Maybe an old shoebox
Billie did not come down with yesterday’s shower of rain. She cannot be fooled by an Amstrad disc and a convenient fib.
STEEPLE – A Scary Go Round Comic
by John Allison
Billie did not come down with yesterday’s shower of rain. She cannot be fooled by an Amstrad disc and a convenient fib.
Ooo… Billie going full-on LaVey in panel 3. Nice.
(I found more websites than I expected discussing “wilt” vs “willst”.)
While used by LaVey, the phrase “Do What Thou Willst” is actually from Rabelais (“Fay ce que vouldras” in the original Old French, from _Gargantua_, 1534, where it is the motto of the Abbey of Thelema.) In turn, this is likely derived from St. Augustine’s “Dilige, et quod vis fac” (“love and do what you will”), which posits (o oversimplify a bit) that if you are sincerely filled with the love of God for His creation, then your actions will be virtuous.
Proof, if any more were needed, that Allison fans are an extraordinarily erudite bunch.
Crowley, Puh-LEASE!
Watch out, Reverend. Billie’s already got you doing what thou willst. And I’m pretty sure that’s devil’s food cake you’re eating.
unlike angel food cake which is … also cake!
One of the Reverend’s special powers is to transmute the cake, so that it is no longer food of the Devil.
I wonder if a devil’s cake can be made with soy milk or exclusively using goat milk.
Do what thou willst.
Honestly, if Billy had accepted such a low-effort cover story I would have been very disappointed in her.
Also, I love Rev Penrose’s expression in panel one. He can see she’s not buying any of it, but he goes though with it anyway because that was the deal.
They just want Gareth to be happy.
They’re robot-pleaers
Only Billie can be a Satanist and make those poofy pants work.
Those pants (trousers, to our British friends) seem to be expanding throughout the strip.
I believe those are Harem pants as purveyed by that glorious popster, M.C of the Hammer
It’s the fib that everyone pretends to believe even when they know that no one else believes it either. There’s probably a name for that. Like “the elephant in the room” but not quite that.
I think that “polite fiction” is the phrase you’re looking for.
The Russians have the word ‘vranyo’, which basically means “I’m lying, and you know I’m lying, and I know you know, but I’m lying anyway.” Apparently in usage it runs the gamut from “The dog ate my homework” to government propaganda.
I’m so glad Billie didn’t buy it for a second, frankly, I didn’t really understand why they felt the need to lie to her in the first place. Hopefully, this is a good lesson for both of them to maybe trust her a little more in the future.
Hah, like you could ever fit an entire copy of the brain of a Generic Non-Trademark-Infringing Form-Changing Robot onto a single floppy disk. You’d never catch anyone doing that in the Transformers, that’s for sure! (Especially in Marvel’s Transformers #24. Nope, definitely not there.)
Port Talbot (and Cybertron) have mad compression algorithms.
A million bytes is a lot! Why, in my day…
When I was a Young Programmer, I started out on the majestic Wang 2200! You could hang 8 terminals off that bad boy at 256K each! And the storage unit had 5 internal and one removable hard disk of 13meg each! A million bytes? You can fit a lot of business in a million bytes!
unironically though, if you exclude music and images, a million bytes IS quite a lot of data. (AI models are pretty chunky too)
Gareth has bitwise compression.
Hey, sometimes good things fit in small packages. You can fit the entire original Legend of Zelda into a small corner of any single texture used to make a modern videogame (and most modern games require hundreds of such textures).
Billie and the Rev will be like something out of William Blake. It will be glorious. And cute.
Billie’s insight into being a people pleaser recontextualises her double-agent turn earlier in the story — she was telling them each what they want to hear, not necessarily because she was playing one of them against the other one, but because she’s just trying to keep them both happy in the short-term for as long as possible.
Does the Rev even have a device that can read such a diskette?
Maybe it’s a ZIP disk?
…that hardly makes it more likely
(I wonder if the SCSI external ZIP drive I have for my Amiga still works?)
I honestly don’t even know if my old SCSI external ZIP drive is even in that old box of computer cables and stuff in my closet. Maybe? Somehow I doubt it. Even if it did I have no idea how I’d connect it to this computer.
I still have one of those 5.25 inch floppies, I don’t have the drive here although I think we still have one (idk if it can still be hooked up, I suspect it can.) At the very least, I have a 3.5 drive somewhere, I used to always hook it up to new builds ‘just in case’ (I still have a CD writer attached to this one, but have never used it — the memory hole is large these days.)
Zip drive? I have three words for you: Click of death!
The click of death claimed the scanned and coloured artwork for many of the early Bobbins strips: BAN THIS SICK DISKETTE
“Look, we only catastrophically destroyed less than 1 in 200 users’ irreplaceable data forever.” -Iomega, during the resulting lawsuit
Looks like the Amstrad proprietary 3″ disc format from the early PCW 8512. Best of luck with that. Truly his personality is in a safe place.
By the size relative to the hand holding it that’s an 8 inch floppy disk.
I have a bunch of those 3.5″ floppies, and even got a few more by asking around on Freecycle, because I have a keyboard synthesizer/recording console that is so old you can only save your work on those media. But it’s a reliable workhorse with vintage sounds. (Korg Triton, if anyone’s interested)
Digital preservation is very challenging!
Billie is amazing, I really like her personally. Understand what kind of people she’s makes her sad, but she has the strength to admit it. Impossible not to admire that.
Is that an 8″ floppy? I haven’t seen one of those in a while.
It’s an Amstrad 3 incher. 178K per side!
Seems… large for a 3″ disk. Unless Amstrad measures by radius.
Maybe it’s a larger-format one that they never released in our reality.
Or the artist drew it slightly larger to emphasise it visually for the reader’s benefit
Nah. He’d never do that!
Alistair Crowley is supposed to have said, ” Do what thou wilt be the whole of the law. ” Apologies for the empty post above . First time.
FALSE WITNESS, REVEREND.
The licking tongues of the fires of Hell, they lick at you! Like a three-headed puppy!
There’s a subtle distinction between bearing false witness and just general-purpose lying. The Reverend isn’t falsely accusing anyone of a crime here.
Technically okay is still okay!
To the Rev’s credit he did a bad job at it. I feel that.
I tell ya, “hold everyone to their own standards while holding yourself to none” will be the whole of the law
Now, I must know the flavor of this cake :3