Well, it's becomeworsebetter
Welp.
Comic's up.
I don't know what I expected, but that wasn't it.
furries pioneered the internet, and they still can't catch a break
Does anyone know what the black thing she's holding in her right hand is?
1:Cows, like horses, technically have hair, not fur.
is it cynical to be fun and sexy and different, though? maybe it could be, but does it have to be? and is it here?
All these cow and milk puns are reminding me that I need to find a good source of cheese curds around here. I have a craving for either Wisconsin-style fried cheese curds, or poutine. Can't decide which.
I've been reading this comic since 2007 and stayed through the countless changes in tone, plot, art, etc. But if this turns into a furry comic I'm done.
I've been reading this comic since 2007 and stayed through the countless changes in tone, plot, art, etc. But if this turns into a furry comic I'm done.What exactly would constitute a 'furry comic'?
... with a stake through its heart and its mouth filled with garlic and sewn shut?
Which is to say, wibble.
I've been reading this comic since 2007 and stayed through the countless changes in tone, plot, art, etc. But if this turns into a furry comic I'm done.
I'd say that having a sexy cow avatar on the internet completely makes sense with what else we've learned about Aurelia so far. Especially if she's a stoner.I think what makes this kind of cringey is the realization that now that Clinton is on that channel, a certain percentage of the audience (certainly a smaller percentage, but most likely nonzero) is masturbating to him... Aurelia signed up for that, Clinton got dragged in.
And if she's streaming enough to have a nickname for her fans, then she 100% knows that there is constantly a percentage of her audience that is masturbating to her. To be frank they should write it into the terms of service for Twitch.
If you exist on the internet at all, chances are at least one person is masturbating too you.
Yes, one single joke I can ignore, certainly. I'm just afraid this is going to be like a regular character trait of hers and the source of many jokes and references. See: Marten's mom being a dominatrix - so in half the strips she's in there's some sort of dominatrix joke. Dale and Marigold like anime which is often referenced when they are present. Steve eats cereal. These all started out as single jokes that then became ongoing things we associate with the character.I've been reading this comic since 2007 and stayed through the countless changes in tone, plot, art, etc. But if this turns into a furry comic I'm done.
For the moment, it's just one single joke. No need to overreact. I agree the whole thing is kind of cringy, but once in a while, that's ok.
Yes, one single joke I can ignore, certainly. I'm just afraid this is going to be like a regular character trait of hers and the source of many jokes and references. See: Marten's mom being a dominatrix - so in half the strips she's in there's some sort of dominatrix joke. Dale and Marigold like anime which is often referenced when they are present. Steve eats cereal. These all started out as single jokes that then became ongoing things we associate with the character.I've been reading this comic since 2007 and stayed through the countless changes in tone, plot, art, etc. But if this turns into a furry comic I'm done.
For the moment, it's just one single joke. No need to overreact. I agree the whole thing is kind of cringy, but once in a while, that's ok.
I find furries to be deeply disturbing so I just really hope there won't be ongoing furry references in the comic.
Yes, one single joke I can ignore, certainly. I'm just afraid this is going to be like a regular character trait of hers and the source of many jokes and references. See: Marten's mom being a dominatrix - so in half the strips she's in there's some sort of dominatrix joke. Dale and Marigold like anime which is often referenced when they are present. Steve eats cereal. These all started out as single jokes that then became ongoing things we associate with the character.I've been reading this comic since 2007 and stayed through the countless changes in tone, plot, art, etc. But if this turns into a furry comic I'm done.
For the moment, it's just one single joke. No need to overreact. I agree the whole thing is kind of cringy, but once in a while, that's ok.
I find furries to be deeply disturbing so I just really hope there won't be ongoing furry references in the comic.
Ummm - "perfect likeness"?? I'm stretching to find anything about it that describes her adequately - though I suppose she means it ironically ("nudge/wink" to Clinton) :wink:
I mean, Aurelia may be a lot of things, but "ample" isn't one of them :laugh:
If you exist on the internet at all, chances are at least one person is masturbating too you.
If that's true - eww - I suddenly feel the need to have a shower...
Oh god, that probably made it worse, didn't it?! :facepalm:
...we don't wanna tell him about The Whiteboard, (http://the-whiteboard.com/) do we?I want to thank you for that "Whiteboard" link! I'm not usually into "funny antropomorphic animals" comics, but anything with a Polar bear name Doc fighting an eldritch horror spawned by home-made Mountain Dew left in the fridge too long with shaped-charges and other mayhem-producing devices is RIGHT up my alley!
Yes, one single joke I can ignore, certainly. I'm just afraid this is going to be like a regular character trait of hers and the source of many jokes and references. See: Marten's mom being a dominatrix - so in half the strips she's in there's some sort of dominatrix joke. Dale and Marigold like anime which is often referenced when they are present. Steve eats cereal. These all started out as single jokes that then became ongoing things we associate with the character.
Yeah I guess you're acting like the other things offend me somehow, which they don't. They're just all things that started off as one-off jokes. Early 2000s Jeph didn't make Marten's mom a sex worker to be inclusive or accurately reflect the real world or anything like that, but because it was a funny punchline. It was played for laughs. Pointing this out makes me anti-SW? And what, anti-cereal? Is that even a thing?Yes, one single joke I can ignore, certainly. I'm just afraid this is going to be like a regular character trait of hers and the source of many jokes and references. See: Marten's mom being a dominatrix - so in half the strips she's in there's some sort of dominatrix joke. Dale and Marigold like anime which is often referenced when they are present. Steve eats cereal. These all started out as single jokes that then became ongoing things we associate with the character.
there's a lot of things to unpack here, in this entire thread really, but i just woke up and i'm gonna swing by a bit of these ones, cuz i feel like i'm taking crazy pills to be frank. just gonna throw it out without translating into 'proper' language for now cuz i gotta go
jokes in a joke strip
a many-years spanning career
oh the sex worker but not the corporate ceo or the musician or the baker huh
a hobby involving multiple storytelling genres that is a significant swathe of a country's storytelling output
a fucking meme that Jeph did like TWICE, years apart, but the fans ran into the ground
the lines seem arbitrary at best
got a minute from work to bang out a quick responseI'm not sure what you mean by "negative-contrasting." I was simply providing examples of character details in this comic that originally began as jokes or to provide material for jokes. One can reasonably infer from the fact that I am still currently reading the comic that I do not find the inclusion of dominatrices, anime, or cereal to be offensive or disturbing.
of course they're as much jokes as anything, which is why i said "jokes in a joke strip", because as it turns out a lot of things are jokes in a joke strip. Aurelia's avatar is as much a joke as anything.
you brought up those examples in a negative-contrasting context with this harmless joke that you literally said you'd walk out forever about, so i don't think it's exactly a stretch to think that maybe, just maybe, you had some negative associations with these other harmless things.
i'm not even trying to accuse of being offended, exactly, though don't think i don't recognize that "acting like" reframe.
right, will try to sneak back off and talk more later, take care
though don't think i don't recognize that "acting like" reframe.What are you even trying to say here? I certainly don't recognize it. Is this a more innocuous way of saying it? "From what you have written, you seem to have misinterpreted that the other things offend me somehow, which they don't."
Does anyone know what the black thing she's holding in her right hand is?
Game console controller.
comic
Let's see, if this is Twitch, she has way more subs than any existing streamer, and she'd be making about $1.6 million/year. Normally you have more viewers than subscribers. I'll assume it was supposed to say "followers".
I take a break for a little while, just a liiiiiiittle while.....and what the hell did I just come back to?! :psyduck:
Am I gonna have to click “I am over 18”? and start using incognito mode?
Popping in on your mom's stream when she's got like twenty viewers is a much different situation than being watched by three thousand people.
Your "fully-clothed bit of transhumanist eye candy" to me is a disturbing sexualized cartoon cow with oversized human breasts. Not comparable to anything related to the most sexual of Jeph's art involving humans.I take a break for a little while, just a liiiiiiittle while.....and what the hell did I just come back to?! :psyduck:
Am I gonna have to click “I am over 18”? and start using incognito mode?
i mean, there was nudity and the like within the first hundred strips, give or take. groping, cheesecake, sex toys, violence, drug abuse, sex.... these have been a part of QC since the beginning.
a fully-clothed bit of transhumanist eye candy, after all this time, after everything we've been through being what's causing such a... visceral trend of reactions, that's.
that's a lot of what i'm trying to get at, in general. a lot of people are mostly joking. i hope. and like, we should be able to joke and have fun and enjoy the silliness of this! there *is* silliness here, there is joyousness here!
but
she's not even in lingerie. she's just a little risque, just being different and playful and attractive in a way outside her over-culture's assigned "respectability" role for her, as a middle-aged mother. the current of disapproval and condemnation through fan reactions here and elsewhere, while not nearly as bad as it could be, well it's a damned familiar taste, i think, to women and to minorities in general, who find ourselves often enough subjected to it in our own lives when being harmless.
so that's where a lot of my frustration and sadness is coming from, here in this thread recently. why i'm bothering to type a bunch. cuz we were feasting together, communal joy together, and now that familiar poison turns sweet wine bitter on my lips.
edit: and it's far, far, far from the first time in this community and fandom
I'm mostly surprised that this mostly offends me because something deep inside me is constantly nagging me "One breast, multiple nippels and lower down her body" on repeat.The uncanny valley's a weird thing. There's no reason it can't be approached from the cow side rather than the human side.
OK, so this technically makes Clinton's mom a furry.
I think this is *the* first piece of fiction I've ever seen that has a character that's a furry. In the sense of having an anthropomorphic animal as a persona/avatar that they use to interact with others, not in the sense of the character actually *being* an anthro animal.
At least, I can't offhand think of any other examples.
Well, Between Failures has some furry content, and some of the characters were originally furries in a previous comic the author did. And Sabrina Online is sort of furry adjacent, and is one of the longest running webcomics still updating, you might want to give them a look.”Sort of.” “Adjacent.”
OK, so this technically makes Clinton's mom a furry.
I think this is *the* first piece of fiction I've ever seen that has a character that's a furry. In the sense of having an anthropomorphic animal as a persona/avatar that they use to interact with others, not in the sense of the character actually *being* an anthro animal.
At least, I can't offhand think of any other examples.
Well, Between Failures has some furry content, and some of the characters were originally furries in a previous comic the author did. And Sabrina Online is sort of furry adjacent, and is one of the longest running webcomics still updating, you might want to give them a look.
In the sense of having an anthropomorphic animal as a persona/avatar that they use to interact with others
I don’t know that Aurelia guilt tripped Clinton. I think she just offered and he said yes.Yeah, nothing about it says guilt-trip to me either. Sometimes parents just want to hang out with their adult children.
As far as I could see, Aurelia didn't force Clinton to do anything. The 'guilt trip' just seemed like a joke to me. 'Oh, woe is me, none of my kids want to hang out with me during my twilight years! The ingratitude! Let me relate again exactly how many hours I spent in labor!' Heck, I joke about that sort of thing with my kids :D
I dunno, since Aurelia shut down his going to the bar, he has had one positive facial expression on-screen. Doesn't seem like he's doing all this just because he wants to. Like yeah it's not the most malicious version of guilt tripping, but I'm sure it's affecting his decisions right now. Like agreeing to go on a stream he was clearly uncomfortable with from the start.
And like, streaming isn't just hanging out. When you have that many viewers, streaming is a job, not just something you do for fun. If she wants to hang out with her son she should do it offline, unless he is enthusiastic and fully informed of what to expect -- like the style/format of the stream, the way he should conduct himself so he doesn't make a faux pas, and the amount and disposition of her viewers. And you do a freaking test run before you go live so your co-host isn't blindsided by your erotic avatar in front of your entire audience.
You’re right about the bar... tho I think I’m still on Aurelia’s side. If a friend showed up to my house and told me they invited a stranger over for dinner without having asked me if either one was welcome, then disappeared for making out, then made it clear they wanted to ditch me for the rest of the night, I’d be really hurt. It seems reasonable to me to ask that the person who invited themselves over actually spend time with you.
"Good news, searching you online just brings up porn."
.....
"Bad news, searching you online brings up porn."
Yeah, anyway....
I dunno, since Aurelia shut down his going to the bar, he has had one positive facial expression on-screen. Doesn't seem like he's doing all this just because he wants to. Like yeah it's not the most malicious version of guilt tripping, but I'm sure it's affecting his decisions right now. Like agreeing to go on a stream he was clearly uncomfortable with from the start.
And like, streaming isn't just hanging out. When you have that many viewers, streaming is a job, not just something you do for fun. If she wants to hang out with her son she should do it offline, unless he is enthusiastic and fully informed of what to expect -- like the style/format of the stream, the way he should conduct himself so he doesn't make a faux pas, and the amount and disposition of her viewers. And you do a freaking test run before you go live so your co-host isn't blindsided by your erotic avatar in front of your entire audience.
You’re right about the bar... tho I think I’m still on Aurelia’s side. If a friend showed up to my house and told me they invited a stranger over for dinner without having asked me if either one was welcome, then disappeared for making out, then made it clear they wanted to ditch me for the rest of the night, I’d be really hurt. It seems reasonable to me to ask that the person who invited themselves over actually spend time with you.
I don’t know anything about this streaming stuff......is 40K really a big deal?
Or to put it another way: no character in Star Trek is a trekkie.
Probably has something to do with LOTR?
I dunno, since Aurelia shut down his going to the bar, he has had one positive facial expression on-screen.
However, I do wonder if she's aware of the really weird fringe that inevitably must exist in her fandom and the things they write about what they fantasise doing to her.
. And that back in the 80s and 90s there were a lot more girls in IT than there were later...
oenone, i had to stare at that post far longer than i should have, before it finally clicked. hee :-)
The LilBeef avatar is way too personalized to be a pre-gen.In *our* universe. In the QC universe AI technology is self evidently way ahead of ours. Who knows what is possible in theirs?
IMO, panel 2 today is basically Aurelia saying to Clinton: "Look, I've tried to give you time and space. I've even showed you an aspect of my life that some might regard as embarrassing. However, this is the last chance: Either you you tell me what's going on or I'm just going to continually badger you until you do so!"
IMO, panel 2 today is basically Aurelia saying to Clinton: "Look, I've tried to give you time and space. I've even showed you an aspect of my life that some might regard as embarrassing. However, this is the last chance: Either you you tell me what's going on or I'm just going to continually badger you until you do so!"
I don’t know anything about this streaming stuff......is 40K really a big deal?
Not really. I mean, sure, it means you've got an actual cult going, and you're not talking to just a basement full of weirdos anymore, but I think the "kinda a big deal" threshold is having, oh, 100k subscribers? Most of the cults, er, channels I subscribe to on YouTube (i.e. OSP) have 1 milllion-2million subscribers, but a few niche ones like John Francis (covers Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld, that sort of thing) are in the 40k-50k range.
I'm not sure what the threshold is for making an actual living from streaming is.
Yes. I was just about to mention that they had two parents for a while. The children have their dad's behavior to deal with plus the impact of a rough divorce.
A puppy was born with six legs.
I thought that was some sort of metaphor but apparently it really happened (and the articles are from February which means it's not a joke): https://www.livescience.com/puppy-six-legs-skipper.htmlYes. I was just about to mention that they had two parents for a while. The children have their dad's behavior to deal with plus the impact of a rough divorce.
A puppy was born with six legs.
Yes.
I’ll admit, I’m curious about the puppy.
EDIT: Ah. Is this an April 1st thing?
The spammer showed a level of persistence that would be admirable in another context and the puppy newspost is in her memory.
Well then I approve. Honouring a worthy foe shows class.
Also, shows anyone else with silly ideas what happened to the last ones who tried.
I wonder if the streaming income is why Clinton and Claire haven’t mentioned student loans as a big concern?
I don't recall any other characters mentioning student loan debt (though I may be wrong). I think it's more likely that it's just not a topic Jeph wants to spend time on in his comic rather than something special about Claire or Clinton.
Um cachorro nasceu com seis pernas na Oklahoma.
eh, it could be invasive, but she seems more flattered than anything, in the main in this context. and why shouldn't she be?
i get the main demographic that's gonna participate on a forum discussion of this comic aren't, like, used to this sort of thing i suppose, but there's plenty of people that like to feel sexy and appreciated. context matters a whole helluva lot, for example public catcalling can be obnoxious (most guys who attempt it are really bad at it), but like... it can be harmless. and fit into the vibe of the performance she's putting on.
i mod for a vtuber, and i've had to step in a couple times when someone started crossing boundaries in chat that she wasn't comfortable with, from people that honestly seemed fairly well-meaning just too enthusiastic for the most part. but she gets to set what those are. it's her space to perform in, to play with her actual friends and her fans in.
i'm not saying you can't set those boundaries tighter for yourself. i do! just i want to encourage examining those on the regular. i had, and still have, a lot of baggage that causes me to needlessly, uselessly, often harmfully constrict myself. (gasp, a queer person having self-repression issues, i know who'd have thought). and i don't want you to hurt yourselves the same way i hurt myself. make different mistakes! :parrot: