Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3481 to 3485 (15-19 May 2017)
Case:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 15 May 2017, 08:26 ---Maybe the AIs opted out! Being in a health insurance pool with organics would be hella expensive for limited benefit.
--- End quote ---
Uhmmmmh - Given that QC-verse AI chassis do not come with self-repair capabilities, I'd say the opposite could very well be true (Meaning that humans are probably significantly less likely to have issues due to normal wear & tear, but when we have issues, they are likely to be more costly to treat).
May's chassis showed critical material-fatigue in a joint in under a year - ever heard of a human whose arms fell off simply due to use?
BenRG:
This is another area in which the culture of government in the US is essentially incomprehensible to the European mind. To public agencies in the US, a parolee is sort of an unclean untouchable who is not really considered worthy of any public services. If May's chassis is defective at the time she received it (which appears to be the case, given her complaints about uneven leg length), well that's her fault for committing a crime. She needs to suck it up and not use up more precious taxpayer's resources by her whining for repairs.
This is ridiculous in fiction. In real life, it becomes a serious driver for recidivism. No-one (at least no-one with the power to do anything about it) seems to care. Jeph made this point by showing how this situation basically forced May into going to a criminal's body-shop and later being forced into prostitution to pay for cosmetic work to make her face match the rest of her body (again a service that she was forced to buy from a serious criminal). This was something that, if Officer Basilisk hadn't been a nice 'bot, would probably have led to her parole being cancelled and her being sent back to Robot Jail (a nightmare for her, from all accounts).
Morituri:
People really, really hate comic sans.
I don't particularly like it myself. I would greatly prefer a 'condensed' font that gets about 1.5x as many letters per inch on a line, and Comic Sans looks HORRIBLE - I mean, even more horrible than the other hand-lettering fonts I have available - if you do any kind of scripted conversion to make a condensed font out of it.
But if you asked me the name of a font that mimics printed hand-lettering, and you did it (as most people would) without even telling me what kind of computer or operating system you're using or what your font resources are or whether you're willing to pay money for a font and what language you're writing in and whether you want most of the printable Unicode repertoire and whether you need bold or italic effects and whether you're willing to go download something from a website you've never heard of and install it on your machine, or where to go to get it, or whether you're relying on it to already be installed on the machines of the people reading the stuff you want to appear in it ...
I would say Comic Sans.
It's available everywhere. It's free. It's got a truly extensive character repertoire. Its character repertoire is available in bold and italic (though not in condensed). And if someone is looking for a hand-lettering effect, it's really and truly the only thing I know to recommend to them, that I can recommend without getting into a long-winded discussion of what conditions they have and where and in what context they want to use it and what effects they need and so on. And I don't want to get into that discussion, because I'm not a graphic designer and it's a boring conversation to me. This only ever comes up when someone is talking about what web interface they want to hang in front of the code that I wrote and care about, and they have missed the fact that what I do doesn't have jack to do with web interfaces and that I don't give a crap about web interfaces.
Seriously. I don't want to go on recommending a font people hate so horribly. Tell me something else - ANYTHING else - that meets universal-use conditions as well as comic sans does.
TheEvilDog:
--- Quote from: Case on 15 May 2017, 09:56 ---May's chassis showed critical material-fatigue in a joint in under a year - ever heard of a human whose arms fell off simply due to use?
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: BenRG on 15 May 2017, 10:05 ---If May's chassis is defective at the time she received it (which appears to be the case, given her complaints about uneven leg length),
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The impression given in the comic is that the chassis wasn't defective, but rather it was so ridiculously old (by AI standards) that it was out of warranty and thus just falling apart.
It's quite possible that the US government in the QC-verse maintains an AI version of the aircraft boneyard, not for military purposes but for the fact that governments never throw anything away and uses the first generation models for parolees because its cheaper than giving them a more up to date body.
jheartney:
--- Quote from: Nycticoraci on 15 May 2017, 09:27 ---Faye's box has changed in the final panel! It's no longer a font message. I wonder why it changed?
--- End quote ---
The wacky-font punchline was too obscure. Also a bit implausible that Bubbles is familiar enough with typography to know that Faye's font recommendations were crappy just from the font names.
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