WE INTERRUPT THE CAR WASH FOR A SOPHISTICATED SUMMER SWAPMEET!
This summer I took part in Lana’s Smexy Summer Swapmeet event and worked with the creators of Alvery Nerveaux’s Secret Case Files in order to swap characters for a fun little voting incentive experience. Be sure to check out my pic of Alvery Nerveaux by voting for Puck, and ALSO…
CHECK OUT ALVERY NERVEAUX’S VOTING INCENTIVE FEATURING THE PUCK CAST!
Alvery Nerveaux’s Secret Case Files came up with a hilariously odd voting incentive featuring the Puck gang. It’s even sorta tangentially Car Wash-related, so be sure to check out the madness and VOTE FOR ALVERY!
ALSO CHECK OUT ALL THE OTHER COMICS TAKING PART IN LANA’S SWAPMEET HERE!!!
As for this comic…
Many were flabbergasted, even highly doubtful, at the prospect of a blind girl texting last week. But honestly, have people never heard of voice-to-text? You just say, “Hey Siri, text Bob: I can’t come to the movies tonight because of apocalypse.” And bam. Very easy. Incredibly simple answer.
Then I had to go throw a wrench in the works and take it one step further with this comic. I’m not sure the exact answer for this comic’s conundrum either, but I’m sure there are ways to use voice-to-text involving emojis.
There is also another answer.
Hannah’s condition is closely based on the condition of a friend’s mom. My brother and I would hang out at their house as kids, and though this woman was blind, she never ceased to impress with her eerie ability to read the world around her. Like Hannah, she wasn’t totally blind. Rather, she could see shapes and colors if something were held right up to her eyes. She made good use of this ability by ASSEMBLING 1000 PIECE PUZZLES. Regularly. She would hold each piece up to her eye, get a sense of it, and her incredible spatial sense would allow her to remember where other similar pieces were in the puzzle. It was a crazy feat, but it was something she loved to do. By looking at the puzzle piece by piece, she got a good sense of the overall image.
Similarly, Hannah could see the individual emojis reasonably well by holding the screen right up to her eyes. I have another legally blind friend who uses an app that greatly zooms in on text as well, so that emoji could be huge if need be. (This other friend quite literally reads text two or three letters at a time, with each word filling the whole screen of a very large laptop. It takes a while, but it’s better than not reading your emails.)
In other words, to quote the divine Jeff Goldblum, “Life, uhhhhhhhhhh, finds a way.”
I’m also going to guess that our little ditch girl can type through muscle memory and knowing what to select thanks to the help of biker boyfriend(s).
I’m also going to guess that the emojis ate related to what “she” did last night.
I’m going to guess that too.
My friends son is blind , and not only has he had some of the coolest experiences due to this ( riding in a drag car, playing with dolphins, the list goes on) but as far as his phone goes , it reads off what his finger is touching. So I’m sure he has very good spatial memory as to where all the keys are. Also when using emojis, it will just read them off as he hovers over them. Happy, sad, eggplant, pelvic thrust etc.
I have never once known him to complain about his “disadvantage”. More people should think like this.
Anyway saw this and wanted to share.
Thanks. Heck, there are blind people who ride bicycles using echo location. It’s a world of possibility!
I’m going to read ‘Dutch’ for ‘ditch’. But yeah, bike boyfriends are always critical to most Hannah equations.
Yeah, my bad. I checked only some of the words for correct spelling. Sorry, meant Dutch.
Smart phones have been a revolution for both thos blind and deaf.
And, braille keyboards have been around for a long time.
Word.
What is braille for that eggplant emoji?
Whatever it is, it’s naughty.
:eggplant: (Hopefully this does not get processed into the actual emoji.)
Did they get rid of the eggplant? Or I heard that they were planning to redesign it due to … you know, how people were using it.
Re: “How does she do that?” I can’t remember if you’ve addressed this already, but perhaps Hannah hasn’t always been blind? In which case, she might know already what the emojis look like (or at least be able to make an educated guess).
Re: the vote incentive — looking at the box cover for the “D&D Shnorf edition”, it occurs to me that Papa Shnorf’s head bears a slight resemblance to the famous demon face from Tomb of Horrors.
Hannah’s always been blind. But she’s not totally blind, so yeah. She could see the emojis if she held the screen up to her eyes.
As for Papa Shnorf, his head is pretty closely based on masks from ancient Greek theater – specifically the mask of comedy. So maybe a common inspiration there? I looked up the pic you were referring to, and I definitely get a Greek theater mask vibe from it.
Jeff Goldblum sounds like Yakko from the Animaniacs.
I can’t argue.
Now I want Jeff Goldblum to do a guest appearance (as himself or as another, equally odd character) on the in-the-process-of-being-revived Animaniacs cartoon. The one with the original cast and the original writers.
How innocent? Any convictions on her record?
No, definitely not. But Hannah seems like the type who doesn’t get caught.
Okay I don’t know if anyone asked this, but how the hell does a blind person use a Smart Phone, especially when sending texts? Unless that glass screened phone is in braille I doubt that she could be able to do that without help.
if i remember correctly, she isn´t 100% blind, just VERY visually impaired – a glowing display right in front of her nose should still work for her though.
See my gigantic breakdown that I put under the comic. But yeah, there’s voice-to-text, and for the stuff that’s not voice-to-text, she’s not totally blind. She can see things if they’re held right up to her eye.
I actually have a couple of friends who are blind. They will use speech to text/text to speech software on their phones, and the stt software they use can even understand emojis.
It’s pretty damned impressive watching them troll someone, actually.
It’s always impressive to see how effectively a blind person can work around seemingly insurmountable barriers just to live their life like everyone else.
That both makes me laugh and gives me hope for the world. XD
If Hannah is not fully blind, then should she have glasses to help her see a bit better ?
With many people who were born blind, the issue often isn’t entirely the same issue as people who need glasses. With someone who needs glasses, the issue is with the lens not flexing to the right shape to focus the light. Glasses can correct that. Blind people, meanwhile, can have issues with other parts of their eyes that glasses can’t help. They can have things like corneal opacity (which Hannah definitely seems to have because her eyes look cloudy), or retinal issues, or even issues with their brain where the processing of the image is irregular.
I have a friend who’s legally blind who can improve her vision somewhat with glasses, but even the strongest prescription only makes the world go from entirely blurry to mostly blurry. Depends on the type of blindness, I think.
It’s now time to interject a description of someone I’ve known since the early 1970s, born sighted but had her eyes removed at age 7 years due to retinal cancers. There are times when she does not seem to be blind, and even times when I’ve watched her directing sighted people around (cue “blind leading the sighted” tropes) to their amazement. She and her husband are both blind, both retired COBOL programmers and group leaders, and both life-long handcrafters of one sort or another (he’s a high partial, suffering from thoroughly degenerative glaucoma), and both almost smugly content with the direction their lives have gone. Pepole from her background (Lighthouse for the Blind, Sacramento, CA, USA) use the term “disadvantaged” as a replacement for “handicapped”.
Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Definitely matches my experiences.
ok, this reminds me of a guy i met in college. so blind he dictated his calculus test answers. white cane too if that means anything. his major? Computer Science and Engineering.
At least it wasn’t a major in visual art.
So happy to see Daphne has a new co-conspirator.
I meant to say, friend.
Is there a difference?
For Daphne or in general?
In general.
Great Alvery pic, EG. I have been reading Secret Case Files since it started on CF.
The writer of Alvery has long been a real booster of Puck, and I happen to really like his comic too, so I thought it would be fun to work with him on something.
Heh. I’m sure she had help.
Well, that’s a possibility too, I guess.
If so, I’d guess that Hannah VERY carefully selects who she requests help from in this sort of instance, because based on Daphne’s amusement, SOMETHING Hannah is talking about is definitely stuff that would scandalize her family. I wouldn’t even be surprised if some of it might be at least technically illegal, considering these were post-prom shenanigans. At any rate, she’d be limiting her requests for assistance to those who know how to keep their mouths shut.
She’s not really getting any help. And her family is … interesting. They would definitely not be down with any of the activities she might have been involved in.
Oh my goodness! Interesting! And I meant help in learning about emojis, not help writing this text.
Re: Voting incentive at the beach. I think I may have that D&D box from the 1980’s, but not with Papa Snorf on the cover. Nice shout-out.
My D&D experience will always be defined by the red box basic set from the mid 80’s. That release isn’t fondly remembered by most hardcore D&D types because it was a dumbed down ‘reworking’ of the original game, which after that point was rebranded ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons’. But it was my first intro into the game. I had the basic set, the expert set, the companion set and the master set. I never got the god set. My character never ascended to godhood.
I started D&D when it wasn’t D&D.
It was called ‘Greyhawk’.
The ‘monster manual’ was known as ‘Arduin’s Grimore’.
The “DM’s Guide” was clad in metal foil (can’t remember its name).
You an OG. Original Gamer.
I caught it during the transition; before that, though, it was Zork, rogue, nethack, Colossal Cave (Advent), and several others. Still have the 1977-era FORTRAN-IV source code and rhe associated data file.
I remember those days. Leafing through those staple-bound beige booklets (and its grey “Chainmail” predecessor in preparation for a mass battle that never happened.) I more or less gave it up when they went to “Advanced D+D” but a few months ago was pleasantly surprised to discover it adapts to online gaming very well, using a “virtual table top”. A lot depends on having congenial playing partners of course, but the VTT takes care of a lot of the accounting drudgery and sight lines and stuff.
Considering my post for the previous strip, I thank you for leaving to your readers’ imaginations the creative string of emojis Hannah left….
You noticed that, huh?
Poor Phoebe; she needs at least one non-cynical friend that will help justify her optimistic outlook on people and events in her life. She needs a love interest.
Enh, she’s doing okay. Though she is certainly surrounded by cynics. Another more positive voice wouldn’t be a bad thing.
The devil’s daughter didn’t catch a bad girl in disguise? Interesting.
The devil’s daughter is the least devilish one in this comic. So yeah, she’s easily tricked.
You know, that outfit just reminds me of the Bride, but a Hollowe’en version.
Yeah, I wasn’t thinking of that at the time, but that totally makes sense.
Two things. 1) is it possible that the next generation of Puck, Phoebe and Colin are being rooted with Daphne, Tylor (Taylor) and Hannah?
2) what is going on with in class learning up there in Hamilton? Is the bug in the comic yet
The next gen of Puck would have to be Miranda and whatever kid Phoebe might have if Phoebe ever has a kid. Daphne, Tyler and Hannah are gen 1.5. And they’re not replacing anyone. They’re just adjunct.
As for the school stuff, it’s a mess. It would take a few paragraphs just to explain the weird and useless ‘hybrid model’ that my school board has drawn up. But it does mean that I will be back in school every single day come September, even if students will not be. That is, until the outbreaks start worsening and they shut everything down again.
And the pandemic will never reach the Puck universe. We are escapists here.
To Escapism .
Electrified or not!
Cuneiform, hieroglyphics, pictographs, runes, all from various forms of language, then we got into the written language, the printing press, carved wooden blocks for lithography, movable type, metal type, offset printing, dot matrix printing, a computer telling an electric typewriter what to write, laser printers, laser etchers, newsprint, and cell phones. Then the Emoji movie, and now we’re back to the beginning again with emojis instead of pictographs or hieroglyphics.
Go figure.
All things form a circle.
Um, do you understand how cuneiform, hieroplyphics and runes work?
My mother is legally blind, became so as a side effect of her leukemia treatments it seems, so yeah, beats an early death all to heck. Still seems like we need to improve those treatments more so that this happens less. Her eye condition is progressive, and one of those eyes needed to be removed last year (wasn’t doing her any good in her head as it was, it was was fine. We got her a black eyepatch and a stuffed parrot for her shoulder. My sense of humor didn’t come out of a box.)
Her type of blindness is photosensitive, so her house is kept pretty dim. Out in public (she loves an overcast day) she’s often seen wearing green plastic welding goggles (she’d bought several pairs of $400 sunglasses trying to find ones that blocked enough light. Turns out she really needed a $30 piece of construction PPE. Live & Learn.)
Screens are usually colour-flipped to a high-contrast, low-brightness setting. She used magnifiers to squint at lines of text a word at a time. The ZoomText app on her computer blows up a small section of her monitor desktop about 400-500%… which makes it nearly unnavigable to anyone else. I dread being called in for her tech support. “Well there should be an icon somewhere in the upper left corner (wherever that is) to fix your problem, but your settings have made the colours black-on-black, so it’s totally invisible now….”
Anyway… You’ve specifically drawn Hannah with cataracts, the most common form of blindness, where a white film grows over the eyes’ lens. Granted it’s about the only way to show blindness visually on a comic page (although there’s always Mom’s enormous welding goggles… Give it a few more years and we can tell people she’s wearing VR goggles for Augmented Reality.)
Yeah, it’s standard visual shorthand when drawing a blind person to give them the cloudy pupils of cataracts. It’s used because it’s the only form of blindness that has a visible tell. That said, the woman who served as the rough inspiration for Hannah also had cataracts. I’m assuming she (and Hannah) have some other issues as well.
Well, you can watch the Emojli movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsyhGHUEt-k