FOOD-THEMED VOTING INCENTIVES!!!
The Patreon bunch voted on various food choices, and the results were … this. So…
VOTE TO PARTAKE OF THE FEAST!!!
As for this comic…
We like to think we’re made of hearty stuff … until the phone stops working.
I am one of those crazy people who does not own a phone. To be fully transparent, my wife owns one, and I benefit by proxy from her phone usage when doing things like navigating around an unfamiliar area. But when I’m out and about, I don’t have a screen to occupy me. I just have to … be wherever I actually am. It’s boring sometimes but it’s also liberating. Few seem to share my tolerance for a phoneless existence, though.
I’m reminded of a statement from Isaac Asimov (I think it was Asimov) where he said something like, “A power outage in 1900 was barely noticed. In 1930, it was a minor inconvenience. In the late 20th century, it is a major inconvenience and in future centuries, a power grid failure will be utterly disastrous.” His predictions were spot on. And so is it with phones. The concept of the cell phone was barely a thing thirty years ago. Then it was a luxury. Then it was pretty much mandatory. And now the idea of life without a cell phone is incomprehensible.
At least for people like Phoebe.
One could make the same analogy about web comics… thirty years ago, no one would have missed their weekly phone-accessible-web-comic installment about ancient fairies of lore. Now look at us today….Puckless Tuesdays would be incomprehensible.
30 years ago we had scanners and stuff. So, there were a few more steps involved. Unless you can sit at a computer and use mspaint for at least a month to copy a centerfold picture.
Indeed. The fact that this comic is almost 22 years old is evidence that the webcomic concept is old. But maybe not 30.
Yeah, I kinds recall 1991 as the year my wife and I whistled at the blistering download speed of 56K over our landline. It only took a few minutes before a high res photo could be viewed.
Kind of you to say.
That whole author description can really be summarized as “I’m an old man and we as people have become too engrained with technology for it to no longer be a novelty”.
Maybe a physical map would’ve probably be good right now in this situation.
I have seen people in real life have this meltdown… it’s not that exaggerated!
I thought that it was going to be Tracee. Wow, I never would have thought. On two counts.
Surprise!
I’m sure there are more than 4 of us who remember the Samurai Pizza Cats…. I’m guessing it’s more like 6
Woo! We are legion!
You are half-dozen.
😉
you just don’t understand… They got more fur than a turtle EVER had!!!
Phoebe, that’s why map applications have Offline Mode. Why did you not… argh.
Phoebe. On a road trip, always that there will be times without reception. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of Wyoming, at Canada’s Wonderland, or the middle of Los Angeles. Always assume that at some critical point, you will not have internet access.
Hmm. Bold doesn’t work that well on even light grey. I mean, I can still tell, but it just doesn’t stick out all that much.
Works fine for me.
Well, Phoebe isn’t the most practical of thinkers, sadly.
She thinks?
Astounding!!!
Some Velma she makes.
We want our money back.
no we don’t
Of course in next centuries a power grid failure will be utterly disastrous. In 1930, people were using wood to keep themselves warm. In 2035, no electricity in winter means you are freezing. Also, there will be practically no job you can do without electricity.
In 2140, without electricity, you will die on multi-organ failure in minutes.
That’s pretty much exactly what Asimov said. With similar examples.
Those days people assumed a exponential curve. It turns out, it was a sigmoid curve which is hard to tell from exponential until it starts to level off.
Unlikely, unless humans somehow get progressively stupider. More people are getting solar these days, with batteries. A lot of people have wood stoves and/or fireplaces. The grid is becoming more distributed as well, and I suspect at some point, power companies will have heavily protected microgrids to prevent such catastrophes (see Texas).
The “unless humans get stupider” line is telling, though. Because I think we are. And moves that would be common sense and highly advantageous to the species are regularly throttled and suppressed due to a few powerful people’s short-term interests.
Also, some power grid companies are LISTENING to scientist warnings about CME (Coronal Mass Ejections).
These are ejections from the sun which blanet the earth and knock out all electrical/electronic system (unless protected).
According to the scientists, we are very much overdue.
They say the earth normally gets hit about once a century and the less one took out 200 miles of telegraph (which was the ONLY electrical system on earth at the time).
Now… include the literal ‘CLOUD’ of satellites around earth and…
Texas is one of the areas preparing, by the way.
It is part of why we aren’t pleased to STILL be part of the USA.
Right now, if we broke away form the USA, we would be the 13th strongest economy on earth.
And (unlike California) we could sustain ourselves.
We are the TOP state that gives more taxes to the USA government than we receive from them in grants ect.
If California left the US… they’d collapse
Do you know what the U.S. has said to Quebec?
Do you know why there’s that big bite out of Texas’ western boarder?
no, I do not know what the USA said to Quedec.
That ‘big bite’ is called the ‘Big Bend’ down here.
Unless you’re talking about that little squabble we had with New Mexico about the southern border of New Mexico.
The U.S. to Quebec: Our trade treaties with Canada will not apply to you if you become independent.
Why’s the Texas/New Mexico boarder where it is (which was what I was talking about, boy did I phrase that awkwardly)? The Texan republic was deeply in debt and the U.S. covered it in return for land they then put into New Mexico.
I could be wrong, but I’m not sure things would be THAT great for an independent Texas. But yes, you could likely make a go of it next time around.
Well, I don’t have a smart phone, but I’m still O.K. I have a book!
At times like this I remember that Harper’s Bazaar cover with the people on a tram all reading magazines.
Replace magazines with phones and yes. Indeed.
For the vote pic: the american “dub” was better than the correct translation.
Yeah, it was a gag dub but way funnier. Just like the Japanese gag dub of Beast Wars is just insanely goofy and (in my opinion) suits the weird, goofy early CGI visuals way better.
E-M-I-L-Y !
nice
Emily could slice the world’s biggest pizza with that! 😉
Thought it had been a while.
No wonder it’s called Spooky Valley! Although, from Phoebe’s perspective, it should be called ‘Abandon All Hope Valley!’
Abandon All Signal Valley.
Does Emily have a back story, and will we get to see it?
Maybe? I dunno. We’re +600 comics in and we still don’t have Daphne’s back story, so chances are slim.
Daffy is an evil mutant – the result of a Human/Jackel bonding.
That’s all our brains can handle.
You misspelled ‘Jackal’.
Loi
And I misspelled “LoL”
groan.
Phoebe… Phoebe, please.
You’re a college graduate. 0_0
You have a brain. Please learn to use it again.
Well, her dad was the president, though. So only kinda.
I have mixed feelings about the Emily votey. I am appreciative, but I think I preferred having more left to the imagination.
More pizza. Gotcha.
More pizza is always good, even if you’re full you can save it for breakfast 🙂
Waste not, want not.
As my grandma always said in the 60’s;
“Never leave home without clean underwear or a charged cell phone. Also, build your blocks 3 high to keep the zombies away at night.”
She was ahead of her time.
And never, ever dig straight down. Grandma’s old school wisdom.
Ahhhahahahahahahahahaha! I live where this is the normal…even where there is supposedly good coverage.
You can tell Phoebe doesn’t get out of the city much.
Phoebe, take a deep breath, distract the boys real quick so the van comes to an abrupt stop while a slap fest occurs in the back seat and rely on your university degree.
The phone GPS should keep working unless you detoured off the expected route. Then it tries to access the internet to recalculate a new route… and can’t.
I took a part time job running deliveries for a construction company last year. New homes tend to be built past the edges of the already built parts of the city. My phone provider covers the cities pretty well, but not the outskirts. There’s been quite a few times when I’ve followed the GPS (Google Maps app) out to the job site but couldn’t plot a route back home to the shop. The trick, I quickly learned (haha, no, I still forget a lot) is to plot a round-trip route while standing in a wifi zone. GPS can get me there and back if I don’t make it find me a NEW route bereft of internet access.
There were also a couple times when road construction forced me to detour off the planned route… except it can’t plot a new detour with no data service, so now I’m trying side streets hoping to find my way around to the helpful blue line again.
Prayer may have been involved.
You are a sorcerer of the GPS. Truly impressive.
Given my options between figuring out a workaround or getting out of the truck, lying down in a ditch <10 minutes outside my own home city to await the sweet kiss of death… I think I chose the lesser evil.