Well, we finally finished the game*. It took us nearly a year (silly school getting in the way of video games), but it was a fun ride and I'm glad I got to come along. These comics also gave me a fun project to work on, so I'm grateful for that. It was nice to flex my cartooning muscles(?) a bit.

Ironically, my niece had been badgering my sister for weeks to just go fight Ganon already. And then this happened. (My sister said, "Do you want me to wait for you?" "No. (leaves the room)")

My sister and niece have started (re)playing Ocarina of Time and I've been watching, but I'm not sure I'm going to draw any comics about that, because a big part of what inspired these BotW comics was the sheer spontaneity of my sister and niece experiencing that game for the first time, my sister having no idea what she was doing (I coached her when she needed it, don't worry), and my niece being totally ridiculous the whole time. When we play OoT, it's more my niece eating snacks while my sister and I reminisce about when we thought N64 graphics were the most amazing thing we'd ever seen. Still fun, but it just doesn't quite fire my creativity the way BotW with them did.

That said, I think we're going to have a lot of fun with Tears of the Kingdom when they get around to playing that.

*Sort of. We freed all the Divine Beasts, beat Ganon, and completed a lot of the Ancient Shrines and some of the side quests. I wanted to take them through all the Shrines and side quests, but my niece's attention span only goes so far and I think they were ready to move on.

Waterhole

Time for more nerdy space poetry!

I find SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) a really fascinating subject, not only because it seeks to answer a very poignant question, but because I think the search may ultimately tell humanity more about themselves than about the beings they're trying to find out there. It's an interesting philosophical exercise.

I've read a lot of literature that runs the speculation spectrum about what ETI might be like and why, after decades of having the technological capability to theoretically detect them, we haven't found any trace of them. One line of thought that I'm not a fan of is the idea that ETI are malevolent, and we should not try to alert them to our presence or else we risk dooming our planet. Stephen Hawking was a proponent of this idea and was against sending intentional messages to ETI (hence the poem's subtitle).

But I really don't think humanity should let pessimism or fear limit us and control our actions. Collectively and individually, we do great things by dreaming big and daring big. I don't see any reason why we should stop reaching for the stars.

(At any rate, I have my serious doubts about the existence of malevolent ETI that could pose a threat to Earth on purely logical grounds. Any civilization advanced enough to be dangerous, with the ability to reach Earth worryingly quickly, would definitely possess the ability to discern that Earth has an industrial civilization on it, with or without us broadcasting our presence. If that sort of ETI existed, we should have been invaded by now.)

 She keeps forgetting the name of Dubious Food and calls it something different every time.

(Yes, I know meat and berries don't make Dubious Food. That's the other part of the joke. No matter how many times I try to explain the cooking system to her, she still doesn't quite get it. I think she's too busy looking for horses.)