Ludus Novus

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.