HarJIT

I would greatly appreciate it if those with suggestions of how to improve it attempted to implement them!

Transferring the current data (including the stuff suggested here and possibly some more suggested over on the Discord) from Dia into GraphViz allowed me to make use of its layout engines, rather than trying to lay it out myself.
So, here's circo:

 

Transferring the current data (including the stuff suggested here and possibly some more suggested over on the Discord) from Dia into GraphViz allowed me to make use of its layout engines, rather than trying to lay it out myself.
So, here's circo:

 

 Lionel Shriver lost me around the point where she equated cultural appropriation with someone writing from the perspective of a murderer without having committed murder, and her grip on me was already very shaky before that.
1) Being a murderer is not a culture. In fact, I would almost call it the antithesis of culture since most cultures I know of are based on living together in a certain way. Not on killing. (And yes, I would not call Nazism a culture; it is barbarism of the crudest sort, its icons and symbolism... appropriated... from cultures that had nothing to do with it.)
2) Cultural appropriation is not defined by these cherrypicked and extreme examples that Shriver likes to wallow in. Cultural appropriation is when someone grabs something from another culture that 'looks nice' and then uses it heedlessly of its origin and without respect for its original meaning. It is not 'cultural appropriation' to cook and eat sushi. It is cultural appropriation when one takes an ancient and respected religious symbol of another culture and then makes it the symbol of a barbaric agenda of genocide and mass murder. Yes, that is where the Nazis got their swastika from and there are people who revere the swastika and wear it as Christians would wear the Cross, and these are of course HURT and HORRIFIED when they come to Europe or the US and are told that they are foul Nazis for revering their sacred icon.
That is an extreme example, of course, but THAT is the essence of cultural appropriation. Shriver's pathetic and self-indulgent complaint utterly ignores that. She has taken the exact wrong lesson from what she has heard: that it is forbidden to use anything from another culture in order not to hurt anyone's tender feelings, which is not true, hyperbole invented by opponents of the concept. What it means is that when one takes something from another culture, one should damn well investigate its origins and use it with some respect for the source material. The sushi menu does not count. On the other hand, if that sushi menu was served by waiters wearing yellowface in WW2-propaganda style outfits and they spoke with a fake 'Asian' accent (most likely not sounding remotely Asian, let alone Japanese) while extolling the virtues of committing harakiri for dessert, then yes, it would be cultural appropriation.
As for Shriver's ludicrous demand that you wait on street corners and beg for permission of people of that culture that happen to walk by, that is worthy only of contempt, an extreme example selected by a moral coward who knows that if she actually states the problem in reasonable terms she will lose the argument. This is the age of the Internet, people. Research has NEVER been easier. If you want to use elements from a foreign culture, LOOK IT UP. If you got this far, you know how to read. Use Google. Spend as much as half an hour reading articles about the subject matter. Then you will have a basic idea. And if you want to be thorough -- a concept entirely foreign to Shriver, it seems -- there is such a thing as social media where you can reach out to the people of a specific culture and ASK them for information. If you do it politely and respectfully and you have done at least a minimum of homework first, odds are that you will find someone who is glad to help.
Or, like, you can do as Shriver seems to recommend and happily write African characters as blackface-wearing Vaudeville clowns from the late 19th Century and Irishmen as jolly uneducated chronic drunks who get into fights all the time and French as Pepe le Pew-accented onion sellers who duel to death with loaves of bread. I'm sure you won't offend anyone that way, and good luck with that. (Yes, an extreme example like Shriver likes to use -- notice how TOTALLY not offensive that is?)
 

https://xkcd.com/851_make_it_better/

https://xkcd.com/851_make_it_better/

I am Number Four.
Sorry, had to be done.

https://xkcd.com/851_make_it_better/

Does it count as a slay if I do not alter any of the text, or any of the pictures, or the chronological order of them, but it _implies_ something different?

Ugh - I should have used a vertical format - I have to click on it 3 times to make it zoom in enough to read!

Oh I agree. Once again, he displayed what he was made of when he drew the line at murdering Abraham and framing Mr. Verres.
Absolutely. Victimisation is often a cycle. This makes it especially important to break such cycles. The thing is, it is possible to be a victim without passing harm on to others. As Eli Wiesel said, victimhood does not ennoble nor confer special privileges. But it does make it important to help the victims. In this case, it also means that victims who in turn become victimisers (as noted, this is not all of them) must be helped but also brought to understand that what they did was wrong.
That is a complex question and I have no ready answer. What I do know is that it is a bad idea to define a person by their victimhood. One does them no favours that way and they tend to find it supremely offensive. In short, remember that what you have is not a victim but rather a human being that was victimised.

Susan. Definitely Susan. She's like an intelligent, snarky Elliot, and ...

We must speak good of the dead.
He's dead. Good.

You see, this particular forum works in the following way. You take one or several frames from the EGS comic, possibly rearranging their order, and replace the text in the speech balloons with some sort of humorous meme or comment on life or the comic...
...why are you all looking at me like that?

Once when I was working what was in part an internal customer-service desk, someone actually tried to launch an official complaint about me speaking formally.
(She made the mistake of telling her boss why I suddenly became rigidly polite. He... ahem... didn't respond formally, nor with rigid politeness. Afterward, he called my boss to praise me for handling the situation so well. And my boss told me about it.)

Tedd's got this covered

I'm on the road and only have a tiny notebook and a silly pencil to draw with, but I felt Diane slowly becoming a main character deserved some sort of recognition. Her pupils are nearly as big as the pencil lead. It's hard drawing small.
Anyway, here we have Diane, with a summoned lance, sitting on Tara. I regret not making the lance glow.
I thought the griffin would be hard to draw, but nope. Seems I'm quite good at griffins. Diane, though ... I couldn't figure out what her old outfit would look like sitting down, her head is 2 sizes too big, and her pose is WAY out.  And I think she's been hitting the donuts.  I might try again when I get home and do a better one.
(FYI Tara is based on the one that is just about to get hit with a soccer ball while chasing Cheerleadra, but I couldn't make it look right with Dan's style of wing so I made my own up)

From the Freefall message boards:
 
@ANTIcarrot:
I'll have to join in the respectful disagreement with your thesis, and quote something I posted back in February:

Almost certainly part of the joke.  This Immortal isn't a 14 year old Japanese girl.  She is a 14 year old girl fascinated by Japanese pop culture.
Let's just hope her tentacle monster activities remain off panel.

https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/08/parentheses/ -

Wouldn't that be peanut butter?

I suspect Leifeld used the Abraham incident as an excuse to remove Edward from his job of covering up the truth about magic. Take another look at the gym scene where Leifeld and Arthur are talking. Just how long ago did Arthur float his plan to solve the problem "for decades" go back? How long have Leifeld and Arthur been conspiring to bring on the magical reset? 
And speaking of that gym scene, isn't that Carol Brown at the far right of the second panel totally hearing Leifeld and Arthur's conversation?
 

The Moderator:
I would like to take this small occasion to thank two of our regular forumgoers, HarJit and Illjwamh, for going above and beyond to make the forums a good place. HarJit for their unceasing work with the Greasemonkey scripts to improve the forums and Illjwamh for patient dedication with sharing statistics and character appearances. I have pinned the Greasemonkey thread for ease of access. Illjwamh's Crazy Counting Guy thread, of course, is already pinned.
Once again, thank you both.
~tOH.

Bottom right, highlighted in red here:

 

You know, someone mind-controlled arguing for mind-control is not exactly convincing. There might be conflict of interest.