An awkward play on words, ladies and gentlemen. I do like how I had characterized Brynne enough to know her vocal fillers. And I suppose the Featureless White Void is as good a place as any to discuss relationships with your roommate.

Everyone who’s lived with roommates knows what an extra pair of shoes outside the door means. In some cultures, it’s a sock on the doorknob, but that’s a bit of a stretch for a simple message.

I think this would have been after the break between winter and spring semesters, sometime in February. The Thorn was published on Friday mornings, so Brynn would have missed at least four days of classes.

Not much to say about this one.

Some tests were just rough for everyone involved. There was also this weird phenomenon where tests would have typos noted on the board. Sometimes these were major issues!

This comic was done for our April Fools issue, the Thron. It was done by one of the humor writers. I have no comment.

There’s a club fair at the beginning of each school year, of course, to recruit members for various campus organizations. Junior year, the SGA had a great idea: do a winter club fair too, to recruit people who discovered they had extra time or were looking to check out new groups. Unfortunately, they did a better job of informing the clubs than informing the students at large. As a result, despite free candy, no one really came. It was a sad room full of dejected people sitting around foamboard displays, like a science fair where the judges decided not to show.

Continuity error in panel 3.

I think the winter snowball fight comics are my favorites.

Brynne doesn’t snowball-fight, I think. And Cassie’s never been good at telling when people would rather not have frozen water thrown at their face. Cthulhu can tell, of course; he just doesn’t care.

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.

When there’s something you dislike, the last thing you want is to be reminded of it, over and over and over. In an environment where people tend to have a bit of trouble reading social cues (and you probably have a bit of trouble giving them those cues), it can be even worse.

Bathing was often an issue at Rose. Students who tend to be geeky, less socially-adjusted, and stressed don’t put as high of a priority on hygiene.

Sometimes I didn’t plan speech balloons too well.

Fantasy races are kind of preposterous when you think about them. There’s the short people, the pretty people, and the people who are dragons. Of course, Brynne must know about elves and dwarves and such; you don’t become Wiccan or major in Black Magic without a healthy childhood obsession with fantasy literature. Let’s just assume she’s screwing with Cassie here.

Rose-Hulman’s first co-ed class of freshmen enrolled in 1995. Sexism was as rampant as it was on many campuses; girls were evidently only there to get married, or maybe the school used different standards for women, or she must be sleeping with the professor because she can’t be that smart. It was perhaps worse that most of these things were said jokingly. Few men seriously accused women of being lesser students, but the jokes and remarks were incessant and pervasive.

On the occasion of the 10-year anniversary celebration of this event, the Flipside was co-ed themed. In addition to cartooning, I edited the Flipside, the humor page of the Thorn. I had the difficult job that issue of making jokes about coeducation and sexism without the jokes themselves being sexist. Every issue had a Top Ten List, always full of ridiculous or satirical items. That issue’s was the “Top Ten Reasons Coeducation Was a Bad Idea.” It was intended to satirize the ridiculous arguments against coeducation and included items like “Women always getting pregnant, menstruating” or “Female upper-body strength insufficient to carry bookbags.” We got a letter to the editor about that one.

Family Circus is one of my least favorite comics. It’s aggressively inoffensive, and it’s one of the tragic examples of a work being passed on from parent to child as if it were some sort of sequential art dynasty. The comic never had more to it than “aren’t childish malapropisms cute?” Its only redeeming feature is the occasional Sunday comic depicting Billy’s dotted-line path of mayhem through the neighborhood.

From time to time, I would half-jokingly tear a particularly bad Family Circus from the paper I was reading, to prevent any heirs of that particular newspaper from having to read it.

Baur-Sames-Bogart Hall, or BSB, is a three-story residence hall on campus. For two years, I (and Cthulhu) lived in the basement next to the radio station. The top three floors were used to house freshmen; the third floor was women-only, while the other two were for men. BSB and the other freshman dorms had a lot of wall paintings in the hallways; it was traditional to paint something and leave it behind for posterity. I have no idea what that painting there is, but it kind of looks like the Screw Attack powerup from Metroid.

There was a ghastly rule for pet ownership in the dorms at Rose: the pet had to be “flushable.” In other words, if it died, it needed to be possible to dispose of it down the toilet. I’m sure the official rule was gentler: “small pets only,” say. Very few people had pets, though. It’s a bit rude to keep a pet with a roommate unless it’s something like a fish that’s silent and rather odorless.

Don’t ask me what’s up with the perspective on the background. Let’s just pretend that Tony’s fell aura is distorting the very laws of space and time.

And the new year begins. This comic would have appeared in the Freshman Issue of the Thorn. Freshmen got an abbreviated issue of the paper in their orientation packets, which presented an interesting problem for my comic; I had to introduce readers to the comic without leaving anything out for non-Freshmen. Additionally, I was shifting the focus of the comic this year, which made it trickier. Finally, I just went for a quick cast intro. At this point, I evidently decided that the Civil Chick (Cthulhu’s name, not mine) was a major character. Absent are Cthulhu’s former roommates: the hapless guy and the grumpy Christian.

Cassie and Brynne are the first named characters in the strip. Cassie’s hairdo got simplified from this design; it was too overwrought. A triple major was not unheard of; more than one student in my year pursued such a feat. CS/EE/ME is a decent way to go. I don’t think you were allowed to do Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. Too much overlap there for them to justify awarding three separate Bachelor’s.

There was no Black Magic degree program at Rose. It was strictly a minor. I took some artistic license.

Cthulhu eats/exploits people. Featureless White Void. And an end to my sophomore year.

When I returned to cartooning in the fall, I realized that I’d hit a bit of a rut with the comic. Year 3 will start with a rather drastic shift in focus.

Read the rest of TASOAE: 049...

Campus beautification was the event where clubs and other campus groups were encouraged to help out with planting flowers, trimming bushes, and other activities.

I’m not sure the joke in this comic comes across. Cthulhu’s idea of “beauty” is to install something the human mind cannot comprehend.

Assassin(s) (also called Killer or Paranoia, according to Wikipedia) is a game that the Residence Hall Association organized every year. It’s sort of a complicated version of Tag. Participants were assigned a “victim,” and had to then “kill” that victim by tagging them and saying a code phrase (I believe it was “RHA Assassination!”). Apparently, this sort of game has become more popular over the years (this comic was drawn in 2005), with a current variant being Humans vs. Zombies, which turns the game team-based and has an interesting escalation-of-danger mechanic. I can just imagine how stressful it would be to be one of the last humans “alive.”

Rose had a series of mailing lists for e-mail, based on each dorm, each major, each class year, and so on. The most dangerous of these was all.campus. All.campus was delivered to all of campus. Faculty, staff, students, maybe even people who lived nearby. I believe there were rudimentary posting restrictions, but I’m pretty sure that any faculty or staff could post to the list without moderation required.

So when someone announced on all.campus that there were free kittens in the Japanese Garden, and then quickly retracted the offer (were the kittens too young to be separated from their mother? I forget.), it was sent to everyone. When they sent a second message to make sure, it was sent to everyone. And when a professor replied in order to tell the original sender not to send an e-mail to everyone, it was sent to everyone.

The list probably should have been more heavily moderated.

This was a problem at Rose, for me and other students. It was an insular environment, and it was entirely too easy to never leave campus except to replenish your supplies of ramen, soda, and snack food. The city of Terre Haute didn’t make it much easier; it wasn’t the sort of place that had a lot of date options, especially for socially-inexperienced geeks. Often, the most culturally-interesting performances took place at the big auditorium on campus, and it lacked a certain romantic quality to take a date to a classical concert a stone’s throw from your dorm room and then on a walk down the mosquito-infested path to the second, lousier baseball diamond.

We had some sort of sportball tournament against a school named DePauw my sophomore year. Someone — the SGA? a fraternity? — had the bright idea to craft shirts that said “DePauw Sucks.” You know, for the school spirit and sportsmanship. This bothered a lot of the faculty.

There’s a generational divide here, I think. For people my age, saying something “sucks” is generally a harmless insult. I try not to use it anymore, because it’s rooted in some unpleasant homophobic and sex-negative concepts, but it doesn’t cause a strong reaction in me. However, for people who are old enough, I get the impression that “sucks” is strongly associated with its roots; that is, every time a person of a certain age hears “sucks,” they think “sucks cock.” For my generation, “sucks” is a casual insult. For someone sufficiently older, it’s irredeemably vulgar.

So someone — the faculty? parents? a passing DePauw alumnus? — objected, as they probably should have. In response, the Powers That Be offered a deal: they would provide, free of charge, a shirt that said “Beat DePauw” in exchange for the “DePauw Sucks” shirts.

If you know anything about the obstinacy, rebelliousness, and willful vulgarity of college students, you can guess how well that was received.

Pretty proud of this one. Civil-teasing was always a rather clumsy and cruel affair; it always seemed to me that civil engineers got the brunt of the teasing from other disciplines (with computer scientists a close second), and sort of had their own cliques that in turn looked down on everyone else. I wanted to do a comic that was laughing with the civils, not at them, and I hope I succeeded. Civils didn’t wear overalls, really. But I imagine it can be nice to date someone who likes to play in the dirt.

The mitten hands were a stylistic choice, not a reflection of laziness, but here they look especially bad. And again with the Featureless White Void. I really should have put some sort of background in, even if it was a single horizon line.

Civil engineers were the butt of many jokes at Rose. They played in mud, they didn’t make anything that moved, they got to take classes (Surveying) that meant they could be outside, they actually liked being outside.

There’s a reference in there to the excellent webcomic Scary Go Round, which has now burst out of its chitonous cocoon as Bad Machinery.

Snow. I always enjoyed doing strips with non-standard layouts. That’s Speed Lake in the background; I believe the building is Mees Hall. That would indicate that the CS Guy and Cthulhu are standing on the back lawn of Speed.

At this point, I have no idea what CS Guy’s shirt is supposed to mean.

This seems like one of those comics suggested by our editor-in-chief when I was wracking my brain at around midnight to come up with an idea. These were dark times for the strip.

“Mr. Obvious McBlatantson” is still pretty good, though.

It’s the civil engineer! And the relationship between Cthulhu and his girlfriend is complicated. Still: mouth tentacles.

A shame this didn’t go up last week, but these aren’t at all aligned with 2010-time. I should be happy it’s anywhere close.

I like Santa Cthulhu.

This comic printed sideways, yes; but it was also printed on the Flipside, the paper’s humor page. The Flipside was printed upside down relative to the rest of the paper, on the back. Like any college humor page, the quality varied dramatically. I like to think that my time as humor editor was a high point in the page’s illustrious history. Before me, there was a tendency for humor editors low on content to “ironically” print a black box on the page. I mostly managed to keep the page from containing any bigotry, and even did some genuine satire. The current state of things is decent, from what I can see.

The music being played is “Soramimi no Cake,” the opening theme to the Azumanga Daioh anime. I hear the US military uses it at Guantanamo Bay during their torture sessions (not really).

Every year, the housekeepers… what? Yeah, we had housekeepers in our dorms. They vacuumed, emptied the trash, and washed our bedclothing. It seems pretty posh, but keep in mind that at Rose, many dorms would have become infested with vermin if not for the housekeepers. People had enough trouble bathing at least once a week and washing their laundry at least once a month.

Where was I? Right. Every year, the housekeepers would put up a rather impressive Christmas light display in the basement of BSB Hall, where there were few student rooms but plenty of stuff like the lounge and the laundry room/kitchen. It was awesome, but those of us who are of the taller persuasion had to dodge and weave to avoid getting entangled.

Cthulhu is cryptic and evil; the world is a featureless white void. Sophomore year is the busiest year at Rose, and at this point I must have been both feeling the coursework and feeling the limitations of my premise. For Year 3, I reinvented the comic quite a bit, switching the focus to two named (!) characters, but I managed to rally a bit with the second half of Year 2 and add some more creativity. Still, these comics are probably the height of the dark ages.

I still think this is a cool fact. On the right, you can see a sketchy rendering of Rose’s rather complex dining hall meal tray disposal and distribution system. It’s a carousel that turns in front of a wide window, with racks on which students place their trays. The trays slowly revolve around, and end up in the dishwashing area, where they are collected by workers and cleaned. With a quick Google search, I was unable to find an example of this product. I found plenty of carousel-style automated dish- and tray-washing systems, but Rose’s device exists purely to provide a high-bandwidth way to dispose of dirty trays and bring them to the dishwashing staff, who then presumably moved them by hand to sinks or other washing devices.

Why is gentleman so worried about the spoons? In the Rose dining hall, the spoons are sharper than the knives.

People always came back from the career fairs with stuff: pens, notepads, little puzzles, and so on. It was a strange dynamic; students wanted internships, and companies wanted interns, but it always seemed like the students were more desperate than the companies. The little gifts would suggest otherwise. Are you really going to get the best intern to work for you if your reward for a booth visit is a set of 50 magnetic ball bearings? Perhaps.

Is Cthulhu saying Mr. Sparky or Mr. Spanky? I think I meant Mr. Sparky.

There is not actually a master password.

In the last panel, you can see Rose’s famous Eternal White Void, located just outside the President’s office. I must have been in a hurry this day.

Midgley widely publicized an “open-door” policy. It was a bit odd, since Rose was small enough that pretty much any faculty or administrative member could be reached on an open-door basis, including the previous president.

At this point, there was a social contract in our room. I may be misremembering the details, but I believe that every time someone said “Excuuuuuse me, Princess!” they were required to watch an episode of the Zelda TV show in punishment. You wouldn’t think this would be a problem, but for some reason it was necessary.

And here’s the start of a storyline! This comic occurred before people started criticizing our new president, Midgley, for being a terrible president. By the end of the year, he was labeled as a sociopath, there were rallies against him, and secret memos were being passed around accusing him of all manner of awful things.

“Koso” is evidently the Japanese onomatopoeia for sneaking.

Apologies for the break in publication; I kept meaning to get around to fixing the scheduling, and only now have done so.

A decent observation in the first panel, here; even as a sophomore, freshmen seemed tiny and adorable. This is a case of explaining a visual joke, though, which automatically weakens it. The rest of the comic is “ha, ha, Cthulhu is a misanthrope,” which is a tired joke by this point. Slightly redeemed by the implications of “bring me my supper” (he eats people!), but I think that was an unintended reading. The tagline at the bottom suggests I realized this one was a bit weak.

President Hulbert was the much-loved and eternally admired friendly old president of Rose-Hulman. He’d been president forever, but he finally retired after my freshman year. He proved irreplaceable; we went through two more officially selected presidents during my time there, as well as the assorted interim administrators and de facto triumvirates that arise during any rough political transition.

Fun fact: During my first quarter, I got to play a ninja who was kidnapping Dr. Hulbert for a Film Club production. I was the one who held the chloroform rag to his face. I may be the last Rose student to ever get that close to the man.

This is the last comic from my freshman year at Rose. Year 2 heralds some longer (loose) storylines.

Lovecraftian horror names are hard to spell and pronounce. According to some stories, Lovecraft would give each person who asked a different pronunciation of “Cthulhu.”

I think my first encounter with gaslighting was in the book The Twits by Roald Dahl.

I suspect that “Last Saturday…” caption is there because that was when roommate assignment requests were due. The Thorn newspaper went out on Friday mornings, so I must have been concerned that the topic wasn’t quite timely enough.

Rose did not have co-ed on-campus housing.

Chemical Engineers are strange creatures that only use computers to talk to their friends and download spyware.

Hoosiers are strange creatures that play games that aren’t digital, use cards that aren’t collectible, and have rules that make no sense.

Cthulhu has no problem with killing humans. He is, however, aware of the complications that other humans would experience if they do so.

Geeky college students often have trouble distinguishing between making humorous allusions and parroting tired lines from popular works. The cake is a lie.

Ahh, Unreal Tournament 2004. Excellent game. My (eventual) roommate ran a server with a stats mod on it that let you gain experience and upgrade your abilities. It was a bit broken.

Edit: Speed was one of the dorms on campus.