Kat says:

Joe is not only saying "gold" because a few gamer terms have become mainstream in the dystopian future, he's saying it because the world economy collapsed and many private institutions and countries have reverted to the gold standard. You'll see people talking about "cents" a lot - that's short for a centigram of gold. The coins minted on the gold standard literally have that amount of gold inside them.

As of this writing, pure gold is going for about US$52 per gram. A centigram (0.01g) is therefore costing about half a dollar. To make things easy we've made a "cent" of gold worth about a dollar in today's money (easily justified by the inevitable price spike when the gold standard started to become popular). Of course, some things are going to cost a lot more, or less, than they would today as well.

James says:

Bottom right panel - I tried a new way of painting the snow on the ground, and I really like it. The way I do the snow in the comics is from a photoshop guide Kat found, and I dig it, but their method of making ground snow is (I think) a bit more for photorealistic picture modification, and the easy-cheesy snow in the last panel is more cartoony, but I think it is less distracting. I'm gonna stick with it.