3001 Powerful Eye Contact.

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And just like that the page number is no longer special. I wonder how many pages it will require for it to be special again. 3100? Probably not. I suspect it will have to be 4000. I’ve actually done more than 3000 pages. There’s two sections of the archive that aren’t part of the regular numeration because of various struggles. Around 100 pages. Still, the previous page got numbered 3000 so it’s got that number magic that makes humans pleased. Human psychology, am I right? I don’t even want to think about how long it will take to reach 4000 pages. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from making this comic is not thinking about things. When I was young I thought about all the things and I wasn’t very happy. Now I don’t think about things whenever possible and things are better. The first day I started making this thing I just started making pages and didn’t think about how many pages it would take to get to my point. Before then whenever I tried to do anything I always got hung up on doing things right the first time, or how much stuff I needed to do before doing other things, and it all piled up until I never did anything. It was the same when I worked with other people. We let ourselves get stopped by wanting to be good right from the start. Now I know that that’s only for special people. Most of us just need to start doing things without being good, then get good over time. Worrying about being good at things stops people from trying. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe only a few people should break free of that thinking so that only a few people throw their lives away chasing dreams before realizing they’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve gotten away with it by having a good portion of luck and just enough talent to get by on. My nature is to downplay any talent I have, but logically I must have some because people wouldn’t pay me to keep doing this if it was making them miserable. I know that infuriates some other people, but them’s the breaks. Sometimes people you hate get to make money doing things you think they don’t deserve. Life is unfair in that way, and many other ways. Not thinking about that is a good thing to not think about. It’s very fun to dwell on unfairness though. I understand if you can’t. The rage it causes warms the soul in that particular way that only righteous fury can.

This actually puts me in mind of someone. My friend Jeff, who I worked with many years ago, does a gameplay youtube channel with another guy I don’t think I know. https://www.youtube.com/@WootandRoxxor As far as I know their stuff doesn’t get many views, but they’ve been posting them for years now. I don’t like that kind of content so I only have a general idea of what it’s like if I’m being totally honest. The thing is though that Jeff is one of the most casually funny people I’ve ever met. In person he’s just a clever observant guy and I don’t know if that doesn’t transfer well to the longplay format or what. If you’re in a room with him while he’s telling stories though he’s an absolute treat though. If I was putting together a team to write a comedy show I would absolutely reach out to him. I know so many people like that too. Whenever people criticize my comic for having too many clever people I’m like I must have been the luckiest fucking guy ever to have met so many exceptional people… One of my friends worked on the latest Laika movie. One does some kind of improve stuff. One guy is a former radio DJ who really should still be one. Like, little echoes of them are woven all into this comic. In some other universe I hope some other me realized what we could have done together and took them all to the heights of success.

Oh well, that’s as may be. This is what I ended up doing and I’m glad of that. Still, I wish I had the wherewithal to bring all those guys together to do something. Maybe we aren’t as special as I feel like we are, but I’m willing to fail if it means finding out for sure. In any case I’ll see you on Friday with another page. I hope your week is going well. Until next time, water your plants.

22 Comments

Heh… I’m a little envious of Thomas; I used to write for pleasure myself, in addition to being a hopeless romantic. I’d roleplay on Final Fantasy XI back in the day, fully absorbed into the persona of a noble knight. Then one day I decided to invest all that in someone I thought would be there forever. Shock, she wasn’t. Then when my next love wanted to RP our characters on FFXIV, I found I just couldn’t bring myself to get into character. Even in DnD these days, I struggle. Gotta keep the walls up, keep the creativity shunted to the side so practicality and realism can reign–we live in their world, now.

Tl;dr: Growing up sucks, makes you lose the best parts of yourself.

Hey, I really feel for you, it’s so hard to bare that inner part of your soul only to have it hurt. I hope you can find something that let’s you feel safe enough to open it up again.

I would recommend personally looking into some of the new and alternative therapy types, Gestalt therapy has been wonderful for me but I hear good things about other humanistic client centered therapies as well as somatic practitioners. Mainstream psychoanalysis and therapy (What you probably know from shows and movies) I feel like is massively out of date. I finally was able to actually connect and enjoy therapy in my 40s because I feel like it finally caught up with what I needed.

I really love his insight here, there’s a lot of neurodiverse behavior that I really resonate with and share characteristics of. Sometimes overly ornate and dramatic language doesn’t take effort, it actually takes effort to mask or conceal your wish for it. It can truly be an expression of your authentic self. One of the times I was most in love was in a long distance relationship where we wrote each other creative dramatic loving texts every day. It felt so good!

Thanks for bringing this to life in this sweet moment between the two of them =)

This is beautiful. Happy 3001! I look forward to wherever you take us on this journey into the lives of “imaginary” people who seem more real than a lot of folks walking around irl. (Though I suspect if someone were to chronicle their lives in depth as you have done for your characters, they, too, would “come to life”.)

There are plenty of reasons for other numbers to be interesting besides roundness. For example, 3001 is prime (for that first panel, the idea Thomas is conveying, and for only being factorable by 3001 and 1).

I didn’t get the chance to say, but congratulations on 3000 pages, Jackie! It’s another day for you, but it’s a nice round number to think on, looking back. Thank you again for your comic and your words. Your characters make me feel better watching them do what they do. It reminds me to appreciate the small things and not to take the happenings of ordinary life for granted. And even though you tend to think of yourself in less flattering ways, I find from your art, your writing, and your blogs that you have a keen sensibility and a genuine kindness toward what you do and the people you care about. In a strangely relatable way, I used to think that having talent and wit was commonplace since the people around me seemed to have it in spades, but as I grew older, I found that wit and common sense aren’t often very common. To that point, your insight has always been something I’ve appreciated. Thank you again for your words. One day I would also like to be a person who simply continues to do things without worrying too much.

Significant upcoming numbers? Hmm 3003, 3333, 3210, 3113, 3223 of the top of my head.

Congratulations on being now officially in 3K!

Ooh, 3k? 3*1024=3072, that’s not SO far off. Are there any 3K-resolution-enthusiasts who can hype up that comic number?

I love Thomas and how he’s so aware of himself that he can just hear that question – which most people would probably take as a rhetorical statement of “what you just said has affected me positively and I don’t have a response that feels adequate,” and genuinely answer it in a very specific and correct way. and also be so adorable as he does so, his expression in the second panel is so cute

Thomas’ people perception skill is maybe a match for Carol’s.

She was the one who clocked Wes as a faux hipster, perhaps Marbleton’s first.

There is a well known proof that every number is, in fact, special. Or at least, interesting.

The proof works by contradiction. Assume that the natural numbers can be partitioned into a set of interesting numbers and a set of non-interesting numbers. These sets may be infinite, but they each have a smallest number (since we aren’t considering negative integers). Consider the smallest number in the non-interesting set. This number is interesting as being the only non-interesting number with this property! Thus, it actually belongs in the set of interesting numbers. We then move on to the next smallest non-interesting number, and move that to the interesting set as well. This process continues until all numbers are placed in the interesting set, and thus, every positive number is interesting.

Therefore 3001 is indeed a special number!

(You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox)

Ok, just because I’m that kind of nerd Jackie, positing that you continue at your current pace of three comic a week, we can assume you will hit comic 4,000 in six years and twenty one weeks give or take a few special numbered comics. It’s not a hard thing for me to imagine myself here reading the 4,00th page, assuming our robotic overlords let us read webcomics.

Really, Thomas is saying what’s fairly normal to think, we all just don’t say it. Kids say stuff like that all the time; we learn not to. The challenge is not shutting it down entirely, letting it out sometimes.

Nah, there’s all kinds of special/funny page numbers before 4000.
3003 (palindrome), 3030, 3131, 3210, 3232, 3333, 3434, 3456, 3535, 3636, 3737, 3838, 3939.

To some degree every page is special as it contributes to the whole that is this story, but the human mind does like stuff to look special to be special (Look at all those zeros!); regardless glad to see these two having a moment.

To me, 3001 is a very special number. If the first page is page 1, then 3001 represents 3000 pages from the beginning of the comic. That’s still pretty special, even if it’s not the 3000th page.

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