Hmm, Jin is taking an interest in the individual characteristics of others, trying to get a bearing on the world she`s wrought? All and all the interest and the lucidity bodes well. Jin is, I think, recovering her humanity. Escaping the “ant farm existance” as it was described.
I find an interesting implication here: presumably there have been parts of the time loop where Tina was not killed and replaced by her demons, and was still herself at the time of the reset. Jin is just now realizing that the Tina she’s known through all of her lives will never exist again.
Jin’s hair is back to normal. Now I’m confused… how many time has passed since the final bout with the Calendar Machine? Can the GGs control their hair length?
Unfamiliar with the name of the tea, but guessing it, possibly Jin is of Asian descent, possibly Chinese?
I’m still confused that she showed up as a “kawaii desu ne!” school girl but is actually Aztec/South American?
Also the distance between (demon) Tina & Jin gives me a sad. But will we get more of Tina’s back story? So far we know she’s the daughter of a mobster and the coffee shop has a cement basement and unidentifiable stains?
None of the GGGs are Aztec/South American/Central American/… – though they played the part for a while (with Jin even being Tochtli). Neither is Tepoz. They all originated in the Old World thousands of years before any of the ancient New World civilizations existed. Remember, the GGGs were basically being hidden there – keeping their power out of the wrong hands is my interpretation.
You are correct: Lapsang Souchong is indeed from China. Fujian province, to be exact. You may have also heard of it (depending on how much you know about tea) as “Russian Caravan.” http://www.adagio.com/black/lapsang_souchong.html Info!
I wonder how many cycles I would have “let slip” just to enjoy/pamper friends. Suddenly I can’t decide which is worse, that I would waste a few thousand years for a few sweet decades, or that I might not.
There was a Stargate SG1 episode in which the team was thrown into a time loop repeating every few days, but only a couple of the team realized they were in a time loop and could remember each loop — after busting their buns thru a bunch of loops trying to learn enough to figure out how to break the loop, they suddenly had the revelation that they could take a vacation for a few loops and do whatever the heck they wanted – and they did.
Playing golf into the stargate is quite an enduring image. Seems that if we get some new Jinn stuff we might get a similar angle. I’d rather like that.
Looks like Jin might be reaching out to establish a bit more of a human connection with someone she was friends with in a previous loop, now that the timeline has been stabilized. Though I guess since Tina’s not really human that may not be quite right…
Or maybe she’s looking to make amends for what happened to Tina.
Me too! Deep, smokey, very fragrant. I’ve heard it described as the “black coffee of teas”. Nah – it’s much better! Tho’ it’s gotten amusing reactions from friends. One guy thought I was drinking somethin’ made outta a weed somethin’ that is just a mite illegal! Most of them just go, “Eeccchhh! She drinking that stinky tea again!!Gleaah!” LOL, they don’t know what they’re missing! MmmmmMMMmmmm!
Woot! Lapsang Souchong gets a nod. My favorite tea, loose or bagged. Love at first taste. The rich, smoky aroma and taste make it like heaven in a cup.
On the strip side, I love the emotion on Jin’s face in the final panel… really pulls at the heartstrings.
I’d think, given how badly she apparently wanted it, that learning she could never be human again was worse, even if at the time she was not mentally able to really understand. I wonder how she’s dealing with that now that here are fewer bats in her belfry.
(If I were Jin, I might be guilt tripping Mayahuel to find some way to fix that; or at least to unmake me so I wouldn’t have to face the prospect of existing for all eternity whether I wanted to or not. And speaking of guilt, I’m wondering how Bud and Brandi are going to get along with May. “Yeah, it was because of you that we were kidnapped, imprisoned, mutilated, tortured and raped, over and over, and then burned alive and turned into super-powered monsters who killed millions and can destroy the world. How are you going to make up for that?” Relations between the GGG and May could be kind of … tense…
If Lapsang is an acquired taste then I shudder to think what Pu Erh would be called. But I am delighted that Tina appears to have it there. Is the availability of low-demand items some demonic power of Tina’s or is there some faint memory of a lost friendship at work in her subconscious mind?
Oh, and hello everybody. I’m a recent reader who could’t resist commenting when tea was mentioned. Sad, I know.
Another tea lover! I found what Pu Erh I’ve had to be very earthy and reminded me of what the “taste” of burning autumn leaves is like. It’s different and supposed to be good for the digestions after a heavy or fatty meal and great for lowering cholesterol.
Personally, I like a good astringent green, a woodsy Oolong and the oft maligned Lapsang. All without sugar or milk, plz! I know with veteran tea drinkers that goes without saying, but I know a few noobs who can’t get used to just tea and tea alone. I’m afraid I’m a real hard-core tea freak! LOL!!
I’m waiting on my first order of Lapsang, after hearing about it from an Aussie author and podcaster. I’m about ankle deep in my exploration of tea, having branched out from the realm of mint herbals and roiboss and into blacks and Earl Greys. I’m wondering how much deeper this stuff is going to put me
Jin has her own issues to work out, and Bud was the one to go all 80′s action hero and mount a one-woman rescue mission for May. Brandi is the only one we don’t have a reaction from yet.
That sounds like some good tea that’s being pimped here. Might have to hunt down some and brew up a cup. I lean towards basic greens and mints myself.
May was stuck in the Demon World for many thousands of years. I’m hoping everyone would think that would be more than enough punishment for the mistakes she made, no matter how bad.
I doubt the people she murdered for no reason, other than to show she could, would agree. The thing about killing someone is that you don’t just kill them but you also kill all the people they would have produced down through the subsequent years via generations that would have come about. Thus, it’s a crime that sweeps through all future time. Yes, I know, sometimes killing is unavoidable, but that does not negate the truth of it all. So, if you murder someone, is there really any punishment that is equal to your crime? Can you ever atone for all those others you deprived of a chance to live?
Who did May ever murder for “no reason”? We see Jin in a “job interview” prove her skills, so to speak, but May? May simply made a really large mistake allowing very nasty sorts to get their hands on the knowledge to make golems — probably she thought they weren’t smart enough or advanced enough to figure the process out on their own and was desperate to get the Calendar Machine out of their hands. It could well be that in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, the Calendar Machine could have made the Chimera seem like a new born kitten — after all, it time looped the whole world as just a strange side effect.
That was May who sliced the guard up. It was explained more in the Wapsi Books. One of the guards that was responsible for the priests violent take over of the city of Lanthis as a backlash of technological achievement finding more answers to questions that their religion could no longer answer.
Ahhh! OK, but I’d say that was a very long way from killing for “no reason” — in my view, there’s very little more fundamentally evil (or more likely to wield that evil) than power mad religious zealots, of any stripe. I assume that was May’s way of getting inside to get the Calendar Machine away from them.
I think we are at the 5 deep limit, so I’m responding to Redbeard from Paul’s post.
So with all that “intelligence” and power at her command that was the best she could do? She couldn’t figure out a way without killing several people on her way in? And doing such evil to stop greater evil is no excuse. Where does that stop? The end does not justify the means. Unless you’re a Nazi or Jihadist. One has to wonder how many others she had killed from time to time in persuit of her goal, or just for the hell of it, since it seemed to come so easily to her. She even seemed to enjoy it.
RE Redbeard’s comment that “May simply made a really large mistake”: If you think about it, May has made a series of mistakes, each worse than the last. She created the Calendar Machine, and then let it fall into the hands of the priests. To get the Machine back, she developed Golum technology and taught enough of it to the priests that they could figure out how to make the Chimera. And then, trying to destroy the Machine, she bungled it again and locked the world into endless time loops. I would HOPE she’s ended her streak, now; I’m not sure Jin (or the Earth) can take much more of this…
I imagine messing with the events of the time stream can screw with ones sense of right and wrong. What is a peaceful village one century could become a despotic empire the next. So which is the bigger crime? Wipe out the small peaceful village, wait and wipe out the larger village that has become the despotic empire and killed many in the process, or do nothing?
Indeed. One could reasonably make an argument that Jin’s lack of morality in that incident was most evident in that she didn’t ginsu those priests as well.
The problem with messing with the timeline is that doing so makes us all someone’s puppets with no real self determination or free will. Then there is the distinct possibility that doing so will result in a world even worse than that which would have been. There may be minimal harm manipulating a few people as did Jin, but anything on a larger scale, like the villiage example, would likely cause vast unintended consequences. In the story line here, manipulating the few people Jin did was justified as she was actually trying to free them from the endless cycle in which everyone was trapped. As things stood, humanity wasn’t accomplishing anything or had any real free will anyway. Once the deed was done, she stopped her manipulation (we assume).
Could there be more to the question about collecting teapots? Maybe a magical mythical teapot leading to new adventures? The last panels expression makes me think so.That’s my opinion. But, I could be wrong.
Or she gave Tina a teapot loooong ago… Yes… The teapot of Doom! The other shoe! Sorry… I am getting late afternoon silly but that just seemed to flow. See P! You are making us into paranoid sillies.
My 2 pence… Tina’s loss of interest in collecting antique teapots makes Jin sad because it shows how far Tina has drifted from her human self. Plus a not so subtle remind of how much Jin herself may never regain.
Did we always know that Jin knew Tina before she died?
Also, Tina looks smokin’ in that first frame.
Nope, just that Jin lost friends that she knew.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/becomingfriends/
*nudge* “That’s
totoo bad…”Oops! =) Fixed. Thanks.
Paul: What Liza said.
StarKruzr – It hadn’t occurred to me, but it seems so.
Hit reload. =)
Hmm, Jin is taking an interest in the individual characteristics of others, trying to get a bearing on the world she`s wrought? All and all the interest and the lucidity bodes well. Jin is, I think, recovering her humanity. Escaping the “ant farm existance” as it was described.
At least thats what I think!
Jin is probably just looking for a nice present for her mother.
I find an interesting implication here: presumably there have been parts of the time loop where Tina was not killed and replaced by her demons, and was still herself at the time of the reset. Jin is just now realizing that the Tina she’s known through all of her lives will never exist again.
Is that Jin? So looks so…so…so sane. I guess her mom is helping her mellow out quite a bit; I wonder if Jin has introduced her to Allen yet.
And what is this about Tina still collecting antique tea pots? Is that something she did in a past incarnation?
A Tina that Jin once knew.
Hmmm.
The implication of Jin’s hesitation and the question about tea pots would seem to be that they were at least somewhat friendly.
So, that day in Mexico City, Jin had to choose between Monica and her friend?
Ow. Another brick in the wall, so to speak.
Gives a whole new level to Jin’s facial expressions and dialog back here:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/nevercontrol/
Yep. Didn’t have that precise strip in mind, but this revelation triggered the thought.
Is there really no way to bring Tina back, despite her body being functional?
How is she not rotting if their not keeping it functional? o.O
(Sorry if this is a suspend disbelief section)
Tina . My favorite barista . Rowr .
And so begins another plot line! With the Calendar Machine gone, Jin can explore the opportunities to repair those lives shattered in this loop!
Tread carefully, darlin — you no longer know what’s out there!
Hijinks ensue…
Yes! That is my kind of acquired taste! (Sorry, tea fanatic… *shuffles to the corner*)
Jin’s hair is back to normal. Now I’m confused… how many time has passed since the final bout with the Calendar Machine? Can the GGs control their hair length?
Jin has the ability to control her hair length. Bud and Brandi don’t have this ability. =)
I like how the use of the panels at the bottom show the distance/divide between two people who were once friends in a previous life.
Also, lapsang souchong makes the best tea eggs.
If that is the case, then the person she really needs to get in touch with is Shelly. Or is she testing the waters first with some one else?
Unfamiliar with the name of the tea, but guessing it, possibly Jin is of Asian descent, possibly Chinese?
I’m still confused that she showed up as a “kawaii desu ne!” school girl but is actually Aztec/South American?
Also the distance between (demon) Tina & Jin gives me a sad. But will we get more of Tina’s back story? So far we know she’s the daughter of a mobster and the coffee shop has a cement basement and unidentifiable stains?
None of the GGGs are Aztec/South American/Central American/… – though they played the part for a while (with Jin even being Tochtli). Neither is Tepoz. They all originated in the Old World thousands of years before any of the ancient New World civilizations existed. Remember, the GGGs were basically being hidden there – keeping their power out of the wrong hands is my interpretation.
You are correct: Lapsang Souchong is indeed from China. Fujian province, to be exact. You may have also heard of it (depending on how much you know about tea) as “Russian Caravan.” http://www.adagio.com/black/lapsang_souchong.html Info!
I wonder how many cycles I would have “let slip” just to enjoy/pamper friends. Suddenly I can’t decide which is worse, that I would waste a few thousand years for a few sweet decades, or that I might not.
There was a Stargate SG1 episode in which the team was thrown into a time loop repeating every few days, but only a couple of the team realized they were in a time loop and could remember each loop — after busting their buns thru a bunch of loops trying to learn enough to figure out how to break the loop, they suddenly had the revelation that they could take a vacation for a few loops and do whatever the heck they wanted – and they did.
I LOVED that episode!!!
Why am I not surprised by that admission. LOL
Playing golf into the stargate is quite an enduring image. Seems that if we get some new Jinn stuff we might get a similar angle. I’d rather like that.
Looks like Jin might be reaching out to establish a bit more of a human connection with someone she was friends with in a previous loop, now that the timeline has been stabilized. Though I guess since Tina’s not really human that may not be quite right…
Or maybe she’s looking to make amends for what happened to Tina.
Or help Tina find a bit of her history, which she seems curious about in some strips.
I’d like to find out what was in her diaries. Unless I missed something, that wasn’t ever answered. http://wapsisquare.com/comic/writteningibberish/
Or maybe she’s just looking for a nice present for her mom.
Lapsang Souchong? Acquired it on the first sip, me.
Me too! Deep, smokey, very fragrant. I’ve heard it described as the “black coffee of teas”. Nah – it’s much better! Tho’ it’s gotten amusing reactions from friends. One guy thought I was drinking somethin’ made outta a weed somethin’ that is just a mite illegal! Most of them just go, “Eeccchhh! She drinking that stinky tea again!!Gleaah!” LOL, they don’t know what they’re missing! MmmmmMMMmmmm!
Woot! Lapsang Souchong gets a nod. My favorite tea, loose or bagged. Love at first taste. The rich, smoky aroma and taste make it like heaven in a cup.
On the strip side, I love the emotion on Jin’s face in the final panel… really pulls at the heartstrings.
The more i consider it, this may be the saddest thing we’ve seen happan to Jin yet.
I’d think, given how badly she apparently wanted it, that learning she could never be human again was worse, even if at the time she was not mentally able to really understand. I wonder how she’s dealing with that now that here are fewer bats in her belfry.
(If I were Jin, I might be guilt tripping Mayahuel to find some way to fix that; or at least to unmake me so I wouldn’t have to face the prospect of existing for all eternity whether I wanted to or not. And speaking of guilt, I’m wondering how Bud and Brandi are going to get along with May. “Yeah, it was because of you that we were kidnapped, imprisoned, mutilated, tortured and raped, over and over, and then burned alive and turned into super-powered monsters who killed millions and can destroy the world. How are you going to make up for that?” Relations between the GGG and May could be kind of … tense…
Wait. Didn’t Paul say they would never age but could die? So she could end it all by suicide now that the machine is gone?
That was regarding the people that were in the room when the machine started, that doesn’t apply to the golems. =)
If Lapsang is an acquired taste then I shudder to think what Pu Erh would be called. But I am delighted that Tina appears to have it there. Is the availability of low-demand items some demonic power of Tina’s or is there some faint memory of a lost friendship at work in her subconscious mind?
Oh, and hello everybody. I’m a recent reader who could’t resist commenting when tea was mentioned. Sad, I know.
Another tea lover! I found what Pu Erh I’ve had to be very earthy and reminded me of what the “taste” of burning autumn leaves is like. It’s different and supposed to be good for the digestions after a heavy or fatty meal and great for lowering cholesterol.
Personally, I like a good astringent green, a woodsy Oolong and the oft maligned Lapsang. All without sugar or milk, plz! I know with veteran tea drinkers that goes without saying, but I know a few noobs who can’t get used to just tea and tea alone. I’m afraid I’m a real hard-core tea freak! LOL!!
Laphroig too. Scotch and tea ftmfw! Smokey is nice sometimes.
I’m waiting on my first order of Lapsang, after hearing about it from an Aussie author and podcaster. I’m about ankle deep in my exploration of tea, having branched out from the realm of mint herbals and roiboss and into blacks and Earl Greys. I’m wondering how much deeper this stuff is going to put me
This is just… wow. Pathos, intentional and unintentional.
Lapsang Souchong. Nice! It’s like a campfire in my teacup. Very interesting turn of events for Jin!
Jin has her own issues to work out, and Bud was the one to go all 80′s action hero and mount a one-woman rescue mission for May. Brandi is the only one we don’t have a reaction from yet.
That sounds like some good tea that’s being pimped here. Might have to hunt down some and brew up a cup. I lean towards basic greens and mints myself.
May was stuck in the Demon World for many thousands of years. I’m hoping everyone would think that would be more than enough punishment for the mistakes she made, no matter how bad.
I doubt the people she murdered for no reason, other than to show she could, would agree. The thing about killing someone is that you don’t just kill them but you also kill all the people they would have produced down through the subsequent years via generations that would have come about. Thus, it’s a crime that sweeps through all future time. Yes, I know, sometimes killing is unavoidable, but that does not negate the truth of it all. So, if you murder someone, is there really any punishment that is equal to your crime? Can you ever atone for all those others you deprived of a chance to live?
Who did May ever murder for “no reason”? We see Jin in a “job interview” prove her skills, so to speak, but May? May simply made a really large mistake allowing very nasty sorts to get their hands on the knowledge to make golems — probably she thought they weren’t smart enough or advanced enough to figure the process out on their own and was desperate to get the Calendar Machine out of their hands. It could well be that in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, the Calendar Machine could have made the Chimera seem like a new born kitten — after all, it time looped the whole world as just a strange side effect.
That was May who sliced the guard up. It was explained more in the Wapsi Books. One of the guards that was responsible for the priests violent take over of the city of Lanthis as a backlash of technological achievement finding more answers to questions that their religion could no longer answer.
Ahhh! OK, but I’d say that was a very long way from killing for “no reason” — in my view, there’s very little more fundamentally evil (or more likely to wield that evil) than power mad religious zealots, of any stripe. I assume that was May’s way of getting inside to get the Calendar Machine away from them.
I think we are at the 5 deep limit, so I’m responding to Redbeard from Paul’s post.
So with all that “intelligence” and power at her command that was the best she could do? She couldn’t figure out a way without killing several people on her way in? And doing such evil to stop greater evil is no excuse. Where does that stop? The end does not justify the means. Unless you’re a Nazi or Jihadist. One has to wonder how many others she had killed from time to time in persuit of her goal, or just for the hell of it, since it seemed to come so easily to her. She even seemed to enjoy it.
Wait, wait, WAIT.
Y’ mean there’s more exposition in the BOOKS?!
OK, I been meaning to get the wife interested in Wapsi, and I think, now, that getting the ‘hard-copy’ version into her hands might be the best idea.
RE Redbeard’s comment that “May simply made a really large mistake”: If you think about it, May has made a series of mistakes, each worse than the last. She created the Calendar Machine, and then let it fall into the hands of the priests. To get the Machine back, she developed Golum technology and taught enough of it to the priests that they could figure out how to make the Chimera. And then, trying to destroy the Machine, she bungled it again and locked the world into endless time loops. I would HOPE she’s ended her streak, now; I’m not sure Jin (or the Earth) can take much more of this…
I imagine messing with the events of the time stream can screw with ones sense of right and wrong. What is a peaceful village one century could become a despotic empire the next. So which is the bigger crime? Wipe out the small peaceful village, wait and wipe out the larger village that has become the despotic empire and killed many in the process, or do nothing?
Indeed. One could reasonably make an argument that Jin’s lack of morality in that incident was most evident in that she didn’t ginsu those priests as well.
Er, May.
Blah.
The problem with messing with the timeline is that doing so makes us all someone’s puppets with no real self determination or free will. Then there is the distinct possibility that doing so will result in a world even worse than that which would have been. There may be minimal harm manipulating a few people as did Jin, but anything on a larger scale, like the villiage example, would likely cause vast unintended consequences. In the story line here, manipulating the few people Jin did was justified as she was actually trying to free them from the endless cycle in which everyone was trapped. As things stood, humanity wasn’t accomplishing anything or had any real free will anyway. Once the deed was done, she stopped her manipulation (we assume).
Could there be more to the question about collecting teapots? Maybe a magical mythical teapot leading to new adventures? The last panels expression makes me think so.That’s my opinion. But, I could be wrong.
Jin could just be looking for a nice gift for her mom.
Or she gave Tina a teapot loooong ago… Yes… The teapot of Doom! The other shoe! Sorry… I am getting late afternoon silly but that just seemed to flow. See P! You are making us into paranoid sillies.
I read it again… Looks like Jin had bought one for Tina perhaps? Or whats left of Tina…
I think it’s something that human-Tina did in another time loop when she and Jin were friends.
My 2 pence… Tina’s loss of interest in collecting antique teapots makes Jin sad because it shows how far Tina has drifted from her human self. Plus a not so subtle remind of how much Jin herself may never regain.
MOOOM these two are getting weird again…