THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Comic Discussion => ALICE GROVE => Topic started by: Kugai on 30 Dec 2014, 13:22
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HAP-PY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!
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'Tisn't January anywhere in the world yet.
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10:53am, 31 December 2014
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My call? Ardent and his sister become the audience POVs (at least for the rest of this part of the story). Alice decides to 'educate' them so they won't treat 'primitives' so badly for the lulz in future. Through their eyes, we come to understand the nature of this region and Alice's own role therein.
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Happy new year everybody. 8 1/4 hours still to go.
Does anybody know why so much of the western EU runs on Bornholm time, BTW?
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It was 2015 on Kiritimati 5 hours ago.
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It was 2015 on Kiritimati 5 hours ago.
More proof that, between this and general relativity, it is impossible to know with any objective certainty precisely when you are.
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HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKSIES
*Since it's 11:35, heads off to make New Years Day Lunch*
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Still Last year, here. Enjoy the future! Send winning lottery numbers.
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Still Last year, here. Enjoy the future! Send winning lottery numbers.
It's no use, it's fifteens all the way down.
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It was 2015 on Kiritimati 5 hours ago.
Still weird to me that it can be January 1 in one place and December 30 in another. Fucking crooked International Date Line :roll:
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I'm wondering if Ardent and his sis from the Culture. Ardent sure acts like one of them.
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I think someone's made that reference before, but I don't remember what that means.
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I think someone's made that reference before, but I don't remember what that means.
The Culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture), created by the late Iain M Banks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks), are a massively powerful star-spanning empire possessed of god-tier technologies and with AIs (often the minds of planet-sized starships) managing most of the day-to-day affairs of their empire. They are characterised as having a 'post-scarcity' society. Simply put, no-one has to do without anything they want. Their fantastically advanced technology means that almost anything that a citizen wants, they can have, very nearly on demand.
The AIs (who seem to basically run things) can identify and counter a threat to their nation so rapidly that they are basically unbeatable except against a Necron-level civilisation.
The Culture will let its citizens do pretty much whatever they want so long as they cause no harm to each other. Sex with whoever you want or even whatever you want. Go wherever you want and do whatever you want so long as you don't hurt anyone except in the absolute extreme of self-defence. Indeed this taboo against harming or forcing anything on others is one of the few moral taboos of The Culture's society. 'No', is an absolute and the body and mind of another is their absolute property over which you cannot and must not think you have any claim or control.
I'm sure that it was the use of 'scarcity' that made a lot of readers think that Ardent and his sister are from a Culture-like society and, to a certain degree, I agree. Indeed, it would explain why Ardent didn't think he'd have to pay for anything (or even understand what that really meant) and why he expected people to be generally sexually receptive unless they were busy. Additionally, the fact that Ardent's sister seems to have not directly caused any injuries to anyone in her attack would strongly suggest that she is following something like The Culture's absolute and inviolable 'thou shalt do no harm' taboo.
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[BonesMcCoyVoice]"Dammit Alice, I'm a Doctor, not a bystander. Now move aside goddamit!!"[/BonesMcCoyVoice]
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Hmmm
I wonder if it's bigger on the inside? ;D
It's going to be interesting to see what it looks like inside Alices home - and what she wants from ArdentSis.
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"Ok, ArdentSis, explain this to me. WHY DID YOU THINK THAT BLOWING SHIT THE FUCK UP WAS THE BEST IDEA TO PRESENT YOURSELF"
Hmmm
I wonder if it's bigger on the inside? :-D
Would be interesting wouldn't it. I think we'd need a companion tho, would that role be filled by Jack?
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Either that or Ardent is about to step into the role
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Hmmm
I wonder if it's bigger on the inside? ;D
It's going to be interesting to see what it looks like inside Alices home - and what she wants from ArdentSis.
As cliche as it sounds, I suspect that it is much bigger on the inside.
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I'm half-surprised that it doesn't have chicken legs and isn't a tesseract inside.
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The house is sitting down right now. Nesting, as it were.
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It would be amusing to see Baba Yaga in this, though, hedgie.
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Well, Alice does seem to be heading into 'bad witch' territory here. It doesn't get much worse that old Dame Baba.
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Well, it's not exactly a creepy cottage in the woods but I think that it's as close as someone with Alice 's pragmatic personality would get. It has the general feel of "My First Minecraft Hut". It covers the basics but seems to indicate someone without the time or patience for something more elaborate.
I'm just wondering why she needs Jack's help! Or does she want to ensure that Ardent didn't tell him anything significant about 'Outside' and erase his memory if he did? Does she not want him running around until she's found out why he followed Ardent into the fight zone?
Or perhaps, and this was an early fear of mine, she needs help digging two unmarked graves because there is only one punishment under law for unauthorised access of a Preserve.
I've got the feeling that Jack's presence will save lives.
BTW - I think that the questions Alice want answered are: "What the hell did you think you were doing and how did the squirrels in your head convince you that it was a good idea?!?"
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I'm half-surprised that it doesn't have chicken legs and isn't a tesseract inside.
How do you know it isn't?
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At least it has the traditional witch's cottage well. I note that it isn't electric.
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Spoiler for the Night Watch series by Lukyanenko, wherein the protagonist and narrator discovers a woman in a similar cottage and suspects she may be a witch:
"Very nice, having an electric tea kettle. Gets the tea hot quickly", I said.
"But say, where do you have electricity from anyway? I haven't noticed any cables anywhere near the house."
Arina's face dropped. "Maybe the cables are subterranean? "
"Uh-uh." I very carefully poured the tea on the ground. "Doesn't fly. Try again."
Arina looked crestfallen. "I always get caught on the little things".
"So you do, I guess."
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It's going to be interesting to see what it looks like inside Alices home
The house probably just hides the entrance to her real home, which is under ground and has lots of computer screens
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It's going to be interesting to see what it looks like inside Alices home
The house probably just hides the entrance to her real home, which is under ground and has lots of computer screens
JACK is standing in a pool of light from a spotlight at the bottom of the ladder. There is nothing else visible in the pitch black.
ALICE: "Watch your step."
ALICE throws a switch to turn on floodlights and JACK jumps back, suddenly realising that he has been standing next to a bottomless pit. There is a chattering and squeaking from above.
JACK: "Bats...?"
ALICE: "They're great survivors."
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Alright, the prisoner is being moved to the only lockup that has any chance of holding her. That's a (non-execution) start.
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That's a (non-execution) start.
Or maybe she has a disintegration chamber. Or maybe she has a roomba!
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She's probably better at healing than Dr Streaks-a-lot and doesn't want to embarrass him.
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What?
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I was suggesting that in addition to her abilities to a) fall unharmed from great heights and b) render bellicose visitors' nanotech useless and c) all the stuff the villagers thanked her for, Alice might also d) have access to healing tech that's better/different/more suited to LEJ's physiology and she may not want to let on to "Doc" just exactly what she's got.
"Doc" has three white things in his hair. I just called him Dr Streaks-a-lot in an attempt to be funny.
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Oh. You were talking about his hair? Well that's disappointing
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxUfg3uCBbg
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Don't look, Ethel!
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Gotcha.
Maybe, the reasoning isn't bad now that I'm listening to it.
I sincerely doubt she cares too much about 'showing him up', though. :p
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I'm getting a definite "Welcome to Alice's House of Waterboarding" vibe from this.
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This could be the beginning of a beutiful friendship
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This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship
Well, maybe. One thing is certain though: The one thing Ardent never expected to be was that he'd be the token sane one in the group!
I'm still expecting Gavia to say it was all some kind of weird practical joke. Alice, of course, isn't laughing. At least she wasn't until panel 4. Something tells me that she's one of those slightly alarming personalities that enjoys having people living in terror of their very proximity.
P.S.: Notice that Gavia is all nice and healed; it looks like I was right to expect that her nanobots would fix her up as good as new so long as Alice didn't permanently kill her!
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So why did Ardent's delightful tail get amputated to that sad looking stump? Given how proud of his tail he was, it seems unlikely that he would voluntarily discard it. Perhaps the tail got blown up in one of Gavia's explosions?
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Alice's face in panel 4 of the latest comic, scary but appealing at the same time.
It seems Alice is committed to the local lifestyle. Her home looks like it's about what you'd imagine the homes of other locals are like. Of course she may press a button next strip and reveal her starship hidden below the floorboards.
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So why did Ardent's delightful tail get amputated to that sad looking stump?
I was just gonna ask that.
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I just noticed that myself.
Maybe it's retractable?
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Maybe it's retractable?
I'm pretty sure that Gavia's baseline-humanoid form proves that Arden's tail is artificial. My guess is that it is either a prosthetic or some kind of body restructuring via his own nanobots. My guess is that he has a pre-programmed protocol in place that when they detect he is under stress (and thus in danger where the tail would just get in the way), they'll disassemble it. Now he's calming down, they're starting to reassemble it.
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Oh god. I just realized it's not a tail. :psyduck:
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What exactly do you mean Zeb?
Also, Gavia is a beautiful name and there should be more people called like that. On the topic of her healing via nanobots, would make sense. It would also make sense if Alice had patched her up, but that's beyond the point. What I do not know is how can she have the nerve to call Ardent a prick after trying to blow up a city.
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To be fair, it wasn't so much a city as a town....
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It seems Alice is committed to the local lifestyle. Her home looks like it's about what you'd imagine the homes of other locals are like.
No, I'm pretty sure I see eyes of newt in one of those jars on the shelf.
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It looks like it was cut off. He may have lost it in the excitement, or he may have jettisoned it to save weight.
Maybe he ate it for extra energy.
Looks like Gavia did assume explosions were a polite form of greeting, though she may just be one of those self centered types. If Gavia punches you, its as it should be. If you punch Gavia, that's just rude.
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Those look more like various jams.
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We haven't seen his tail for a while; this (http://www.alicegrove.com/post/104381918079/boom-boom-boom-lemme-hear-ya-say-way-oh) looks like the last time to me.
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Bets on whether Jeph forgot to draw it?
Either way, it's a bloody stump now, so something probably cut it off.
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Ah, poor miss Gavia: surprised when Alice wasn't a shrieking soon-to-be-corpse after engulfing her in roaring flames, surprised Alice struck back after her attempt at murder, surprised that Alice was playing for keeps after a surprise attack on an unsuspecting civilian population, and just all-around wtf by human standards.
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I'm still thinking that, in panel 4, Ardent is thinking: "Why can't I ever meet normal girls instead of ones like... well, these two?"
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What exactly do you mean Zeb?
Have you seen Welu's current avatar?
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Ah, poor miss Gavia: surprised when Alice wasn't a shrieking soon-to-be-corpse after engulfing her in roaring flames, surprised Alice struck back after her attempt at murder, surprised that Alice was playing for keeps after a surprise attack on an unsuspecting civilian population, and just all-around wtf by human standards.
I've already said it: I'm convinced that, to Gavia, it wasn't really lethal force. Almost any injury can be healed without even a mark by nanobots now that the people Outside treat even killing someone as trivial and easily reversed. Unless you do it in a way that was intended to beat the Nanobots, which is what Alice was doing.
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Whether or not she intended to, Ardent's sister *was* an active threat to others, so Alice was justified to use whatever level of force needed to neutralise that threat. Her gleeful smile whilst doing the beat-down is something else entirely. I think a previous comparison to Granny Weatherwax fits well. Good ain't always nice and all.
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Huh. I must be more tired than I thought; I'm having to clarify again.
I'm not defending Gavia's actions. She could have hurt someone with the resulting stampede even if her attacks were not, of themselves, lethal force (and Alice's comment in panel 5 strongly indicates against that argument). The point I'm making is that, with even most forms of death easily curable, those from Outside might have a casual attitude to lethal force. Psychologically, Gavia likely viewed the attack on the town as being no more 'for real' than a raid in World of Warcraft or something similar.
For such a person from such a culture, to suddenly encounter someone who countered with force intended to kill her and make it stick must have been a nightmare. To Gavia, it was the approximate equivalent experience of going into a paint-ball tournament and suddenly realising that your opponent is armed with a fully-automatic AR-15 and had the clear intent to use it to its full potential.
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Okay, so we knew from this one (http://www.alicegrove.com/page/16) that Ardent is on vacation, at least according to him. I think in the next comic or two, we'll get to learn whether or not that's actually true. He might be a space-fugitive on the run from the space-police for space-crimes.
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What I do not know is how can she have the nerve to call Ardent a prick after trying to blow up a city.
That didn't make much sense to me at first either.
Remember, her first words in the story were "WHERE IS HE?"
It seems that Ardent has wandered off/escaped from wherever it is he was supposed to be (with her? on holiday?) to somewhere he definitely shouldn't be and she's furious about (a) having to go looking for him and (b) where he's gone.
I don't think we yet have the full story about why it's so bad (from Gavia's point of view) that he's there.
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What exactly do you mean Zeb?
Have you seen Welu's current avatar?
Oh.
OOOOHH.
What I do not know is how can she have the nerve to call Ardent a prick after trying to blow up a city.
That didn't make much sense to me at first either.
Remember, her first words in the story were "WHERE IS HE?"
It seems that Ardent has wandered off/escaped from wherever it is he was supposed to be (with her? on holiday?) to somewhere he definitely shouldn't be and she's furious about (a) having to go looking for him and (b) where he's gone.
I don't think we yet have the full story about why it's so bad (from Gavia's point of view) that he's there.
While that's ok, "looking for my dumb brother" doesn't entitle anyone to blow shit up. Maybe Michael Bay, but that's it. Ardent might have been a PITA, but Gavia was verging on psycho.
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I dunno, it seems like what Gavia was doing was the whole 'playing Angry God' for the locals. Come in, set off a few flash-bangy noisy explosions that didn't really have a lot of oomph behind them just for the sole purpose of scaring the townfolk. I can't really tell if her surprise after trying to explode Alice was 'you're still alive?' or 'why aren't you running?' yet. We'll probably find that out on Friday. It just doesn't seem to me like either Ardent's or Gavia's actions are all that malicious... They just seem more like the actions of somewhat spoiled children, going off and doing what they want without concern about other people and how they might be affected. Gavia's pissed at Ardent because her vacation is ruined too, trying to babysit her brother who went off the plan and has gone where he shouldn't be, now she's here (sent?) to bring him back. So she's feeling pissy about the whole thing. So she comes in, with her version of stomping her feet and yelling, only to find an older, and not very pleased Alice willing to beat her into the ground.
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Still, with Alice's smile in that fourth panel -
Are we thinking Chaotic Good or Lawful Neutral?
I'm seriously thinking the latter.
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Or she may just be a more sane and controlled version of Zintiel from Flaky Pastry
hell of a though huh?
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Wouldn't 'sane and controlled Zintel' be an oxymoron though?
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I'm not going to say the smile's not a possible weak point, but it doesn't denote an alignment shift.
That said, we're not sure what her alignment is yet. Evidence would suggest she cares about her folk, but whether as people or not (and whether she's very good at that, even if she does), well...
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Wouldn't 'sane and controlled Zintel' be an oxymoron though?
Probably
Bur just think how dangerous she is as insane and uncontrolled as she is now
Now add calm intelligence
Ohgodogodwereallgonnadie
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Hmm, Gavia is a loon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon).
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I've just got to repeat this: Alice's smile reminds us that she's enjoying the fact that Gavia is now terrified of her. A troubling insight into her mindset, I think.
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To be fair, we're enjoying watching it.
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loving the sibling dynamic, vaguely concerned about what's going to happen when their Momma Bear or equivalent shows up... I think that's probably what's driving the high level of concern in Gavia too
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What exactly do you mean Zeb?
Have you seen Welu's current avatar?
I'm days late but I finally showed up.
I hope Ardent gets some additional clothes soon. Now that someone from his homeworld has shown up, it draws more attention to his being dressed differently.
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The funny thing is.. Gavia's been out long enough for Alice to change out of her coveralls, but she didn't throw a shirt or something at Ardent? At least give the poor guy a towel! He's so cold he's turned blue!
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No, I'm pretty sure I see eyes of newt in one of those jars on the shelf.
Given how she handled falling from the wind turbine, I'm pretty sure those are eyes of Newton. :claireface:
Wouldn't 'sane and controlled Zintel' be an oxymoron though?
Not as much of an oxymoron as 'sane and controlled Dilandau Albatou'.
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Hmmmmmmm
Their momma gonna be pissed when she finds out.
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No, I'm pretty sure I see eyes of newt in one of those jars on the shelf.
Given how she handled falling from the wind turbine, I'm pretty sure those are eyes of Newton. :claireface:
Eyes of newt, on the shelf?
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I'm really starting to wonder how old Gavia is. The line of reasoning that she offered to Alice in the 1/9/2015 strip is the sort of thing I'd expect a 13-year-old to say! Even her demeanour is that of a sulky teenage girl being forced to explain herself to an authority figure whom she knows had power over her but she she does not respect in the slightest!
Oh, and a confirmation from The Word of God: T. Stimac Tweeted (https://twitter.com/T_Stimac/status/553303920466870273) that Alice Grove is "a Discworld witch in a sci-fi setting". Jeph replied: (https://twitter.com/jephjacques/status/553305744075132928) "That's a pretty good description I think".
So, Alice the Force Witch?
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Jedi Alice
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No, I'm pretty sure I see eyes of newt in one of those jars on the shelf.
Given how she handled falling from the wind turbine, I'm pretty sure those are eyes of Newton. :claireface:
Eyes of newt, on the shelf?
Indeed. The jars are moving around or changing color, too...
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I'm really starting to wonder how old Gavia is. The line of reasoning that she offered to Alice in the 1/9/2015 strip is the sort of thing I'd expect a 13-year-old to say! Even her demeanour is that of a sulky teenage girl being forced to explain herself to an authority figure whom she knows had power over her but she she does not respect in the slightest!
And Ardent comes across as even younger. Not that I think they are necessarily young in terms of years - they may actually be much older than they seem. But they clearly come from a culture where great power means great immaturity. Think about it: if you're in a post-scarcity economy where you can basically have whatever you want on a whim, where's the pressure to grow up?
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Question: Super advanced healing technology, or just Jeph not wanting to keep drawing bruises?
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The former, I think.
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I'm really starting to wonder how old Gavia is. The line of reasoning that she offered to Alice in the 1/9/2015 strip is the sort of thing I'd expect a 13-year-old to say! Even her demeanour is that of a sulky teenage girl being forced to explain herself to an authority figure whom she knows had power over her but she she does not respect in the slightest!
And Ardent comes across as even younger. Not that I think they are necessarily young in terms of years - they may actually be much older than they seem. But they clearly come from a culture where great power means great immaturity. Think about it: if you're in a post-scarcity economy where you can basically have whatever you want on a whim, where's the pressure to grow up?
This has intriguing comic possibilities for later on. Given Ardent is probably at Gavina's power levels, imagine Alice being in this situation: She uses the Quantum Entanglement Communicator in her basement to call their folks who, in the usual, spoilt manner of their breed, tell her that they're busy on holiday and they'll pick their kids up at the end of the week. Alice then has to brat-sit two super-powered tag-alongs who are fully physically and sexually mature but have the personality of spoiled 8-year-olds.
I'm betting that, when their parents arrive, both kids will be sitting completely still in Alice's cabin with beer cans balanced on their heads.
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If I scared you primitives...
Well you got fucking carried away, what with *shooting one of them* you murderous twit.
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Oh, and a confirmation from The Word of God: T. Stimac Tweeted (https://twitter.com/T_Stimac/status/553303920466870273) that Alice Grove is "a Discworld witch in a sci-fi setting". Jeph replied: (https://twitter.com/jephjacques/status/553305744075132928) "That's a pretty good description I think".
So, Alice the Force Witch?
"Black Aliss" Demurrage is at once the envy of most Witches and a cautionary example. She may have been the most powerful of them all : she once sent a entire castle to sleep, unchanged, for a hundred years. Aliss's look and feel would become the standard for generations of Witches and the perception of the public. Her silhouette may still be seen flying across the moon on shop windows and schoolroom walls every autumn. She was known as "Black Aliss" long before her anti-social excesses; the nickname came from her fingernails. She came from the Forest of Skund, an intensely magical bit of the Ramtops neighbouring Lancre, and became famous across the continent for showy magic and some nasty fits of pique. Eventually, she went over the edge. She built the confectionery cottage. She cackled incessantly. Finally she was so out of touch with reality that two Überwaldean children could push her into her own oven.
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:o I never noticed.
She was not called Black Aliss because of her exploits, which were the result of bad temper rather than actual malice. She was called Black Aliss because of her fingernails. And her teeth. She had a sweet tooth and as a result used to live in a gingerbread cottage [...]; this followed early experiments with broccoli and bran cottages, which didn't seem to have the same frisson and smelled a lot worse. At the same time, modern witches declare she never ate anyone. Well, perhaps a few people, but only rarely, and more or less by accident and short-sightedness, and that hardly made her a cannibal. A couple of kids shoved her into her own oven in the end.
She is generally spoken of by modern witches [...] with a sort of wistful disapproval.
(Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion... so far)
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Oh, and a confirmation from The Word of God: T. Stimac Tweeted (https://twitter.com/T_Stimac/status/553303920466870273) that Alice Grove is "a Discworld witch in a sci-fi setting". Jeph replied: (https://twitter.com/jephjacques/status/553305744075132928) "That's a pretty good description I think".
So, Alice the Force Witch?
That's Jeph's thoughts on the comic (or actually, his thoughts on someone else's thoughts), not the comic itself. Interesting, but hardly canon :roll:
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I've just got to repeat this: Alice's smile reminds us that she's enjoying the fact that Gavia is now terrified of her. A troubling insight into her mindset, I think.
I rather like this side of Alice. I hope to see more.
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Worldbuilding is an ongoing process
You tend to start out with a general idea of what your Universe is, who may or may not populate it and how things generally work, but as time goes on, you tend to tweak things as you get more and more into it.
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Well, now we have a bit of an idea that whatever it is we call where Alice lives is normally considered off limits by the people of wherever the troublesome siblings come from. And I'm guessing the Praeses is some sort of AI given Alice referring to it as an it and not a he, she, they, etc.
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CONFIRMED: The Town and its surroundings are a sealed environment/preserve of some kind.
CONFIRMED: Those from Outside are not allowed in there.
CONFIRMED: There are some kind of intelligences, the 'Praeses', who are at the very least in charge of/protect and guide individuals and may be in charge of everything.
SPECULATION: The use of the term 'down here' suggests either the lower levels of a structure (like a ultra-long-haul generation ship or maybe even a 'infinite tower' building where different levels are different worlds). However, it could refer to a 'garden planet' (to use the Mass Effect term) and the Vicissitude siblings are spacers.
SPECULATION: The 'Praeses' are monitoring/guardian AIs; everyone Outside has one looking out for them.
SPECULATION: The two Vicissitude siblingss are in the Bubble Environment for a reason. Someone or something in authority Outside wants to add a chaotic element to this Environment and they've been chosen to be it.
It is quite possible that things are about to get remarkably ugly...
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Ugly? More like awesome.
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Ugly? More like awesome.
ALICE: "There's only one way to stop this disaster; we're going to the top."
ARDENT: "You think that you can get to talk to the Executive Board?"
ALICE: "No, the board are just pen-pushers and bean counters. There's only one being who can stop this now."
GAVIA: "You mean...?"
ALICE: "That's right, kids. Buckle up. We're going to get to the very top. We're going to see The Architect."
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Confirmed: Alice is formidable as hell. She knows when you are fucking with her and will demonstrate exactly why that is a really bad idea.
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A "praeses" is a leader. Archaic meaning of provincial governor, derived from the latin for "he who presides." I suppose if you wanted to be inaccurately direct, you could say it translates to English as "president." But that's not quite it. Anyway, it came to refer to particular class of provincial governor. Basically the bottom rung of three.
In 18th century German, the title designated the equivalent of a PhD advisor/mentor.
In modern terms, it's used as title for "Chairman" in a handful of religious settings and student societies.
Speculation:
1. The Praeses is a machine. While very little is actually impossible--just extremely unlikely is some cases, computers breaking their coded rules is colloquially "impossible." It certainly the kind of thing you expect someone to say of computer, especially in a scifi setting. "TX71 killed Jones? But that would violate the first law! That's impossible!"
2. Alice referse to it with the genderless pronoun "it" rather than "they." In English, that's bad form. No one need assume they are speaking English, but it's a general rule of storytelling clarity that you don't go using words in non-standard ways without some kind of hint that you're going to be doing that.
3. They have transporters in the Outside. I'm hoping against matter/energy conversion, as that gets weird.
4. Alice is the local equivalent of a Praeses, or has been deputized by the same. She's too well informed. The fact that she can't directly, or via appeal to higher authority, send the Vicissitudes home suggests either a lack of ability or a rule that she can't break.
5. The Vicissitude Praeses is a singular entity, or a collective. It is not a "one of many" That's why Gavia calls it "the" and Alice says that Ardent tricked it then Gavia convinced it. Alice appears to be saying that they both interacted with the same one thing.
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It could very well be a mix of both.
Cybernetic 'Elite Class' types who are a benign, but stern version of the Borg and operate either individually or in concert as a Hive Mind when the situation requires it.
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It'll be a several millennia old Pintsize.
Alice: "By the Singularity, you're him! The Butt King. Pintsize."
Pintsize: "Hey, I haven't been the Butt King since 2366!"
Alice: "I've heard the stories. Why would they put someone with your reputation in charge?"
Pintsize: "Geez, make hippo anuses appear on every screen on the planet in 2021 and they never let you live it down!"
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Even better - the Praeses will be May. :evil:
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CONFIRMED: The Town and its surroundings are a sealed environment/preserve of some kind.
No, it could be the whole planet, with "Outside" being orbital habitats or just a station for an even bigger culture.
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CONFIRMED: The Town and its surroundings are a sealed environment/preserve of some kind.
No, it could be the whole planet, with "Outside" being orbital habitats or just a station for an even bigger culture.
Yeah, I thought this was strongly implied.
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I can't imagine May or Pintsize allowing themselves to be modified with rules they couldn't break.
Can the Borg really be called a group? If it really is a single minded entity, does it matter how many parts it is made of? I'm not saying the word can't be applied. I'm saying that it is a group in the same way as I am a group. I'm a population of trillions, all by myself. But my cells aren't individuals in the same way a borg drone isn't an individual.
I figure if the Praeses is a collective, it's either one mind or a very small group.
Consider this: So far, Alice hasn't been wrong in what she has said about the way world works--how the Grove relates to the Outside. If that trend is continuing, it suggests the most important question is the one Alice is implying--What are the siblings hiding?
Right now, the only thing I can think of that fits all the facts is that they have discovered some means to circumvent or subvert some core aspect of the Praeses or the infrastructure it runs on. Unfortunately, that analysis depends on the assumption that everything they've said is true.
Ardent is "on vacation," but it's not a sanctioned trip by any means. His absence--and the place he went--poses a threat to whatever he and Gavia know because it makes it obvious that they know something. This explains Gavia's anger, as well as means she chose to find out where he was. That she was willing to do something that flashy suggests that it's difficult to "see" into the Grove from Outside. No one's going to notice a few explosions, and no one's likely to believe Ardent did something impossible, unless he's caught in the act of doing the impossible thing.
So the faster Gavia finds him and brings him back, the better.
At this point, Gavia and Ardent have different goals. Ardent wants to continue his vacation, and Gavia wants to bring him back. If we assume that they really do know something valuable, it's not in either of their interests to let Alice know. They likely ended up giving the game away by assuming Alice wasn't aware of the nature of the impossibilities. (Ardent did twig to the fact that Alice is better informed than he expected, but he was distracted. Gavia has less of an excuse, given the fact that "primitive" Alice just gave her an epic smackdown.)
Of course, that all rampant speculation. Not a thread of evidence to support it. And it ignores the most pressing question of all:
Where's Jack?
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Of course, that all rampant speculation. Not a thread of evidence to support it. And it ignores the most pressing question of all:
Where's Jack?
No,no,no the question is:
If Alice lives in a one story house, why does it have a staircase going up?
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Alice's house doesn't have a "ceiling" hanging under the eaves in that corner. The ceiling is vaulted, following the line of the roof. There's clearly something under the vault, since there's a ladder leading to it. I looks like there's six and a half feet of clearance between the top of the exterior wall and the peak of the roof. Not what I would call a comfortable head room, but I'm six feet tall. Alice doesn't seem quite that tall to me.
I guess Jack could be up there.
Also, worth noting: Gavia is a loon.
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No, all loons are Gavia.
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Also noticed: the windows are set deep into the walls. That could indicate that the walls were made that way on purpose.
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I'm getting the feeling that we now have our main cast of characters (Ardent, Jack, Gavia, and obviously Alice,) and that our main conflict is going to revolve around whatever the heck a Praeses is, and whatever is going wrong with them.
And it only took, uh, three and a half months to set that up... I've made my issues with the pacing clear in the past.
That being said, I'm really liking where this is going!
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I'm sticking with my theory that the Praeses deliberately allowed the Vicissitude kids in. The reason? Either a malfunction or a part of an ancient experimental protocol that a human could never understand even if the Praeses were programmed to explain, which they aren't.
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No, all loons are Gavia.
Multiple personality disorder?
If the Praeses is involved in something fundamentally incomprehensible to humans it would be a really dull story--"Just as it is impossible to conceive of intelligent live totally different from our own, so we find our Earth trained minds unable to comprehend the weird phenomenon that may exist on this strange new planet."
I have no idea where the quote comes from, but it makes the point well enough. We can't have real stories about the incomprehensible because the author can't comprehend it. As such, the audience couldn't understand either. Certainly a story could be told. Ultimately we tell stories about people, so having the inconceivable in the background works just fine. But...
It's an X-Files problem. At a certain point your learn that the author has no intention of ever answering the questions, or ever moving closer to resolution. The threat ceases to have power because you know that the sword cannot fall. It's possible Jeph is going to do that, but I'd be let down if he did. The single reason I am a fan of QC is that he set up his story based on one of those questions that authors of consumer fiction often pose with no intention of answering, "Will they or won't they?" Authors don't like answering those questions because they often build all of the tension around them. Answer the question, and you lose the tension.
But Jeph answered the question.
Writing alien intelligence--even if it's just artificial--is hard. It's hard because it's impossible. It's always humans in funny make up. But people can write stories about humans in funny make up well enough that they seem alien (Asimov's Robots make a good, if jarringly anachronistic, example). Whatever motive the Praeses has, it will be explicable if it's important to the story. Otherwise it's a cheat (unless, of course, the whole point of the story is that the Praeses is inexplicable. But I still think that's an X-Files problem).
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Asimov's Second Foundation provides a good idea for where this may go. The 2F was originally founded by Harri Seldon to monitor and protect his grand plan for the salvation of human civilisation of the galaxy, his so-called 'prime radiant'. However, with time, his plan was 'refined' by later leaders of the 2F (much in the same way as later clerics 'refined' the teachings of their prophets and turned them into divine mandates for imperialism, misogyny and a clerical dictatorship). Ultimately, the direction of the Foundation became increasingly perverted and more and more about the ego of the leadership of the Second Foundation.
I'm wondering whether this is what we are seeing to a certain extent here. The Praeses (those who preside) are responsible for maintaining and overseeing the successful conclusion of The Experiment, of which the Town and the Vicissitudes' home environment are both part. However, the Praeses are flexible enough (with self-modifying code) that they are able to refine their instructions to improve the efficiency of The Experiment and fidelity of the results. Based on this, they may have been subtly and sometimes overtly altering the conditions of The Experiment because they have concluded that the original researchers' were too imperfect to fine-tune it properly. There may have been lots of modifications over the years (Alice's introduction may have been one). Ardent and Gavia are just a more overt modification.
I wonder if this story will be Alice's voyage to discover the truth behind The Experiment and to see if the Praeses' modifications are benign or the result of a dangerous malfunction ("I'm bored, lets start a war between two Environments because we can!").
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Have we had a discussion recently of the nature of Alice herself? I mean, is she another outsider with a special role in maintaining the "primitives", or is she a "primitive" who has gained some (externally provided) extra skills and knowledge? The first seems more likely, but at one point Gavia implied the second.
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Have we had a discussion recently of the nature of Alice herself? I mean, is she another outsider with a special role in maintaining the "primitives", or is she a "primitive" who has gained some (externally provided) extra skills and knowledge? The first seems more likely, but at one point Gavia implied the second.
Gavia has no special knowledge; she's just assuming that, because Alice lives amongst the primitives and basically looks like one, she is one. My call remains is that Alice is a Caretaker, one of the Praeses' human agents within the Environments that keep things in good repair and occasionally enact upgrades or deal with... security issues.
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Well, the Viccistudes have said they are on vacation... I think that may be a literal truth. The town and surrounding areas are essentially a zoo. One of those 'Views into the ways our ancestors lived' except instead of actors in period outfits, they don't know about the outside world. Alice is there as Caretaker and janitor. She fixes things that the residents/zoo animals don't understand and she deals with interpersonal issues that could disrupt the town to much. I'm guessing she's from Outside, and modified to look like the locals, but with a few hidden tricks she might need. She seems isolated from the Outside though. When Ardent showed up she didn't try to contact the upper management or Parses, and she didn't grab him and send him right back. It seems her choices are trying to minimize the social damage a blue alien boy might cause in her bubble, or make him disappear permanently.
Ardent seems like a bored kid who decided he wanted a closer look at the zoo animals. Especially the laaaaadies. So he tricked/bribed/whatever one of the volunteer workers to try and teleport down to the surface. Something he was surprised actually worked. I suspect that when it was found he was gone and where, Gavia was sent down with the Prases' permission to get him back as quickly as possible and minimize the disruption. They/it probably figured that Gavia looked sufficiently like the zoo animals (or was changed quickly to look like them) so she could get in and remove him quietly when she found Ardent. They didn't know she was going to get all explosion happy as soon as she arrived.
Alice seems the odd one out. Apparently the outside world can send agents down to the surface, but didn't tell them to find Alice. Or couldn't contact her. Or tried to but she wasn't home/near her communicator so they sent Gavia. That or the Prases doesn't know Alice is there for some reason. Maybe she is a native who found a bit of outer world tech and figured it out, and decided to become a caretaker on her own. There are still so many questions, but we're starting to get some answers.
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My current take is that Gavia and Ardent are just a couple of bored and spoiled kids with an immature regard (if this is not a redundant statement) of the world around them, including the "primitives." Ardent thought he could play with the zoo animals and Gavia is -- as older but not adult siblings will do -- taking her role of older sibling a little too seriously.
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Ardent asked someone who apparently had physical access to a transporter and they were able to hack it; how is this tricking anybody?
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Ardent asked someone who apparently had physical access to a transporter and they were able to hack it; how is this tricking anybody?
My guess that the trick was to do so without alerting the Praesis in charge of him and Gavia to his actions. As Alice points out, that is supposedly impossible, which is what inspires my theory that Ardent and Gavia's misadventures to date have been entirely with the Praeses' knowledge and that they are following some bizarre agenda that only a centuries-old AI could formulate.
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A lot of things that are 'supposedly impossible' are that way only because nobody challenges that assumption.
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Exactly. It's only supposed to be impossible because the Praeses is supposed to prevent it. And I'm going to throw out the possibility that this isn't some incomprehensible plan by the Praeses, but rather that it is suffering from the AI equivalent of senility. Time and entropy have degraded it to the point where it can't fulfill its duties any more. Which is kind of frightening when you think about it - an incredibly powerful but senile AI.
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Alice keeps saying it impossible. It could be that it's just a schtick. Thing happens: Alice says it's not possible. Que Inigo Montoya.
But I don't buy it. It's early in the story, but this point keeps coming up. Alice, Ardent, and Gavia know what she's talking about. They just haven't told us.
If Ardent and Gavia aren't lying (omission counts here) then there's nothing really special about their being there other than a broken rule, and Alice is wrong. But if Alice is right, and they aren't lying, then they really are the specialest goddamn snowflakes Alice has ever met.
Maybe its a bias toward responsible people, but I can't help but believe that Alice knows what she's on about. If that's the case, it's vastly unlikely that Gavia and Ardent are super special snowflakes. Ardent's guilty look seems to support that.
Jeph promised exposition on the twitfeed. He also promised more questions than answers. Ardent and Gavia as simple troublemakers doesn't raise any questions. Ardent as troublemaker and Gavia as recovery agent does raise any questions--or if either scenario does, they still answer more than create (The answers of Ardent = troublemaker, Gavia =troublemaker/troublefixer, and Alice = obstinately misinformed act as first level answers to every question but "what is a Praeses and what is the Outside). Alice being right raises a bunch of questions (Everyone in the scene is more than appear to be, so what are they? The Praeses should have prevented this, so why didn't it? This all has to add up to a threat to Alice's world--a personal threat--she is the main character--so how? Where's Jack? What happened to Ardent's tail? Is Gavia's outfit self cleaning or did Jeph decide he didn't want dray dirt and blood stains? Did Gavia's teeth grow back?What is the question of life the universe and everything? Did I leave the iron on?).
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I'm also a little troubled by a transporter that works but apparently delivers you unconscious.
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I'm also a little troubled by a transporter that works but apparently delivers you unconscious.
Ardent's reaction when he awoke was so joyful that I suspect that he genuinely feared not waking up at all. Maybe there are shields and programme lock-outs designed to stop people doing what he did and his accomplice's claim to be able to 'hack' them was of dubious plausibility.
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Rhat makes me wonder why he risked it. I mean, we could just chalk it up to the stupid, but maybe Ardent's gadfly pose is more act than he'd like to admit. Which raises the question, what was so dangerous that risking death by transporter was a more sensible option?
(Note: given his unconscious arrival, we can guess death by transporter is painless--or no one has time to scream before they're gone. So it's not far fetched to think a fate worse than that particular death might be possible.)
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(Note: given his unconscious arrival, we can guess death by transporter is painless--or no one has time to scream before they're gone. So it's not far fetched to think a fate worse than that particular death might be possible.)
Read The Jaunt by Stephen King, if you haven't already.
There are deaths and there are deaths.
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I suspect Alice is an ex-soldier. She retired to what she thought was going to be a nice, relaxed place where the problems are simple and small, and where she expected not ever to have to fight again. Because when she does fight, she gets rather nasty, as can be seen in her fight with Gavia.
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Ardent's reaction when he awoke was so joyful that I suspect that he genuinely feared not waking up at all.
I dunno, maybe it took hours to set up and he fell asleep on the transporter and didn't wake up until he was already in...Town.
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I doubt we'll get full exposition on entities that will become characters in the story. In other words, I think Jeph will let the Praeses tell its(their?) own story(ies) when the the time comes for it(them) to participate.
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I'm also a little troubled by a transporter that works but apparently delivers you unconscious.
I would hope it works some way other than most people agree the Star Trek transporter is supposed to work: basically a people-fax that destroys the original after transmission.
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Actually, that's not how the transporter works. The transporter uses good old E=mc2 (or more accurately, E²=(mc²)²+(pc)²) to turn the target into engery, then fires the energy at the destination, where it reassembles the energy as a person. Sine mass and energy are equivalent, it isa supposed to be the same person (same matter/energy) on each end.
My objection to the transporter is that turning even a tiny fraction of a person to energy would be a huge explosion. Then there's the whole method of handwavium behind converting matter to energy. I'm not against handwavium. I love the stuff. but the thing about turning matter into energy is that some of the energy likes to whiz off as neutrinos. those thing are pretty much impossible to catch.
Those things aside, there's also the dead pan delivery and the implausible driving. Jason Statham's fun to watch in a fight, but something about flying Audis breaks suspension of disbelief.
Granted, any way you design a transporter, it's going to violate some law of physics (thus flying Audis) but the way the transporter is meant to work, there's no physical reason it couldn't make copies--it's not a fax as much as it is a factory. It takes you apart and puts you back together. There's no reason it has to reassemble you as you. It could assemble you as someone else (Tuvix anyone?). Given the right starting mass, there's no reason it couldn't assemble any starting material as you. The transporter can make people from scratch.
That's not a bad thing on its own, but it doesn't actually fit with the world Star Trek presents. The implications of what the transporter can do (including some of those kicks) are mind boggling. I'm all for a story that keeps to that--that doesn't try to sweep them under the rug, as were (or leg sweep them and punch them in the face). But if you aren't going to explore those implications, I'd rather just handwave in something equally improbable without the explosions and replication effect--like a wormhole or something.
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Don't be silly, all you need to do is say "Energise."
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The implications of matter transport and replication technology are huge, in the social, philosophical, legal and technological sense. And most of it was ignored in Star Trek. Even the most basic question of.. if you are destroying a person's body and rebuilding it at the destination, how is their consciousness transferred? Does this mean that the consciousness of a person is merely electrochemical impulses? How does this impact the concept of the soul? Patterns of people can be saved in the transport buffer, does that mean you could make multiple copies of a person by just providing the energy to churn out duplicates? What about medical uses? Could you alter someone's transport pattern to change how they are reassembled? Couldn't that eliminate most diseases, injuries and possibly even old age by 'resetting' a person's pattern in the transport buffer?
And then there are the social and financial implications of replicators. That was only ever glosses over in the most vaguest of terms in the shows. Mostly by saying everyone's physical needs were taken care of, leaving people to pursue their interests, rather than slave away at jobs for the sake of survival. Star Trek was just very good at handwavium and junk science to fix plot problems, rather than technology and science driving the plot, most of the time. It was pretty much in the state of 'any advanced science is indistinguishable from magic'. And it never took a very close look at the magic.
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Exactly. When Dr. Pulaski got infected by the antibodies from the perfect children, there's a throwaway line about how the Transporter should filter out disease vectors like bacteria or viruses. That's just amazing right there. If the transporter can filter out things, why can't it add things? Lose an arm? No problem. Step into the transporter with this bucket of organic matter.
Let's say the Transporter is all or nothing. That is, it can always assemble you as you are when the sensors read you. We'll handwave the ability to remove vectors as super special snowflake circumstances. But we'll assume that the pattern from the last time you used the transporter can't be combined with the one generated just now (ignoring the fact that the Dr. Pulaski issue I mentioned was solved by doing just that). So it can't just add back an arm. It reassembles you exactly as you were the last time you used the transporter. So if you used the transporter 3 days ago, you become you 3 days ago. Everything you learned/experienced in those 3 days is lost.
So obviously you don't want to do that to fix a paper cut. But what about a more serious injury. Like death.
From your POV you're dead either way. But from the POV of the people who know you, from your contribution to society, your death can be fixed!
Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga has this idea of implants that track your experience. Then you go to a shop and and download your life. If you die, you can be brought back from your backup. A transporter pattern is a backup like that, except it's not just your memory/personality. It's you, right down to the clothes you had on at the time.
There's a lot of story potential there. Such a story would be kinda difficult to tell, since we are used to death being a serious thing--it's the same problem as creating a truly alien intelligence, writ small. But it is writ small, so it's actually do able. Some of the theories about why Gavia was so cavalier about using (seemingly) deadly force relate. if death isn't a permanent thing, people behave a little different.
(Hamilton's world, with the fact that body-loss also equals losing everything since your last trip to the back up--though, IIRC recovering your chip allows you to be restored right up to the time of you death. So if I shot you in the head, I've caused you a body-loss. If I then shot you in the chip, it's murder, even though you have a an earlier backup--has interesting results. Like a character is declared legally dead due to disappearance, so they restore him from backup. Not knowing if the other him is still alive somewhere gives him an anxiety complex. I think there's a side plot where a person has faked their death so that they'll be restored from backup and the backup will have to deal with the repercussions of their actions and debts. Been a long time since I read those books.)
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Alternative Possibility - The transport volunteers fly stealth shuttles to drop off supplies for Alice and the other Caretakers (as well as do things like cloud seeding). This is done exclusively at night. Not wanting to wander into (or even find) the town at night, Ardent just decided to take 40 winks at the point where the pilot dropped him off and that's where Jack and his uncle found him.
This doesn't entirely explain Ardent's actions. One explanation is that he didn't entirely trust the guy and he half expected to wake up on the wrong planet or in the exercise yard of one of the Praeses' prisons for those who are persistently naughty (for example by trying to break into Preserves).
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Some of the transporter issues were discussed in TNG. Biggest one was Scottie's idea of saving his transporter pattern in his doomed ship, which resulted in him suddenly appearing - still at the age he was in ST:G - on Enterprise D.
Transporter use was glossed over in TOS because of the expedience of telling the story. They couldn't have the captain and crew fly down via shuttlecraft every single episode, as that would increase the budget of the show. So, they developed the idea of a transporter which would allow the actors to just "suddenly" be in the place where they could start telling the story.
However Jeph wants to explain it is fine, but I think the similarity is clear - in developing the story, we need to get all the characters in the same place, while indicating that this isn't the world of QC (or even the Real World) that we're dealing with.
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I suppose I could go on about the inconsistency of the transporter some more, but that's not the point I was trying to make. And it leaves the topic of Alice Grove completely.
The main point I was making was that transporter isn't really a fax machine (A fax scans an object, sends the results of the scan. The recieving fax then recreates the object with materials on hand). What the transporter does is scan the object, then turn the object into something more portable. It send both the object and result of the scan to the destination, where the object is reassembled in the less portable form. All the technobabble about buffers, matter streams, confinement beams, etc is refering to this process.
In Alice Grove we know they have transporters, but we don't know what those devices do.
After thinking about Star Trek's transporter for an old idea I had about reinvent Star Trek for the modern age, I came to the conclusion that the transporter was a terrible idea--basically for all of the reasons I mentioned above, and then some. I'll the biggest and then some:
It removes danger from the story.
Kirk and crew beam down. Danger happens! What do they do? Well, they can beam right out.
The obvious fix is to say something prevents the transporter from working. I'd be cool with that for something that ran like old school Doctor Who, with season long stories. But a 22 episode per season show starts to get wonky when your high tech stuff breaks every other episode just introduce drama. At the same time, I felt that Star Trek without a "transporter" isn't star Trek. So I reinvented it.
Mind ylu, I've never written any of this, and this the first time I've mentioned it to anyone else. So, it's not a declaration that my idea is better. It's just a different way of looking at the idea, given that I don't have the limitations of a tv production budget in 1966.
The transporter is a ship. Well, it's system, part of which is carried by a ship. An autonomous shuttle. The system ALWAYS requires a receiver. To beam from the Enterprise to Earth you have to beam into a transporter facility. So the shuttle part of the system is for beaming to places without a pad. The shuttle brings one down. This is better than just using shuttles for ship to surface movement because it is one trip down, one trip back up for the shuttle, but once it lands the crew can go back and forth between the ship and surface all they want.
It induces drama because even if the solution to "Danger happens" is "beam back up," you first have to get from the danger to the transporter.
Whether this version of the transporter was going to have all those other abilities was a question I haven't answered. One issue with updating Star Trek to a modern version of the future is that our ideas of what the future might be like are a lot different. As much as I want to do the project, I also want it to feel like Star Trek. Having actual backups of one's self seems aodd in that context.
Anyway, this all relates to AG in the sense that a generic "transporter"--the Star Trek default--adds the same problems. No writer is obliged to actually solve those problems, but I'd said originally that I'd hoped Jeph was handwaving in an idea that didn't create those issues--like a wormhole. (The energy involved is still titanic, but wormholes don't copy people---unless they are turned into time machines, but that's actually a pretty tricky thing to do, so...). If it's going to be a basic matter/energy transporter, it would be nice to see that some of the implications of that technology actually influence the world the characters live in. (Like the occasionally used trope of, "we live this primitive way because we can. We can because we aren't primitive at all.") Matter/energy manipulation means you can have anything you need, which makes you question what the word "need" means.
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As I'm ignorant about the non-Discworld sci-fi of the past twenty years or so, I won't comment on the references. But I just get the vibe that the Vicissitudes really are the specialest snowflakes. As in Ma or Pa Vicissitude is ranked higher then they care to admit. Of course, the Praeses may habitually break the rules, or break them for a reason of their/its own (some interesting possibilities have been proposed), but it might also be the case that the Vicissitudes are exempt from some of the rules strictly enforced on commoners (whatever equivalent they have among the spacers). Ardent's look in the last panel suggests that he still has something to confess... In other words, Alice hit very close to the truth.
I, too, wonder, what Jack thinks of this discussion. Narrativium has probably made him temporarily deaf. Or may be his running errands like hoisting bucketloads of water from the well in Alice's garden?
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Outside of the past 20 years gives you all of Star Trek up to the second season of Voyager ;p
I still think Alice's certainty that tricking the Praeses isn't possible and that getting in from the outside isn't supposed to be possible has significant meaning. If family connections are all it takes to circumvent impossible, then I'd expect Alice wouldn't think of it that way. If there's one consistent rule of reality it's that the rules don't apply to the powerful, and the powerful live that to the fullest.
If subverting the directives of Praeses was just one of the rules, Alice would have seen a lot more tourists. (Generally rules against doing things people do people don't want to do don't exist. Either demand creates a rule or the existence of a rule creates demand. So the fact that not contaminating the primitives is a rule suggests a demand for breaking it.) This suggests to me that there are some aspects of the Praeses control that you can't buy your way past.
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:)
(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/movie_ages.png)
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Did you realize that that comic came out four years ago?
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Did you realize that that comic came out four years ago?
That's meta (that's what the Kids These Days say, right?)
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I don't know what the Kids These Days say. I was born closer to the moon landing than the present day.
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There are no kids these days.
Only Zuul.
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I don't know what the Kids These Days say. I was born closer to the moon landing than the present day.
You could be as young as 22 for that to be true. Almost 23 but still.
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That's true. I had a senior moment thinking of that one. Then again, I was born closer to the Eisenhower administration than the present day.
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So was I, albeit barely. I'm 27.
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Well, since I was born in '62.......
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...you were born closer to the Taft administration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Howard_Taft) than the present day.
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[LostInSpaceRobotVoice]Oh ha ha ha[/LostInSpaceRobotVoice]
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I was born closer to the moon landing than the present day.
I was first married the same week as the moon landing.
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In 10 months Mr. Fujitsu is going to fire Marty McFly...
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I actually haven't seen the second or third BttF movies. I probably should.
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Did you realize that that comic came out four years ago?
Do you think we've had all the best comics already, and it's all downhill from here?
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1920 (http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1920)
There, I'd have to go with '75.
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I think the best music happened before I was born, so I dunno if that makes me old. But there are always a few good songs a year even now.
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New comic up and... the mood whiplash is quite astonishing!
No, Alice, they're not idiots. They're worse: They're children in fully mature bodies. Imagine six-year olds with hormones and superpowers and you'll get close to what they are.
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Scary!
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Every time Gavia opens her mouth, I knock another year off her assumed age... She's sounding less like a teen and more like a little kid these days...
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I'm telling you, execution would have been a lot simpler and less irritating.........
p.s. Alice was pretty innocent-looking when Gavia hit the boom.
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I'm wondering if Jeph created the 'Scary!' meme in reaction to our response to Alice's demonic smile whilst she was pounding the stuffing out of Gavia?
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p.s. Alice was pretty innocent-looking when Gavia hit the boom.
Alice, when Gavia met her.
(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Dj8lbbPr1QI/VLj3wOlmBpI/AAAAAAAABvs/SFoz9oEl8GM/s800/Alice.png)
I'm gonna have to give Gavia the point. It's a stupid point, but she's not lying. That's the face of a woman who means to beat something to within an inch of it's life, and knows she can do it.
First impressions. They color what comes after.
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*hands out-stretched, palms forward and empty, face fairly neutral* "Can't we talk about thi-"
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I didn't say Alice wasn't trying to negotiate. I said the first thing Gavia saw was Alice's scary face. Which is true.
People who should be trained observers constantly shoot and kill innocents because of first impressions. What Gavia did was stupid, but that up there was her first impression of Alice.
I'm also not saying Alice is wrong. They are idiots.
Neither has asked just how she came out of that explosion unharmed.
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Alice, when Gavia met her.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
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Neko_Ali, winning the thread.
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Neko_Ali, winning the thread.
Agreed. That was bloody brilliant.
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Thank you thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the blue monkey dishwater.
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Complimenting the Purple Monkey Dishwasher?
I wonder if Alice has Panadol on the shelves for the headache she's beginning to feel dealing with these two?
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Purple Monkey Dishwater is the specialty next door. The Blue Monkey is the house special here.
*holds up a bottle with a grinning Ardent on it*
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*Holds up a bottle of Ol' Janx Spirit*
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I honestly think we should have retired Purple Monkey Dishwasher out of respect when Marcia Wallace died.
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So THAT'S what happened to Ardent's tail huh. Gavia didn't even bother too. You're a bad sister Gavia.
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He didn't even notice? Sheesh Ardent...
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So no nerve endings in the tail, then. Which is consistent with it being a post-natal addition to his physiology. Meaning he can get another one next time he's upstairs.
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So that's what happened to Ardent's delightful tail, huh.
Fix'd
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Thanks Method.
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I saw this coming!
Well, actually I thought it was an art error and then Jeph started cropping the image so you couldn't see his tail.
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Thinking about the sibs today the thought came to mind that they're the transhuman/posthuman/whatever the hell they are version of Sam. Gavia probably brings Z'nerreibian Space Frogs home regularly, and Ardent has been known to pretend he's Skullmaster, Master of Skulls. Which regularly pisses off the real Skullmaster.
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Nannomeds must have dulled the pain.
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It's certainly a designer tail. Ardent said as much to Jack. It's probably capable of full feeling, too. I'm gonna have to go with nanomeds on this one.
I saw this coming!
Well, actually I thought it was an art error and then Jeph started cropping the image so you couldn't see his tail.
Jeph already drew the stump in an earlier strip. He's been setting this up since the "She's my sister" strip.
I'm wondering if the exposition is going actually expose anything, beyond Ardent's nipples. I mean there really are a lot of questions about this world. If I were a non-QC reader or one of the Patreon people who nominally fund AG I'd be pretty disappointed in this comic. We're 32 strips in and we know nothing.
That's probably pretty fast for a five day a week comic, but it's insanely slow for 2 day.
I feel kinda armchair-ish, saying that, but I'm struggling with the same issue in writing, and I don't have a devoted fan base to cover for it. You start thinking, "I can't, as much as I'd like to, take seven strips on this."
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I feel kinda armchair-ish, saying that, but I'm struggling with the same issue in writing, and I don't have a devoted fan base to cover for it. You start thinking, "I can't, as much as I'd like to, take seven strips on this."
I dunno, Grrl Power (http://grrlpowercomic.com/) has been on the first super-villain battle since March 27th of last year, and will finally finish it this Thursday, according to the news post. Almost a year on one fight.
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There were a lot of people though... He did mention that he actually had to take a bunch of stuff out to make it shorter. Fight scenes themselves are fine for comics like this, but there has to be some exposition, jokes or story advance throughout the fight and not just people punching each other. That goes with any scene I think.
But I do believe in this story we're learning something new about the characters each strip, it's just all kinda subtle.
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It's official: Today's comic has me stumped
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I feel kinda armchair-ish, saying that, but I'm struggling with the same issue in writing, and I don't have a devoted fan base to cover for it. You start thinking, "I can't, as much as I'd like to, take seven strips on this."
I dunno, Grrl Power (http://grrlpowercomic.com/) has been on the first super-villain battle since March 27th of last year, and will finally finish it this Thursday, according to the news post. Almost a year on one fight.
Bad example, since I'm not talking about story pacing, but story set up. Grrl Power set up its story hook in like 6 strips, sweetened the hook ~15 strips after that, then got to the first action ~15 strips later. The next big exposition comes in ~20 strips (only 10 after the last action ends). So the Grrl Power pacing seems in line with what I'd expect for a comic book. Which might be an accident, but still.
I don't know the update rate of Grrl Power. I expect it was slower than Alice to start, based on the colors, but the author might be a fast artist/colorist. Setting a solid hook by strip six and then running with it by strip 20? Seems pretty good to me.
Then again, my sense of pacing is imposing rather arbitrary cut offs. For all we know this the tail end of the set up, and an actual hook is about to snap.
I'm not sure. If this were old school QC, I'd say different things about how the story ought to break. But the AG punchlines don't have the same, well, punch as the first QC. I haven't laughed at a single AG. I actually chuckled at several of the Grrl Power. I might have to add that to my reading list. I'm sure there's room at the end.
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I agree with the recent commentary about pacing. I feel like we still haven't gotten to what the real conflict is going to be, we're just now hopefully going to learn something about the universe, and I know practically nothing about any of the main characters beyond names and basic personality archetypes.
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He didn't notice that his tail was missing? So, no nerve endings then. Or some kind of adaptation that stops him from feeling the searing pain of the traumatic amputation of one of his limbs. Some kind of unconscious injury-control adaptation is supported by the fact that Alice didn't notice him sitting in a pool of blood.
This implication of an artificially-augmented body feeds into my 'Body by Me' theory that both Gavia and Ardent might have remodelled their bodies using their nano-bots. I wonder how human they normally look?
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Ardent should have turned tail when he saw explosions.
-
He did. He just didn't turn with it.
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It suddenly occurred to me: Where's Jack? Alice specifically asked him to tag along to her house as she had something that she needed him to do but he's been missing in action since then. I suppose she might have him doing some busywork outside whilst she debriefs the Vicissitudes (which probably includes details that he cannot be allowed to know) but what job does she want him to do?
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It's official: Today's comic has me stumped
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Pun jar, NAO!
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It suddenly occurred to me: Where's Jack? Alice specifically asked him to tag along to her house as she had something that she needed him to do but he's been missing in action since then. I suppose she might have him doing some busywork outside whilst she debriefs the Vicissitudes (which probably includes details that he cannot be allowed to know) but what job does she want him to do?
He could be outside, tending a fire under a very large pot of oil. Once it comes to a boil, Alice will start seriously questioning Gavia.
Or Alice could have brought him along because she knows she's going to need to work off a lot of frustration after this is done, and Jack is going to be her boy-toy.
Or he's making cookies. Because Alice is from the Dark Side.
What I really think, though, is that Alice sent him back to fetch Ardent's tail. She's going to hold it hostage to ensure Ardent's good behavior.
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It's official: Today's comic has me stumped
I don't think it's going to restore itself, either. So don't be disappointed if there's a lack of groan.
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He could be outside, tending a fire under a very large pot of oil. Once it comes to a boil, Alice will start seriously questioning Gavia.
Or Alice could have brought him along because she knows she's going to need to work off a lot of frustration after this is done, and Jack is going to be her boy-toy.
Or he's making cookies. Because Alice is from the Dark Side.
I like the way you think.
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Pun jar, NAO!
What have I said about pun shaming? I can't exactly punish you for it but it's still discouraged :parrot:
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Now we know Gavia's job. She works at a car wash.
She's the detailer.
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This is a new form of Butts Disease.
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Since Ardent has no understanding of money he can't take advantage of retail services.
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Now we know Gavia's job. She works at a car wash.
She's the detailer.
*groan*
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Now we know Gavia's job. She works at a car wash.
She's the detailer.
*groan*
I suppose that if Alice can fix it, she'd be working in retail?
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.....Anyway, this all relates to AG in the sense that a generic "transporter"--the Star Trek default--adds the same problems. No writer is obliged to actually solve those problems, but I'd said originally that I'd hoped Jeph was handwaving in an idea that didn't create those issues--like a wormhole. (The energy involved is still titanic, but wormholes don't copy people---unless they are turned into time machines, but that's actually a pretty tricky thing to do, so...). If it's going to be a basic matter/energy transporter, it would be nice to see that some of the implications of that technology actually influence the world the characters live in. (Like the occasionally used trope of, "we live this primitive way because we can. We can because we aren't primitive at all.") Matter/energy manipulation means you can have anything you need, which makes you question what the word "need" means.
......, I'd rather just handwave in something equally improbable without the explosions and replication effect--like a wormhole or something.
The writer of schlockmercenary (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/) had addressed both topics of macro and micro wormholes and their application as well as the application of nanites for military use.
Add in politics, intrigue, spy stuff, marketing, lots of explosions and stuff. Did I mention alien aliens? You might recognize a few that were inspired by classic storied races.
A different premise on which to base transporter technology is extrapolating the use of the Diode Tunneling Effect. Mind you that effect still required something on either side of the space being traversed. Well that and compensation for things like relative motion and altitude. Some good short stories and books were based on that idea.
Fantasy has it easy. All you need is a 5th level teleport spell.
<rant>
Star Trek was always science lite in TOS but I felt they kept their hand-waving limited and wrote everything down so things at least were consistent.
Each series became less and less science and more, throw the latest buzzards at them since nobody will know what they mean anyways, we sure don't.
Add to that using a different explanation for the technology whenever they needed a technical mishap to write a story around.
The science that more and more of the stories were based on was tabloid at best.
Also a lot of the stories were "inspired" from a lot of older science fiction short stories and adapted by the screen writers [aka butchered]
</rant>
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The Teraport. I'm familiar. ;p
Pillage. Then burn.
Howard actually went "there" as far as transporters go. The gatekeepers made copies of everyone who used their galactic skate transporter network and interrogated the copies to death. Ghey used the information for political and economic advantage.
Thus, the Gav. And Breya's husband.
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Dude needs some clothes anyway. Time to visit a tailor.
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You know, all this talk of Ardent's appendage is full of sound and furry, but signifying nothing. How do I know this? Because, before he lost it, it was a tail towed by an idiot.
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At least he's not under surveillance anymore.
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Maybe he does not feel the pain because of the shock. It happens to humans. Why not to Ardent?
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Maybe he does not feel the pain because of the shock. It happens to humans. Why not to Ardent?
Shock only lasts so long and it has been quite a while. His pain aside, an injury of that kind would bleed horrifically. The doctor would have noticed him standing or sitting in a pool of blood and mentioned it to Alice.
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Which is why I consider it more likely that, like his sis, his body has some form of Nannotech/Nannomeds in it.
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I kinda hope we get answer to that. I kinda hope we don't because there a ton of other stuff I'd like an answer to.
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And undoubtedly by Strip 2015 we'll have all the answers :-D
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So, 19 years from now?
Cool. I'll set a timer :)
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At which time we'll find out that this is actually Tais favorite Sci-Fi TV Show in the QCverse.
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At which time we'll find out that this is actually Tais favorite Sci-Fi TV Show in the QCverse.
Headcanon accepted. And it makes for nice little easter eggs in both comics. :-D
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At which time we'll find out that this is actually Tais favorite Sci-Fi TV Show in the QCverse.
I find it difficult to believe that Tai would be interested in a work of fiction with so little overt and sub-textual erotica. :wink:
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Give it time. We'll soon learn why Ardent only wears shorts.
(The answer is easy access, btw.)
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The question then becomes: Does Tai ship Alice and Jack, or Alice and Ardent? :-D
(Answer: It's Ardent and Jack, naturally.)
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She ships Alice, Miss Wheelwright, and the copy machine that mysteriously appeared in Alice's house.
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You know, all this talk of Ardent's appendage is full of sound and furry, but signifying nothing. How do I know this? Because, before he lost it, it was a tail towed by an idiot.
I admit defeat.
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Found this while looking for tail puns:
(http://grimmsfurrytail.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-tail.jpg)
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Well at least we have this to balance out the sad that is QC.
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Cypress?
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The games afoot Alice.
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Well, I'm glad that Alice is smart enough to realise something strange is going on. I doubt that she'll let the kids out of her sight until she works out what that is.
[Edit]
Every time I see Gavia, she seems to get younger in my eyes. I'm wondering if she's about the same age as Sam in Questionable Content. That makes her behaviour a bit more comprehensible, especially if her Praeses gave her incomplete, confusing or cryptic/vague instructions. Her plea to Alice to confirm no-one was hurt in the previous comic also makes her a lot less an antagonist and a lot more a super-powered child in beyond her depth.
I'm guessing that Cupressacae is the Vicissitudes' Praesus. That's the family name for the Cypress trees, by the way. That family of trees includes the biggest and most long-lived trees on Earth, the Middle-Eastern Cypress and the North American Sequoia.
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Ah, ha! They are ents in disguise.
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Every time I see Gavia, she seems to get younger in my eyes. I'm wondering if she's about the same age as Sam in Questionable Content. That makes her behaviour a bit more comprehensible, especially if her Praeses gave her incomplete, confusing or cryptic/vague instructions. Her plea to Alice to confirm no-one was hurt in the previous comic also makes her a lot less an antagonist and a lot more a super-powered child in beyond her depth.
Seeing everyone standing up today, both siblings look like kids. It'd explain their crazy behavior a little (though I know some very young children who behave better than that ;) ).
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At which time we'll find out that this is actually Tais favorite Sci-Fi TV Show in the QCverse.
Or maybe the other way around? Maybe Ardent came to earth hoping to meet Veronica Vance?
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Ah, yes! The Historical Document!
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"We're sorry, the Cupressacae you are trying to reach is unavailable, or has traveled outside of the coverage area. Please try your call again later. Message ML-35." <bzzt bzzt bzzt bzzt bzzt>
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Looks like Alice is going to have some houseguests. I doubt at this point she'll trust them to be out of her sight for more than a few minutes. I also suspect that Alice is the primary focus of whatever it is that is going on, not Gavia and Ardent. I think they're being used.
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Gavia's going about it all wrong. All she has to do is tap her heels three times and say "There's no place like home."
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Welp, they're stuck.
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"We're sorry, but
Functional God Cupressaceae is out on lunch break. It will be back to service your request by the next major plot event. It may not agree to comply with the request, but it will be addressed."
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She forgot to say Energise.
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"We're sorry, but Functional God Cupressaceae is out on lunch break. It will be back to service your request by the next major plot event. It may not agree to comply with the request, but it will be addressed."
"As of January 26, 2015, all requests to Cupressaceae will be automatically addressed to 123 Fake Street, Faketown FK 00000."
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Cupressaceae has obviously decided that the Outside culture needs seasoning from a more... hands on... way of life.
Ardent didn't trick it. It let him go. It didn't break the rules for Gavia. It found a loophole. They can't go home until they meet it's objective.
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Cupressaceae has obviously decided that the Outside culture needs seasoning from a more... hands on... way of life.
Ardent didn't trick it. It let him go. It didn't break the rules for Gavia. It found a loophole. They can't go home until they meet it's objective.
That is exactly what I think and have thought for a while. They were allowed into the Preserve in line with the Praeses' will and purposes. So, they aren't leaving until those purposes are fulfilled. I wouldn't be surprised if the nature of those purposes are such that they are never leaving unless Alice can successfully appeal to a Higher Authority.
So, I think that we are at the end of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 will be Vicissitude back-story and Alice's initial investigations sprinkled with a liberal coating of 'fish out of water' jokes.
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"Heimdall, open the bifrost!"
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I'm going to go one step further and say that Ardent and Gavia have likely been manipulated their entire lives to reach this moment. Their education and the entertainment which they were able to access would have been finely judged to ensure that, when that door opened, they would jump through without a second thought. Naturally, they wouldn't realise that it was a trap until the door closed behind them and they couldn't even find a seam in the resulting perfect wall.
Why would the Praeses do this? I can think of two obvious reasons:
- Everyone in the Preserve is descended from people lured in from Outside and marooned there. Of course, Ardent and Gavia do not want to spend the rest of their lives as 'Primitives' in the Preserve but their desires are not relevant to this equation; what matters is to regularly inculcate fresh blood into the population in the Preserve;
- The Praeses are concerned at the increasing technological dependence of those Outside. It has been decided that select individuals will be temporarily relocated to the Preserve to learn lost social skills and crafts identified as important to improve the health of the general population Outside. Ardent and Gavia don't know it but they have been selected to be two of the Prophets of the Good Ol' Days. Whether or not they wanted to learn how to live as primitives and pass this knowledge onto those Outside is, once again, not relevant to this equation.
For two kids (and I do think that they're kids) from a technological utopia where everything is available on demand and, sometimes, even before they are consciously aware they want it, living in the Town and its environs is going to be a terrific culture shock. They are going to have to learn social skills, come to live in line with social conventions and develop bonds that have long since ceased to exist Outside. They are going to learn to co-operate and be part of a community. This is, of course, entirely in line with the Praeses purposes.
Some predictions:
- Gavia x Jack - A love story with all the expected elements of the trope of 'Rich, sophisticated but naive city girl meets simple but strong, wise and noble country boy' but with a real sci-fi tinge. For example, even though I doubt Gavia is older than fifteen, it is quite possible that she has had sexual partners but only in the 'scratch the itch' terms (because sex has lost all of its social and possibly even its reproductive significance Outside). Consequently, she has never really cared about someone before. That will be a frightening, terrible but wonderful experience; of course, her learning this lesson is one of the Praeses' purposes for her;
- Ardent working on the farm - Ardent is going to have to learn the value of things; he's going to need to make the painful mental transition to understanding that you need to earn the food on your table, the clothes on your back and the roof over your head. I have no doubt that he has the physical ability to work but it will be quite a psychological leap for him to come to understand the necessity; of course, him learning this lesson is one of the Praeses' purposes for him;
- Living in a Community - I suspect that Outside does not has much of a broader society or community. Ardent and Gavia are going to have to learn that their actions and inactions have an effect far wider than their individual selves. They are going to have to learn to lend a hand, be a part of the broader community and also develop and maintain social bonds if they want to achieve anything; of course, them learning this lesson is one of the Praeses' purposes for them;
- Auntie Alice - There is no getting around the fact that Ardent and Gavia are now alone in a very strange world where the people have few if any common frames of reference with them. One of the few people who understands them is their fellow immigrant from Outside, Alice. Alice, although she isn't necessarily a good person, seems to have a moral conscience; she won't be able to leave them to sink or swim. The simplest way to handle the matter is to introduce the Vicissitudes as moderately-distant kin from out-of-state (cousins, maybe) whose parents have placed them in her care for an indeterminate period. It should be interesting, as time goes by, whether or not she and they become used to living as a family, developing those emotional and social bonds and looking out for each other instead of their own narrow interests; of course, learning this lesson is one of the Praeses' purposes for them;
Ultimately, of course, the time will come for them to return to the Outside. Maybe years will have passed, maybe many years. Will they be willing to leave their friends, their community...? Their home...? Maybe even their spouses and children?
Of course, learning this lesson is also one of the Praeses' purposes for them.
I suspect that, in the end, at the very end, Alice will meet with The Old Man and finally get the answers she seeks.
ALICE: "Who... are you?"
VOICE FROM CLOUD: "I... am the Creator... of a popular sci-fi vid-show that has brought happiness, entertainment and hope to millions."
ALICE: "And who am I?"
VOICE FROM CLOUD: "You... are its star!"
((Yes, lifted from The Truman Show; I love that film!))
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Was I terribly naive for not knowing what "vicissitude" meant? I looked it up:
"a change of circumstances or fortune, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant."
That explains a lot, and fits in pretty well with BenRG's post above.
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I wondered if it being 'not possible to trick the Praeses" is propaganda and it is perfectly possible to trick them but they want to keep that fact quiet. Meaning Ardent and Gavia are in serious danger as they'll need to be silenced before they can go around telling people the Praeses were successfully tricked.
Another possibility is that some sort of power struggle going on between Praeses in which Ardent and Gavia were carefully picked to cause problems and be framed for crimes (such as getting onto the planet when that is not allowed) because of their multiple personality flaws. They are selfish, rude, idiotic and one is prone to temper tantrums. They were born to be scapegoats.
Am I the only one who thinks that Cupressaceae sounds like something an American would call a cup of coffee or coffee machine? Maybe in the distant past a coffee machine gained sentience and went on to take over human civilisation.
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Am I the only one who thinks that Cupressaceae sounds like something an American would call a cup of coffee or coffee machine? Maybe in the distant past a coffee machine gained sentience and went on to take over human civilisation.
This leads to the inevitable scenario that, when Alice confronts Cupressaceae, it keeps on presenting her with a cup of tepid sludge that only purports to be coffee and chirping "Share and enjoy!" in a way that implies a profound and irreversible coding error.
ALICE: "You mean you did all this in an attempt to selectively breed a human race that actually likes your coffee?!?" :facepalm:
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Well it probably seemed completely reasonable to the sentient coffee maker. The sole reason for its existence was to make coffee for humans to enjoy. And if the humans aren't enjoying the coffee, clearly the humans are defective and steps must be taken to rectify the error in their genetic programming.
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I think this was an exile, plain and simple. Ardent and Gavia annoyed Cupressaceae every bit as much as they are now annoying Alice, so Cup got rid of them. Fortunately their antisocial tendencies made it easy: dangle a shiny object in front of them and they jumped.
Which will lead to an interesting conversation when Alice finally manages to contact Cup: "These two are your problem!" "NOT ANY MORE!!!"
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Ah, so they're "irreversibly contaminated", or will be by the time Alice gets ahold of Cupressaceae....
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Am I the only one who thinks that Cupressaceae sounds like something an American would call a cup of coffee or coffee machine? Maybe in the distant past a coffee machine gained sentience and went on to take over human civilisation.
This leads to the inevitable scenario that, when Alice confronts Cupressaceae, it keeps on presenting her with a cup of tepid sludge that only purports to be coffee and chirping "Share and enjoy!" in a way that implies a profound and irreversible coding error.
ALICE: "You mean you did all this in an attempt to selectively breed a human race that actually likes your coffee?!?" :facepalm:
Origin story of Cupressaceae (http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2574)
:evil:
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So, is there a pronunciation guide somewhere? I could slide by assuming praeses might be pronounced like when someone 'praises' something. But Cupressaceae is a bit much for me.
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I see "praeses" as rhymes-with-brace, followed by ease.
Cupressaceae to me would be cup-ress-ack-ay-eye
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BenRG: you may want to spoiler your comments, or at least the predictions :D
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Googlespace has opinions:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#safe=on&q=Cupressaceae+pronounce+OR+pronunciation
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I was going by Latin rules, where there is no such thing as a soft c.
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There are
a number of many pronunciation schemes for Latin. At school I had to use different pronunciation in class1 and when singing in the cathedral choir2 ("Church Latin"). And just last term my choir was using eighteenth century French Latin3, and this term nineteenth century Germanic4...
And yes, I have a book on the subject of Latin pronunciation in different places and times.
1: c=k
2: c=ch
3: c=s
4: c=ts
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"He knows the Faith", mayhap? :angel:
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I only learned pronunciation 1, which I also learned in school.
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I imagine that the Praeses would prefer to use classical Latin pronunciation. Church Latin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin), as the name suggests, is used almost exclusively by the Catholic Church, so unless the orbital colonies were established by the Vatican I doubt they use Church Latin pronunciation.
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She forgot to say Energise.
No, she forgot to say "Simon says".
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Fides = "Faith". "Fidum" is the object form (in Latin).
Scio = "to know". Scit = the 2nd person form of "Know", meaning "He knows".
Pronunciation in Catholic Latin makes the "sc" sound into "sch", where the "c" is mostly silent.
So... speak the sentence out... :angel:
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Seems they've been exiled. Now's the question: Is it as a punishment for their transgressions down on earth or is it for some other reason and allowing Ardent to "trick" the system and sending Gavia after him was just a plot to get rid of them?
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My suspicion is either one of those of Ben or that the Deities responsible are tied up in some conflict which demands their full attention. We may well be looking at the two sole survivors of their world here.
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Am I the only one wondering what's happened to Jack? Alice asked him to come along.
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Am I the only one wondering what's happened to Jack? Alice asked him to come along.
At the beginning of this day, she was trying to fix the wind tower, so maybe she asked him to grab the wrench she left at the site?
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For whatever reason Cupcake* doesn't want them back or maybe is just away from the controls.
*Yeah that's what I'm gonna call it from now on.
-
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Fides = "Faith". "Fidum" is the object form (in Latin).
Scio = "to know". Scit = the 2nd person form of "Know", meaning "He knows".
Pronunciation in Catholic Latin makes the "sc" sound into "sch", where the "c" is mostly silent.
So... speak the sentence out... :angel:
The only Latin you need to ever know:
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I had already taken enough Latin when I first saw it to see it was wrong and be annoyed...the annoyance subsided quickly ^_^ I was in high school Latin I and I felt proud for understanding all that :P
NOW DON'T DO IT AGAIN!
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HAIL CAESAR!
-
HAIL CAESAR!
Is that what happens when you put ice cubes in a salad?
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Fun fact, the salad never actually invented Caesar.
-
Comic!
And we're at the end of chapter one.
Ardent and Gavia are trapped in Alice's Grove.
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Oh no! They're trapped! If only I knew what this meant, empathized with these characters, or had some semblance of grounding to understand why I should care...
Also, I wonder... It says 'End of chapter one'. Does this mean this was supposed to be the equivalent of a single chapter of a book or whatever, or does it just mean that it's a break point in the story and there's about to be a time-skip or something?
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Oh no! They're trapped! If only I knew what this meant, empathized with these characters, or had some semblance of grounding to understand why I should care...
I'll tell you why you should care, it's the same reason Alice cares. It's because she and everyone else on that unfortunate world is stuck with the little horrors until their Praeses decide to take them back! I bet Alice off screen was hoping Gavia would succeed so she could go back to taking care of her town and not dealing with Ardent hitting on every female in sight and Gavia who thinks explosions are a great way to solve problems.
Though for my harsh words, I do think that we aren't supposed to like Gavia and Ardent yet. I think that is due to happen later, after they go through some steep learning curves and period of adjustment. We could potentially have a chapter two of Gavia and Ardent struggling to adjust to primitive life, but I think it equally likely Alice is going to instantly start pulling every string she has and every trick she knows in trying to get the little horrors back where they belong, i.e. not with her.
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Cue freakout by Gavia in 3 .... 2 .... 1
*Fade to black*
Titles over with dramatic music
TO BE CONTINUED...
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Ardent and Gavia are trapped in Alice's Grove.
No, it seems the Praeseses are the Grove, and the Vicissitudes are trapped out of it.
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I don't find myself agreeing with mikmaxs often, but I don't care. We've got a solid question hook: what is Alice? Solid story hooks: What is this place and where did these two kids come from? But no personal hooks. Alice is a cipher and I don't have any motivation to find out why.
As comics go, I'd have skipped out on this one, except inertia. There's a link to it on the boards, so I keep checking.
It's not hate. I don't find any other characters objectionable. Jeph's given me no reason to dislike them. But he's given me no reason to care about them either.
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Called it! :-D About the chapter thing, I mean. I'm pretty sure that this would be the end of the first issue of a serial-released graphic novel. I wonder if Jeph has any idea of what issue 1's cover art would look like? Probably like that one bit of fan-art with dungeree-clad Alice in a dramatic pose on a hill with the town and wind turbine in the background.
I don't think anyone here doesn't believe that Ardent and Gavia have been deliberately marooned. The unanswered question is: Why?
I'm sticking with my earlier chapter 2 prediction: Alice begins her investigation whilst the kids tell Jack their back-story. All liberally sprinkled with fish-out-of-water/culture shock jokes.
@Reindeer,
I'm drawn back by the potential and the desire to find the answers to those many questions. As for the characters? They're just the means to tell the story.
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I don't find myself agreeing with mikmaxs often, but I don't care.
I have to say, this comment took me off guard. Not that you tend to disagree with me, I can often be stubborn, have strong opinions, and am bad at filtering and clarifying what I'm trying to say.
I mostly just now realized that I've actually posted enough to have a presence on this forum other than just an anonymous voice. After years of lurking, it's an odd feeling.
@WildRoses, I can't say that I care if this town is stuck with those little horrors, though, because I don't know anyone well enough to care about them except maybe Alice, and even Alice is too much of an enigma for me to care about her as a person. The only townsperson I know is Jack, and he doesn't seem to mind.
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I don't find you disagreeable, either. We're just often on different pages. No offense intended. I could have phrased it better. Sorry.
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So, why are all the Praeses named after trees? Is it a code name? A manufacturer's brand? Is the Outside ruled by Ents? Are they the Grove, as ysth says? Or is each responsible for their own grove, like Alice? Why are most of them genera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genus), but Cupressaceae is a family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_%28biology%29)? Is Cupressaceae the Praeses of Praeses? Or is that Yggdrasil?
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I don't find you disagreeable, either. We're just often on different pages. No offense intended. I could have phrased it better. Sorry.
None taken, I didn't mean to imply that either. People disagree with people, it's a thing that tends to happen. No apologies necessary.
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So, why are all the Praeses named after trees?
It depends. Some ancient, pagan cultures here in Europe believed that trees were aware and the source of wisdom if appropriately propitiated. Given that trees, on average, tend to live a lot longer than humans, it's possible that the Praeses chose tree names for themselves to symbolise their far-greater-than-human longevity (possible functional immortality, if they're AIs) and wisdom.
Gavia's behaviour is interesting if you take the druidism parallel further. If you didn't know that she's trying to contact AIs to request a beam-up, doesn't it read like she's invoking the gods? I think that this gives us a clear insight of the relationship between Praesae and human. It is close to that between god and supplicant or parent and child. Between the provider and the helpless. That is why it makes me think that they've marooned Gavia and Ardent so they have to learn to look after themselves. The Praeses have clearly decided that society will benefit from having a bit more scarcity and appreciation of value rather than the current 'consume on demand' paradigm. They want humans to learn how to survive without the moment-to-moment care and control of the gods.
Who would have thought that Jeph and Gene Roddenberry would have parallels in their writing? :wink:
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Who would have thought that Jeph and Gene Roddenberry would have parallels in their writing?
Well, QC has had occasional underpinnings of AI Civil Rights, technology advancement and its influence on society, and the geopolitical ramifications of colloqualistic loquacity in verbage, so... He has for a while, really.
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"Alice" must be short for some other tree genus or family or something.
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Do we know which sibling is younger? Ardent certainly seems to know what's going on better than Gavia, even though he started off as ditzy.
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I'm a bit confused by Jeph's note at the end of today's strip. Obviously every process is different, but AG seems to be a story where plotting is key and that he needs time to plan out what's next seems a bit odd to me, especially since it's the end of this chapter. Sadly, I didn't have the funds to contribute to the Kickstarter when it was going on so I'm not sure if AG was supposed to be a "Welp, I've got this idea and let's see how I sketch out the beginning and if it seems to catch on, I'll try to figure out the rest."
If it wasn't that way, considering the pacing of this story thus far, I'm a bit concerned. A gag-a-day strip has its inherent difficulties, but it isn't dependent on plot, per se. Something like this, however, needs a definite roadmap. I'm getting weird flashbacks to T Campbell's QUILTBAG and his shuttering it because he simply didn't have a roadmap, flailed around a bit and then decided he'd written himself into a corner.
I'm intrigued by what's going on, but I don't want to have a sense that there's no plan in place to advance the story.
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Well, it's possible to have a good idea of where you want to go without knowing in detail how you're going to get there. Or it may just be a need to work out the pacing a bit more and planning the upcoming strips accordingly. We'll see, I guess.
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Few stories spring to life fully formed from the head of the author. They take work. Jeph's going to take a few days to do some of that work. While I have no doubt he knows exactly where the story ends up, some of the details of the route need to be worked out as he goes.
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Few stories spring to life fully formed from the head of the author
We call those Athenas.
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Do we know which sibling is younger? Ardent certainly seems to know what's going on better than Gavia, even though he started off as ditzy.
Gavia seems a lot shorter than Ardent—and not in a naturally short kind of way. I think she is the younger sibling.
Really loving the story. Going to be hard seeing it go on break at such a cliffhanger, but looking forward to see what happens next.
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Ah, okay. That makes sense. I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that AG was a story Jeph had been wanting to tell for awhile but could not because QC is his main source of income and therefore had to be the priority. Yes, I think that it's very true that no story springs fully formed. I was just confused because AG is such a plot-driven webcomic. I feel much better now, thanks for the additional information.
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I think what we have here is the general framework for the story. For example, Gavia and Ardent's characters have board traits right now (IE the foundation) and Alice has been slightly fleshed out (Foundation and Framework) but has also been established in board strokes. I think we will see some slow character development in the next chapter or two. Jeph did something similar with QC after all, Marten, Faye and Pintsize were established in board strokes then refined through solid story telling.
While not WOWed by Alice Grove I see potential here and willing to give it the time it needs to become great. Well there are my two cents.
On an unrelated note my computer refuses to let me spell Jeph's name right it keeps making it Jeff.....grrrrrr.
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... there's about to be a time-skip or something?
I am expecting a time-skip, too. Forward or backward?
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Actually...
QC was unlike AG. We meet Marten and right off we are offered a reason to care about him. He's unhappy. He's unhappy about things a lot of people can relate to. In speech and inner dialogue, we are introduced to the inner life of Marten Reed. We don't know who he is, exactly. On the other hand, he isn't a cipher, either. What he does, and why, is explicable by his previous actions.
Faye IS a cipher, but that's okay because we have a viewpoint character, and we've been offered multiple opportunities to care about him. At strip 22, the situation is clearly introduced. The question isn't "What's going on here?" It's "where's this going to go?" About 480 strips later, we find out.
I'm not dumping on AG. I'm simply saying that nearly 40 strips in and I still don't have a sense of connection to the main character. The ONLY character who seems to want something they don't already have is Ardent. And he's self-centered in an unsympathetic way. You get the sense that he has enough toys. Sure, Marten was the woobie in his intro, but it was an effective hook.
That's what I mean about the current state of AG. It's like reading the first chapter of a book and realizing that author expects you to read chapter two because of whose name is on the dust jacket, rather than for the content.
Part of me is desperate to tell the other half. It's not exactly easy to build a strong hook. Connecting the reader to the character isn't a trivial thing. but this is getting long. Suffice it to say, I understand the challenges. I'm just saying AG hasn't met them. A for effort, though.
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I'm pretty sure the plural is Praeseses.
I don't think anyone here doesn't believe that Ardent and Gavia have been deliberately marooned. The unanswered question is: Why?
And by whom. I don't think we have sufficient evidence there.
Why are most of them genera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genus), but Cupressaceae is a family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_%28biology%29)? Is Cupressaceae the Praeses of Praeses?
If so, that could be one reason they are such special snowflakes.
I'm not sure if AG was supposed to be a "Welp, I've got this idea and let's see how I sketch out the beginning and if it seems to catch on, I'll try to figure out the rest."
He didn't say "rest", he said "next"; important distinction there.
While not WOWed by Alice Grove I see potential here and willing to give it the time it needs to become great. Well there are my two cents.
I'm enjoying it quite a lot, and getting very attached to Alice. I like her sense of humor.
I think having a different style of comic will stretch Jeph in ways that will pay off handsomely in QC too.
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He didn't say "rest", he said "next"; important distinction there.
Not to be an ass, but isn't this a distinction without a difference? It would be a bit different if this were the 50th or even 5th chapter of this tale. It's the first. So "next" sort of does equal "rest" from where I'm standing.
It doesn't matter though. I was mistaken because I thought AG was a project Jeph had on his mind but had to mind the QC store and held the Kickstarter so he could get some funding to branch out. That was not the case. So it makes sense to me now that he has an idea of where he wants things to go but only detailed the first chapter and is now assessing/reassessing things.
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I'm pretty sure the plural is Praeseses.
Actually, the plural of Praeses is Praesides. :-D
See either http://alicegrove.wikia.com/wiki/Praeses (http://alicegrove.wikia.com/wiki/Praeses) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeses) for more info.
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I'm pretty sure the plural is Praeseses.
Actually, the plural of Praeses is Praesides. :-D
See either http://alicegrove.wikia.com/wiki/Praeses (http://alicegrove.wikia.com/wiki/Praeses) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeses) for more info.
This is either the most awesome, or most pedantic first post I've ever seen, anywhere. There aren't enough hearts or emojis in the world to express how much I love it.
A+ Ben Ellery. A+.
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Okay, so, my 2 cents on chapter one.
It took a while to get rolling. That's not at all unusual, but it is different than QC, which definitely sunk its hooks in with the first page. AG had a few early hooks to keep you reading to the end of the chapter, such as "how did she survive that fall" and "what's with the half-naked blue kid sleeping in a field?" but the real hook seems to be the last page of the chapter. Most authors/cartoonists wouldn't be able to get away with a delayed hook like that, but Jeph's almost fanatical QC followers have been shown already that Jeph is the bomb, and I think he knew that we'd all hang around long enough for this story to build up steam and stand on its own feet. I know, I mixed two different metaphors there, but they just makes AG into some kind of steam-powered mechanical juggernaut, which is almost as cool as the stuff Jeph writes.
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I'm pretty sure the plural is Praeseses.
Actually, the plural of Praeses is Praesides. :-D
See either http://alicegrove.wikia.com/wiki/Praeses (http://alicegrove.wikia.com/wiki/Praeses) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praeses) for more info.
This is either the most awesome, or most pedantic first post I've ever seen, anywhere. There aren't enough hearts or emojis in the world to express how much I love it.
A+ Ben Ellery. A+.
I've actually been lurking around for about 2 weeks now. And I'd planned for my first post to be something more productive, I swear. But then I saw this, and I just couldn't resist. Oh well.
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I think it is better if you eliminate all thoughts of QC from your mind as you read AG, although that might be harder for some people than it is for others. I imagine practically everyone who reads it (including me) started doing so because it is done by the same guy who did QC. So the danger of expecting something exactly like QC and being displeased because it is not is higher.
I consider QC and AG quite different because of the emphasis. In QC Jeph put a lot of work into the characters. The plot and the world his characters live in are of secondary importance as readers are invested in the characters, and they want to see what happens to the characters and how they react to certain things. So in QC the plot and the world's primary work is to give the characters a place to exist and react.
In AG, we have the reverse. What is important is the plot and the world. The primary work of the characters is not to make readers like them, it to show the readers what sort of world they live in and reveal the plot, and Jeph has chosen to do this by not quite revealing everything so his readers are full of questions. It was effective in my case. I'm not following AG because it was done by the same guy as QC anymore, I'm following it because I want my questions about both societies answered.
And just to be clear, I don't consider characters serving plot or plot serving characters any better than the other. Both are valid, and as all people are different it is possible to prefer one without having bad taste. However, if you are the sort of person who thinks character is more interesting than world building and plot (and there are probably a lot of you because of QC), be aware you will probably never like AG as much as QC. That doesn't make AG bad, just different. Lots of artists want to experiment with different things and don't want to make the same piece of work again and again.
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I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not comparing AG and QC. The relation I described above was just refulting Isyrion's suggestion that AG and QC started at a similar pace. They did not. There were several character hooks in QC by strip six.
Taking AG as it's own thing, I still find it wanting. Story is character. Character is story. Or more accurately, Plot = Character plus Conflict.
AG is nigh 40 strips in and we don't know much at all about the putative main characters, and have very little feel for why Vicissitude's conflict should matter to us. Not to mention it was just introduced.
I rather expect AG will do just fine, in the long run. Name recognition goes a long way, and there are plenty of other ways to drive new readers to strip (other artists). I'm not prognosticating, I'm not complaining. I'm offering a structural critique.
As a reader, offering no comparison to QC, I don't give a damn about AG's world or characters.
I've been somewhat over focused on the sympathy side. John Grisham knows you don't need sympathy to create an audience hook (I once tried to read everything he'd published, and found that I couldn't deal with any of it, because his characters were too unlikable to root for but not unlikable enough to root against. That said, Grisham was a best selling author and his book were being turned into movies in job lots. So he was doing something right). And, to be fair, AG started off raising decent hooks on the mechanical side.
The issue is what I call The X-Files problem. If you raise interesting questions that are not fundamentally unanswerable, the audience expects answers. In AG's case, the question raised for the starting block is "what is Alice?"
Now, the right thing to do is to string the audience along. Rather than giving them the answers, give them more questions. I call this The X-Files problem, because the was a certain point in the shows run where it became obvious that the writers were never going to answer any of the questions. Like, they didn't have answers. Right around the point, the show's rating declined.
The X-Files went for years, AG has had months. But I don't think I'm premature. X-Files got away with what they did by offering answers to the questions regularly. It just turned out every answer was another set of questions. AG has raised questions but barely touched on them.
I look at it this way: What if this was a comicbook? Given that one of Jeph's pages is about half a comic page, it turns out that the end of Chapter one lines up nicely with where a 22-24 page comic would end.
Would you buy issue two?
I don't know that I would. I don't know I wouldn't, but I do know that if I did, it would because of the author, not the story.
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@Reindeer,
Your problem is the 'I am the world" fallacy. Just because you consider those things to be problems does not make that universally true. I, for one, will come back because, with these questions posed, I want to hear the answers and know that they may be many chapters away. To me, this is a feature, not a bug.
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I actually find these mysteries that have been put out to be the reason why I want to keep reading. This first chapter was just basic set up, presenting the reader with a world similar to one we are familiar with, then introducing things showing that it's a lot deeper and stranger than we know, starting from the first 'How did she survive that fall' and 'who is this blue monkey kid?' So far we have been introduced to several principle characters, a couple of conflicts and story hooks and a small bit of world building. That is really pretty standard for the first chapter of a story. It only seems long because of the slower update schedule of the comic. If this were a comic book, or a graphic novel or written book, we would be talking first issue or a few dozen pages here. You can't expect a huge amount of characterization and resolutions at the very beginning, though we did have a small three part arc with hook-conflict-resolution between Ardent, Alice and Gavia.
Or to put it shortly, this is just the introduction. I find there are plenty of hooks that have my attention that I want to know more about. It's way to early in the story for us to know everything, or even a lot of things about those characters. The story is being written along the lines of a longer, more episodic format than a web comic 'important stuff/punchline every day' format.
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Yeah, I also have enjoyed it so far, quite a bit.
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@Reindeer,
Your problem is the 'I am the world" fallacy. Just because you consider those things to be problems does not make that universally true. I, for one, will come back because, with these questions posed, I want to hear the answers and know that they may be many chapters away. To me, this is a feature, not a bug.
Nope. I don't have a problem. But thanks for playing.
Just because I can point out some structural issues with a work, it doesn't follow that the work is bad. In fact, I never said it was.
Pick up any book on writing and it will tell you same things I have. The game has rules. Like any game, the key is learning how they can be broken. But the rules don't exist to control fiction. They exist because 9 times of 10, not following them results in a bad story.
I'm not aware of any particular law that forbids me pontificating on issues as I see them, or rambling on about the mechanics and methods of story telling. I've been studying the subject for 33 years. I'm bound to have a point of view.
Your problem is the "I am the world fallacy." That you see someone disagreeing with your POV as a problem is rather egocentric, no?
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The Fate of ArdentSis
Twenty years in an IsoCube - Judge Alice .......... 1 (2.6%)
Assimilation - "We are the Alice, resistance is futile" .......... 1 (2.6%)
A shock collar and no release till she cleans up her mess .......... 3 (7.7%)
Flashback time .......... 8 (20.5%)
Alice the Slavemaster .......... 2 (5.1%)
We don't want to know .......... 5 (12.8%)
Jeph surprises us .......... 13 (33.3%)
Blue Ardent Dishwasher .......... 6 (15.4%)