A video forum is the long distance version of a video conference, and is in some ways closer to a group chat or email chain. It will group local people into live video calls but also allow them to record video chunks and attach them to a reply chain. This works better than "live" calls for groups of people over a couple minutes of lightspeed lag from each other.
Transcript
Talita: No, no, it’s not that!
She waves her hand dismissively.
Talita: I just wish Mel had ASKED. After 8 years living in dry storage, I’m not opposed to moving… But by making it a “surprise,” Mel has made it non-optional.
Panel background: The south curve of the habitat's circular road shows Talita's dry storage unit across the way from the apartment buildings.
Talita: And because it was a gift, if there’s any issues with the remodel, asking for changes will upset Mel…
Panel background: Mel holds up a gift box for Talita, smiling. Talita takes the lift off and grimaces at the contents.
Idrisah: Sounds like you should tell them the jig is up.
Talita: Then they’ll be upset that I guessed the surprise, instead.
Idrisah: Sometimes you have to have to tell people stuff they don’t wanna hear!
Talita: Ugh……
Suddenly Idrisah's laptop starts playing a ringtone, and a video forum invite from her mother appears on the screen.
49 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 153”
creetur
Very late to this page.. oh well.
I do enjoy how technology in Rtts does have a basis in tech irl. Makes it feel more believable to me, if that makes sense.
Thisfox
Darn, I’ve reached the end.
This has been really good! Looking forward to more pages.
Hunter
SPEAKING OF TELLING PEOPLE THINGS…
Sen
Mel is getting a big helping of upsetti spaghetti regardless how it will turn out.
Gar G
And speaking of…
SheTheTDE
I’ve always said that there’s no such thing as a good secret. This secret has put Talita in the horrible position of choosing between her happiness or theirs. Choosing your own happiness always looks selfish but this whole thing is soposed to be about her happiness in the first place because it’s a gift. Unfortionately, gifts are never actaully about the happiness of the recipient. They’re about the giver looking like a better person than they really are. I mean offering to do the renovations and talking them through with Talita would have been a genuine thoughtful and heartfelt effort but by making it a surprise they can now make a show of presenting Talita wih the gift. If something’s not right, that show is exposed as a farce and the gift giver looks like an even worse person than they were before, so the “don’t be ungreatful” line comes out. The show stays in tact, the gift giver looks like a wonderful person being taken advantage of and Talita looks like a greedy pig. This situation has been every birthday for most of my life. Only recently have I started learning to enjoy them.
JoB
> I’ve always said that there’s no such thing as a good secret.
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… sorry, but I cannot possibly let that stand unchallenged. 8-|
(Sysadmin dealing with passwords, privkeys, PSKs, cryptography, yadda yadda, and the goals and procedures of privacy protection at various legal levels here.)
eden
I think those two things are very different and one clearly wasn’t meant to be grouped in with this concept of secrets
SheTheTDE
Passwords were invented so that people with secrets didn’t need to keep those secrets themselves.
Adrienne
We can always count on you, Job
IncompleteMachine
That sounds like you were horribly gaslit and manipulated for a long time. Secrets are normal, people keep them to spare embarrassment to themselves or protect other people from danger (if its the passcode for a lab full of dangerous chemicals for example). I understand your feelings, genuinely, but this isn’t a healthy belief.
Chrysalis
Technically you don’t HAVE to tell people things they don’t want to hear. There’s always the option to fester in silent resentment. Or run away.
Rossignol
Perhaps…..to the stars???
K
We did it folks, roll credits
Vinemaple
Oh, gad. Perfect comedy timing, Mom.
Things are getting a little *too* relatable for me, on Dirtball…
creetur
Couldn’t agree more, with both statements..
Somewhat unrelated, but this whole situation is likely going to be the catalyst for Talita and co. to leave Dirtball once and for all. As to where they’re going? No idea, but hopefully they’ll all benefit from it.
TotallySomebody
Oh, Mel…
Tentament
Oh god. She’s not going to talk to Mel, and then one morning 10 centaur temps are going to show up asking where her clan is and she’s going to freak out.
Vinemaple
I feel like Mel is just doing this for Talita. It sounds as if they’d be hard-pressed to find 10 Centaur temps looking for work outside Centaur space… unless maybe it’s a small clan or something.
theplushfrog
It sounded like earlier they had a Centaur clan lined up? No idea how long it takes for folks to traverse from place to place but considering the amount of prep one needs to travel when you need “specialized” spaces, food, and etc, there’s probably a lot lined up already even before the living quarters was planned.
It’s also likely not many companies/places are open to reorganizing their living, farming, waste, etc structures and so can only handle very temporary Centaur visitors, if that, so a company/place offering living space and work, even temp work, for Centaurs is novel enough to have interest already for consistent workers planned for awhile, regardless of Talita being there or not.
JoB
> No idea how long it takes for folks to traverse from place to place
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Two weeks (as Idrisah mentioned WRT herself two pages ago). One week to navigate within the respective system, and the wormhole passage in between is pretty much instantaneous (and makes the distance between systems irrelevant).
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… assuming that no administrative delay goes on top of that (like two years’ worth of booked-out skyhook slots), of course.
eden
and I don’t see ohitiil or the dominion of till it willing to put so much into renovations for *one centuar that as far as all management is concerned has been perfectly housed for the last eight years…
JoB
> I don’t see ohitiil or the dominion of till it willing to put so much into renovations
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They don’t; coughing up the money is up to Ixion / Jovia.
astrobun
mel sounds like they give gifts that are thoughtful, but not helpful. upgrading talita’s housing situation? thoughtful! not giving her any input, possibly reacting poorly to any requests for changes? not helpful.
Vinemaple
I feel like Mel keeps doing things that are UNhelpful and make the problem worse, while trying to be helpful. May you all never have to deal with that IRL!
theplushfrog
Undesired gifts that are just off of what you actually want makes things so complicated, especially when the person doing the gifting isn’t… receptive of any, even slightly, negative responses. Unfortunately I am well-versed in this.
Vinemaple
This woman I used to know, she had her house renovated, it was a little cabin she lived in full-time, so it was a big deal, not like a prestige renovation to keep up with the Joneses or something. Her best friend volunteered to do the tile in the bathroom. The friend picked out some lovely tile, and proceeded to do a terrible job, every tile crooked and not flush, I don’t know if she’d ever done tile in her life before or what. When the homeowner commented that the tile looked “a little crooked” to her, that was it. The best friend walked out and never talked to the homeowner again, for the rest of the homeowner’s life.
BoldlyGone
Good luck, Idrisah….
K
Yeeaaaah, I think in this case, instead of making it a surprise it should have been some kind of “interactive gift”, like, approach Talita with the idea before putting all those resources into the project would have been the better way to go. (then again Mel’s tendencies are like half the conflict in this story) It’s unreasonable to give someone something so big and expect them to be happy about every aspect.
Vinemaple
I can almost literally hear someone in my IRL asking, “But, why is that so unreasonable?”
Mar
I love Talita’s character and the social dynamics at play in this comic, it’s such a nice breath of air for sci-fi enjoyers that aren’t interested in large, sweeping, planet-destroying stories. I much prefer this small character-driven narrative with relatable stakes. I greatly appreciate the reality these people occupy. (And it’s fun watching Talita’s antlers grow in!) Always looking forward to more.
Vinemaple
I desperately want a term for this kind of sci-fi that doesn’t make it sound like it’s all about Becky Chambers and nobody else. “Low sci-fi” just doesn’t sound right. What would the opposite of “space opera” be?
Seriously, the tone and vibes and small stakes and small scale of this story are at least as much of a draw for me as Jay’s speculative biology. I don’t even understand half the alien biology, although the cultures fascinate me.
Guest
Sli-sci if li-fi
Solidago
You get my laughs
hessian
i’ve seen them describe rtts as a slice of life, which i think fits! slice of life sci-fi :]
Teod
Slice of life sci-fi.
creetur
Sci-fi of life
Lilac
its been 8 YEARS ??? Kinda sucks it took This Long fjfhfhs
But also I understand the Social Difficulties…. when you want to say a thing but you don’t want to make anyone feel bad but you will feel bad if you don’t say it and so on and so forth. Yeah….
Greebus
Only “Human” Resources? 😏VERY ANTIQUATED, Ixion…
40
Isn’t the comic technically translated into modern English?
JoB
Partly (where protagonists use ASL – translated to written English then, to be precise – or outright alien languages). Technically, most of the action happens in Jovian English, and whether that’s just so overwhelmingly compatible to ours that we can read it, or transparently translated for us, remains unclear AFAICT.
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FWIW, there already has been a discussion in the comments whether “HR” might have gotten retconned into “hired resources”. 😉 (As I don’t see where Greebus took the spelled-out “human” from.)
Solidago
Look closely at Idrisah’s laptop in the last panel. The menu says “Member(?) Home, Announcements, Messages, Group Calendar, Documents, Records/Receipts(?), Human Resources, Payroll.” I really like the hired resources idea!
JoB
> Look closely at Idrisah’s laptop in the last panel. The menu says …
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… say, do you have access to a hi-res version somehow? The last menu item could just as well say “Paprika” for all *I* can decipher. :-3
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But yes, that’s “Human Resources” right above. (Back on page 75, that item was left off panel.) Also, Idrisah got a … photo? Chibi? Caricature? … of herself instead of Talitas (first) initial (only) … personal preference, or … ?
Solidago
I just opened the page image in a new tab so I could see better, it’s 1341×2048 in full which is a little bigger than the embedded version. Still pretty compressed but I looked closely. I definitely see “paprika” too though. xD
Right now it’s very common (popularized by google?) for sites to use the user’s initial as their default avatar. It looks like Idrisah has changed her avatar to her own photo, and Talita is just using the default. That feels in character to me. x) Though you could also read into it that Talita doesn’t want to draw attention to herself as The Centaur in online company interactions.. it seems like the plant is small enough that everyone knows each other, but maybe it makes her more comfortable anyway. Now I want to see everyone else’s avatar..
JoB
> I just opened the page image in a new tab
> so I could see better, it’s 1341×2048 in full
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A ha! So you do have access to “a hi-res version”. (When I open the page’s inline image in a new tab, it’s a 1006×1536 PNG. Apparently the website dishes out different versions based on browser/viewport/bandwidth/whatever. I’m using a single aged monitor and a low-bandwidth DSL line here.)
malmo
Don’t worry, Talita. It’s actually much worse!
Chiyana
Oof, yeah. I was thinking about Talita having to live near the temps, but I hadn’t quite grasped that being ‘surprised’ by something like this comes with so many other issues. Add in that it’s far and away too late to stop any of this and Talita is stuck in a lose-lose scenario.
Vinemaple
Also, based on in-comic AMA #1 or 2, this is the *second* time Mel has done something like this for Talita. Mel handled Talita’s college living situation badly as well.
Some readers may not understand how *easy* it is to just get used to dealing with someone who constantly creates problems for oneself. But, let me tell you, sometimes this kind of thing can just seem like a fact of life, and it can take years, and perhaps a painful crisis, to realize that a familiar, even beloved, person is doing nothing for you except making your life worse.
waterfan2
Ah, Idrisah, finding out the kick in the pants that is dramatic irony.