2690 What Is Me?

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Drink soda!
I went back into the old files to drag out the old soda machine from day one. A nearly 20 year old file that CSP was able to open easily, I might add. I’ve never been able to properly draw the layout of the store, so the location of the soda machine may not be obvious. It sits near the exit doors along the window that looks out into the parking lot. It’s an L shaped path from Carol’s customer service lane to that door. You pay for a soda then fill it up as you leave. There is supposed to be a popcorn maker along the same path but I don’t remember if I ever drew it in any of the past pages. My guess is that I didn’t because drawing the soda machine on the old tablet was extremely difficult. At any rate, there are 3 register lanes running parallel to each other that all sit in front of the soda machine wall. I’m certain I’ve never shown the layout well enough to make that obvious.
The store is set up in a layout that is called a “racetrack” You come in the front doors and the natural path is to move into video. You can follow the obvious path into that department, which then transitions into Games/software, then into magazines, and finally into books. This track spirals around the store back to the front and past the opening of the music section, which sits in the middle of the store. You don’t have to follow this route, but everything in the store is laid out in such a way as to compel you to make this trek through every department every time. It was very common in store design in the 90s and most places still use some version of it. There is usually one main path that moves in a big circle past all the departments. When I was little it was more common for stores to just open up into a grid system of parallel isles. It wasn’t very intuitive. The individual sections of most stores are still grids, but the track is the factor that makes them less daunting as you can move freely around the area without having to constantly avoid others that are blocking the isles.

Anyway, just a bit of not very important lore. I had always hoped to make a 3d space that I could manipulate and basically take photos of and then draw my characters over, but it was too difficult to learn how and keep making the comic. I know it can be done because tons of video games started doing that exact thing in the 2000s mimicking a cartoon style. Maybe someday I can go back and George Lucas all of that.

That’s as may be, I guess. For now I will remind you that support links are at the top of the post and that I hope to see you again on Wednesday. Until then, don’t do anything a Minecraft youtuber would be accused of.

8 Comments

Happy Monday! I jammed my middle finger and its all bruised up this morning. Being alive is a challenge that being dead removes but I think I still want to be alive…

I mean, not getting any straight answers is what philosophy is all about

Yeah, that’s more or less what I was gonna say, if you want to dabble in philosophy, you’re not going to get anyone telling you “things as is”, because philosophy doesn’t really deal in that, because if things like the natures of reality, morality, and the self were so straightforward as to be encapsulated in a single, direct statement, there would be no point to philosophy as a discipline as the questions it exists to answer would be fairly obvious.

When the questions philosophers ask start to get answers, a new field study is born.
Example: science is an offshoot of philosophy, starting about half a millenium ago.

I remember the old Hastings when I was in college had the soda machines up front with all the other snacks. This comic represents a store setting that doesn’t exist but surely now kids would think is cool… or perhaps kids of our generational cohort

I remember they also did studies about store layouts, and one result was funny; if you walk in the front door and the “track” takes you towards the right and then around the store, great, people were happy. But if the “track” took you to the left and around the store, oh man, that was a problem, with people much more consistently jumping off the track to go their own way. Otherwise identical layouts, that was the only change; I guess most people being right-handed somehow translates to us just liking to go right. Or maybe it’s because we read left to right, or some such. Very funny results.

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