No Good Thumbnails
Shaenon: Just another set of thumbnails. Violet!Water Cooler is a lot of fun to draw, and also hard to explain to people.
Channing: I actually can’t believe I got this long into “Skin Horse” before including a character who is limited to five words or less and has to verbally express themselves using only those five words. It’s kind of a repeating theme when you look at my overarching themes, which, as overarching themes go, is admittedly somewhat uninspiring.
One of my robot characters could literally only say the F-word. I mean, literally. That’s all he was capable of saying. Explaining why this was would take a while.
Well at least it’s a very versatile word.
Is it Violet!Water Cooler or Water Cooler!Violet? What does that exclamation point stand for, anyways?
As I’ve seen it used, the word before the exclamation point is used as to modify the word after. So Violet!Water Cooler would be the Water Cooler in Violet’s robot body, while Water Cooler!Violet would be Violet doing… something as a water cooler, or in its shape, or whatever. (Like Nick could be Heli!Nick for as he is most of the time, and Violet!Nick for when he was using the robot body.) Heck if I know where this notation came from, though.
According to TVTropes, it comes from fanfic tags. It doesn’t say why exclamation marks, though.
Easier to type than “|” and/or more commonly used, I would guess. And not used for something else (without spaces)
Reacting to Guesticus down there: By the way, “pipe fic” appears to be an unused term (whatever the meaning may be)
Actually, Violet!Water Cooler and Water Cooler!Violet would be the same in this particular case, but only because she has been in more than one body AND the Violet drone has had other people in it before.
The easiest way to remember it is thinking that “X!Y” means “the X version of Y”. In this case, the Violet version of the Water Cooler (as opposed to Original!Water Cooler) is the same as the Water Cooler version of Violet (as opposed to Nick!Violet).
I suspect that the use of exclamation points for fanfic like this was inspired by the old bang path notation used on pre-Internet email systems. In the old UUNET system, email addresses were of the form server!username, instead of the username@server system used now. Exclamation marks were also used to separate server names if a message had to go through multiple servers, so you might address an email as server1!server2!server3!username to specify the full routing path. This system largely vanished when the more modern TCP/IP systems appeared, but you can still find it embedded in the routing information in some email messages.
I assume the robot that could only say the F-word was a Baltimore PD detective.
Reading Tip’s line in that 3rd thumbnail for the second time, suddenly I’m shipping Helen Narbon/Tip.
(TUNE: “Three Little Maids From School”, Gilbert and Sullivan)
Five little words can Bubbles say!
Seen in a sketch on a bright Sun-day!
Still gets her meaning across, some way …
Five little words she’ll say!
Most hardcore of the cooler dames!
”Service is my only joy,” she claims!
She’s kicking butt and taking names!
Five little words she’ll say …
(That’s all she needs, OK?)
Five little words, so ordinary,
Make up her whole vocabulary!
M. understands her, it’s slightly scary!
How does he do it, pray?
Five little WORDS she’ll say!
Agh! There’s that exclamation point again!
davidbreslin101: seems, going by the first ‘panel’, he wanted Chris
The use of the exclamation point might be to differentiate from the ‘/’ used in Shippage
“She’s like Nuku Nuku, but instead of a cat, she used to be an intelligent water cooler with a one-sentence vocabulary.”
How’s that?
Who, or what, is/was a ‘Nuku Nuku’?
There are been (at least) two origin stories for Nuku Nuku. In the one I prefer, she was an actual cat whose mind was transferred from her dying original body into a prototype military android by genius inventor, estranged from his armsmaker wife, due to the pleas of his distraught son.
Actually, it was her brain that was transplanted into the android body. “Nine lives, nine hundred horsepower,” nyao.
Which could also describe me when I have too much catnip, nyao! >^_^<
The title character from the anime All-Purpose Cultural Cat-Girl Nuku Nuku. You have to watch it to truly get the reference, nyao.
I suspect the single word/phrase trope may be a meme soon. For one reason: “I am Groot!”
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before: “That’s true you’re absolutely right”