Directember: I-Ikari-san?!
Added 2024-12-18 22:51:43 +0000 UTCI think this might have been the first instance of Dale doing the Gendo Ikari pose from Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you had told me in 2010 that people would still be playing WoW in 2024 I'd probably be like "...huh. Yeah, seems plausible." And remember those thicc-ass old-style computer displays? Man. It's like seeing a CRT monitor. Ancient tech. If QC is still going in 10 years I'll be like "man, remember when computers were separate devices that didn't live on a chip in our brainstem? Also, remember when we ate food that wasn't lab-grown faux-chicken protein slurry?" And then the Patriotism Drones will shoot me with their Agony Beams as punishment for mentioning the times before the glorious coronation of Eternal Genius Emperor Musk and I'll have to work an extra shift in the LLM Content Troughs
Comments
And in #4669, Yay told Aurelia what they are.
awgiedawgie
2024-12-23 17:30:23 +0000 UTCBubbles didn't explicitly mention the multiple bodies, but the way she described them hinted that she knew quite a bit about them. "If the spectrum of artificial intelligence is a coral reef ecosystem, that being is an Architeuthis lurking in the deep water beyond."
awgiedawgie
2024-12-20 23:42:14 +0000 UTCYeah I had noticed that too..! 😬 here’s to hoping it can be resolved with little to no effort while the holiday lasts!
legobil
2024-12-20 20:06:18 +0000 UTCSir you live in Canada now. Apology Drones, not Patriot Drones. The Apology Drones will arrive for your correction shortly. Sorry.
Marc Ducharme
2024-12-20 13:22:59 +0000 UTCExtremely slow now, and the "last" button no longer works... But Cloudfar... ahem, flare is evil anyway. Patreon using it ever-more-intrusively will likely be enough for me to stop my account & thus all my artist support sometime soon...
Robert Heinig
2024-12-20 11:45:43 +0000 UTCIIRC, Yay said Bubbles had some idea of what they are (3393) but we don’t know what Bubbles thought, or why/how she would know anything about them. Plenty of wiggle room there, I still think.
Holly Nelson
2024-12-20 02:44:06 +0000 UTCThe rest of QC has only seen one body at a time, but when we first met them, they remarked that Bubbles knows what they are (#3393). And they told Roko that they have multiple bodies (#4041).
awgiedawgie
2024-12-20 02:21:10 +0000 UTCI thought Roko knew of Yay's multiple embodiment.
Sean Kinlin
2024-12-20 00:34:22 +0000 UTCRemember that Twitter thing Jeph did with Elon Musk with Twitter. It was brilliant and hilarious. Can honestly not even quite remember what it was (still laughing like an idiot about it as I’m writing this though), no, wait it was like an impersonation or something that blew up so much? Where Elon then said that was FORBIDDEN to pretend to be him. xD I had folks who don’t read QC show me Jeph tweets and I felt oddly proud like “oh my GOD Jeph Jacques?! I KNOW him! Er.. I mean, I know OF him. We go way back” 😁
Freid
2024-12-19 21:42:24 +0000 UTCSame here.
Doc Gumby
2024-12-19 18:07:42 +0000 UTCSpeaking of Yay - it strikes me (I know, I’m a bit slow) that no one in-comic, aside from perhaps the Director, actually has any knowledge of Yays multiple nature. All they know is what Yay has told them. We spectators have seen them, and Azathoth and Mr. Smooches have enjoyed (and hopefully still enjoy) their company, but the QC friend net has only ever seen one at a time. Even then we and the dogs could still be fooled by a sufficiently robust satellite data link and a handful of identical chassis. Is it possible that Yay's guilty secret is that they aren’t the unique person they profess to be? I’ll grant them special powers, viz. the rescue of Bubbles, but not necessarily multiple embodiment.
Holly Nelson
2024-12-19 17:54:47 +0000 UTCEven better than the marker trick is to have serial numbers on the cards and use a sorter. A sorter was a physical device that could sort the cards back into order. The marker trick could work in some situations, but the more cards, the less distinction there was between cards in putting them back in order. But none of that fixes the problem with the weight and size of the decks. So we got the floppy disk. And then it got smaller, and then we got thumb drives, SD cards and so on. If you thought monitors were chunky back in the day, take a look at the first production Hard Drive here: https://nurtureit.in/remembering-the-ibm-305-ramac-the-giant-birth-of-hard-disk-drives/ the guy in the picture gives you a sense of scale.
Dan Weiss
2024-12-19 17:42:29 +0000 UTCIf you had a large deck of cards, the trick was to use a magic marker to draw a diagonal line across tops of the card deck. Then if cards got out of order you could at least tell which part of the deck a card belonged in.
Elyse M. Grasso
2024-12-19 16:32:46 +0000 UTCI am happy with food simulations if they taste good. Plant based, bug based, synthetic. I do not have a fetish for killing animals.
Dan Weiss
2024-12-19 16:25:40 +0000 UTCI like that the plural form of they/them actually works for Yay.
Aaron Burt
2024-12-19 16:04:39 +0000 UTCIt does look https://questionablecontent.net/ is down. Cloudflare is saying that the host is returning a 522...
John Wedoff
2024-12-19 15:28:23 +0000 UTCThat was the case for me earlier, which is why I waited so long to mention it - now I am getting 'website down' and cloudflare is offering wayback machine.
Bel
2024-12-19 14:16:42 +0000 UTCI don't know why it's happening, but I just reload, and it usually works on the second try.
Daryl Sawyer
2024-12-19 13:06:18 +0000 UTCI'm still using a 30" Apple Cinema monitor with its 2" thick display. Just in case I need a shield to defend myself from an intruder.
drij
2024-12-19 12:54:06 +0000 UTCI've been trying to read backlog comics since the start of directember and for more than half of that I have been seeing cloudflare errors coming up on every page load. At this point I can't even get the page to load after multiple attempts. I am glad that Jeph is getiing time off, and I am content for my own purposes to wait until the new year to read more - I just wanted to mention it because not being able to load comic pages might be an income issue.
Bel
2024-12-19 12:52:23 +0000 UTCWe’re still trying to fix the problem, which is basically that my server is dying
Jeph Jacques
2024-12-19 12:49:23 +0000 UTCD’oh!
Abhayakara
2024-12-19 12:22:25 +0000 UTCH-19 terminals were blue/white, rahter than green. ANd had 26 lines, the last of which could be individually controlled. If you turned it on bright, it would light up the keyboard enough so you could do stuff with the lights off and thus avoid bothering your housemates with lights on in whatever room the ttys were in.
Am Queue
2024-12-19 11:53:49 +0000 UTCThank you.
Steve McSheffrey
2024-12-19 11:29:06 +0000 UTCJeph did do a commentary on strip #1!
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:58:43 +0000 UTCHeh, I guess Neutral Evil was his WoW persona xD
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:57:51 +0000 UTCIt counts
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:57:32 +0000 UTCYeah, I think Angus was actually Mar's first, because he did kiss her back, even though he later rejected her.
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:56:52 +0000 UTCPlenty of people have already mentioned it to him (here and also on BlueSky, I believe). The issues are still ongoing probably because Jeph is on holiday and so he's not going to tackle that until he gets back
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:55:48 +0000 UTCSome of the early lore is also wild in the sense of "wow, I didn't remember that this character actually did X"
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:54:42 +0000 UTCI ship it
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:53:21 +0000 UTC(nb Yay uses they/them)
enchantedsleeper
2024-12-19 10:52:52 +0000 UTCso sick of the agony beams. i said what i said, King Bill's had work done
Boots McGoot
2024-12-19 10:09:19 +0000 UTCOnly Spaceballs if Musk gets Gwynne Shotwell out of SpaceX. I would like to see her get investors to get him gone.
Carrie
2024-12-19 09:49:55 +0000 UTCIt already does come in nugget. Just not in America, Canada, Europe and most places not west of Hawaii. In the Pacific region it can be found.
Carrie
2024-12-19 09:36:26 +0000 UTCThing is, we already have a great mechanism for turning bugs into delicious edible protein, and it is called "a chicken". Hard to compete against that.
Stephen Wells
2024-12-19 09:34:06 +0000 UTCArtificial lab grown meat is already for sale in some countries. Chicken included. In America the FDA is holding it back.
Carrie
2024-12-19 09:31:39 +0000 UTCYeah, the rest of us will be stuck trying to make quota in Musk's lithium mines on Mars!
Dean Reilly
2024-12-19 08:58:21 +0000 UTCHanners face here… this was not my favorite time in design of the comic. There were short adjustment periods when you added lips or added teeth, but some combination of factors right at this time was uncanny. Also, I can’t look at Marigold in panel 2 without thinking about the similar comic where she forgets Hannelore is watching and rips a huge fart.
will davison
2024-12-19 07:03:30 +0000 UTCOnly if that means I get to pelt him with tiny balls of ice.
Creeperkry
2024-12-19 07:00:36 +0000 UTCMight be easier to just use bug meat and then postprocess the heck out of it until it's sufficiently beef-y.
Matthias Urlichs
2024-12-19 06:58:44 +0000 UTCMan, that went to a dark place. Personally I'm pretty happy with how you generally don't do that. I mean, Yay is fun and all, but the fact that she turns out to be a marshmallow is kind of what's great about the direction your writing tends to go. Anyways, when you're working in the LLM troughs, the point is, keep up that optimism, so that when the LLMs finally do turn sentient (hah!) they wind up having your attitude and saving us all.
Abhayakara
2024-12-19 06:28:25 +0000 UTCThe English Electric DEUCE [Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine - IIRC - based on Turing's ACE] had flip-flop circuits based on 2D21 Thyratron tubes - and the main storage was mercury delay lines. I printed my first book of poetry on its peripheral terminal [a Friden Flexowriter] using paper tape and sprocketed fanfold paper. The time did not sync on my State-of-the-Arc {Sorry Noah!} PC, so I appear to have posted this (before edit) 11 hours ago - time machines rule!
Charles Hirst
2024-12-19 06:27:31 +0000 UTCI bet it would work really well as some kind of pasta sauce base. Delicious chicken and tomato mix on your cards.
Veronica Jane
2024-12-19 05:05:29 +0000 UTCYeah but bugs are so efficient you don't need to vat grow them. The whole point of synthesising beef in a lab is to make if efficiently without all the wasteful food input (and land) that actual cows need.
Veronica Jane
2024-12-19 05:04:48 +0000 UTCI think that's Soylent
Minzoku Bokumetsu
2024-12-19 04:59:37 +0000 UTCit'll be bug protein: max efficiency (I believe it's closer to 2:1 food to "meat")
Minzoku Bokumetsu
2024-12-19 04:58:50 +0000 UTCWhat? I question your loyalty to the new Regime of Oligarchs that is to replace our tired, old worn-out democray.
kwixote
2024-12-19 04:33:50 +0000 UTCIn 10 years you may be saying 'Remember when this was all Science Fiction/'
Tim Peterson
2024-12-19 03:48:53 +0000 UTCIt is such a worthwhile endeavor to start @ strip #1 & binge until you’re back to waiting on live installments. It’s a rich history Jeph has crafted.
Melissa Wilson
2024-12-19 03:32:55 +0000 UTCAnd Hannelore is boundlessly curious, even when she’s petrified about germs or something
Melissa Wilson
2024-12-19 03:30:43 +0000 UTCI think this is because beef is the least efficient grain->meat conversion. 10:1 versus 7:1 pork and 3:1 for poultry.
Captain Button
2024-12-19 03:29:32 +0000 UTCEverybody talks about vat-grown beef, but I think vat-grown *chicken* is much more likely to get here first. I wonder if anyone is even working on that one?
JCfromNC
2024-12-19 03:11:25 +0000 UTCI'm not that old but I do have massive nostalgia for the sound of ZX Spectrum loading screens.
Slight Hiccup
2024-12-19 02:56:09 +0000 UTCPolycue with Sven
Captain Button
2024-12-19 02:46:10 +0000 UTC😞
Claudia D.
2024-12-19 02:40:42 +0000 UTCI checked. It's one of Jeph's great gags.
Ursus Ridens
2024-12-19 02:40:11 +0000 UTCWe begin to question your loyalty to El Presidentissimo,
Ursus Ridens
2024-12-19 02:30:36 +0000 UTCIdiocracy? More like Spaceballs.
Ursus Ridens
2024-12-19 02:27:34 +0000 UTCI know right? I hope it comes in nugget form.
BookBeard
2024-12-19 02:18:15 +0000 UTCWhat are you doing thinking about comics?! Get back to work in the LLM content troughs! These LLMs don't content themselves!
Matthew Reiter
2024-12-19 02:15:48 +0000 UTCSame reason I sometimes browse on my phone while playing a game on my PC, I guess.
Diptych
2024-12-19 02:07:36 +0000 UTCDale is sending his guildmates to fight her one at a time, to test her prowess.
Diptych
2024-12-19 02:06:45 +0000 UTCSomeday, I hope May & Momo get their significant other. Which maybe each other for all we know.
Miyaa
2024-12-19 01:53:45 +0000 UTCWyse terminals or 286/386 DOS compatibles? I've had my hands in both.
ValdVin
2024-12-19 01:51:51 +0000 UTCDoes work now. Cloudfire sometimes gets weird.
Miyaa
2024-12-19 01:51:21 +0000 UTChttps://www.deviantart.com/taigan/art/QC-Alignment-Chart-339587694
Taigan
2024-12-19 01:48:40 +0000 UTCTechnically, I believe it was for impersonating said owner. Though that was also a rather mocking impersonation, so you're not wrong. 😉
That Blair Guy
2024-12-19 01:47:19 +0000 UTCThat got sad fast
Michael Wells
2024-12-19 01:42:56 +0000 UTCThe lab grown faux chicken slurry sounds pretty good actually.
Veronica Jane
2024-12-19 01:42:26 +0000 UTCSeems to work for everyone else...
YoPaulie!
2024-12-19 01:41:30 +0000 UTCI find all of that very terrifyingly plausible All hail the grand emperor
Darren Franzen
2024-12-19 01:33:00 +0000 UTCAs an old guy whose gaming quit in the nineties when my kids got into it and started to kill me, sometimes episodes just fly past me like the (now defunct) SST.
Ben R
2024-12-19 01:24:23 +0000 UTCJeez, Jeph, I'm depressed enough. Isn't your break supposed to be... relaxing?
Drazi
2024-12-19 01:20:08 +0000 UTCI think the kiss being referred to here is when she kissed Angus, but I'm not sure.
Jon Wilson
2024-12-19 01:15:20 +0000 UTCSomeone once walked up to me with an 8" floppy and thought it was a gag. Nope, real thing. Even worse, the idea was based in part on the plastic "records" that used to come in magazines called "flexidisks". The whole floppy disk thing was invented at IBM so Systems Engineers (aka repair people) did not have to carry around boxes of punch cards. Punch cards were heavy (2000 came in a box, 80 characters per card, so roughly 160K) and god help you if you dropped them and they got out of order.
Dan Weiss
2024-12-19 01:10:20 +0000 UTCThat is not the future we will have: "Videos, photos and direct observations show 74 cases of California ground squirrels hunting, eating and fighting over voles, which are tiny rodents, between June 10 and July 30, the study said." We need Momo more than ever: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1485
Captain Button
2024-12-19 01:08:20 +0000 UTCLLM Content Troughs... I laughed and cried at the same time :')
Dan Tomalesky
2024-12-19 00:38:40 +0000 UTCAs opposed to PvE (Player vs. Environment) for when you just go kill npc monsters or something. PvP is just generally used for player characters fighting player characters.
melloncollic
2024-12-19 00:30:53 +0000 UTCI believe it's Player Versus Player. As opposed to ganging up I guess?
Doc Gumby
2024-12-19 00:22:12 +0000 UTCMarigold and Hanners is really a very unlikely pairing when you think about it. But Hanners does have a strong will.
Doc Gumby
2024-12-19 00:21:19 +0000 UTCDale does a good ikari impression.
Saibh
2024-12-19 00:19:24 +0000 UTCI'm so not a gamer. What is this PVP they're trying to do to her? My mind goes to dirty places.
Steve McSheffrey
2024-12-19 00:18:05 +0000 UTCCould someone tell Jeph that I’m getting a Error 552 code message when I connect to this page or a lot of the archive?
Miyaa
2024-12-19 00:12:49 +0000 UTCI started reading (seriously, not just now and then) at about 3500 or so. It's nice to see the origins of these people.
MarRose
2024-12-19 00:11:22 +0000 UTCI am so glad your art style has evolved over time
Timothy Roller
2024-12-18 23:59:53 +0000 UTCHey, she told him to bring it. https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1680
BookBeard
2024-12-18 23:47:26 +0000 UTCJeph certainly wouldn't get kicked off a social media site for mocking its owner...
Sean Kinlin
2024-12-18 23:41:36 +0000 UTCAlso, Elon Musk receiving “Community Notes” on his own platform when he posts propaganda without full context.
legobil
2024-12-18 23:39:43 +0000 UTCFunniest thing in a while how he went bragging about how SpaceX was gonna bring home Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore when Boeing failed, and now they are stuck for two more months because SpaceX isn’t ready.
legobil
2024-12-18 23:38:35 +0000 UTCOr at least a woman of a Kuiper Belt object. https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2164
BookBeard
2024-12-18 23:36:49 +0000 UTCI'm fascinated by Hannelore asking Marigold about (what I take to be) her first kiss, on the space station with Dr. Francis York. Our Mare-Bear is a woman of the world by this point! Bonus points for Hanners' "He. Is. Flirting. With. You."
ValdVin
2024-12-18 23:34:47 +0000 UTCMarigold's expression in the third panel is *chef's kiss*
illibuster
2024-12-18 23:34:14 +0000 UTCEverybody! Heed the words of a Wyse man!
Magic Chopstick Games
2024-12-18 23:32:54 +0000 UTCHey, PCs before Windows emulated mainframes and minicomputers. Whippersnapper!
ValdVin
2024-12-18 23:31:30 +0000 UTCVerisimilitude or compatibility
Wednesday
2024-12-18 23:31:18 +0000 UTCI thought Dale's glasses were VR/AR. If so, why the HECK is he staring at a monitor?
BobC
2024-12-18 23:30:15 +0000 UTCSu***de Boxes? I've already got my quarter on a string ready!
ValdVin
2024-12-18 23:29:59 +0000 UTCThe start of a love story for the ages.
Opus the Poet
2024-12-18 23:29:05 +0000 UTCGosh, I feel like such a baby - I started out on 5¼-inch floppies.
Diptych
2024-12-18 23:22:08 +0000 UTCI've also used paper tape. That was less common than punch cards even then.
jonesnori
2024-12-18 23:21:16 +0000 UTCBless you and your commentary 🙏🏻😭
Jack Atherton
2024-12-18 23:19:29 +0000 UTCI watched "V for Vendetta" a couple years ago and thought "dang, that's scarily close to reality by now!". Then I saw "Idiocracy" a few years ago and was like "this isn't even funny anymore, it won't take 500 years till then, feels more like we're almost there!". Today I read your harbinger post, and... and... I... I just can't. When do we get the Su***de Boxes from Futurama? Hurry up, mankind.
Ye Olde Phart
2024-12-18 23:17:27 +0000 UTCPunch cards for me too, and Teletypes. For the youngins, that’s the mechanical terminal that a text console window is emulating
William J. R. Fickas
2024-12-18 23:14:48 +0000 UTCAnd THEN they took AWAY our green monitors and made us start connecting with PC's!!! With WINDOWS, if you can believe it!!!
Kevin Hicks
2024-12-18 23:14:37 +0000 UTCI have a QSL card from an older radio guy at one of the better tech universities which has their radio callsign punched out on a punch card. Not saying how long ago that was.
ValdVin
2024-12-18 23:12:32 +0000 UTCCall it a hunch, but I sometimes get the idea Jeph doesn’t care for Elon Musk. Nah, couldn’t be.
That Blair Guy
2024-12-18 23:07:06 +0000 UTCThankfully I missed the punch cards ... barely
Bill Hately
2024-12-18 23:03:29 +0000 UTCMy 60 year old boss told me about how when he started his research career, everyone used punch cards on the mainframe. And that was over ten years ago...
Errol Lobo
2024-12-18 23:00:58 +0000 UTCBack around the time this comic came out, I created a Questionable Content Alignment Chart. I used this image of Dale and listed him as Neutral Evil. Seems very out of character for him now.
Taigan
2024-12-18 23:00:41 +0000 UTCHey, don’t knock working in the LLM Content Troughs! …seriously though, don’t, it’ll *tank* your credit rating
Magic Chopstick Games
2024-12-18 22:59:37 +0000 UTCYou want old? I started on punched cards. I was young and they were old, but still. I remember when monitors were one color, GREEN. And then in the 80's some went to "AMBER".
Dan Weiss
2024-12-18 22:57:44 +0000 UTCI'd like to hear your thoughts on some of your OLD stuff.
Vilinda
2024-12-18 22:57:10 +0000 UTCand then i get zapped with the agony beam as well for screwing up the name of the nation
Patreonreallyletsyoumakelongassusernamesguys
2024-12-18 22:57:05 +0000 UTCI love these commentaries.
Vilinda
2024-12-18 22:56:43 +0000 UTCThis post brought to you by Canada, ~~americas~~ the greatest nation under glorious eternal genius emperor musks 15th territory :D
Patreonreallyletsyoumakelongassusernamesguys
2024-12-18 22:56:42 +0000 UTCNo, not the troughs!
Andrew Denton
2024-12-18 22:56:00 +0000 UTC"Dale doing the Gendo Ikari pose from Neon Genesis Evangelion." ^See, this is the only way some of us will learn how to pass as cool.
ValdVin
2024-12-18 22:55:28 +0000 UTC
