Topic: WCDT - 19th Dec to 23 Dec (strips 4936-4940) (Read 33238 times)

pwhodges · « **on:** 18 Dec 2022, 15:21 »

With Claire being as wound up and furious as this, I'm expecting the nature of the Director to be something which completely deflates her.

shanejayell · « **Reply #1 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 15:34 »

'Other.' Tho I AM thinking it's a previous character.

......

Corpse Witch?

de_la_Nae · « **Reply #2 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 15:50 »

The allosaurus

Ampersand8888 · « **Reply #3 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 16:09 »

The floating, humming black slab with the coffee cup still attached.

Farideh · « **Reply #4 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 16:53 »

The old Claire! The one who helped Cosette with her curse.

Stoon · « **Reply #5 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 17:16 »

It's something Emily summoned by accident.

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2853

Wombat · « **Reply #6 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 19:42 »

The Director is Jeph, and things are about to get meta.

Stoon · « **Reply #7 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 19:56 »

Quote from: Wombat on 18 Dec 2022, 19:42

The Director is Jeph, and things are about to get meta.

It's been a long time since he made an appearance.
https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2066

badbum61 · « **Reply #8 on:** 18 Dec 2022, 22:13 »

Shoosh, you two motormouths, Claire can't hear herself seethe...

bhtooefr · « **Reply #9 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 03:32 »

So the director is an AI, that breaks some ideas of who it could be...

Mr_Rose · « **Reply #10 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 05:09 »

Quote from: bhtooefr on 19 Dec 2022, 03:32

So the director is an AI, that breaks some ideas of who it could be...

It’s actually Moray-prime, the original goo-puter, but they don’t have the more advanced motility functions or covering so they’re just a big ol’ open vat of oil that sometimes bulges up into vague shapes to emote non verbally.

derris_kharlan · « **Reply #11 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 07:10 »

Claire is the worst.
I hope it’s the Allosaurus and it eats her.

*Battens down the hatches for the incoming storm from Claire’s fans

de_la_Nae · « **Reply #12 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 08:47 »

derris you are *so* down bad for her lol

de_la_Nae · « **Reply #13 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 08:48 »

(it's me, i am the storm)
(but i'm eating chili so that's all i got right in the chamber right now)

hedgie · « **Reply #14 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 08:58 »

I've walked out of far lesser clusterfucks than poor Claire is enduring now. I'm honestly rather impressed that she's going through with chewing out the director, rather than asking Hanners if Spaceship can give her and Marten a ride home.

shanejayell · « **Reply #15 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 09:54 »

Quote from: hedgie on 19 Dec 2022, 08:58

I've walked out of far lesser clusterfucks than poor Claire is enduring now. I'm honestly rather impressed that she's going through with chewing out the director, rather than asking Hanners if Spaceship can give her and Marten a ride home.

Hanners: "We can nuke it from orbit if you want."

Marten: "WHAT."

Claire: *is thinking about it*

Marten: "NO."

Elder Sign · « **Reply #16 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 13:15 »

Quote from: shanejayell on 19 Dec 2022, 09:54

Hanners: "We can nuke it from orbit if you want."

"It's the only way to be sure."

Perfectly Reasonable · « **Reply #17 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 13:24 »

I have saved you the trouble of googling Star Trek spaceship ambient:

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/spaceshipNoiseGenerator.php

Tova · « **Reply #18 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 13:38 »

The strip numbers are wrong on this thread. Should be (strips 4941-4945).

Also, if it does turn out to be Yay, I will laugh and laugh and laugh.

DreDotJs · « **Reply #19 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 14:52 »

It's Melon and Lemon's sister, Persimmon. She's got an orange chassis with Neko ears and a r/OneOrangeBrainCell personality.

dreed · « **Reply #20 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 17:34 »

I... dont understand the plot.

Why she is so angry about some inept staff? So a staff member supposed to do her job on the room but didn't finish it on time. So in sheer stupid panic hid away.

Apologies but it was some breaking the straw point?

But we only saw the over excited gel girl. No other redflags. And now she is getting that robot girl fired?

The plot turned in a weird way...

Elder Sign · « **Reply #21 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 18:08 »

Quote from: dreed on 19 Dec 2022, 17:34

I... dont understand the plot.

Why she is so angry about some inept staff? So a staff member supposed to do her job on the room but didn't finish it on time. So in sheer stupid panic hid away.

Apologies but it was some breaking the straw point?

But we only saw the over excited gel girl. No other redflags. And now she is getting that robot girl fired?

The plot turned in a weird way...

So to recap from about the mid-4920s:

The first Cubetown contact they met was overexcited and scatterbrained, drove in an unsafe way, and was less-than-reassuring about the people who live there
The sentient boat that took them across to the community was an asshole to her boyfriend
Her first sight of Cubetown entailed a massive explosion which supposedly tends to be larger
The first Cubetown worker they met feuded with their own sentient arm
There's a mysterious quadrant of town nobody wants to talk about at all costs, and which the community can't agree on developing
Cubetown's chief of security was lurking on the hotel room balcony (even if well-intentioned), doing their job poorly, and alluded to planetary-scale threats that periodically originate from resident scientists
When she wants to see a higher-up, they're deep in some distant sanctum well below ocean-level which is designed to be forbidding and discourage contact

I mean, I don't think I identify with her sheer hot-bloodedness at all, but she certainly has grounds to be frustrated.

hedgie · « **Reply #22 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 18:18 »

Neither she, nor her brother have any chill (and she’s particularly odd about libraries and the sanctity thereof). But in this case, it’s 100% justified, for the reasons you mentioned.

Elder Sign · « **Reply #23 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 18:21 »

Yeah, if I had to sum up both their characters it would probably be "zero chill", more or less.

Although having worked in a library as a student page in my ever-more-distant high school past, I get why people would be particular about how they operate.

hedgie · « **Reply #24 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 18:25 »

Aye, but Claire treats them like some high church thing, whilst Tai treats it as one of those temples that have have rather shocking rituals.

Elder Sign · « **Reply #25 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 18:44 »

I suppose a part of that might simply be humour aimed at librarians and frequent library patrons rather than being super critical to their characters.

Now that I think about it a bit more, I find that since QC became so heavily AI-focused and -centred, I actually kind of appreciate a sort of storyline that brings this post-singularity godlike-AI worldbuilding a bit back down-to-earth. That AIs, for all their advancement and processing capability, are so prone to thinking themselves down so many random, entropic tangents that they might actually be crap at building and operating a functioning community in the real world.

Something that demonstrates that there might actually need to be an ongoing societal symbiosis between humans and AI-kind, because humans need the AIs' drive to push the boundaries in new dimensions just as much as the AIs need humans' practicality and experience to keep them grounded. Reminds me of V'ger returning to seek the Creator to gain the ability to leap beyond logic, but reversed -- here, the AIs need their human counterparts to remind them what logic and practicality are.

de_la_Nae · « **Reply #26 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 18:44 »

Also all of her previous interaction on the phone, and some research, indicated this is a shitshow, which is being confirmed by a lot of the experiences. this implies a *lot* of headaches coming up if she takes this job.
she's also in negotiation to be a *department head*, essentially. in a high-stakes negotiation at that; this is the opportunity of a lifetime, on top of being a shitshow. so... no pressure lol
also whether she means to or not, a show of power on her part is a pretty valid strategy. if she's being invited to wrangle these quantum cats vibrating and disappearing all over the place, figuratively, well... there's no getting around that you have to use the stick sometimes. there's different ways to do it, and no she's arguably not being perfect. but we're finding out whether or not she's got fire *and* iron in her belly, as it were.

shanejayell · « **Reply #27 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 19:15 »

Still curious who the director will be.

de_la_Nae · « **Reply #28 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 19:18 »

and i have to admit some personal bias here. i've worked in shitshow companies and shitshow projects. They tend to be massively vulnerable to grift and abuse on ridiculous scales. And even when they aren't, they tend to be so busy putting out fires, bailing water, patching hull, and fucking around that they don't *write down what they discover*. so much valuable work and data lost in the churn of no/bad infrastructure.
creativity is important, but it needs to be fed, sheltered, comforted, recorded, protected, and taken care of.

Right now, there's only a little indication that upper management of Cubetown gives a damn about that, arguably. you can only throw money at things willy nilly for so long. the lordlings, at least in our reality, make up financiers and management caste? they tend to be a complex mix of evil, selfish, and easily bored. and they usually have enough leverage that they won't be the ones eating shit when the skimming on repairs, inspections, and safety supplies means the 1 o'clock explosion causes shrapnel that tears 3 people apart. or when the funding dries up and everyone that actually gives a damn or needs to make a living are out on their ass. or when an experiment goes off the rails and causes a power surge that fries the data storage racks that weren't shielded and protected properly cuz of an installation failure on the part of overworked, self-trained, and under-supported techs. and it turns out the automatic backups broke 2 months ago, and the bad software patch that did for it also broke the auto-alerts that should have warned someone, but there's been no one with the time and energy to remember to check. or boring but critical-to-comfortable-operation supplies like toilet paper, air filters, lightbulbs, pens have run out because inventory's just straight-up FUCKED, so worker's bonuses had to (well "had" to) be spent on rush shipment from further away and/or inflated prices cuz ops can't hold out until a market price dip. the list goes on.
ceos, directors, and that, they don't have to worry about house payments, groceries, medical bills. they don't eat shit unless they piss off enough other lordlings, otherwise they get to go into a cushy exile at worst, usually. a new "job" at a new company. a new contract payout or new scam.
infrastructure is part of how we protect the rest of us

de_la_Nae · « **Reply #29 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 19:20 »

as anyone who's put up with me in discuss forum knows, i uh... have Ideas and maybe get to typing too much lol

Torlek · « **Reply #30 on:** 19 Dec 2022, 23:45 »

While true that Claire is displaying zero chill here, this place has absolutely not earned any chill. The job interview isn't just about the interviewee showing the company why they should want to hire them. It's about the company showing the interviewee why they'd want to come work there. The only thing Cubetown has shown Claire so far is, "We have NO fucking idea what we're doing."

brasca · « **Reply #31 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 00:19 »

It's been a year since I delurked and strangely enough it was Claire's attitude that drew me out back then.

Last year I found her annoying for being upset over her mother mistakenly thinking she got the job she was dreaming about instead of a temporary job at Coffee of Doom. Now I'm not sure how much time has actually passed since then, but there was a bit of a time jump and Cubetown is the first place that's actually extended a job offer to her. I'm not sure what librarian jobs are available in the world of Questionable Content, but looking around my corner of it I'd say beggars cannot be choosers especially when you consider the alternatives. Would she be happier working in one of those red states that pass laws that censor what books libraries can have or lend? And then there's their stand on LGBTQ rights. Yes. Cubetown is dysfunctional, but I would think by now she'd be used to it. She shares an apartment with Pintsize. She works at Coffee of Doom. She lives in Northampton.

If she's going to be this way the least she could do is recommend her brother for the job.

Cypher · « **Reply #32 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 06:16 »

Personally, to whatever extent she's entitled to feel peeved, there are ways of conducting oneself gracefully and respectably, if only not to lose the moral high ground. THIS... is not it. This is a teenage "uh, like, whatEVER" sulk. If I were Marten (let alone security woman, who should have noped out of there ages ago) I would have put up with about two minutes of this surliness, then said "OK, I'll be at the exit; see you whenever you're done". And I usually like Claire. I think maybe Jeph's gone a bit too far in trying to convey she's disillusioned; it's just making her look tiresome and self-absorbed.

Wheel.of.Fish · « **Reply #33 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 07:54 »

Quote from: Cypher on 20 Dec 2022, 06:16

Personally, to whatever extent she's entitled to feel peeved, there are ways of conducting oneself gracefully and respectably, if only not to lose the moral high ground. THIS... is not it.

Quite vehemently agreed. Claire has a record of taking firm stands against incompetence and poor organization, but what's with the glaring stolid snapping at Marten who didn't do anything? And why is she so mad at the awkward pink security lady? She spends half her life talking to socially awkward tall people.

Her grim face heading to the office seems to be evoking Hanners' similar relentless march on her own mother, but Hannelore was rightfully enraged at being manipulated and at having another person's life manipulated on her unwilling behalf. Claire is seemingly super angry at everyone around her for finding out exactly what multiple people had told her previously and what her own research had confirmed; Cubetown is not well-run. It's an open-ended AI-headed concept shop with no particular limiters in place, like some sort of technophilic version of Leary's house or John Lilly's lab.

She knew the risks when she chose to come down here, and now she's mad that the place that is world-famous for not running especially well is not running especially well.

I think she should be more amazed that Cubetown is ongoing DESPITE everything that's happening constantly. Clearly there's SOMETHING functional here, and someone so centered in organizational design should be eager to find out what it is.

... but yeah, no, snap at Marten some more.

Elder Sign · « **Reply #34 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 08:39 »

Yeah, like the least you can do when you're angry is to keep that anger directed at the actual legitimate recipient(s), instead of malignantly taking it out on everyone around regardless of whether they contributed anything to the problem or have any real power to correct it.

Anger does not "control" the person who is angry; it's the other way around. Lack of self-control when frustrated, angry, enraged, etc. is not a feature, it's a flaw. And not correcting that character flaw reflects on the person choosing to do that.

Perfectly Reasonable · « **Reply #35 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 11:04 »

I think that Claire should take the job. She can set Cubetown up with a simple wiki. Which would be massively better than the mess they have now. Then she can leave with an interesting addition to her resume.

( this will not happen because it is a simple solution that would derail the plot )

gprimr1 · « **Reply #36 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 12:18 »

Something else to consider...

What if they are "putting on a show" so to speak? We know Cubetown needs help, but what if they really aren't as bad off as they are making it out to be, and just want to see how well she can handle disorder?

shanejayell · « **Reply #37 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 14:18 »

New Comic

Welp, no one guessed who the Director was....

Tova · « **Reply #38 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 17:07 »

Ah yeah, that was my second guess.

Ampersand8888 · « **Reply #39 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 17:11 »

Beats a robotic Cthulu, or a cyborg cat, I suppose.

dreed · « **Reply #40 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 17:47 »

Claire has no working experience in library except the short stint as intern under marten in local university library.

The cubetown personnel did not show any malice to her nor show toxicity of the work culture.

We got confirmation that they are very well funded so there will be no issues with them making payments on her salary and accommodation.

What she got instead is a place which definitely needs help with organisation and culture building, a position for which is 100 percent underqualified but seems like she already got based solely on the potential to grow into.

She is in the wrong being so angry and poor marten is trying to change the mood and is being shut down.

Furthermore, as a person who she is, she really should be more open to people not really fitting into the society norms.

dutchrvl · « **Reply #41 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 17:55 »

Quote from: Elder Sign on 20 Dec 2022, 08:39

Yeah, like the least you can do when you're angry is to keep that anger directed at the actual legitimate recipient(s), instead of malignantly taking it out on everyone around regardless of whether they contributed anything to the problem or have any real power to correct it.

Anger does not "control" the person who is angry; it's the other way around. Lack of self-control when frustrated, angry, enraged, etc. is not a feature, it's a flaw. And not correcting that character flaw reflects on the person choosing to do that.

Yeah, even then her anger seems bizarre to me.
This is after all a job interview for all its intents and purposes. If she doesn’t like what she sees, that’s fine she can simply say “no thanks” and leave. Cube town is not obligated to function a certain way, and Claire is certainly not entitled to anything, yet that is how she’s acting here. Besides self absorbed, she also behaves in a high and mighty fashion, as if it’s somehow an affront that cubetown dares to function this way in her presence. A bit more humility and a simple sense of wonder about how different things could be approached would suit her (and make her more likable).

I suppose it could maybe be framed as “she is already acting as if she works there and therefore showing she has what it takes” but it’s a massive stretch tbh

Tova · « **Reply #42 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 18:20 »

I still fail to understand how any of this could possibly have been a surprise to her.

shanejayell · « **Reply #43 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 18:56 »

Well, yes...

Is it cold in here? · « **Reply #44 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 19:07 »

Quote from: gprimr1 on 20 Dec 2022, 12:18

Something else to consider...

What if they are "putting on a show" so to speak? We know Cubetown needs help, but what if they really aren't as bad off as they are making it out to be, and just want to see how well she can handle disorder?

You got me thinking of a town I know of where all the city personnel who deal with job applicants are instructed to be rude and obstructionist to people applying for police jobs. Candidates who lose their cool don't get hired.

derris_kharlan · « **Reply #45 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 19:16 »

Quote from: de_la_Nae on 19 Dec 2022, 08:47

derris you are *so* down bad for her lol

I would pay money, REAL MONEY for Jeph to write her out of the comic.
Her holier than thou attitude.
Her zero chill.
Her bullying of her brother.
My least favorite character in the comic by miles.

But that’s not gonna happen so I just vent here from time to time.
After all its just a webcomic.

Perfectly Reasonable · « **Reply #46 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 19:47 »

I am amused that in response to Claire's demand for light, the Director fires up their photophores.

What else goes on down here? I was sorta expecting a giant squid, but we were told 'AI'.

( ignore the man behind the curtain )

Gyrre · « **Reply #47 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 20:23 »

Quote from: Stoon on 18 Dec 2022, 17:16

It's something Emily summoned by accident.

https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2853

In light of the reveal, this still may be case.

Quote from: Perfectly Reasonable on 20 Dec 2022, 19:47

I am amused that in response to Claire's demand for light, the Director fires up their photophores.

What else goes on down here? I was sorta expecting a giant squid, but we were told 'AI'.

( ignore the man behind the curtain )

Same.

Sounds like a deep sea marine life survey/study

Tova · « **Reply #48 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 22:54 »

Quote from: derris_kharlan on 19 Dec 2022, 07:10

*Battens down the hatches for the incoming storm from Claire’s fans

Heavy clouds but no rain. Disappointed?

traroth · « **Reply #49 on:** 20 Dec 2022, 23:43 »

Get well soon, Jeph. Covid is no joke. I got it last week of september. The coughing is almost gone, now...

THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)

Poll

What awaits?

Author Topic: WCDT - 19th Dec to 23 Dec (strips 4936-4940) (Read 33238 times)