02/06/23 – Someone(s) Else

Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, February 6, 2023.

|

2023-02-06-spacetrawler3b

|

One can never do many good deeds in a day, right?

26 Comments

  1. Hans

    Haha, this is quite funny.

    However, the robot mice should bring a new issue to be solved by the author of this web comic, I presume. There should be a sack full of frozen mice or another wonder in space please.

    The robot mice while being produced by the food dispenser due to request of our most beloved friend Coyote will contain some kind of meat and were requested to be produced as an edible snack. Thus this meat, being artificial or not, should contain water and thus became frozen during the adventure in the sack on the back of the bar bot in space unfortunately.

    A space walk without protection might be much fun if you have a metal body – but not for everybody, in particular not for all water bodies like humans, some aliens and certainly edible robot mice.

    Having said that I am quite open to another hilarious wonder in space please.

    1. Hans

      Maybe protection by alcohol in a tight closed sack?

      All the mice could already swim in a reservoir of Limbic Fizzler and will be washed out of the sack into the spaceship as a mess producing a happy mess in the mess?

      1. Hans

        Fair point but might be misleading in this example.

        Please recall the line in the first speech bubble ends:

        “. . . NOT a living being, it’s a bar-bot.”

        We all have to trust both the sensors of the spaceship being state of the art and the autor C. B. being highly creative in solving this riddle of life and death, I presume.

        1. Shen Hibiki

          We also know tech is weirdly literal sometimes in this world. Also prone to pranks and weird reactions for no reason… so not “A” living being can mean it’s multiple instead (?)

          I mean, why not? XD

        2. Tavis

          I took it to mean that the incoming message was signed by bar-bot, who is recognized as nonliving, and being outside a ship, presumed to be alone. Because of that, I also assume that no attempts to scan for life signs were necessary, so the question of whether they would appear as living to such sensors may still remain unknown.

          Also, oh boyyyy, just from the last panel alone I can already imagine much chaos coming from this turn of events. Hahahahaha

    2. You all have hilarious awesome thoughts on this, I hope it is not disappointing that I went with a simple fix of the bar-bot simply saying it’s an insulated bag. But there it is. 🙂

      For future comment explorers, the original text read: “And what’s in the sack?” – “This is full of Robot Mice.”

      1. Hans

        So an economic amend of the text.

        In the light of your excellent work and the upcoming slides presumably all drawn already, I have to rest my case.

        “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.”

        “The mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth.”

        Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC
        (Horace)

    3. TB

      Difference between a robot edible mouse and a real mouse is that the former can survive being frozen and will be alive without ill effects when thawed out. It’s right there in the spec sheets.

  2. Demarquis

    Having organic matter included doesnt make them alive. For all we know, it’s just a useless outer layer of meat to make the mice taste palatable. All the important bits could easily be mechanical.

  3. Pete Rogan

    I am reduced to absurdity. No, really.

    The prospective survival of the mice in the sack (never mind retaining air pressure, which lack killed the Soyuz 11 cosmonauts in 1971) and the appearance of the discarded bar-bot from Spacetrawler (an event I don’t specifically recall, in a location ditto) notwithstanding, I really don’t find Horace’s ridicule of Phaedrus’s ancient fable terribly cogent here. This just continues the abuse of the aphorism that may in fact be older than its potentially Greek origins through the Middle Ages, often far from its original meaning of words being easier to make than useful works. Hell, American political cartoonists were making hay from it as late as 1872. This is not a trend to celebrate or, as here, continue.

    Lord, how Google has made a classical education so much wastepaper on a screen!

    Let me provide a more timely, and accurate, aphorism, from a more modern source. Like Bob Seger’s “Ship of Fools,” from his “Night Moves” album of 1976.

    I alone survived the sinking
    I alone possess the tools
    On that ship of fools

    1. Hans

      Hi, Pete! We all are all keenly awaiting your next book:

      From Mousse au Chocolat to a Mouse in my Slipping the Mickey – A short journey in space and time and its relation to myth and believe of human litertature from a forgotten planet named Earth.

  4. Hans

    “The mountains will be in labor, and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth.”

    Horace is hereby poking fun at heroic labours producing meager results; his line is also an allusion to one of Æsop’s fables, The Mountain in Labour. The title to Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing expresses a similar sentiment.
    Line 139

    If you are looking for a more common phrase to be understood in English, you can use “much ado about nothing” or “making a mountain out of a molehill”.

    All found without any Google but found on the Internet anyway.
    😉

Leave a Reply to Pete Rogan Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *