Questionable Content XVIII: "That's only sort of good news"

[Wraith]

Isnt jeph doing this specifically because he wants to make a huge change to the comic? I could have sworn that was the point of all this. So giving her a local library job wouldnt really alter much of anything. It would introduce a new storyline to the standard "world" we have been in for like 15 years now. So he is setting up a background full of colorful characters who will introduce all sorts of shenanigans and interpersonal interactions in a new location while leaving most of the old cast behind. Kind of a soft reboot of the series.

I don't think that anyone is complaining about big changes being made to the comic, more just that they're being made in the most bass-ackwards way possible that it's not really entertaining, its just "lolrandom".

Claire is newly graduated with a bachelor of Library Sciences. She's interned in one library ever, hasn't ever been shown to have friends or a network outside of her immediate family and Marten, but has somehow been head-hunted by the mysteriously unnamed Director of a top-secret AI-run floating town and has been offered a carte blanche position in a role that she isn't suited for. None of this makes sense - it's not even wish fulfilment in the most normal sense, because the job that Claire has been offered isn't the sort of job that she was training for so we can't really say its what she 'wants'.

It could turn out that the Director turns out to be Claire's estranged father or something similarly convenient, tying some elements together in hindsight, but in the meantime it's just things that are happening without explanation. The promise of "plot tomorrow" only goes so far.

[Radar]

Can I just say how much I adore the idea of a gathering of idiots being referred to as a "shower"?

Because I do. A lot.

English language has a lot of established colorful words for a bunch of something specific. While a shower of idiots might not be one of them, it would not be bad to add it to the list.

Also, it reminds me of a specific gag from DBZA.

[halfeye]

English language has a lot of established colorful words for a bunch of something specific. While a shower of idiots might not be one of them, it would not be bad to add it to the list.

Also, it reminds me of a specific gag from DBZA.

Whether it's a defined use or not, "shower of idiots" is old.

[Delicious Taffy]

Isnt jeph doing this specifically because he wants to make a huge change to the comic? I could have sworn that was the point of all this.

Most people would start killing off characters to shake things up a little. Most people don't have both a robot fetish and a long-running webcomic, though. I'm still not convinced this hasn't all been an excuse to make Tim Hortons jokes.

Come to think of it, I wonder whether the comic has more readers in the USA or in Canada, and whether that's influencing anything.

[geoduck]

Most people would start killing off characters to shake things up a little. Most people don't have both a robot fetish and a long-running webcomic, though. I'm still not convinced this hasn't all been an excuse to make Tim Hortons jokes.

Come to think of it, I wonder whether the comic has more readers in the USA or in Canada, and whether that's influencing anything.

It's probably already been said, but it's because Jeph himself moved to Halifax. And yeah, there are about a thousand better ways he could have moved the comic's action to that city.

I see I wasn't the only one to wonder if it was going to turn out that Claire's father is involved in Cubetown somehow.

Random Trivia of the Day: James Lipton, the guy who hosted The Actor's Studio, also wrote An Exaltation of Larks, which is an exhaustive collection of group names, both historical and ones that Lipton himself made up.

[Vinyadan]

I think the easiest way to teleport to Halifax would have been a drunken night out after Claire's master graduation.

"You wake up on the roadside. The city looks unfamiliar, and people have an odd accent. You can see the gray sea, and a gigantic inflatable yellow duckie looms over the moored fishing vessels and container ships. A suspiciously polite local tells you you are in Halifax."

[Radar]

I think the easiest way to teleport to Halifax would have been a drunken night out after Claire's master graduation.

"You wake up on the roadside. The city looks unfamiliar, and people have an odd accent. You can see the gray sea, and a gigantic inflatable yellow duckie looms over the moored fishing vessels and container ship. A suspicious polite local tells you you are in Halifax."

This description made me mentally add something afterwards:
>

[geoduck]

I think the easiest way to teleport to Halifax would have been a drunken night out after Claire's master graduation.

"You wake up on the roadside. The city looks unfamiliar, and people have an odd accent. You can see the gray sea, and a gigantic inflatable yellow duckie looms over the moored fishing vessels and container ships. A suspiciously polite local tells you you are in Halifax."

As Radar says, it would be more like-

You wake up on the roadside. The city looks unfamiliar, and people have an odd accent. You can see the gray sea, and a gigantic inflatable yellow duckie looms over the moored fishing vessels and container ships.
There is a local here.

>EXAMINE LOCAL

The local looks suspiciously polite.

>LOCAL, WHERE AM I?

"You are in Halifax!"

[Wraith]

English language has a lot of established colorful words for a bunch of something specific. While a shower of idiots might not be one of them, it would not be bad to add it to the list.

When I was a kid, my father would use the phrase "a short, sharp, shower of s**t" as an alliterative way of describing an unforeseen, but brief, series of unpleasant events. You know the type - one day you have everything happen out of nowhere, in the space of an hour, and all of it apparently designed to annoy you?

As I grew older, the phrase evolved several times including into "shower of s**theads" to describe the instigators of said-s**tshower. In polite company, "s**theads" would become "idiots", although we all knew exactly what he was referring to.

So it's not an established collective noun, but it is one with a logical progression, of sorts. Much of (especially British) English language has similarly convoluted roots, and don't even get me started on my local dialect which I have long since trained myself out of using on the internet

**distant, heckling laughter from Scotland**

I think the easiest way to teleport to Halifax would have been a drunken night out after Claire's master graduation.

The weird thing is, Jeph alluded to a plotline wherein the QC cast would end up in Canada through entirely organic means - Dora and Tai's bachelor party. They WERE going to spend a weekend in Canada, but they aborted the idea in order to have money to donate to May's chassis fundraiser.

He abandoned a perfectly good and entirely plausible excuse to get his characters to the place he wanted them to go, abandoned it for wacky AI nonsense, and then had to pull a random Faustian/random-AI-nonsense deal out of his butt to set it up again.

With a timeskip in between, for some reason.

[halfeye]

Random Trivia of the Day: James Lipton, the guy who hosted The Actor's Studio, also wrote An Exaltation of Larks, which is an exhaustive collection of group names, both historical and ones that Lipton himself made up.

There can never be an exhaustive collection of group names, exactly because anybody can make one up. Extensive, yes, complete, no.

[Manga Shoggoth]

The weird thing is, Jeph alluded to a plotline wherein the QC cast would end up in Canada through entirely organic means - Dora and Tai's bachelor party. They WERE going to spend a weekend in Canada, but they aborted the idea in order to have money to donate to May's chassis fundraiser.

He abandoned a perfectly good and entirely plausible excuse to get his characters to the place he wanted them to go, abandoned it for wacky AI nonsense, and then had to pull a random Faustian/random-AI-nonsense deal out of his butt to set it up again.

And was there a reasonable probability of one of more of them staying there (apart from nailing Pintsize to a tree) afterwards?

The only place it is mentioned (at least from a quick trawl through the comic) is the page you posted. That was hardly alluding to a plotline, just giving a rather nice display of charity within the community.

With a timeskip in between, for some reason.

How far ahead do you think this comic is plotted? There's 614 comics (and numerous plot changes) since then. That's about two years, 4 months worth of comics.

[Kish]

Isnt jeph doing this specifically because he wants to make a huge change to the comic? I could have sworn that was the point of all this.

Ah, Jeph, I'm sure you were prepared for the usual complaints that you haven't changed the comic to comply with strangers' random-ass complaints about it, but were you prepared for Telephone Game?

[Wraith]

And was there a reasonable probability of one of more of them staying there (apart from nailing Pintsize to a tree) afterwards?

That depends what you mean by 'reasonable' - More or less probable than a random AI CEO of a floating city independently learning Claire's name and head-hunting her based on a reputation that we all know that she doesn't have?

Besides, who said she had to stay immediately? I was thinking more like, just a vague introduction? Perhaps for example: Claire goes to the bachelorette party, meets someone in a bar and impresses them with her silly puns, and she wakes up the next morning with a business card in her purse and little-to-no memory of where it came from. Boom! She's met the CEO and that's why he likes her! Cue job offer! Come back next week and we'll talk (preferably while sober this time)!

How far ahead do you think this comic is plotted? There's 614 comics (and numerous plot changes) since then. That's about two years, 4 months worth of comics.

Truthfully? About 30 minutes, give or take. But then I'm caught in the paradox that "the thing the robots are building in Halifax" dates back to 3055, which is 1900+ comics and is ~7 years ahead of time. Clearly someone was going to do something in Canada at some point?

[Vinyadan]

For me, the most unexpected callback was when Angus said that his old gilfriend was so mean his roommates burned her effigy, and then she turned out to be Renee.

[Mordokai]

Was I the only one to get a "horror" vibe from todays comic?

You know, when the group of teenagers arrives to the cabin in the woods and the ominous music swells, you just know they are in for a bad time? I got that feeling from the Cubetown being shown.

And that was before the explosion.

[Mechalich]

Was I the only one to get a "horror" vibe from todays comic?

You know, when the group of teenagers arrives to the cabin in the woods and the ominous music swells, you just know they are in for a bad time? I got that feeling from the Cubetown being shown.

And that was before the explosion.

Considering that the explosion is powerful enough to shake the entirety of the Cubetown platform, it ought to produce one heck of a wake and put Ol'Boaty (who I swear is smaller than fishing boats I have seen towed on trailers) at severe risk of capsizing, or at least hurling Marten - whose center of gravity is not in an ideal position at the moment - over the side.

So yeah, I'd agree with the argument that they're already too close.

Edit: Updating this to reflect the newest comic, I'd like to add boats to the list of things Jeph doesn't know anything about an is too lazy to google. Specifically, when Ol'Boaty moors with Cubetown, he's two full stories below the dock level, which means that in order to get up Claire, Marten, and Moray had to climb a ladder to get there - Boaty has insufficient bow space to accommodate a gangplank, a huge design failure in a launch. Speaking as somehow who has climbed those ladders personally - because tugboats have this problem when they moor at commercial docks designed for the ships they are escorting - this is very dangerous, especially in the North Atlantic, where ice will form and cling to the rungs for roughly half the year. If the, supposedly very seasick (though he seems to have recovered with astonishing speed), Marten had slipped and fallen he could have sued Cubetown for a fortune.

And sure, this is kind of a ticky-tack thing, but the entire issue could have been avoided by making Boaty a properly-sized ferry rather than a tiny launch.

[Cikomyr2]

Oh god, two "entirely new" cast member now.

I do like Armold tho.

[VoxRationis]

Someone is clearly just trying to use up extra budget before the end of the fiscal year; I can see no other reason to embark upon such a bizarre experiment.

[DavidSh]

Perhaps the ladder shown in the first panel is just for the dock worker. There could be a floating dock, not shown there, that the final mooring is to. Or Cubetown could have a ramp that it lowers down to boats. Or the dock could have a lock-like structure that raises the water level when closed (I've seen something vaguely like that in areas of high tide range). Or a cradle is lowered down, and lifts Ol' Boaty to a convenient level. Tides at Halifax are about 1 to 2 meters though, nothing like the Bay of Fundy.

Or, more likely, Jeph just didn't think about it.

[Cikomyr2]

Someone is clearly just trying to use up extra budget before the end of the fiscal year; I can see no other reason to embark upon such a bizarre experiment.

Give a whole new meaning to "blowing up the budget"

[VoxRationis]

Give a whole new meaning to "blowing up the budget"

I was actually thinking more of the "independently sentient arm" experiment, which just seems facially silly. Perhaps in a setting that hadn't already established that nerve-to-electronics prosthetics exist, such a scheme might be justified as a way of providing amputees with additional functionality. As it is, however, the reasons why one wouldn't want an appendage to be its own entity outweigh any possible reasons why that would be helpful, and that's ignoring the structural issues with the mismatched limb.

Also, apparently the author is not fond of mixed-use zoning. It's a little difficult to get a proper sense of the scale right off the bat, but Cubetown looks large enough that I could see actual utility in people living next to shops, rather than having to travel to an entirely separate section of the structure for routine commerce (especially since, so far, we haven't seen any sort of transit system at work).

[Vinyadan]

Now it feels like Boaty must be some sort of executive transport and Cubetown must otherwise be served by a small fleet of cargo and ferry ships owned by external companies (and so without Cubetown employees ashore).

[Mechalich]

Now it feels like Boaty must be some sort of executive transport and Cubetown must otherwise be served by a small fleet of cargo and ferry ships owned by external companies (and so without Cubetown employees ashore).

The drawings of Cubetown show a pair of cargo container cranes - which are probably ~50m in height by the way, for a sense of scale - and the only reason to have those is if container ships dock with the facility. Presumably, Cubetown imports most of its food and consumer goods and exports a lot of trash and whatever stuff it produces (whatever goo/membrane combo Moray's made of maybe?). There ought to be regular ferry service too. If nothing else, Cubetown is shown full of parks and would represent a fun tourist destination in the warmer months (NS's economy is already heavily tourism influenced)

It would make sense for Cubetown to have a launch to conduct instream meetings with ships prior to docking with the superstructure in case of heavy seas, special conditions, or to conduct CBSA officials out to inspect vessels prior to docking (assuming Cubetown is allowed to take foreign cargo). Most port facilities have such vessels. Boaty isn't properly configured for that - he needs greater open space in either the bow or stern to allow a gangway connect so launch passengers can board much larger vessels - which is regrettable since it's not certain what his primary purpose would be otherwise since he can probably only carry a dozen passengers and no cargo at all.

Boaty makes more sense as a research vessel, a small, fast and maneuverable ship that can dart about the bay and chase fish shoals, migratory birds, or whales (google confirms that whale watching is a thing around Halifax, seasonally), who has only been reluctantly repurposed for passenger transport on occasion.

[geoduck]

Edit: Updating this to reflect the newest comic, I'd like to add boats to the list of things Jeph doesn't know anything about an is too lazy to google. Specifically, when Ol'Boaty moors with Cubetown, he's two full stories below the dock level, which means that in order to get up Claire, Marten, and Moray had to climb a ladder to get there - Boaty has insufficient bow space to accommodate a gangplank, a huge design failure in a launch. Speaking as somehow who has climbed those ladders personally - because tugboats have this problem when they moor at commercial docks designed for the ships they are escorting - this is very dangerous, especially in the North Atlantic, where ice will form and cling to the rungs for roughly half the year. If the, supposedly very seasick (though he seems to have recovered with astonishing speed), Marten had slipped and fallen he could have sued Cubetown for a fortune.

And sure, this is kind of a ticky-tack thing, but the entire issue could have been avoided by making Boaty a properly-sized ferry rather than a tiny launch.

Sooo... it turns out Boaty isn't even supposed to be docking there, but got into a pissing match with some harbor official, and is now risking people's lives as you describe! Red flag #12034 waving wildly in Claire's face!

[Wraith]

You're overthinking this. Boaty is a lolrandom AI who wanted to be a boat, so they inhabited the first one they could find/afford/that could accommodate an AI pilot.

Whether or not being a boat was useful, appropriate or sensible, was entirely coincidental. That they can ferry a couple of passengers from the mainland at all is nothing short of miraculous - Be grateful they're not an electric pedalo or something.

Red flag #12034 waving wildly in Claire's face!

I'm particularly enjoying the way that Marten appears to be having a good time, at least. Apart from the comments from Boaty (is it just me, or was the 'real man' comment weirdly out of place for the sort of inclusive tone that QC is going for?), he's cracking jokes and getting on with people whereas Claire seems completely out of her depth. He must be more acclimatised to AI nonsense after years of Pintsize's influence.

I suppose that Marten HAS to be shown to approve of the place, otherwise "Claire gets her dream job and Marten tows along being her without input" makes for a lop-sided story. "Claire gets a job and Marten makes a bunch of new connections" makes for a much smoother transition... Or even some weird tension where Claire decides she DOESN'T want the job, but Marten kind of wants to move anyway?

[Vinyadan]

I think that the beauty of Marten as a character is exactly that he is multifaceted. He is very laid back compared to Claire, has no desire for a career, played in a band that never went anywhere, likes jokes, is rather non-judgemental, but he also is a soft straight man in that he is surrounded by drama that he constantly dampens by virtue of not losing his head at the first turn. So he can take weirdity easier than Claire, and, unlike her, he doesn't have a life-changing decision in front of himself.

I wouldn't be against the couple moving to Halifax in spite of Claire not taking the job. I would like some more Marten in the comic, and the two of them being in a new environment could make for interesting pages.

[Gez]

Also, apparently the author is not fond of mixed-use zoning.

Yeah, I noticed that too and it actually struck me as really really weird. Because there's only two ways to design a city:

1. Design it for pedestrian, and then you need to have mixed-use everywhere, so that people don't actually need to go on a full-day hiking trial just to go buy groceries or get to work or put their kids to school
2. Design it for automobile, and then you can justify very strict zoning separation because every house is like twenty miles away from anywhere the house's residents may want to go

Like, there's a reason every pre-automobile street was designed according to the principle of "shops and workshops at ground levels, housings on the upper stories". People just didn't want to walk for ten hours to commute.

It especially stuck out because I had recently binge-watched a bunch of Youtube vids about urban planning (channels with names like "Strong Town", "City Beautiful", "Not Just Bikes", etc.) but given the twenty-something hipster demographics that is the QC cast, it's even weirder. They're not suburbanites in identical single-family housing units having barbecues with their neighbors on their oversized front lawn; they're city-dwellers who walk everywhere they go and spend their time at coffee shops. Exactly the kind of people who want to just above a hat shop.

[DavidSh]

You don't think there are a lot of 19th century residential side streets with row houses, but no shopping? There is a common pattern of stores on the main streets, with some residences above them, and pure residential side streets.

[VoxRationis]

You don't think there are a lot of 19th century residential side streets with row houses, but no shopping? There is a common pattern of stores on the main streets, with some residences above them, and pure residential side streets.

Yes, it's not the case that housing above shops is the only way to organize a pedestrian city (housing behind shops on the same lots is another such way), but it's generally the case that if your city isn't going to be organized around people spending their lives in car traffic, it needs to have goods and services in the same neighborhood as residences.

I'm also wondering, based on the comment that the housing in the commercial zone is overpriced, if the employee housing in the residential zone is not provided gratis, which is what I would have expected.

[Wraith]

On the one hand, many landlords do divide a single building into two tenancies, one downstairs that can be used as a shop and the upstairs as a residence where foot-traffic isn't easily accessible because... What else can they do with the space? Low-price storage and completely waste the access to water, gas, electricity, etc? It's certainly 'real' and happens everywhere.

On the other, no one WANTS to live above a shop if they can help it. Living on a high street is noisy and polluted, and especially bad if your 'downstairs neighbour' has customers until the early hours of the morning like a bar or takeaway food. People only live in these places because they have to, and a two-room apartment is cheap enough that the sacrifice is worth it.

This leads us to the question; why does Cubetown have such a thing? Cubetown is pre-planned to have separate districts for people to live in, presumably there's enough room for people to live or they would stop inviting more people to come over? Not only that, but Cubetown is (from what we've seen) a couple of kilometers wide which is walking distance for just about everything one can think of, and would have to be because having cars and buses on a floating city would be prohibitively expensive and inconvenient. No one needs to live so close to a hat shop.

Similarly, they're not the product of 19th century exploitative capitalism, so there's no need for buildings to be sublet like this.... Except to cater to a very strange kind of poverty-LARPer who wants the 'authentic' experience of living in a crowded city while also paying extravagant rent and import fees on food, clothes, etc that have to be brought to a floating community.

WHY would anyone pander to such a weird, niche community? The answer is "random AI nonsense" as adorable pastel people pretend to be human beings in a weirdly sterile and cotton wool-swaddled version of real life. Cubetown is a half-way house between the AI's birthing crèche and fending entirely for themselves - they're 'playing' at living in poverty to acclimatise before experiencing the real thing when they move to the mainland. Its weird to think about, but by QC standards it makes a certain kind of sense.

That or Jeph just didn't think about it. He walked down his local high street, saw "people live above stores in apartments" and didn't think any further about it. That also makes a lot of sense and is consistent with the rest of QC.