Compared to the Walter Slovotksy fallback alternative (dying slowly, horribly, and in great pain), yeah, it does seem better. That’s about all I can say in its favor, though.
It’s not even a good way to resolve Monica’s complaints about her continually-shrinking bras… really, dermabrasion is best performed in a proper clinical setting and not as a do-it-yourself-at-home remedy!
I hope there’s a lot of ice available in the fridge… both Monica and Jin are probably going to need cold-packs for a while.
Oh blast. Yes, it seems you’re right… Wiki says he died last June. Sorry to hear that… I quite enjoyed his work.
Apparently he was working on a third D’Shai novel, listed as “currently unpublished”. Would be neat if somebody could bring it to press… I always wondered how Kami danShir would work out in the nobility, considering that his sympathies are likely to remain with the peasants.
I think Jin learned that trick from Bud… and, knowing how painful it was to be on the receiving end of it, was just a tad more careful than Bud (or had a moment longer to pick her point of aim carefully).
“Waxing your hardwood floors. It’s not just a great-looking tradition, not just good for protection of your expensive hardwood. It also eliminates over 85% of those awful-looking, embarrassing-to-explain skreeeee-rashes!”
It’s going to depend on the relative coefficients of friction between floor and fabric, and between fabric and skin. She could end up getting a “rug burn” from the inside of the fabric top, if the fabric is yanked backwards/downwards high enough by friction on the floor. That “skreeee” sounds like a repeated grab/release/grab sort of friction (sticking friction vs. sliding friction), so something is being pulled past its yield-point.
In any case, I doubt that this feels like a gentle ride down a water-slide for either Monica or Jin.
What if there was a lanthian device, unstable after all these years that reacted to their positing back and forward and when critical. Just how big a boom would a V-Cell make if it kaboomed?
It could be a long dormant volcano that decided to finally blow it’s top. A reactivated volcano might be quiet in the time between its last rumble and its finally blowing apart the old lava cone. I do relive that there is a historical record on this.
the island will be converted to a crater in the sea floor.
several cubic (that’s CUBIC, not square) miles of sea water and water life is converted to energy (anybody remember E=MC squared?). the cloud of debris (possibly radioactive) would fully mask any solar radiation, rendering practically the entire planet uninhabitable in less than a year.
the tsunamis radiating from the area would hit any coast in direct line at close to half a mach and be over a mile high. coasts not in direct line may have the velocity and/or wave height reduced by as much as half.
M looks lucky that she still has her top on, and that it’s not worn through. Any bruises she has would be much worse without at least the minimal cover provided by the cloth.
It’s not a bra. It’s a bikini, and she’s suggested beofre that her bikinis are not armor plated (which is why the tiniest of them is reserved for watering plants in the backyard). 🙁 Owwie.
only if they used the old “But Officer, The Grill Tricked Me” ploy!… Justin gets a call, about someone blowing up their BBQ grill, and he immediately thinks of Shelly… then he does a double-take and realizes that he is with Shelly in the Library, so who could be the one blowing up the grill now? then when he says that he just got called up for duty and has to go, she asks where do you need to go, he tells her the address, and OMG That’s Monica’s place!… Hilarity ensues…
Yup… somebody went mucking with the stuff in the mineshaft alright… although it seems it wasn’t one of the girls. Are… er… WERE there still monkeys on that Island? I seem to recall we pretty much depleted the troop after the fiasco with our foodstuffs…
Meanwhile, M went from “Sqeee” to “SCREEE” in one ‘Poit’- MAN that’s gotta be rough on the nipples, they weren’t designed to be landing gear. Jin looks like she’s working on a shoulder dislocation and both are candidates for a concussion depending on how much further it is to the wall.
I guess the other island is looking pretty good right about now…
first of all, a small icemaker on generator. Absolutely essential to control the process as the chemical reaction can generate enough heat to de-stabilize the mix. Start with Nitric and sulfuric acid, regent grade, in an ice-bath crucible. All mixing to proceed CAREFULLY with glass rod. Once mixture has cooled down, titrate raw glycerine into center of the mix, keeping a close eye on temperature. If temp starts rising… run… run really fast…
I could continue, but then the feds will start monitoring this strip.
or you could just make batches of less than one fl. oz. at a time. That’s big enough to make a loud noise, but not enough to seriously hurt you if something goes pear shaped. If you need more than that just combine the batches after you mix everything up and make it stable.
(sigh) a small group, myself included, had chased down a vault buried beneath the north shore of that island. Supposedly from Ponce de Leon’s first officer, there was talk about several bottles of this wonderful elixer therein. The rock surrounding the valt was heavily checked, the sort of thing where nitroglycerine is actually the tool of choice, as osmosis pulls it right where you want it to go. Trouble is, we realised that the wretched vault sat right on top of a live lava tube- the plan was to wait a decade or so and see if the tube solidified… but I guess it’s rather a moot point….
BTW- my instructions deliberately left out some critical points… attempting to make it might be … welll… let’s just say you will have a SHARP learning curve to ovecome. Easy to make. Tricky to store. Near impossible to transport…
Reminds me of a classmate who told me a story of his school days. Seems that, in Chem lab, they were trying to identify an unknown organic liquid.
The teacher came by at one point, and asked casually what step they were on. “Nitration” he replied.
“You didn’t get a reaction before this?”
“Nope.”
“Ummm. Keep stirring–gently!–while we evacuate the class.”
Seems he had added too much denaturing agent, which masked the identity of the glycerine at the previous step. My friend was casually stirring about 200 ml of Nitroglycerine in his ice bath.
They called the local police bomb squad, who dug a hole in a nearby field to dispose of the experiment. The cops even let my friend push the button to set off the blast himself. “You made it, you get to detonate it.”
200 ml nitro? and it did not heat up? I’m not sure I understand how that happened, unless it was already in an ice flask… and they did not come down with fierce headaches? Usually your first clue, the headaches, dropped blood pressure and clam sweats. My brother and I managed to destroy half the science building as well as a chunk of parking lot behind the Campbell shopping center back in 1969… the parking lot explosion removed clothing, hair and hearing on both of us. Luckily they didn’t have forensic explosives experts avaliable back then or we would have been locked up for some time… as it was, they knew there were two explosions and somehow the Howard boys were involved but nothing could be proven so we went free… Officer Connolly had a nice quiet chat with us afterwards about how some experiments ought not be repeated, and we agreed
Besides, the Army taught me about the glories of C-4 at Ft. Benning GA… you can get ARTISTIC with that stuff… to this day, I cannot cross a bridge or see a dam without calculating the minimum amount needed to bring it down. If it ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY needs to be DESTROYED overnight- United States Army Rangers…
I retract my previous o.0 . I wish I knew how much explosive it would take to slag the castle I wrote in the book I’m editing; it would make this so much easier.
Possible. Would probably have required hitting a magma chamber which was already pre-pressurized to near-eruption condition. Even then, I’d expect to see a more typical “sudden gassification of magma” eruption… a big cloud of volcanic ash and pyroclastic flow. Ths looks more like the sudden detonation of high explosives.
Didn’t the US military play around with atomic-tipped bunker busters, to take out seriously-hardened strategic targets? Whatever hit that island, looks to be about the sort of thing that would be needed to crack open e.g. Cheyenne Mountain…
Actually the volcano probably blew because it did not have enough pressure, not too much. In that situation the weight of the summit will cause it to start collapsing into the magma chamber, on land it slumps, at sea it lets the ocean in. Cold seawater meets white hot magma and you have a massive steam explosion. That is what they think happened at Krakatoa.
Many say it happened at least twice. The first time, some 1500 years ago, give or take a century, it created the Sunda Strait, and was even bigger than the 1883 explosion.
They think the same thjong happened at Santorini in the Med, but resulted from a sistained eruption that eroded the cone from the inside until the only thing supporting it was the pressure of the eruption. When the eruption subsided, the cone collapsed, the sea rushed in and BOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!
My undstanding is that those huge caldera-forming collapses occur fairly late in a volcanic eruption, after a great deal of the built-up magma and gasses have already been released into the atmosphere. The cycle seems to be… magma rises and liquifies, pressure increases, land bulges upwards, pressure increases to the point of opening vents to the surface, big volcanic eruption occurs, magma and ash escape, magma chamber empties and pressure drops, unsupported area above collapses downwards, huge kaboom.
In this case there was no visible eruption before the big boom, so I don’t think it could have been a sudden downwards collapse due to inadequate support.
There are many incidents on record of battle rounds (particularly general-purpose rounds of 14 inch or larger) sinking entire islands.
There ONLY guns of the required size still in use by ANY navy is the 16A# guns of the Iowa-class battleships (US navy).
There are several dozen missile and rocket types which could pull this off, though. These missiles and rockets are used by almost every government in the world (and a few terrorist organizations).
nope… Don’t forget the BOOM on Friday, that’s either THREE SHOTS or FIVE…
if you count the 3 different versions of the text “boom” as echoes of the same explosion, then it’s only three, but if you count them as three separate explosions very closely timed, then that would make FIVE shots…
me, i’m going with one boom that echoed very well… but either way: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is ENEMY ACTION… i say that these were either missile test shots, exploratory mining blasts, or… somebody is trying to off the girls…
From the sequence it looks like two explosions occurred. One on the side blowing that side of the cone up. The second was deeper under the center of the volcano and appeared to finish the job. So was #1 the trigger for the second? A gas-air explosion could do it, especially underground. If a combustible gas had collected under the code, the first blast could have cracked the containement allowing the gas to be ignited. A twofer.
That was the Mount St. Helens event. An earthquake (from magma movement) destabilized a large section of the mountain, which slid down hill as a rock avalanche. The pressure released the magma which then burst through the avalanche, overall going more sideways than up. Video
Yeah, internal pressure caused the North slope to inflate like a balloon. Scientists were poking it and saying: “What’s going on? I don’t get it.” Then the bubble popped and there was much destruction. Given the apparent general lack of observable recent destruction, I have doubts that this is actually a volcanic eruption as volcanoes rarely just explode without warning.
I’ve always liked Mt. St. Helens, just because she erupted on my birthday. Best video: The Fire Below Us. Sorry it’s just the trailer. Full film is much better.
Ouch. A little quick thinking by Jin, and they could have poited somewhere miles away yet still over water. I’m sure skipping a few times would have been less painful.
…and so, the uninhabited island of Krack Your Toe-a is now just a memory. All natives of the island had been evacuated three months ago in anticipation of today’s event. What once was a paradise, is now a steaming bowl of lava. Next, we have…
You know, there is now a new island at Krakatoa’s location.
The new island is growing quickly and is obviously volcanic in origin. They have given it a local name which means ‘Krakatoa’s child’.
Looking in panel #2 (the big explosion), the remains of the island look amazingly like the silhouette of a late model soviet cruiser (one the soviets commissioned just before that union collasped).
that cruiser had a heli-deck (a deck for servicing helicopters) behind the superstructure and its forward deck was dominated by 36 VLM/MP. tubes (Vertical Launch Missile / Multiple Purpose).
While some versions of that cruiser also had a VERY small main gun (largest type was 105mm), this is not shown in the panel.
@Davids4250 – That should be spelled “Pharts” – don’t want to upset the young folk – they think we don’t know all those “Dirty” words . It would be nice to have them hear my RSM (From the Black Watch) read the riot act to his new group of 18Yr. newbies .
Possibly, doing momentum manipulation during a poit requires concentration, or is to some extent a matter of advanced decision and intent? If Jin did that poit, and her thought was “leap and poit!”, the two actions might have gotten conflated into a leapnpoit, without enough time to direct the poit to a soft landing.
Aah, the physics and psychoneurology of fictional biogenic teleportation. Probably room there for someone to write a master’s thesis, al least!
Also, Jin may still have the MENTAL reflexes of when she was INVULNERABLE, and that little bitty skid wouldn’t even have been an issue, as it seems she was trying to poit both of them away, with her going to take the brunt of the fall when they landed, thus protecting the not-so-invulnerable-Monica… OOPSIE!… now that SHE’S NOT invulnerable, we’ll see just what kind of damage she did to herself and Monica with that landing!
Another factor: Home is SAFE–and it’s where they poited as if by reflex. She may not have had time to consider that arriving with too much excess speed was not all that safe, or comfortable.
Wow – @bmonk, no, I don’t think I’d ever heard of The Twenty-One Balloons and I was simply following up on the baseball theme of this particular thread. “Baseball been berry, berry good to me!”
Well now. The only one who has yet to asplode an island is Brandi.
I bet there are some left in the Mururoa-atoll that haven’t been irradiated by French nukes…let’s take her there.
“Well, ya see… my boyfriend came over, and we got a little frisky… do you really want me to go into brain-bleach-requiring detail, or shall I stop there, dearie?”
And it wasn’t volcanic either.
Volcanic explosions are loaded with pulverized rock and although hot enough to be incandescent aren’t hot enough to match radiance with the sky.
The first thoughts that came to mind (in about 5 seconds) were “saved by the air bags” and “that’s a bit rough on the landing gear” but I see both were hit already. ::glances back at panel 4 again:: And boy, were they. Ouch.
::drops a titanium-kevlar bikini top padded with memory foam into the pun jar::
Man, I gotta peek in earlier – I’m on the night shift and you guys beat me in here … is it just because of Friday Cliffhanger Syndrome? 😀
I had the same question. I’d vote for the “requires prep/concentration” angle myself.
I tend to think of “poiting” kind of like hyperspace from Star Wars: using it safely requires advanced calculations, taking into account your velocity vector, masses of objects near your route, etc., etc.; you can also make a “blind-jump”, which is unbelievably dangerous – many who try it are not heard from again.
Poiting seems somewhat safer, in that you won’t fall into a black hole or pass through the middle of a star – but if you don’t do the work ahead of time, the finer control is gone.
It does seem as if when you’re in a tearing hurry when you poit you’re likely to have that sort of problem – remember Monica going headlong when she poited back with the portal cloth?
The friction burns will be bad enuf, but if the bikini fabic lights on fire that’ll be adding insult to injury(along with the need for a LOT burn ointment!)
While everyone is having a lovely time discussing Boobie injuries – and making donations to the Maw that must be fed – Why has no-one commented on the outline of a ship in Panel two . I know it could be left-over Basalt from the explosion – but it looks to accurate !
In order to have a block of text, which shows up as a hyperlink and which (when clicked) takes you to the page in question, you need three parts:
(1) Start it off with an “a” hypertag, and specify the URL with an href field and the URL in quotes. This is pretty much just what you did do. Don’t bother to include a “title” field. I never bother with a “nofollow” field. Then, have a closing bracket to end this tag.
(2) Enter the text that you want to have appear in the human-readable page, for instance the word “pareidolia”.
(3) Close the tagged area with openbracket-slash-a-closebracket.
So, what you have here is the text you want to display, not inside the tags themselves. Instead, there’s one complete hyperlink-open tag (an “a” block) before it – this contains the URL – and a second complete end-of-hyperlink tag after it.
Here’s what you were trying to accomplish: pareidolia
If your browser lets you “View page source”, you could go in and search for this word, and see the difference between what you did originally and what I did.
The same trick works for bold and italic text. If you use these, please proof-read carefully before posting… if you fail to close a bold or italic block, it’s likely to bleed over into subsequent comments.
@Nathan – see the “THOOOM” with the spout from the explosion . There is a large flying black block of rock – that kinda looks like a bird in flight . Directly below that – sitting low in the water – is a black item that appears to me to have the form of a Destroyer class ship . But what do I know – I was just a ground grunt .
One last thought = it appears that it was the “shock wave” from the blast that destroyed the cone – that’s mega-tons of heavy Basalt being tossed around . And the time from the sound of the blast – until the shock-waves arrived – does not appear to be a great deal of time. Any one have any ideas on this ?
Looking in panel #2 (the big explosion), the remains of the island do look amazingly like the silhouette of a late model soviet cruiser (one the soviets commissioned just before the union collapsed).
that cruiser type had a heli-deck (a deck for servicing helicopters) behind the superstructure and its forward deck was dominated by 36 VLM/MP. tubes (Vertical Launch Missile / Multiple Purpose).
While some versions of that cruiser also had a VERY small main gun (largest type was 75mm), this is not shown in the panel.
It does look quite like a naval vessel (although I can’t speak as to the type).
It’s hard to tell perspective in a 3D scene from a 2D drawing, but if it is a vessel, it looks as if it may be within the blast-debris radius. As in, “If you’re close enough to see the island that you just THOOOM!ed, you’re too close and are about to be dead.”
I see what you mean, and yeah on second glance it does look like the outline of a destroyer, but I still think it’s just a coincidentally-shaped remant of the island that blew up. As others have noted if it is a ship, unless it has some sort of supernatural protection of its own, is gonna be even worse off than the sub was after Bud found the grenade.
I would postulate that the air rushing through the portal poit, while it was opened, propelled them through, even if it was for a brief instance. In skydiving the only thing with momentum is you.
I’d imagine it’s difficult to disregard the pain in the chest when you’re getting your nipples sanded off, but you’re right about the arm. Her knees are gonna be scraped all to hell too.
If there’s any of that island left, they should name it Nofun Atoll.
Here are two of many uninhabited islands in the Bahamas. I believe I have sent Booby Cay to you previously, but neglected to include the Concepcion National Park next door. Both have nice sandy beaches facing east with minimal waves and are not volcanic in origin so no kaboom. http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=8.1833675e-11,-80.109&z=15&t=h&hl=en
That looks like a less than pleasant landing. I guess it beats the alternative though.
Compared to the Walter Slovotksy fallback alternative (dying slowly, horribly, and in great pain), yeah, it does seem better. That’s about all I can say in its favor, though.
It’s not even a good way to resolve Monica’s complaints about her continually-shrinking bras… really, dermabrasion is best performed in a proper clinical setting and not as a do-it-yourself-at-home remedy!
I hope there’s a lot of ice available in the fridge… both Monica and Jin are probably going to need cold-packs for a while.
OMG! I haven’t heard Walters name in ages. The King Lives!
I recently heard that Joel had died. No more books.
No more friendly online arguments about gun laws.
One more friend i’ll never meet face-to-face…
Oh blast. Yes, it seems you’re right… Wiki says he died last June. Sorry to hear that… I quite enjoyed his work.
Apparently he was working on a third D’Shai novel, listed as “currently unpublished”. Would be neat if somebody could bring it to press… I always wondered how Kami danShir would work out in the nobility, considering that his sympathies are likely to remain with the peasants.
I think Jin learned that trick from Bud… and, knowing how painful it was to be on the receiving end of it, was just a tad more careful than Bud (or had a moment longer to pick her point of aim carefully).
that or the fact that she actually has to worry about dying now… wonder if golems have simulated adrenaline…
…or isn’t quite so much like a rock compared to Monica as Bud was, compared to her.
Or moving so fast.
I suspect Monica will need to visit a medical facility. The abrasions will be bad enough, but look at M’s left arm.
remember, M is human despite her para-abilities.
I have yet to read in Wapsi of anybody who can heal other people in a paranormal sense and M will need some professional attention.
OOOOH That is gonna sting. I mean that was a rug burn where no rug burn should ever be.
hmm, military test range, then…. and by the sound effect, not carpet, so not soooo bad…:-/
That is the sound of high skin friction on varnish.
It is not good.
Not good at all.
I will now be cringing all day, and I can’t even see the comic at work.
“Waxing your hardwood floors. It’s not just a great-looking tradition, not just good for protection of your expensive hardwood. It also eliminates over 85% of those awful-looking, embarrassing-to-explain skreeeee-rashes!”
Having rug burns that weren’t fun getting is the pits.
Hope the Girls are Okay. Jin and Monica also. All I can think from seeing that last pic is: “OW!, My T-..ah I mean Boobs!”
It’s going to depend on the relative coefficients of friction between floor and fabric, and between fabric and skin. She could end up getting a “rug burn” from the inside of the fabric top, if the fabric is yanked backwards/downwards high enough by friction on the floor. That “skreeee” sounds like a repeated grab/release/grab sort of friction (sticking friction vs. sliding friction), so something is being pulled past its yield-point.
In any case, I doubt that this feels like a gentle ride down a water-slide for either Monica or Jin.
Any landing you poit away from . . .
Is a good landing. I know. A great landing is when you can use the island again afterwards. This was not a great landing.
not their fault! no, a good landing is one you can walk/ limp away from!!!
Can’t rule that out, yet…
What if there was a lanthian device, unstable after all these years that reacted to their positing back and forward and when critical. Just how big a boom would a V-Cell make if it kaboomed?
Poiting, Poiting back and forward…. (DYAC!!!)
I think I can say, if it was lanthian, them and half the ocean may have been atomized…. :O :O
It could be a long dormant volcano that decided to finally blow it’s top. A reactivated volcano might be quiet in the time between its last rumble and its finally blowing apart the old lava cone. I do relive that there is a historical record on this.
Maark30, so they just had very bad timing?
I doubt there’s a coincidence here.
if a V-cell self-destructed? how much damage?
the island will be converted to a crater in the sea floor.
several cubic (that’s CUBIC, not square) miles of sea water and water life is converted to energy (anybody remember E=MC squared?). the cloud of debris (possibly radioactive) would fully mask any solar radiation, rendering practically the entire planet uninhabitable in less than a year.
the tsunamis radiating from the area would hit any coast in direct line at close to half a mach and be over a mile high. coasts not in direct line may have the velocity and/or wave height reduced by as much as half.
OwOwOwOw.
I’ll second that!
Oh my. Boobie burn. That’s gotta hurt.
* inserts joke about crash bags and safe landings. :O
Not every woman has reliable air-bags.
And some are silicone-based.
and some have aftermarket hardware. piercings anyone? just, ow. but i doubt Monica is that kind of gal. 😉
M looks lucky that she still has her top on, and that it’s not worn through. Any bruises she has would be much worse without at least the minimal cover provided by the cloth.
OWIE! indeed!
BOOBIE BURN!
This is the new meme, so good I just had to shout it.
High velocity friction burns before is a special kind of suck.
well I guess monica’s armour plated bra would help…. 🙂
It’s not a bra. It’s a bikini, and she’s suggested beofre that her bikinis are not armor plated (which is why the tiniest of them is reserved for watering plants in the backyard). 🙁 Owwie.
hmm, yeah…
next scene in hospital beds, lots of bandages…..
“so d’ya think he believed our alibi???”
“aaaagh, please scratch by dose, too painful to reach….:/”
“ugh, dont make me laugh, my back hurts too much!!!! :(“
only if they used the old “But Officer, The Grill Tricked Me” ploy!… Justin gets a call, about someone blowing up their BBQ grill, and he immediately thinks of Shelly… then he does a double-take and realizes that he is with Shelly in the Library, so who could be the one blowing up the grill now? then when he says that he just got called up for duty and has to go, she asks where do you need to go, he tells her the address, and OMG That’s Monica’s place!… Hilarity ensues…
I’ll third and forth it (for the twins) – I think I will be cringing all day at work too. owowowowowow
But… yay, they are back home and alive (though at first they may wish they weren’t)
Meanwhile… back at the library….
At least M avoided a face plant.
with her ‘build’, I’d think a face-plant at any time would be highly improbable.
Yup… somebody went mucking with the stuff in the mineshaft alright… although it seems it wasn’t one of the girls. Are… er… WERE there still monkeys on that Island? I seem to recall we pretty much depleted the troop after the fiasco with our foodstuffs…
Meanwhile, M went from “Sqeee” to “SCREEE” in one ‘Poit’- MAN that’s gotta be rough on the nipples, they weren’t designed to be landing gear. Jin looks like she’s working on a shoulder dislocation and both are candidates for a concussion depending on how much further it is to the wall.
I guess the other island is looking pretty good right about now…
Not to mention it looks like they were just ahead of the plasma front when they poited, may be some burn damage, not just ‘rug burn’.
first of all, a small icemaker on generator. Absolutely essential to control the process as the chemical reaction can generate enough heat to de-stabilize the mix. Start with Nitric and sulfuric acid, regent grade, in an ice-bath crucible. All mixing to proceed CAREFULLY with glass rod. Once mixture has cooled down, titrate raw glycerine into center of the mix, keeping a close eye on temperature. If temp starts rising… run… run really fast…
I could continue, but then the feds will start monitoring this strip.
… o.0
or you could just make batches of less than one fl. oz. at a time. That’s big enough to make a loud noise, but not enough to seriously hurt you if something goes pear shaped. If you need more than that just combine the batches after you mix everything up and make it stable.
Just what, exactly, did you leave in that mineshaft? Nevermind, I don’t really wanna know.
Don’t worry, I’m Lost, too.
(sigh) a small group, myself included, had chased down a vault buried beneath the north shore of that island. Supposedly from Ponce de Leon’s first officer, there was talk about several bottles of this wonderful elixer therein. The rock surrounding the valt was heavily checked, the sort of thing where nitroglycerine is actually the tool of choice, as osmosis pulls it right where you want it to go. Trouble is, we realised that the wretched vault sat right on top of a live lava tube- the plan was to wait a decade or so and see if the tube solidified… but I guess it’s rather a moot point….
BTW- my instructions deliberately left out some critical points… attempting to make it might be … welll… let’s just say you will have a SHARP learning curve to ovecome. Easy to make. Tricky to store. Near impossible to transport…
Reminds me of a classmate who told me a story of his school days. Seems that, in Chem lab, they were trying to identify an unknown organic liquid.
The teacher came by at one point, and asked casually what step they were on. “Nitration” he replied.
“You didn’t get a reaction before this?”
“Nope.”
“Ummm. Keep stirring–gently!–while we evacuate the class.”
Seems he had added too much denaturing agent, which masked the identity of the glycerine at the previous step. My friend was casually stirring about 200 ml of Nitroglycerine in his ice bath.
They called the local police bomb squad, who dug a hole in a nearby field to dispose of the experiment. The cops even let my friend push the button to set off the blast himself. “You made it, you get to detonate it.”
That could have gone very badly. Instead, epic school story! 🙂
200 ml nitro? and it did not heat up? I’m not sure I understand how that happened, unless it was already in an ice flask… and they did not come down with fierce headaches? Usually your first clue, the headaches, dropped blood pressure and clam sweats. My brother and I managed to destroy half the science building as well as a chunk of parking lot behind the Campbell shopping center back in 1969… the parking lot explosion removed clothing, hair and hearing on both of us. Luckily they didn’t have forensic explosives experts avaliable back then or we would have been locked up for some time… as it was, they knew there were two explosions and somehow the Howard boys were involved but nothing could be proven so we went free… Officer Connolly had a nice quiet chat with us afterwards about how some experiments ought not be repeated, and we agreed
Besides, the Army taught me about the glories of C-4 at Ft. Benning GA… you can get ARTISTIC with that stuff… to this day, I cannot cross a bridge or see a dam without calculating the minimum amount needed to bring it down. If it ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY needs to be DESTROYED overnight- United States Army Rangers…
I retract my previous o.0 . I wish I knew how much explosive it would take to slag the castle I wrote in the book I’m editing; it would make this so much easier.
Next question: was whatever that was, gunning for the island, or gunning for them? Certainly wasn’t an ordinary volcanic eruption!
Don’t know a gun that could do that to an island in two shots without involving either nuclear payloads or asteroid strikes….
Bud sneezing?
Possible. Would probably have required hitting a magma chamber which was already pre-pressurized to near-eruption condition. Even then, I’d expect to see a more typical “sudden gassification of magma” eruption… a big cloud of volcanic ash and pyroclastic flow. Ths looks more like the sudden detonation of high explosives.
Didn’t the US military play around with atomic-tipped bunker busters, to take out seriously-hardened strategic targets? Whatever hit that island, looks to be about the sort of thing that would be needed to crack open e.g. Cheyenne Mountain…
At present, I think the only country that still performs nuclear tests is France.
Actually the volcano probably blew because it did not have enough pressure, not too much. In that situation the weight of the summit will cause it to start collapsing into the magma chamber, on land it slumps, at sea it lets the ocean in. Cold seawater meets white hot magma and you have a massive steam explosion. That is what they think happened at Krakatoa.
Many say it happened at least twice. The first time, some 1500 years ago, give or take a century, it created the Sunda Strait, and was even bigger than the 1883 explosion.
They think the same thjong happened at Santorini in the Med, but resulted from a sistained eruption that eroded the cone from the inside until the only thing supporting it was the pressure of the eruption. When the eruption subsided, the cone collapsed, the sea rushed in and BOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!
My undstanding is that those huge caldera-forming collapses occur fairly late in a volcanic eruption, after a great deal of the built-up magma and gasses have already been released into the atmosphere. The cycle seems to be… magma rises and liquifies, pressure increases, land bulges upwards, pressure increases to the point of opening vents to the surface, big volcanic eruption occurs, magma and ash escape, magma chamber empties and pressure drops, unsupported area above collapses downwards, huge kaboom.
In this case there was no visible eruption before the big boom, so I don’t think it could have been a sudden downwards collapse due to inadequate support.
There are many incidents on record of battle rounds (particularly general-purpose rounds of 14 inch or larger) sinking entire islands.
There ONLY guns of the required size still in use by ANY navy is the 16A# guns of the Iowa-class battleships (US navy).
There are several dozen missile and rocket types which could pull this off, though. These missiles and rockets are used by almost every government in the world (and a few terrorist organizations).
nope… Don’t forget the BOOM on Friday, that’s either THREE SHOTS or FIVE…
if you count the 3 different versions of the text “boom” as echoes of the same explosion, then it’s only three, but if you count them as three separate explosions very closely timed, then that would make FIVE shots…
me, i’m going with one boom that echoed very well… but either way: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is ENEMY ACTION… i say that these were either missile test shots, exploratory mining blasts, or… somebody is trying to off the girls…
From the sequence it looks like two explosions occurred. One on the side blowing that side of the cone up. The second was deeper under the center of the volcano and appeared to finish the job. So was #1 the trigger for the second? A gas-air explosion could do it, especially underground. If a combustible gas had collected under the code, the first blast could have cracked the containement allowing the gas to be ignited. A twofer.
That was the Mount St. Helens event. An earthquake (from magma movement) destabilized a large section of the mountain, which slid down hill as a rock avalanche. The pressure released the magma which then burst through the avalanche, overall going more sideways than up. Video
Volia! Earth-shattering ka-boom!
Better video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H_HZVY1tT4
Yeah, internal pressure caused the North slope to inflate like a balloon. Scientists were poking it and saying: “What’s going on? I don’t get it.” Then the bubble popped and there was much destruction. Given the apparent general lack of observable recent destruction, I have doubts that this is actually a volcanic eruption as volcanoes rarely just explode without warning.
But who’s to say that they didn’t happen to be there for the warnings? Since they’ve only been there a brief time, they might have missed something.
I’ve always liked Mt. St. Helens, just because she erupted on my birthday. Best video: The Fire Below Us. Sorry it’s just the trailer. Full film is much better.
Ouch. A little quick thinking by Jin, and they could have poited somewhere miles away yet still over water. I’m sure skipping a few times would have been less painful.
Not necessarily. I have painful memories of bouncing off the surface of water.
…and so, the uninhabited island of Krack Your Toe-a is now just a memory. All natives of the island had been evacuated three months ago in anticipation of today’s event. What once was a paradise, is now a steaming bowl of lava. Next, we have…
shakes the pun jar
Keep making those donations.
C.B., I’m such a regular contributor, I have every other paycheck directly deposited into the Pun Bank of Wapsi Square!
LOL, I was going to say they probably found Krakatoa just before it exploded.
You know, there is now a new island at Krakatoa’s location.
The new island is growing quickly and is obviously volcanic in origin. They have given it a local name which means ‘Krakatoa’s child’.
Looking in panel #2 (the big explosion), the remains of the island look amazingly like the silhouette of a late model soviet cruiser (one the soviets commissioned just before that union collasped).
that cruiser had a heli-deck (a deck for servicing helicopters) behind the superstructure and its forward deck was dominated by 36 VLM/MP. tubes (Vertical Launch Missile / Multiple Purpose).
While some versions of that cruiser also had a VERY small main gun (largest type was 105mm), this is not shown in the panel.
I think the first thought would have been to get home safely – and then – do some VERY careful investigation afterwards.
Is anyone going to mention “airbags save lives” or is it just me?
Nope, just you.
Didn’t read the article, but i recently saw a headline online about a woman claiming her 38KKK boobies had saved her life.
There it is.
Saw another link on that same page.
Tried to create link, it didn’t work, here’s the URL.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4120503/Woman-has-size-30L-natural-boobs-which-wont-stop-growing.html
The real-life Monica? 🙂
No, she has silicon implants.
I was thinking more along the lines of “Armstrong Tires grip the road,” but probably only Fairportfan is old enough to get that gag… 😛
And me – I’m a few years older than him.
Lots of us old farts here.
@Davids4250 – That should be spelled “Pharts” – don’t want to upset the young folk – they think we don’t know all those “Dirty” words . It would be nice to have them hear my RSM (From the Black Watch) read the riot act to his new group of 18Yr. newbies .
And some of them have real good memories.
I’m sure they’ll blame Bud for this one too.
Possibly, doing momentum manipulation during a poit requires concentration, or is to some extent a matter of advanced decision and intent? If Jin did that poit, and her thought was “leap and poit!”, the two actions might have gotten conflated into a leapnpoit, without enough time to direct the poit to a soft landing.
Aah, the physics and psychoneurology of fictional biogenic teleportation. Probably room there for someone to write a master’s thesis, al least!
Also, Jin may still have the MENTAL reflexes of when she was INVULNERABLE, and that little bitty skid wouldn’t even have been an issue, as it seems she was trying to poit both of them away, with her going to take the brunt of the fall when they landed, thus protecting the not-so-invulnerable-Monica… OOPSIE!… now that SHE’S NOT invulnerable, we’ll see just what kind of damage she did to herself and Monica with that landing!
Another factor: Home is SAFE–and it’s where they poited as if by reflex. She may not have had time to consider that arriving with too much excess speed was not all that safe, or comfortable.
Ok. Worried about Jin. Did they poit in time? She’s taken the brunt of the explosion. And we know she can bruise, bleed, and suffer broken bones.
SAFE!!
LOL.
SAAAAAAAAAAFFFEEEEEEEEE!
Ninja’d. 🙁
By the way, that DOES appear to be M’s front hallway.
Would be interesting to see if anyone else was home.
You think Dietzel could catch ‘er?
(drops three diamonds into the pun jar… one for my pun, one for Cherish Bloom’s, one for this one)
Dave, are those diamonds anything like those in The Twenty-One Balloons?
By the way, thanks for a trip back into a well-spent childhood, even if you did so inadvertently.
Wow – @bmonk, no, I don’t think I’d ever heard of The Twenty-One Balloons and I was simply following up on the baseball theme of this particular thread. “Baseball been berry, berry good to me!”
Holy lonely island underground nuke test, Batman…
Well now. The only one who has yet to asplode an island is Brandi.
I bet there are some left in the Mururoa-atoll that haven’t been irradiated by French nukes…let’s take her there.
I just knew it was gonna go “BOOM” in a huge way.
ow. Boob-skid.
I wanna see how she explains those red marks to people.
Aside from Kevin, who’s gonna see?
“Well, ya see… my boyfriend came over, and we got a little frisky… do you really want me to go into brain-bleach-requiring detail, or shall I stop there, dearie?”
it looked to me that the entire side of the mountain collapsed and set off a nice boom.
I don’t see any obvious injuries on either of them, but that explosion looked very hot.
And it wasn’t volcanic either.
Volcanic explosions are loaded with pulverized rock and although hot enough to be incandescent aren’t hot enough to match radiance with the sky.
I suspect this explosion to be paranormal in origin.
Perhaps someone is taking potshots at either M or J.
The first thoughts that came to mind (in about 5 seconds) were “saved by the air bags” and “that’s a bit rough on the landing gear” but I see both were hit already. ::glances back at panel 4 again:: And boy, were they. Ouch.
::drops a titanium-kevlar bikini top padded with memory foam into the pun jar::
Man, I gotta peek in earlier – I’m on the night shift and you guys beat me in here … is it just because of Friday Cliffhanger Syndrome? 😀
Welcome to Bimini Island, Ladies… Enjoy our lovely beaches for 5.. 4…3…2…
oww boob rash! That cannot feel good.
Can only hope this does not portend that another, less altruistic, player is coming on the scene…
They are about due…
Hokey Smokes!! That made me wince!
That escape was…
*shades*
Im-poit-ant
YYEEEAAAAAAAA!
*mutters as he makes a pun jar deposit* Yanno, I should just set up a monthly account with this thing…
I had the same question. I’d vote for the “requires prep/concentration” angle myself.
I tend to think of “poiting” kind of like hyperspace from Star Wars: using it safely requires advanced calculations, taking into account your velocity vector, masses of objects near your route, etc., etc.; you can also make a “blind-jump”, which is unbelievably dangerous – many who try it are not heard from again.
Poiting seems somewhat safer, in that you won’t fall into a black hole or pass through the middle of a star – but if you don’t do the work ahead of time, the finer control is gone.
It does seem as if when you’re in a tearing hurry when you poit you’re likely to have that sort of problem – remember Monica going headlong when she poited back with the portal cloth?
I don’t even have breasts and it looks like that landing hurt.
owowowowowoweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The friction burns will be bad enuf, but if the bikini fabic lights on fire that’ll be adding insult to injury(along with the need for a LOT burn ointment!)
Ah crap – “bikini FABRIC”. Mondays suck……..need MORE coffee………………..
OOOWWWWWWWW!!! Carpet burns on some sensitive bits! Monica is not going to be feeling too good for a while!
*points to the vault deposit box*
I guess they should’ve checked out that other island again like Monica wanted?
They chose… poorly.
Well, at least they weren’t turned into dried out squeletons…
Silly me: mixing the English Skeleton with the French Squelette…
Maybe–but it sure looked really nice. For at least 15-30 seconds.
So did Ceti Alpha Five.
😀
While everyone is having a lovely time discussing Boobie injuries – and making donations to the Maw that must be fed – Why has no-one commented on the outline of a ship in Panel two . I know it could be left-over Basalt from the explosion – but it looks to accurate !
Yeah… okay… I just spent the last three minutes staring at panel 2, and I don’t see any outlines.
I’m thinking… , maybe?
(Man I hope that works… I hate HTML code… prefer BB Code…)
Yeah… that was a failure. It should say “I’m thinking… pareidolia, maybe?”, where pareidolia would link to the Wikipedia page about it.
Anyone wanna give me a “for dummies” explanation of how this HTML stuff works?
Please?
You were close, Nathan.
In order to have a block of text, which shows up as a hyperlink and which (when clicked) takes you to the page in question, you need three parts:
(1) Start it off with an “a” hypertag, and specify the URL with an href field and the URL in quotes. This is pretty much just what you did do. Don’t bother to include a “title” field. I never bother with a “nofollow” field. Then, have a closing bracket to end this tag.
(2) Enter the text that you want to have appear in the human-readable page, for instance the word “pareidolia”.
(3) Close the tagged area with openbracket-slash-a-closebracket.
So, what you have here is the text you want to display, not inside the tags themselves. Instead, there’s one complete hyperlink-open tag (an “a” block) before it – this contains the URL – and a second complete end-of-hyperlink tag after it.
Here’s what you were trying to accomplish: pareidolia
If your browser lets you “View page source”, you could go in and search for this word, and see the difference between what you did originally and what I did.
The same trick works for bold and italic text. If you use these, please proof-read carefully before posting… if you fail to close a bold or italic block, it’s likely to bleed over into subsequent comments.
Attempting visual demonstration of the above: “The red words of clicky goodness”
Boy do I hope that works….
🙁 the quotes did not work.
This is the comment with the visual in it.
The Skulker’s link to making it show up right which I am not going to try now.
@Nathan – see the “THOOOM” with the spout from the explosion . There is a large flying black block of rock – that kinda looks like a bird in flight . Directly below that – sitting low in the water – is a black item that appears to me to have the form of a Destroyer class ship . But what do I know – I was just a ground grunt .
One last thought = it appears that it was the “shock wave” from the blast that destroyed the cone – that’s mega-tons of heavy Basalt being tossed around . And the time from the sound of the blast – until the shock-waves arrived – does not appear to be a great deal of time. Any one have any ideas on this ?
no, not at the center of that big an explosion…. :O
Looking in panel #2 (the big explosion), the remains of the island do look amazingly like the silhouette of a late model soviet cruiser (one the soviets commissioned just before the union collapsed).
that cruiser type had a heli-deck (a deck for servicing helicopters) behind the superstructure and its forward deck was dominated by 36 VLM/MP. tubes (Vertical Launch Missile / Multiple Purpose).
While some versions of that cruiser also had a VERY small main gun (largest type was 75mm), this is not shown in the panel.
It does look quite like a naval vessel (although I can’t speak as to the type).
It’s hard to tell perspective in a 3D scene from a 2D drawing, but if it is a vessel, it looks as if it may be within the blast-debris radius. As in, “If you’re close enough to see the island that you just THOOOM!ed, you’re too close and are about to be dead.”
I see what you mean, and yeah on second glance it does look like the outline of a destroyer, but I still think it’s just a coincidentally-shaped remant of the island that blew up. As others have noted if it is a ship, unless it has some sort of supernatural protection of its own, is gonna be even worse off than the sub was after Bud found the grenade.
At this rate Stinky will show up with an old Soviet nuclear sub, complete with nuclear warheads on board.
I dunno if that’s needed. I ate a foot-long sub once–talk about an explosion in the gut!
[drops a Subway gift certificate into the vault]
I would postulate that the air rushing through the portal poit, while it was opened, propelled them through, even if it was for a brief instance. In skydiving the only thing with momentum is you.
OUCH!!!
Grounding to a dead stop on your tits must frickin’ hurt O_O
I got none to speak of, being a guy and all, but I feel for Monica.
disregarding the obvious pain in the chest, note her left arm.
I think she will need some serious professional attention.
I’d imagine it’s difficult to disregard the pain in the chest when you’re getting your nipples sanded off, but you’re right about the arm. Her knees are gonna be scraped all to hell too.
If there’s any of that island left, they should name it Nofun Atoll.
http://instantrimshot.com
Thought you got away with that one, didn’t you, Dafy?
::bobs head in direction of the pun jar::
You know what to do …
One word. OW!!!
If she skids any further, her breasts will catch fire.
I think Jin forgot to cancel her momentum in that Poit.
Yeek! Atomic friction burn. *cringe*
I’m not sure this is what Genesis was referring to, in their song “Riding the scree”?
Here are two of many uninhabited islands in the Bahamas. I believe I have sent Booby Cay to you previously, but neglected to include the Concepcion National Park next door. Both have nice sandy beaches facing east with minimal waves and are not volcanic in origin so no kaboom.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=8.1833675e-11,-80.109&z=15&t=h&hl=en
At least her air bags deployed…
Let me guess. This island is called Krakatoa?