No pressure! Have fun! (But please please please keep working on Vampire Poets? IT’S SO GOOD!!)

P.S. I like how your shirt changes colour in the last two panels. Is it like a mood ring?

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer

“Because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC…..were drafted from a corps of human computers, the world’s first professional computer programmers were women, paving the way for careers in data processing as socially acceptable for women in an era of gender roles.”

Anyway, Suffering Artist, suffering isn’t ALWAYS necessary to produce the good stuff!

As for Brunel, if more engineers were like that, my college days (I went to a combined art-architecture-engineering school) would have been wilder than they were — which is actually saying a bit. The discussion about sex-typing programming is interesting… it reminds me of the Harvard Observatory’s program of cataloging stars from telescopic photographs at the turn of the 20th century, a job requiring extreme exactitude, patience and thoroughness and relegated entirely to women. Which led to the period/luminosity relationship in Cepheid variable stars being discovered by a woman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and THAT eventually led to Hubble’s realization of the scale of the Milky Way in relation to the larger universe. Too bad Leavitt’s out of your time frame, Sydney. I think Babbage might have been happy to send her a valentine.

Sorry if I accidentally spoiled anything.