Well, after the last strip, people’s reactions to the big news were somewhat divided down gender lines. Most female readers expressed something along the line of “OMG! Puck pregnant? I’m so excited!” Many male readers, however, expressed something along the lines of “Dude, a baby? You’ve RUINED Puck forever! I hate you!”
I hereby try to reassure my male readers that I will endeavour to make the strip not suck from here on in.
As for this strip, I know that some people from non-English-speaking countries will be confused by the concept of root beer. Root beer is, as the name implies, a beer made from roots, but in North America, it’s sold as a non-alcoholic soda pop. Pretty much everyone who hasn’t grown up with root beer hates it upon first sip. I, however, love root beer. So does Colin.
Hopes:
#1. Miscarriage.
#2. The Daphne gets killed in a random traffic accident.
Sorry to disappoint on both counts.
Good lord this guy is a —-. Sure he’s commenting on every strip, but he always makes such rude observations.
For the record, I love your strip and its very funny. As indicated by the fact that its 4 in the morning and I should be in bed.
You’re also seeing the edited version of those posts, so there’s some crazy, totally over-the-top stuff he wrote that you haven’t even seen. But seriously, I got the feeling that his comments were in jest and that he (by and large) liked the comic, so I’ve got a good sense of humor about it. Thanks for the words of support, though. And I’m glad that I can rob sleep from you in the wee hours of the morning. (I think? Is that a bad thing?)
I just finished going through the archives over at Spinnerette, and he does the same thing there on nearly every post. There’s always one of them among commenters who doesn’t seem to understand the concept of “tact” and CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. Sigh. (And as an artist, writer, and teacher, I find this to be one of my pet peeves–it doesn’t help, either, I’m sure that I’m a stereotypical INFP-sensitive-type… oh, well.)
Yeah, it happens. I take it as lighthearted jest and move on. I’m far more troubled when I have intelligent, well written criticism given to me by readers who seem to know what they’re talking about. That smarts. This … doesn’t.
I can pretty much guarantee they’re not saying these things in jest, sadly
You’re kinda in the minority in even seeing that. Curious.
I tend to comment on somewhat of a “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” basis. i.e. If I see something I like, I just nod and move on without saying anything most of the time. I only bother commenting when something provokes an averse reaction… which is largely due to the fact that, unlikely as it is that my complaints about things will ever make a difference, they make 100% more of a difference than not saying anything. Well, that and it has become a bit of a game. Most people are too positive, and at some level I kinda want to off-set that.
Actually, one thing you’re not seeing a lot of here is when I start directing my disgust at other commenters for being too positive. I’m not entirely sure whether I’m being facetious or not with THAT particular approach. Some webcomics draw a lot of sycophants though… and I can’t really let that sort of thing pass without saying anything.
This daphne thing is becoming a running joke for me now
Believe me, it just keeps on going.
Hooray Rootbeer, my personal favorite flavor of coke.
Also, found this comic yesterday and am enjoying it greatly.
Oh, root beer cannot compare to Coke at all. NO COMPARISON!!! That’s like saying Dr. Pepper is a flavour of Coke! Heresy!
Remember when you had to explain what a tuque was your non-Canadian audience? Well, I must explain Kale’s use of “coke” in this “non-southern US” context.
It’s just another word used in that part of the country for soda, pop, or whatever you call it. Even though its a brand name.
Believe me, it was confusing the first time I was in the deep south. “And a coke to drink.” “What flavor?” “Coke, you flipping moron!” “I know. What flavor?” “Are you retarded or something?” And then I was told by someone who grew up in the south the confusion between me and the server.
And yes, my friends from the deep south, Coke is a brand name everywhere but where you come from. YOU are the weirdos in this instance! 🙂
Weird. And very useful info to have. That’s just as weird as the people in the Maritimes who call lunch ‘dinner.’ Seriously, they’ll say “Come on over ’round dinnertime,” and expect you to be there for noon.
Language is weird.
What Hitokiri said.
And yes, language is weird. Curiosity, when you are giving somebody directions do you give it in distance or time?
Give directions in time? That’s weird. Well, I would probably give directions in time if it were a long distance. So I’d say that Toronto is an hour away. But if I were giving directions down the street, I’d likely give it in kilometres.
In Oregon we use time. It tends to confuse the Californians 🙂
In Texas, we tend to give directions in time, as everything is so spread out. “It’ll take ya’ ’bout a ha’f hour ter get thar,” and, yes, Coke has been genericized down here. We have this conversation *all* the time: “I’d like a coke, please,” “A’ight, what type, Sugar?” “A Dr. Pepper, please?”
Seriously, quit being so nice, and…, never mind. If SotiCoto ain’t botherin’ you, no big.
Oh, you Texans and your “everything is so spread out here” argument. Guess what? Ontario is BIGGER than Texas! Seriously! A lot bigger! I didn’t believe it when I looked it up, because Texas is depicted as being so big in popular culture, but yeah. Ontario’s bigger. Mind you, almost everyone in Ontario lives in the small southern end, and the rest is largely people-free wilderness, while I think Texas has a population that’s bigger and more spread out. So yeah. I guess from a travel perspective, Texas IS bigger. I get the distances in time thing. I really do.
Yeah, but… Ontario is mostly frozen tundra and this big honkin’ bay.
Yeah, but no one lives up there where you are. Everyone’s huddled around Lake Ontario.
And the north shore of Lake Erie. As someone who grew up in the emptier parts of Arizona and Michigan, the shortcut to NY and New Hampshire through Ontario (Sarnia to Niagara) was the heaviest traffic I’d ever seen. Southern Ontario is also significantly south of where I’d been living since I was 9, and probably rather warmer – at least until the wind blows straight through from Hudsons Bay.
Ontario traffic is indeed bad. The stretch of highway between my city and Toronto is, I’ve been told, the most congested roadway on the continent outside of Los Angeles. (Nothing can compete with Los Angeles.)
Honestly EG, if there’s one thing about this strip (which I still enjoy) that I feel fell short, it’s that you have this rich mythological background with which to tell… a perfectly ordinary-life story.
Seriously! You have a centuries old, semi-famous elf/fae, a succubus/demonspawn girl, a cute doggirl/werewolf… and you could switch them all out with perfectly normal humans and you’d have to, what, make text edits on a few panels, at most?
I’m exaggerating a little to make my point, and there WERE a couple early comics that briefly addressed the non-humanness of the characters, but any and all implications of their non-humanness are completely ignored. Fine if you want to build a complex and interesting alternate world in which, unlike ours, all these widely varied beings live together in mostly sarcastic harmony… but you never did that either, did you?
Basically I just feel like this series had the potential to be really unique and interesting (which was certainly the initial draw; you called it “Puck, Ancient Fairy of Lore” not “Yet another webcomic about sarcastic 20-somethings”) and just did not take full advantage of it.
Puck’s popped the kid out no in recent updates. Give her some fairy wings (P: “What? Colin, you married a Fairy and didn’t even know we’re born with wings? Why did you think I sent you shopping for diapers and large butterfly nets?”) and let’s have a few comics about trying to catch a flying baby… whose diaper fell off about a block back; don’t look up without protective eye-wear.
Let’s have the interestingly designed characters with abnormal backgrounds do some stuff that’s actually abnormal to the human experience now and again, yes?
Dude, there’s billions and billions of ‘contemporary fantasy’ webcomics out there that do just that. I’m not doing that. And yeah, there’s lots of webcomics about sarcastic twenty-somethings too, but this is mysarcastic twenty-something webcomic, and let’s leave it at that. Chalk it up to my own weird sense of humour that I have these fantastical beings that live ordinary, mundane lives. But I really don’t care about fantasy; I don’t do fantasy. I do slice-of-life. And yeah, you can say “Why did you make the protagonist a fairy, then?” but my answer is honestly “I don’t really remember.” It was fifteen years ago. And though it’s weird, I like what it’s grown into.
Sounds like Hinoron hasn’t heard of ‘Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager’.
I haven’t either, but it sounds intriguing.
You should check it out. It’s on YouTube.
Can we do links, here?
Let me try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wGR4-SeuJ0
I enjoyed that. And yeah, I’d say that matches the tone of what I do nicely.
I think that’s why I enjoy Puck.
Extra-ordinaire thrown into… ordi-ordinaire… 😀
(Also, when they get to the “more powerful laser check out system” scene – you will pee yourself from laughing) 😀
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the Ep #…
Found it;
S2E2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu7gzjK16oc
Worth the hunt.
I want to test rootbeer. ;_; To do list: get to the US/Canada and buy some. Or throw money at screen so EG can ship me some.
…
*Throws money at screen* WORK DAMN IT!
It’s amazing. But I totally get why other nationalities would think it’s gross.
I introduced root beer to a NZ friend. She loved it. Says she found “something similar”. (which scares me)
Well, she’s the one in a hundred that doesn’t hate it, then. I’m shocked, actually.
I frickin’ love root beer and a reasonable number of my friends do, too. (In case you’re curious, Californian over here /wave) I was honestly surprised to hear a lot of people hate it. 😛 I guess it’s like a Korean finding out most non-Koreans hate kimchi, though. Or like a half-Chinese person (which I am) finding out some people think soy sauce tastes weird.
There are some flavors which are, I think, instantly appreciated by pretty much every person on Earth, like straight-up sweet dessert offerings. There are other flavors, though, often ones with a certain bitterness to them, that seem to be inherently tied to culture and a taste for them seems to be acquired rather than innate. I’m sure some non-North Americans like root beer upon trying it for the frist time, but I haven’t yet met any. Australians, Chinese, Brits, South Africans – seriously, everyone seems to hate it unless they grew up with it.
Im a generic caucasian waspy californian male and i like all of those things and leechee too. I enjoy all types of soda including root beer, but the real treat is true sassafras or sarsparilla soda. And we have chocolate maple bacon soda here.
Really. But the fried pepsi is an awesome fair treat 🙂
Fried Pepsi? Maple Bacon Soda? California really is the promised land, isn’t it?
St. Louis girl here, born and raised and I cannot stand root beer, so I guess by your definition something’s wrong with me. Many people also probably think it’s wrong that the smell of bacon cooking stovetop has always made me nauseous, even before I stopped eating pork. On the other hand, I’m white and love soy sauce, to the point that I’m also baffled that some folks think it tastes weird. My dad doesn’t mind soy sauce, but he always adds table salt and black pepper to Asian food instead of extra sauce which I think is odd of him.
1) Yes, you’re weird.
2) My wife gets nauseous at the smell of bacon too, though she’s been vegetarian for decades. And I’ll even admit to the fact that the smokey rendered fat smell is a little icky at times. It’s one of the reasons why I order bacon in restaurants but don’t cook it at home.
3) MOST white people love soy sauce. In fact, I was once talking to some Asian friends, along with one other white guy, and the white guy was talking about how he loved white rice with soy sauce, and the Asian guys all said that white rice with soy sauce was a white people thing. They use soy sauce in dishes, but just applying the soy sauce on top of crap? Not them. (It must be noted that these guys were NOT Japanese, because the Japanese do kind of love to put soy sauce on top of crap.)
4) Table salt and black pepper to Asian food is wrong. Your dad is wrong.
Soy Sauce is ….. ok.
But PEANUT SAUCE RULES !
Ironically, though I don’t like root beer, since I stopped drinking carbonated beverages, I do miss going to Fitz’s, a St. Louis restaurant known for it’s root beer. I went there for orange soda, which, like the root beer, is also available bottled in stores, but it’s not as good as the fresh stuff at the restaurant.
You mentioned that Japanese people put soy sauce on everything. This technically includes candy if you count soy sauce flavored candy. In Japan there are like a hundred flavors of KitKat Bars, including a soy sauce one, which I would honestly try given the opportunity. Other flavors include cheesecake, lemon chocolate, green apple and both aloe AND aloe yogurt, which I find weirder sounding than a soy sauce one by far.
And, as far as sauce choices go, hoisin sauce is good stuff, though it’s strong enough it really needs to be mixed with something else. I’m fond of an odd ethnic hodgepodge of hoisin sauce, soy sauce and ponzu.
Peanut sauce I have no experience with because it’s usually found in combination with coconut and/or hot peppers, neither of which I can stand.
I would not try the soy sauce candy. I would try the aloe yogurt.
Luv Luv Luv
Hot Peppers
Sriracha Sauce
Cocoanut
Pineapple
Cherries
And oh, so much more.
But NOT sushi.
Fun fact: rum and root beer is tasty. My preferred way to drink the alcohols.
Dude, that is WAY too rich for my tastes. That’s like liquid sugar poured down your throat. I likes me liquor dry and slightly bitter. Not that I drinks me liquor anymore. I’ve been dry for years.
Mmm liquid sugar….
Sorry, what were we talking about again?
Honestly though, I only drink once every six months to a year. So I tend to stick to drinks I enjoy.
I’m shocked that I’m the first person to pass along the Star Trek:Deep Space Nine references to root beer.
The first, and best, is where Garak tries a root beer for the first time.
Quark: What do you think?
Elim Garak: It’s vile.
Quark: I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Elim Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Elim Garak: It’s insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.
For the rest, go here…
http://root-beer.blogspot.com/2006/11/way-of-warrior-root-beer-related.html
That is glorious. I watched DS:9 but never saw that episode.
Rules of why root beer is better than women: (you know them, right?)
They dont shreik if you plop a scoop of ice cream on them.
Its ok to have two at a time, neither one complains about the other.
Dont even think about going to bed with one, but they wont complain if you take two.
Theyre really cheap.
Ok, we’re outta time here.
You forgot to tell me to try the veal.
There you go, folks! He’ll be here all week, tell your friends. Dont forget to tip your waitress.
And try the veal.
MMMM, ROOT BEER!!!!
(I hate it when it’s not foamy though.)
🙂
Yeah, it’s best when foamy. And served in a frosty mug.
A&W !
Another chain I miss.
THEY (it’s always “they”) even closed the BRITISH BEER CO near me.
very sad now
A man of taste.
It actually ties right back to the beginning of the series. It could be fun.
Root beer is always a sign of good taste.