page 1358 – absolutely not lampshading anything
Okay, so first off: I’m not QUITE fully healthy yet, but I’m sure as heck doing better than I was when I posted the last page. So that’s good, I guess. Still, things only just started to improve around the start of the weekend, so if this page looks like the product of somebody who was still fairly under the weather, you know why. Sorry about that. HOPEFULLY, I’ll be fully cleaned up in time to get a fresh TWC Voting Incentive done this week… but Ive also got a lot of OTHER stuff to get caught up on that I’d hoped to get done during that week I spend blowing my nose a lot, so a few things might still be in flux over the next couple of days. I dunno, we’ll see.
But anyway, I usually try to avoid explicitly 4th wall-breaking jokes in Far Out There (at least, in the MAIN comics), but I think it works when the character is established in-universe to be the sort of person who would actually say that kind of stuff for real. And Avi would absolutely follow the whole “don’t let the audience hear the plan so that it’s more exciting when it plays out” thing in real life, just because he’s seen it on TV too many times.
EDIT: New Voting Incentive really did get done!
You need to whisper because if the Cap’n has got any sense at all he’s monitoring every singe thing those loony kids are doing and saying on his ship so he can put a stop to it before they cause even more damage. And Mariska really ought to also have a bug or 50 planted on Avi set to give an alert any time he says the word “plan”. It should give an extra high priority alert any time he whispers the word “plan”.
That’s… actually a fair point.
It would be… if whispering didn’t make it easier to hear people. I’m not sure about technology picking up the conversation easier, but by this time even the “One Dollar for a bag of 20” level listening devices should be capable of allowing those listening into a room as clearly as if they were within the room themselves.
As for Mariska bugging the boys, part of the reason why she hasn’t is because it’s against the terms of her Nitpicker Contract. Simple solutions that are already not the case need simple explanations to why they’re not used.
At first, I misread the second paragraph, and thought it was suggesting that it was against the Nitpicker contract to do anything simple.
That thought amuses me.
Honestly, I would be shocked if the Nitpicker Contract doesn’t have a paragraph or five effectively saying “Solutions proposed by Nitpickers may be unreasonably convoluted, with steps taking five or more processes to cause conclusions that could conceivably be completed in one with the same materials and less work. Historical examples include…an elaborate trap proposed that utilised thirty guards, the construction of two buildings, five different steel cages and seven different professional chefs roasting meat over a fire; which was replaced with one steel cage hanging from an existing building with a singular whole-beast being cooked by an automatic spit-roast machine… These overly elaborate plans cannot be held against the Nitpicker in question, nor the Nitpicker’s Guild. It is also acknowledged that replacing a complicated plan with a simple one will likely make the Nitpicker in question non-violently upset for the rest of their stay, and incredibly smug in the situation where the simple plan doesn’t work, regardless of the conclusion to their own suggested plan”.
That said, returning to what you actually said, I am also at fault for not including the words “for things” in that last line.