The other day I was just thinking way too hard about what tyrannosaurs could possibly have used their dinky forelimbs for, and, uh, this is where my mind went.

And then I had to draw it.

Seeing as it's Christmas and all, perhaps now is a good time for a bit of end-of-year pontificating. There's a lot of negativity and contention going on in the world, and the more people bicker and try to prove they're right and force the solutions they want, the worse things get. In this season when I and many others celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, let's try to be peacemakers and find ways to get along and love one another. Let's laugh at some dinosaur comics and remember all the things there are to like and appreciate about each other. The world has a lot of issues to hammer out, but I think the way forward is to work together to find solutions everybody can agree on, and do so in a spirit of unity and caring for all.

This Christmas, would you consider taking the time to find ways to brighten someone's day? My church's Light the World initiative has lots of great ways you can contribute to your family, your community, and to your brothers and sisters around the world. That's what Christmas is really about--giving back in service of the One whose birth we celebrate.

 So this NPC tells you this as a hint that the developers hid some invisible items on the floor of the underground path.

But of course I had to take things a step further, and now I just imagine the underground as a place where people go to ditch all their unwanted junk.

Like Lass.

(It's semi-implied that this is the same Lass from Mt. Moon. I'm sure her "friends" told her they'd meet her here, too. She's been waiting so long that she turned into some sort of zombie mole-person.)

Lass going unhinged is kind of another of the subplots of this comic, and looking back at my treatment of Lass now, I'm wondering if it might have been a little bit of a subconscious representation of some really terrible friendships I was in at the time. I'm glad now I spend my social life talking to scientists.

 I doodled this after a fantastic Fossil Friday where we got to discussing theropod feathering, and it made me want to render a very speculative troodontid*, specifically the undescribed giant species found in Alaska and northern Canada. I just really wanted it to have fluffy snowy owl feet. I also would not be surprised if troodontids had facial discs like owls, because they have asymmetrical ears like owls, so it's reasonable to conclude that they may have employed facial discs to further focus their hearing. Their large eyes also suggest they were probably low-light hunters that likely made good use of sound.

I kinda think this guy turned out like a combination of a snowy owl and a wolf, which is epic.

*There is sometimes some confusion on how to pronounce "Troodon". When the species was originally described in 1856, it was named Troödon (with the diaresis) and is supposed to be pronounced "troh-oh-don". Twenty years later the name was amended to Troodon because the International Committee for Zoological Nomenclature does not allow diacritics in taxonomic names. But it should still be pronounced as if it contained the diaresis.

 You go through all that trouble to retrieve this guy's Dig TM... and he has a Diglett who learns Dig by leveling up. And doesn't want the TM back.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with these people.

I loved drawing the guy's face in the third and fourth panels, though.

 Just about any problem can be solved with a fake moustache, honestly.

 I guess you can tell how old this comic is because it's still called Twitter* and not X.

Also, I like how Bill's PC is undoubtedly one of those great old beige CRT-monitor models, and yet there's social media. (You young'uns might have a hard time believing that there was an age when social media didn't exist.)

Fun fact: The Pokémon Bill gets transformed into is different across media that depict this event. The original games never specify what Pokémon he is; they just use one of the generic minisprites that were used for the party menu screen back then (which is how I chose to depict him in this comic). Later remakes show him having specifically turned into a Clefairy and then a Nidorino. And in the anime... he's just stuck in a Kabuto costume for some reason. And has green hair and a British** accent.

(The early Pokémon anime was so weird.)

*I hope nobody minds that I essentially never use X anymore and took it off my list of ways to contact me. I barely used it anyway, and lately I've been more into BlueSky, which is a lot like a more sane version of X. Social media is so stressful. I can basically only handle two platforms at a time, maximum.

**Extra fun fact: Across Japanese Pokémon media, Bill is consistently portrayed speaking with a Kansai*** dialect. The Kansai dialect is notoriously difficult for American English localization teams to work with because it carries cultural nuances that don't really match anything in America. Sometimes a Kansai dialect is translated as an American Southern accent because both have the vague connotation of being more rustic and rural. This is what the translators did for Bill in the Pokémon Adventures manga. I just think it's kind of odd that the translators instead gave him a British accent in the anime.

***Bonus extra fun fact: In Gen II, it's revealed that Bill's hometown is Goldenrod City in the Johto region. Regions in the Pokémon games are inspired by and based off the geography of real-world regions. In Johto's case, it's based off an area of Japan west of Tokyo, and Goldenrod City is a stand-in for Kyoto, which is the seat of the Kansai dialect. It's awesome that the developers paid this much attention to detail.

 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

I just thought it was funny that Lass says that first line in the games, but then (like all Lasses) she already has little cutesy Pokémon. This Lass must be wanting a different vibe.