It turned out to be just a weird thing where WordPress stopped using one field to populate the title attribute and started using a different one instead! I went back and changed things! Everything is okay now!
Also, Worf singing.
I am experiencing delight!
This is a bit of giffery by how-did-I-not-know-about-this-blog-before Brother Brain, aka John McGregor. Brought to my attention via mlkshk with a hat-tip to @mathowie.
Just turned this up on the web while skulking around a bit, and it’s just the weirdest goddam thing: someone apparently liked Larp Trek #1 enough to want to share it on the internet, but not enough to do so without taking an image editor to it to geeeeeently nudge it a little bit closer to perfection. Observe!
So: they changed the punchline (using the wrong font), very slightly nudged the alignment of the panels, and rather poorly cropped the bounding whitespace. But they left the attribution in the title panel; whether out of a sense of obligation or just as an oversight I will likely never know. I can’t even find where this was originally posted; the guy who shared it on G+ a few weeks ago doesn’t remember where he found it.
Here’s the original strip, for comparison. Again, it’s all about that last panel.
I am super curious about the mindset that leads to this. I rewrite other people’s punchlines now and then, I’m sure everybody who likes comedy in an active crafty sort of way does, but I can’t think of a time that I actually sat down and booted up an editor and rewrote one. Probably a mystery for the ages, but wow, so odd.
I’m going to assume it was an enthusiastic 12-year-old with MS Paint, thinking “yeah, it’s a good comic, but it needs more cusses”.
There’s a lot of sass lurking behind the staid, stoic facades of the Enterprise crew. I’ve probably got something like this for just about all of the senior officers at this point, but for some reason Data in particular kills me.
This counts as a sort of sneak preview of tomorrow’s strip, because, you know, time travel.
A few folks have noted that there is no alt text when you hover over today’s comic — or, as you’ll discover with mounting horror while paging back through the archives, over any of them!
They were stolen by Ferengi.
Wait, no, they disappeared for some reason right after I updated WordPress to 3.5. I’m not sure why; it could be a change in WP itself (the new Media Library stuff is a big thing with this update), or it could be some interactional issue between the new WP code and the webcomic plugin that drives the webcomicry of the site. Or gremlins.
I’ll try to get it back, because who doesn’t enjoy a nice mouseover joke? You’re missing out today on reference to a coffee commercial. That’s not okay. Something must be done.
For serious, Dorn is an awesome dude. Give this Nerdist podcast episode a listen for an hour or so of proof. Jet planes! Vegetables! Etc.
Seems to be a thing at the moment:
And this is of course a curious inversion of the normal “Riker is the father, isn’t around for the birth” pattern.
via God, apparently.
As of strip number 11, I’ve started revealing character choices on the part of the crew of the Enterprise D, and so folks are talking about who should be who — this came up in particular in the comments from yesterday’s strip — so I figure let’s give it a proper post of its own:
Who from The Next Generation do you think ends up playing who from Deep Space Nine?
And, arguably more importantly, why? This is all about rationale. Paint a picture, make an argument, justify an unlikely juxtaposition of character types to the limit, etc.
It’s a contest where the prize is having made an awesome argument. So, incentive.
As of this writing I’ve already established that I’ve got Picard playing Sisko and Bev Crusher playing Dax, but if you’ve got an alternative universe scheme where I’m wrong about that, don’t let my obvious correctness stop you from presenting a compelling thesis along those lines. You will not be out of the running for being an awesome person, I promise. Later arrivals will have even more well-established facts to contradict, since I’m just gonna keep rolling out character reveals in any case.
So have at it, Internet. The fun of matching up TNG and DS9 people is what got this whole thing started in my brain in the first place, so as fun ways to kill time go I figure you shouldn’t miss out.
Someone mentioned on Metafilter being curious what my folder full of TNG headshots looked like. The short answer is that it looks a bit bigger than really fits into a decent screenshot, but here’s a snippet to service curiosity.
I’ve been masking these out from a larger collection of screenshots as-needed; I might write up a little more about my screenshotting process and aesthetic sensibilities and all that some other time. But, yes: a large collection of tiny heads. It’s an odd thing to have around.