A Thousand Pardons!

A Thousand Pardons!

I decided to make the Panopticon a little less subtle in this page. Please let me know if you can see it – monitors vary a lot!

And hooray for actually getting two pages out this week.


If you’re wondering where “gongoozling” for “operating a warp drive” comes from, well, my exes had this running joke about the “Postfurry Solar System” – a lightly-sketched sci-fi setting full of media-terrorist Martian tigers, politely communist blue Mooncats, glamazon bunnies on Venus, mind-controlling squid on Saturn, etc, etc. When I started going out with them, I of course needed a comic-opera space animal caricature or two as well, and thus were born the bipolar raccoons of Mercury and the cheerfully sideways robot spiders of the asteroid belt. They are generally considered kind of insane; they like to blow themselves up for fun now and then, and are pretty much the only users of the warp drive known as the “gongoozler”. Which… does things… …to your brain if you use it, and has a tendency to occasionally make you vanish entirely instead of going where you want to. Especially if you’re in a gravity well.

…Does “warping too deep in a gravity well is hazardous to your health” have a page on TVTropes by now? Why yes, yes it does. (Warning: TVTropes.)

8 thoughts on “A Thousand Pardons!

  1. Well you asked to know if we can see it but I think you were being sarcastic because it’s excessively clear and obvious… On the other hand I’ve never noticed it on any other page.

    • I really wanted to know; I’ve had problems with subtle stuff being completely invisible on some people’s screens in the past!

      I’m debating going back to the Panopticon’s previous appearances and making it a little more contrasty as well, since it IS an important part of the story. Not sure.

    • That last red balloon is intentionally tiny and pretty much illegible; it’s mostly there to indicate that the conversation is going on outside of our awareness. That said it says “They are strange. I always seem to have some kind of mission or something..

  2. I think ‘warning: TVTropes’ may be the most salient warning I’ve ever seen. Finally (_finally_!) chewing through these bit by bit and absolutely adoring, BTW! Hopefully I’ll have something more interesting to say somewhere along the way. :-)

  3. I noticed the panopticon being tagged in the page right after Rita caught the bullet, but couldn’t see it. Even going back to look for it now, I didn’t see it for awhile. On this page, I missed it. When I saw the comment, I looked for it and I can see it, but it doesn’t stand out. For what it’s worth, my monitor is on its minimum brightness setting because the room it’s in is usually kind of dark (though it still is pretty bright for the surroundings).

    • Thanks!

      ‘Can see it but it doesn’t stand out’ is pretty much what I’m aiming for. Especially if your monitor is all the way down; you wouldn’t see the printed equivalent if you were reading it in a dark room, either.

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