Irregular Webcomic! #1712 Rerun

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1712.html

Comic #1712

Ah, the special meal. It always pays to order a special meal of some sort, even if you don't have any dietary restrictions, since you always get served first! Assuming of course that you can stomach airline food at all. Personally I'd rather pay $50 less on my fare and pack my own sandwiches, cold roast chicken, and coleslaw. Maybe some brie, a nice bitey cheddar, and crackers.

The woman sitting behind Steve, by the way, is a Lego minifigure I picked up on my trip to Germany a few months ago. I found a very cool Lego shop in Cologne. They had a big bucket of disassembled minifigures and you could assemble your own from the parts available and buy six for the price of five. So of course I grabbed all the coolest looking parts I could find and stuck them together hastily to make complete figures. It was awesome. :-)

2018-04-22 Rerun commentary: I will say that airline food seems to have improved somewhat in the past decade or so. Still not fantastic (with the exception of when I got upgraded to business class on JAL...), but at least moderately decent. As it happens, I shall be returning to Cologne later this year, on a business trip for photography standards meetings. Assuming the Lego shop is still there, I shall have to pay it another visit. A quick web search indicates it is still there. Awesome!

Irregular Webcomic! #1711 Rerun

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1711.html

Comic #1711

19 September was Talk Like A Pirate Day. But as this comic suggests, I'd forgotten all about it until the beginning of September, when someone reminded me. By which time I'd already made and queued up comics as far as today (which by my calculations should be 3 October).

So there was no pirate-themed comic on 19 September.

But I'm well in advance for the joyous celebration we all know and love, Life Day!

2018-04-21 Rerun commentary: Hmmm, I'm trying to remember what that T-shirt I'm wearing is. It's one I threw out years ago because it was getting too worn out. There's a hint of a word in the first panel, but not enough to spark my memory of what was printed on the front. Life Day is of course everyone's favourite space holiday.

Irregular Webcomic! #3851

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3851.html

Comic #3851

Apparently there is some inter-dialectical confusion over the English terms cupboard, closet, and cabinet. I tend to think of these terms as all more or less interchangeable, but usually default to "cupboard" to describe all of them (as I believe most Australians do, in my experience). I'd even go so far as to say that in my usage a closet is a specific type of cupboard (usually for clothes), and a cabinet is a specific type of cupboard (often built into a kitchen, but possibly also free standing, like an office cabinet). It looks like there may be a bit more of a distinction in US English at least, maybe also British. Old Mother Hubbard, you have a lot to answer for!

Irregular Webcomic! #1709 Rerun

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1709.html

Comic #1709

Let me tell you the story of today's comic.

Some of you may know that Irregular Webcomic! also appears fortnightly in Pyramid - The Best In Gaming. Since they pay me for comics, they stipulate that I can't show them for free. If you're a Pyramid subscriber, you get to see those extra comics. That's right, I make 15 comics a fortnight, not merely 14.

Pyramid recently showed its hundredth Irregular Webcomic! It was an incredibly tortured pun that - sorry, I'm going to give away the punchline here - if you'd rather not spoil it for yourself, stop reading this annotation right NOW.

Still with me? Okay then, an incredibly tortured pun that involved Dungeons & Dragons characters descending into a salt mine on enchanted dragon claws, as explained by the Dungeon Master. The final panel showed a character looking at these dragon claws and quipping:

So DM, claw ride, huh?
The initial reaction on the Pyramid forums was puzzlement. Several people didn't get it at all and wanted to know what the joke was. Then someone explained it, that they were going into salt mines, and the character said "So DM, claw ride"...

So DM, claw ride...

Sodium chloride.

Some people said they had had to read it six times before getting the pun, but that it was well worth it. Some people said they had had to read it six times to get the pun, and that it wasn't worth it. Some people only got it after it had been explained, and were angry and confused, and felt ripped off. Some people felt deflated, expecting it to be some hilarious joke, but feeling only disappointment at the extreme lameness of it. And some people still didn't understand it.

Then someone commented that the Pyramid editor should have rejected this comic submission, since it was so astoundingly unfunny and unworthy of being included in the magazine. And in fact a former editor of Pyramid chimed in with a comment that really stung, saying I should have saved the obscure science puns for my own website, rather than submitting them to Pyramid. Well, it would have stung if I'd taken any of these comments seriously. The fact that some people loved the strip was enough for me. I never let myself get caught up in the trap of trying to please everyone.

So I got to chatting online with the current Pyramid editor, Steven Marsh, about the fallout from the comic. I said I was half-tempted to submit an even more tortured science pun for the next week's comic. Just to stir up a bigger reaction.

And Steven, within a minute or two, came up with this gem. I was very tempted to use it for Pyramid. But I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and didn't send it over there. Which is why you now have the pleasure.

If you still don't get today's pun, have another look at it now.

Back? Still need help? Try this.

2018-04-15 Rerun commentary: Steve Jackson Games has made the full back inventory of Irregular Webcomic! originally published in its pages available to all for free. The 100th strip mentioned above can be seen here, and the full index of all 120 Pyramid strips here. If you've never seen these before, then wow! This is like a treasure trove of all-new comics! Enjoy!