I can’t recall if The Ames Curve was a well known successful sad-boy band or just a local one. I don’t really care to recall. Music from this era was all bad from the top down, and my opinion counts because I still like the ska and swing music that was popular about five years prior to these strips.
The other poster is the main girl from Love Hina, a very generic anime that I liked for some reason. Thankfully these days there’s a shudder and a wretch that are born and must escape from my soul whenever anime is brought up, with exceptions being few and far between. I don’t recall if Flatliner touches on our trips to various Anime conventions back in those days, but the sense memories will never dissipate. “It smells like the game room…”
The Blast-O-Butter flavor of popcorn exists to this day, and is maybe more disgusting now?
If they were up to something regarding me they blew it big time.I’m laughing at the Ames Curve poster, must more than I am at the strip.At some point in 2002 I was regrettably dating someone. I got better.
Hey everyone! We’re taking a little break from Flatliner today to celebrate the most awesomest movie series in the history of cool shit. You see, a couple of years back a man named George Lucas dusted off the scraps of some unknown movies he made when he was just a kid and reinvigorated them into a little known masterpiece as the Star Wars saga.
Beginning with a corrected draft of each of these films, he was able to make his true vision known to the world. In 1997 he released the spectacle editions. These spectacle editions were a great testing ground, using his mediocre middle phase to really flesh out ideas before going on to make such masterpieces as The Phantom Menace. Did you know that there were more movies, chronicling the life and times of many of these characters? Some of them AREN’T EVEN A BOBA FETT, if you can believe it.
When you’re done saying “Whaaaaaaaaaat?” you can feel free to take a look at some of these rad May the Fourth graphics I made for you. Feel free to save them and upload them to your Livejournals or Tumblrs, I don’t mind!
Han Solo is the name Donald Glover’s character takes on when he is older. Fans were not sure how quick his trigger finger could be, but he proved them right!
This is a man made of gold. How cool is that? Only a really good character who is super bad ass can pull that off!
This gargantuan eater of worlds was wise beyond his years!
It’s amazing how little has changed in twenty years. I actually don’t remember which fruit my current Animal Crossing Island started with, and I am yet to find a Master Sword, though I don’t think that would fit the with vibe they’re going for over there. My love for this game series came with the first Animal Crossing on GameCube. It was the perfect answer to the boring existence I was living in Vermont- a slightly more colorful and less boring existence in a pretend forest, with slightly more engrossing social interactions. (Bob always seemed to borrow Aziz’s Game Boy for just a little too long.)
Harvest, if nothing else, was a bleeder. He bled all the time. That guy could injure himself in ways that you and I or most normal people would not have deemed possible. It was never quite an accident, but it was never something that someone would do on purpose. It was kind of endearing much much later.
And there we are- open hostility towards two other webcomics. There’s the shot at the one, much more well known comic and one I don’t remember at all. Penny Arcade got their comeuppance in the long run, though- my now ex-wife crop-dusted Tycho at Pax East 2011. She had no idea who he was or why it was slightly more funny to our little circle. She was also a death knell for the strip itself. You’ll see if you stick with me to the end- a character inspired by her appears in the final strip, and then I’d spend the next fifteen years not doing MS Paint shitposting (on this scale).
In 2002 I used to leave the GameCube on so Animal Crossing could be my moment by moment soundtrack.An absolutely deranged depiction of us not following the advice of Douglas Adams.A very half-assed web search for cheese-n-rice did not produce the strip in question. It is lost to the ages.
I’m thinking a lot about that one ill-fated semester of college in Vermont because of these strips. What brought me there was the end product of far-flung boredom and lack of foresight. What got me out of there was realizing I had much more well developed versions of those things back in Massachusetts.
How much I liked DDR back then is… troubling. I could see myself playing DDR exactly one more time in my life purely as a proof-of-concept of my own mortality and surely not wanting to look back on the dumb things I used to do anymore, right?
Getting an “A” into the word “extreme” is an accomplishment, especially from a bygone era where we didn’t say words like “stream” every day. Also, jumping from the top of an amphitheater down to its center when you are in sub-suburban Vermont, which is what actually happened in the strip as depicted, remains today to be one of the greatest ideas ever had.
We sure did a lot of strips with this cell phone accessory booth, though I recall Harvest’s career there was short lived.Harvest would often find a box, or fliers, or something to add an element of pure chaos to sprinkle over most things.The reality of this situation is that my lines were more likely those of our friend Dustin, and mine were more like “please, don’t” and “stop.”
Jeremy appears in exactly one strip. Years later, I would work at a different terrible job with Jeremy. He had one specific memory about Harvest and I waiting in line for a movie when he was a ticket taker. (We were all teenage mall people, working any job that vile building could throw at us.) It was not a great memory, but he liked to bring it up? Anyway I hear he’s doing well.
Yes, at some point I could scream out various original Japanese anime theme song lyrics. Well, like two, but that is far too many. Even the car looks like it’s cringing. Fortunately we are looking back on teenage years so you know deep in your heart you were just as awful (but definitely not worse) of a person in some way.
I love the Kasey strip. Kasey was so excited to be shown in the strip, but didn’t think that it was the honor that it was when she finally saw it. There are very few examples where Flatliner is genuinely funny, and this is one of them- so who knows what her problem was?
It would be at a later date that we would briefly lie and say I had left Flatliner, though that story was already telling itself.I’d say that this is the most embarrassing strip of all, but there’s no way I’d put all my chips down on that bet.“Rock me stupid” is a fantastic turn of phrase.
What have we got here? New characters, events reflecting real life, and even my Microsoft Image Composer skills showing their face. The first strip shows the Flatliner equivalent of our friend Tricia, who had this way of taking a moment to a level no one would ever expect. I’m fairly certain this is yet another conversation as it actually happened.
Then there is Pumpkinseed. The conversation he has with me is the start of one I had every day at that job. People really couldn’t wrap their heads around there being two standard types of sprinkles they could have on their ice cream. In many of their minds there must have been a default. To me, the well-educated ice cream salesman with his finger on the pulse of the community- this was simply not true.
The character of Pumpkinseed appears again later, and in a storyline that I don’t think I quite understood at the time. Then there’s a whole strip foreshadowing my short-lived life in Vermont (I got better).
Hello, it’s Tuesday! (I’m writing this on Monday, so I miss out on all the fun.)
I actually kind of like all three of today’s strips. In retrospect I do not recall if the car game where you punch the ceiling after seeing a car with one headlight typically had a strip- element to it or if that was just something that happened in our odd little circle.
I have, since that first bonus post a week and a half ago, streamed at least one SSBU match every day at around 6 AM EST to my twitch channel. I’m hoping I will start to recognize and develop rivalries with people by playing at what is probably the same low volume hour every day. Feel free to check out the highlights and much more noticeable lowlights over there. http://twitch.tv/jasonbowie.
If you were in Jen’s car, she was going to make you take off your clothes.Claiming that an inanimate object bit you is funny to this dayThe fake flashback had already been done better elsewhere, but as a cop out, that was innovation.
Let’s toss in some near-racism and homophobia. I say “near” because no actual phobia was expressed and because it’s not racist to dislike the French.
I’ve got new content on my mind, which was exactly the hope when I started posting these again. I’m trying to settle on which direction to go with. All of those directions involve finding a lot more spare time to do things, but coming back here four days a week is helping with that. I’m also writing usually one post ahead, which brings us to the date this goes live: April 25th!
That’s right, only eight months til Christmas! You have until midnight to get your decorations up, or else your neighbors get to call you a Grinch until the New Year. (After that it’s tax season again).
Ripped from the Warcraft III client chat logsMaybe our panels were too big all alongI had not yet mastered Microsoft Image Composer in such a way that I could add a background… yet.
I remember when I started posting these a couple of weeks ago. I had read ahead and thought there’d be more editing (removal of the R word) coming up. So far, no. So either I’m going to miss it entirely somehow, or find out that what I remember as “better” will in fact be filled with offensive material. One of the two…
The *Spalt* strip was originally titled Harvest’s First Day at Community College. It turns out that when I would later attend the same college, the quality of classes would substantially be greater than that of the four year college down the road. Also, the real damage had been done to both of us by our high school and college wasn’t going to tread on any new territory.
“Hell Hath no Funny” should continue on at the three strips, four days a week pace until approximately next Tuesday. I’m starting to think about other content to post in addition to Flatliner, both good and bad. I’ve been streaming SSBU losses to my twitch channel at random and without telling anyone about it or talking to anyone who does show up to watch. It’s top quality stuff. Maybe I’ll cut a highlight reel of my most embarrassing matches.
And he didn’t!“Spalt” to this day remains my favorite typo.Check out the realistic motion blur effect.
I think about Jedi ghosts a lot. Too much, really. It’s not just because I’m going back through this comic on a daily basis. It’s not because I even like Star Wars, really. Star Wars fans have ruined that. It’s just a bizarre narrative. “People who took special classes never die, but they can’t have ice cream.” seems to be the rule set presented to us in the Star Wars universe.
In 2002 we were already looking back on the 90’s with disdain. This was an odd choice as the 90’s didn’t even really get started until 1993. They probably had a couple of years left in them. We were ready to move on to much dumber things, however.
I can’t wait to get to the end of the comic and find that the bear was still showing up.
These are based on real people, one of whom will be featured again (A record for Flatliner.)I’m pretty sure this is one of the strips I made myself, so the typo is particularly devastating.I can’t tell if I’m charmed by or tired of the bear.
