This is why the idea of letting computers make decisions for humans isn’t necessarily a good thing. The machine overrode your decision to use puppeting and in its infinite wisdom substituted pupating. Most of the time we get messed up because the computer does exactly what we told it to do, not what we meant. In this case it wasn’t true.
I really hate machines that know what I want better than I do. We had a copy machine like that. When I put a piece of paper on the glass to get an exact copy, it tried to fix it up–resize it, remove blemishes and edge marks, and so on. But I wanted a copy!
That machine, thankfully, is no more. Maybe that axe handle that appeared by it had something to do with its demise?
I thought Shelly closed her doorway when she fused all her demons into Conscience (I also thought it might be her at first, but Conscience hasn’t hit puberty yet and whatever it is in the background clearly has). It’s gone in the next Shelly scene, though, so maybe it’s just symbolic. As long as it’s not Jin’s Doubt staging a comeback… Since Phix said the troublemakers had been taken ‘care’ of, that’s unlikely, but J-Doubt might be resiliant…
I got the impression that Monica was turned into a ‘vacuum cleaner’ for a brief period and sucked up a lot of the demons loose in the world. Being that close to the nozzle, M’s and Jin’s demons would surely have been sucked back to the demon dimension. So they are probably still ‘alive’.
Why their visages would manifest in Tina’s shop may have something to do with the fact that, closed or not, Shelly is a doorway.
Monica’s Doubt (and her other demons) were careful to stay BEHIND Monica when her polarity was reversed; they’s still around, I think it was just Jin’s Doubt and the Calendar Machine that got sucked in. Whether J-Doubt is still alive after Phix got done dealing with her is… questionable.
It occurs to me this is at least the second time recently we’ve gotten a flash of something unexplained happening in Tina’s shop; not that long ago, there was a single panel of Conscience in her boiler room right in the middle of the action, with no connection to what was going on in the narrative. Maybe these events are related, and something strange (well, stranger than normal) is going on…
Tina is a realist. She harbors no delusions about what she actually is. I like that. Besides, she’s cool with it so why try to make her something she isn’t? And no, she isn’t more complicated than that. That is, however, quite complicated enough as it is.
Maybe she is somewhat of an experiment for the inteligence behind the Library. Perhaps it hasn’t had the sphinxes dispatch her yet because it wants to see how she turns out. It may not have produced her, but, now that she’s here, why not see how it goes?
Much as I’d like to think of myself as a collection of demons in a 9-to-6 meat puppet, I still can’t fry spiders in my eye socket. Good for Tina. She knows what she is and what she ain’t.
I seriously admire people that know exactly who they are, yet, somehow they creep me out too. They feel as if there’s nothing left to do or discover. Sortof like an end-game.
In this case, however, Tina apparently fails to calculate in the way the interaction of her “puppeteers’ made a distinct, singular character that Monica, Shelly, and the kittens see as a friend.
Tina’s ceartainty also feels a bit as something she tries to hold on to..in the process inadvertantly creating this cherished “individual” named Tina.
So I’ve been reading Wapsi for a while now, and I think I more or less know what’s going on.
So far I’ve figured out: some of the characters are possessed… or something, or are reanimated and inhabited by… rats? I would have guessed sphinxes and satyrs prior to this strip. This seems to be indicated by whether they have tiny spiral eyes. Also at least one of the characters can teleport and presumably take others with her, there’s a library somewhere and when you’re in it you take on some sort of animal aspect, that or your true form is revealed or something.
Am I even close? Is there a sort of general summary of the world at large or do I have to read the entire archive for that? Not that that would be a bad thing, I’m just trying to get up to speed.
Sort of close. Tina used to be a normal human. then she was killed. Her various internal demons – Fear, Doubt, Hate, etc, with perhaps help from Nudge – brought her back, but her soul was gone. So now the demons, in a collective and calling themselves rats, are ‘running the ship’, and seem to be becoming human in the process… The Library is an other-dimensional space containing copies of every book ever written. Phix, a Sphinx, and Nudge, a trickster goddess, are former/current librarians and get on each others’ nerves. Bud, Brandi, and Jin are golems, human girls killed (pretty horribly) thousands of years ago and transformed into mystical beings with almost unlimited power: Each can probably destroy the Solar System without trying. And as Jin is showing signs of mental illness, that’s got everyone running scared. Monica used to be a normal (sort of) museum archeologist until an enormous slice of weirdness landed in her lap. Now she’s learned how to teleport, owns Bud, Brandi, and Jin (although with one exception she’s never ordered them to do anything against their wills), and has been bitten with the ‘saving the world’ bug…
You’d really have to read the archives to get all this sorted out.
Oh yeah I’m looking forward to going through the archives, but that’s something that will take a while and I’m saving for a rainy Saturday or something. I was just trying to get up to speed in the meantime.
Her body is, at least medically, still operating. It must have stopped at one point to end up in a morgue, but then it started again and keeps trundling along. She broke a bone, had it set, and it healed. So at least the mechanics and major biological processes continue to go on.
That said, while her body is technically and scientifically alive, she might be more “supernaturally” dead. Certainly Tina as a person died to begin with, so there might be “soul” scarring or something. More than that though, she exhibits highly abnormal functions which are clearly NOT biological (the whole “sleeping” standing up and the spider frying and whatnot). These are clearly supernatural forces manifesting in an otherwise at least partly operational shell.
My personal theory? She’s on magic life support. Ish. Her body received a jolt to get her off the table in the morgue (remember, this was Nudge’s work!) and while most of the important systems booted back up, some didn’t. So, lacking the utility of the inoperable systems, the workaround is to find ways of providing the same results through “magic”. She doesn’t sleep, instead she “recharges”, feeding off ambient mana or something. I don’t recall ever having seen her eat anything, so she might receive magical “nurishment”. Things like that.
The Thutton Typewriter Thervice,
12 New Thtreet,
Thutton, Thurrey
Dear Thir,
Will you pleathe thend thomeone to mend thith typewriter? Thith ith the thecond one we have had from you on which the eth key doeth not work.
Yourth thincerely,
T. Thamuelth
—
Mr. T. Zamuelz
Dear Zir,
We quite underztand your trouble, and will be zending zomeone around az zoon az pozzible.
She eats. I recall a sequence showing her take delivery of a pizza (with anchovies she didn’t want), then enjoying a particularly gooey slice. It’s unclear, however, if she has to eat to stay “alive.”
Well, if you are a Star Trek TNG fan, you will know ‘Data’ (the android, FYI JIC,YDK) does not ‘need’ to eat, but he can ‘burn up’ ingested food/drink to be ‘social’ in a ‘food situation’… 🙂
Hey, Jim, no worries. There is a whole mob of women/girls that like vampires and they aren’t quite alive either. So I’m sure you can find a support group if you want. Tina is, however, hotter than any vamp and doesn’t need blood either so if I were you I’d forgo the support group.
My question is
Can Shelly teach Tina’s demons to combine like hers did? Could Tina’s demons combine into one identity? That would be a goal for Tina. Yea, she can still give out wisdom to customers with their coffee, but Tina needs a goal to reach for.
another pair that could be sisters….and this time not just with personalities….also, Shelly has a point, if Tina really was just several entities controlling one body, wouldn’t she have severe schizophrenia? every conscious being has motives, even demons…
I’m thinking she’s along the lines of Dairugger XV (Vehicle Viltron), excellent teamwork making the dream work. Certainly displaying more cooperation than most G1 TransFormer combiners.
The good news is that it is on the internet. The bad news is that the address exceeds the character limit allowed by current standards by several hundred thousand. Routing through the interdimentional portals is a bear. You could, of course, type in the address numbers directly, but even this is a cascading system requiring the perfect entry of 524,288 numerical addresses in the correct order. The numerical address entry system does not allow copy and pasting either, whereas the character address does.
They are blissfully unaware of this and continually wonder why no one ever visits their site. Oh and the 13 levels of usernames and double blind passwords have to be in Glyphs, so unless you’re a “reader,” forget it.
… and most elders say it is “only a passing fad” – why waste time with this foolish device, when one can merely poit, and get all the info with a wave… >:(
“Pupating”? What’s going to come out?
AAAUUGH!!! Even after I negated the spell check it still changed “puppeting” to that! *smashes computer*
But it’s such a wonderful image…
I saved it both ways.
Personally, i’d have said “puppeteering” rather than “puppeting”, but – your comic, your script.
I like colloquial-made-up-words for odd stuff like that. 🙂
When it attempts to change the word, add your spelling to the dictionary. From then on, it will recognize it as correct.
I like “puppeting” better, too…more pithy.
I’m rather partial to “demon infested clown car”…
This is why the idea of letting computers make decisions for humans isn’t necessarily a good thing. The machine overrode your decision to use puppeting and in its infinite wisdom substituted pupating. Most of the time we get messed up because the computer does exactly what we told it to do, not what we meant. In this case it wasn’t true.
I really hate machines that know what I want better than I do. We had a copy machine like that. When I put a piece of paper on the glass to get an exact copy, it tried to fix it up–resize it, remove blemishes and edge marks, and so on. But I wanted a copy!
That machine, thankfully, is no more. Maybe that axe handle that appeared by it had something to do with its demise?
If only programmers would make more use of the RMM instruction (Read My Mind).
No–if only programmers would not keep changing the assumptions that we want WYSIWYG into WYGIWICGY. (What you get is what I can give you.)
Tina with butterfly wings? I like that image….
for the pumpkins fans… -a- tina with butterfly wings *roffles till i fall off a cliff*
Meant to add this link, hit “Send” too soon
More complicated than a dozen entities inhabiting a single body? That’s hard to do.
Panel-1-Tina has sort of a shark vibe.
Panel-2-Tina is a cutey.
It even seems to amuse her that she might be creeping Shelly out.
Maybe Conscience used to be part of Tina 1.0’s collective?
“why, no, Tina, that wider-than-natural shark-toothy grin doesn’t in any WAY creep me out. Much.”
What’s Monica’s Doubt doing behind Shelley in the first panel?
Eek. I was so amused by “pupating” that i didn’t notice.
That is strange. Perhaps it’s one of Tina’s group.
Yikes. And with Shelley still a ‘wide open gateway’ per Jin, ya hate to see – things – stealthily reconoitering her in the background……….
Drat my memory – I can’t find the proper page to link to.
I thought Shelly closed her doorway when she fused all her demons into Conscience (I also thought it might be her at first, but Conscience hasn’t hit puberty yet and whatever it is in the background clearly has). It’s gone in the next Shelly scene, though, so maybe it’s just symbolic. As long as it’s not Jin’s Doubt staging a comeback… Since Phix said the troublemakers had been taken ‘care’ of, that’s unlikely, but J-Doubt might be resiliant…
I got the impression that Monica was turned into a ‘vacuum cleaner’ for a brief period and sucked up a lot of the demons loose in the world. Being that close to the nozzle, M’s and Jin’s demons would surely have been sucked back to the demon dimension. So they are probably still ‘alive’.
Why their visages would manifest in Tina’s shop may have something to do with the fact that, closed or not, Shelly is a doorway.
Monica’s Doubt (and her other demons) were careful to stay BEHIND Monica when her polarity was reversed; they’s still around, I think it was just Jin’s Doubt and the Calendar Machine that got sucked in. Whether J-Doubt is still alive after Phix got done dealing with her is… questionable.
It occurs to me this is at least the second time recently we’ve gotten a flash of something unexplained happening in Tina’s shop; not that long ago, there was a single panel of Conscience in her boiler room right in the middle of the action, with no connection to what was going on in the narrative. Maybe these events are related, and something strange (well, stranger than normal) is going on…
maybe she’s there, cause there’s a nugget of doubt, about monicas feelings where tina’s concerned, ammo for a ‘they don’t trust your feelings’ jibe.
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/we-will-break-her/
A discussion on who’s who in the demon set. It seems to jibe with Fear being the eyes in the background and Hatred as the hooded one…
Uh no, it’s even earlier than that… FOUND IT! Don’t Be Rude – that’s not Doubt, that’s Hatred?
Tina is a realist. She harbors no delusions about what she actually is. I like that. Besides, she’s cool with it so why try to make her something she isn’t? And no, she isn’t more complicated than that. That is, however, quite complicated enough as it is.
Maybe she is somewhat of an experiment for the inteligence behind the Library. Perhaps it hasn’t had the sphinxes dispatch her yet because it wants to see how she turns out. It may not have produced her, but, now that she’s here, why not see how it goes?
Much as I’d like to think of myself as a collection of demons in a 9-to-6 meat puppet, I still can’t fry spiders in my eye socket. Good for Tina. She knows what she is and what she ain’t.
“can’t fry spiders in my eye socket”
Have you tried, though? ^_^
I haven’t tried recently, but I don’t expect it to change that much.
Well, I do a frying pan test. If the eyedrops I use don’t sizzle and pop, then I know my eye’s not hot enough to fry a spider.
Actually, given the evidence of modern neuropsychology about the lack of unity of consciousness… that’s pretty close to normal human anyhow.
I seriously admire people that know exactly who they are, yet, somehow they creep me out too. They feel as if there’s nothing left to do or discover. Sortof like an end-game.
In this case, however, Tina apparently fails to calculate in the way the interaction of her “puppeteers’ made a distinct, singular character that Monica, Shelly, and the kittens see as a friend.
Tina’s ceartainty also feels a bit as something she tries to hold on to..in the process inadvertantly creating this cherished “individual” named Tina.
Yes. She’s quite the multi-faceted gem.
So I’ve been reading Wapsi for a while now, and I think I more or less know what’s going on.
So far I’ve figured out: some of the characters are possessed… or something, or are reanimated and inhabited by… rats? I would have guessed sphinxes and satyrs prior to this strip. This seems to be indicated by whether they have tiny spiral eyes. Also at least one of the characters can teleport and presumably take others with her, there’s a library somewhere and when you’re in it you take on some sort of animal aspect, that or your true form is revealed or something.
Am I even close? Is there a sort of general summary of the world at large or do I have to read the entire archive for that? Not that that would be a bad thing, I’m just trying to get up to speed.
Sort of close. Tina used to be a normal human. then she was killed. Her various internal demons – Fear, Doubt, Hate, etc, with perhaps help from Nudge – brought her back, but her soul was gone. So now the demons, in a collective and calling themselves rats, are ‘running the ship’, and seem to be becoming human in the process… The Library is an other-dimensional space containing copies of every book ever written. Phix, a Sphinx, and Nudge, a trickster goddess, are former/current librarians and get on each others’ nerves. Bud, Brandi, and Jin are golems, human girls killed (pretty horribly) thousands of years ago and transformed into mystical beings with almost unlimited power: Each can probably destroy the Solar System without trying. And as Jin is showing signs of mental illness, that’s got everyone running scared. Monica used to be a normal (sort of) museum archeologist until an enormous slice of weirdness landed in her lap. Now she’s learned how to teleport, owns Bud, Brandi, and Jin (although with one exception she’s never ordered them to do anything against their wills), and has been bitten with the ‘saving the world’ bug…
You’d really have to read the archives to get all this sorted out.
Five or six times for good measure and to tell the characters apart easily.
Dammmn, Eee, that was one hell of a summation! Bravo. You don’t by any chance write the blurbs on the back of paperback books do you!? 😉
Read the archive and take Your time for it. The story and characters are highly complex.
Miss a couple of pages and all sense is lost. I only got all of it after the second read-through.
By the by, reading the whole archive isn’t exactly a chore. it is highly enjoyable (why would we all be reading Wapsi Square if it wasn’t 😉 )
Oh yeah I’m looking forward to going through the archives, but that’s something that will take a while and I’m saving for a rainy Saturday or something. I was just trying to get up to speed in the meantime.
There is a Wikipedia article, but it’s not very helpful yet.
I don’t know how I feel about Tina’s “not quite living” status if she insists upon continuing to be all hot like that.
She’s not “dead”, just “not quite living”.
Her body is, at least medically, still operating. It must have stopped at one point to end up in a morgue, but then it started again and keeps trundling along. She broke a bone, had it set, and it healed. So at least the mechanics and major biological processes continue to go on.
That said, while her body is technically and scientifically alive, she might be more “supernaturally” dead. Certainly Tina as a person died to begin with, so there might be “soul” scarring or something. More than that though, she exhibits highly abnormal functions which are clearly NOT biological (the whole “sleeping” standing up and the spider frying and whatnot). These are clearly supernatural forces manifesting in an otherwise at least partly operational shell.
My personal theory? She’s on magic life support. Ish. Her body received a jolt to get her off the table in the morgue (remember, this was Nudge’s work!) and while most of the important systems booted back up, some didn’t. So, lacking the utility of the inoperable systems, the workaround is to find ways of providing the same results through “magic”. She doesn’t sleep, instead she “recharges”, feeding off ambient mana or something. I don’t recall ever having seen her eat anything, so she might receive magical “nurishment”. Things like that.
~D.
“Nourishment”. Stupid sticky O key.
The Thutton Typewriter Thervice,
12 New Thtreet,
Thutton, Thurrey
Dear Thir,
Will you pleathe thend thomeone to mend thith typewriter? Thith ith the thecond one we have had from you on which the eth key doeth not work.
Yourth thincerely,
T. Thamuelth
—
Mr. T. Zamuelz
Dear Zir,
We quite underztand your trouble, and will be zending zomeone around az zoon az pozzible.
Yourz zincerely,
The Zutton Typewriter Zervice
WIN! 😀
She eats. I recall a sequence showing her take delivery of a pizza (with anchovies she didn’t want), then enjoying a particularly gooey slice. It’s unclear, however, if she has to eat to stay “alive.”
The Pizza might have been more for the demons inside than for her, though.
I have my suspicions that Tina 2.0’s existence is intentional for a reason – but at whose decision, we have yet to find out.
Well, if you are a Star Trek TNG fan, you will know ‘Data’ (the android, FYI JIC,YDK) does not ‘need’ to eat, but he can ‘burn up’ ingested food/drink to be ‘social’ in a ‘food situation’… 🙂
Oh, if you still ‘refuse STNG’… An episode shows that he can get ‘intoxicated’ and prove he is ‘all man’ 🙂 🙂
Hey, Jim, no worries. There is a whole mob of women/girls that like vampires and they aren’t quite alive either. So I’m sure you can find a support group if you want. Tina is, however, hotter than any vamp and doesn’t need blood either so if I were you I’d forgo the support group.
My question is
Can Shelly teach Tina’s demons to combine like hers did? Could Tina’s demons combine into one identity? That would be a goal for Tina. Yea, she can still give out wisdom to customers with their coffee, but Tina needs a goal to reach for.
PBH
Unlikely – she doesn’t know how she did it.
Duh. She died and they were fused together by the shock.
Meant to say that Shelly’s lookin’ good in the last panel.
Agreed! That’s the most girly that I’ve seen her.
another pair that could be sisters….and this time not just with personalities….also, Shelly has a point, if Tina really was just several entities controlling one body, wouldn’t she have severe schizophrenia? every conscious being has motives, even demons…
Boy, they do look a lot alike in thos two bottom panels…
I’m thinking she’s along the lines of Dairugger XV (Vehicle Viltron), excellent teamwork making the dream work. Certainly displaying more cooperation than most G1 TransFormer combiners.
Rhinoplasty!
D: OMG YOU’RE RIGHT!
But that would mean she had it to make her nose look larger. Very unusual.
maybe she discovered streisand…
I think it was mentioned before, Nudgectomy, not rhinoplasty.
😉
I wish my hair would do what Shelly’s does in that last panel.
Entirely off-topic, I wonder if the Library has an Internet wing.
The good news is that it is on the internet. The bad news is that the address exceeds the character limit allowed by current standards by several hundred thousand. Routing through the interdimentional portals is a bear. You could, of course, type in the address numbers directly, but even this is a cascading system requiring the perfect entry of 524,288 numerical addresses in the correct order. The numerical address entry system does not allow copy and pasting either, whereas the character address does.
They are blissfully unaware of this and continually wonder why no one ever visits their site. Oh and the 13 levels of usernames and double blind passwords have to be in Glyphs, so unless you’re a “reader,” forget it.
And we’ll not go into the monthly fees for that kind of bandwidth…
Win and Win. 🙂
And of course, if you make an error entering the address, you usually end up on a porn site…..
VERY nasty Demon-Porn at that…. 😆
By the by, the adress is IPv24..SQUARED…that’s the problem here.
… and most elders say it is “only a passing fad” – why waste time with this foolish device, when one can merely poit, and get all the info with a wave… >:(
Pshaw, there’s an app for that.
W.: aren’t you late for your ‘casting for minors’ class??
You put lashes on Shelly’s eyes; that’s a rare and good look for her.