Irregular Webcomic!

Irregular Webcomic! #2610

Staphylococcus aureus, also known as Staph. aureus, is a common bacterium that can be found in many places, including on the skin of many people.

However, if it gets inside your skin, it can cause a wide range of different types of infections, from minor such as pimples, to serious and life-threatening.

I should know, I was hospitalised in 2001 with a Staph. aureus infection in the sinuses. It caused major blood clotting throughout various nearby veins. It ate away the nerves controlling my eye muscles - thankfully it didn't damage the optic nerves that carry visual signals to the brain. Doctors feared it might get into my brain.

I was on a cocktail of 20 different intravenous antibiotics, plus the blood-thinning agent heparin, plus regular injections of morphine, for about a week. This regime was slowly relaxed as I got better, but I didn't leave hospital for nearly four weeks.

I've mentioned this illness in passing before. It was actually part of what inspired me to start Irregular Webcomic! In the many months I had to have off work in order to allow my eyes to recover, I got a bit bored and started making comics to pass the time. If you'd like to read more about this experience, and you are not squeamish about hospital procedures, I wrote it all up in a diary.

Irregular Webcomic! #2609

I had trouble finding a decent piece of advice that one might give to the British in late 1940 that could realistically lead to a shorter war, that could also be expressed pithily enough for Terry's line. My initial though as I wrote this script on the train to work one morning was, "Fortify Belgium." But unfortunately, as I discovered when I checked the dates, the Nazis had already run through the Netherlands and Belgium and occupied the entirety of France by mid-1940. So there was no saving France.

I did briefly consider "Increase funding of Bletchley Park," but that would have been a bit wordy, and arguably of marginal value to the overall course of the war, since it was pretty well funded as it was.

Something that definitely could have helped would have been to better protect the British merchant convoys crossing the Atlantic from German U-boat attacks. But there doesn't seem to be any easy way for the British to have achieved that, and certainly none that could be expressed in a sentence or less.

So I decided to go with moving the "Fortify Belgium" idea over to Yugoslavia. Being on the eastern side of the Axis powers, this would have been ridiculously difficult for the British to actually do, and probably of marginal benefit, but hey. There's always the chance that having stalled in Yugoslavia the Nazis might have been prevented from occupying Greece, which could have delayed Operation Barbarossa, and... well, who knows? It's all up in the air by that point.

Performing what-ifs on the Second World War is infamous for creating arguments between armchair historians. I'll be disappointed if this comic doesn't start some serious conflagrations of its own.

But besides all that, "Fortify Yugoslavia" has two benefits: 1. It's pithy and exactly the sort of line Terry needs to say there. 2. It uses the word Yugoslavia, which I haven't had need to use for nearly 20 years now.

Irregular Webcomic! #2608

The most common description of the Gorgons is that they were a mythical trio of sisters with snakes instead of hair on their heads. Anyone meeting their horrifying gaze would be turned instantly to stone.

This depiction is the end result of centuries of widely varying stories. At different times in Greek myth, or according to different authors, the Gorgons were also variously described as having wings, claws, tusks, or fangs. In some stories there is only one Gorgon, described simply as a "monster". The origin of the Gorgon or Gorgons is variously ascribed to specific gods. In most stories, they were created as horrible monsters, but a later tradition has them looking fully human to begin with, and only Medusa being cursed to have snakes for hair.

And then there's Dungeons & Dragons, which has a race of bull-like monsters called Gorgons, and another entirely different race of snake-haired women called Medusas. The latter have male counterparts called maedars. These are stocky men with no hair at all and, conveniently, the power to turn stone to flesh. This is used as a way of justifying an entire race of such creatures and trying to turn them into a workable ecological species. The medusas hunt by turning animals into stone, then the males come along and turn them back into flesh that can be eaten.

And you thought Greek myth was wacky.

Irregular Webcomic! #2607

A few people have already pointed out in the forums the consequence of the discovery in this comic. I'd intended this plot development all along, so it was interesting seeing some readers predict it so far in advance.

Unless... they travelled back in time to post a "prediction" in order to make themselves seem smarter. Yes, that must be it...

I'm on to you.

Irregular Webcomic! #2606

I'm afraid I have not the time to do this strip justice with a full explanation.

I have mentioned the subject in passing before, and will provide a Wikipedia link for readers keen to dig for themselves.

Proving this comic is funny is left as an exercise for the reader.

Irregular Webcomic! #2605

Isaac Newton did indeed invent the cat flap. Or at least popular legend has it - the true inventor is probably lost to history.

Although given how clever Newton was, it certainly isn't terribly far-fetched.

Irregular Webcomic! #2604

Wow... a thought just occurred to me. Remember the "greed is good" corporate bubble times of the 1980s? (Some of you may be too young to recall it, but I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about.*)

Imagine if the Internet was mainstream back then.

I think my brain just exploded.

* Truly, although computer networks existed in the 1980s, the Internet as we really understand it now DID. NOT. EXIST. before the early 1990s. There, that should blow the minds of readers too young to remember any of the '80s.