Fruit picking or sports massage
DEAN THOMPSON! A stalwart of the Giant Days series (in many ways everyone’s favourite character), but eight years have passed and in the meantime he has been given responsibility for children. Astonishing.
ITEM! Enjoy today’s the special programming joke just for computer likers.
The fate of Britain’s youth depends on a digital turd based out of the Cayman Islands and Dean Thompson. I weep for the future!
A fine pair of DTs
Gasp! Both are roomies from hell…
But good catch m.
GASP!!!! Dean Thompson!!!! Can’t believe he’s in this story and looking after young students, who probably knows really well what an awful person he is. Or maybe he has improved as person? This is reality great!
Fruit picking, eh? At least Alfie has currant job skills.
I’m sure you must have had a good raisin for this post, but I’m having trouble picking up on what it might have been …
Do you think his tree climbing technique is up to date?
Fruit picking is a plum job, and if you get promoted to supervisor, that’s just the cherry on top.
AAA game design? Can you degree in beggaring franchises?
Good news, Alfie! You can become an AAA game designer as long as you learn Excel and don’t mind having half a salary.
Bad news is, you’ll be sharing credit with a dozen other people, and I suspect that’s not quite what you wanted.
As a programmer I can tell you that learning C won’t let you design any AAA games. Designing them is more akin to art direction… so there’s no real direct path to that, unless you’re born with connections (or get lucky). Learning C would certainly give you an in on designing an indie game.
You could design databases!
AAA databases, no less! None of this indie stuff for Alfie — he’s gonna hang with the cool kids at Oracle.
Well, it’s either that or learn INTERCAL and program for the Nitrome Enjoyment System.
Auughh, it is Dean Thompson. Of all the Giant Days folk to resurrect, why must it be him? Aged quit a bit, but haven’t we all.
Dunno. With his hair down, he looks almost younger to me than in the past.
In his heart, Dean Thompson has always been 45 years old.
This feels accurate. In Giant Days I was never able to conceive of Dean as being the same age as the other characters. He just does not come off as a 20-year-old.
Dean’s definitely the type of tall fat man who’s looked 35 since he was 19
Daisy had better turn up or I’ll riot (I mean I won’t but it’d be nice if she did show up)
I’m imagining that Alfie had been taking an exam earlier that day to which “sex” was the answer to the one question that he knew he would have trouble with.
And yet he wrote it upside down to his viewpoint… which demonstrates more skill than he seems to actually have.
Good point. Maybe the ‘E’ is really ‘∃’ (the symbol for existential quantification), and he actually wrote the formula ‘X∃S’?
Symbolic logic joke!
Nice work laying down a line for the formalists in opposition to those programmers of the thread below
Perhaps he used his intuition in dealing with the logicism.
Bwahahaahaha! Why did I enjoy that programming joke far too much?? Surely it can’t be because of the innumerable hours I wasted poring Idiot’s Guides to C, C+ and C# Once Upon A When I Thought I Was Still Young!!
We got off lucky: it might instead have been a “Python”, “Swift” or “TensorFlow” joke for the very much insiders…
But we already have Claire with her lisp for the real insiders.
Excellent work
And this is just the prolog.
Eh? Prolog, postscript, whatever. It’s really all in the assembly.
The point is that Alfie hasn’t a snowballs chance. Oh, he may compile some documents, or become an interpreter, but he’s really doomed to try to be a connectionist and back propagate a slow gradient descent into Hell.
Or he might confuse Snowball with SNOBOL and get there much faster, stemming from the confusion.
Dead Thompson back again and ever the smoldering monster that he is! I hope we get to see him in a kimono again.
We need to have a poll of the Bobbinsverse worst of the worst, including Dean Thompson, Rachel-Dukakis Monteforte, Tom Pendennis and Bob Warren.
Rachel Dukakis-Monteforte. Now there’s a blast from the past!
Don’t forget Bob Crowley!
And the owner of Pixie Garage!
…I think you’ve hurt Des’ feelings by not including him on your list.
But Des isn’t actively evil. He’s just cluelessly self-absorbed.
Who said anything about “evil”? “The worst of the worst” can mean many different things.
I often forget that, like Westworld, the Scary Go Round universe plays out over multiple subtly intwined timeframes, and also anyone could be a robut.
And there he is, in a coif that doesn’t disappoint! I had a feeling (a premonition?) that he might turn up in this story, even before the fridge reveal.
Since farm simulation is a viable genre, surely there’s space in the AAA game market for a fruit picking simulator. Chase that dream, Alfie!
To paraphrase Gandhi, learning C would be a fine idea.
March to the C
Dean… This can only mean that Esther is near. There orbits are too intertwined.
More probable we will see again his adorable little dog. Maybe Dean is somewhere still friend with Ed Gemmell.
The chances of your experiencing a crossover with Dean Thompson are fleetingly small, but it could happen.
On second reading, I have only just noticed that the clouds in panel 1 are all Jobby.
Yup.
And in the trees… Is that “Heelfy Henlow Academy”?
I think it’s “Heeley Henlow Academy.”
Given the writing on Alfie’s hand, I am glad “SPORTS massage” was specified.
Also, I’d advise learning “COBOL,” as the current/sparse batch of programmers who know that language are aging fast and lots of penurious companies & govt agencies still have ancient computer systems.
COBOL, to paraphrase someone else, is Hell’s own indiscriminate fire. It is the general, as opposed to any specific, violation of professional conscience. I once debugged a COBOL compiler (not its output, the compiler itself) and thereby caught the CPU vendor concealing a microcode bug; a proud moment, but at least I did not have to learn COBOL, which would have made the whole business feel faintly dirty.
Never seen this guy before, he seems like a normal and upstanding young gent tho.
So who’s shouting, “Learn C, boy!” beneath Glen? Is it Dean, and the bubble is supposed to be pointing toward the 4th wall? Is the joke that Satan is advising Alfie to spend his limited time on Earth in this way?
It’s me.
Given what “cyber” meant when I was coming of age (hint: it was a verb), I certainly never expected to see schools advocating it as a career. Alfie’s wrist-reminder makes me think the lad may have potential, though!
Is this the storyline when we finally learn that Dean was, in fact, the artist’s model with the extravagant tattoo? (Am I remembering this right? It’s late.)
I couldn’t sleep. I looked it up. Less “extravagant” and more “who gets a back tat that says UBUNTU,” which… yes, it’s totally Dean.
Seriously. Slackware or gtfo.
THOMPSON
I should have KNOWN