And her mother and one of her best friends (even if they do bicker) are standing there arguing in tones and terms that suggest that she’s just a thing, not a person.
When I saw that last panel, I was like “HOLY SHIT DID SHE SNAP HER RIBS?!” It took me about four seconds to put the facts together that she is much more vulnerable now. :'(
First, welcome, please enjoy your stay. Next we ask that you enjoy the services of gravatar.com, so that we may be able to better recognize you in the future.
Though you might be easy to remember with such a punny name!
*drops piggy bank into swirling abyss that is the Pun Jar*
Not much to say ‘cept your post reminded me I needed to get an avatar, and I actually had the time for it , aannd I;m a sucker for puns. especially bad ones (much to the chagrin of my wife).
The sun shines
People forget
The spray flies as the speedboat glides
People forget
Forget they’re hiding
The girls smile
People forget
The snow packs as the skier tracks
People forget
Forget they’re hiding.
Behind an eminence front
Eminence front – It’s a put-on.
It’s an eminence front
Guess we’ll find out tomorrow who’s going to feel bad about doing that to Jin. Still not sure if Bud jumped or May threw her. The former makes more sense, but I don’t want Bud to feel bad for trying to keep Jin from shooting herself.
hmm. I am afraid tomorrow, and the rest of the week are gonna’be true tear-jerking.
Something like: “Stop it!” I have done enough. I am tired. I lost too much, have given up too much. I want to have peace. I did what I had to do, now please, let me die?”
And Bud and May trying to convince her there is still much to experience, and then May breaking down and/or getting angry, and rubbing Jin’s face in the fact that she endured aeons in the demon-realm ,just because she tried to help her daughter.. something like that ,You know?
Even still, Jin’s probably more stunned by the impact and not used to ‘actual’ physical pain, considering how many millenia it has been since she felt it.
I know I’ll be proven wrong, but I honestly doubt Bud would be clumsy enough to hit Jin with enough force to shatter her ribs. Bud has enough strength to flatten a continent, but enough control to avoid injuring Monica, Tina, & Shelly in physical contact (in times of calm, stress, and inebriation). She wouldn’t have hit Jin with the same force she did back when she was enraged at her, not after Jin showed signs of vulnerability (stubbed knee and hangnail).
So yeah, I think this is more “Oh, so this is what actual pain feels like again” tears than “my insides are now a fine paste” tears.
Yeah – but i have to agree that Bud wasn’t the prime mover – that May basically threw her at Jin. Look back at Friday’s page – that’s not someone diving to stop a friend harming themself – that’s someone flying through the air and trying to catch herself.
problems…
she now has a limited lifespan, but does that mean ‘less than infinity’ or a ‘human’ lifespan??
“she is still a golem, just with new parameters” – does this mean she is still indestructible, but can still feel pain, and can be ‘slightly damaged’ enough to bleed??
( or is that just a ‘special effect??)
If the parameters have been adjusted to “can’t die too soon” poor Jin is going to have a pretty steep learning curve trying to adjust to “very nearly mortal”.
A awesome cliff hanger followed by a killer heart tugging tear jerker. Paul to a T. No we just need something so funny tomorrow that I nearly pee my pants and my week will be compete.
The question that is left here is can May reverse the new fragile nature of Jin so she wont get hurt so easily again. Also can we get Alan over there so he can start the “Jin don’t you dare kill yourself and hurt me by leaving me all alone” therapy that he is bound to do.
Well, I just don’t know what to think about this one. On the one hand Jin is hurting and if she was real I would want to comfort her. On the other hand she did just pull the trigger on a pistol while holding the muzzle in her mouth and only Bud’s super speed kept Jin’s head from being provided with a new back door.
Kind of reminds me of that scene from The Incredibles near the beginning where Mr Incredible saves the man jumping off a building. Obviously Jin isn’t that much of a jackass, but still the whole injuries from being saved from suicide by a super-powered being thing…
Considering Bud’s sensitivities over being viewed as an object rather than a person, May’s ability to inflict such a drastic change on Jin, for better or worse, you know was going to upset Bud no matter how things turned.
She’s actually handling the situation better than expected.
Nah, that just means that she’s adapted to this time frame very well indeed, to be using slang and metaphors correctly even while under stress, and this is definitely a stressful situation to say the least!
Since Nudge claims to have never met an angel, one could assume that invoking Christ is just like any other swear word in English in Wapsiworld.
But it does add an unsettling layer, in that the Golem is a part of Jewish folklore, and that the New Testament may just be another part of that folklore, and that if there is any functional form of physical resurrection in Wapsiworld, we just saw it.
Panel 4 doesn’t resemble the story of Lazarus very well because they are all automatons, and see my rant below…
There have been plenty of emotional scenes, long before this one, in which the only characters were golems. But this one is creeping me out because it keeps underscoring that these are all sophisticated AI who, like cylons, have crawled far up the distant side of the uncanny valley. They are “uploaded” personalities, and therefore, copies of people long dead, not the people themselves.
Maybe the Golem Girls were more comforting while alone, since they died as strangers and were reconstituted as sisters. It was all new, they were learning together. May’s return upsets this idyll; she is the will of the ancients haunting them again, restoring relationships that should have vanished ten millennia ago.
Most eerily, the echoes of class warfare from a civilization long since annihilated keep distracting them. Bud dutifully fetches and guards, on cue, but distrust keeps her arguing and turning to violence. May, the elite Timekeeper, is still calling the shots and only half-answers the farm girl’s questions. This distracting anger and violence consistently overrides the obvious human need for comfort.
One guard process complete, Bud returns to threat posture. Her repair process complete, May runs a default self-justification program. As long as she doesn’t attempt shutdown, Jin is allowed to process alone down there on the floor, within her new set of parameters.
I don’t know what would be more hellish to watch happen next. Brandi popping in with her motherly-comfort… subroutine? Or Alan walking in as the only live user in an already busy runtime environment?
Yes I was waiting for a “timey whimy sorta thing” to creep into that one, but with the perceived IQ of this forum (and I have to admit I have gotten the idea that this forum has a high quotient) someone had to see that Waspi World is the definition of the uncanny valley, just so close that it is surreal.
Very introspective writing, to be sure. Perhaps I was influenced as a very young child by devouring all my father’s science fiction anthologies from the 40’s and 50’s (I still own them), but I don’t find Wapsi surreal at all… it’s a world I would gladly live in. That said, I understand the sentiments about the uncanny valley.
i think surreal still fits in the sense that an ancient society was capable of technology light decades ahead of even their current timeline, and almost destroyed universe as a result… Other than that, yea I would totally want to live there too!
Oo, thanks for the link – I had begun to follow this one, but then somehow lost it. You’d think someone would invent a way to find things on the internet. They’d make a fortune.
And thank YOU for your screen name… i have the GN of Yamara, collected from the Dragon magazines, but i didn’t know they were still doing it, until i saw your gravatar and Googled it!
Wow, I wake up late on a Labor Day to high praise from fellow fans. Thanks guys. Paul touches on a lot of inspirational themes, so my rant can only be used as proof I could be a professional critic. Looks like I should keep trying this mindfulness meditation thing.
Fairportfan – I would love to see Paul write an episode of Who. I’d love to see a lot of the people who are Wapsi fans write one! Paul certainly has the heart of the show down, that empathy is the best and the most heroic in humankind, and villainy is its erasure. Though, this moment in this scene mixes the Whovian boundaries of loyal companions vs. a tide of soulless monsters. …Maybe Jin really has thought all this through.
Maark30 – I really liked the Gaiman episode of Who, and his takedown of the lazy handwaving phrase “timey wimey” (‘it’s spacey-wacey’). I don’t do wimey. It’s either satire/farce or hard fiction with hard consequences. Still a fan of happy endings, since it’s more challenging to make them realistic, and when they are, it has a better chance of really helping people.
Wolf – I got into SF by reading a lot of the great stories of the 1970s, but was fortunate enough to actually have an SF class in high school in that decade. It was a serious overview of SF from Frankenstein to Bradbury. Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” from The Martian Chronicles was in my head as I wrote that rant.
illiad – It’s somehow more uncanny because they’re so far past the obvious visual valley itself. The simple question, why are Bud and May fighting? just gets freaking eerie when you try to think through the answer.
Kramegame – Paul does use that as a welcoming advertisement for the Wapsiverse, and here I am enjoying the story, but a real world with teleporting sentient weapons of mass destruction, presumably on top the ones that exist here, is not my first choice in co-ops. While I’d trust the ‘subcreator’ not to blow Wapsi up, I think living in Templar, Arizona would be my choice if I were forced to pick a 2D environment. I would dig hanging out at Phix’s Library, though.
fair point, but if the ‘uncanny valley’ only involves robots and Transhumanism in fiction, then starwars, startrek etc has already done lots….
If you are talking about OTT abilities and concepts, futurama has done brain swaps between humans,robots, computerized buckets, animals etc..
also time-travel, destroying/creating the universe/ reality…
why are Bud and May fighting? well what would you do if you saw someone you only vaguely know, doing something to your bestest friend, that made her seem to die/turn to stone???
Actually, Bud and May should know each other fairly well. When she went in to get her, they were together for quite some time considering Bud came out with different clothes from what she had on going in. Perhaps years passed for them.
What’s a person tho?
is a person the sum of their experiences therefore Bud most certainly is no longer the person who died in that pit so long ago or is the person a ‘person’ because of how they think and feel in which case (from the ikea lamp) Bud is very similar still to that young girl.
Also – aren’t we all just machines.
Lets face it the body is a machine with all its parts designed for certain things. The mind is a computer. We are programmed (brought up) via experiences and what we are told.
If you look at anything in its basic format it will creep you out 😛
That’s a very worthy point, and probably why watching Bud and Brandi grow as people early on was only creepy when they let their monsters show, and only in regards to acknowledging their monstrousness. They were sisters finally finding adulthood and places in Minnesota society.
What sets humans apart from golems is that each of our sentient consciousnesses are not duplicates of dead people. (Or even each other: I’ve known ‘identical’ twins. They’re never identical.) If something can be duplicated, it can be industrialized, and so on to the horrors in the promises of Ray Kurzweil, and in the fiction of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Galactica. Empathy is made redundant, or into empty ritual, when you can replace people like spark plugs, modify their agency at the convenience of another. Perhaps the cleansing fire of the Chimera was a blessing compared to what Lanthis would have done with a golem army of the one perfect and most loyal soldier.
Ah, but that’s speculation. What if golems are intrinsically unique?
What if the imprint of an incinerated creature can never be recopied, only reconstituted, once at a time?
Then Paul is making an important decision about the nature of the soul in his universe. That’s a very poorly-loaded, very imprecise word for a highly precise statement on a concept the highest importance. If sentience–that common nature which makes us identify with and care about the characters–is intrinsic, then in Wapsiworld, everyone who has ever lived can genuinely be recovered.
Ghost Hunters, “haunted golems” and Tina’s muñeca para el Dia de los Muertos would be the foreshadowing groundwork for understanding the core philosophy of Wapsi Square. For instance, the dance of the robots would become a very different thing if the person speaking in panel 4 is actually the Lanthian child that faced the Chimera at her door.
I still don’t like calling her “Crispy”.
Too soon.
…
Anyway. I gotta get back to drawing terrified League of Nations delegates. Cheers.
Actually, the brain is just a computer, the mind is something else entirely. The essence of self is the question for the ages. Whatever it is, must be in the brain, but is more than simply the sum of hat is stored in it. If you transfer your brain into a clone of your body (with it’s brain previously removed) you will wake up in the new body. Your “self” will have been transfered. If, however, you simply copy every bit of the data stored in your brain to the brain of the clone (assuming it was blank) and you are killed, you will not wake up in the clone. The clone might as well be another individual. It will not be “you.”
And all this begs the question.
“Where does continuity (real?) end and copy begin?
It’s a revisit of the Star Trek transporter conundrum.
Personally I don’t think May would consider herself a mere knockoff of a dead woman, nor the GGs mere automatons.
ROFL! How long have you been waiting to do that one!
Jin is feeling pain for the first time, and not just pain, but overwhelming pain. It is my conjecture that her heartfelt “Stop It!” is referring to the new and frightening sensations caused by her bruised and broken chest and nose. More of a “Make it Stop!”. But it also works well as a child crying out to embattled parents too.
Delicious writing!
So I had a thought while commenting up top, and resulted in this question… Would the actual Chimera, if it blew up the earth, have been able to survive space?
While proposed that it’s parts are made up of extremely technologically advanced ceramics, they’re still ceramics. Space, along with no atmosphere, has an intense simultaneous heat/cold, as well as massive amounts of radiation. (thats what I’ve been told anyway, but until I get a spaceship and a few volunteers, can’t really prove otherwise…)
I feel the constant temperature change, as well as being constantly bombarded with radiation and high speed debris, would result in a malfunction somewhere along the line, as it does with our space shuttles today.
Even if it could make a force field, how long would it have been able to “hold it together”? would it have been able to make it to a different planet with atmosphere (remember we’re talking light years here), or would it have eventually just been more debris in space?
It really depends, doesn’t it–the Chimera, IIRC (and I may well be wrong) was not ceramic so much as clay. Which would lead not to thermoshock-induced shattering as the possibility of drying out and erosion of the dessicated layers. Which golem magic may provide protection against, or not. (Like so much technology, it’s always hard to tell where magic will fail before you actually see it in action.)
as Florence Ambrose says: any technology no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it;
the Girls and May are much more sophisticated than we realize, i don’t think the heat/cold cycle will be too much of a problem, as the Chimaera they did create the plasma wave that vaporized everything around them, so they can handle the hot, and when Bud and Brandi got the day off due to snow, their reactions seemed to imply the cold wasn’t a problem either, granted it’s not the absolute zero or thereabouts as space is, but… as for the rapidity of those changes, i think Jin’s “warm butt” episode says it wouldn’t be as much of a problem as you think it would be. as for the time it takes to get to another planet, that’s a bit more problematic, assuming they have read up on current search results they have quite a few choices to go to, but where to go is the question? the actual getting there part isn’t the issue since they can throw rocks at a SIGNIFICANT fraction of light speed, all they’d have to do is stand on an asteroid and throw rocks away from them to move in the opposite direction, granted they cant start off at that speed, as they would shatter the rock they were standing on, but nipping off tiny pieces along they way they could get up to a significant speed before they need to swap sides and start decelerating.
What’s the range and method of their teleportation powers? I think that might be tied to the whole “destroying” thing, as in: Moving half of the core to rest on the surface of Eurasia, at will.
Maybe they go to Mars and from there flatten the Earth.
Oh hey I can see Tau Ceti from here. Let’s poit to some big asteroid around that, and then squish the Sun.
how are you guys reading this page? i can’t tell if it should be read as: top left> bottom left> right> panel 4, or as: top left> right> bottom left > panel 4… how says y’all?
That last panel. :'(
Poor Jin, not completely sure that those tears in the last panel are tears of pain >.<
Well she’s holding her chest and her nose is bleeding. I think pain has something to do with it.
And her mother and one of her best friends (even if they do bicker) are standing there arguing in tones and terms that suggest that she’s just a thing, not a person.
When I saw that last panel, I was like “HOLY SHIT DID SHE SNAP HER RIBS?!” It took me about four seconds to put the facts together that she is much more vulnerable now. :'(
physical AND emotional pain…. 😛
Sad Jin is sad
First???…sorry I had to do it
oh…nevermind…this is my first time commenting on the site though I’ve been reading for over a year now
First, welcome, please enjoy your stay. Next we ask that you enjoy the services of gravatar.com, so that we may be able to better recognize you in the future.
Though you might be easy to remember with such a punny name!
*drops piggy bank into swirling abyss that is the Pun Jar*
Not much to say ‘cept your post reminded me I needed to get an avatar, and I actually had the time for it , aannd I;m a sucker for puns. especially bad ones (much to the chagrin of my wife).
Gonna take a while for Jin to get used to this.
I think we’ve all experienced that sort of gut punch crying sometime in our childhood.
Awwwwwwwwwww…
Poor girl… 🙁
The sun shines
People forget
The spray flies as the speedboat glides
People forget
Forget they’re hiding
The girls smile
People forget
The snow packs as the skier tracks
People forget
Forget they’re hiding.
Behind an eminence front
Eminence front – It’s a put-on.
It’s an eminence front
Does this make Bud her Daddy?
Cuz. you know what this argument sounds like.
They really should have brought the rest of the scoobies along.
After being cannonballed by an indestructible golem, I wonder how many ribs Jin has broken..and she probably has broken her nose to boot.
Poor Jin..
Guess we’ll find out tomorrow who’s going to feel bad about doing that to Jin. Still not sure if Bud jumped or May threw her. The former makes more sense, but I don’t want Bud to feel bad for trying to keep Jin from shooting herself.
hmm. I am afraid tomorrow, and the rest of the week are gonna’be true tear-jerking.
Something like: “Stop it!” I have done enough. I am tired. I lost too much, have given up too much. I want to have peace. I did what I had to do, now please, let me die?”
And Bud and May trying to convince her there is still much to experience, and then May breaking down and/or getting angry, and rubbing Jin’s face in the fact that she endured aeons in the demon-realm ,just because she tried to help her daughter.. something like that ,You know?
I don’t think she HAS ribs, but not confident in that. Mom may be able to fix them by popping open the chest hatch and tinkering.
Don’t know about the bloody nose (and subsequent black eyes), tho.
Even still, Jin’s probably more stunned by the impact and not used to ‘actual’ physical pain, considering how many millenia it has been since she felt it.
I know I’ll be proven wrong, but I honestly doubt Bud would be clumsy enough to hit Jin with enough force to shatter her ribs. Bud has enough strength to flatten a continent, but enough control to avoid injuring Monica, Tina, & Shelly in physical contact (in times of calm, stress, and inebriation). She wouldn’t have hit Jin with the same force she did back when she was enraged at her, not after Jin showed signs of vulnerability (stubbed knee and hangnail).
So yeah, I think this is more “Oh, so this is what actual pain feels like again” tears than “my insides are now a fine paste” tears.
Yeah – but i have to agree that Bud wasn’t the prime mover – that May basically threw her at Jin. Look back at Friday’s page – that’s not someone diving to stop a friend harming themself – that’s someone flying through the air and trying to catch herself.
problems…
she now has a limited lifespan, but does that mean ‘less than infinity’ or a ‘human’ lifespan??
“she is still a golem, just with new parameters” – does this mean she is still indestructible, but can still feel pain, and can be ‘slightly damaged’ enough to bleed??
( or is that just a ‘special effect??)
If the parameters have been adjusted to “can’t die too soon” poor Jin is going to have a pretty steep learning curve trying to adjust to “very nearly mortal”.
A awesome cliff hanger followed by a killer heart tugging tear jerker. Paul to a T. No we just need something so funny tomorrow that I nearly pee my pants and my week will be compete.
The question that is left here is can May reverse the new fragile nature of Jin so she wont get hurt so easily again. Also can we get Alan over there so he can start the “Jin don’t you dare kill yourself and hurt me by leaving me all alone” therapy that he is bound to do.
Well, I just don’t know what to think about this one. On the one hand Jin is hurting and if she was real I would want to comfort her. On the other hand she did just pull the trigger on a pistol while holding the muzzle in her mouth and only Bud’s super speed kept Jin’s head from being provided with a new back door.
But still OWIE! face…
Kind of reminds me of that scene from The Incredibles near the beginning where Mr Incredible saves the man jumping off a building. Obviously Jin isn’t that much of a jackass, but still the whole injuries from being saved from suicide by a super-powered being thing…
As long as Jin doesn’t turn around and sue Mom for interfering.
It seems Jin’s cure is going to cause her more problems than its solves. Poor kid. 🙁
Law of unexpected consequences.
Yeah, that one and Murphy’s are always a problem.
Considering Bud’s sensitivities over being viewed as an object rather than a person, May’s ability to inflict such a drastic change on Jin, for better or worse, you know was going to upset Bud no matter how things turned.
She’s actually handling the situation better than expected.
On an unrelated note, does it seem odd to anyone else Bud using the expletive “Jesus Christ”?
I know she’s done it before, but it’s somewhat funny for her to invoke the name of someone she predates for such purposes.
Nah, that just means that she’s adapted to this time frame very well indeed, to be using slang and metaphors correctly even while under stress, and this is definitely a stressful situation to say the least!
Since Nudge claims to have never met an angel, one could assume that invoking Christ is just like any other swear word in English in Wapsiworld.
But it does add an unsettling layer, in that the Golem is a part of Jewish folklore, and that the New Testament may just be another part of that folklore, and that if there is any functional form of physical resurrection in Wapsiworld, we just saw it.
Panel 4 doesn’t resemble the story of Lazarus very well because they are all automatons, and see my rant below…
Nah – it just means that Tepoz installed the GolemOS “Modern Idiomatic English” language pack when he sent them to Monica.
GolemOS “Modern Idiomatic English” ROFL!
yes, many English, even though having no religion, go back to mom& dads way of expression…
Europeans do not seem to reference god or Jesus, but take the name of Mary or other saints in vain…
the literal translation of these is very boring, but said to them is even more shocking to them than our f words..
the ‘asterix’ version is “by tuotatis!” 🙂
There have been plenty of emotional scenes, long before this one, in which the only characters were golems. But this one is creeping me out because it keeps underscoring that these are all sophisticated AI who, like cylons, have crawled far up the distant side of the uncanny valley. They are “uploaded” personalities, and therefore, copies of people long dead, not the people themselves.
Maybe the Golem Girls were more comforting while alone, since they died as strangers and were reconstituted as sisters. It was all new, they were learning together. May’s return upsets this idyll; she is the will of the ancients haunting them again, restoring relationships that should have vanished ten millennia ago.
Most eerily, the echoes of class warfare from a civilization long since annihilated keep distracting them. Bud dutifully fetches and guards, on cue, but distrust keeps her arguing and turning to violence. May, the elite Timekeeper, is still calling the shots and only half-answers the farm girl’s questions. This distracting anger and violence consistently overrides the obvious human need for comfort.
One guard process complete, Bud returns to threat posture. Her repair process complete, May runs a default self-justification program. As long as she doesn’t attempt shutdown, Jin is allowed to process alone down there on the floor, within her new set of parameters.
I don’t know what would be more hellish to watch happen next. Brandi popping in with her motherly-comfort… subroutine? Or Alan walking in as the only live user in an already busy runtime environment?
Ready Player One.
A mind that could come up wit those thoughts should be writing for “Doctor Who”.
Yes I was waiting for a “timey whimy sorta thing” to creep into that one, but with the perceived IQ of this forum (and I have to admit I have gotten the idea that this forum has a high quotient) someone had to see that Waspi World is the definition of the uncanny valley, just so close that it is surreal.
and yes this is one of my favorite comics and forums.
I think Futurama has explored uncanny valley quite a lot.. 🙂
Very introspective writing, to be sure. Perhaps I was influenced as a very young child by devouring all my father’s science fiction anthologies from the 40’s and 50’s (I still own them), but I don’t find Wapsi surreal at all… it’s a world I would gladly live in. That said, I understand the sentiments about the uncanny valley.
i think surreal still fits in the sense that an ancient society was capable of technology light decades ahead of even their current timeline, and almost destroyed universe as a result… Other than that, yea I would totally want to live there too!
i agree, either writing for Dr. Who proper, or maybe talking to Rich who did “The Ten Doctors” for a collaboration effort…
http://comics.shipsinker.com/?id=561
Oo, thanks for the link – I had begun to follow this one, but then somehow lost it. You’d think someone would invent a way to find things on the internet. They’d make a fortune.
And thank YOU for your screen name… i have the GN of Yamara, collected from the Dragon magazines, but i didn’t know they were still doing it, until i saw your gravatar and Googled it!
not really ‘uploaded’ … live in any society for long enough, you will get used to their idioms..
And I find from my foreign friends, the first thing the like to learn is how to be crude, rude and insulting!! 🙂
Wow, I wake up late on a Labor Day to high praise from fellow fans. Thanks guys. Paul touches on a lot of inspirational themes, so my rant can only be used as proof I could be a professional critic. Looks like I should keep trying this mindfulness meditation thing.
Fairportfan – I would love to see Paul write an episode of Who. I’d love to see a lot of the people who are Wapsi fans write one! Paul certainly has the heart of the show down, that empathy is the best and the most heroic in humankind, and villainy is its erasure. Though, this moment in this scene mixes the Whovian boundaries of loyal companions vs. a tide of soulless monsters. …Maybe Jin really has thought all this through.
Maark30 – I really liked the Gaiman episode of Who, and his takedown of the lazy handwaving phrase “timey wimey” (‘it’s spacey-wacey’). I don’t do wimey. It’s either satire/farce or hard fiction with hard consequences. Still a fan of happy endings, since it’s more challenging to make them realistic, and when they are, it has a better chance of really helping people.
Wolf – I got into SF by reading a lot of the great stories of the 1970s, but was fortunate enough to actually have an SF class in high school in that decade. It was a serious overview of SF from Frankenstein to Bradbury. Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” from The Martian Chronicles was in my head as I wrote that rant.
illiad – It’s somehow more uncanny because they’re so far past the obvious visual valley itself. The simple question, why are Bud and May fighting? just gets freaking eerie when you try to think through the answer.
Kramegame – Paul does use that as a welcoming advertisement for the Wapsiverse, and here I am enjoying the story, but a real world with teleporting sentient weapons of mass destruction, presumably on top the ones that exist here, is not my first choice in co-ops. While I’d trust the ‘subcreator’ not to blow Wapsi up, I think living in Templar, Arizona would be my choice if I were forced to pick a 2D environment. I would dig hanging out at Phix’s Library, though.
Happy Labor Day!
fair point, but if the ‘uncanny valley’ only involves robots and Transhumanism in fiction, then starwars, startrek etc has already done lots….
If you are talking about OTT abilities and concepts, futurama has done brain swaps between humans,robots, computerized buckets, animals etc..
also time-travel, destroying/creating the universe/ reality…
why are Bud and May fighting? well what would you do if you saw someone you only vaguely know, doing something to your bestest friend, that made her seem to die/turn to stone???
I think it may be equally violent… 🙂
Actually, Bud and May should know each other fairly well. When she went in to get her, they were together for quite some time considering Bud came out with different clothes from what she had on going in. Perhaps years passed for them.
What’s a person tho?
is a person the sum of their experiences therefore Bud most certainly is no longer the person who died in that pit so long ago or is the person a ‘person’ because of how they think and feel in which case (from the ikea lamp) Bud is very similar still to that young girl.
Also – aren’t we all just machines.
Lets face it the body is a machine with all its parts designed for certain things. The mind is a computer. We are programmed (brought up) via experiences and what we are told.
If you look at anything in its basic format it will creep you out 😛
That’s a very worthy point, and probably why watching Bud and Brandi grow as people early on was only creepy when they let their monsters show, and only in regards to acknowledging their monstrousness. They were sisters finally finding adulthood and places in Minnesota society.
What sets humans apart from golems is that each of our sentient consciousnesses are not duplicates of dead people. (Or even each other: I’ve known ‘identical’ twins. They’re never identical.) If something can be duplicated, it can be industrialized, and so on to the horrors in the promises of Ray Kurzweil, and in the fiction of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Galactica. Empathy is made redundant, or into empty ritual, when you can replace people like spark plugs, modify their agency at the convenience of another. Perhaps the cleansing fire of the Chimera was a blessing compared to what Lanthis would have done with a golem army of the one perfect and most loyal soldier.
Ah, but that’s speculation. What if golems are intrinsically unique?
What if the imprint of an incinerated creature can never be recopied, only reconstituted, once at a time?
Then Paul is making an important decision about the nature of the soul in his universe. That’s a very poorly-loaded, very imprecise word for a highly precise statement on a concept the highest importance. If sentience–that common nature which makes us identify with and care about the characters–is intrinsic, then in Wapsiworld, everyone who has ever lived can genuinely be recovered.
Ghost Hunters, “haunted golems” and Tina’s muñeca para el Dia de los Muertos would be the foreshadowing groundwork for understanding the core philosophy of Wapsi Square. For instance, the dance of the robots would become a very different thing if the person speaking in panel 4 is actually the Lanthian child that faced the Chimera at her door.
I still don’t like calling her “Crispy”.
Too soon.
…
Anyway. I gotta get back to drawing terrified League of Nations delegates. Cheers.
Actually, the brain is just a computer, the mind is something else entirely. The essence of self is the question for the ages. Whatever it is, must be in the brain, but is more than simply the sum of hat is stored in it. If you transfer your brain into a clone of your body (with it’s brain previously removed) you will wake up in the new body. Your “self” will have been transfered. If, however, you simply copy every bit of the data stored in your brain to the brain of the clone (assuming it was blank) and you are killed, you will not wake up in the clone. The clone might as well be another individual. It will not be “you.”
And all this begs the question.
“Where does continuity (real?) end and copy begin?
It’s a revisit of the Star Trek transporter conundrum.
Personally I don’t think May would consider herself a mere knockoff of a dead woman, nor the GGs mere automatons.
Jin needs a tonic…
plink!
ROFL! How long have you been waiting to do that one!
Jin is feeling pain for the first time, and not just pain, but overwhelming pain. It is my conjecture that her heartfelt “Stop It!” is referring to the new and frightening sensations caused by her bruised and broken chest and nose. More of a “Make it Stop!”. But it also works well as a child crying out to embattled parents too.
Delicious writing!
So I had a thought while commenting up top, and resulted in this question… Would the actual Chimera, if it blew up the earth, have been able to survive space?
While proposed that it’s parts are made up of extremely technologically advanced ceramics, they’re still ceramics. Space, along with no atmosphere, has an intense simultaneous heat/cold, as well as massive amounts of radiation. (thats what I’ve been told anyway, but until I get a spaceship and a few volunteers, can’t really prove otherwise…)
I feel the constant temperature change, as well as being constantly bombarded with radiation and high speed debris, would result in a malfunction somewhere along the line, as it does with our space shuttles today.
Even if it could make a force field, how long would it have been able to “hold it together”? would it have been able to make it to a different planet with atmosphere (remember we’re talking light years here), or would it have eventually just been more debris in space?
It really depends, doesn’t it–the Chimera, IIRC (and I may well be wrong) was not ceramic so much as clay. Which would lead not to thermoshock-induced shattering as the possibility of drying out and erosion of the dessicated layers. Which golem magic may provide protection against, or not. (Like so much technology, it’s always hard to tell where magic will fail before you actually see it in action.)
as Florence Ambrose says: any technology no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it;
the Girls and May are much more sophisticated than we realize, i don’t think the heat/cold cycle will be too much of a problem, as the Chimaera they did create the plasma wave that vaporized everything around them, so they can handle the hot, and when Bud and Brandi got the day off due to snow, their reactions seemed to imply the cold wasn’t a problem either, granted it’s not the absolute zero or thereabouts as space is, but… as for the rapidity of those changes, i think Jin’s “warm butt” episode says it wouldn’t be as much of a problem as you think it would be. as for the time it takes to get to another planet, that’s a bit more problematic, assuming they have read up on current search results they have quite a few choices to go to, but where to go is the question? the actual getting there part isn’t the issue since they can throw rocks at a SIGNIFICANT fraction of light speed, all they’d have to do is stand on an asteroid and throw rocks away from them to move in the opposite direction, granted they cant start off at that speed, as they would shatter the rock they were standing on, but nipping off tiny pieces along they way they could get up to a significant speed before they need to swap sides and start decelerating.
What’s the range and method of their teleportation powers? I think that might be tied to the whole “destroying” thing, as in: Moving half of the core to rest on the surface of Eurasia, at will.
Maybe they go to Mars and from there flatten the Earth.
Oh hey I can see Tau Ceti from here. Let’s poit to some big asteroid around that, and then squish the Sun.
Wormholes? Keep those away from Sunshine.
Why does your comment make me hear,”Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Mega thrusters are go!?” Form SanLion!
Perhaps instead:
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
how are you guys reading this page? i can’t tell if it should be read as: top left> bottom left> right> panel 4, or as: top left> right> bottom left > panel 4… how says y’all?
Top frames CCW, then bottom frame.
http://youtu.be/tZZv5Z2Iz_s!
pardon??