Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2021-05-26
‹‹ First ‹ Prev Buy! Comments(41) Next › Last ››

2021-05-26

by shaenon on May 26, 2021 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Off to the Fair
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Discussion (41) ¬

  1. Tiff Hudson
    May 26, 2021, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    1) Dont’ worry. You will respawn.
    2) Do worry. Nick will make you wish that you hadn’t.

  2. Tiff Hudson
    May 26, 2021, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    s/t’/’t/

    • David B Huber
      May 26, 2021, 12:22 am | # | Reply

      Ah for the “good old days” when a sed script converting Generic Text printer output to HTML was good enough! 😉

      Today we need autocorrect keyboard filters to let us know we are misspelling “sex”… *sigh*

  3. Smilodon
    May 26, 2021, 12:11 am | # | Reply

    Whew…I was a bit worried about how dangerous Nick’s new power is. Lovelace doesn’t seem to have expected that.

    • Towering Barbarian
      May 26, 2021, 12:19 am | # | Reply

      She knew that Nick’s deletion powers were sinister but now she *really* knows. 🙂

      • David B Huber
        May 26, 2021, 12:25 am | # | Reply

        Consternation is good for her!

        I wonder if any of her backups automatically spawned during that little interlude?

        • D. Walker
          May 26, 2021, 9:18 am | # | Reply

          I assume when you’re a digital being, you anticipate the possibility of brief connectivity outages and put a time delay on activating backups.

          Otherwise, you’d be cloning yourself every time the wi-fi hiccuped, and that would get annoying pretty quickly.

  4. thejoemoose
    May 26, 2021, 12:12 am | # | Reply

    Oh wow, wasn’t expecting *this*

  5. Jim Janney
    May 26, 2021, 12:14 am | # | Reply

    I’m glad that wasn’t one of those status bars that gets to 98% and just…

  6. David B Huber
    May 26, 2021, 12:14 am | # | Reply

    Aimee has equipped her world with excellent fail-safes!

    And I am astonished at the expressiveness of the body language as well as the facial expressions of the actors in this strip! Shaenon has outdone herself in bringing them to life!

    • christopherheiny
      May 26, 2021, 1:34 am | # | Reply

      Agreed. Some pictures are worth a thousand words, but the past two strips constitute an entire novel plus a couple of near-death-experience memoirs.

    • Sheik
      May 26, 2021, 11:21 am | # | Reply

      It took me a while to pin down why I liked Shaenon’s work in spite of what seemed to be a very primitive style.
      Her expressiveness is second to none!

    • Clifton
      May 26, 2021, 2:59 pm | # | Reply

      Nick in panels 2 and 3 is brilliant, practically a Jules Feiffer character! And Lovelace’s hand in panel 2 is brilliant; I swear my hands do that when I get a nasty surprise. As you say, incredible expressiveness of line.

  7. Towering Barbarian
    May 26, 2021, 12:15 am | # | Reply

    It does look as though Nick has become scary to friends as well as to foes. 🙂

  8. David B Huber
    May 26, 2021, 12:33 am | # | Reply

    Kudos to jdreyfuss and BMunro for calling it!

  9. greenknight32
    May 26, 2021, 3:55 am | # | Reply

    Aimee hasn’t seen the full extent of Nick’s power. The rule really is “if you’re an AI, don’t tick Nick off – ever”.

    Anyway, he seems to have Baron’s full attention now.

  10. John Campbell
    May 26, 2021, 4:15 am | # | Reply

    Well, that’s a more comforting system message than, “buffering…”

    • D. Walker
      May 26, 2021, 9:20 am | # | Reply

      “Reticulating Splines…”

      • cbob
        May 26, 2021, 10:25 am | # | Reply

        “Teaching snakes to kick…”

      • John Campbell
        May 26, 2021, 9:22 pm | # | Reply

        Thank you, you made me spend the afternoon digging up my SimCity 2000 CD and getting it installed and working in dosbox, and I’m now 20 years into a new city.

        Jury is still out on whether that “thank you” is ironic or not.

  11. Robert Nowall
    May 26, 2021, 6:44 am | # | Reply

    But if he doesn’t know anything about the fate of Dr. Lee, he doesn’t know anything about the fate of Dr. Lee. Nick has no reason other than bad temper to be mad at him…well, no more reason than usual.

    • StClair
      May 26, 2021, 1:44 pm | # | Reply

      He’s mad that they had to waste all of this (subjective) time and do all of that STUPID stuff to find out.

    • Regret
      May 26, 2021, 2:58 pm | # | Reply

      But he does know something about the fate of Dr. Lee. He even knows two things:
      1. For some reason he cannot understand she is madly in love with him and wants to spend every waking moment with him.
      2. She is not currently spending every waking moment with him.

  12. kiralamouse
    May 26, 2021, 7:27 am | # | Reply

    Poor Lovelace, always on the wrong server when the infuriated guy with computer powers comes through…

  13. Arkutt
    May 26, 2021, 8:12 am | # | Reply

    “She stopped, because she saw, for the first time in her life, by what sort of look one learns that a man is capable of killing. But he was not looking at her. She was not sure whether he was seeing her at all or hearing her voice.”

  14. EvilMidnightLurker
    May 26, 2021, 9:03 am | # | Reply

    Nick is making Angry Seventies Doonesbury Character face right there.

  15. Michael J Mooney
    May 26, 2021, 9:58 am | # | Reply

    I think this is one of the first times we’ve seen Lovelace nervous or bothered.

    • D. Walker
      May 26, 2021, 10:55 am | # | Reply

      Well there was that time she was murdered.

      http://narbonic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/060819.jpg

      That said, I think she has gotten a better hang on “facial expressions” in the intervening time. She didn’t used to be very good at emulating human behavior.

  16. jdreyfuss
    May 26, 2021, 11:22 am | # | Reply

    HA! I was right.

  17. Robert Nowall
    May 26, 2021, 1:05 pm | # | Reply

    Don’t tick off the angry Nick. Don’t get on his sodding wick. Be friend, foe, or stranger, it puts you in danger. It’s not nice, it’s impolitic.

  18. Shadowmehr
    May 26, 2021, 1:08 pm | # | Reply

    The Baron looks like he may have added some fertilizer to the garden area. Not quite what I was expecting, but greatly appreciated nonetheless.

  19. Eowyn
    May 26, 2021, 1:18 pm | # | Reply

    I am truly cackling over the line “new rule you may not know”

    • awgiedawgie
      May 26, 2021, 4:17 pm | # | Reply

      I am laughing just as much over Baron’s response. Two little words which horribly understate just how thoroughly he has, in fact, “got it.”

  20. Author X
    May 26, 2021, 1:37 pm | # | Reply

    These expressions are fantastic, the three panels aid in comedic timing but you could tell exactly what everyone’s thinking from the middle, without dialogue, alone.

  21. The Flower Cosmic
    May 26, 2021, 2:09 pm | # | Reply

    That seems. Unpleasant.

    Good rule 😀

  22. LordDave
    May 26, 2021, 4:34 pm | # | Reply

    And that is how an AI can have a near death experience.

  23. ThatOneGuy
    May 26, 2021, 4:41 pm | # | Reply

    The first part of Mad Science is the Mad part… Nick is now to programs what regular mad scientist can be to normal people.

    You have a slight idea of how it happened, but at the same time you do not want it to repeat in fear of what might happen.

  24. georgethearchon
    May 26, 2021, 5:45 pm | # | Reply

    Just for the record, I think this has indeed now officially gone off the track of my wild hypothesising way back several strips ago. 😉

    Not sorry – I enjoy the roller-coaster ride.

  25. Jen Steffen
    May 26, 2021, 9:51 pm | # | Reply

    Well, Lovelace did tell him to hold onto his deletion powers. On the plus side, the Baron is now free.

  26. Kyle
    May 26, 2021, 11:03 pm | # | Reply

    Yet more machine envy. They can experience the harrowing, cold embrace of the void and come back afterwards to talk about it! Those lucky schmucks.

  27. Sleepy John
    May 27, 2021, 12:08 am | # | Reply

    Do I have your complete attention NOW?

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