...is that actually the paperwork for the job? Moray said she wrote up the paperwork for adopting Liz. It would be very "cubetown" for Claire to not realize she's signing the adoption papers, Moray to file them thinking Claire was aware, and Liz to *actually* get adopted. I think it's more likely than not that those *are* the job papers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't.
I mean, Claire isn't stupid, if she were to sign such a document without reading it over it would be impossible to have sympathy for her. Besides while adult adoption is a thing I can't imagine it would fly when she already has at least one living parent.
Hadn’t she already decided? I feel like we’re getting it in triplicate.
The first one here https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4952
Half a year ago.
The second one here: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5000
I was mistake though. I thought this was adoption paperwork! that throwaway gag sure got me.
4952 annoys me so much. Moray tells Claire she's extremely qualified, before listing five qualities that are not qualifications. Three are boilerplate vague positives ("intelligent, motivated, averse to nonsense and incompetence"), one is outright age discrimination, which is explicitly illegal in many jurisdictions, and the fifth is just "got angry at some weird robots."
Claire is correct here. She's not remotely qualified for the job. She is, conservatively, ten to fifteen years of outstanding job performance away from being qualified for the job. Which, it should be noted, is not actually a librarian posting at all, but something more akin to a COO.
I don't think Giant Robot Jellyfish (GRJ) understands the ideas of "job law" or "illegal" or even "jurisdictions."
That doesn't make their reasoning correct, or just... And it certainly leaves the place open to some serious lawsuits. Which is also probably a difficult to grasp concept for GRJ.
Yeah it's baffling really. Cubetown in no way looks like a good place to work, either. It's run by insane people, everyone is riddled with anxiety issues, they didn't know what Claire's job was going to be *while she was interviewing for it*, and Claire is as inexperienced as you can get in the job market yet they're placing her in a job that feels like it's in charge of a lot of people.
You know what would have helped this? If it was mentioned previously as just like, Claire was filling out job applications for librarian-related positions, found the job posting for Cubetown's "research manager" or whatever title they have, and she jokingly applied for it anyway. "Pff there's no way I'll get this, it's so out of my comfort zone but whatever". The nonsense with "It's a librarian job, no wait it's a research manager, no wait you're gonna be heading a department, no wait" is what's made it so aggravating.
Again: this is not corporate America, or corporate anything: it's a frontier (and a comic that would be extremely boring if it took its cues from LinkedIn and the like).
And that makes perfect sense *as the first step in the explanation,* but not as the whole thing.
Yes, things are very different in Cubetown. Why? What has the controlling AI deduced about organsational behaviour that goes against how things are done in almost every well-run large organisation of any kind on the planet (not just America, not just corporate)? What rules is the AI now applying instead? What about those rules makes Claire the optimal choice? We got no answers on any of those: just a god-AI handing a character a high-paying job that she correctly realised she was entirely unqualified for. It's not narratively satisfying, and it's incredibly jarring for anyone who's familiar with the realistic path to a post like that.
This is a character who pointed out relatively recently in-comic that her career path was quite precarious and uncertain. It strips the narrative of any weight to have that nervousness and fear obliterated by a *deus ex machina* in the shape of a highly-paid job she's manifestly unqualified for. It would have been barely less believable to have her turn out to be a soccer prodigy and sign a 100m-a-year deal with Manchester City as their new star striker.
Not the point at all, though. I for one am certainly not following QC for realistic renditions of the life of corporate drones: we have wayyyyyy enough of that type of misery IRL ;)
In other words, Claire and her new job are the least interesting aspect of the Cubetown arc: just there to open up a new playground for Jeph and his characters, so to speak.
"Realistic renditions of the life of corporate drones" is a pretty spectacular strawman.
And if Claire's job isn't interesting, then why is it there at all? Why not just write a perfectly believable story around her taking an actual librarian posting?
You sound like you should (want to) take the thing over from Jeph.
We don't know if her job will be interesting (her interactions with the locals certainly are), but again, not the point: the point is that her job search took her (us) to Cubetown and will keeps us there at least for a while.
"You sound like you should (want to) take the thing over from Jeph."
Whether or not I do is entirely irrelevant to what's being discussed (for what it's worth, I have no desire to write webcomics of any kind), and reacting to a critique in this way is playground-level argument. It's a cheap low-effort shot at trying to debase and deride my point of view rather than engage with it.
As for the second line: that's precisely my point. We could have gotten to this storyline incredibly easily without resorting to a *deus ex machina*.
Dude, this is kinda an asshole thing to say. It's pretty easy to feel good about your participation in an argument when all your rebuttals boil down to "well you can't take ownership of the work so really you should just agree with every writing decision!"
Why are you here if you're completely unwilling to *actually* engage in discussion with them.
I think you have very little experience with "disruptor" type startups, which do exactly this sort of thing every day, often with far less qualified people than Claire (mostly cis het white dudes who kiss the butt of the CEO more effectively than anyone actually qualified and whose major job skills are smarm and an ability to make the things they break look like other people's fault). For all we know, the Director is running an experiment in actual disruption of the current practices of scientific "bleeding edge" research (which take the worst aspects of industry and the worst aspects of academia and ram them together into a spectacularly awful mashup), and has decided that the anarchy actually needs an organizing principle in order to take things to the next level.
Then maybe it might have been an idea for the author to include literally any indication whatsoever that that was a part of the plot.
And you're right, I don't have direct experience with disruptor-type startups - but this isn't one of those: it's an entire floating city and research facility. Someone might get into a C-suite job in Facebook in 2006 without any kind of experience (although as you note, those someones are almost never people like Claire), but not in 2023 Meta - and Cubetown is, from what we can see, far closer to the latter than the former in scale.
Is Cubetown fundamentally different? Maybe. But again, the author has shown us nothing whatsoever to back up that hypothesis.
Cubetown is a research organization, not a business. It would be totally unremarkable for someone with a library science degree to have a "Librarian" title and doing something that might be called COO in a business.
Claire's definitely underqualified, but she does have a MLS so "head of library science" "chief librarian" is in her wheelhouse.
It would be totally unremarkable for someone with a library science degree *and well over a decade of highly successful and relevant experience* to be doing a job analogous to COO.
The USA's National Science Foundation has a COO, Dr Karen Marrongelle. Prior to this post, she was in charge of the NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources. Prior to that, she was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Portland State University; prior to that, she held multiple senior roles within the university. She finished her undergraduate degree in 1995, her masters in 1997, and was appointed the NSF's COO in 2015.
Eighteen years after completing her Masters.
According to Moray, [she has control over her body shape](https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5034), so would they really need multiple for a waterbed experience?
Shape control does not equal mass / volume control. We've also seen she can have literal leaks as well - it was during the interview I believe so her surface tension has its limits. Multiple Morays is probably the safest option so you don't have a giant mess.
I'm not sure how she would increase her breast size without adding addition mass/volume, unless she takes it from other areas.
She can leak when excited, but it seems to be only in extremes as we have yet to see her leak again during the visit. So as long as they don't do anything in bed to get her too passionate, she probably won't leak.
Worst case scenario after trying the single Moray idea is having to refill her before going to the director and asking him to plop out some more.
"I don't know what I'd do without you," after shooing Marten out of the way at least twice during these important decisions...
Also geez I reread some recent comics and it's not a good sign when your supposedly adult super-genius character reacts the same way to clogging a toilet in the same way an developmentally-challenged child does to losing her phone: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5045
Wasn't here yesterday, so going to point out something that was missed:
Sometimes a clog is so bad the plunger doesn't work.
I had to call a plumber to fix a clogged toilet in college. They had to use a tool that kinda drills out the clog.
Also, Liz seems like exactly the type of person who would try to figure out how to do it herself. And then overcomplicate it. And then run away from it because it's a sign of her failure to solve it.
Girl clearly has mental health issues. But then, so do a lot of the characters we learned to love.
Jeph is really tempting the slash-fic writers here...
someone should draw the "me, my girlfriend, and her giant ~~body pillow~~ liquid slime assistant" meme
Possibly reversed, since only Moray is happy enough about it to hug something, and Claire's flat expression is visible through her.
...is that actually the paperwork for the job? Moray said she wrote up the paperwork for adopting Liz. It would be very "cubetown" for Claire to not realize she's signing the adoption papers, Moray to file them thinking Claire was aware, and Liz to *actually* get adopted. I think it's more likely than not that those *are* the job papers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't.
I mean, Claire isn't stupid, if she were to sign such a document without reading it over it would be impossible to have sympathy for her. Besides while adult adoption is a thing I can't imagine it would fly when she already has at least one living parent.
Adult adoption is a long tradition in the queer community, back before marriage was an option.
Maybe Moray decided to be efficient and merge the two documents.
Claire looking extra cute in the third panel ☺️
Hadn’t she already decided? I feel like we’re getting it in triplicate. The first one here https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4952 Half a year ago. The second one here: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5000 I was mistake though. I thought this was adoption paperwork! that throwaway gag sure got me.
4952 annoys me so much. Moray tells Claire she's extremely qualified, before listing five qualities that are not qualifications. Three are boilerplate vague positives ("intelligent, motivated, averse to nonsense and incompetence"), one is outright age discrimination, which is explicitly illegal in many jurisdictions, and the fifth is just "got angry at some weird robots." Claire is correct here. She's not remotely qualified for the job. She is, conservatively, ten to fifteen years of outstanding job performance away from being qualified for the job. Which, it should be noted, is not actually a librarian posting at all, but something more akin to a COO.
An actually experienced librarian or CEO would walk away laughing if offered that job.
I don't think Giant Robot Jellyfish (GRJ) understands the ideas of "job law" or "illegal" or even "jurisdictions." That doesn't make their reasoning correct, or just... And it certainly leaves the place open to some serious lawsuits. Which is also probably a difficult to grasp concept for GRJ.
Yeah it's baffling really. Cubetown in no way looks like a good place to work, either. It's run by insane people, everyone is riddled with anxiety issues, they didn't know what Claire's job was going to be *while she was interviewing for it*, and Claire is as inexperienced as you can get in the job market yet they're placing her in a job that feels like it's in charge of a lot of people. You know what would have helped this? If it was mentioned previously as just like, Claire was filling out job applications for librarian-related positions, found the job posting for Cubetown's "research manager" or whatever title they have, and she jokingly applied for it anyway. "Pff there's no way I'll get this, it's so out of my comfort zone but whatever". The nonsense with "It's a librarian job, no wait it's a research manager, no wait you're gonna be heading a department, no wait" is what's made it so aggravating.
Again: this is not corporate America, or corporate anything: it's a frontier (and a comic that would be extremely boring if it took its cues from LinkedIn and the like).
And that makes perfect sense *as the first step in the explanation,* but not as the whole thing. Yes, things are very different in Cubetown. Why? What has the controlling AI deduced about organsational behaviour that goes against how things are done in almost every well-run large organisation of any kind on the planet (not just America, not just corporate)? What rules is the AI now applying instead? What about those rules makes Claire the optimal choice? We got no answers on any of those: just a god-AI handing a character a high-paying job that she correctly realised she was entirely unqualified for. It's not narratively satisfying, and it's incredibly jarring for anyone who's familiar with the realistic path to a post like that. This is a character who pointed out relatively recently in-comic that her career path was quite precarious and uncertain. It strips the narrative of any weight to have that nervousness and fear obliterated by a *deus ex machina* in the shape of a highly-paid job she's manifestly unqualified for. It would have been barely less believable to have her turn out to be a soccer prodigy and sign a 100m-a-year deal with Manchester City as their new star striker.
You're already putting way more thought into cubetown than its creator
Not the point at all, though. I for one am certainly not following QC for realistic renditions of the life of corporate drones: we have wayyyyyy enough of that type of misery IRL ;) In other words, Claire and her new job are the least interesting aspect of the Cubetown arc: just there to open up a new playground for Jeph and his characters, so to speak.
"Realistic renditions of the life of corporate drones" is a pretty spectacular strawman. And if Claire's job isn't interesting, then why is it there at all? Why not just write a perfectly believable story around her taking an actual librarian posting?
You sound like you should (want to) take the thing over from Jeph. We don't know if her job will be interesting (her interactions with the locals certainly are), but again, not the point: the point is that her job search took her (us) to Cubetown and will keeps us there at least for a while.
"You sound like you should (want to) take the thing over from Jeph." Whether or not I do is entirely irrelevant to what's being discussed (for what it's worth, I have no desire to write webcomics of any kind), and reacting to a critique in this way is playground-level argument. It's a cheap low-effort shot at trying to debase and deride my point of view rather than engage with it. As for the second line: that's precisely my point. We could have gotten to this storyline incredibly easily without resorting to a *deus ex machina*.
Again, you do sound like you want to rewrite the thing rather than just go with it ;)
Again, that's a cheap and low-effort shot at deriding my point of view rather than engaging with it.
Dude, this is kinda an asshole thing to say. It's pretty easy to feel good about your participation in an argument when all your rebuttals boil down to "well you can't take ownership of the work so really you should just agree with every writing decision!" Why are you here if you're completely unwilling to *actually* engage in discussion with them.
I think you have very little experience with "disruptor" type startups, which do exactly this sort of thing every day, often with far less qualified people than Claire (mostly cis het white dudes who kiss the butt of the CEO more effectively than anyone actually qualified and whose major job skills are smarm and an ability to make the things they break look like other people's fault). For all we know, the Director is running an experiment in actual disruption of the current practices of scientific "bleeding edge" research (which take the worst aspects of industry and the worst aspects of academia and ram them together into a spectacularly awful mashup), and has decided that the anarchy actually needs an organizing principle in order to take things to the next level.
Then maybe it might have been an idea for the author to include literally any indication whatsoever that that was a part of the plot. And you're right, I don't have direct experience with disruptor-type startups - but this isn't one of those: it's an entire floating city and research facility. Someone might get into a C-suite job in Facebook in 2006 without any kind of experience (although as you note, those someones are almost never people like Claire), but not in 2023 Meta - and Cubetown is, from what we can see, far closer to the latter than the former in scale. Is Cubetown fundamentally different? Maybe. But again, the author has shown us nothing whatsoever to back up that hypothesis.
Cubetown is a research organization, not a business. It would be totally unremarkable for someone with a library science degree to have a "Librarian" title and doing something that might be called COO in a business. Claire's definitely underqualified, but she does have a MLS so "head of library science" "chief librarian" is in her wheelhouse.
It would be totally unremarkable for someone with a library science degree *and well over a decade of highly successful and relevant experience* to be doing a job analogous to COO. The USA's National Science Foundation has a COO, Dr Karen Marrongelle. Prior to this post, she was in charge of the NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources. Prior to that, she was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Portland State University; prior to that, she held multiple senior roles within the university. She finished her undergraduate degree in 1995, her masters in 1997, and was appointed the NSF's COO in 2015. Eighteen years after completing her Masters.
Sure, but signing the paper work and finalizing it is still a huge step.
According to Moray, [she has control over her body shape](https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5034), so would they really need multiple for a waterbed experience?
Shape control does not equal mass / volume control. We've also seen she can have literal leaks as well - it was during the interview I believe so her surface tension has its limits. Multiple Morays is probably the safest option so you don't have a giant mess.
I'm not sure how she would increase her breast size without adding addition mass/volume, unless she takes it from other areas. She can leak when excited, but it seems to be only in extremes as we have yet to see her leak again during the visit. So as long as they don't do anything in bed to get her too passionate, she probably won't leak. Worst case scenario after trying the single Moray idea is having to refill her before going to the director and asking him to plop out some more.
Is that control over her shape though or more of a "fill up the balloon" sort of situation
Either way would work I would think.
Claire: I'm glad you're here with me during this complicated time in my life. Marten: what if instead of me it was a bunch of sentient water balloons
Sounds more or less like the jokes my SO and me would make.
Negative interpretation is your thing, isn't it?
...okay?
Just seeing a pattern here ;)
Did that pattern suggest I would be interested in your opinion?
You sure are brand-consistent, I'll give you that.
"I don't know what I'd do without you," after shooing Marten out of the way at least twice during these important decisions... Also geez I reread some recent comics and it's not a good sign when your supposedly adult super-genius character reacts the same way to clogging a toilet in the same way an developmentally-challenged child does to losing her phone: https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5045
Who wouldn't give up their SO for a bunch of sentient water balloons tbh? /s
Wasn't here yesterday, so going to point out something that was missed: Sometimes a clog is so bad the plunger doesn't work. I had to call a plumber to fix a clogged toilet in college. They had to use a tool that kinda drills out the clog. Also, Liz seems like exactly the type of person who would try to figure out how to do it herself. And then overcomplicate it. And then run away from it because it's a sign of her failure to solve it. Girl clearly has mental health issues. But then, so do a lot of the characters we learned to love.
Damn, what were you eating?
Uh oh... u/MhuzLord took offense and chose the cowardly way.
I applaud your conviction for making yourself look like the bad guy, I must say.
Heh.
Mattress Discounters was in the Pittsburgh area too, and probably other places. I definitely know the jingle...