When it comes to landing Mars rovers, I didn’t think anything could be more awesome than the airbag touch-downs of Spirit and Opportunity several years back. But what NASA/JPL did with the Curiosity rover last Sunday (Aug 5, 2012) is seriously mind-blowing – I mean, the “sky crane maneuver” alone should spark imaginations across our planet for years to come – and it’s simply amazing that they pulled it off! Can’t wait to see what discoveries all the new tech on that rover yields in the coming months/years. Anyway I just had to mention that before getting into today’s strip.
Growing up with movies like The Last Starfighter, WarGames, Tron and novels like Ender’s Game, have always made me somewhat suspicious of what might be happening behind the scenes when playing video games. Not that I’d mind being recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan Armada, stopping a nuclear war from happening or landing a car-sized science lab on the surface of Mars, but I’m just saying beyond the immediate coolness of such events, it’d be a lot of pressure I’m not sure I could handle.
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Also, thanks for waiting for the site to come back after being away for a week! I’m always happy to be back working on JEFbot and talking with y’all.
…this is entirely too amusing to me.
Mostly because when “The Last Starfighter” came out, I convinced my little brother that our Odyssey2 was really controlling starfighters when I put in the ‘Star Fighter’ cart.
It still amuses me that worked.
my neighbor had an Odyssey2 and i totally wanted it when he showed me KC Munchkin, Mephron! sadly, i never got one, but i’m sure i would’ve loved “Star Fighter” and pretended i was piloting a real ship. kudos on tricking your little brother. heheh.
and check you out – by logging the first comment (sorry the system took a while to approve you) you just achieved the Shades of Firsting! wear them well – they also serve as virtual reality goggles when commanding intergalactic fleets:
😎
It’s cool, man. You’ve had a lot to do, cleaning up around here.
true that. 🙂
I read Ender’s Game when I was around age 14, I think. For a couple months after that I kept wondering if half the games I played were simulations controlling some alternate reality.
I feel so, so very sorry for the people affected by my destructive habits while playing Roller Coaster Tycoon.
Ender’s Game has that effect, Raiser! and i hear ya re: RCT – if Theme Park were real, there’d be some very unhappy (and nauseous) parkgoers in the world. 😉
Your talk about Roller Coaster Tycoon has reminded me of this comic.
http://www.nerdnirvana.org/tag/roller-coaster-tycoon/
That game was part of my childhood. 🙂 I remember that I was timid and built more gentle theme parks while my Dad would build coasters and other rides just to see them crash. Then he would still beat the scenario.
funny strip! and your dad sounds like he was quite the gamer. 🙂
Now for a comment about the comic.
Yeah, I totaly know what you mean there. I also congratulate you on unkowingly pulling off such a fantastic landing with the Couriosity. No one at Nasa could have done a better job than you did.
heheh. i’ll admit, the landing was, indeed, “7 minutes of terror” but i’m happy i pulled it off, GB. 😉
I’m speechless. I never knew other people thought like this.
glad you could relate, ROM! us geeks share a hive mind about a great, many things.
I agree that I wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure.. Putting my own life on the line doesn’t bother me, but having to take action like in the film the last star fighter, one would just crack..
Very happy your comic is back up, right now though Is sleep, spent last week sleeping on a couch ( family vacation to Rhode island home of nothing but beaches and very little else). Hope everything is going better now for you
agreed, Satoshieyes – i can handle a lot of pressure when it comes to myself, but when others are depending on me, the pressure can be too intense. must be why the team sports during the Olympics are so painful to watch for me.
and, thanks! i’m happy the site’s back up, too. haven’t had many problems with it yet, so let’s hope it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out.
Back from the Hack and with style!
This is best comic strip for a while. Love the emotions from characters even MORE than awesome Gozilla poster in background.
The site look isnt half bad either.
And Im writing this in UK! Just moved here. Any chance youll have convention around these parts?
yep! back from the hack and it feels gOOOood, Maryz.
glad you dug the strip so much – as per usual, i never know how these strips are gonna go over with the BOTreadership. 🙂
and congrats on moving to the UK! i’d LOVE to do a convention over there but, as of now, i have no plans to. once i feel confident i could make a profit doing a comic convention over there, though, i’ll let you know!
After watching Tron I always felt bad playing the game, thinking that the guy on the lightcycle that I was controlling was really dying, especially since I sucked at the game so badly he lasted about twenty seconds and maybe to the second screen. I pictured him looking through the computer monitor, seeing me, and going “oh crap.”
I was actually watching The Last Starfighter not to long ago, I think that movie needs some sort of reboot or remake using today’s video games (maybe they find the kid on Xbox live?)
heh. i felt the same way when the TRON arcade game came out, TPC. and it’s been a long time since i’ve watched The Last Starfighter, but i bought it on blu-ray a few months back so i’m sure i’ll be watching it soon. and i agree – the original TLS premise is pretty solid, and it’s one of the few movies i wouldn’t mind seeing rebooted, but, seeing how dismally recent reboots have performed (Total Recall and Conan, to name just a couple Schwarzenegger-less ones,) i won’t hold my breath.
Let us know when they recruit you. All that video game playing in your past (and present to a lesser extent) has to have made you Ender-competitive. 😀
How did your Mars landing go? Was it as good as the real one? I’ll have to look for video online -I’ve been at the beach and totally out of media contact.
i’ll let you know, Shanna! if they come calling, i’ll definitely have to do a bunch of training to get back in gaming-shape. 🙂
and my Mars landing was perfect. sometimes i respond well to pressure!
P.S. The new site looks awesome!
thanks! 😀
Love The Last Starfighter. I should take it to work and actually watch it this time. 😀
yeah, i’ve been meaning to revisit it for quite some time now, TCG. but i loved it when i was a kid and rented it several times until i finally taped it when they aired it on cable. 🙂
Nice. I bought the 25 year edition a few years back on the cheap.
I’ve never read Enders game, but I like the idea of game based worlds.
you should read it, 52pickup – it’s really good. i read a couple of the sequels and remember liking them, too, though not as much as Ender’s Game.
Finally Bot is back! (:
The new site looks great, I love it.
I love Bot and CF’s faces in the last panel. Great comic Jeff.
woo! glad you’re back, too, Natalie. who’s that Batman with you in your gravatar!!?
When I realized I had missed so many comics I went to go check and it was down. ):
I went the midnight showing at Burbank and I found him there! (: I was lucky he was nice enough to let me take a picture with him. I never got the masked stranger’s name.
cool! you should come to the Comikaze convention in L.A. next month – there’ll be lots of Batpeople there, for sure. and you can come hang at the BOTbooth. 🙂
Really? ((: That’d be so great! How much are tickets?
Hopefully, this strip doesn’t turn into a “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch”. Anyway, great to have you back up. I have mixed emotions about your site being hacked. I hate to see that happen to anybody’s site, but it does inform me as to what I must watch out for when I post my web comic “Reaper’s Legacy”. It’ll be about the grim reaper training his eventual successor about the job of harvesting souls.
i remember being pretty freaked out by Season of the Witch, Rainey. not sure how i’d feel about it now, but as a kid, being controlled by Halloween masks was a real concern. 🙂
Reaper’s Legacy sounds cool! let us know when it’s up. and, yeah – getting hacked is always a concern; keeping your software up-to-date and making regular backups can help prevent anything catastrophic from happening, but if someone really wants to hack your site, it’s gonna happen.
Good Morning and welcome to the Red Planet BOTiverse.
Yeah I have to admit I am enthralled by this whole landing thing. And then I get the conspiracy theory thing going on in my brain and think “What if it;s just in Colorado or Arizona or something?” I dunno, too much Fantasy in my brain.
Oh I remember Wargames “would you like to play a game?” (VERY young Matthew Broderick) and The Last Starfighter. I should see if those are on netflix so I can check them out again. I love me some old 80’s movies!
morning, Pixie!
we totally share that “conspiracy” brainwave vibe (among other geeky vibes) as i always wonder whether this stuff is just being created on a soundstage or in a desert somewhere, too. i think it’s good not to just accept things at face value! a little paranoia goes a long way. 🙂
Netflix has totally been letting me down on the ’80s movies, lately – wanted to watch the original Total Recall before seeing the reboot and they didn’t have it. anyway, if you haven’t seen the new Recall yet, i’d advise waiting for home viewing – it was pretty meh.
See? That’s what I was afraid of. Sometimes things don’t need to be remade, they are perfect just as they are.
And when did Colin Ferrel become the remake guy? Really?!
i know! he’s so talented i don’t know why he’s wasting his time on these crappy remakes.
I’m totally in favor of being recruited by the Navy or someone to fly the drones. That’s perfect for gamers who’ve had to learn the fine muscle control required.
And apparently I need to read Ender’s Game. It’s been on my Sci-Fi Must list, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
yeah, i’d love to take a crack at those drones, T! they look like they’d be a lot of fun to pilot. i hear Apple and Google are using fleets of drones to 3D-map cities now, so maybe there’s hope that we can get our chance. 🙂
and, yes! reading Ender’s Game is a must. haven’t read it since high school, but i’m thinking about revisiting it again, so i hope it holds up.
Just finished reading Ender’s Game. Wow. That is a great little book, and I’m disappointed in myself for not reading it sooner. But then, too, there’s something about the very first time I experience a book that makes it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s a good, solid book, and I suspect I’ll be revisiting it soon.
that was fast! glad you enjoyed it. i read a couple of the sequels and liked them, but can’t remember too much about them. if i had more time, i’d read them again so i can catch up on the sequels to the sequels. i have so much other stuff to read, though, that it’ll be a long time before this happens. if you end up picking up Speaker for the Dead or Xenocide, let me know.
o my gosh thats what I think too! maybe all war games and space games are just conspiracies to teach the next generaton about war! its not working too good, all the people who are playing them are geeks, they wouldn’t last a second in real war or space… not that all other geeks and other people would survive better…
Awesome comic as always! your facial expression in panels 3 and 4 are awesome! this is just what I needed right before school starts!
re: geeks not surviving in real war or space – maybe that’s why they’re using videogames to “simulate” battles, DressesAreStupid! we could really just be piloting drones or robots on battlefields, patched into our XBOXs and Playstations! O_o
thanks, glad you found the comic awesome. good luck at school!
Ender’s Game comes to theatres next year!
really? wow – seems like that project has been on-again/off-again for decades! glad to hear it’s finally being made! fingers crossed.
Its slated for Christmas/3rd quarter 2013. The girl from the 2010/2011? True Grit Remake will be playing Valentine, Ender is the young boy from Hugo and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Harrison Ford is Graff. Looks like its going to be good. But apparently it has taken some liberties. We’ll see.
that’s an awesome cast! sounds like they’re putting some money behind it, at least. now let’s just hope the script and directing’s good.
Er… Black on dark gray is a bit hard to read. Can we either get a lighter background for the text or (lighter) colored text? (I’m using Opera v12.01, if that matters.)
Glad you’re back online though. 🙂
Huh… and it didn’t handle the italics around “bit” properly there, either.
i noticed that, too. use (em) and (/em) instead of (i) and (/i) – substituting the parentheses with angle brackets – and let me know if that works for ya.
Testing this on one line.
Yeah, that works, though it would probably be better to prevent the linefeeds that happen when you try to use italics if you can figure out the problem.
the background is light gray on my machine, but i’ll see what i can do, HiEv – this won’t be the final design, so expect changes in the coming weeks. thanks for letting me know how it looks on your system!
In Opera v12.01 the background is a solid #111111 and the text is #000000, so they’re both pretty dark. In Firefox v14.1 the background is a much lighter gradient fill, which I don’t have a problem reading.
If you change the “#submit, #searchform button, .type-post, .type-page, .type-comic, .type-showcase, .type-music, .sidebar h2, #comment-wrapper” section of the CSS to have a background of #DCDCDC instead of #111111, that fixes the problem in Opera (though you don’t get the gradient fill effect).
Hope that helps!
And after a few days of being botless we’re back ladies and gents.
wooHOO! we’re back, Jiro! 😀
Spirit and Opportunity, when I heard about I admit I was a bit obsessed, it died down for a while till I came across a video of Curiosity landing on mars. Now I finally can get back on the the Jefbot site and the first thing I see is a mention of my original obsession. Amazing timing.
that’s the geek hive mind in action, Zolen! glad to see you’re excited about Curiosity, too.
oh man that was a really good movie nice shout out jef also that would make video games scary instead of fun lol
yeah, that video’s pretty crazy, MrSnow. whoever dreamed up the sky crane was insane, and the team that made it a reality even moreso! glad we have such crazy, talented people working on our space program. 🙂
Dude. This is an awesome one!
thanks, Saeed! glad you dug it! 😀
A. Love the new design of Jefbot! B. I LOVE your reaction in the last panel!!!
There was a Doctor Who book about 7 years ago called “Winner Takes All”, where the characters in a videogame are actually real, and the “camera” in-game was literally a mind-controlling camera attached to the subject’s forehead. Funnily, there were no checkpoints or extra lives, only restarts…
Hah, I was thinking it was more like Ender’s Game than The Last Starfighter. Goodness I loved that book.
that happened to me wiht the Game uplink i have to shut down my wifi and be unpluged from the net to be sure it wasn’t legit cause MAN does that game feel real (fun game btw and available on the appstore)