Could have been the demons which sent her, I suppose… but why?
I’m thinking it was probably the MIB “security force” which sent her… although her deal with a presumed demon may have been part of how she was able to succeed at the job.
Indeed! Over toast this morning, I get to see the setup for the next five years of story lines. And at this rate, we’re rapidly approaching the storytelling and art levels of Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary.
Ladies and gentlemen, get ready to submit your Hugo nominations…
Girl Genius has been VOLUNTARILY removed from future nominations by Authorial Fiat… The Foglios have won it the last 3 years straight, and they said they feel that they NEED to give someone else a chance or the award will become meaningless. So please DO remember Wapsi Square when nominations start for the next years award.
doh, 2013 – currently the vote is held two years ahead of the convention, so if you join in 2012 you get to help pick the site for 2014..
you have got your WSFS? 🙂
okay
had to take a moment there so I did not emit a high pitched squee over this comic.
just the thought of more peeps from the old stories 😀
(coughs)
anyway. Glad that is why Brandi was upset. understandable really 🙂 she prolly thought she had kept them all nice and safe and someone found one!
inter-dimentional travellers?
Indiana jones and the crystal skull type peeps?
probably not entirely by themselves, but if that is the case then the Grid that Bud talks about has been messed up since WWII due to the German U-Boat taking it away from it’s resting place in Ireland. then again… Is it a V-Cell in the first place? it was never explicitly stated if it was or not. from what Bud is saying here, it is highly likely that it IS, but until we know if the thing Shelly brought back from the Time-Forest IS or ISN’T a V-Cell, we’re just guessing; also remember that May has ANOTHER device she calls a Galaxy Alternator, is THAT a V-Cell or not?
right, but what WAS buried in Ireland in THIS loop? (the thing that the Nazi’s found) i think it was fully functional in THIS time loop, because Shelly #1 was the one that put the plutonium into it, and that was at least back in midevil times for the Celtic graveyard etc, not counting the 56 loops in between (or at least the last 1450-ish years)… anyways.. there has been PLENTY of time for Brandi to have found it, and either left it where it was safe, or to have moved it into position for the World Grid, if that’s the case, then when the Nazi’s took it then got sunk, it messed up the grid and we just now found out about the error, so Brandi may NEED to take it OUT of Jin, in order to fix the Grid.
You should also consider these people think in terms of millennial projects – not even the earth is stable over such a span, so I suspect any competent engineer designing for such built in as much redundancy as s/he could afford.
I don’t think the cross artifact had anything to do with the grid. Brandi would have lost it back then when she saw it, if it was part of that system. I’m not sure that thing even contained a V-Cell.
Also don’t think the V-cell used in Jin was a part of the grid power source since it was put together separately. Seems to me to be one crafted apart from the initial stock. Therefore no weakening of the grid.
it wouldn’t make a difference what CM Loop it came from, because of the TIME RESET… that means that the ONLY time we in loop 57 are aware of is THIS loop, and that EVERYTHING got rebooted to the PRECISE LOCATION AND STATUS they were in when May attempted to destroy the CM and cause the loops in the first place. SO, if Brandi had found and emplaced a V-cell in the grave in Ireland, BEFORE Tepoz hid the GG’s, and got subsequently stoned, then for the last 400 years at least we’ve been safe from ET’s, or were until the Nazi’s took it away. and remember, the CM loops didn’t START happening until WELL AFTER the GG’s were separated from the Chimera, but BEFORE the various fallings-out and battles of the Mahabharata, and Ramayana. because THEY were NOT used as a weapon DURING those accounts, they were part of the clean-up crew (ironic isn’t it 🙂 ) that went and found the remaining V-cells and hid them, so they couldn’t have been the combined Chimera in order to do that. and I’ll make a W.A.G for some more Moxana points that those accounts are the correct time frame for the various Time-Keepers to have died out.
So our heroes saved the world by eliminating the calendar machine and then saved it again by stabilizing Jin.
Then we had a bit of an “intermission” and witnessed the emergence of maturity in Shelly and some rage in Brandi.
I seem to have missed something:
Are the girls currently on a quest?
Is the world in danger of being annihilated again?
Or is all this exposition the prelude to their next adventure?
All those story threads that SoWhyMe was unhappily saying had been abruptly dropped, are about to re-emerge with a vengance. They’re all part of the big picture that Paul has been setting up.
Nah. I’m sure I’d know if Paul was pulling a Retcon on us… I’d taste it in my drink and I’d realize that I was about to purple monkey bus dishwashur frezel snurb gnurrr &%#8xc7
I didn’t say dropped permanently. Just dropped suddenly and moved on to something else, time and again. Of course he will pick them up in the future or he would not have done them at all. Just that it’s annoying to have them stopped so suddenly like that. No idea of when they might be picked up again, if ever, on some. So much up in the air. Not unlike a soap opera.
Probably. There’s still ‘Crispy’ to worry about, we need to see how Shelly and Justin’s relationship resolves, and Brandi, last time we saw her, seemed to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown / angst storm. As well as long standing questions like what ‘the gods’ are up to and who stoned Tepoz. But those might be part of, or become part of, the next quest…
Tunguska was relatively small beans, as asteroid-fragment explosions go, and not all that uncommon. I has somewhat surprised to learn, a while back, that there’s one Hiroshima-bomb-level explosion in the upper atmosphere, caused by a small chunk of rock, about once per year on average. Tunguska was roughly a thousand-year event if I recall correctly… no more than a 10,000-year event at best.
The V-cells sound as if they could be much worse.
If some of the Olde Gods show up and start making nasty, a little city-destroying asteroid impact might start sounding like a really good idea… brrr…
As far as Tunguska, I recently heard a theory that it may bave been caused by a test of Nicola Tesla’s tower in NJ. He was testing it at the same time that the blast happened. And Paul has mentioned the tower before.
The blast was also about 1000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, flattening over 2000 square kilometers of trees. Imagine that hitting somewhere populated…
Yup. Would not have required much difference in its course to have come down a bit later (or westward) and southward, and taken out Moscow. A bit more variation, and Paris or London could have gone bye-bye.
… and a bunch of flashy plasma golf balls might have served as an effective “searchlights shining into the sky from the used-car dealer’s lot” attention-getter. Perhaps not the best was of working off a snit that Bud and Brandi could have chosen.
Whee. Yes, this really does set up the next little while to be Verry Interesting.
It puts the Golem Girls in a difficult situation. They (Bud anf Brandi) might be able to become mortal and human-ish as Jin has, but doing so might require the finding and use of more V cells… and might weaken or break the world’s coating of Gods-B-Gone and leave us open to invasion.
It’s even possible that Jin’s transformation might already have done so… although since the V cell which powered her alternator-artifact had been outside our timeline, that might not be the case.
Yuck… as if Jin or the others need another reason to feel guilty…
The world might end up needing all that “super team” firepower somebody was talking about in yesterday’s comments, if a bunch of extremely mojo-heavy “visitors” from the next dimension over decide that they want to come back to their old vacation haunts and start running things again.
But, according to the mythic trope, erecting a barrier to invasion of heebie-jeebies is never a permanent solution. Sooner or later, the barrier weakens and collapses–and all those aliens are still waiting to be dealt with.
Hopefully, the girls and their Scooby Gang will be ready when the walls come down.
[Reminds me of a science fiction story where the reason there were no time travelers in the present day was because a future government had erected a barrier. When the barrier was disabled, a whole slew of visitors appeared, caused much chaos and confusion–until a well-chosen death caused all the future travelers to vanish. One of the last travelers (from the past, which is our present) deduced that there was another barrier that would be erected–and raised a toast to the moment after that barrier fell.]
Brandi hung out an interdimensional do not disturb sign.
Since we haven’t seen anyone porting in just yet we can hazard a guess that our Jin Tylenol Mental cold cure was a new V-cell that was recently fabricated. Prior to the Shelly’s forest trip, it wasn’t actually powered up or a part of that grid that Brandi set up.
It always bugged me that writers tend to write about Nordic, Greek, and Roman gods like they have been in stasis and doing nothing for the last 2,000 years. This, on the other hand, is clearly a pantheon that has been busy.
Any chance that you (or some other well-read scholar) could identify some of the relevant sections of these two epics? I’d love to read through these bits but don’t really have the time to digest both epics in their entirety.
Sheesh. LOL Just the wikipedia article alone is an epic read! Mahabharata
While reading the Wikipedia article I had a realization. We are lucky in the US that we only have 200 years of history to learn in school. Most of the world has thousands of years of history in their countries. Plus all of the mythology.
I recommend that anyone interested in Indian Mythology tae a gander at Nina Paley’s feature-length animation, Sita Sings the Blues; not only is it an interesting, funny and tragic story and film, but you will meet a great early blues singer’s recordings.
(You can watch it free online, download a DVD image free to burn your own copy, or buy a pre-recorded DVD.)
yep!, the various texts that describe a device that made the manna they ate could, in theory, be an actual high-tech nuclear powered artificial food factory. i saw an article that described how somebody is working on it now and that it IS scientifically feasible with today’s tech level (almost). That, and withm the descriptions of the Arc of the Covenant being a crude nuclear reactor that the “clerical vestments” that had to be worn or you’d die in it’s presense were the anti-rad suits. yep sure sounds like it to me.
Then there’s the theory that the Chinese “demons” that can’t turn corners are actually nuclear radiation–and that the Chinese are really descendants of star-drive workers who jumped ship several hundred thousand or million years back, and still remember a bit of their anti-radiation lore. . . .
Chlorella i.e. algae made into edible stuff.
The theory goes that there was a Mana-Machine that was actually a nuclear-driven , very compact factory for edible algae.
The reactor that drove it, was stored in the Arc of the Covenant. (hence the gold&lead) and priests, probably, wore lead-lined ceremonial clothing.
Those that had a peek at the Ark without he clothing had symptoms remarkably similar to radiation-poisoning.
Sounds logical……..
..
..
..
If One believes in that kind of stuff…
Especially the Sodom-Gomorrah thing. Reads much like the bomb drop on Heroshima and it’s aftermath. Also a reason not to look back so as to not be blinded by the flash. There is speculation the pillar of salt thing actually meant one would be blinded as if salt was thrown iin the eyes.
yep, modern scientists have found vitrified rock out there in the Middle East deserts that exactly matches rock samples from various nuke test sites, and that particular type of rock is NOT able to be produced naturally, thus implying it was indeed a weapon blast out there (where exactly i dis-remember right now)
as for the pillar of salt thing, I’m not so sure how accurate it is, but every image I’ve ever seen depicting Lot’s wife getting turned into a pillar of salt shows Sodom/Gomorrah in a slight valley, with Lot and other surviving family members on the opposite side, downhill from the crest, with Lot’s wife standing right at the top of said hill… to me that could be the towns getting nuked, and the heat wave totally evaporating/irradiating away all of the moisture from her and all that’s left is the solid components, ie. a dry dusty SALTY compound. Lot was protected because he was down below the crest of the hill and the heat/radiation was blocked by the earthen hill itself… yeah, OK the whole body’s worth of water getting vaporized that quickly would tend to explode a person via steam pressure, but still… if you were to touch the leftovers and then taste it, it WOULD taste salty…
another thing i always mistrusted about that story… if GOD is Omnipotent and Omniscient and All-Powerful, etc, etc… why did he send the angels down to get them out of town in a HURRY? he could have just waited till they got out of town and to a safe distance THEN Poof!… nope… it sounds to me like “god” was on a TIMETABLE, one that gave him minimal to no extra time for slowpokes… IE like an orbit-to-surface launch window for a nuclear missile! if you delay the launch too much, there isn’t enough fuel on-board the missile to compensate for the difference in trajectories and the missile doesn’t hit what you’re aiming at. therefore he sent his minions down to rush them out of town just ahead of the launch, and they STILL just barely make it to safety.
An electric rock western starring Jon Rubenstein and DOn Johnson, and featuring the James Gang, the New York Rock Ensemble, White Lightnin’ and Country Joe and the Fish?
Nah. We’ll just do a Buffy, and drop back to a musical-number version of the storyline, full of classic movie tunes. That will make everything better… a really sweet solution.
That’s a good analogy. Monica acted as a portal to another dimension, through which a Big Bad wanted to escape. The escape was prevented.
And, the destruction of the Calendar Machine (by means of the same Monica-portal) meant that time would stop looping over and over. Instead, it could flow forward naturally, as it should, into an era which had not ever occurred before.
So, yeah, it’s fair to say that Monica is the Dawn of a New Age.
(dropping one coin, and the Other Shoe, into the Jar)
this is one time that I worry about the potential slippery slope. all because a few people in Hollywood want to control a small amount of material, the U.S. government and other agencies will be in a position to maintain control of everything that you see online.
I think that the only reaction to the passing of this bill is to have a all-encompassing ban on all U.S. film releases and DVDs.
Hpw nice. The do-gooders are at it again. We’ve already lost some of our freedom of speech due to political correctness and specious lawsuits, now this. There is always a faction which hates free expression. If something like this happens, I would hope the geek network would simply drop the WWW and create something else to take it’s place. Something better and inherently free of government or hollywood meddling would be good. Perhaps if the current WWW dries up due to over government regulation, a lesson “might” be learned.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s kind of weird that Monica introduces Bud to Euryale and there’s no “hello, how are you” or anything, Bud just immediately launches from sitting at a park bench to discussion of world-altering metaphysics and ancient technology?
It isn’t just that. Bud isn’t surprised to see her in Euryale’s company. There is no sheepish “sorry we omitted some details, sweetie” from Bud to Monica. That sort of thing. The characters stopped being characters here and started being story vehicles.
nah
she is just excited and wants to get the info out. Bud is almost glowing 🙂
you never suddenly started a conversation with someone who has just come into the room at work or somewhere without first greeting them? i know i have ^^ when info is to be shared the common curtesy get ignored.
That and I assume Monica texted bud to let her know to meet them and would have mentioned eury 🙂
So now Jin is part of the Earth defense systems !? O_o
Brandi is.
She is captain planet!
Brandi was sent?
Take a look here.
Could have been the demons which sent her, I suppose… but why?
I’m thinking it was probably the MIB “security force” which sent her… although her deal with a presumed demon may have been part of how she was able to succeed at the job.
Darnit, I hate to start off picking nits, but: YOUR academic reputation PRECEEDS you, I believe. 😉
Think of it as a free, fan-provided copy-reader service.
Hit refresh! 🙂
Wow… This storyline is certainly building up to epic proportions!
Indeed! Over toast this morning, I get to see the setup for the next five years of story lines. And at this rate, we’re rapidly approaching the storytelling and art levels of Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary.
Ladies and gentlemen, get ready to submit your Hugo nominations…
That is a good idea. Will have to remember that when nomination time comes around.
yes, storyline good, but to stand any chance against Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary, there has to be color…..:/
Girl Genius has been VOLUNTARILY removed from future nominations by Authorial Fiat… The Foglios have won it the last 3 years straight, and they said they feel that they NEED to give someone else a chance or the award will become meaningless. So please DO remember Wapsi Square when nominations start for the next years award.
um, have you seen the Hugo FAQ??? purlennty of time to get in for 2014 AFAICS..
😮
doh, 2013 – currently the vote is held two years ahead of the convention, so if you join in 2012 you get to help pick the site for 2014..
you have got your WSFS? 🙂
okay
had to take a moment there so I did not emit a high pitched squee over this comic.
just the thought of more peeps from the old stories 😀
(coughs)
anyway. Glad that is why Brandi was upset. understandable really 🙂 she prolly thought she had kept them all nice and safe and someone found one!
inter-dimentional travellers?
Indiana jones and the crystal skull type peeps?
I’m glad it’s been explained as well. I’m starting to get caffeine shakes from all the time I’ve been spending in Confusion Corner lately.
As for inter-dimensional travelers, I was leaning towards a Wapsi / Stargate crossover with the mention of Amun-Ra.
Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath get my votes.
Wanna bet whether or not the Library has a true translation of Alhazred?
And if so on whether it’s in the closed stacks?
This possibility suggests that Stinky might be a double agent? Can a squid be a mole?
or an octo-spy?
if paul ever has a stargate in his comic i may just die from sheer happiness 🙂
i just about coped in reallife comics when the guy there made one 😛
Ehrm…
but one V-cell has been removed – did they power the grid…?
probably not entirely by themselves, but if that is the case then the Grid that Bud talks about has been messed up since WWII due to the German U-Boat taking it away from it’s resting place in Ireland. then again… Is it a V-Cell in the first place? it was never explicitly stated if it was or not. from what Bud is saying here, it is highly likely that it IS, but until we know if the thing Shelly brought back from the Time-Forest IS or ISN’T a V-Cell, we’re just guessing; also remember that May has ANOTHER device she calls a Galaxy Alternator, is THAT a V-Cell or not?
They most likely didn’t mess anything up. The v cell they removed was from a previous version of the time loop.
The Very First, as a matter of fact.
Not to mention the power source was not in the cross. It was far off Earth in the Time Forest which is not even part of the time stream.
right, but what WAS buried in Ireland in THIS loop? (the thing that the Nazi’s found) i think it was fully functional in THIS time loop, because Shelly #1 was the one that put the plutonium into it, and that was at least back in midevil times for the Celtic graveyard etc, not counting the 56 loops in between (or at least the last 1450-ish years)… anyways.. there has been PLENTY of time for Brandi to have found it, and either left it where it was safe, or to have moved it into position for the World Grid, if that’s the case, then when the Nazi’s took it then got sunk, it messed up the grid and we just now found out about the error, so Brandi may NEED to take it OUT of Jin, in order to fix the Grid.
You should also consider these people think in terms of millennial projects – not even the earth is stable over such a span, so I suspect any competent engineer designing for such built in as much redundancy as s/he could afford.
I don’t think the cross artifact had anything to do with the grid. Brandi would have lost it back then when she saw it, if it was part of that system. I’m not sure that thing even contained a V-Cell.
Also don’t think the V-cell used in Jin was a part of the grid power source since it was put together separately. Seems to me to be one crafted apart from the initial stock. Therefore no weakening of the grid.
it wouldn’t make a difference what CM Loop it came from, because of the TIME RESET… that means that the ONLY time we in loop 57 are aware of is THIS loop, and that EVERYTHING got rebooted to the PRECISE LOCATION AND STATUS they were in when May attempted to destroy the CM and cause the loops in the first place. SO, if Brandi had found and emplaced a V-cell in the grave in Ireland, BEFORE Tepoz hid the GG’s, and got subsequently stoned, then for the last 400 years at least we’ve been safe from ET’s, or were until the Nazi’s took it away. and remember, the CM loops didn’t START happening until WELL AFTER the GG’s were separated from the Chimera, but BEFORE the various fallings-out and battles of the Mahabharata, and Ramayana. because THEY were NOT used as a weapon DURING those accounts, they were part of the clean-up crew (ironic isn’t it 🙂 ) that went and found the remaining V-cells and hid them, so they couldn’t have been the combined Chimera in order to do that. and I’ll make a W.A.G for some more Moxana points that those accounts are the correct time frame for the various Time-Keepers to have died out.
Love the art in the first two panels… gorgeous play with the light
That’s the reason why. I thought Amun and Shiva was over their parents house. Who knew?
So our heroes saved the world by eliminating the calendar machine and then saved it again by stabilizing Jin.
Then we had a bit of an “intermission” and witnessed the emergence of maturity in Shelly and some rage in Brandi.
I seem to have missed something:
Are the girls currently on a quest?
Is the world in danger of being annihilated again?
Or is all this exposition the prelude to their next adventure?
YES!
🙂
All those story threads that SoWhyMe was unhappily saying had been abruptly dropped, are about to re-emerge with a vengance. They’re all part of the big picture that Paul has been setting up.
We have just had one hell of a big Reveal!
Or a Big Retcon, anyway…
Nah. I’m sure I’d know if Paul was pulling a Retcon on us… I’d taste it in my drink and I’d realize that I was about to purple monkey bus dishwashur frezel snurb gnurrr &%#8xc7
NO CARRIER
Please Paul does not Retcon. He fixes the existing story structure with new and or unknown information from places like the noodle incident.
I didn’t say dropped permanently. Just dropped suddenly and moved on to something else, time and again. Of course he will pick them up in the future or he would not have done them at all. Just that it’s annoying to have them stopped so suddenly like that. No idea of when they might be picked up again, if ever, on some. So much up in the air. Not unlike a soap opera.
Probably. There’s still ‘Crispy’ to worry about, we need to see how Shelly and Justin’s relationship resolves, and Brandi, last time we saw her, seemed to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown / angst storm. As well as long standing questions like what ‘the gods’ are up to and who stoned Tepoz. But those might be part of, or become part of, the next quest…
They’re talking about power grids and interdimensional travelers, and all I can think about is a twinkie 35 feet long, weighing 600 pounds.
lets hope what happened in Tunguska doesn’t happen here! besides, who ARE we gonna call?
Tunguska was relatively small beans, as asteroid-fragment explosions go, and not all that uncommon. I has somewhat surprised to learn, a while back, that there’s one Hiroshima-bomb-level explosion in the upper atmosphere, caused by a small chunk of rock, about once per year on average. Tunguska was roughly a thousand-year event if I recall correctly… no more than a 10,000-year event at best.
The V-cells sound as if they could be much worse.
If some of the Olde Gods show up and start making nasty, a little city-destroying asteroid impact might start sounding like a really good idea… brrr…
As far as Tunguska, I recently heard a theory that it may bave been caused by a test of Nicola Tesla’s tower in NJ. He was testing it at the same time that the blast happened. And Paul has mentioned the tower before.
Keep in mind that Tunguska was an ‘air burst’ 5-10 km above the earth. Essentially one of Bud’s golf balls in reverse only 20 or so meters across.
The blast was also about 1000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, flattening over 2000 square kilometers of trees. Imagine that hitting somewhere populated…
Yup. Would not have required much difference in its course to have come down a bit later (or westward) and southward, and taken out Moscow. A bit more variation, and Paris or London could have gone bye-bye.
um… no that’s just what *THEY* want you to think… it was actually a pan-dimensional cross-rip. at least according to Egon and Spengler.
(at least that’s what i remember them saying, memory is a bit fuzzy from the neuralyzer still.)
That one could also work as the fault of Tesla.
The GGG! (imagines Bud flame-breathing Cthulhu)
With an assist from the MiB!
And Monica, of course.
That’s a big Twinkie.
Just don’t think of a 50′ Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man–even if he does make you feel safe.
I’m keeping an eye out for mass sponge migrations, myself.
Oopsie!
Shelly and May, between them, just hung out the “Welcome Cthulhuoid Denizens of the Outer Spaces” sign…
… and a bunch of flashy plasma golf balls might have served as an effective “searchlights shining into the sky from the used-car dealer’s lot” attention-getter. Perhaps not the best was of working off a snit that Bud and Brandi could have chosen.
*blink*
Whee. Yes, this really does set up the next little while to be Verry Interesting.
It puts the Golem Girls in a difficult situation. They (Bud anf Brandi) might be able to become mortal and human-ish as Jin has, but doing so might require the finding and use of more V cells… and might weaken or break the world’s coating of Gods-B-Gone and leave us open to invasion.
It’s even possible that Jin’s transformation might already have done so… although since the V cell which powered her alternator-artifact had been outside our timeline, that might not be the case.
Yuck… as if Jin or the others need another reason to feel guilty…
The world might end up needing all that “super team” firepower somebody was talking about in yesterday’s comments, if a bunch of extremely mojo-heavy “visitors” from the next dimension over decide that they want to come back to their old vacation haunts and start running things again.
You want some Super Team Firepower?
Happy to Oblige.
http://youtu.be/M6mQfnC2wL4
😛
“Gods-B-Gone” – i like it.
My granddaughters’ bedroom has a sign on the door (provided by their mother a few months back when a series of nightmares had a common cause):
“Zom-B-Gone (poof!)”
Let’s try again – i accidentally posted a bare URL and it got caught in the spam filter, apparently.
Anti-Zombie Charm.
Third time’s the charm – mistyped my e-mail address.
Anti-Zombie Charm.
(Go ahead and delete the previous attempts)
Oh. Well, that explains everything.
Wait, who?
*sssssshhhhhhhh……SPLAPOOFF!!* ( brain exploding in messy manner)
Despite calling it, this. Still. Blows. My. Mind
Knee-deep in legends from allaround the world.
Someone is busy trying to connect allancient texts and legends.
*gets latte from Tina, and plops down in entertained-spectator-corner*
this is gonna be great!
Well, this answers one of my previous speculations about what else was out there. And now we know why it hasn’t shown up.
But, according to the mythic trope, erecting a barrier to invasion of heebie-jeebies is never a permanent solution. Sooner or later, the barrier weakens and collapses–and all those aliens are still waiting to be dealt with.
Hopefully, the girls and their Scooby Gang will be ready when the walls come down.
[Reminds me of a science fiction story where the reason there were no time travelers in the present day was because a future government had erected a barrier. When the barrier was disabled, a whole slew of visitors appeared, caused much chaos and confusion–until a well-chosen death caused all the future travelers to vanish. One of the last travelers (from the past, which is our present) deduced that there was another barrier that would be erected–and raised a toast to the moment after that barrier fell.]
Ah! Don Martin sound effects!
Ack! M is outside? Where’s the snow *plop*???
No plop today. Plop tomorrow. Always a plop tomorrow.
Besides snow only plops when Monica *isn’t* dressed for it.
yeah.. no fun when she will just shrug it off…. 🙁
Or poit it away.
Another strange event happening on the Spoiled Princess Cruse Lines might just kill the company as being cursed tends to be bad for business.
it has to happen, before you can poit it….
I like where this plot is going.
Brandi hung out an interdimensional do not disturb sign.
Since we haven’t seen anyone porting in just yet we can hazard a guess that our Jin Tylenol Mental cold cure was a new V-cell that was recently fabricated. Prior to the Shelly’s forest trip, it wasn’t actually powered up or a part of that grid that Brandi set up.
It always bugged me that writers tend to write about Nordic, Greek, and Roman gods like they have been in stasis and doing nothing for the last 2,000 years. This, on the other hand, is clearly a pantheon that has been busy.
Ooh, bringing in Indian mythology! 😀
I think I remember that bit of the Mahabharata — one of the weapons brought into that great battle sounded a awful lot like a nuclear-fusion warhead…
Any chance that you (or some other well-read scholar) could identify some of the relevant sections of these two epics? I’d love to read through these bits but don’t really have the time to digest both epics in their entirety.
Sheesh. LOL Just the wikipedia article alone is an epic read!
Mahabharata
While reading the Wikipedia article I had a realization. We are lucky in the US that we only have 200 years of history to learn in school. Most of the world has thousands of years of history in their countries. Plus all of the mythology.
I recommend that anyone interested in Indian Mythology tae a gander at Nina Paley’s feature-length animation, Sita Sings the Blues; not only is it an interesting, funny and tragic story and film, but you will meet a great early blues singer’s recordings.
(You can watch it free online, download a DVD image free to burn your own copy, or buy a pre-recorded DVD.)
Ever read the part of the Bible where they are in the desert for 40 years? It reads a lot like the Air Force manual for survival in a nuclear zone.
yep!, the various texts that describe a device that made the manna they ate could, in theory, be an actual high-tech nuclear powered artificial food factory. i saw an article that described how somebody is working on it now and that it IS scientifically feasible with today’s tech level (almost). That, and withm the descriptions of the Arc of the Covenant being a crude nuclear reactor that the “clerical vestments” that had to be worn or you’d die in it’s presense were the anti-rad suits. yep sure sounds like it to me.
Then there’s the theory that the Chinese “demons” that can’t turn corners are actually nuclear radiation–and that the Chinese are really descendants of star-drive workers who jumped ship several hundred thousand or million years back, and still remember a bit of their anti-radiation lore. . . .
But the manna fell from the sky, did it not?
Mebbe the machine spat the end-product out, so it could dry on the desert floor.
Who knows. I completely believe we tend to underestimate our forefathers. I am not too sure about this mana-machine though.
Chlorella i.e. algae made into edible stuff.
The theory goes that there was a Mana-Machine that was actually a nuclear-driven , very compact factory for edible algae.
The reactor that drove it, was stored in the Arc of the Covenant. (hence the gold&lead) and priests, probably, wore lead-lined ceremonial clothing.
Those that had a peek at the Ark without he clothing had symptoms remarkably similar to radiation-poisoning.
Sounds logical……..
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If One believes in that kind of stuff…
Especially the Sodom-Gomorrah thing. Reads much like the bomb drop on Heroshima and it’s aftermath. Also a reason not to look back so as to not be blinded by the flash. There is speculation the pillar of salt thing actually meant one would be blinded as if salt was thrown iin the eyes.
yep, modern scientists have found vitrified rock out there in the Middle East deserts that exactly matches rock samples from various nuke test sites, and that particular type of rock is NOT able to be produced naturally, thus implying it was indeed a weapon blast out there (where exactly i dis-remember right now)
as for the pillar of salt thing, I’m not so sure how accurate it is, but every image I’ve ever seen depicting Lot’s wife getting turned into a pillar of salt shows Sodom/Gomorrah in a slight valley, with Lot and other surviving family members on the opposite side, downhill from the crest, with Lot’s wife standing right at the top of said hill… to me that could be the towns getting nuked, and the heat wave totally evaporating/irradiating away all of the moisture from her and all that’s left is the solid components, ie. a dry dusty SALTY compound. Lot was protected because he was down below the crest of the hill and the heat/radiation was blocked by the earthen hill itself… yeah, OK the whole body’s worth of water getting vaporized that quickly would tend to explode a person via steam pressure, but still… if you were to touch the leftovers and then taste it, it WOULD taste salty…
another thing i always mistrusted about that story… if GOD is Omnipotent and Omniscient and All-Powerful, etc, etc… why did he send the angels down to get them out of town in a HURRY? he could have just waited till they got out of town and to a safe distance THEN Poof!… nope… it sounds to me like “god” was on a TIMETABLE, one that gave him minimal to no extra time for slowpokes… IE like an orbit-to-surface launch window for a nuclear missile! if you delay the launch too much, there isn’t enough fuel on-board the missile to compensate for the difference in trajectories and the missile doesn’t hit what you’re aiming at. therefore he sent his minions down to rush them out of town just ahead of the launch, and they STILL just barely make it to safety.
Is the World Grid akin to Larson’s Bozone Layer, keeping the universe safe from us?
Curiouser and curiouser cried Alice.
Pardon me Mr. Taylor, but have you ever played or GM’ed (Game Master)ed Call of Cthulhu before? LOL
I’m impressed by your research, not many people know of the Siddhartha.
Ever heard of the movie Zachariah?
An electric rock western starring Jon Rubenstein and DOn Johnson, and featuring the James Gang, the New York Rock Ensemble, White Lightnin’ and Country Joe and the Fish?
Written by Firesign Theatre.
Remember, we’re all Bozos on this bus!
How can you be two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?
It’s easy if you don’t know how!
This piqued my curiosity bigtime. I did a part of my master’s degree on the literature of India.
See my just-previous comment, about Zachariah.
I also referenced Sita Sings the Blues.
Both interesting takes on Indian myth.
I just read Siddhartha when in a Herman Hesse phase. . . .
Shoot! Insert \!
When that solar wind drops, I sense much AMUN-osity occouring…And the SHIVA’S really gonna hit the fan! 😀
Nah. We’ll just do a Buffy, and drop back to a musical-number version of the storyline, full of classic movie tunes. That will make everything better… a really sweet solution.
“Heaven! Amun heaven!”
Hey! What’sa you a-staring at?
*clink*
So, is Monika the key/Dawn in this scenario?
That’s a good analogy. Monica acted as a portal to another dimension, through which a Big Bad wanted to escape. The escape was prevented.
And, the destruction of the Calendar Machine (by means of the same Monica-portal) meant that time would stop looping over and over. Instead, it could flow forward naturally, as it should, into an era which had not ever occurred before.
So, yeah, it’s fair to say that Monica is the Dawn of a New Age.
(dropping one coin, and the Other Shoe, into the Jar)
Once again, Euryale, my new favorite character!
Paul, I have a request… can you please put this up somewhere? It’s kind of important. http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html
I put a link up on Facebook.
this is one time that I worry about the potential slippery slope. all because a few people in Hollywood want to control a small amount of material, the U.S. government and other agencies will be in a position to maintain control of everything that you see online.
I think that the only reaction to the passing of this bill is to have a all-encompassing ban on all U.S. film releases and DVDs.
Hpw nice. The do-gooders are at it again. We’ve already lost some of our freedom of speech due to political correctness and specious lawsuits, now this. There is always a faction which hates free expression. If something like this happens, I would hope the geek network would simply drop the WWW and create something else to take it’s place. Something better and inherently free of government or hollywood meddling would be good. Perhaps if the current WWW dries up due to over government regulation, a lesson “might” be learned.
Hm…a cosmological cloaking device.
No wonder reality is so much duller than fantasy.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s kind of weird that Monica introduces Bud to Euryale and there’s no “hello, how are you” or anything, Bud just immediately launches from sitting at a park bench to discussion of world-altering metaphysics and ancient technology?
The way I see it, is they know each other pretty well by reputation garnered over millenia.
What’s the point? They know how the other is. The same as they have been for the last X-thousand years. Immortality breeds complacency.
It isn’t just that. Bud isn’t surprised to see her in Euryale’s company. There is no sheepish “sorry we omitted some details, sweetie” from Bud to Monica. That sort of thing. The characters stopped being characters here and started being story vehicles.
nah
she is just excited and wants to get the info out. Bud is almost glowing 🙂
you never suddenly started a conversation with someone who has just come into the room at work or somewhere without first greeting them? i know i have ^^ when info is to be shared the common curtesy get ignored.
That and I assume Monica texted bud to let her know to meet them and would have mentioned eury 🙂
Whoa…Brandi’s a Global do-gooder. Accomplished woman, our Brandi.
Of course. Name one 100,000+ year old woman who is not well accomplished.
And Wapsi Square explains why the Old Gods are no longer active on Earth. Perfect.