palordrolap

Loss or, better: Is this Loss?

The best Mothman one is the one where the other cryptids buy him

Those are obligate carnivore teeth. Creatures with obligate diets nonetheless purposefully eat things outside of their regular diet.

Horses have been seen to eat small birds. Cats eat grass (if not houseplants).

Here I think Bob did something to annoy the creature, and even though it’s Bob, it might not have been intentional.

The Inequidy of the Carnivorse

Uh. Forgive my obvious naïveté, but wouldn’t a drag king’s shirt falling open be … detrimental … to the suspension of disbelief?

You’re still going to need a portal or some other kind of tech (or magic) in order for both characters in this comic to be sharing anything like that. Or there’s one heck of a perspective trick going on.

They both have the same one in. This is now a sci-fi plot because how is that even possible?

Or if there isn’t one, this is now a metaphysical question because we must ask: Does everyone who doesn’t have one in actually have the same one in?

That cat would be on a one way trip to as far away as possible for an hour.

oh alright, thirty-seven seconds.

… six

… no just six

… shut up

But my point is, that cat should be at least two rooms away and out of reach of causing damage during that time.

Boundaries, people.

“You keep using that word laugh. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

What’s your opinion of the word “neologologist” and are you proposing that these “most linguists” are in fact described by it? And what do you think their opinion of it would be? ;p

I envy these linguists’ ability to either not be irked by grammar errors at all or to be able to deal with their irritation when errors arise.

I’m about 50/50 on grammar errors. They bother me either way, but sometimes I feel the need to correct them and try to explain why.

Today I seem to have worded it in a way that’s rubbed people the wrong way. It has gone better. You win some, you lose some.

And yes I know I sound like an LLM. I used to not be able to communicate my ideas at all (flashback to not being able to string a 500 word essay together at school) but then I got a job working technical support and I had to figure out a way of getting my ideas and explanations across. And this is now how I communicate, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, LLMs learned how to communicate in a not dissimilar way. And so we sound alike.

*whose

“who’s” is “who is”[1] or “who has”[2], and it can be wrestled into a possessive if you make “who” all or part of a name[3], but it’s the wrong sort of possessive for this context. If you really want the possessive form, it ought to be phrased “which person’s”, which is mostly what “whose” means.

(An actual linguist would speak more about the genitive and how it works in English, but I’m not as capable.)

[1]: e.g. “Who’s there?” [2]: e.g. “Who’s let the cat out again?” [3]: e.g. “This is you-know-who’s box of tricks.”

The bigger shock is that by 2155 they’re still using the smartphone form factor.

My 20th century brain is too limited to conceive of what might exist by then but that seems like an anachronism in waiting.

Brain implants might seem a likely avenue, but body modification and/or surgery isn’t going to be cheap.

And if it’s enforced by the state, well then, we’ll be Borg by 2155.

Yeah, yeah, Shen didn’t have time to invent and introduce new tech for the sake of a four panel comic. I get it. And yet…

I’d like to believe that this means that these three pieces of software actually work and that someone in high office has decided that that is unacceptable.

Paranoid authoritarians really do not like ordinary people having access to secure communications and personal privacy. That might be an avenue they can use to organise and elect someone who isn’t a paranoid authoritarian, and that won’t do.

On the other hand, these pieces of software might already be compromised and this is all an elaborate double-bluff.

In which case it’s time for a few well placed communications over purportedly secure channels that would be guaranteed to generate an authoritarian response. Which they’ll then have to pretend they didn’t read until it’s too late.

I’m talking organising - horrors - peaceful protests. They really don’t like those. They have to use their brains, or someone else’s, in order to find a good excuse to stick the boot in.

Neat. Don’t give them the ability to self-replicate and we’re golden.

nobody is fucking outside their species

Is this canon? They’re probably not having kids outside their species because that (probably) wouldn’t work (given the apparent lack of weird hybrids), but just plain copulation? Heck, we see that in the real world occasionally.

As for what the carnivores are eating, two possibilities present themselves: 1) The Disney Goofy / Pluto paradox is resolved by realising that one is more evolved than the other, and while they’re related species, they’re not the same species. The Zootopia world may have less evolved equivalents of the multiple sapient species, and they may be OK with eating them. 2) You don’t see any humans in their world. Does that mean they’re not there? Longpig is said to be delicious…

Pipewire is newer and emulates PulseAudio so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement. There’s literally a command called pipewire-pulse related to this.

It makes me wonder if they really have both installed or are mistaking Pipewire’s emulation for an active PulseAudio installation, and so it’s just Pipewire that’s acting up.

I’d say reboot, but being in space might be one of those times where that’s a non-starter. In which case, they’re going to have to get their hands dirty unpicking system hooks and trying to reattach them all again as and when Pipewire’s working again, assuming it doesn’t do that automatically.

I never had a problem with either Pipewire or real PulseAudio back when that was current. I had motherboard sound physically pop, requiring the purchase of a separate sound card, but never a driver issue, so I can’t even imagine what might be going on.

There’s something about the mouth on this character that reminds me of this ancient GIF: https://tenor.com/view/cereal-funny-laugh-explode-milk-gif-7566949

Might be nothing there. A skeleton held together by hopes and dreams (or ill will and nightmares) is already pretty creepy as it is.

If Death’s got a prosthesis or a baculum in there, it goes from creepy to, frankly, curious.