UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

5 thoughts on “542 – Catching Up”

  1. Keith

    Some friction, but yeah. IRL, I’d like these two…they should have kids. 😉

    1. Dawn

      I might have to draw out what their kid would look like. First thought is that their kid would look like Ongo Gablogian from “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”

    2. Scarsdale

      He’s pushing 60, she’s maybe 30, more likely less. Chuck is most likely shooting blanks, and besides, he’s talking to her like a baby sister than a love interest.

  2. ConcordBob

    It is really hard to have a favorite character, as there are so many good ones. But I think Rosa is my favorite. Chuck is a good accomplice in sneaking work, but not much for romance. Uugh.

  3. Otaku

    I mean, if they don’t have at least an inkling of what’s going down, I’m actually disappointed in Clearstream. If anything, I’m starting to wonder if they caught on and realized “Wait, we can use this.”

    Because of course they can. 😉

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542 – Catching Up
Posted on April 9, 2025 by Dawn

On the evolution of grammar…

Posted on May 4, 2022 by Clint
Policing language and grammar is ever a slippery choice of career (or hobby). Don’t get me wrong, since for better or worse I am my own editor for Zombie Ranch and so have to do exactly that, especially before committing to print where fixing a typo is not just a matter of editing a text layer. I also have characters who are not necessarily adept at communicating in formal Oxford English, which is just a fancy way to say they “don’t speak good.” Yet the very idea of someone’s quality of communication is a malleable concept. You may have heard that in modern writing, “passive voice” is to be avoided. “The ball hit Jed” and not “Jed was hit by the ball.” Some explain it’s because the latter, passive expression sounds “weaker” but as far as I can tell the derogatory view of passive voice is a 20th Century invention intended to conserve words while conveying the same concept. Go back to the mid-19th Century and you’ll see passive voice everywhere, even in military communications where you’d think Generals were getting paid by the word. Sorry, I mean the word paid the Generals. Woof, that’s active voice but doesn’t make much sense. That’s the rub, isn’t it? The end goal of communicating is to convey ideas, everything else is just window dressing. A message forum question like “how to find code?” sounds ESL to me as a knee-jerk reaction, and yet the more I think about it, do we really need to say “How do I find the code?” or is that just a lot of unnecessary grammatical dressing? Everyone knows what you meant and much in the same vein as passive voice fell out of favor, isn’t this possibly just the next step in the name of efficiency? It’s arguable that the invention of the telegram is what led to the marginalization of florid verbosity (usin’ lots o’ big words) in favor of more succinct communications. Nowadays one of the main ways people communicate is by texting, which is like telegrams in real time. Data plans don’t make you pay per text any more like they used to but speed and compactness of message are big priorities, so who am I to look down upon a message like “where r u?” This may well be the future, like it or not. Today the smartphone, tomorrow the OED and the style guides. Though in the meantime, you may continue to look forward to complete sentences from yours truly. Mostly. How to make webcomic?