The OTHER Totally Real Holiday Happening in 2025
Okay, I alluded to this before, but I’ll just go ahead and say it right out in the open: I had absolutely NO ideas for an April Fool’s Day joke this year. In previous years, I’d had fun playing around with a spontaneous change in art style or medium, but I just had NUTHIN’ to run with this time around. So when aqua suggested that a Nitpicker’s Day really ought to happen on April 1st, I just had to latch onto that.
Oh, and if you’re struggling to read all the tiny text on the newspaper, guess what! It’s all zoomed in and clearly legible over on Patreon!
Anyway, just in case you missed me saying it last week, this is NOT one of those times where I’ll be doing an extra regular page to make up for the special page hogging the Tuesday update. Believe me, I’d love to, but the whole “end of the month” scramble REALLY caught up with me hard this time around, and I’m actually still getting caught up on regular content that was already supposed to be done. A whole extra Far Out There page just isn’t in the cards this week, so check back for 1360 next Tuesday. Sorry!
EDIT: OKAY! NEW TWC VOTING INCENTIVE IS UP! Sorry it’s late, but I think you;ll be able to tell what took so long!
Re: Hovertext:
It was this guy
https://faroutthere.com/comic/page-201-so-what-are-we-doing/
He just wanted to contribute
You sure he didn’t want to be a part of the celebrations?
It’s difficult to thoroughly analyze his true character motivations, as Banner Guy’s entry seems to be missing from the cast page.
*note to self: have Banner Guy become a hugely plot-relevant character five hundred pages from now*
yay i have impact!
a nitpicker holiday being a synonym for disaster makes sense.
i definitely like the idea that the banner guy contributed the banner free of charge as thanks for the nitpickers showing up and saving the day in that arc, atleast one nitpickeer figured it out. it was bugging them, much was destroyed by trying to figure this out without asking anyone.
Aunt Domino was only up there looking for clues!
So, why is it a “national” Nitpickers day? Seems like a very small region. I suspect that the Guild tried to get various Galaxies, Quadrants, Systems, and Planets to establish such a holiday…but nobody really likes Nitpickers much, so they all refused. Only the one Nation on the one Planet where Nitpicker Universal HQ is located agreed to establish a holiday, and that was only because of the Huge amount of Tax money the guild brings in for having located there…it’s basically their entire National Budget.
Honestly, the real reason is that I tried a lot of more celestially-oriented designations, but “National ____ Day” still sounded funnier to me than any of them.
how big are nations in far out there? i think most planets have seemed to have a single government and culture so far, Astrid is part of a police force covering multiple planets. are nations global, or even multi planetary? is there a single governing body with a lax control of the galaxy in far out there?
The answer is “Yes.”
The longer answer is that it’ll be whatever a specific comic requires. Some national/governmental/jurisdictional span across numerous planetary systems, others only don’t even cover the entirety of a single planet.
@ Bitz: A better answer would be “it varies” and “there are layers to government”. To explain:
‘Nation’ in FOT would be a political field, akin to our current ‘local, ‘district’, ‘state’ and ‘national’ levels of government. It would expand upon from there, with inclusions such as ‘planetary’, ‘inter-planetary’, and more.
What level you want to interact with depends not only on where you are, but also what you’re doing. For example, FOT will never interact with the Galactic Level of government, as they literally only care about everyone in FOT using a consistent currency. Anything but people trying to make a new currency is not their problem, up to and INCLUDING attempting to make fake money. It’s just not worth it to them, though they MAY be the ones who initiated the Nitpicker’s Guild.
Interplanetary Governments may come up occasionally, and they’re usually more active. The specifics vary from option to option, with some being Empires, others being Peace Treaties, and yet other’s being useless places where the planetary governments send those they want to abandon in political limbo.
Planetary Governments are usually where most of the authority is, though they’re not always who you want to deal with. They regularly have authority over the space lanes in and out of a planet, as well as the Space Ports, but sometimes have no real authority outside of that. Depending on the planet, this alone can give them a LOT of authority from which they are in near complete control over the planet’s governments, or be the cause for them to have been limited to little more than a regulatory body with no real enforcement power. Which one occurs depends on diverse & numerous enough internal & external factors that it’s treated as random.
Then you get down to National Level, which can be anything from an entire Continent down to a single island that only a few thousand people live on. Sometimes this merges with the Planetary Government, sometimes it’s mistaken for the Planetary Government, and sometimes it has absolutely no power at all due to the Planetary Government taking over all of it’s responsibilities.
Then there’s State, District and Local Governments, each of which having less and less authority and more and more direct interaction with their constituents. For example, the Local Governments run the Building Inspectors, but the District Government run the (often) incompetent Local Police Force, and the State Government run the (hopefully) competent Local Police Force.