Honestly, I just wanted to make a comic about my watch. The picture in the second panel, blurry as fuck because I only had a cameraphone with me, is a wristwatch I hang from the dash of my forklift at work. I dropped it a couple weeks ago and the face came unstuck. The watch still keeps time, the numbers just lie to you now. You’d be surprised how easy it is if you’re used to reading analog clocks. And if you’re not, you’re not very smart and I don’t think we can be friends.

There’s no real reason for this to be in the Maturity series, except to illustrate that I’m not making a joke about Jessica being too young to read a clock. And believe me, temptation was HARD to resist.

In this strip, we see the TV sprite pulling double duty as a computer monitor through careful framing.

Jessica tries, but Max simply has a lot more experience talking smack. I have a feeling I could’ve come up with something better for both of them, but I was distracted trying to make them different. Most of my curses are “[object] [sex act]ing [another object] [another sex act]er.” As in, “child sodomizing chimp rapist.” Shit, I should replace Max’s with that one…

I’d have put a little more effort into this, but I was listening to Horseshoes and Hand Grenades on NHB, and they did a couple of chugs, wherein they play the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and all those listening chug their drink when it reaches a climax. Hence, I have more beer in me than I rightly should.

If I can think of something, I’ll do another installment of this series, but no more than one more. I already have a comic in the can, just waiting for me to finish this so I know what number to put on it.

Don’t ask me how Max plays DooM with his arms pinned to his sides. We’ve already established that they stay where they are, so your guess is as good as mine.

Just watched David Malki’s Expendable. If you’ve got half an hour to kill, check it out. And make sure to watch the credits, if only to hear Kristopher Straub’s song. (Warning: Straub uses reverb on his vocals like current-gen video games use light bloom. Don’t listen if you have a fear of bathrooms. (I kid. The metric ton of reverb actually sounds really good.))

If I can think of anything suitably offensive, there’ll be an HoD about the movie later on. I’ve been writing a lot of soft, “I don’t want to make anyone cry” bullshit of late and damned if I don’t want to make some people cry.

Anyhow, well done, Malki! Expendable was awesome and I’m still blown away that you can fly a plane. (Though I’m disappointed that the man behind Wondermark doesn’t fly a steam-driven zeppelin or some shit. For shame, Malki.)

Also, read Wondermark. Also awesome, but much less expendable.

Comics are now updated at 10pm the night before, mountain standard time, aka midnight eastern. Shocking news, no doubt.

Trying something different, visually. This hopefully clashes less with the design. Next up is to tweak the CSS to make the the site a little more legible…

Also, the comic is now slightly narrower. I noticed that in Firefox, the image just continues off to the side, covering the menu under lower resolutions. In IE, it just drops down underneath the menu, but if you’re using IE you deserve every problem you get. (Thankfully, the vast majority of my hits seem to come from Firefox.) So the comic now fits better on a 1024 pixel display, though it’ll still clip into the menu a little. That’s just to remind you that 1024×768 is a bitch resolution.

The comic alluded to in the first panel is Maliki, near as I can tell. It’s been five years since I had to speak French. Let’s all thank Ian McConville for driving me completely out of my skull.

This comic also reveals that I mainly talk about Zork as opposed to the much-superior Hitchhiker’s game is because people have actually heard of Zork. Granted, it was fun, but Return to Zork was far superior.

I forgot to add the little “TBC” bit at the end there. Ah well. TO BE CONTINUED, true believers!

That TV is huge. And funky-looking.

No links for a change. Just a little bit of character stuff as I try to make Jessica into less of a strawman. And “bing.” Abrupt transitions in mood always make that kind of sound. Hrmm, I should do a comic about MacHall… and Serenity Rose. Yes, this is something I should look into once I’ve had my fun with Jessica doing all that boring live, learn, grow shit.

For those playing the home game, Jessica was 17 when HoD first launched, two years ago. I guess her birthday is immediately after it folded that first time, if the Modified date on the original PSDs are to be believed. The age of 20 has no particular significance other than that she’s slightly older and more mature.

Is it obvious that she’s playing the game? I was gonna draw her hands and a PS2 controller, but how often do you game with the controller level with your collarbone?

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

I couldn’t let this one go without comment. And I even got to use that lame joke on Tim Buckley I’ve been kicking around all day. (I hope he doesn’t obsessively check his referral logs. That could lead to an angry post which would draw a lot of traffic to this site, and I’d hate that. Yes indeed.)

I like Tip. He’s silly.

The stock art is from bstocked and mark45cmd over at deviantArt. Though nearly worthless for artists, it does remain the only place you can find stock without some asshole asking fifty bucks for it.

Hey, look at that! I can get in now! Hooray for the MySQL server actually serving MySQL!

I grow weary of Jessica being my strawman. I think I’ll do something about that in the future.

The Angel Moxie strip in question, though you really ought to read it from the beginning.

“Steve Troop’s tiny southern parrot” refers to his catchall response when someone started picking apart the pseudoscience in Melonpool: “You’ll believe the giant talking hamster, but now…” This explains the “parrot” part. The “tiny” and “southern” parts should be more self-explanatory.

I already know the answer to the question in the last panel. I’m a massive pervert. Non-perverted people don’t give that kind of thing a second thought. Of course, my bias toward badass baggy clothing over spandex may be a factor.

Now, if I were smart, I would’ve done these strips before I said anything on the Venis Board, so the first thing all the Moxie fans see coming in is an in-joke targeted specifically at them. (On the other hand, that in-joke involves tentacles, so maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t…)

I’ve been working on the TNP website, and I spent a GODDAMNED HOUR tracking down some glitch with the previous page/next page thing because the COCK SUCKING documentation refers to a FUCKING DEPRECIATED version of the same FUCKING bit of code. An HOUR wasted because the Wordpress docs don’t synch up with the actual program. But not all of it, the documentation for that specific command was correct, just the little “how to do this” bit. Which was grand because I wouldn’t have ever found the correct doc if I hadn’t gone over the incorrect doc three fucking times.

So now it’s 2AM, I have to be at work in six hours, and I’m trying to decide on sleep or just staying awake for the next five hours and going in tired as fuck. Nothing says fun like manual labor on no sleep. I seem to recall thinking this would be “easy” when I started working on it tonight. Fuck.

One might wonder how Jessica knows about John Prine. Its the same reason I know about John Prine: her dad played John Prine albums a lot when she was a kid. Er, more of a kid. How she’s heard of George Harrison, though, your guess is as good as mine.

The comic in question is from Realms of Ishikaze by Dan Hess. The page itself is behind a subscription wall, so the link only works if you’ve shelled out the three bucks a month for a Wirepop subscription. However, if you’re a cheapskate, Dan is graciously looking the other way while I post a cropped image below.

Now go and subscribe, it’s only three dollars.

I try and make it a rule not to make the punchline of a comic an in-joke, and I told myself that I wouldn’t do anything evil while discussing an all-ages comic, but panel six kinda blew both of those at once. Oops.

(Incidentally, the paraphrase in the fourth panel is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.)

I will probably do a lot of stuff on old Something Positive strips. My second time through the archives, I saved every strip to my hard drive, and I frequently reread it. Tonight, I was somewhere in the middle of Year 3.

As per usual, the age-related comment in question. This is 100% accurate, I was born in 1984 (me, Ghostbusters, and most of the Atari 7800 games I grew up with, yes ‘84 was a good year) and always feel really uncomfortable that I’m only two years older than Nancy. Actually, if she was born earlier than December, it’s a year and a few months. Eek.