Scott Meyer

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to See Your Heroes in a New Light

The documentary is real, and it is very good. If you have any interest in Phil Collins, I highly suggest it.

If you just want to see if I am exaggerating, the boyhood photos of Nic not having drums pushed on him are around this point.

The channel that produced the video has also released their full, uncut interview with Phil.

They’ve also released the footage of them assembling his drum kit, and him sitting behind it for the first time in years.

They are really capitalizing on the footage they gathered, because they’d be foolish not to.

The documentary focuses more on the injuries that stopped him from drumming than on the damage to his vocal cords that had him needing steroid injections into his neck before performances in the ’90s. You can find information about that elsewhere online.

I think my favorite quote from the documentary is toward the end. They asked Phil very specific questions about small decisions he made on a songs he recorded decades ago, and while trying to explain why he couldn’t really remember some of the answers he says the following.

“I am not Genesis’ biggest fan.”

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Figure Out How They're Screwing You

Yeah, after I posted my comment about having started out wanting a Mac and never gotten one, I received just enough encouragement here (which, if I’m being honest, I may have been fishing for) to nudge me off the Mac cliff.

I’ve had My 13-inch MacBook Air for a few months now, and it has become my primary computer.

I really do like this computer a lot. The battery life on this thing doesn’t seem possible. It goes days of use as my primary computer between charges. I have suffered far fewer glitches, far fewer crashes, and the operating system seems much smoother, faster, and more reliable than Windows overall. I understand this and the battery life are due to the tight integration between the operating system and Apple’s custom designed chips. It seems to work, but I don’t understand how. Also, there are a lot of little things, like batch file renaming, task automation, and automatic backups, that are built into the Mac OS, but on Windows require extra software (if you want them to work well).

And, to be honest, it just looks and feel super cool. I’m old enough that the first personal computer I owned looked like someone stacked four large pizza boxes, spray painted them beige, then sat a small tube TV on top of them. The idea that my entire primary computer, including the monitor, keyboard, and pointing device, folds up to the size of an old issue of Newsweek just reminds me that I live in the future.

That said, learning a different operating system after decades of Windows use hasn’t been effortless. There is more focus on keyboard shortcuts, which may feel easier someday, but today isn’t that day. The app installation process is simpler and more reliable in theory, in practice it feels really weird to me. And I still can’t get used to the idea that closing an app’s only open window doesn’t close the app.

Also, this thing was not cheap (Note: that is a complaint, not a brag). It’s not just that a Mac costs more than a Windows machine. Because they control the hardware so tightly and it’s impossible to upgrade after the fact, the model of Mac you want costs much more than the already more expensive Mac you don’t. You get what you pay for, and I believe that I have gotten good value for money out of this thing, but dropping the money I did on an object that, again, is the size of an old issue of Newsweek, did give me pause.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Share Your Knowledge

I sometimes get almost finished with a comic and become convinced that I did a comic on that exact subject, using those exact jokes, years ago. I would just write this feeling off as paranoia, if it hadn’t actually happened, twice. In both cases, I scrapped the new copy of the comic and started over.

I got that creeping feeling about this comic, but a quick search showed that I had not done the whole comic before. What I had done was to include one similar joke, with the same, very specific two line phrase as a punchline. It’s the big balloon in panel two of this one.

I decided to stick with it in this case, because it’s quoted from my old stand-up act, specifically, one of the hundreds of bits I could never get to work. I always liked this bit, and I figure if I’m allowed to steal from myself, I might as well do it twice, as long as I resolve not to do it again. I feel like most of my act was made up of bits that didn’t get the reaction I expected. Right now I can only remember the one that IKEA is built on the idea that you’re more likely to buy a furniture if you’re trapped in a baffling maze. If I come up with more later I will try to collect them so you can enjoy them slightly less than I do, like my audiences of old.

After I quit stand-up, absconded to Florida, and started working at Walt Disney World, IKEA came to Orlando. It was fun to watch my new coworkers discover IKEA for themselves. One coworker found their furnished maze layout so off-putting that she literally fled and drove straight to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy something there as a sort of retail detox. 

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Learn From Other People's Poor Choices

I was born and raised in Washington state. The Seattle Seahawks have been a source of pain to my family for generations. Literally! There is no exaggeration there. My earliest memories of sports are my father shrieking the name "Zorn" as if it’s the greatest curse imaginable. Decades later, I saw the look of bitter disappointment in my nephews’ eyes as their team suffered the cost of choosing not to hand the ball to Lynch.

The Seattle Seahawks have earned far worse than the gentle ribbing I give them occasionally.

The strip has been fictionalized a bit, as the background the guy on the train was using was the team photo for FC Porto, not the Seahawks. And Ric would more likely use a still frame from a swimming pool scene in an old episode of The Love Boat than any of Charlie’s Angels. I think he found them intimidating.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Proceed When a Technology is Not Mature

The original draft of panel one ended with Rick saying we wanted a William Shatner future, but the one we’re getting is more Charlton Heston. I decided the reference was too dated and obscure.

Omega Man. Planet of the Apes. Soylent Green. When you look at the vision of the future Heston seemed to gravitate toward, it’s no wonder he became a gun enthusiast.

I made a deliberate choice this year not to do holiday strips and to keep the comics coming at a normal pace through the holidays. I feel like between holiday themed comics, reruns, and weeks off, the period between Thanksgiving and New Year's is sort of thin for the comic strip fan. This comic is the last that will run before the new year, so I’m taking next week off. See you on January 13th! Here’s hoping 2025 is a good bit less interesting than it looks like it may be.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Evaluate Advances In Pet Care Technology

I think the greatest value of pets is that they bring unconditional love into the house. They just don’t all do it in the same way, or from the same direction. I know people who have dogs, dogs that seem to adore and shower them with affection no matter what they do.

We have cats, whom we adore and shower with affection no matter what they do.

One of our cats decided a few months ago that her proper feeding time was an hour earlier than we wanted to wake up. (And bear in mind, I am a morning person.) We disagreed, but our arguments did not impress her and her methods of making sure we were awake to feed her become harder to ignore.

I can tell you, from experience, it is impossible to get back to sleep when you wake up to an animal chewing on your beard.

Anyway, we got an automated feeder and set it for 5 AM. Now, she doesn’t deliberately wake us anymore, but she occasionally wakes us accidentally by making a mad dash across our home, using our bed as a launchpad, to get to the machine when her sharp little cat ears hear it “pay out.”

Also, we have caught her more than once staring at the device, waiting for it to make a move, or even reaching her little paw up its chute, trying to coax it into giving her a snack.

If it had a lever and a slot, she’s happily give it every nickel she had.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Face Reality

I wish it happened more often, but it is rare that a conversation I have in real life will make its way, verbatim, into the comic. When it does, it’s pretty easy to decide who should say what to whom.

I assure you, this comic was NOT one of those cases.

No, in this case, I came up with the dialog from the first panel, and immediately knew I wanted to build a comic around it. Unfortunately, that meant I had to decide who should use this withering insult and who should get it used on them.

Most of you are thinking, “Obviously, Rick. If someone’s going to get insulted, it has to be Rick.” The problem is that this insult felt particularly mean, and I worry that if the abuse always flows from me to Rick it will begin to feel like I’m kicking a guy when he’s down.

I told Missy the joke, and asked her opinion. She said that I should aim the insult at Rick.

I called the real Ric, told him the insult and asked who he thought should be on the receiving end. He instantly and vehemently stated that the insult HAD TO be aimed at him. I mentioned my fear of kicking him while he’s down. He responded with words to the effect that if I don’t kick him when he’s down, I’m never going to kick him at all.

I worry sometimes that our friendship isn’t entirely healthy.

Anyway, I decided to have Rick use the one extremely mean insult on me, then I could just dump on him for the rest of the comic and nobody would mind. I told Missy that I had come up with a solution, and I looked forward to getting her opinion.

Missy reads all of the comics before anyone else. She is the last line of defense between you and my diabolical punctuation.

Unfortunately, I made a small error, and sent her the comic in the last stage of construction, instead of the finished comic. For a few minutes, she thought my interesting solution was to make a comic where the balloons had no tails, and any line of dialog could be said by any character. That did solve my cutting insult problem, with the minor tradeoff of making the entire comic incomprehensible.

She was very diplomatic when she told me what she thought.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Honor the Intentions of Those Who Came Before You

I have known enough scientifically inclined people to understand their general sense of humor. I believe that forcing scientific journals, news anchors, and NASA spokespersons to repeat butt puns would qualify nicely as “a larf.” As such, not only is changing the pronunciation of Uranus disrespectful to the original intent of the name, but adding the words “the planet” in front of Uranus to short circuit the joke is, at best, an act of cowardice.

That said, I did add “the planet” in panel one to make it clear I was not making a joke at Missy’s expense.

When it comes to marriage, there are two kinds of men: occasionally cowardly men, and divorced men.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

Just to mention one last time, in case you missed it before ...

I have a new novel out!

It is entitled That's Not Right, and I am extremely proud of it. It is available on Kindle, and on Audible, narrated by the always excellent Luke Daniels.

Things often happen that are out of my control, but I would very much like to turn releasing a new book abut this time of year into an annual event, similar to how Agatha Christie always released “A Christie for Christmas.”

If I can pull this schedule off, I hope people will refer to reading my new book each year as having a “Meyery Christmas.”

As part of the festive holiday commercial extravaganza, my first (and, by far, most popular) novel, Off to Be the Wizard will be available for Kindle in the US market for $1.99 throughout December. This is a nice chance to give it a look-see for less than the cost of a Starbucks. If you like it, the Kindle version of the second book in the series, Spell or High Water will also be on sale for $2.49.

So, on that note, allow me to be the first to wish you all a very Meyery Christmas!

Thanks. Now let us never speak of it again.

How to Take an Interest in a Subject You Usually Don't Find Interesting

I have a new novel out!

It is entitled That's Not Right, and I am extremely proud of it. It is available on Kindle, and on Audible, narrated by the always excellent Luke Daniels.

Things often happen that are out of my control, but I would very much like to turn releasing a new book abut this time of year into an annual event, similar to how Agatha Christie always released “A Christie for Christmas.”

If I can pull this schedule off, I hope people will refer to reading my new book each year as having a “Meyery Christmas.”

As part of the festive holiday commercial extravaganza, my first (and, by far, most popular) novel, Off to Be the Wizard will be available for Kindle in the US market for $1.99 throughout December. This is a nice chance to give it a look-see for less than the cost of a Starbucks. If you like it, the Kindle version of the second book in the series, Spell or High Water will also be on sale for $2.49.

So, on that note, allow me to be the first to wish you all a very Meyery Christmas!

Now, on to the commentary

Here’s the news story this comic was based on. 

I don’t want to make light of a person’s death, even if it happened a century ago, while participating in an activity that is exciting primarily because of its death-defying nature. There’s just something about the image of climbers finding a foot, still in its boot and sock, and knowing it belonged to a famous missing climber because his name was embroidered on the sock in bright red letters, and cheering about it. It’s only slightly less perfect than the mountain climbing episode of the Simpsons where Homer found the body of his father’s deceased climbing partner, with an incriminating letter and a bite taken out of his leg.

I haven’t seen that episode in well over a decade and I remember so many details, down to the fact that “That snake Abe Simpson” ate the last canned short-stack of pancakes. If the Simpsons had been an educational show, the United States would be the smartest nation on Earth.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

I have a new novel out!

It is entitled That's Not Right, and I am extremely proud of it. It will be available in December on Kindle, and can downloaded now on Audible, narrated by the always excellent Luke Daniels.

Things often happen that are out of my control, but I would very much like to turn releasing a new book abut this time of year into an annual event, similar to how Agatha Christie always released “A Christie for Christmas.”

If I can pull this schedule off, I hope people will refer to reading my new book each year as having a “Meyery Christmas.”

So, on that note, allow me to be the first to wish you all a very Meyery Christmas!

How to Evaluate Someone Else's Plan

NOTE TO YOU, THE PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE:

Because of the lag time between when I create a comic and when it runs, I am writing this message to you from Monday the 4th, the day before the US presidential election. Needless to say, I am having difficulty concentrating. Also, I have a great deal of admin to do involving the release of my new novel, That's Not Right (Available for pre-order now on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible!) so I am taking this week off. The comic will be back next week. Sorry for any inconvenience.

END TRANSMISSION FROM THE BEFORE TIMES!!

Yes, another language learning comic. Missy and I are taking an organized Portuguese class now, not trusting an animated owl on our smartphones to see us through. You can probably expect more language humor and school-based insecurity.

Lucky you.

Here’s an interesting factoid: Portuguese does not have a single word that replicates the usage of the English word “is.” Instead, it has three different verbs that cover three common use cases for “is,” and each of those is regularly conjugated five different ways, depending on what “is,” and how it “is.” That’s fifteen different words for basic usage.

Examples:

If the subject is in a state that is temporary, as in “The student is panicking,” you use the verb estar, conjugated for a single subject.

If the subject is in a state that will not change any time in the foreseeable future, as in “The student is middle aged, and doesn’t learn language as easily as he did when he was young,” you want the verb ser, again, conjugated for a single subject.

If you’re describing the subject’s permanent location, as in “The pharmacy is across the street, if the student needs pain relievers for the headache this lesson has given him,” you use the verb ficar, which means “to stay.” And you would conjugate it as a singular. When dealing with verbs, we don’t have to worry about gender, but for the record, pharmacies are feminine, obviously.

My teacher puts a friendly face on it by talking up the incredible specificity of the Portuguese language, and she has a point. She is always able to point out specifically why the word I chose was incorrect.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Find the Cause of the Problem

I’m not going to get into a lot of detail about Henry Ford’s reasons for promoting square dancing in public schools, because I find it distasteful. I’ll just say that it seems like any time you want to know why Henry Ford did something you don’t understand, you can assume the answer was likely either “increased efficiency” or “antisemitism.”

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Learn a Language

BRIEF PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

I try to keep politics out of the comic. I want people from every point in the spectrum to feel welcome here, and frankly, I just don't find the government very funny. Also, I suspect the majority of the comics readers have a good idea where I stand. That said, it is election time in the USA.

If you are a US citizen, please vote.

Specifically, please vote for Kamala Harris.

She is not perfect. She is not even close to perfect. But, she far better than the alternative.

Thank you. Now the commentary, as originally written.

I saw this ad at a metro station yesterday. I was proud of myself that I could read it without the need for google translate, but the fact that it says (roughly) “Princesses also make poop” lessened my sense of accomplishment.

And yes, if you ever visit Portugal, take extra care when ordering a hot chocolate. It does not help that “choco” means “cuttlefish.” 

Also note: The diagram on the trashcan in the lower right corner always looks to me like a kid protesting as their parent throws away their mobile game device.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Expand Your Palate

One advantage of coffee, as a hobby, is that it is something you can enjoy every day. Another advantage of it is that it can be managed in a way that actually saves you money and delivers a superior product, compared to buying a coffee from a shop every day.

The chief downside of coffee as a hobby is that making it well can be fiddly and detail-intensive, and most people don’t have the patience or mental bandwidth to deal with fiddly details until after they have had their coffee.

Anyhoo, there was a coffee event at our local convention center, and Missy and I went. I wanted to sample several roasters output in one convenient place, and Missy wanted to watch me struggle through awkward personal interactions.

We both got what we were looking for.

When we got to the convention center, we were surprised at the length of the line. We were also surprised how many people had brought children to a coffee event. Most of the groups in the hundred-yard-long line had at least one toddler or small child. It struck us as odd, but we shrugged and hiked to the back of the line.

Next to the end of the line, there was a desk for the coffee event. I suspected this was just an information station, but I was wrong. It was the entrance to the coffee event. It turns out two events were happening that day: the coffee event we were there for, and “The Baby Market,” a baby merchandise fair (not the swap-meet-for-babies the name suggests) we had gotten in line for.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Think Critically

This comic posed me with an ethical question.

Not about bombarding hibernating bears with gamma rays (which is a real thing we 100% did, btw). I think we all have a very clear idea where we stand on that issue.

No, I had to think long and hard about an ethical question related to comedy writing.

I heard about the bear gamma ray experiment while listening to StarTalk: https://startalkmedia.com/show/hibernating-for-deep-spaceflight-with-ryan-sprenger/

Their guest mentioned that experiments were done exposing hibernating bears to high levels of gamma radiation, and my brain immediately went to the idea that they were trying to make bear hulks. The guest spoke a bit longer, then Chuck Nice, having made the same cognitive leap I had, asked if when they woke up, the bears said, “Bear smash.”

Then Neil deGrasse Tyson said something about us not wanting bear hulks, and they all moved on.

I was left wondering if it was ethical for me to make a comic about the idea of creating bear hulks, because I really wanted to.

In the end, I decided I was comfortable proceeding because I had come up with the premise on my own before they mentioned it. Also, I intended to name them specifically as the source of the story and give them credit for also seeing the connection. Furthermore, I intended to explore areas they had not.

These are the things I lose sleep over.

Another problem is that they bombarded the bear with gamma rays while it was hibernating, which, if I understand comic book logic, would result in a bear that turns into a hulk when it gets sleepy. If the goal is to weaponise the bear hulk, that seems less than ideal. I mean, it might be crankier than usual, but the idea of a super strong being taking super powered naps doesn’t really strike fear into the hearts of your enemies.

One Line from a Future Comic Taken Totally out of Context

How to Open Your Mind to New ideas

I’ve been on a diet for several months, with some success. I see now that the problem keeping me from weight loss was mental. The key was accepting that I was going to be unhappy no matter what I did.

I wasted a lot of time looking for a way to lose weight that allowed me to eat large quantities of food I liked, without having to spend all day, every day, walking on a treadmill. I wanted a means of losing weight that would not make me unhappy. What I should have been looking for was a way to lose weight that made me less unhappy.

I’m counting calories, which means I still eat what I want, but I eat less of it. Or, I eat more of things I don’t like. So, yeah, the plan has obvious downsides. So does being overweight.

They way I’m looking at it these days is that I’m trading away the downsides of being overweight (fatigue, everything taking more effort, aches, pains, illness, and a measurably shorter lifespan), for the downsides that come from calorie counting (enjoying my meals a certain amount less).

For the last six months, it’s a trade that has worked for me. Talk to me in another six. It may be a different story.

If you are at all tempted to tell me I didn’t look like I needed to lose any weight, thank you. If I didn’t look heavy, it’s down to three factors.

• I carried the weight pretty well.

• I primarily choose images to draw from that were taken when I was at the low points of my yo-yo dieting.

• I was drawing myself. If you were drawing yourself, you’d look fairly thin as well.

As for Rick’s weight-loss plan, I’m sure it will work. After his inevitable death by malnutrition, rapid weight loss will ensue.