Happy Violent-tines Day, 2021!
First of all, this is actually my first attempt to schedule a page in advance on the new site, so let’s hope I’m actually doing this right. Cross your fingers, Future Me!
Second, I was trying to finally make good on that idea I had back on the 4th of July to use the these holiday comics as an excuse to do some more worldbuilding instead of just a glorified greeting card. This attempt is… not quite what I’d intended. I mean, it’s a nice return to Avatar doing the whole “bottomless fount of weird knowledge” thing, but I wish I’d put a bit more thought into her story behind “hahaha violent valentine presents” and done something with more of a narrative. Heck, I very nearly posted a version of this with Tabitha just mentioning some random scifi-sounding nonsense name, before it dawned on me I should at least slip in one of those recurring names that keep cropping up (that is, a SPECIFIC scifi-sounding nonsense name instead of a random one).
So, yesterday I promised you all more of an explanation when ACTUAL new comics were starting back up. I’d hoped to drop a new one right after the anniversary hit, but I didn’t get anywhere near as much site-building work done over the course of the past week as I’d hoped… since I was too busy playing around with this weekend’s stuff. I want to at LEAST get the Character Profiles online and fully updated (with new pictures for everybody) by the time regular updates begin, so I’m gonna take at least the next week to just focus on that. HOPEFULLY page 1168 will hit sometime the week-after-next, and whatever day it’s done will be the new update day for the near future.
Oh yeah, that’s the other thing: I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ll reiterate for anyone who didn’t see that Far Out There will NOT be going back to the twice-a-week update schedule while the rest of the website work still needs doing. I want to get back to that eventually, but for now I need to allow myself more time to work on more things. That and, ya know, I need to get back into the groove of doing full comics on a regular basis before I can even say for sure that I CAN keep that schedule up anymore. One step at a time, ya know?
The issue with this is that you’ll end up making a new one of these every year, and you would refuse to repeat yourself due to it being boring. Sure, you’re fine with a call-back, but practically repeating yourself seems to be a no-no to you. Sure, you’ve created a universe where there’s 1,001 strange things for every sane one, but I don’t think that you’ll end up giving us 9 different valentines-related chaos stories in the next 10 years, with one year off for something like Trigger giving Skye a Valentines Card.
That’s the thing, though, it doesn’t specifically have to be “Valentines” related. That’s part of why this page disappoints me, because it’s still technically the recognizable Real World holiday. That “4th of July” comic I was so proud of isn’t directly about American Independence Day at all, but a fully in-universe event that just so happens to vaguely resemble one of our holidays. I should have taken a second pass at writing this page so that it wasn’t explicitly about “Valentine’s Day” but instead some made up holiday that happens to also be focused on romance or relationships or chocolate or something like that. Way more potential for variety there.
True, but you’ll still end up making 9 different holiday’s for “Valentines” and “Easter” related days. That said, if you wanted to mix it up, 4th of July only matters for the US, as it’s their “Country Day” and every country has their own day. You could pick a random country (or, more specifically, Primarily English Speaking Country) and make a “Weird World Day” due to that country’s day.
I’m curious as to how a maple fudge bong would normally be used or what it would be used for when it hasn’t been rigged to explode…their culture must really like maple fudge…
😉
…what the actual hell. I saw that typo, caught it, and fixed it. HOW IS IT BACK?!?!?!?!?
(EDIT: Oh, okay, I only fixed the web-sized version, so when I changed Tabitha’s dialog, it restored the original typo. Eh, what the heck, it’s probably funnier this way.)
I’m just gonna go ahead and post this here in case anybody doesn’t see it elsewhere, but I posted a public blog on Patreon that goes into more detail on all that mysterious “website stuff” I keep saying I need to do more of before regular comic updates can resume
https://www.patreon.com/posts/far-out-there-so-48107987