New ones posted:

http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/outsider146.html
http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/outsider147.html

Now, why did they not bring these to him before? And what will be their reactions to the food he has?

You can't enjoy the age-old joke of feeding the foreign dignitary your most disgusting food and pretending it's luxurious cuisine if you hand him his own rations.

"you are officially my hero"

Then embrace and kiss! /fandemands


I'm sure Alex will enjoy the astronaut food supply, as long as it lasts....

Barcodes are still a thing in the 22nd century?

As a human, Jardin consumes more oxygen and nutrients than Loroi, right?

Why not? If it works now, it'll work then too, they'll still have the computerized inventory tracking in the future, where barcodes (and the 2 dimensional codes like QR) will work for.

Can anyone figure out what it says on the label?

I think that it says 'PREUS DEWD' at the top right of the label and 'GDR' at the bottom left.

GDR- German Democratic Republic.

The Reds will rise up again!

We're slowly wandering through the instances, and we'll take over Berlin!

Fun aside,
I tried reading the text too, but could not make sense out of the images.
The second word in the upper right corner seems to be "dried".
Maybe a Patreon has access to higher resolutions?
(And who wants a wager that they won't have enough water for Alex to rehydrate his rations?)

And I presume barcodes will remain for a long while. They're extremely cheap, and all they need is a printer.
A little printing on a package needs to be done anyway and it uses less ressources than an RFID.


One thing though I keep stumbling over...
The food did not agree with Alex, or Alex did not agree with the food? (page 147 - panel 1)

Other side notes, I like how the "A" changes its form from panel 1 to last panel. (nametag page 147).
In panel 1 the A-"legs" seem to rather triangular, in the last panel the A-"legs" are nearly parallel to each other...
It just shows that the characters are hand drawn.

I like it.

I'm definitely going with "Freeze Dried" on the upper right, but really not sure what the lower left is supposed to be.

So... Astronaut Ice Cream, anyone?


Edited to add:


Based on the text on the lower right corner of the Chapter 2 splash page, the puke-color bun disagreed with Alex for sure, another caused nausea... other foods it might have been more his disagreement with even trying it ("Eyeball thing," lol!). I am curious which of the foods was rated to be 'edible' though.

Could just be the manufacturer.
The small text will likely be the kind of dish, and the preparation instruction.

I thought they had everything on the ship in "trade"....?
Or I am mixing up stories in my head....?
(I once read a story of first-contact too, and there the contact mission changed a lot on ship to prevent anyone from deducting anything about Earth and its position. They changed the light colour, dyed the personnels skin a tad, changed the writings of monitors and permanent markings on the wall to the "trade language", .... - to make it appear as if "we" evolved under a sun of a different colour, so their search algorithms would run into nothingness.)


Edit: I think I'm mixing it up with the "Gibraltar Earth" series from Michael McCollum

Well, Jardin can certainly pee on his rations. Current MREs can be rehydrated using any water including urine, right? I'd like to think that future rations would likely retain that bit as a contingency. If his own is not enough, well...

You still need a certain volume. And over time the volume your kidneys will expell will reduce if there's no additional water inflow.

And... - yuck. personal opinion, but your fetish is yours...

hi hi

Hopefully because they were analyzing them so that they can synthesize more of it when the reach someplace that has the appropriate facilities. If Alex is going to be stuck in Loroi space for potentially the rest of his life, those rations may not last very long.

Although, with the way things are looking now, the rest of his life may not be very long.

--
Also, looking at Beryl's expressions between the two pages, I daresay she's prodding Alex on purpose on page 146. I'd give it even odds that she's trying to get him to relax and open up, distract from the otherwise grim situation by being overly jovial, or a bit of both. She kind of reminds me of those parents who are trying to convince their kids that the camping trip really is going to be super fun, even if there's no internet or cell phone reception.

Alex is of course not having any of it, and in my opinion, rightfully so. Survival first, and all that.

Survive, hide, panic, eat and then ... ew eliminate.

I bet that if there is any consolidation to preserve warmth that takes place, there is zero romance, or a terrifying variation of what human intimacy works with.

Precisely. She's nice to Alex, but keeps the ugly truth from him, like a mom talking down to her kids. Let's not kid ourselves, the variables she still needs are how long Alex will last, not anything about the Loroi.

I'd expected something more advanced like a holographic watermark or something.

Why bother, when you already have a rugged and sturdy system, something that will be more important to stuff that might be around for decades, and can be easily readable by anything with a light source and camera/laser sensor, and an optional datalink to a database to parse the information.

Infrastructure have an inertia, and even if they start to use something better, like the aforementioned RFID, the older methods might be kept around as a backup solution, in case of the RFID chip say gets fried by excess radiation, or just breaks down say 10 years down the road. Especially if they are dirt cheap as barcodes.

EDIT: plus on the artist's side, it's much easier to draw barcodes, and they are more recognizable to the readers than whetever gizmo they can come up with.

Guys, it's already established that the Loroi have blanket technology.

Generic Daily Ration, maybe?

And militarizes tend to be slower to move onto new systems then others. So barcodes are probably in.

Well, think that barcode is writing system and we still use old (though updated) latin ABC.

Computers will probably be so good at reading Latin text in 2160 that barcodes may well be unnecessary, but know... bureaucracy.

The speech recognition on my Galaxy S4 still blows me away.

Barcodes are extremely versatile with a wide range of applications, maybe their appearances will change but as long as there are a wide range of stuff needing moving then automated processing systems in a logistics chain will require a barcode to function. Machine reading of Latin text may become flawless in the future but the certain and absolute nature of a barcode will make them a mainstay unless a better, cheaper and non intrusive system comes around.

hi hi

I think the irony here is that Latin text is even older than the barcode.

Still, space is not a hospitable place for delicate electronic devices. If something can be made simple and sturdy, that's advantageous in its own right.