Yeah, but can they trust the answer’s answer? Trickster that she is… if she has some sort of alternative double-secret secondary hidden agenda, it’ll be a task twistier than a ton of snakes to get the straight truth of the situation out of her.
I heard it in Goulum’s voice from the old Rankin and Bass “The Hobbit”
Bilbo: Whatever is the matter?
Goulum: It GUESSED, my Precious. Time IS the answer.
lol Dave we’ve upgraded to a vault… I’ve actually been working on some rather stellar security systems, but then no one would be able to put anything in the vault so I shut them down. oops.
So… now that this part of the truth is out un the open, Connie seems to have calmed down… her sphinx facial markings have faded. And, in her cynical downer way, she seems willing to pursue the answers to what actually occurred… she’s not trying to distract Shelly now.
So… the whole subject was uncomfortable for her, perhaps because she doesn’t know the answers and preferred to simply not think about it?
Can’t be easy, being an 80kY-old entity, knowing your origin is a group of timeless immortal beings, and that your knowledge of your origin was deliberately taken from you.
I learned long ago that people will stand in line and pay good money to hear someone tell them: “It’s not your fault!”
And if the don’t have some one to do that, they will go to great lengths to blame others. That’s why being stupid is such hard work — every day you have to find a new excuse to explain why the world doesn’t meet your expectations.
I kinda get the feeling that Shelly’s time in the forrest coupled with her acceptance of her Sphinxyness has left her a bit of a “sunny, potted little daisy”. Phix is her mentor, after all. That leaves Conscience to take a darker view of things. They balance one another. Scilla called them sisters and I think it fits. And I’m looking forward to seeing Nudge again.
Connie may also have a touch of generalized Baby Herman syndrome… the frustration of being an adult entity, perpetually stuck inside of a child’s body.
Right… if I recall correctly Baby Herman’s complaint was “A fifty-year-old lust in a one-year-old’s dinky”. Not that I think that lust (or Lust) specifically is playing a primary role in Connie’s crankiness… we haven’t seen any evidence of that… but a similar frustration with having powerful origins and a limited current nature may be in play.
Causality is hiding under the couch in Confusion Corner, shivering pitifully. Causality could use a large mug of Moka Java, liberally laced with some of that old Jim Beam.
well, yes, except for at the coffee shop I used to hit up on the way to college… Java Jive was good, but Moka Madness was better and their Mean Monday Moka got me through a good many math classes.
“Moka” and “Mocha” are both valid variations of the name… but they both can also refer to two different things:
(1) A non-blended (single origin) coffee variety from Yemen (named for the ancient port city of Mocha) with a bright, acidic character, or
(2) A beverage containing both coffee and chocolate.
“Moka-Java” or “Mocha-Java” is a two-coffee blend… Moka, plus a rounder, fuller coffee often from Java or elsewhere in Indonesia. No chocolate.
Confusing, that’s for sure. I’m of the school which uses “moka” to refer to the single-origin coffee variety, and “mocha” to refer to the coffee/chocolate yummy beverage. Other folks use “mocha” for both.
I wasn’t aware of Moka being the name of an anime character… if from Africa or Indonesia it would probably indicate that the author was having a punny with us.
Not only do I know Norwescon (although I missed it this year), I know that corner you were in. You scored a good spot for fan table activity; I sat there myself briefly, for the Tonopah Westercon bid years ago. I hope your booth sitting paid off.
Everyone else, I mean this corner, which is well situated in a hotel well suited for conventions. (Unless maybe you’re in Wing 5B, which is “special.”)
Or maybe it’s a matter of dotting i’s and crossing t’s – “I know this happened because you’re here so I need to remember to set this train moving when I get to that point in the cycles.”
if both Shelly and Nudge were traveling in the SAME relative direction of time, then this would be a paradox, but you forget that Shelly (and CLG) were traveling BACKWARDS in time relative to Nudge and the rest of the universe, therefore the reason that Nudge didn’t seem to remember about it was that it hadn’t happened YET for HER, but it was in the PAST for Shelly. the simple act of thanking her “for getting me lost in the woods that day” COULD have been the “reminder” that Ayshela is talking about in her post above mine. and because Shelly said she hadn’t yet experienced the first of her CM Loops yet, she would obviously go on to try and get more and more detail in order to “make” Nudge “remember” something she “forgot”…. thus when Nudge comes BACK to the normal universe after visiting the TTF, she has all the details needed (in theory) to get Shelly lost in the proper way, at the proper time, for all this to happen according to the “Secret Heinz 57 Plan” i also think that for this to have happened, that Nudge didn’t visit the TTF until at least what, 10-12 years had past by for TTF-Shelly… that way when Nudge returns to the normal time stream she does so BEFORE Pre-Vision-Quest-Shelly actually GOES on her quest, because if she visited Earlier (relative to TTF-Shelly’s frame of reference) then she would have returned AFTER PRE-V.Q.-Shelly went on her quest and the point would be moot…
The only time Shelly 57 is without Connie is before she is created on the visionquest.
It’s a causal violation to have an object meet itself; this has been demonstrated mathematically. But I think they get around this since the information is passed back and forth in separate universes.
But there’s no guarantee Nudge knows everything that happened. In fact, I’m betting she was put on totem spirit duty in the calculations of Brandis 1-56 precisely to keep her from meddling in what Jin and the Rogue Queen knew.
Besides, Nudge could only know what was going on if she were in demon form while Connie was being created. And if there was any moment you would not want to be in demon form….
So Nudge had to wait in physical form while Shellycub played with the ethereal Play-Doh. Even if she knew what was going down in Mexico City, she would have to arrive late, since she cannot poit.
All that was left was a hospitalized Monica and a pile of amnesiac demons in a body at the morgue. Nudge can answer why she reanimated Tina. But I don’t think she has a clue as to why Connie exists, or what her demons were trying to accomplish in blocking souls.
“It’s a causal violation to have an object meet itself”
Are you sure? If you go back in time 24 hours, using your preferred method, you will share the universe with another self. what does it matter if you and the other you are 1000 km apart or in the same room shaking hands?
What’s tricky is doing that without changing everyone’s behavior, which might lead to events in which you did not go back in time. Even momentarily distracting the wrong person who doesn’t know you might disrupt the sequence.
I don’t think you can go back in time in ‘your’ dimension. When you go back in time, it causes a fork in the Space-time continuum. Whether or not you can ever get back to the one you started out in is… uncertain.
What that brief article means is that anything looping back in time will not encounter itself at its point of departure. (I think there was a computer model developed within the last 5 years demonstrating this, but I can’t make an internet tell me.) But it’s a math thing; if a story is further or premised on it, then it should run with that.
I was just noting that Paul seems to have created a solution in keeping with known laws of physics, so bully for him.
And I have come here from the future to say I was right about Nudge having no knowledge of how Connie was made, so neener.
I plead wibbly wobbly timey wimey, ’cause that and Star Gate and Star Trek are where I learned my Time bendy wendy stuff well that and a friend in college taking advanced mathmatics and chemistry…
Hmp. Looks like an old Kay–but HTH did she get her leg UNDER the strings?? (A bass with the bridge set high enough to get one’s leg under the strings would have an unplayably high action.)
Had a band here in Atlanta called Hillbilly Frankenstein. Psycho rockabilly. Great band.
Phyllis, their bass player, (going by what she wore onstage at different times) couldn’t seem to decide if she was channeling Stevie Nicks or a bad-ass biker chick.
She played both electric and upright – the uprights body was stuffed full of foam or something, and it was contact miked.
No matter how she was dressed, one thing you could pretty well count on was that she’d wind up playing at least one of the encores on her electric, standing on the upright that would be lying on its side.
Man i wish i had pics from the Atlanta clubs in the 80s/90s…
(I forget the name of the guy who builds them, but he also builds guitars, mandolins, fiddles, etc., and about twenty years ago, a bunch of Brit folk/rock types recorded a tribute album to him.)
I play keys, You wouldn’t believe the amount of synths I have gathered over the years (not even mentioning the fx, enhancers, gates, compressors and whatnot) it’s a musician thing.
Every instrument, even if it’s the same type, has it’s own timbre that fits a certain composition, and/or style, especially in modern music.
Then again, I know a Cellist that has several Cello’s and violins that are the same to a layman, until she plays them and points out the differences in tonality…
It happens with other artists, too. For example, people who draw quickly accumulate vast collections of pens and pencils – many interchangeable to the casual observer.
I’m just not clear on a lot of things. When did Shelly meet Nudge in the time forest? I thought Phix had been her only visitor there, other than herself and CLG. tilt
Nah…there was some reference to Nudge visiting there and receiving instructions from Shellynx shortly after Shelly returned from the Forest. I’m sure someone will happily come along and link us to that page. 🙂
I’d say – a Fender Jazz, a Fender P-Bass, a Gibson (looking an awful lot like a Gibson Les Paul guitar with a bass neck, did they make one with a switch? i bet they did), aaaand something with an oval pickup.
The only time travel paradox that we have here is the classic bootstrap paradox (named after the concept of a man lifting himself up by his own bootstraps). Basically, this means that the sequence of events that lead to Connie’s creation could not have happened had she not already existed. It’s an event causing itself.
Nudge IS the answer!
That should proved to be a very interesting conversation. Nudge’s interpretation of the events will be….unique. 😀
Yeah, but can they trust the answer’s answer? Trickster that she is… if she has some sort of alternative double-secret secondary hidden agenda, it’ll be a task twistier than a ton of snakes to get the straight truth of the situation out of her.
“Nudge IS the answer”
I couldn’t help but read that in the voice of a certain old Lords of Acid song.
NSFW just like all their music.
I heard it in Goulum’s voice from the old Rankin and Bass “The Hobbit”
Bilbo: Whatever is the matter?
Goulum: It GUESSED, my Precious. Time IS the answer.
Lords of Acid old?
well, hell, I suppose they are
:/
Don’t you just hate being reminded that time marches on and we have to go with it?
It’s not getting older that I mind…
…it’s that sudden stop at the end.
I just realized that the second frame here, is absolutely a metaphor for the basic theme underlying all of Wapsi Square.
It’s a sphinx / demon bass-off.
(I think I’ll probably have to go out and rob a bank to pay the Pun Jar for that… gimme a couple of days, OK?)
The pun jar thanks you for paying off its college education. It though tit would never pay off it’s doctorate.
Oh, I don’t know – tits have paid for lots of things in my experience. ::Drops diamond studed bra into jar::
lol Dave we’ve upgraded to a vault… I’ve actually been working on some rather stellar security systems, but then no one would be able to put anything in the vault so I shut them down. oops.
AH, so that vas your vault. Drops in one Romanian Leu.
Oh no I claim no ownership of the vault… I think it was just kinda there. I did however try to install the security system.
So… now that this part of the truth is out un the open, Connie seems to have calmed down… her sphinx facial markings have faded. And, in her cynical downer way, she seems willing to pursue the answers to what actually occurred… she’s not trying to distract Shelly now.
So… the whole subject was uncomfortable for her, perhaps because she doesn’t know the answers and preferred to simply not think about it?
Can’t be easy, being an 80kY-old entity, knowing your origin is a group of timeless immortal beings, and that your knowledge of your origin was deliberately taken from you.
Who am I? Where do I come from? What is my pourpose? Welcome to mortality, Connie.
SHE may not know her porpoise, but I do. His name is Bob, and he’s the best porpoise ever.
And you’re going to hug him, and pet him, and call him Geor— BOB?… that don’t make sense…
If it’s good enough for a planet, then it’s good enough for a porpoise.
ah… the relief of talking about and blaming *someone else* 🙂 🙂
I learned long ago that people will stand in line and pay good money to hear someone tell them: “It’s not your fault!”
And if the don’t have some one to do that, they will go to great lengths to blame others. That’s why being stupid is such hard work — every day you have to find a new excuse to explain why the world doesn’t meet your expectations.
Connie’s a bit of a potty-mouth, ne?
I kinda get the feeling that Shelly’s time in the forrest coupled with her acceptance of her Sphinxyness has left her a bit of a “sunny, potted little daisy”. Phix is her mentor, after all. That leaves Conscience to take a darker view of things. They balance one another. Scilla called them sisters and I think it fits. And I’m looking forward to seeing Nudge again.
Connie may also have a touch of generalized Baby Herman syndrome… the frustration of being an adult entity, perpetually stuck inside of a child’s body.
Garnished with the added frustration of not even having a body.
Don’t you mean Baby Huey?
Nope…he means Herman…from Roger Rabbit. 🙂
Because I was already on wikipedia: Baby Herman
Right… if I recall correctly Baby Herman’s complaint was “A fifty-year-old lust in a one-year-old’s dinky”. Not that I think that lust (or Lust) specifically is playing a primary role in Connie’s crankiness… we haven’t seen any evidence of that… but a similar frustration with having powerful origins and a limited current nature may be in play.
Off to see the happy, tricksy puppy-goat.
Shouldn’t that be “yay”? “Yea” is pronounced the same, but it means yes. Yay is like hooray.
Nhawp, pipple spelz hau thei wantz theez deiz…
Please, Old Wolf, I get cross-eyed trying to read “Quantum Vibe” that way.
That made me urp a little…Please don’t ever spell that way again, Wolf. 🙂
Mark Twain thought well of it, though.
Well Mark Twain was an evil man. That just made my head hurt.
ajm rɪli sɑri tu hɪr ðæt, dʒuli. ɪt prɑbəbli ɪzənt æz bæd æz ɪt me sim.
¿ɹǝʇʇǝq ʎuɐ ןǝǝɟ noʎ ǝʞɐɯ sıɥʇ sǝop ˙ǝıןnɾ ʎɹɹos
Actually, upside-down/backwards I can handle pretty well. 😛
Meihem in ce Klasrum.
You’re just encouraging them, you know…
하지만 우리가 즐기고있는
And causality is sent chasing its tail yet again.
Causality is hiding under the couch in Confusion Corner, shivering pitifully. Causality could use a large mug of Moka Java, liberally laced with some of that old Jim Beam.
I believe you mean “mocha”. Moka is a vampire from a fan-servicy harem anime.
well, yes, except for at the coffee shop I used to hit up on the way to college… Java Jive was good, but Moka Madness was better and their Mean Monday Moka got me through a good many math classes.
recipe??? is it red in colour ??? 😀
Yeah, “Moka-san” was fun to watch, but your eyes hurt trying to read the subtitles. At least now I can say “YES” and “THANK YOU” in Japanese. 🙂
Hai?
Arigatou gozaimasu.
bmonk: careful, there. “Hai” implies “yes, I heard vou” without necessarily implying agreement with what was said. “Moshi” is “yes, I agree.”
“Moka” and “Mocha” are both valid variations of the name… but they both can also refer to two different things:
(1) A non-blended (single origin) coffee variety from Yemen (named for the ancient port city of Mocha) with a bright, acidic character, or
(2) A beverage containing both coffee and chocolate.
“Moka-Java” or “Mocha-Java” is a two-coffee blend… Moka, plus a rounder, fuller coffee often from Java or elsewhere in Indonesia. No chocolate.
Confusing, that’s for sure. I’m of the school which uses “moka” to refer to the single-origin coffee variety, and “mocha” to refer to the coffee/chocolate yummy beverage. Other folks use “mocha” for both.
I wasn’t aware of Moka being the name of an anime character… if from Africa or Indonesia it would probably indicate that the author was having a punny with us.
More a case of her family liking such names.
She has two half sisters called Kokoa (cocoa) and Kalua (Kahlúa), also has a stepmother called Gyokuro (green tea) and stepsister called Akua (Water)
@ DAve – thanks for the kind comments yesterday – I just happen to have whats’ left of the Black label. Here you go sir.
Nah, Causality is set here in Seattle… http://www.watchcausality.com/
Whoa! Thanks for the watchcausality.com ping! I will now return the rest of you to this lovely comic.
Not only do I know Norwescon (although I missed it this year), I know that corner you were in. You scored a good spot for fan table activity; I sat there myself briefly, for the Tonopah Westercon bid years ago. I hope your booth sitting paid off.
Everyone else, I mean this corner, which is well situated in a hotel well suited for conventions. (Unless maybe you’re in Wing 5B, which is “special.”)
Is Causuality Diezel’s sidekick-demon?
Or maybe it’s a matter of dotting i’s and crossing t’s – “I know this happened because you’re here so I need to remember to set this train moving when I get to that point in the cycles.”
Hmmm. Otherwise, it would create a time paradox in the Time Forest. I wonder where that would lead?
as Dr Who would say, “you’re just not thinking four-dimensionally….” 🙂
dig out the ” don’t blink ” episode…. 😀
if both Shelly and Nudge were traveling in the SAME relative direction of time, then this would be a paradox, but you forget that Shelly (and CLG) were traveling BACKWARDS in time relative to Nudge and the rest of the universe, therefore the reason that Nudge didn’t seem to remember about it was that it hadn’t happened YET for HER, but it was in the PAST for Shelly. the simple act of thanking her “for getting me lost in the woods that day” COULD have been the “reminder” that Ayshela is talking about in her post above mine. and because Shelly said she hadn’t yet experienced the first of her CM Loops yet, she would obviously go on to try and get more and more detail in order to “make” Nudge “remember” something she “forgot”…. thus when Nudge comes BACK to the normal universe after visiting the TTF, she has all the details needed (in theory) to get Shelly lost in the proper way, at the proper time, for all this to happen according to the “Secret Heinz 57 Plan” i also think that for this to have happened, that Nudge didn’t visit the TTF until at least what, 10-12 years had past by for TTF-Shelly… that way when Nudge returns to the normal time stream she does so BEFORE Pre-Vision-Quest-Shelly actually GOES on her quest, because if she visited Earlier (relative to TTF-Shelly’s frame of reference) then she would have returned AFTER PRE-V.Q.-Shelly went on her quest and the point would be moot…
Who needs controlled conversations with Dr. Fraiser Crane behind closed doors at three digits an hour when you can talk to youself freelance instead…
The only time Shelly 57 is without Connie is before she is created on the visionquest.
It’s a causal violation to have an object meet itself; this has been demonstrated mathematically. But I think they get around this since the information is passed back and forth in separate universes.
But there’s no guarantee Nudge knows everything that happened. In fact, I’m betting she was put on totem spirit duty in the calculations of Brandis 1-56 precisely to keep her from meddling in what Jin and the Rogue Queen knew.
Besides, Nudge could only know what was going on if she were in demon form while Connie was being created. And if there was any moment you would not want to be in demon form….
So Nudge had to wait in physical form while Shellycub played with the ethereal Play-Doh. Even if she knew what was going down in Mexico City, she would have to arrive late, since she cannot poit.
All that was left was a hospitalized Monica and a pile of amnesiac demons in a body at the morgue. Nudge can answer why she reanimated Tina. But I don’t think she has a clue as to why Connie exists, or what her demons were trying to accomplish in blocking souls.
“It’s a causal violation to have an object meet itself”
Are you sure? If you go back in time 24 hours, using your preferred method, you will share the universe with another self. what does it matter if you and the other you are 1000 km apart or in the same room shaking hands?
What’s tricky is doing that without changing everyone’s behavior, which might lead to events in which you did not go back in time. Even momentarily distracting the wrong person who doesn’t know you might disrupt the sequence.
I don’t think you can go back in time in ‘your’ dimension. When you go back in time, it causes a fork in the Space-time continuum. Whether or not you can ever get back to the one you started out in is… uncertain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_homotopic
What that brief article means is that anything looping back in time will not encounter itself at its point of departure. (I think there was a computer model developed within the last 5 years demonstrating this, but I can’t make an internet tell me.) But it’s a math thing; if a story is further or premised on it, then it should run with that.
I was just noting that Paul seems to have created a solution in keeping with known laws of physics, so bully for him.
And I have come here from the future to say I was right about Nudge having no knowledge of how Connie was made, so neener.
I plead wibbly wobbly timey wimey, ’cause that and Star Gate and Star Trek are where I learned my Time bendy wendy stuff well that and a friend in college taking advanced mathmatics and chemistry…
It figures that Nudge turns out to be the lynchpin to this personal mystery Shelly’s.
Oh god, it’s so wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey that I’ve gone cross-eyed!
Why does Shelly have so many guitars?
…Why not? If you’re a serious musician, why wouldn’t you have several?
Four isn’t all that “many”. Guitarists (and bass players) accumulate guitars like i accumulate electronic gadgets.
Even though we don’t see it here, Shelly apparently has at least one upright bass, too.
Hmp. Looks like an old Kay–but HTH did she get her leg UNDER the strings?? (A bass with the bridge set high enough to get one’s leg under the strings would have an unplayably high action.)
Had a band here in Atlanta called Hillbilly Frankenstein. Psycho rockabilly. Great band.
Phyllis, their bass player, (going by what she wore onstage at different times) couldn’t seem to decide if she was channeling Stevie Nicks or a bad-ass biker chick.
She played both electric and upright – the uprights body was stuffed full of foam or something, and it was contact miked.
No matter how she was dressed, one thing you could pretty well count on was that she’d wind up playing at least one of the encores on her electric, standing on the upright that would be lying on its side.
Man i wish i had pics from the Atlanta clubs in the 80s/90s…
I thought Shelly was a bass player so aren’t those basses?
Bass guitars, yes.
At least two seem to be Fenders; i’m not good with basses, so i can’t actually identify all of them, even if we could see them more completely.
The most beautiful basses i’ve ever seen are the custom-built five-strings that Dave Pegg plays in Fairport Convention.
(I forget the name of the guy who builds them, but he also builds guitars, mandolins, fiddles, etc., and about twenty years ago, a bunch of Brit folk/rock types recorded a tribute album to him.)
I play keys, You wouldn’t believe the amount of synths I have gathered over the years (not even mentioning the fx, enhancers, gates, compressors and whatnot) it’s a musician thing.
Every instrument, even if it’s the same type, has it’s own timbre that fits a certain composition, and/or style, especially in modern music.
Then again, I know a Cellist that has several Cello’s and violins that are the same to a layman, until she plays them and points out the differences in tonality…
It happens with other artists, too. For example, people who draw quickly accumulate vast collections of pens and pencils – many interchangeable to the casual observer.
I’m just not clear on a lot of things. When did Shelly meet Nudge in the time forest? I thought Phix had been her only visitor there, other than herself and CLG. tilt
Nah…there was some reference to Nudge visiting there and receiving instructions from Shellynx shortly after Shelly returned from the Forest. I’m sure someone will happily come along and link us to that page. 🙂
HAPPY?
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/kept-her-safe/
HAPPY.
And junior, per-Forest Shelly hears part of the story it from Nudge here:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/demigod/
Thanks Yamara, otherwise I’d have been looking for it.
Happy! 🙂
OOooooo…guitars! Sorry…I’m easily distracted by pretty things.
There are guitars in the picture?
*5*
tricked me into posting again
I’d say – a Fender Jazz, a Fender P-Bass, a Gibson (looking an awful lot like a Gibson Les Paul guitar with a bass neck, did they make one with a switch? i bet they did), aaaand something with an oval pickup.
If Paul included it, i’d bet they made it.
Did ya check out this pic of Dave Pegg and his five-string?
Wish i could remember the name of the guy who built it.
Tonight’s random Wapsi Square link:
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/10082003/
The only time travel paradox that we have here is the classic bootstrap paradox (named after the concept of a man lifting himself up by his own bootstraps). Basically, this means that the sequence of events that lead to Connie’s creation could not have happened had she not already existed. It’s an event causing itself.