What do you have there?
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Did a little cleanup on the site. While I’m revisiting my social media useage re: Twitter, I opted to clean up the ads on the site and make it look more presentable to those who choose to un-adblock me. Periodically I take a peek at how the site looks to the unblocked, and I’ve decided I’m tired of seeing a cluttered mess of bad mobile game clones. So I’ve removed the ads from the widget bars and am just using the sticky banner for now.
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
Todd, your Human First-World prejudices are showing… Take a cue from the “Bonte” episode. Let Selkie do the talking.
I’m curious now, do you have a number for that episode? I can’t remember anything called “Bonte” =(
Two strips ago as they entered the store. Todd seems to be eating feet today.
My mother never wanted us kids to use sharp knives: we had these really dull things with a little serration on one part that never did the job right.
When I moved out I bought sharp knives—which still upset my mother, though I was almost thirty by then.
Dull knives are much more dangerous than sharp ones.
I’m surprised that Selkie is surprised. Maybe she just didn’t think it through.
That movie watching party that she had at her house, where she found out that Sandy and Wu had gotten adopted. Te Fahn was telling about going hunting with her parents. She would hide in the bushes, and her parents would bait the eel into chasing them, and is it swam by the bush she would pounce out and cut it main tail muscle so it couldn’t swim away. The equivalent of hamstringing a quadroped.
If she’s going to spring out and cut that muscle, she obviously has to have a knife.
https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie1222/
For those who want to see it
The month we first got a set of Ronco blades, every member of the family donated flesh to the blood god.
When you’re used to dull knives, you put way too much pressure on them, and you also develop a *ton* of bad habits for knives of any quality. (Though technically, I got back to cutting toward my hand when cutting certain foods, using sharper knives — I’m just a bit more careful about how quickly I cut them, how much pressure I use, and how far the knife is through the cheese before I turn it around.)
We made a distinction between “butter knives” (dinner knives, but not steak knives) and “sharp knives” (steak knives, kitchen knives, and tool knives). The idea was that “butter knives” are really unlikely to draw blood, let alone cause serious harm, while “sharp knives” can result in ER visits.
On the other hand, as a young boy living in a forested area, I had a pocketknife at roughly Selkie’s age.
It’s educational!
I hate to break it to you but there are banners on each side and the bottom, and they cover a lot of space. Not everything, but a lot of space, especially the bottom banner
An observant man would notice the blood on the apron, and taking into account the cultural context and immediate locale, conclude that the young man butchers meat in the kitchen.
I am not an observant man, so when I got to frame 3,
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
“the young man butchers meat in the kitchen”
The “young man” is a girl.
“I am not an observant man.”
Good save?
In Dondonesque’s defense, Te Fahn is usually one of the girler girls in the series – liking pink clothes, jewelry and pretty skirts.
She doesn’t always dress super feminine, but she does it enough that her current outfit – while it makes sense because she’s clearly busy doing messy work – looks very out of place on her at first glance.
Honestly, I read the “I should get you some samples” as coming from Te Fahn off-panel.
Been texting those out as an option instead of the widget based ones. Perhaps having both the sides and the bottom banner is a bit much though.
Dave you just made me realize something, I have my PC locked down harder than Fortknox. I need to remember to turn adblocking off for your website.
I don’t know, maybe it was just due to the era I grew up in, but by the time I was like 8 or 9 I had a Swiss army knife I carried around for odds and ends.
I guess now that I think about, the girls aren’t all that trustworthy. Both of them have abused their abilities in the past. I could see them doing something stupid with a knife.
I also don’t like how Selkie is looking at that knife in the last panel. She’s a good kid, but the way it looks like she has glee over seeing that knife is a bit unnerving.
I can practically hear the little metallic “shing” sound when she pulls out the knife
Born in 1953, I just about always had a knife in my pocket from age 8 until airport security began fussing about it on my business trips. There is a bit of a difference between a pocketknife with a 2 or 3″ blade, and that butcher knife the kid is holding, but the butcher knife is the appropriate tool for the work he’s doing.
If you want a kid to learn to be trustworthy with something, you have to let him use it, and you have to do some teaching, even if you just let the kid watch while you clean and carve up the fish.
My parents always let me run with scissors.
.
.
.
I’m pretty sure my sister was their favorite.
Te Fahn is looking very Wednesday Addams in panel 3.
Te Fahn, NO.
Ah, that takes me back.
Suffering not a small bit of other culture shock upon relocating in the nineties, on one of my first days in fifth grade, my pencil broke, so I took my normal pencil sharpener out of my bag and started working on it. After a few wide-eyed exclamations of ‘what is that’ and stunned silence from the other kids, the teacher told me (choking back panic) to Never! Again! bring a push-knife to school.
Te Fahn: W-wanna try some Eels, Mr. Selkie’s dad?
Todd: Actually I’m…
*Todd flashes back to “I AM PANTS!”*
Todd: …I’m DELIGHTED to try a bite!