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Ah 2005. The films, the fun, the fashion. Remember when it was trendy for young women to wear shirts that said rude phrases in fancy letters, like “bite me” and other Bart Simpson classics? Me neither. I wish I hadn’t been making that up.

I remember being told that Sideways was a “hilarious comedy” and it was not. It seemed to be a calculated effort to be the exact opposite of both of those words. I’m going to stand by that and I’m sure as hell not giving it a rewatch.

Real life VS Video was bragging about ending their ridiculous late fee structure a whole lot when I worked there. It was a see-through paper thin move of just renaming Late Fees something else. They were a bad company and it’s good that Netflix killed them and now Netflix is as boring those stores were by comparison. This is proof of progress, or time moving forward, or the existence of an uncaring God or something.

And of course, #404. If my chopping arm weren’t so tired from the start of this chapter it would have been skipped for lack of originality. That would’ve been unfair to the 403 preceding strips that were also lacking originality, so it stays.

Good to get around to a few strips with minimal issues for once! Not going to Otakon, and in general not going to conventions has largely been a good decision. I did hit PAX East in 2011 specifically to try Guild Wars 2 before it was released, and my then-wife cropdusted one of the Penny Arcade guys, so that was a highly worthwhile convention. Otherwise though, I do not miss going to those things AT ALL.

Then it’s on to what at the time was the 400th comic! It’s probably around 375 now when you add up all the unredeemable stuff I skipped up to this point. At this time I was working on my website Rated-Arr.net, which was meant to be some sort of webcomic equivalent to The Hype House, maybe? Anyway, you’ll see Snafu Dave and TCS Wayne, and I’m sad to say I don’t remember the pink haired goth girl. Now the purple haired goth girl… I also do not remember her. They had excellent webcomics, however. I was apparently embracing the art form super hard even though YouTube had just been launched and was ready to obliterate it entirely.

I don’t think the video store ever let me actually do my own Staff Picks shelf. The bastards.

AW crap. Is there another Thanksgiving tomorrow? I hate Thanksgiving. See ya Monday.

Thank the lord, I copped out of that story. I was worried that the limited bulk of what’s left may have involved Harvest putting a ship’s wheel in his pants and repeating the “it’s drivin’ me nuts!” joke ad nauseam. Instead we get a strip that tears some dialog straight out of something I wrote when I was like 13 and repeats it.

And we move on to my final bad job of the Flatliner years, though certainly not the final bad job of my IRL years. I spent a glorious year working with the miscreants at a video store that people are nostalgic for, despite the cannibalization of its own industry it had orchestrated some years prior.

The boss character at VS Video had a real life counterpart, but that guy just got drunk and slept in the back room all the time. I probably could have milked that for some comedy, but apparently I chose a different route.

I have no idea on this third strip. I don’t know who Neil or the other person are. I don’t know if they’re real people, or if there was some gag we’d been working on about “Flatliner: Europe” or something that certain does not pay off when you look now. At least it goes to show, all people who play video games are interchangeable and it doesn’t matter in the least. It was true then and it’s true today.

Flatliner skews a little closer to reality and brings in Adam. It also tells the true story of Rebecca Hill. Rebecca, the dead character who gets more mileage than any of the alive characters somehow, rolls down a hill in a construction barrel.

This is based on a real life thing that happened in Plymouth, Massachusetts around the time. Some dumbass actually did roll down the very steep hill situated across from Plymouth Rock in one of those barrels and nearly died. Said dumbass was my direct supervisor at my job at the time. People still refer to that hill as being named after him, even though it does have a more historical “on-purpose” name.

I think this Boat Trip thing is a red herring, but I’ve been wrong every time I’ve tried to remember something about this strip. For all I know there’s a whole pocket dimension folder full of strips about this Boat Trip. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Let’s talk about Star Wars, because no one does that on the internet. Actually, there’s no good reason to talk about Star Wars. However, it’s interesting that Flatliner is sort of bookended around Episodes II and III. It’s just nice to know that the thing you made isn’t the worst that was happening at the time, you know?

I am actually not sure who made the Zombie Becky strip. I could go dig for that in the news posts or titles (those do exist) but that is less fun for me. They’re not my dialog bubbles, they’re not Harvest’s trademark serif font, and they lack Zelda’s, Gina’s, and Ryan’s individuals flairs. Also it’s someone who would have something to add about Becky?

We’ll never know.

Chapter 5 is way, way worse for wear than any of the others. We’re creeping up on the end. There was a mild falling out in the not too distant future, and these last contributions from Harvest, many of which I’m skipping due to modern sensibilities might reflect a little bit that it was in the making, even if they have nothing to do with it.

On to lighter things, I was definitely worse about Guild Wars than the average World of Warcraft player was about that at the time. For years it was my primary off-work activity. I was GWAMM before there was GWAMM. My guild tag- [TGMG] has been tattooed on my shoulder since probably 2008 or 2009. I found Guild Wars 2 to be an empty micro-transaction cash register for the publisher and my fevered interest in the game/series died out very quickly after its release.

Then it’s a hell thing and a two-panel job about Dana, who if I recall correctly was IRL drinking milk as his default beverage for all occasions for a while.

The last chapter is the one that even I remember the least, so these are coming all as mild surprises. I should refrain from predicting anything, as I seem to immediately predict wrong. I’m also doubling down because I could easily read ahead and make a plan about what to write. I even have plenty of time to do all of that. But that isn’t the Flatliner way. If I’m going to celebrate Flatliner, I’m going to have to act like Flatliner.

So Becky got a funeral. Ryan was in attendance, and Harvest chimed in with a strip to answer as to what happened regarding Ryan’s exit from Heaven. It is of course, about what it’s about. It feels like a Family Guy cutaway. Kind of funny, but I really don’t want it to be.

Happy Birthday to me. We open our final chapter with an absolute slew of strips that probably won’t ever see the light of day again, so what you get today are the first three acceptable strips of the chapter, and somehow they’re not even in the original order.

The story of the removed arc is based on our experience going to a fledgling anime convention at a college in Western Mass. It had some pitfalls and inconveniences at the time that to me seemed pretty meh, but apparently to Harvest were insurmountable offenses. The chapter opened with a series of misogynistic and hateful depictions of real people who were doing their best and not quite yet succeeding. I can’t in good conscience put these back out there.

So we begin our final act by sweeping some crumbs under the rug, a lab coat gag, and the last appearance of Becky that isn’t a self-retconning flashback. There is an image in the final strip that may offend a lot of idiots out there- a female Ghostbuster. Paul Feig eat your heart out. And to all you Ghostbusters fans out there on the internet, a solid middle finger to you. Answer the Call ruled.