Dig your heels in
For all Dean’s bad personality problems, he has a genuine fondness for Glenn. He will not let him founder.
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Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
For all Dean’s bad personality problems, he has a genuine fondness for Glenn. He will not let him founder.
Comments are closed.
Christ, I can taste that cardboard-flavoured radiator overflow the “coffee” machine is spewing forth
And cleverly it matches all joyless greys and browns in his page
The room is all grays, like the “gray areas” lawyers are so good at exploiting.
It’s the antithesis of the room in which the IMF would usually meet to discuss their plan. That room was always black and white.
I never new that as a kid, because we always watched “Mission Impossible” on a black-and-white TV. Couldn’t tell the difference.
What does it say that I thought for two paragraphs that you were talking about the International Monetary Fund? (Who I assume meet in rooms in shades of leather and oak, but who might go for Bauhaus modernism.)
Joyless greys and browns? His name is Dean Thompson, sir.
I’m worried about the “AI assist” button on that coffee maker.
Reminds me of my work coffee machine where I have to put in a double espresso and an americano to nudge it above the homeopathic level.
The control panel on that machine is a riot! Makes me all the more glad I hate coffee.
Anyone selecting “AI Assist” deserves whatever hideous fate results!
It would probably give you a cuppa the appearance of a freshly poured Guinness but the flavor of the inside of a bicycle tire.
Something almost, but not quite entirely unlike coffee.
Share and enjoy!
Directly from the plantations of Uncanny Valley.
We ALL thought exactly that, didn’t we? 😁
The presence of “AI Assist” on a coffee machine is terrifying for a number of reasons. I don’t know what that number is, but it is certainly greater than zero.
It gives the exact same results as the “Black Coffee” button, but somewhere in a data center a hundred miles away a rack of servers increases 10°C in temperature, and a hundred gallons of municipal water are shunted down a drain.
80% of the time, it’s the exact same result as the “Black Coffee” button, except as noted above. The other 20% of the time, it’s some weird hallucination of a cup of coffee, still with all the additional effects noted above.
You’d have a fair chance of getting a decently average cuppa joe. Maybe even something spectacular.
Or poisonous.
(meant to reply to the comment about the AI assist button, oops)
It would have the wrong number of fingers. Hey wait a sec. Why are there any fingers in my coffee?
So greater than zero is the wrong number. All is correct.
It’s actually AL assist, but he makes coffee that is always extremely bad.
Donkey’s years ago I worked at a place with a coffee machine that always gave me a – how can I put this nicely – dodgy tummy whenever I used it. I soon learned to avoid the damn thing. Some years later when they took it out to fit a new one they discovered it was plumbed in to a lidless storage tank in the roof which contained, amongst other things, the remains of a dead pigeon. It was a truly lovely place to work. /sarc
You’d think that, knowing Esther, Dean would have a significantly higher tolerance for weird nonsense.
Mind you I’m not saying he should take a full Ptolemy to the face. Nobody’s prepared for that.
I am.
He at least seems familiar with Daisy’s encounter with Derek Dooley
After all, Glenn not only SAVED Dean, he saved him in the BEST POSSIBLE WAY- by making use of a living carpet, a giant sloth, and an automated one-man band.
Why would they offer him a coffee when he already has one?
Dean is being offered the coffee; he just walked in off-panel. Apparently choosing soup coffee
Of course. I must have been flummoxed by the thought of AI-assisted coffee.
Soup coffee button is selected! Good catch. Everyone should try the soup coffee once (and only once).
Dean regards Glenn as something of a genius at coding, so there’s that connection.
I wonder if that will yet save the day for Glenn and Claire.
I certainly laughed, yet I shudder to imagine what AI Assist for a coffee machine would be like.
Wait, I realized it chose soup coffee. That checks out.
It looks like Dean pressed the soup coffee button, and AI Assist is its own button press.
…and, it turns out that the simplest answer to why Ygln is in the UK is the correct one.
Sometimes, I look too hard at things.
Mildred already told us. Although, one can’t always believe everything Mildred says. You know how she is. https://badmachinery.com/comic/got-chatting/
I have no idea what you could be talking about.
That poor hamster.
I like to think he killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.
He killed a man in Christchurch just to watch him die.
“Mildred doesn’t often make things up.” — “Shauna Wickle, 2013
“I thought Mildred made that up. You know what she’s like.” — Shauna Wickle, 2022
I was going to say “Shauna got wiser as she got older”, but really it’s more that Mildred got less trustworthy as she got older.
This is a geninely sweet moment and a reminder despite some flak he’s gotten from the lawsuit dean isn’t a monster. He’s just very bad with people.
No, he IS a monster. He just isn’t an EVIL monster.
So like Grover or Cookie Monster?
More like Big Mean Carl or Sweetums
Grover and Cookie Monster are GOOD monsters. Dean’s not an EVIL monster, but he’s not really a GOOD monster, either.
He’s sort of like Sam Eagle from the Muppet Show. Neither good nor evil, but he always plays by the rules as he understands them. Too bad he’s surrounded by Chaos Muppets.
One hundred percent correct. Down to being surrounded by Chaos Muppets.
Dean was a repellent creep when he appeared in Giant Days. Since then, John has humanized him. Dean is awkward and inept at interpersonal relationships, but he cares and tries to do better. In the Bobbins universe of Weird Bollocks All The Time, Dean is an Everyman trying to cope as best he can. Just like most of us in real life, which is why he is relatable. I have ever-increasing sympathy and respect for Dean.
The AI Assist function is Java-based.
I’m having dinner and that just ruined my appetite. On several levels. Take your upvote and go!
This needs more upvotes.
If the AIs ever learn what Dean did to Ed Gemmel’s coffee machine, he’ll never get anything but puddle water from them.
Smoothie machine’s broken.
Uh Oh…I know you still regard him as a friend Glenn, but you shouldn’t have revealed thst to Dean giving him potential leverage. This will not end well.
I hope I’m not the only one looking forward to a flashback of when Dean himself broke off a whirlwind affair just before the wedding bells.
…or knowing her previous suitor, maybe Dean will be looking for information on Cathey? A potential match made in… Hmmm… the interweb?
FLURSH
Oh no he’s trying to turn into the Incredible Hulk!
If talking to his ex destroy Glenn’s nerves so much, being with her must have been a long, painful torture. Or there’s a risk that she’s coming to visit him… That would be amazing!
Is the surprise that, unfortunately, there IS matcha in it?
For me, the surprise would be that, unfortunately, there is coffee in it.
Those cursed tombs are a ruddy menace they are. Someone should write to the council!
Wait wait wait…all this time I should have been hearing Glenn’s voice in an Irish accent? Or Australian? Or, who knows, DUTCH?
Er, Glenn is from New Zealand.
Te Awamutu specifically
Which, it occurs to me, means that he pronounces his own name as “Glinn,” thereby explaining some of Lottie’s confusion
She’s no longer confused, but now she’s committed to the bit.
You wouldn’t go so far as to say his heart is in the right place, but every now and then its orbit swings into the vicinity of the solar system where the right place lives.
Oh dear, it was the cursed tomb of Mrs Havisham …
Off topic: has anyone else had a frustrating experience trying to change their payment option on Patreon? My old credit card had to be scrapped because of fraudulent charges, and when I try to enter my new one Visa supposedly sends a one time verification code to my mobile phone… except it never comes. I’ve checked my profile over twice and the phone number is correct.
I really like Dean’s verticality in panel 3. He’s looming like a cliff!
where is Glenn from?
Als I have to reread all of Giant Days
Glorp is from the first issue of this very comic (https://badmachinery.com/comic/2022-04-15/) and has pretty much exclusively appeared in this title since.
Of course, his doppelganger appeared in the banned Conan comic, and had a cameo in Savage Sword of Susan.
Glenn first appeared in the Solver Spring Special, which was the first story to use the “Solver” title (Circus Windows could also be considered the first Solver story, even though it didn’t use the title). In-universe, Glenn’s from New Zealand.