Ludus Novus

Personal projects were common at Rose; I had a roommate that would build complex Lego robots that performed tasks that strained the bonding forces of the bricks themselves. Another roommate built his own server rack and coded up a service that provided a browser homepage full of quick links. I played around with game development and coded some interactive fiction. I’m a bit distrustful of a computer scientist or engineer who’s never worked on a side project.

I make an all-too-easy mistake in this comic. It doesn’t make any sense that Brynne is surprised by Cassie’s spider legs. Just because the reader can’t see them doesn’t mean Brynne can’t, and it’s hard to believe that she’d miss it. I should have put Cassie in the bathroom or behind a closed door or something.

Sam’s Club was a mainstay for many college students. By junior year, I’d already become familiar enough with Wal-Mart’s business and employee practices to choose not to shop at either of the corporation’s brands. Still, it was a very popular store, and resulted in students coming home with tubs of cheese puffs the size of a freshman.

In retrospect, it might have been funnier to have Brynne be the one who bought the pig’s blood.

And two months in, the new cast finally meets the old cast. The junior-year transition was a bit of a Wizard of Id moment for the strip, when it became sort of divorced from its foundational concept. Id is named after its wizard, which became less of a focus of the strip over the years. In a similar way, The Absolute Sum of All Evil‘s title refers to Cthulhu, who is quite evil. Neither Brynne nor Cassie is really evil, despite Brynne’s growing desire for revenge. I think I figured out a decent balance of the two casts by the end of the strip.

It’s also worth noting that Cthulhu is evil, but not always malicious. His is a distant, uncaring evil, where given the option between helping you and hurting you he will choose harm, but doesn’t care enough about you to choose a particularly painful sort of harm. Human-type people are less fundamentally evil, but are capable of far more acute bouts of malice.