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No. 1008:

First | Previous | 2011-10-10 | Next | Latest

First | Previous | 2011-10-10 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/postcard/?comic=1008

Rescued from a corrupted hard drive by: Vivificient

The author writes:

I'm occasionally criticised by readers when a strip is too predictable. Not too often, mind you, but it seems people have come to assume that because a lot of my strips contain unexpected twists or happenings completely off-the-wall I should be able to produce something nobody anticipated every day.

I think few understand how hard it is to be reliably random. It's true that I use various means of random number generation to aid myself in creating surprises. But you can only use the same charts so many times before the statistical distribution of plot twists becomes noticeable. I've thrown so many darts deciding which characters to kill off that I've learned to aim and it isn't random any more. I can recognise all the folds on my decks of cards. I've flipped open my dictionary to random pages so many times that the pages are coming out. Even the Internet Oracle seems to be giving me the same answers over and over these days.

So anyway, that's why everything that happened in today's strip was what the characters were expecting at the end of yesterday's. I wish I could say that that was a twist of sorts, but unfortunately I've already used it approximately once in every 52 strips so far.