page 1208 – Meeting The Neighbors
Under normal circumstances, I would feel the need to apologize for getting the page up this late in the day, but ACTUALLY this is well ahead of schedule! I’d already told everyone there was no chance of me getting the next page up on Monday AT ALL, and to expect sometime Tuesday at the very earliest! And I meant that, too, cos I was at a convention all weekend… or at least I’d PLANED to be. But then a big ol’ winder storm kicked up and I wound up staying home Sunday instead of braving all those icy roads, and suddenly I was a lot less behind schedule than expected. Granted, I was also REALLY tired from two days of very early morning drives, but apparently I could hold things together enough to get this page done well before the day wrapped up! Now, the bigger question is if I’ll be able to KEEP getting stuff done on time while I’m also trying to crank out a new batch of Conventional Wisdom comics at the same time as these…
In the meantime, look! Our periodic reminder that Vengeance is still a character in this comic!
(EDIT: Okay, Voting Incentive is up!)
I’m not sure Vengeance has a mouth to eat with (we’ve certainly never seen his mouth). Even if he does, I don’t think he eats people. He just has a passive fear aura going, allowing them to think he does things like that (and also explains the background color change). We saw some ice cream in front of him earlier, but it’s unclear whether he actually ate any or it just melted in the bowl.
On a separate topic, now that the ingredients have been extracted from portal storage, does the ship actually have cooking facilities, like a stove/oven? Given the captain’s tendency to feed his passengers via vending machines, I would not be surprised if there’s no oven on the ship.
Vengeance eats in whatever the worst way you personally can imagine is.
As for the cooking facilities… I could crack another joke, but it actually is going to get addressed shortly. In fact, there WAS going to be some dialog from Ichabod on that subject in this page, but I decided having “background dialog” made the page too cluttered, so that bit got pushed back to a later page.
Given the existence of much much better technology for cooking already (microwaves!) I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s no ovens anywhere (not just on this ship)
I hope you realize those are called microwave ovens. I will try to skip the discussion of whether they’re “better” than conventional ovens, but I can easily believe FOT has newer appliances for cooking that don’t include the word “oven” in their names.
No ovens anywhere is harder to believe, though – I’d expect there to at least be some in a few museums, and there could be some luddites or even Space Amish who use conventional/microwave/toaster ovens instead of the newer cooking appliances.
I’m suddenly tempted to declare that future slang has shifted so that every cooking apparatus is now referred to as a “food whatchamajig” and only old foggies like Ichabod still use antiquated words like “oven” anymore.
Technically, sure, but in common usage I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to one as such in conversation. Somewhat, I suppose, like the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to their car as their “automobile” in conversation, despite having seen the word used in print zillions of times to refer to the vehicles as a group. I would classify “microwave oven” as an archaic phrasing, even now, much less in FOT timeframe, when it has been superseded by food whatchamajigs unless you’re s Space Amish, of course.
**Of course the caveat on all that is that word usage is regional so there may be places or entire countries still where “microwave oven” is preferred. But I’ve never lived in any of them yet.
Though as far as word usage, I’ve always assumed what I consider to be the default scifi assumption – that the characters a zillion years from now are all speaking neopostenglishineseian anyway and our future-viewer is just translating it for us into Ancient English, so we’re not **really** reading what they’re actually saying anyway.
And then all 4 of the fearless heroic fighters of evil had to go excuse themselves to get another change of underwear. :D.
And they have yet to even encounter Stilez, whom they actually have reason to fear based on reputation.
Then again…
Stilez: Terrifying based on reputation but adorable and mostly harmless when you get to know her.
V: Unknown based on reputation but absolutely terrifying when you get to know him. And probably not harmless, despite us never actually having seen him harm anyone.