First, there's the implication that being a god is something like a job; that there are times the gods are working, and that they get time off, according to some set schedule. This doesn't mesh up with the gods' behavior throughout the strip, and I'm not sure it was a good idea to introduce this concept just for the sake of a joke.

Secondly, what bothers me even more is the—well, "anachronism" more or less gets across what I want to say, but isn't quite the right word, because it's not specified what time the strip is set, relative to our own; it's set on a different world, which apparently doesn't have the technology of modern Earth (and which may operate according to completely different laws of physics so the technology of modern Earth isn't even possible), but it could very well be taking place at the current time (assuming it even makes sense to compare times between distinct cosmoi), or even in the future. Let's say "anachthonism", which is a word I just made up. The anachthonism of the reference to "on the clock". This phrase, of course, derives from the punch clocks used at many workplaces to keep track of employees' hours. (Or so I assume, though admittedly a quick web search failed to find any sources definitively confirming this.) This technology, while somewhat obsolescent in modern Earth, clearly doesn't exist in the nonindustrial world of Soup—and therefore Nizini shouldn't really be using the phrase. (Actually, this isn't even the first time this happened, really—when Erlak's champion referred in an earlier strip to "the job description", well, that's a phrase that pretty much came from modern employment techniques, too, I think.) I could justify it by claiming that what she actually said was something somewhat different, but it was "translated" to a modern colloquialism for effect; or that the phrase "on the clock" does indeed exist in the world of Soup but has a different origin than it has in our own world. But I'm still not totally comfortable with it.

(Of course, if one wanted to continue along those lines, one could argue that the characters shouldn't be speaking English to begin with—I actually have a response to that, but it's not worth going into here. And no, it's not that they're not really speaking English but their dialogue is presented "translated" for the readers' convenience"although that would be a valid explanation too. Well, not entirely, because there are a few strips that rely a bit upon wordplay, but anyway.)

And, okay, yikes... when I was looking through the archives for the strips linked to above, I found that a few of the archived pages weren't linked up correctly, the link to the next strip leading in one case to the same page and in the other to the index page. Fixed now, but... aargh. That's one of the hazards of doing this by hand... it's too easy to make mistakes. And that's yet another reason I need to get that frikkin' auto-update script working again like I keep on saying I'm going to do! I am an idiot.

(It is not entirely impossible that someone has already e-mailed me about the above glitches. If so, I have not seen the e-mail... or any other e-mail sent to the address on the "e-mail the cartoonist" link at the bottom of the page. That's because, for reasons also not worth going into here, I haven't actually checked my e-mail at that address since the strip was relaunched (I have a number of other e-mail addresses). This is something else I really need to do...)

Oh, yeah, and... happy Halloween! In honor of the holiday, I give you... a frighteningly long "news" post, apparently...