page 1176 – lemme watch my stories
Well now, here’s an annoying brain fart. Back in the re-posting fest that was last year, I misread the old SmackJeeves comments on page 1162 and thought they meant I’d intended to animate that page. It turned out those comments were actually about the Voting Incentive, not the main comic… but Present Me actually really liked the idea I’d assumed Past Me was talking about. Having several speech bubbles on a loop, appearing one at a time instead of having to squeeze all three into a single panel (and visually communicating the act of channel surfing at the same time)? That’s a pretty clever idea if I do say so myself! So, better late than never, the idea ends up happening for real!
Oh, and if you think this page is going up a bit late because I was fiddling with the animation, nope. I was actually done with this page Saturday night. No, the ACTUAL reason for the delay was the Voting Incentive. Just like last week, I started playing around with some really intricate artworks and got waaaaaaaaaaaay too carried away with it all… to the point that it’s not done yet. Yep, I’ve been working on this one piece of art pretty much non-stop since Sunday morning, and it’s STILL not ready to put online. I was trying to get it all done and posted in one blast, but at this rate I really needed to give in and get the already-finished comic out the door already. So come back sometime tomorrow and I should FINALLY have this needlessly complicated Voting Incentive all finished and online. Man, there’s ANOTHER thing that feels weirdly nostalgic to say…
(5/19 EDIT: WOW that took longer than I expected. Sorry about the crazy delay, but I got waaaaaaaay too wrapped up in experimenting with some new art techniques… half of which you probably won’t end up being able to see, of course. But yeah, the new TWC Voting Incentive is finally up… and I’m just gonna go ahead and say it now, but there will NOT be a new one next week. Not just because I wanna make sure everybody gets a chance to see this one, either, but I’m gonna have a LOT of Real Life over the next week or so. With the amount of time I wound up blowing on this Incentive, I’m really gonna need to give myself less to do over the weekend. Hey, that’s something ELSE to feel nostalgic over!)
No wonder he’s suicidal, he used to be a renowned motivational speaker, until someone (presumably the Motivational Speakers’ Guild?) renounced him!
Though I’m still trying to figure out how many rabid whatevers can fit on the head of a pin. Wouldn’t seem like it was enough to kill someone. Maybe they’re small but very dangerous?
And if your stories had more useful knowledge on what not to do beyond “Don’t Date Person You Obviously Shouldn’t Date”, “Doing Stupid Thing On A Date Is Stupid”, and, possibly the common for your dating stories, “Unforeseen Life-Threatening Destruction Destroy Dates”, Marshall might be interested in hearing them. But your dating stories are generally end up so insane, when they aren’t with someone that causes them to start that way, that they’re useless to anyone who isn’t you. I’m talking “Can’t make a TV Show about it due to it being TOO random” levels of insane. And that’s with FOT TV Publishing.
Not having actually heard any of her dating stories, but just having heard *about* her dating stories, leaves me wondering which kind of disaster she specializes in:
A. Her dates end up as disasters because she has horrible taste and chooses horrible people to date, and those horrible people screw up the date horribly
B. The person she dates is a fine, wonderful, quality person, but SHE invariably does something on every date to make it go horribly, catastrophically wrong, despite that
C. The explanation that only works in a FOT-like universe – she doesn’t do anything wrong, her date is a fine person who doesn’t do anything wrong, and the relationship would seem to be extremely promising, but every date is ruined by some completely random, incomprehensibly unlikely and impossible to predict occurence – aka the “Disaster Magnet” theory.
If it’s A or B, there may actually be something to learn from. C – not so much.
It’s FOT. The answer for why all her dates are horrific is obviously (D) All Of The Answers. You didn’t even include (E) Easily predictable disasters that destroy the date, such as crazy ex’s turned stalker, or regular (let’s say annual) but non-specific date events destroying the date by being either too early, too late, or not paid attention to (think trying to have a romantic date on Saint Patty’s Day while a parade is going on right outside the restaurant).
Nor did you include (F) Something situational about the person she’s dating gives them weird perception on what’s normal, causing the date to go sideways. Think the Undergrounder’s in Milo Murphy’s Law. There’s one episode of that where one of Milo’s Teacher’s goes on a date with an Undergrounder and at the end of the episode praises him. When asked if she’ll go on a date with him again, her response is “Oh, no no no. He lives UNDERGROUND. He has to specify NOT to cook things on toilets”. I can easily see Mariska having multiple dates with different people who fit requirements like that.
No matter how much of a Mariska she may be, she’s still a highly trained professional expert Nitpicker, so she shouldn’t ever be foiled by anything that’s easily predictable, or even slightly remotely predictable, even if it’s early, late, or out of place. Predicting the slightest potential predictable problems is their thing – she loses all Nitpicker cred if she can’t do at least that much. That’s why I specified that it has to be utterly unpredictable stuff. Though she really ought to have predicted that also.
But she is a PROFESSIONAL Nitpicker, and we’re talking about her PERSONAL life. And the things I listed as “easily predictable” all had some variance to them, or were things that being a Nitpicker wouldn’t help you predict. Well, except for the Saint Patty’s Day Example, but it’s not exactly a holiday when parades are all that common, to my knowledge, so it’s something easily missed. So that’s my reasoning for (E).
As for my reasoning for (F), it actually comes back to the fact that she’s a Professional Nitpicker. She sees all kinds of people and enters all kinds of situations. Gaining dates with people who most would normally decide “that person’s background is too fundamentally different from my own, because they willingly choose to live in *enter awkward place here* right next to this more commonly habitable place” is perfectly reasonable. For example, I’m looking forward to discovering what went wrong when she went on a date on that planet where everyone wears living monster masks on their head that remove the toxins from the air to allow them to breathe.
The correct answer to “What goes wrong on Mariska’s dates” is always “Something even worse than whatever you were thinking just now”
I was just thinking that it was probably something worse than what I was thinking just now!
Moving the conversation to a new “Reply” list, because I don’t know how long it’s going to continue for:
Well, yes, obviously. Not only is this FOT we’re talking about, it’s a plot point that we’re NEVER going to see. Honestly, Noodle Incidents are commonplace in this story, and Mariska’s Dates are just one example of them. What was being discussed is related to WHY Mariska’s dates all go horrifically badly, not HOW.
That’s a very different question. How ascribes the details, while Why ascribes lessons Mariska could learn from, but probably doesn’t. I’ll use the lettering system to give explanations on how she could improve her dates:
– A. Horrible Dating Partners: Mariska should either heighten, lower, or completely reposition her dating standards, because her chosen relationship partners are always horrible.
– B. She’s a Horrible Date: Learn how to not Nitpick during a Date, or otherwise actively destroy the date itself. Alternatively, don’t mix Dates and Work, or learn how to calm down during a date.
– C. Unpredictable Disaster Magnet: Learn how to “roll with the punches”, and adapt to issues that arise during dates. Like the Main Character of Milo Murphy’s Law does for everything.
– D. All The Answers: All the Lessons.
– E. Understandable Disaster Magnet: Do a quick check (no more than 30 minutes, so that you don’t obsess over it) for major local events that can happen within two months of the date, either side, focusing on ones that are set for the day of the date, and ones that don’t have a specific calendar date, that may disrupt the date itself.
– F. Dating Partners with Weird Background: See the answer for A.