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Many dragons have treasurephilia. A fetish for gold and trinkets and shiny, magic weapons and sometimes even nicely framed art or delicate glass figurines. Having a big hoard is a nesting instinct, as humanoid currency isn’t really a necessity for them. When you bring a lady dragon back to your place, make sure you sweep out all the goat and adventurer bones, straighten up the tapestries with the gold thread you pilfered from the castle you knocked over, and make sure you’ve got enough coins and gems for a nice rumpy-pumpy caldera. And if you have a few virginal maidens chained to the sacrifice posts for a post-coital snack, even better.
Of course, that’s how your more anti-social dragons do it. A few razorbacks slow cooking over a lazy magma fissure is nice as well.
Anyway, dangling a “gold” woman in front of a dragon like that, especially one that spends a lot of time in a humanoid form and can appreciate the particulars of the female humanoid form, is borderline irresponsible and/or funny, because Cora knows Maxima can vociferously dissuade Gaxgy if he “just has to have a little pinch.” Cora figured there was a 50/50 chance Gaxgy would either do this or stand in the back forcing down a Squee of monstrous proportions.
And yes, I am working on a picture of Maxima supining on a pile of gold. I hope to make it a vote incentive, it just depends on how it turns out.
Maxima knew she was going to un-disguise, and didn’t want to wear that white zentai suit under the hologram for the reveal. As long as she’s on the ship, she can do that. The suit is for off-ship infiltration, but the ship has projectors in corridors and rooms. They’re not enough to do the whole interior holo-deck style, but Cora is planning on that as an upgrade. Partially that’s for fun times when it’s just her and her hunky crew on board, but having the entire interior of the ship able to function as a holodeck would make hostile boarding actions really difficult. If the force-field part of that equation was strong enough to withstand blaster fire and acetylene torches, or whatever raiders might use to cut through security doors, you could keep pirates going in circles for hours before they started to guess something was up. Or just send them in a U back to the hull and shoot them all into space. Really, any boarding party would have to have full environmental suits, because venting the part of a ship that raiders were in would be SOP.
Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!
So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
the_daily_wtf_feedWe recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.
Jessica writes:
I work for a company in the UK which writes legal software for law firms.
This raises the question what illegal software for law firms might look like, but I understand her meaning.
In the UK, there is a system called "Legal aid", where law firms can give free legal services to people who otherwise couldn't afford it and get reimbursed from the government for their time. As one might imagine from such a system, there is a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of complexity.
The core of the system is a collection of billing rate sheets, billing codes for the various kinds of services, and a pile of dense forms that need to be submitted. Every few months, something in that pile changes. Sometimes it's something small, like moving a form field to a different alignment, or one police station changed its rate sheet. Sometimes it's a wholesale recalibration of the entire system. Sometimes it's new forms, or altered forms, or forms getting dropped from the workflow entirely (a rare, but welcome event).
The good news is that the governing body sends out plenty of notice about the changes before they go into effect. Usually a month, sometimes two, but it's enough time for Jessica's company to test the changes and update their software as needed.
That's what Jessica is working on right now: taking the next batch of changes and preparing the software for the change, a change that's scheduled to deploy a month from now. It's plenty of work, but it's not a hair-on-fire crisis.
Then, during a team meeting, her manager asked: "I haven't booked my holiday yet, and wanted to double check who is available to work over Christmas?"
"Why would anyone need to work over Christmas?" one of the senior developers asked.
Why? Well, one of the larger rate sheets was going to publish new changes on December 22nd, and the changes were expected to be rolled out to all clients on the same day.
"It's just a data update," the manager said weakly. "What could go wrong?"
Probably nothing, that was certainly true. But even just rolling out a change to payment rates was not a risk free endeavor. Sometimes the source data had corrections which needed to be rolled out with great haste, sometimes customers weren't prepared to handle the changed rates, sometimes there were processing pipelines which started throwing out weird bounds errors because something buried in the rate sheet caused a calculation to return absurd results. And sometimes the governing body said "it's just changes to rates," but then includes changes to forms along with it. There wasn't a single rate sheet update that didn't involve providing some degree of support, even if that support was just fielding questions from confused users who didn't expect the change.
The point is that Jessica's team, and every other vendor supplying software to lawfirms in the UK, will be making a major production update three days before Christmas. And from that, providing support to all their customers through that Christmas window.
The only good news? Jessica just started at this job. While the newbie is usually the person who gets stuck with the worst schedule, she's so new that she's not prepared to handle the support work alone, yet. So it's one of the senior devs who gets to work through the holiday this year.
Jessica writes:
Thank god it's not me this year!
Oh, don't worry Jessica. There will be plenty more holidays next year.
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Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, this dusty interstellar
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gws_feedysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmith questionable_content_feed
It's hard to believe the first Cubetown visit was like 800 friggin' comics ago, holy crap. Time does weird things when you draw a comic every day for 20-odd years. As I recall, at this point I was still trying to figure out if QC would switch solely to focus on Marten and Claire's Cubetown adventures, or if I'd split the focus between Cubetown and Northampton. I ended up doing the latter, which I think was the right choice. Too many fun characters to just leave behind like that! And of course then I immediately added like four new ones, and then Anh basically took over the comic for a year. Is Sam still going through her goth phase? IS it just a phase? ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT (I will do whatever seems funniest at the time)
ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmithjanetmiles. It also fills the Questioning square in my 6-2-25 card for the Pride Fest Bingo. It belongs to the series A Poesy of Obscure Sorrows. 
ysabetwordsmithjanetmiles. It belongs to the series A Poesy of Obscure Sorrows. dialecticdreamer
ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmith mdlbear - Thankful Thursdayysabetwordsmith - Birdfeedingseawasp - A personal record...grrlpowercomic_feed - Grrl Power #1416 – Hoard bunnythe_daily_wtf_feed - CodeSOD: Tis the Season(al Release)apod_feed - The Horsehead Nebuladaily_illuminator_feed - December 11, 2025: Let's Get Silly – Toon Second Edition Is Coming Soon To BackerKit!dumbingofage_feed - Grab somegws_feed - Girls With Slingshots - GWS Hair of the Dog #793ysabetwordsmith - Today's Cookingysabetwordsmith - Sustainabilityquestionable_content_feed - QC Rerun Time 2025 #44ysabetwordsmith - Family Skillsysabetwordsmith - Historyysabetwordsmith - Poem: "Koinophobia"ysabetwordsmith - Poem: "Nementia"dialecticdreamer - Plans for the Forgotten (part 2 of 2, complete)ysabetwordsmith - Politicsysabetwordsmith - Birdfeedingassignedmale_feed - (no subject)timeasmymeasure
