There’s staggering amounts of of weirdness in places like Florida and Texas, it’s just all the kind of weirdness you’d rather didn’t exist in the world.
As a Texan, not all of Texas is weird in that way (the shear variety of non-native parrots and our endangered psychedelic cacti come to mind), but I’d have to admit I’d much rather Ted Cruz blast away off the planet than any zombie or talking dog.
Not all of Texas is weird in a bad way, and not all Texans are weird in a bad way. I count myself among the Texans who are weird in a good way, and I’m not the only one. (At least, I *hope* I’m weird in a good way…)
@ Candace,
Our political alignments seem very different but based upon what I have seen of your posts over the past five years or more I would say that your hope has been completely fulfilled. 🙂
Ya got me there! But Austin is the one that *advertises* itself as weird. As in “Keep Austin Weird”. The joke in some conservative circles was that Austin is where Californians move when they get too liberal by Californian standards. 😀
@Towering Barbarian: “The joke in some conservative circles was that Austin is where Californians move when they get too liberal by Californian standards.” Well, that’s actually more or less factual. Probably somewhat of an exaggeration, and not the full story, but not really false. Of course, people also tend to leave California (and other states) for Texas because of the lower cost of living, and lower real estate costs here. I get the impression that Californians do tend to favor the Austin area. And yeah, Austin is weird, and getting weirder. ;-D
And then there’s Jersey (as in New). At best, it can be used as a warning to others. A mildly radioactive benzene soaked warning of just about everything done wrong. On a generous day, I’ll give some credit to “they meant well”. Most days? Nope. Epic examples of greed/ambition/idiocy from every part of the political spectrum are the norm.
Well there will be eventually more weirdness, since normal humans become mad scientists and those create sentient nonhuman constructs, among other things. So what does Nera’s shirt say? “I grow Spock”?
thanks for giving the source of this term, I’ve seen it since some times already and as a non native speaker had no idea it was an Heinlein artifact (and now I will likely refrain from using it).
I look forward to the day when the AI robot, having replaced its bricklayer trainer by learning the smooth economy of movement ingrained into the human-operated waldoes, is in turn replaced by the 3D printer… 😉
Robert Nowall:
RAH didn’t just coin the term “waldoes”, he created the very concept of them and has been recognized as their point of origin by those who eventually built them based on his descriptions in the book “Waldo”.
Further trivia – he also came up with the idea of water beds before they became the hip new thing, although Heinlein envisaged them as a way for long-term spacers to ease their re-acclimation to earth’s gravity.
There was at least one other major real-world scientific advance that he came up with but I can’t dredge whatever it was/they were out of my uncooperative memory at the moment.
Yes, I’m a fan, and have been since about third grade in the mid 60s when I started reading his preteen and teen oriented stories. Didn’t take me long to graduate to the deeper and somewhat more socially relevant stuff!
Re: Forrest M. Davis: I don’t think Heinlein can be credited with the concept, just the name. Others were already trying to manipulate by remote control before he wrote “Waldo.” Naming is important, though.
You can credit Heinlein with deducing the nuclear weapon face-off in “Solution Unsatisfactory.”
He also describes cell phones in “Space Cadet.”
Yup, I’m a fan, too, also starting in third grade when I was looking at the Margueritte Henry books and my eye drifted to Heinlein. (I owe her a great deal for that.) Every so often I’ll dig out my copies and reread them, or do something like work out the “video game” at the beginning of “Space Cadet,” or trace out on a map the route taken by the characters in “The Year of the Jackpot.”
Tigerlily is not really from Lovetron. Berenice was born on Earth, and went Mad. But the bees noticed her, because of her particular style of spring-powered clockwork Madness, and implanted the idea of her being a Princess of Lovetron in her mind.
Because Lovetron runs on spring-powered clockwork, and Lovetron needs technicians around with thumbs.
But her attitude needed to be adjusted. Can’t have a spunky sassy spark who might throw a spanner in the spinning gears. No, they wanted a smiling Stepford spark, a sub to their oh-so genteel dom.
Further whack idea:
Gavotte, having endured the unpleasant experience of having been mind-controlled against her will, decides to unleash the full Tigerlily, to wreak funky cosmic chaos.
This checks out with what we know. Pavane did introduce herself by trying to implant an idea in Sweetheart’s mind, then went on to implant a different one in every other non-human
The problem isn’t whether he can be with her. Last week, she said “I’m glad you made it,” implying that he’s welcome. The problem is that she’s not the same Tigerlily any more.
I was thinking of Tigerlily’s clockwork robot army. They offered to try to figure out how to upload them to Aimee’s Whimsey Wonderland, but they wanted to stay in this world. For them, why would going to Lovetron be any different?
(Come to think of it, does it matter to Aimee whether her server is on Earth or on Lovetron?)
BMunro: The whales probably got to the saucer in the same way Renard and #12 did at the end of Muddled Duddled Fuddled Wuddled Fox. It can’t be much fun for them on such a small spaceship, though.
I don’t think they’ll ever run out of NHIs in a world where where radiation is basically magic, and there are irresponsible people at all levels. If reality blindness returns, they may find them harder to locate.
New mad scientists are born every day. There will always be non human sentients. Just fewer in the U.S. for a little while. And I don’t think Gavotte is going.
New mad scientists are indeed born every day, which is exactly why A-Sig didn’t bother declaring war on nonhumans until it had a solution for that in place as well.
Shaenon and Jeff, I second this question! I’m finally in the position to resume a little discretionary spending and the Skin Horse books are very high on my list (possibly even the number one option after replacing the leaky kitchen sink). Not sure if I should start buying them individually or hold out for an omnibus edition…
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate how responsive you always seem to be to questions from your fan base!
Individual books it is, at least for now – Looking forward to reading through the whole thing once again (5th time? – 6th time?) in an offline mode. I’ve reread your series (all of them) more times than any other that I follow. The nearest followers are probably Questionable Content and Too Much Information, and it looks like Andy’s health issues are bringing the latter one to an incomplete end unless they can find someone to take it over. Sad to see it go, many of his characters had become as alive and relatable as your main characters are.
I’m content to finish my collection of individual volumes – especially given the stretch goals and extra stories! 😉
That said, a bundle of all volumes would make for excellent gifting…
As for “The Complete Skin-Horse Chronicles Omnibus Edition” which includes *everything* (even Nick’s journal and the dossiers + wallpaper from Patreon) there definitely should be one. Only one, collectibility assured by NFT. So Shaenon and Jeff can retire to their own island!
Were ALL the Madbloodbots destroyed? Will we be seeing any, or Bruce the Protocol Droid, entering the craft?
I HOPE the final scene does not include the phrase “It’s a cookbook!”
All we ever were told was that two dozen of the androids went north to meet with the hamsters. And we didn’t see even that many after the hamsters… repurposed them.
That leaves well over 14,000 that may very well still be roaming around somewhere (and I’m pretty sure we saw a few of them in the crowd at the robot deathmatch). And none of them really has much reason to want to leave. They look human enough that with a little effort, they could blend into human society, whilst still retaining their autonomy as machines.
And Bruce and his buddies work for Dave and Helen, so I really don’t see them wanting to leave (if only because they value their circuit boards).
As long as SF fans and otaku exist there will always be plenty of weirdness. 🙂
…plenty of non-awful weirdness, anyway.
There’s staggering amounts of of weirdness in places like Florida and Texas, it’s just all the kind of weirdness you’d rather didn’t exist in the world.
As a Texan, not all of Texas is weird in that way (the shear variety of non-native parrots and our endangered psychedelic cacti come to mind), but I’d have to admit I’d much rather Ted Cruz blast away off the planet than any zombie or talking dog.
@ Gfrogs,
“The Woke shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us will colonise the Universe!”. 🙂
Awesome! Have a good trip!
@Rob Loughrey,
Thank you. And in return I wish you good luck in trying to discover fire. 🙂
I’ve been operating on some time on the theory that Ted Cruz is actually a lizard person from Zeta Reticuli in a human suit.
Not all of Texas is weird in a bad way, and not all Texans are weird in a bad way. I count myself among the Texans who are weird in a good way, and I’m not the only one. (At least, I *hope* I’m weird in a good way…)
@ Candace,
Our political alignments seem very different but based upon what I have seen of your posts over the past five years or more I would say that your hope has been completely fulfilled. 🙂
@Towering Barbarian,
Thank you! 🙂
“It’s just the sort of weirdness you’d rather didn’t exist in the world.”.
Yeah, your assessment of Austin in Texas and Dade County in Florida are completely correct. 😛
Don’t just pick on Dade County. All of Fl is weird. Think The Villages or Tallahassee. Or even The House of Mouse.
Ricky from IT (Internet Today) is a Floridian and even he reckons Florida is not quite right. He loves the place as his home … but, yeah, nah.
I take it you’ve never been to Houston either, if you think Austin is the only part of Texas that doesn’t agree with your politics.
Ya got me there! But Austin is the one that *advertises* itself as weird. As in “Keep Austin Weird”. The joke in some conservative circles was that Austin is where Californians move when they get too liberal by Californian standards. 😀
@Towering Barbarian: “The joke in some conservative circles was that Austin is where Californians move when they get too liberal by Californian standards.” Well, that’s actually more or less factual. Probably somewhat of an exaggeration, and not the full story, but not really false. Of course, people also tend to leave California (and other states) for Texas because of the lower cost of living, and lower real estate costs here. I get the impression that Californians do tend to favor the Austin area. And yeah, Austin is weird, and getting weirder. ;-D
And then there’s Jersey (as in New). At best, it can be used as a warning to others. A mildly radioactive benzene soaked warning of just about everything done wrong. On a generous day, I’ll give some credit to “they meant well”. Most days? Nope. Epic examples of greed/ambition/idiocy from every part of the political spectrum are the norm.
Nera and Jonah look like I feel. Bewildered. Dismayed.
But Tip sounding the alarm echoes my deepest disconcertment: “Come back!”
Well there will be eventually more weirdness, since normal humans become mad scientists and those create sentient nonhuman constructs, among other things. So what does Nera’s shirt say? “I grow Spock”?
The t-shirt is “I Grok Spock”. You get a better view of it in yesterday’s strip.
And if you don’t grok the term “grok”, check out Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
I don’t know of many other words found in English dictionaries that we’ve looted from a Martian language…
thanks for giving the source of this term, I’ve seen it since some times already and as a non native speaker had no idea it was an Heinlein artifact (and now I will likely refrain from using it).
Can’t vouch for Martian, but Heinlein also coined the word “waldoes.”
And now with the advent of 5G, remote physical work via waldo is almost an inevitability.
Very true, Sheik.
I look forward to the day when the AI robot, having replaced its bricklayer trainer by learning the smooth economy of movement ingrained into the human-operated waldoes, is in turn replaced by the 3D printer… 😉
Robert Nowall:
RAH didn’t just coin the term “waldoes”, he created the very concept of them and has been recognized as their point of origin by those who eventually built them based on his descriptions in the book “Waldo”.
Further trivia – he also came up with the idea of water beds before they became the hip new thing, although Heinlein envisaged them as a way for long-term spacers to ease their re-acclimation to earth’s gravity.
There was at least one other major real-world scientific advance that he came up with but I can’t dredge whatever it was/they were out of my uncooperative memory at the moment.
Yes, I’m a fan, and have been since about third grade in the mid 60s when I started reading his preteen and teen oriented stories. Didn’t take me long to graduate to the deeper and somewhat more socially relevant stuff!
Re: Forrest M. Davis: I don’t think Heinlein can be credited with the concept, just the name. Others were already trying to manipulate by remote control before he wrote “Waldo.” Naming is important, though.
You can credit Heinlein with deducing the nuclear weapon face-off in “Solution Unsatisfactory.”
He also describes cell phones in “Space Cadet.”
Yup, I’m a fan, too, also starting in third grade when I was looking at the Margueritte Henry books and my eye drifted to Heinlein. (I owe her a great deal for that.) Every so often I’ll dig out my copies and reread them, or do something like work out the “video game” at the beginning of “Space Cadet,” or trace out on a map the route taken by the characters in “The Year of the Jackpot.”
I see that Tip is taking this with dignity and grace.
Well … all the dignity and grace he can muster anyway.
Whack idea:
Tigerlily is not really from Lovetron. Berenice was born on Earth, and went Mad. But the bees noticed her, because of her particular style of spring-powered clockwork Madness, and implanted the idea of her being a Princess of Lovetron in her mind.
Because Lovetron runs on spring-powered clockwork, and Lovetron needs technicians around with thumbs.
But her attitude needed to be adjusted. Can’t have a spunky sassy spark who might throw a spanner in the spinning gears. No, they wanted a smiling Stepford spark, a sub to their oh-so genteel dom.
Further whack idea:
Gavotte, having endured the unpleasant experience of having been mind-controlled against her will, decides to unleash the full Tigerlily, to wreak funky cosmic chaos.
This checks out with what we know. Pavane did introduce herself by trying to implant an idea in Sweetheart’s mind, then went on to implant a different one in every other non-human
I’ve said before that my issue with the whoie Bernice-of-Lovetron-is-a-scam theory is that I can’t see what Pavane gets out of it.
Now that I can, I am ranking it as “plausible”.
So…
Boggle anyone?
Actually, that’s a good point.
What happens to the next batch of super- mutant Ur-girbils that are created?
Whaddya mean “next batch”? There’s an island full of them, and I don’t see any of them here waiting to board.
Plus the contents of hundreds of mad scientist labs all over the world.
What if Tip became a werewolf again to be with Tiger Lily.
The problem isn’t whether he can be with her. Last week, she said “I’m glad you made it,” implying that he’s welcome. The problem is that she’s not the same Tigerlily any more.
She’s very definite that *all* the cryptids are going away. Are they?
That’s what I was wondering.
She seems to have an unwarranted faith in the efficiency of the Lovetron operation.
I was thinking of Tigerlily’s clockwork robot army. They offered to try to figure out how to upload them to Aimee’s Whimsey Wonderland, but they wanted to stay in this world. For them, why would going to Lovetron be any different?
(Come to think of it, does it matter to Aimee whether her server is on Earth or on Lovetron?)
I was wondering myself how the sentient whales were supposed to get to Kansas.
BMunro: The whales probably got to the saucer in the same way Renard and #12 did at the end of Muddled Duddled Fuddled Wuddled Fox. It can’t be much fun for them on such a small spaceship, though.
I don’t think they’ll ever run out of NHIs in a world where where radiation is basically magic, and there are irresponsible people at all levels. If reality blindness returns, they may find them harder to locate.
They’ve got their own ride — a Klingon warship.
New mad scientists are born every day. There will always be non human sentients. Just fewer in the U.S. for a little while. And I don’t think Gavotte is going.
New mad scientists are indeed born every day, which is exactly why A-Sig didn’t bother declaring war on nonhumans until it had a solution for that in place as well.
The Cure ain’t just Robert Smith’s band.
Oh snap, I only just noticed we’re 3 strips into a new chapter!
Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon was so long that I thought it might be the very last one
“Phantomwise” comes at the *end* of “Through the Looking Glass.”
Likewise.
Nera has really skinny ankles here. She should always wear boots. Or at least hightops…
Hey, at least she’s not wearing those ultra-skinny jeans that make girls look anorexic.
The best weird is homegrown anyway. [looks longingly at flying saucer]
With the cryptids about to depart, it tears Nera’s longings apart. If weirdness is through, just what will they do? Board game reviews, for a start.
Nice!
Cheer up, Nora. It ain’t over yet.
When will “The Complete Skin-Horse Chronicles” become available for delivery and how much am I gonna shell out for them?
Shaenon and Jeff, I second this question! I’m finally in the position to resume a little discretionary spending and the Skin Horse books are very high on my list (possibly even the number one option after replacing the leaky kitchen sink). Not sure if I should start buying them individually or hold out for an omnibus edition…
I don’t know if we’ll ever do an omnibus, but there should be two more volumes coming soon…
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate how responsive you always seem to be to questions from your fan base!
Individual books it is, at least for now – Looking forward to reading through the whole thing once again (5th time? – 6th time?) in an offline mode. I’ve reread your series (all of them) more times than any other that I follow. The nearest followers are probably Questionable Content and Too Much Information, and it looks like Andy’s health issues are bringing the latter one to an incomplete end unless they can find someone to take it over. Sad to see it go, many of his characters had become as alive and relatable as your main characters are.
I’m content to finish my collection of individual volumes – especially given the stretch goals and extra stories! 😉
That said, a bundle of all volumes would make for excellent gifting…
As for “The Complete Skin-Horse Chronicles Omnibus Edition” which includes *everything* (even Nick’s journal and the dossiers + wallpaper from Patreon) there definitely should be one. Only one, collectibility assured by NFT. So Shaenon and Jeff can retire to their own island!
Move to Europe. We’ve never seen A-sig doing anything abroad..
(I love this comic, but you gotta admit it’s sort of America-centric.)
There was once mention of the Sistine Chapel, Unity and Sweetheart, and double-excommunication…
That’s a mighty frail peg to hang any framework of speculation on. 🙂
Well, sure. That’s, what A-sig *wants* you to think! ^_~
Were ALL the Madbloodbots destroyed? Will we be seeing any, or Bruce the Protocol Droid, entering the craft?
I HOPE the final scene does not include the phrase “It’s a cookbook!”
Unless it’s Unity exclaiming it! 😉
All we ever were told was that two dozen of the androids went north to meet with the hamsters. And we didn’t see even that many after the hamsters… repurposed them.
That leaves well over 14,000 that may very well still be roaming around somewhere (and I’m pretty sure we saw a few of them in the crowd at the robot deathmatch). And none of them really has much reason to want to leave. They look human enough that with a little effort, they could blend into human society, whilst still retaining their autonomy as machines.
And Bruce and his buddies work for Dave and Helen, so I really don’t see them wanting to leave (if only because they value their circuit boards).
Must have been plenty of them left because they threw a reunion party for Mad blood in the closing Narbonic montage as I recall. 🙂
Some Madblood robots were seen at the “Green Noah” Battle of the Robots that Nick won.
Considering Tip was an Ex-were-Chihuahua dog thing, I think he has a chance on the spaceship lol.
Berenice did tell him “I’m glad you made it.”