page 1268: cooking sounds hard
Wow, a reference to Mariska’s ill-fated dating life AND a callback to some of the other Nitpickers we never see! I should have tried to squeeze Ichabod’s girlfriend and the story behind Tabitha’s Mom and what’s inside The Mystery Room, just to complete the set of stuff that doesn’t get explained.
Okay, so all the usual stuff about a new TWC Voting Incentive going up of Friday and some extra Patreon content comic up and so on and so forth apply to the coming days… but I’m not gonna lie to ya’ll, I’m too busy being distracted by the fact that I’VE FINALLY FINISHED RE-POSTING ALL THE OLD CONVENTIONAL WISDOM COMICS TO THE NEW SITE! Granted, I’m only “done” in the sense that I’m done re-posting Far Out There material, which is to say “still with a lot of old Bonus Incentives and Patreon extras and stray other stuff left to do.” But still! The main comic archive is finally up to date! And it only took… more than a whole year longer than Far Out There did! That honestly seems like it should have been the other way around; but then, Conventional Wisdom technically never went on hiatus like Far Out There did. Does this mean that Far Out There will finally be going back to two pages a week? Not anytime soon, but I DID get this page done a lot earlier than most pages have gotten done recently, so clearly the work flow is stating to improve at least somewhat!
EDIT: TWC Voting Incentive is up!
What this comic is saying is that Mariska’s dating problems aren’t, as I expected, always her choices in dates. Sometimes, if not commonly, the issue is Mariska herself. And one of her character traits is that she’s obstinately refusing to learn lessons from her own past. I had just thought that she was clumsy until now.
I mean, it’s gonna be all of those problems at once, PLUS MORE, but yeah. One of Mariska’s defining character traits is a certain amount of indefensible optimism, which includes an extreme reluctance to (permanently) admit hard truths about herself and others.
…which is honestly a more common trait among Nitpickers than the nature of the job would lead one to believe.
the saying goes that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and since the resemblance between lawyers roles and nitpickers has already been pointed out, likely the same saying exists in the future for them. they probably need to hire other nitpickers to nitpick their own personal issues, but are too competitive and proud to do so. either that or they just looked around at the available nitpickers and figured none of them really ought to be giving personal advice either 😉
re: hovertext
it reminded me of this …looks like japan already thought of these a million years early!
Or maybe that was the intent anyway..overpriced and alot of work but no actual substance… 😀
Sounds like luxury gourmet dining to ME!
Also, with all due respect to the crew of Mothership Charlie, I don’t think they have to worry about Hangover Demons. Elapsed time for Stilez to defeat Hangover Demons, 14 seconds, and only because she was toying with them for the first 13. And that’s only if the Hangover Demons don’t run into Vengeance first and flee the ship of their own accord in panic. Not to mention the fact that the Caligari family appears to use Demons regularly as cooking appliances for meals, they might end up getting turned into a Waffle Iron or something….
In that situation, Ed8, the Hangover Demons aren’t the danger. It’s Stillez realising that her headache, and Tax’s headache, originated from the Hangover Demons. Chances of Stillez compromising hull integrity in that situation are reasonably high. And that’s assuming that she doesn’t try eating them, and gets drunk from the result, which is potentially far more terrifying. Stillez with her inhibitions is terrifying, without them we have a 50% chance of her destroying the ship, a 25% chance of her sleeping it off, and a 25% chance of Blitz completely ignoring how alcohol actually affects a person in order to “do fun things” with Stillez while she’s drunk.
So, some problems with this I see are:
a. From what I’ve read about them, Hangover Demons don’t cause hangovers, but rather are caused by them – or rather, more specifically, they are the physical corporeal manifestation of the person’s hangover agony as channeled through the connection with the immaterial starches interface with nonspace in the digestive tract. The worse the original drinker’s hangover, the more powerful the HD, that being why they were so difficult to defeat (because Mariska). Usually, the tactic is just to play defense against them until the original person’s hangover goes away and breaks the connection to the pain energy they feed off of, but that would take too long in their case (because Mariska would probably get another hangover before they ran out of energy)
b. Stilez’s superregenration/ultrahealing would mean that she would not experience headaches, or they would be cured instantly, and would she not be affected by alcohols to begin with as her hypermetabolism would process the toxin immediately upon consuption. She considers Masogentes Genocide Pies as a tasty desert snack (because callback!). Likely she’s not affected by any toxins or drugs, with maybe the possible exception of catnip (because cat) or alternately they discover she gets intoxicated off of some unremarkable ordinary food/drink item that has no effect on regular people (because irony). That would still be difficult, though, because as much as she eats everything in sight it would be hard to find something she had never had before. It’d have to be something ordinary, but rare. Possibly something healthy like broccoli, because she doesn’t normally recognize it as a food item unless it’s junk.
c. Stilez basically has her inhibitions already set to 110% max anyway, and her judgement and common sense set to zero, so there really wouldn’t be any difference if intoxicated. Unless she was one of those morose depressing drunks instead, and started crying and huging people and reminiscing sadly about her childhood in the lab complex. Now that would be WEIRD seeing Stilez like that of all people. Or whatver substance makes her drunk actuall yhas the opposite effect, since she’s essentially drunk all the time, and instead she becomes smart, logical, calm, and serious. That would be even weirder.
d. Even drunk, she wouldn’t do anything to compromise hull integrity with Tax still on board. That’s her one most important thing she would always remember (because if that weren’t true Tax would never have survived this long with her)
I’m pretty sure B is the most relevant thing. It feels like a stretch to imagine that Stilez could shrug off a laser to the face but being impaired by something she drank.
…although that DOES start me wondering what kind of thing it actually WOULD take to cause such a reaction (Oh gosh, look at that, Blitz is pondering “doing fun things”)
Will we have to wait for the Stilez&Tax spinoff comic for that one? 😉
Honestly, the more I think about it, the more my gut says that Stilez would just be a sleepy drunk (or the equivalent) simply because it’s kind of the only contrast to her normal personality that works narrative. Like, if Stilez starts being really noisy and knocking stuff over and acting without thinking… would anyone even notice?
Also, I was gonna make a joke about not tempting me with the idea of a Stilex 7 Tax comic… but that’s basically what half the Patreon Mad-Lib comics end up being anyway, right?
This is true, but I kind of assumed those were noncanonical unless explicitly otherwise stated, whereas a dedicated comic would be inherently canonical. And by dedicated I would mean something like TKSODD rather than a 4th concurrent comic. 😉 I’m sure that would take a lot of planning though as far as their backstory, timeline, etc. OR maybe you already have that figured out?