El Goonish Shive

I've never enjoyed the taste of alcohol, but being mildly tipsy is pretty fun.

I've never reached the point of noticing input lag, but it does sound unpleasant.

It's weird. The first time I had alcohol, I was eighteen, and hated it. I had it only a few times - maybe every month or two - over the next few years, mostly what amounted to pruno loaded up with sugar. Then I hit 21, at which time I'd gone a full year without a single drink, and I was expecting to hate it, like I had at 18... but somehow, the harshness was gone. Whiskey tasted candy-sweet.

Edited by TwinBird on Feb 17th 2020 at 2:07:02 PM

"That's weird. Last night it just tasted like horrible burning."

Your sense of taste can change as you get older. I guess it shifted enough in those three years that whatever bothered you at first stopped tasting bad.

Me, I'm 30 and I still don't really like the taste of alcohol. I have found a few drinks where it's sufficiently covered up that I like them though.

Edited by Elfive on Feb 18th 2020 at 10:03:39 AM

I might have been doomed from the start. My mother has stories about me snatching spare doses of Benalyn (liquid Benadryl) if she turned her back because I liked the taste.

For me, I don't particularly like the taste of alcohol - by which I specifically mean ethanol. Frequently, I find that the taste of the things mixed with the alcohol (like the tannins in bourbon or the fruits in cordials) are nice. So I tend to cook and bake with them, to evaporate out the ethanol and leave the flavors I like.

As for Daremo's joke on the previous page, maybe readers of other comics wouldn't expect an exposition...

Too spicy for Ashley

NP: People drink this stuff?

The NP was already posted, that's why people were talking about their experiences with alcohol earlier.

Ah, mea culpa.

Today's NP.

Imagine, creating an entire comic based on the concept of running non-canon ideas with characters from your actual comic... and then just replaying the scenarios from the main comic, but with different cosmetics. And being very excited that you get to do that.

Shive baffles me sometimes.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Feb 19th 2020 at 8:16:58 AM

Boy Catalina just drives all momentum to a screeching halt wherever she goes huh?

Whoever this Catalina is (is that why her hair looks like a cat's head?), I'm putting money on the idea that she's the Hero of Magic.

Also, I know that it's only been three strips but get back to the Fableing.

That awkward moment... I love Justin's face in panel five https://www.egscomics.com/comic/party-124

I'm overall not terribly fond of this story, but today's comic is admittedly gold. I can think of at least five other appropriate facial reactions in addition to Justin's current one.

Oh man, after being fairly unrecognizable for a long time, it is good to see Diane back in the Alpha Bitch saddle. I'm loving this.

Also love that it's Susan that calls Diane out on the "technobabble" terminology. Of all the flavors of nerddom out there, the Trekkie would be the insistent one about that.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 21st 2020 at 9:04:46 AM

I’m honestly surprised Diane didn’t know Susan at least was a nerd. She’s watched the review show, she should be well aware of that, even if she doesn’t know about the rest of them.

That said, hell yeah, bitchy Diane! Now I remember why I loved her way back when.

Edited by smokeycut on Feb 21st 2020 at 11:07:40 AM

I'm almost certain that Diane's definition of 'nerd' is going to be the more extreme end; poor hygiene, mother's basement, no friends style. Since these people obviously have friends, they cannot be nerds, in her mind.

Or something to that effect.

No True Scotsnerd, as it were.

New NP

I get to keep one of my fingers.

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 22nd 2020 at 4:05:34 AM

You know, the people Dan says we wouldn't believe would exist - even though I don't doubt they existed, I expect they existed twenty years ago. If a Diane of today were so against "nerds," I expect it would be for very different reasons than one of twenty years ago.

Diane Defines A Nerd

Small trivia corner: in my native language (Brazilian Portuguese) we actually have an entirely different word to define the kind of person Diane is talking about! They're called a CDF (An abbreviation for a set of less-than-polite words that don't translate well to English, essentially coming to mean "Ironbottom", as they spent a lot of their time sitting in order to study.), which is essentially a slightly jerkish way to refer to that kid in somebody's class who just seems to know everything, but doesn't necessarily have any nerd-like interests.

Anyhow, trivia corner aside, this strip has two effects on me, one good and one bad: The good is that, considering how Diane seems to consider Nerd an automatically bad thing to be, while the cast is mostly a bunch of proud Nerds, this should give us some slightly interesting conflict (well, ideally. It's Shive). The bad is that Diane's definition already plants a way for this to not be a flaw of hers: the last part of her definition includes the mention of nerds "looking down on people who don't share their views", which is to mean Diane is actually against the arrogance more than anything else, so it's not really a fault of hers, retroactively making her less jerkish thanks to that. So yeah.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Feb 23rd 2020 at 3:58:11 PM

Well, worth noting that this kind of goes back into the whole issue of "geek" and "nerd" not having a solid consistent definition (I know the ones I grew up with - both describing someone who gets absorbed in more intellectual pursuits of any variety, with "nerd" being pejorative and "geek" being complimentary - are not the ones most people I deal with use).

NP is here, and, if you'll excuse me, my nerdy, aspiring videogame developer ass is about to go on a small rant about what Shive says on the commentary.

No. That is most certainly not how that should work. Games have themes, and focuses, and many other elements to them, and a small sidequest is not in any way supposed to give you as much reward as the more important things in a game. Most games are not there to simply reward the player for playing: they tell stories, they offer challenges, they depict ideas. And for that to happen, things in a game need to have different levels of challenge and reward, as according to either their importance or their relevance to what the game is trying to do. Unless a game's specific point and theme includes making every little thing in it have the same level of reward, then having everything give you the same rewards regardless of what it is but instead based on how often you do each thing not only makes no sense, it makes for a bad game. It would mean that your game lacks either focus, or quality, or both. And it also means that, without the incentive of different rewards, people will simply skip the parts of your game they are not good at or don't like best, which results in wasted development time for your team, and might also result in them missing a part of the theme of your game. Essentially, if every part of your game has the same reward, then you're assigning an equal level of importance to every part of your game, which is not a good thing; it means you find the main story of your game as important as the minigames within it, which no matter how you slice it is a bad sign for your story and everything else that is more involved and supposedly interesting than that small minigame. Even in a game as free as Skyrim, there are tiers of importance to things. Smithing and picking flowers by the road is not as important as doing quests, and thus carries smaller rewards. Wanting rewards to be connected to whatever you do most in a game instead of what is actually important in it not only makes no sense in any type of game design, it would make for an unfocused and ultimately bad and uninteresting game. And that's not a nitpick, it's not about being realistic or unrealistic, that's basic understanding of how games work.

Ahem.

So yeah, I disagree with Shive on that one.

Funny, while those definitions are mostly spot-on, nerd is rarely used as a pejorative term around here. The two terms just mean slightly different, but ultimately very similar types of people.

The one I grew up on has nerds being science, engineering and “useful” stuff while geeks were into pop culture. The arts also fell under nerdom, but only old timey stuff.

>When you want to get information from an NPC but you forget that the one that stands in the same place the entire time only starts the minigame.