Annotated 27-24
If Shanna’s “battered wife” metaphor holds, then this scene is the flowers HR buys Carol to convince her that, okay, from now on, things will be good again. I didn’t mean that “you’re in this as deep as I am” talk, I’m so sorry. Let’s make a baby together! He starts this conversation a bit suspicious (“rather long lunch”) and ends it conciliatory and comforting. I’m not sure which of those two he is in panel 3; he could be saying “Gosh, the things we’ve done are awful, I’m sorry for putting you through them,” or he could be suspecting that she has indeed found someone else to confide in, and that’s why she took the long lunch.
He’d probably guess her mother, or a sorority sister, or someone she’s had a couple of dates with in her rare off-work hours. A reporter would be nowhere on the list. But the nature of their work is such that her telling anyone about it could be dangerous.
Carol knows this and dodges the question. She’s not ready to confess her disloyalty to him and never will be: as we’ll see, her brain starts working overtime to convince herself those moments of disloyalty never happened. Hey, it’s her job to handle the things he’s too busy to handle, right? So she’ll handle this. In “exchange,” she confesses something of much lesser importance she’s been keeping from him. He takes it very well indeed, which leaves them united, for now, in hoping they can get their working relationship back to (hahahahahaHAHAHA) normal.
Love Carol’s face in panel two. Reminds me of my favorite gag in Mulan (the animated one)
He could be saying “Gosh, the things we’ve done are awful, I’m sorry for putting you through them,” or he could be suspecting her.
¿Porqué no los dos? HR is an intelligent man; obviously he suspects her. There’s a bit of underlying menace in his interrogation, while at the same time he makes noise to suggest he’s still human enough to be horrified by his own actions. I’m not buying that for a minute, though. HR needs Carol’s cooperation. His humanity is a front that he keeps up to prevent her desertion.
Naw friend, the more disturbing thing is that one can commit such atrocities, be subject to desires as our man H.R. is, and be emphatically human. Some would argue the paradox, is the definition. We invented all the monsters, they are just the scattered reflections of us.
Something weird has happened to the comic for the past week, where it wont load on google chrome, only internet explorer, which is a terrible browser.
I myself use Google Chrome and have had no problems, so I’m not sure what’s up. I’ll mention it to our tech.
I use Firefox and have no trouble loading the page, except that lately it never *finishes* loading. I get the message saying “A web page is slowing down your browser. What would you like to do?” and I have to click “Stop it”.
I tried Chrome just now and found a similar issue. The page shows up okay initially, but the loading wheel keeps on spinning. Eventually a popup appears saying “Page unresponsive. You can wait for it to become responsive or exit the page.” If I click “Wait”, the popup reappears a few seconds later. If I click “Exit”, the page crashes (“Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. Error code: RESULT_CODE_HUNG”). If I do nothing, the error message eventually goes away.
FWIW, my laptop uses a proxy server; perhaps riotlama does too?
One more datapoint: I’m on Firefox with no proxy, and have not observed these issues.
I’m also on Firefox with no proxy, and I *have* had this problem.
Chrome. No problems. Ever. Well, with this website, anyway.
I’m on Chrome too and have never had problems with the site.
I use Safari, FWIW, and I’m not having problems now, though there have been several occasions over the past several years where it takes a long time to load, and sometimes fails to completely load (the bottom half or so of the page will just be black).
Same, was happening on my phone, laptop and main PC. This page is okay, hence I can finally comment about it. The last url I saw loading in the status bar most times was upapi something, but not sure if that was actually the culprit.
Firefox on Mac, something in this website triggers the “a website is slowing down your browser”. On Linux it seems ok.