1 Serron: Ohmygod! The computer's malfunctioned on hyperspace injection! Abort! Abort!
2 Iki Piki: Hang on...
3 Iki Piki: I see "Abort", but what are these "Retry" and "Ignore" options?

Someone asked me how I put the backgrounds like the stars and the BSOD in #296 into the photos. Actually, for the earlier space strips up to #175 I just placed a starfield from an astronomy book behind the set and shot it directly. Since then I've been using my graphics program to select and remove the window pane areas, and then paste a starfield (or other) image into the background behind it. If some foreground objects are blurry, I go around them with a blurring tool to soften the edges a bit.

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2012-10-11 Rerun commentary: Ah... so somewhere between the last time I talked about this and now I switched from placing printed starfields behind the windows to compositing them in afterwards.

Thankfully I later developed a Photoshop macro to do the edge blurring thing automatically. That one macro probably saved me something over a hundred hours of time doing the edge smoothing by hand over the course of the comic. This early strip is still a bit "cardboard cutouty", with sharp edges around all the window frames where the windows have been cut out and the stars pasted in, but the effect improves later on.