Monday, May 26, 2025

Bob's Neighbor Joro

 







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I am terrified of the Joro spider invasion of the US! I know, I know, they're harmless, non-aggressive, and despite their size their fangs can't even penetrate human skin and their venom doesn't affect people even if they could. That just doesn't comfort me when I have nightmares of walking into their webs and their 4-inch legs start crawling on my face! I won't even get started on baby Joro spiders flying around! Ugh...  Well, at least Tom and Bob found a way to live with them. Forget math, karaoke is the universal language! 

I had a few challenges with this episode. First, I wanted there to be a language barrier, but the kanji font just didn't look right, so I used the transliteration from Google translate when I put in the dialog. If there are any Japanese speakers who notice any egregious errors in Joro's dialog, take it up with Google, I just copy-pasta'd what it gave me. Secondly, I wanted to avoid Joro speaking "pigeon English" or some stereotypical non-pronunciation of the English "L", or anything else that would seem racially insensitive. In the end, I think Joro is just a polyglot that has been sand-bagging his skill with English until it came time to sing "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey. And finally, at first I was troubled with how I was going to transition from their argument ostensibly in their webs to a dingy karaoke bar. But, I think Bob screaming at the bartender made it clear where they are located at the end there. This is also the first time I had to show more than two spiders singing together, since it's usually just Tom and Bob singing so using a single text bubble (square) is easy in that case. I think it came out ok. 

Enjoy. And as always, sweet dreams.

Carlos Diaz
May 26th, 2025














Monday, May 5, 2025

Spider Alignment Chart



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I love alignment charts! It's based on the personality profiles of Dungeons and Dragons characters and monsters, and being an inveterate D&D nerd, or nerd in general, I enjoy seeing characters from other books, movies, comics, or tv shows having their alignments done. Here's a concise, well written treatise on alignments and what they actually mean:  easydamus.com/alignment

I had actually made this chart years ago and thought this would be an easy installment for this episode of Tom and Bob. But with all the font issues, visibility, new characters, and uneven text, I had to remake it and it ended up being one of the more technically challenging and time consuming episodes of the series! Ah, well, such is life... Anyway, what do you think? Did I assign these correctly?

Why is there no Lawful Good entry? Do you know any Lawful Good characters in this comic? Any Lawful Good spiders at all!? I didn't think so. 

Enjoy. And as always, sweet dreams.

Carlos Diaz
May 6th, 2025




Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Tom and Bob Are Bad Dates

 






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I find it amusing that at some point they were charming JUST enough to get the female spiders to go out with them in the first place. I thought it would be neat to put musical notes in the dialog where they're singing karaoke songs, and it was more difficult that I imagined. I downloaded and installed the Musica font which had the notes, but I couldn't find the letters that made the notes. Luckily there was an example file with the font so I could copy-pasta the notes onto the dialog. That was a long way to go for a really boring story about copying and pasting a few wing dings. Thanks for listening!

The song Bob is singing is "Steal My Sunshine" by Len. 

Enjoy. And as always, sweet dreams.

Carlos Diaz
June 26, 2024












Monday, June 3, 2024

Tom and Bob Work for Boeing






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I dedicate this week's spider fun to all my DoD peeps out there! I used to work for companies that developed computer tutorial software for the military, basically making all the computer simulation  training that soldiers, sailors, and flyboys have to complete in order to do the stuff for real real in their jobs. And all that training software has to be checked for quality assurance ("QA") by the steadfast men and women who work in those companies. There were times I had to step in and do quality assurance myself, it is a demanding job and the documentation for it is not totally completely wholly absolutely unlike Tom and Bob's experience above! Though, suggestions for airplane nose art were correctly absent from those QA sessions. Luckily for us, Bob is really motivated! 

Side note, is Tom and Bob working for Boeing somehow a socio-political commentary on the military-industrial complex and the culture of developing high tech and cutting costs resulting in catastrophic and often deadly consequences? That's up to you. I just think it's funny that spiders are working on computer stuff! 

Enjoy. And as always, sweet dreams.

Carlos Diaz
June 3rd, 2024