July 16, 2010

Imperial marks, while they are treated as currency in certain places, exist more as a measurement against which the exchange for other currencies can be set. Since the mark does not, precisely, exist, it's quite stable, and a great many Imperial bureacrats spend a great deal of time and obscure equations figuring out the precise amount of real money one could get for a mark. The closer the exchange is to par, the more stable the Empire considers the currency.

The number of doles one could buy for a mark is best summarized as 'quite a lot'.

... you know, I was quite good about schedules, once. I used to apologize when the comic went up in the evening rather than the morning. There were occasional breaks -- with filler -- but all in all the thing went along rather smoothly.

Then I was hospitalized in November, and this was, apparently, some sort of celestial signal for the gods to start treating my life as an amusing cat toy. There isn't even some chain of logic I can follow here; the bad stuff keeps happening, for various degrees of bad, with teneous if any connection to the previous bad stuff, and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do but spin helplessly and hope that sometime soon, someone else will happen along who smells even more like God-catnip than me.

The current spin was simultaneously fraught and boring in the way that only large-scale accounting errors can be. It is hopefully over now. I will hopefully be back on schedule next week. Either that, or someone will have jumped out and shown me a column of figures and my eyes really did start bleeding this time.

Sorry, guys. Again. *sigh*