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.
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.
