Welcome to Skin Horse!
Skin Horse ran daily from 2008 to 2022. Click back to the first installment or check the dropdown menu to read the complete archives.
If you want more, we have an ongoing archive trawl with commentary running on our Patreon. Also check out the store for the complete print collections.
Thanks for visiting!
-Jeff & Shaenon
<3
Beautiful picture of the cast 🙂 I knew checking for updates wasn’t completely in vain!
Now the question is, when do we stop checking for good? When do we finally admit to ourselves that it’s over, and doesn’t need to be checked every single day, and retire the link to the completed folder?
Bite thy tongue…..You are obviously delusional.
NEVER!
I still keep checking a site that hasn’t been updated in 23 months.
There is always hope for life on Erf.
Are we talking intelligent life, or just life?
There’s at least two examples of intelligent life that I’d love to see reappear. I’m hoping that at some point if they make the final decision about either proceeding or not, that if they decide not they tell us a few paragraphs about what was to come. (at least as far as they had preplanned it)
Alas, poor Astral Aves, I knew ye well…
I check a lot of sites that have ground to a halt…I can’t bear to make myself stop.
I still check Strong Female Protagonist occasionally!
Shaenon and Jeff have earned my undying loyalty. 🙂
Same on both counts.
I mean, I still check comics that haven’t updated in years. Including my own comic, which I would know if it had updated… But sometimes you have to make room for a new comic. For example, Skin Horse moved to my “first checked every day” slot when the Narbonic Director’s Commentary was finally retired to the “completed” folder.
“Skin Horse” is departed, ’tis true. It’s made us all sorrowed and blue. But as long as it’s archived we won’t be all deprived—we’ll always have something to do.
Hear! Hear!
Aww, at least one of the cuddle cobras made it in!
<3
Yippee!!!
Starting the ride over, what a roller coaster!
Oh, and thank you… Shaenon & Jeff of course, but all the commentators make this such an enjoyable experience.
woohoo! book cover!
Ah, I was wondering if we’d get something like this. Looks great, and *biiiiiig* thank you!
(And I have to say, I’m jealous of how easily Tip rocked all those outfits throughout the series. 😛 )
<3 <3 <3
Glad to see more comments. I hope to start reading again from teh beginning!
Skin Horse is the only webcomic that I’ve followed from the beginning clear through to the end. If you’re new here, enjoy. You’re going to have an awesome ride.
I look forward to seeing what Shaenon and Jeff get up to in the future, either separately or together.
Ira looks worried. Tiger Lily coordinated her jewelry with her big ass cool space gun. This is awesome.
1) The Violet drone doesn’t look like Bubble’s body language. Isn’t that the water cooler in front of Ira? So who is operating the drone?
2) Ira and the Abbess appear to be eyeing one another. Could they share some history?
Violet/Bubbles just looks a bit uneasy. I mean, wouldn’t you be if you were standing in front of Tigerlily and that gun? And maybe the water cooler got a new brain. After all, that is what Virginia does best.
And it looks to me like Ira and the Abbess are both looking at Unity. Perhaps both of them marveling that she can actually pull off “normal human” so well (no pun intended… oh, who am I kidding? Pun totally intended!).
That’s the drone in her Violet Bee manifestation (hair, clothing), when she was being operated by Ira. Presumably that’s her controller in his hands.
Where is Nigel the Antigravity Ferret!?!1!??
12:01am… no new comic. 🙁
I know how you feel, awgiedawgie. I, too, hoped against hope that the unscheduled hiatus threw off the timing of an “ending” revealed to be an April Fool’s prank perpetrated by The Authors…
*Sigh*
That was pretty clear to me that it was a real ending. Pressure to update this for so long must have been enough to make me wish the authors a rest long enough to compensate!
Oh, I had no doubt that it was the real ending, despite some loose ends. I’m just sad that it’s over.
But yes, after all this time, Shaenon and Jeff and Pancha have earned a break.
So. When’s the Next Big Thing?
That would be the plugin that uses AI to convert your Tweet into a Haiku. 😉
Sorry to see it end Shaenon & Jeff, I’ve enjoyed Skin-horse tremendously. I re-read my Narbonic compendiums often. Can’t wait to see what comes next. I wish you both nothing but the best.
Ah well. Good to see i’m not alone in calling back here.
Community is found in strange places
I haven’t missed a comments section this much since Chaos Manor ceased with Jerry Pournelle’s passing…
Unsolicited testimonial: I was worried that Shaenon would be excessively idle without Skin Horse, so I commissioned a piece of original art from her. The commission was a mix of pernickety details embodying a couple of subtle jokes, and “make something up yourself”; if this made her roll her eyes, it didn’t come across. Needless to say, the art is gorgeous, and overall it is what I originally envisaged but even better. And very affordable. So go on, you know you want an original piece too.
The last two books are on Zoop! URL is in the comic description a few pages back… zoop . gg / c / skinhorse …just get rid of all of the spaces.
Rice University Mads have coined the term “necrobotics” for their work using murdered spiders as robotic grippers.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202201174
Ildar Rakhmatulin, a research associate at Heriot-Watt University, has open-sourced his design for $250 AI bug zappers using computer vision to aim a laser at insect pests including mosquitoes and cockroaches.
https://github.com/Ildaron/Laser_control
Mohsan Saeed (Assistant Professor, Biochemistry) is lead researcher in work at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories splicing the Omicron variant spike protein to the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain.
Testing on K18-hACE2 mice showed mortality decreased from 100% for the original SARS-CoV-2 strain to only 80% for the engineered version using the spike protein from BA.1 Omicron (which had a 0% mortality rate in the test mice, yielding only mild symptoms).
Said Saeed, “Consistent with studies published by others, this work shows that it is not the spike protein that drives Omicron pathogenicity, but instead other viral proteins”, noting that “..the K18-hACE2 mouse model is a well-established model for investigating the lethal phenotype of SARS-CoV-2.”
“The Saeed lab is hiring a postdoc! We are looking for a highly motivated virologist to work on positive-strand RNA viruses.”
Elbit Systems Ltd. has designed an autonomous killer drone for urban battlefields.
https://elbitsystems.com/media/LegionX_LANIUS-4-Web.pdf
Mike McCulloch reports progress demonstrating propelantless thrust in his lab loosely conforming to predictions based on his theory of Quantized Inertia.
QI hypothesizes that inertia originates from acceleration instantiating Rindler information horizons, receiving more “Unruh radiation” ahead than behind in accordance with Landauer’s principle. This is similar to the Casimir Effect but should not be confused with the cosmic horizon.
If confirmed, this could help explain other observations of anomalous thrust like the Em Drive and Mach Effect devices. And of course implies over-unity production of free energy.
MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms Professor Neil Gershenfeld has begun work on self-replicating “voxels” – tiny von Neumann machines acting as structural electronics to assemble AI capable robots.
The team behind Apple’s Face ID has formed Bionaut Labs to create remote controlled drug delivery microbots, says founder Michael Shpigelmacher.
The devices are small enough to be injected into the brain (“a few millimetres long”) and contain a strong magnet to guide them to their target and extract them after delivery.
Animal studies have been promising and human trials are about to begin.
Synthetic bacterium syn-3 has been granted cell motility by splicing different combinations of seven genes from Spiroplasma bacteria in an investigation testing possible origins of cell mobility by graduate student Hana Kiyama, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka City University and Professor Makoto Miyata from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University.
Eventually the researchers created a “minimally motive cell” requiring the expression of only two proteins. Professor Miyata said that the actin protein MreB is not involved in the motility of many other bacterial species, which confirms that there are multiple evolutionary pathways that led to microbial movement.
Their work offers insight into creating assemblers using synthetic biology in addition to nanotechnology.
Cyborg nanobots Real Soon Now…
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/972489
A team at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Medical Center led by Prof. Benjamin Reubinoff (director of the Swartz Stem Cell Research Center at the Goldyne Savad Institute of Gene Therapy) created male and female stem cells with the same genetic code from the same person that only differs in sex chromosomes.
Their study, “Modeling sex differences in humans using isogenic induced pluripotent stem cells”, is an outgrowth of work by Dr. Ithai Waldhorn for his doctoral dissertation. Dr. Waldhorn explained “we used the blood cells of a man with Klinefelter syndrome – a genetic syndrome in which the man has two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome (XXY), and appears in one or two out of every 1,000 males. The blood cell donor to our study was unique and one of the few Klinefelter sufferers in the world whose blood also had small subpopulations of normal male (XY) and female (XX) cells.”
The researchers hope to streamline the process of testing drug therapies for efficacy and toxicity between men and women since isolated stem cells can mature into any cell in the human body.
Rereading the archives, great fun. But I have to ask: Jeff, where is that MLP fanfic you promised us? 🙂 https://skin-horse.com/comic/2019-03-03/
Very interesting that Jeff identified as Lawful Neutral at that time.
BTW, I’ve started reading Narbonic. For the fifth time! Something always happens to drag me away every time I settle down with it (whether web or “The Perfect Collection”).
Reread category: things which still don’t quite work for me
The whole “I’m coming for you” subplot. Pavane communicating the basic concept “don’t worry, rescue is coming!” in such an unclear and frightening manner – can anyone make sense of that for me?
I mean, they eventually clarify a bit with Sweetheart, [1] but not until scaring the crap out of so, so many others.
[1] https://skin-horse.com/comic/succeed-but/
Perhaps Pavane yearned for Gavotte’s approval despite their inherently different points of view on how to handle the NHS issue (not to mention the tension between tea vs coffee drinking!)? I agree it’s surprising she thought approaching them as their creators would be comforting while simultaneously holding the position that separation was the best way to resolve the tension. Oh, wait…
Just checking back to see if the strip has restarted.
Nope. Not yet.
I’ll come back….
So this is the third strip of Shaenon’s I’ve followed to the end. What is next?
I check back once a week to find out lol
Well, there’s some new stuff in Volumes Eleven and Twelve…
And new Monster of the Week!
Goodnight, Kitirena, wherever you are!
Just so’s y’all know, I MISS YOU CRAZY PEOPLE!!!
There. I got it out of my system for a couple days. Maybe.
Electro- shock may help. or you could roam the night looking for evil dooers, like I have taken to doing
An excellent suggestion, Duane. Especially since the Tasers could do double-duty! 😉 Although I’d rather employ a sling to lob flashcubes, supercaps, RF trackers or pepper balls as needed.
The problem is thinking of a vigilante name that hasn’t already been taken!
You’re right. But, you could make a little cash as Uber Man
Duane, I think you’ve got something there! As the Metaverse supplants Augmented Reality I foresee a real need for an AI-based superhero similar to Max Headroom able to interact, intervene and indeed rescue player characters when summoned.
More than an “assistant”, Uber Man would have Agent Smith level admin access to right wrongs, change history and even issue credit! (monetary and reputation)
“When in VR you find a need
To undo actions serving greed
Or rescue with heroic deeds
Just tap an app with lightning speed for
Uber Man! (Uber Man)”
etc.
Perhaps you’re just thinking too narrowly, David. After all, who’s to say you can’t simply _invent_ a new word to use as your superhero name? Or create an amalgam of several different words – even in several languages.
As Helen was so fond of pointing out, we’re not limited by what’s possible.
aww we miss you too
A quick note to The Authors of gratitude for many years of enjoyment and Best Wishes for a rejuvenating nap.
Just don’t think you aren’t missed!
This feels like i’m stalking the strip
arent’ we all? I know I’m going to at least until I wrap my head around managing to express what a thrill and how wonderful it’s been.
So, yeah… just after midnight, and I’m still checking this page out of pure habit.
Nope, not doing that daily either.
I’ve been going over the old strips. Sure, I’ve got the books, but it’s not the same without all the comments…
My very own thoughts, put into words! I went for the whole set of volumes 1 – 12 through the Zoop campaign and will absolutely treasure them, but the user community and comments here on the site were also a big part of the experience through multiple start to finish archive trawls.
Despite things having ground to a halt…let’s all wish Jeffrey C. Wells a happy birthday.
Seconded!
(And thank you, Robert, for the reminder!)
Happy Birthday!
It just seems appropriate to wish all y’all’s a Happy Halloween!
It’s been 4 months and I still come by here
Just felt like saying “Howdy!’ and wishing all y’all’s a very Happy Thanksgiving!
“We’ll always have Skin Horse.” 😉
Let’s also wish Nick Zerhakker a happy birthday. (This is the date he gave in his blog.)
I hope all yall in retail survived Black Friday lol!!!
I did my part to help. I stayed home all day!
Glad to see the community is still keeping watch. Whatever happened to Nicks Live Journal?
Still there, but Nick stopped updating it sometime during his AG-I days. His life might’ve gotten too busy to keep up a blog / diary.
We’re all yearning for more. I’d be thrilled to see a collaborative effort bringing the famed Skin Horse Tarot Deck by Sam Dyuaaxchs to realization as a Kickstarter…
In a way I’m glad it ended as I’ve seen comic writers drag on their comics past the point of no return for cash (coughQuestionableContentcough), but I REALLY miss it.
If you haven’t seen the ad banner above or gotten an e-mail, it looks like Skin Horse Volumes Eleven and Twelve have arrived. It’s very brave to mail any out in the Month of December.