What are the little things that move us? The simple joys that warm our bodies and hearts? The micro life of insects that influence our world more than we think? The tiny steps we make everyday to have a happier tomorrow?
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
The Forgotten Order
Christy
A young witch for whom every spell is a misfire finds solace and friendship in her new companion - a cursed doll.
ARISE, YE SKELETON KING
Brian Clevinger, Escher Cattle, Lee Black
A troupe of wandering "adventurers" down to their last silver "acquire" a map only to find the real treasure was the fiend they dug up along the way.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
The Weave
Rennie Kingsley
A young woman pursued by bad luck is witness to the murder of the Fairy Queen of Summer. Can she get to the bottom of this mystery?
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Edison Rex
Chris Roberson
The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Scape
Lauren
Sula has always preferred to forge her own path, but before she knows it, she is pulled into the middle of a civil war between man and monster!
How to be a Werewolf
Shawn Lenore
Malaya Walters was bitten by a werewolf as a child. After being raised by her human family, she faces the chance to learn what being a werewolf is really like as an adult.
Within
Verena Loisel
A young hitman meanders between a reality that seems to happen without him, and his dreams where he is lost in an endless house. When he makes an accidental friend, his world is shaken up and he realizes there are things he can't remember about himself.
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Nigh Heaven & Hell
Scotty
Heather Vodihn is on a simple mission: find her father. However she becomes entangled with two strangers with mysterious powers being stalked by a group with bizarre demands. Heather must learn to trust her new traveling companions, even if she is untrustworthy herself.
This is Not Fiction
Nicole Mannino
What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
Ride or Die
Mars Heyward
Ride or Die is an LGBTQ webcomic about two street racers who team up with a demon-possessed muscle car in the search for a missing woman, while being hunted by a deadly religious cult.
Sleepless Domain
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
In a world where magical girls and their battles are commonplace, loss has become all too common as well.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
Not Drunk Enough
Tess Stone
Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
Headless Bliss
Clover
A story about story-telling, and other metaphysical themes such as Nightmares! (Failed) Teamwork! Comedy! And more!
Freakshow
Scotty
A festival of broken people, blood flows in the center ring. Come one and come all, to the greatest show in all of Paris.
The Last Diplomat
Cat Farris
Samma and Tark didn't ask to be stuck together, but now they're partners on the adventure of a lifetime.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Quick$ilver
Crypto
The flirtatious, directionless, and ever disastrous Luci searches for excitement in a life of crime, and finds himself caught in a web of messy romance and bad blood.
Missing Monday
Elle Skinner
Two girls fall in love through a magic door connecting their worlds. When Monday suddenly goes missing, it's up to Foyle to find her. How she's going to navigate an entirely unfamiliar world is another matter.
Gzhel Guardian
Atla Hrafney, nushanchel
The Railway World is a complex, mysterious network of trains, towns and mechanical monsters. Leo is a Guardian of one of these towns, and although their burn-out and depression has taken hold of them, they have one last job to finish.
Alexander, The Servant & The Water of Life
Reimena Yee
The 21st century retelling of the life and legends of Alexander the Great.
The Substitutes
Myisha Haynes
What happens when three roommates accidentally acquire otherworldly and powerful magic weapons destined for someone else?
Sakana
Mad Rupert
Our heroes must navigate a hazardous dating scene, overcome personal anxieties, and wrangle unruly seafood in order to find love, peace of mind, and a paycheck.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Lies Within
Lacey
Lysander's aimless and carefree life is turned upside down when he accidentally discovers that the cute boy next door, Simon, is a literal monster
The Golden Boar
Magnolia Porter Siddell
A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
Barbarous
Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota
A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
Saint for Rent
Ru Xu
Saint Halliday runs an inn for Time Travelers. Unfortunately, he seems to attract other supernatural "guests," too.
Trying Human
IntroducingEmy
Two women separated by over half a century are brought together by an alien-filled conspiracy involving murder, mystery and romance!
Augustine
Winter Jay Kiakas, Windy
August and her ragtag group are just like everyone else, simply surviving in the treacherous Crater... When they stumble into what may be an artifact of the ancient past, their lives are thrown into a much bigger loop as they trifle with bounty hunters, monsters and gods.
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Darkling Bright
Chris Hazelton
Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
At least, he was, and that was the idea...
Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Aquapunk
Lo
In an underwater world of unknown coordinates, inhabited by aliens, ghosts, and robots, a young member of a warrior underclass is framed for a crime and goes on the run. Little does he know he is part of a grand design that only gods and ancestors could choreograph.
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Pain in winter as a result of injuries is a funny thing in my experience. Granted, I’ve dislocated both knees but haven’t had anything scarring.
Anyway, for me, the worst pain in winter is from sudden temperature changes, mostly when it drops 15-20 degrees overnight. Then, my knees ache something fierce. But when I was in a place with more typical, gradual change in temp with consistently cold days (as opposed to the hyperactive rabbit on drugs that is California weather), my knees were kinda sore sometimes, but not anything really too bad.
but as I said, scarred injuries might be very different from damaged ligaments.
I have a few scars on my torso (one from heart surgery one from being stabbed), and the one scar from surgery never hurts really but my rips get hella sore because they developed pretty wonky (my rips are like a D shape if that makes sense) and my organs that got injured from being stabbed hurt a ton when I get sick but aren’t affected much by cold.
Yeah, from what I know, it’s more likely to hurt A) If the scar is wonky (mine’s really bumpy) or B) With bone damage (which, since the knife went THROUGH her hand, there almost certainly was).
I have a scar on my hand from a saw… it hurt in the winter for about two years (even in Texas baby-winter), then it stopped. Hasn’t returned even after moving to a place with slightly colder winters.
Given we’re all like, 80% sure it was tendon and bone damage? Yeah, gotta be unpleasant. Oof.
But still. She’s happy! She’s playing music again! She’s presumably training herself to do so while accounting for that injury! I am also dead from cute.
Well Adam’s rendition is pretty awesome. And for me it also has notes of hometown boy done good. That said, to answer your question hypothetically:
– Your local band likes it.
– They’re good at playing it.
– It’s about summer
– It’s popular with the townsfolk
– Gigamesh and Yogsothoth like to make flesh puppets dance their souls away in the dying of the light when the moist air is heavy enough to carry the smell across the shadows boundary.
I would be surprised. She seems to have little trouble with actual hand dexterity with that hand despite the wound. She was, after all, able to trade training in Mario Kart for Algebra lessons. Besides, learning to play left handed is a bongo. Many left handed guitarist simply choose to learn to play right handed as it is simpler to learn it that way.
Actually, which hand was stabbed? If it is the right hand, I think trying to play left handed would be far more problematic. Working the fret board requires a lot of dexterity and flexibility. One has a large number of options for strumming a guitar if nerve damage makes holding a pick an issue.
People who are right-handed (like myself) generally play the guitar with the neck and fretboard in their left hand; they train their left hand to do their will. And as you noted, many left-handers play the guitar that same way since if it ‘easier’ to learn if you are doing things like everybody else instead of mirror-imaging it, which would also include re-stringing the guitar ‘backwards’. But not everybody followed conventional wisdom. There are some who did it ‘backwards’; Paul McCartney of the Beatles is one of the best examples.
So it just comes down not so much to manual dexterity as it does to what you get used to.
Yep. He trusted the mass-producedness of the RH guitars.
It did make it harder for him to get the last few frets on the high strings (asymmetrical shape around the fretboard) but he had huge hands and lots of talent, and it didn’t hold him back (to put it mildly).
The weird thing about McCartney is that, although he plays guitar/bass left-handed, he’s actually right-handed when it come to other things.
In other news, Hendrix apparently played right-handed guitars flipped, rather than purpose-made left-handed ones, which some have credited with producing his particular tone.
It’s nice to see Sal smile again, but I’m slightly worried; her hand’s definitely gonna be sore due to the weather. Hell, my elbow turns sore whenever it even rains.
Not much, and when it does it wrecks EVERYTHING. My brother-in-law moved to Alabama and said that whenever they get 1/4″ of snow the sheer volume of automobile accidents that occur because no one has a clue how to handle it is staggering.
I’ve lived my entire life so far in a part of the Midwest where we get a decent amount of snow every winter, and there are still people here who don’t seem to know how to drive when it snows.
I can only assume people in the south drive around on bald summer tires year round.
Up here, so many people buy into the myth that all-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive makes their SUV indestructible in the winter. It doesn’t. I’ve only ever owned FWD sedans, and I’ve only gotten stuck once. (Driving home in a blizzard, I got run off a ramp into the un-plowed breakdown lane, ran out of momentum, and got beached in the snow.)
Exactly. But, a high center of gravity does help you roll. So maybe it’s like a natural selection / rapture thing. Choose me now Jesus!
My favourite was always grabbing a chair in the coffeeshop at the bottom of the hill in town. Grab a hot-chocolate and sit and watch all the 4WD’s. See them just put it in 4 and floor the gas, trying to go back up the hill. Wheels flying and the trucks/suv’s are sliding back and forth all over, drivers white-knuckling the wheel, fresh latte’s and mocha’s spilling. They had to be putting a mile on their odometer just to go a yard back up that hill.
England- it’s /supposed/ to snow in the winter here, but the past 30 years it’s got much rarer. So now, every time it snows more than an inch, the whole damn country falls apart like a wet paper bag.
When it snows in places that don’t normally HAVE snow they don’t have the equipment to clear it properly and they end up having to pay other cities for the use of their crews and trucks.
Certain counties in California discovered the hard way to get the crews too, they borrowed a bunch of vehicles and manned them with their own inexperienced people, who summarily ripped several hundred miles of Botts’ Dots off the interstate highways.
(I’m from the part of California that doesn’t bother with such things.)
If you live in Miami or Ft Lauderdale, it’s never. (Well, there was a brief dusting on January 19, 1977 – yes, people remember the date. It didn’t stick, but it was the first time many people down here had ever seen snow. It hasn’t happened since – in fact, perhaps due to warming, we almost never get down into the 40s anymore, and it used to do that or lower for a couple of day or 2 cold snaps every “winter”. It was good – it killed off the mosquitoes, and helped keep the python sand iguanas in check.)
Python sand iguanas are the worst — those are the ones that drop out of the trees in the cold and strangle you while simultaneously causing crotch chafing, right?
Is this the first time we’ve seen Sal with a fingerless glove? (Actually, I’m sure it’s the first time we’ve seen her with one; the question is whether we’ve seen her with two.)
Snow!!! I moved to southern Arizona from Ohio a few years ago and I miss snow a lot more than I thought I would. I’m glad Sal gets some quiet time with it, at least. What a beautiful and peaceful strip.
Wait until the middle of February, when it’s about a foot-and-a-half deep and all the dirt and particulate matter from car exhausts have turned it into a dirty dish-water gray color. And then you realize that you’ve still got March to get through before it starts to go away.
I took a picture of the last time I saw snow, and I can’t remember when that was it was so long ago. If the gap between the records from the old phone and the pictures in the new phone means anything it was in 2018 or late 2017.
I know this has nothing to do with todays strip, but let me just say this, if Billie and Ruth have broken up and Billie’s left the comic JUST as they were starting to become a healthy relationship that will be one Damn You Willis I will never be able to forgive.
Sal spent a lot of time in Tennessee, probably not a lot of snow down there right? She probably missed snow… I’m really looking forward to snow myself.
Specific training for specific tasks can help, as well. I’ve got chronically poor fine motor control including motor dysgraphia, but I managed to do half-decently drawing when I actively practiced it. The stamina in my arms has never been great, but that’s more manageable with a drawing where you can stop and plan the next thing instead of writing an essay for an exam (both time crunch and the way thoughts flow mean stopping is less doable there, so I’d try and compensate by compressing what I was trying to say as much as possible and write less.) There’s still hard limits – despite my best efforts, some video games are still too precise for me to ever beat (and by this I mean ‘I have spent literal months straight throwing myself at some levels of Super Mario Sunshine without success,’ not like Dark Souls or something,) but as a hobbyist I could probably draw well enough if I started putting time in again. My handwriting still looks like an eight-year-old’s, but it’s mostly legible now in a way it wasn’t when I was actually eight, at least for short uses.
I suspect Sal’s still going to hit those walls where she wasn’t before, and she may not manage to play as long (almost certainly not as fast,) but being able to do so at all can be a psychological boost in itself.
She’s letting her hair keep some curl! And that smile! This is such a sweet strip today. I really hope it’s a sign that Sal is just going to feel so much more supported for being herself.
A guitar has a bigger sound, fuller sound. A Uke is For fun, a guitar is amazing. Sometimes friends give each other big gifts. Someone likes me enough to give me a guitar. And it’s touched my heart. But I don’t play outdoors under Fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Fingers get too stiff.
That’s a left-handed guitar, with the pick guard on that side, not a right-handed guitar restrung. That means it’s not borrowed; Sal picked it out herself, for herself, with her own money. Left-handed guitars are harder to find, especially if you’re trying to get one second-hand, and usually cost more. Maybe she traded in the motorbike for it?
She’s wearing a regular glove on her left hand, and a fingerless glove on the right. You can kind of see it around the neck a little bit. (That’s also her scar hand, she probably still covers it up most of the time.)
Okay, the first thing I saw is that Sal has an actual left-handed guitar. All mine have been right-handed and turned around. Southpaws notice stuff like that right away.
Hey oh
Listen what I say oh,
Come back and hey oh
Look here what I say oh
The more I see, the less I know
The more I like to let it go
Hey oh, whoa, whoa, whoa
As a Canadian, the sudden onset of snow is never a moment of excitement for me. It portents the deep cold that is to follow. Maybe not on the first snowfall, maybe not even for a month, but the moment the first snow appears, we all know that winter is coming, and we must deal with february again soon enough
As a Canadian, I love it. I always get excited for snow. I get why some people don’t though – some people don’t like shovelling snow, staying inside to get warm, or making adjustments for driving or the cold.
I like it too, in the abstract. When you’ve got no choice but to get up hours early to dig out to risk your like on the roads with all the idiots who can’t drive in the snow to make it to work on time, the pleasure fades.
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wish I could do that
…
ex’s “friend” ran off with my guitar )=|
Oof.
You only had one guitar? That’s your first problem…
But one guitar can just blow you away; you see stars in your eyes, and the very next day…
You buy a beat up six string in a second hand store; don’t know how to play it, but you know for sure…
That one guitar feels good in your hands;
doesn’t take long to understand…
Just one guitar slung way down low?
It’s a one-way ticket, only one way to go.
I had a guitar once when I was a kid, but I never bothered to learn how to play it and we sold it or something.
Who fucking does that? What an inconsiderate pustule
THAT! Is a capital offense. As in Capital. I say off with it’s head! Pustule is a little weak, I think. How about scrofulous pustule?
“Anyway, here’s Wonderbread.”
(Danny appears)
danny never answers his texts so that’s the only reliable way to get in contact with him
Danny: “Wow, I’ve never seen a ukelele that big!”
I love this comment so much
This comment is wholly underrated. <3
It’s nice seeing Sal smile.
Yeah, I hope she’s been keeping up with Marcie and that maybe she’s been opening up to more people (in a healthy way)
I wonder if Marcie made progress with Malaya?
Yeah, I want to print & frame this one
Did Sal quit smoking?
I hope
A) Too happy, iz ded.
B) Her hand has to hurt like hell in the winter. Oof.
Pain in winter as a result of injuries is a funny thing in my experience. Granted, I’ve dislocated both knees but haven’t had anything scarring.
Anyway, for me, the worst pain in winter is from sudden temperature changes, mostly when it drops 15-20 degrees overnight. Then, my knees ache something fierce. But when I was in a place with more typical, gradual change in temp with consistently cold days (as opposed to the hyperactive rabbit on drugs that is California weather), my knees were kinda sore sometimes, but not anything really too bad.
but as I said, scarred injuries might be very different from damaged ligaments.
I have a little one on my hand and it always tingle-stings in winter.
I have a few scars on my torso (one from heart surgery one from being stabbed), and the one scar from surgery never hurts really but my rips get hella sore because they developed pretty wonky (my rips are like a D shape if that makes sense) and my organs that got injured from being stabbed hurt a ton when I get sick but aren’t affected much by cold.
Yeah, from what I know, it’s more likely to hurt A) If the scar is wonky (mine’s really bumpy) or B) With bone damage (which, since the knife went THROUGH her hand, there almost certainly was).
I have a scar on my hand from a saw… it hurt in the winter for about two years (even in Texas baby-winter), then it stopped. Hasn’t returned even after moving to a place with slightly colder winters.
Yay! It’s the pits.
Given we’re all like, 80% sure it was tendon and bone damage? Yeah, gotta be unpleasant. Oof.
But still. She’s happy! She’s playing music again! She’s presumably training herself to do so while accounting for that injury! I am also dead from cute.
This makes me really happy
SOOOOOOO… MEBODY ONCE TOLD ME
I got my first real six string
Bought at the Five & Dime…
Played till my fingers bled, was the summer of ’69
That song’s a staple of the “local band plays music at the town bandstand during the summer” setlist and I don’t know why.
Well Adam’s rendition is pretty awesome. And for me it also has notes of hometown boy done good. That said, to answer your question hypothetically:
– Your local band likes it.
– They’re good at playing it.
– It’s about summer
– It’s popular with the townsfolk
– Gigamesh and Yogsothoth like to make flesh puppets dance their souls away in the dying of the light when the moist air is heavy enough to carry the smell across the shadows boundary.
the world is gonna roll me, I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed
Last panel made me think of Peanuts gang catching snowflakes on their tongues.
I heard the music behind that scene!
Now I do too!
It’s January, so they should be ripe.
Plays “Linus and Lucy” by Vince Guaraldi
I’m hearing the instrumental version of “Christmas Time is Here”.
LET IT
Go inside, you’re gonna ruin your guitar
Every once in a while, you come across a strip that’s just perfect. Nothing could possibly be added to make it better.
Danke.
Does she play left-handed because of the hand injury?
I would be surprised. She seems to have little trouble with actual hand dexterity with that hand despite the wound. She was, after all, able to trade training in Mario Kart for Algebra lessons. Besides, learning to play left handed is a bongo. Many left handed guitarist simply choose to learn to play right handed as it is simpler to learn it that way.
Actually, which hand was stabbed? If it is the right hand, I think trying to play left handed would be far more problematic. Working the fret board requires a lot of dexterity and flexibility. One has a large number of options for strumming a guitar if nerve damage makes holding a pick an issue.
Right hand, but she was left handed before the stabbing too (she held the knife in her left hand).
People who are right-handed (like myself) generally play the guitar with the neck and fretboard in their left hand; they train their left hand to do their will. And as you noted, many left-handers play the guitar that same way since if it ‘easier’ to learn if you are doing things like everybody else instead of mirror-imaging it, which would also include re-stringing the guitar ‘backwards’. But not everybody followed conventional wisdom. There are some who did it ‘backwards’; Paul McCartney of the Beatles is one of the best examples.
So it just comes down not so much to manual dexterity as it does to what you get used to.
Paul was one of the best, yes. But I believe Jimmy Hendrix,… Is the Record Holder for excellence with the guitar, just no words to.
Jimi Hendrix strung his right-handed guitar upside down and played it left-handed.
Yep. He trusted the mass-producedness of the RH guitars.
It did make it harder for him to get the last few frets on the high strings (asymmetrical shape around the fretboard) but he had huge hands and lots of talent, and it didn’t hold him back (to put it mildly).
The weird thing about McCartney is that, although he plays guitar/bass left-handed, he’s actually right-handed when it come to other things.
In other news, Hendrix apparently played right-handed guitars flipped, rather than purpose-made left-handed ones, which some have credited with producing his particular tone.
Playing a restrung, flipped RH guitar makes bending notes easier on some guitar designs like the Fenders that Jimi liked to play.
I do that! (Although, when I failed at learning guitar, I held it right handed) I eat and write lefty, everything else is done with my right hand.
It’s nice to see Sal smile again, but I’m slightly worried; her hand’s definitely gonna be sore due to the weather. Hell, my elbow turns sore whenever it even rains.
Going off of the hover text:
Informer…..
Licky boom boom down
Sal/Yuki OTP confirmed.
;D
The snow lady?
Aw, I wonder when she last saw snow.
okay I forgot the time skip and that it has probably snowed other days
Still, she spent so much time in the South that maybe the novelty hasn’t worn off.
Cue to the Life is Strange soundtrack.
Doesn’t snow much in the south huh?
Not much, and when it does it wrecks EVERYTHING. My brother-in-law moved to Alabama and said that whenever they get 1/4″ of snow the sheer volume of automobile accidents that occur because no one has a clue how to handle it is staggering.
I’ve lived my entire life so far in a part of the Midwest where we get a decent amount of snow every winter, and there are still people here who don’t seem to know how to drive when it snows.
Same here, in Michigan. One day on my commute to work (about 35 miles) I saw 13 wrecks. 12 on the way home. It’s ridiculous.
I can only assume people in the south drive around on bald summer tires year round.
Up here, so many people buy into the myth that all-wheel-drive or four-wheel-drive makes their SUV indestructible in the winter. It doesn’t. I’ve only ever owned FWD sedans, and I’ve only gotten stuck once. (Driving home in a blizzard, I got run off a ramp into the un-plowed breakdown lane, ran out of momentum, and got beached in the snow.)
Yup, nothing like the big 4WD SUVs blowing by you on the highway in a blizzard. 4WD doesn’t help you stop. Or turn.
Exactly. But, a high center of gravity does help you roll. So maybe it’s like a natural selection / rapture thing. Choose me now Jesus!
My favourite was always grabbing a chair in the coffeeshop at the bottom of the hill in town. Grab a hot-chocolate and sit and watch all the 4WD’s. See them just put it in 4 and floor the gas, trying to go back up the hill. Wheels flying and the trucks/suv’s are sliding back and forth all over, drivers white-knuckling the wheel, fresh latte’s and mocha’s spilling. They had to be putting a mile on their odometer just to go a yard back up that hill.
Not just no clue, though that’s not really surprising due to no practice, but also no snow infrastructure – no plows, no salting the roads, etc.
England- it’s /supposed/ to snow in the winter here, but the past 30 years it’s got much rarer. So now, every time it snows more than an inch, the whole damn country falls apart like a wet paper bag.
When it snows in places that don’t normally HAVE snow they don’t have the equipment to clear it properly and they end up having to pay other cities for the use of their crews and trucks.
Certain counties in California discovered the hard way to get the crews too, they borrowed a bunch of vehicles and manned them with their own inexperienced people, who summarily ripped several hundred miles of Botts’ Dots off the interstate highways.
(I’m from the part of California that doesn’t bother with such things.)
If you live in Miami or Ft Lauderdale, it’s never. (Well, there was a brief dusting on January 19, 1977 – yes, people remember the date. It didn’t stick, but it was the first time many people down here had ever seen snow. It hasn’t happened since – in fact, perhaps due to warming, we almost never get down into the 40s anymore, and it used to do that or lower for a couple of day or 2 cold snaps every “winter”. It was good – it killed off the mosquitoes, and helped keep the python sand iguanas in check.)
Python sand iguanas are the worst — those are the ones that drop out of the trees in the cold and strangle you while simultaneously causing crotch chafing, right?
Is this the first time we’ve seen Sal with a fingerless glove? (Actually, I’m sure it’s the first time we’ve seen her with one; the question is whether we’ve seen her with two.)
No, she’s got a couple different pairs of ’em iirc.
Snow!!! I moved to southern Arizona from Ohio a few years ago and I miss snow a lot more than I thought I would. I’m glad Sal gets some quiet time with it, at least. What a beautiful and peaceful strip.
Wait until the middle of February, when it’s about a foot-and-a-half deep and all the dirt and particulate matter from car exhausts have turned it into a dirty dish-water gray color. And then you realize that you’ve still got March to get through before it starts to go away.
I like snow. From my window, with a cup of chai tea. Otherwise, no.
I took a picture of the last time I saw snow, and I can’t remember when that was it was so long ago. If the gap between the records from the old phone and the pictures in the new phone means anything it was in 2018 or late 2017.
After all the drama this strip is just so heartwarming.
I know this has nothing to do with todays strip, but let me just say this, if Billie and Ruth have broken up and Billie’s left the comic JUST as they were starting to become a healthy relationship that will be one Damn You Willis I will never be able to forgive.
Ah, the good ol’ six-string orchestra…
YES.
Sal spent a lot of time in Tennessee, probably not a lot of snow down there right? She probably missed snow… I’m really looking forward to snow myself.
Tennessee gets snow.
Especially in the mountains.
She grew up in Evansville (right across the river from KY) and it’s never been established where in TN she was for five years.
So, what happened to her hand being to messed-up to play?
She hadn’t sung much in recent years. Maybe she also hadn’t tested how much dexterity she’d regained in quite some time?
If her friendship with Danny has partially helped get her to this moment, I will be forced to love him forever.
She’s reversed the guitar, using her left hand to work the fret board instead of the right.
No, wait, that’s wrong. Blame the mirror effect!
She’s learning from the Django Reinhardt Songbook? (He had two permenantly damaged fingers.)
Specific training for specific tasks can help, as well. I’ve got chronically poor fine motor control including motor dysgraphia, but I managed to do half-decently drawing when I actively practiced it. The stamina in my arms has never been great, but that’s more manageable with a drawing where you can stop and plan the next thing instead of writing an essay for an exam (both time crunch and the way thoughts flow mean stopping is less doable there, so I’d try and compensate by compressing what I was trying to say as much as possible and write less.) There’s still hard limits – despite my best efforts, some video games are still too precise for me to ever beat (and by this I mean ‘I have spent literal months straight throwing myself at some levels of Super Mario Sunshine without success,’ not like Dark Souls or something,) but as a hobbyist I could probably draw well enough if I started putting time in again. My handwriting still looks like an eight-year-old’s, but it’s mostly legible now in a way it wasn’t when I was actually eight, at least for short uses.
I suspect Sal’s still going to hit those walls where she wasn’t before, and she may not manage to play as long (almost certainly not as fast,) but being able to do so at all can be a psychological boost in itself.
Marcie incoming?
This is beautiful.
<3
She’s letting her hair keep some curl! And that smile! This is such a sweet strip today. I really hope it’s a sign that Sal is just going to feel so much more supported for being herself.
Her hair looks less like Batman’s cape today.
I was gonna comment on Sal letting some of the floof in her hair remain. It looks really good on her.
And if you listen really closely, in the background you can hear Mike singing Desperado.
He really only mended one fence, Amber.
But gosh! Sal’s smile makes muh heart sing!
If Danny lit the fire — I’ll forgive the little uke.
A guitar has a bigger sound, fuller sound. A Uke is For fun, a guitar is amazing. Sometimes friends give each other big gifts. Someone likes me enough to give me a guitar. And it’s touched my heart. But I don’t play outdoors under Fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Fingers get too stiff.
I’m glad that Sal is trying to get back her music. She needs things in her life to bring her joy!
She forgot the hat.
The hat is flying wild and free now. Maybe Sal can give it a new home.
For all this talk of what a dork Danny is, surprisingly many characters look to Danny or inspiration.
That’s a left-handed guitar, with the pick guard on that side, not a right-handed guitar restrung. That means it’s not borrowed; Sal picked it out herself, for herself, with her own money. Left-handed guitars are harder to find, especially if you’re trying to get one second-hand, and usually cost more. Maybe she traded in the motorbike for it?
*Ahem* And a one and a two and…
Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam
Do the jitterbug out in Muskrat Land
And they shimmy… Sam is so skinny
Great, now Sal has Toni Tennille’s singing voice in my mind. Thanks.
Dangit!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2BuP-NcJ5Q
MUSHAHAHAHA!
It’s calm – how nice
It won’t last.
I’m takin’ what I can get whilst I still can, dangit!
I love this strip
But… I wanted to know who lives in the singles rooms!!!
‘Lives’ may be an overstatement.
Soon Marcie shows up with a Strat, battery powered practice amp, and a talkbox. For the rest of the chapter she talks but sounds like Peter Frampton.
You can’t play guitar in gloves.
What about with a pick? Seems like she has one by her hand shape in the last panel?
They were doing it half a century ago.
Her fret hand might not be wearing a glove. (The lighting is hard to determine.)
She’s wearing a regular glove on her left hand, and a fingerless glove on the right. You can kind of see it around the neck a little bit. (That’s also her scar hand, she probably still covers it up most of the time.)
Yes, I saw that. You can’t play guitar with gloves on.
Time for the last silhouette to decloak in the background, wicked-sinister like.
Okay, the first thing I saw is that Sal has an actual left-handed guitar. All mine have been right-handed and turned around. Southpaws notice stuff like that right away.
Smiling and letting her hair get back to natural. She’s in her zone:-)
This is nice
Hmm, *twang* LA LA”
“YOU SUCK”
“Aww”
Oh, hey, you’ve heard me play…
Hey oh
Listen what I say oh,
Come back and hey oh
Look here what I say oh
The more I see, the less I know
The more I like to let it go
Hey oh, whoa, whoa, whoa
She baby.
man, in that weather i would have SEVERAL LAYERS OF SCARVES around my neck
As a Canadian, the sudden onset of snow is never a moment of excitement for me. It portents the deep cold that is to follow. Maybe not on the first snowfall, maybe not even for a month, but the moment the first snow appears, we all know that winter is coming, and we must deal with february again soon enough
Cold, gloom, and shoveling.
As a Canadian, I love it. I always get excited for snow. I get why some people don’t though – some people don’t like shovelling snow, staying inside to get warm, or making adjustments for driving or the cold.
I like it too, in the abstract. When you’ve got no choice but to get up hours early to dig out to risk your like on the roads with all the idiots who can’t drive in the snow to make it to work on time, the pleasure fades.
I have found that the older I get, the more I dislike winter. I am starting to understand snowbirds.
Annnd then a hat flies down and plops on her head, and thus the curse has been transfered.
First time since before boarding school she’s seen snow?
Pretty impressive to play guitar with a glove on. Sal’s very talented.
I find it interesting that there is snow accumulating on the grass, but not on the masonry or steps.
Also, that would be very hard on an acoustic guitar.
Snow. Its snowed last night.
my 5 year old got to go outside and play in the snow for a bit. Snow. 
I’m so happy for Sal she’s letting her hair curl.
And that’s the sum of my wisdom from spending how long ago this strip was until the time of this comment rereading the comic.