that tells me to take out the trash every Wednesday. I’ve got a thing at work that tells me when someone on my team has committed code. At this point, I pay far less attention to these messages than the cats pay to anything I say, and no, my cats aren’t unusually attentive.
So if my phone said, “Wednesday stands bold, it’s nipples defy the edicts of the very sun king!” It would not tell me to take out the trash, but I would notice, while I don’t notice, “Wednesday, trash night” anymore, and if I heard that, I’d remember why my phone is talking about wednesday.
So if you’re near a centaur’s path, it doesn’t say, “Warning, I am carrying a large object, please don’t step in my way,” which you might ignore. It says, “Warning:” followed by a randomly generated string.
Also, this comic contains an embarrassing in-joke that only I get. A completely different one is Chiwetel Ejiofor. That stuff about image recognition came from my mistaking Chadwick Boseman for Chiwetel Ejiofor (this was before ‘Black Panther’, so I only knew Boseman from Civil War and Gods of Egypt).
The in-joke hear is about ‘novelty’. I misplace words when I’m nervous. I was at a party, and I couldn’t remember the word. “I said, ‘you don’t drink champagne recovered from the Lucitania because it tastes good, you do it for the. . .’”
I spent 45 minutes trying to remember the word. Blake Messer came to my rescue when he showed up, and I said, “What’s a word that means a thing that has value because it’s new and unusual?”
“Novelty,” he answered right away.
Generally, I try to make Finch stick at the kinds of things I stick on (nouns more than anything else, for some reason), though he stick after the first phoneme, and I can’t think of the word.