How to Take Stock of Your Life

I was going to write something here about how my beard marks me as the evil Mirror Universe version of Scott Meyer, and that somewhere there’s another clean-shaven me who created a comic strip solely to tell the universe what a swell guy his friend, evil Rick is.

That got me to thinking about the Mirror Universe in Star Trek. (Yes, I was raised in the country, and I do occasionally still say things like, “got me to thinking. I’ve grown to accept that.) I don’t remember them ever showing us what the Klingon Empire is like in the Mirror Universe.

I’m picturing lots of doilies.

Note from Missy: The idea of mirror-universe Scott saying nice things about Rick feels so familiar.  Is there a strip with that premise?  Or was it in another commentary?  There are over a thousand comics, and honestly, after about 50 I start forgetting what they all are. 😆

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How to Use Insults as Compliments

I generally have a pro-women stance, and will always advocate that they are equal to men. That said, whenever a woman says she wants to be treated like “One of the guys,” I do tend to think that they don’t know what they’re asking for.

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How to Admit Your Mistakes

Toward the end of the time period when my mother, both of my brothers, and I all lived in the same house, my older brother lost his toothbrush somehow. Instead of getting a new one, he found it more amusing to just use mine. Anyone who has an older brother (including my younger brother) will understand that me not wanting him to use my toothbrush did not stop him.

So, what did I do, you ask?

I bought a second, secret toothbrush (never a sign that your life is going well) and in front of multiple witnesses I used my old toothbrush to scrub between my toes, then put it back in the toothbrush cup for my older brother to use.

And he did.

Many times.

I saw him do it, and pretended to not want him to.

You may be wondering when I finally told him about this. Assuming he reads these comics and comments: just now.

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How to Help Others Appreciate Something the way That You Do

The woman in question did come back, as a villain, who also turned out to be the mother of one of the main characters, and redeemed herself with the help of her ex-husband. He was a normal man, played by Kyle MacLaughlin, who would transform into a vile, evil, super strong creature called Mr. Hyde (thank you, public domain laws), but because Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have the kind of budget WandaVision or Loki later got, his transformation consisted of minor facial appliances, a wig, and a funny walk.

That was before the season where they were in space, the season where they were in the past, or the season where Coulson was no longer Coulson, but was still Coulson.

Someday there will be a documentary about that show. It will be like Jodorowski’s Dune, only this time the crazy improbable project actually got made.

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How to Communicate Poorly

I did eventually buy two oversized novelty coins, just for this purpose. Here is photographic proof.

Or do I just have the world’s smallest cat? You can’t really know for sure!

My favorite thing about the coins is that they are both the same size, so if I take a picture of them together, the viewer would assume I either have a very small quarter or a slightly large penny, never suspecting that both coins are huge. It’s diabolical!

Useless, but diabolical!

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How to Handle Something That Is Both Irritating and Predictable

When I worked at Walt Disney World, I used to love working Halloween night. Partly because I got paid extra. Also, if Missy worked that night too, it meant we weren’t home to greet Trick-or-Treaters, and would get to keep all the candy for ourselves. And the people in the parks that night always seemed extra happy to be there, I assume for the same reason. But my favorite thing about working Halloween night was that as I left at park close, the whole place would be decorated for Halloween, and when I’d return to open the park the next morning, the whole place would be decorated for Christmas, which always impressed me.

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How to Get Inside Someone Else's Head

Happily, I have been told more than once that I am good at writing characters who are women.

Even more happily, I’ve been told that by women.

(Note: My first draft of that first sentence was, “I have been told more than once that I write characters who are women well.” I reworded it because it could have been interpreted to mean that I wrote characters who were abnormally good at being women.)

Here’s how I write characters who are women.

Step 1: I think of what a reasonable person would do in their situation.

Step 2: That’s it. There is no step two. I just write a reasonable person in the situation they are dealing with.

Some of you are probably thinking that there is at least one time, one regularly occurring time, when a woman’s physiology makes them “irritable.” True, but that irritability is, again, perfectly reasonable. They are being inconvenienced, often in quite severe pain, are powering through these issues to continue to do the things they need to do, and on top of that, they have to deal with a bunch of men acting as if they are crazy. Some irritability is to be expected.

Just saying.

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How to Explain the Origin of Your Nemesis

I recently saw Black Widow, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

I bring this up because there’s a character in it who we are meant to like and root for, who is highly proficient with knives. In one scene this character ends a fight with a knife attack across the opponent’s belly that, in a hard-R movie, would have requires a special effects artist to spend days perfecting their disembowelment splatter animation.

Black Widow was not a hard-R movie, so the opponent who received this attack clutched their midsection, groaned, fell over, and died with almost no blood. The victim did have enough life left in them to say a few words to their attacker. As they opened their mouth to speak, I was kind of hoping they would say, “Why am I not bleeding more? That’s weird, right?!”

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How to Find Meaning in Symbols

This comic was written after I had attended a wedding where they did the sand ceremony I describe. The problem was that the receptacle the bride and groom poured their sand into was about four times larger than was needed for the amount of sand the couple poured in. When they were done, their lovely sand art just sort of pooled in the bottom.

It's not a great start to your marriage when you display the finished artistic symbol of your marital unity and it gets a noticeable laugh.

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How to Analyze a Failed Purchase

The character who I describe in this comic as “Lando Calrissian’s butler” was named Lobot, and I was irritated that we didn’t meet him at all in the movie Solo. That said, there’s been talk about a Lando Calrissian series, so there’s still hope for a rich Lobot backstory.

The thing on Lobot’s head was surgically implanted, which is a bit much, but I think there’s merit to the idea of a computer attached to headphones that you wear while doing your job. Science fiction writers often picture some sort of eyewear to convey information to the wearer by superimposing graphics into their field of vision, but it’s going to be a long time before that’s possible to do with the kind of quality you’d want, and it may never be possible with glasses that look stylish or unobtrusive. But imagine a pair of headphones that whispers reminders about your schedule, answers your questions, offers useful information, and identifies the person you’re talking to by name, like the digital version of a politician’s body-person. I feel like that could be done relatively soon. It would look like the user is constantly listening to music though, so parents would hate it, which means kids would love it.

Note from Missy: I’m picturing the whispering headphones sounding like Baby Secret, which both terrifies and delights me.

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