She isn’t reality blind, she is a random bystander who happens to be a character whose arc finished. Remember the two of nick’s friends who broke into skinhorse to rescue him? that is those two.
Magic is magic… and you know the old saying: “Magic is just technology sufficiently advanced that we don’t understand it yet.”
I’m thinking something along the lines of “Memespace-borne Apathy Virus”. Sounds EXACTLY like Anasigma to me; particularly the part of deploying technology even though they don’t fully understand it yet. :p
Ummm yeah. And it’s a meme (damn those tricksy li’l things) that is probably older than you and me put together; it has long ago become part of the cultural subconscious, which means it’s fair game as fodder for further thought, not some absolute quote which must be enshrined. Personally, I think picking that particular nit is like stepping on ants; petty and serving no useful purpose. Or were you actually going somewhere with this?
Not necessarily.
After all they are part of the Whimsy gestalt entity, who has just experienced a lot of emotion in a few hours. Perhaps, the same way that adrenaline or other hormones can affect our cells the Whimsy equivalent can affect its employees (aparently, without them even noticing)
I’d argue that at least part of the filter can be bypassed by sufficiently strange events. Consider mad scientists in this setting….they’re quirky and do strange things, but they don’t actually see into the abyss of wierdness until they ‘crack’….mostly thanks to Those Fools at the Institute or Helen Narbon Sr.
Therefore it’s possible that while a certain level of filtering is genetic, the rest is a social conditioning/other psychowhateveryoucallit thing….which can be broken if you whack it with a nice hammer of stuff that can’t just be explained away. It may not last all that long though unless it’s a REALLY big hammer, since the brain might try to repair things (thus why we don’t see constant references to Madblood taking over the moon).
……ooooooooor…….these two are good enough actors to fool the Skin Horse peeps.
its NOT genetic. its a malevolent force placed on humans by outsiders
it has to be! come on, why would humans (and only humans) evolve a selective blindess which prevents them from seeing possible predetors, and has weirdly specific standards for what they can and cant see, and yet doesnt (presumably) block things that are weird but logical
(like the auora borialis, presumably they can see that, right? but thats pretty damn weird if you hadnt heard of it! if your brain evolved to block things that would be too weird for you to handle, surely it would block that.)
conclusion, long clunky theory, theres no way this is natural. its an attack and some peopel are immune
By Mage: The Ascension rules, Reality Blindness strengthens the Gauntlet, the barrier between this world and the spirit realms, and therefore protects if from the Nephandi.
You’re silly. Why would OUTSIDERS be needed when this world has perfectly genial MAD SCIENTISTS that might have induced that effect as a mad psychology experiment ?
Well to be fair most people did not notice Retia from power rangers even though she took over the moon and sent giant monsters constantly from the moon to that one city.
As for the reality filter… its mostly affected by how stubborn a person is.
The girl has started to notice some stranger things mostly because of everything that happened while the guy is unaffected even though he went through even weirder stuff…
In fact I’m willing to bet he didn’t even hear the “I like girls instead of boys” much less the robot airplane line.
Nah — “I like girls (said by a girl),” and, “I’m really a guy, even though I look like a girl” are entirely “normal” things for Internetty people nowadays. Which the non-helicopter guy in question is, assuming Nick’s assessment (probably based on offscreen time together) is accurate.
I think there’s different levels of reality blindness, and she’s at the level where she can perceive reality on the periphery of her senses, but her brain won’t let her perceive it consciously. That kind of cognitive dissonance can’t be good for you.
Secrets and lies, it’s all secrets and lies with these people!
They are not reality blind in reality; Sweetheart is secretly doing her Father’s task, conquering USA through bureaucracy; Nick never was a boy; and the true reason behind Tip’s reluctance to mingle with Greendrone is that Tip [i]is[/i] Mr. Green.
She’s not actually taking over the United States, but she’s definitely bogging it down in paperwork, and using the bureaucracy against itself, though that part isn’t really that hard.
Mind you, I would say that Sweetheart herself is being reality-blind in one regard – Just because something has gone unnoticed doesn’t mean that it can’t have a profound effect. You’d think that someone who works in covert ops the way that she does wouldn’t need to be told this. >_>
Technically they didn’t “help a nonhuman lay claim to a Fortune 500 company.” The nonhuman is question was already the Fortune 500 company to start with!
One could argue that freeing oneself from slavery IS, in fact, laying claim to oneself. Or, more pedantically, removing someone else’s claim upon yourself.
The Whimsy employees are probably somewhat de-blinkered on the specific point of nonhumans talking, given where they work. Even so, notice how the guy dismissed the incident, with a derail even! — in a few minutes, it’ll fade into the mass of “wierd stuff she sees at work”.
I’ll second that! I imagine the kaiju would be seeking legal help from Skin Horse with all the reparation suits the government has filed against them in regards to their rampages.
Or the Potential Plot Point could lurk ominously for months, another clue that this entire strip is an experiment in mind manipulation by Mad Artists.
Oh, come on, you know you’ve been thinking of the concept…especially since we have an example, in Collodi. His technological skill was clearly only developed in order to realize his artistic creations, after all.
I thought it was well-known that this is an experiment in mind manipulation by a Mad Cartoonist. There were plot points in Narbonic that lurked in the background for YEARS.
Okay, a comment on the website organization… Finished my archive binge a couple weeks back, love the comic, have recommended it to friends, have started Narbonic, you know the drill. Coming back today to read the last couple weeks’ worth? I naturally expected to find an ARCHIVE link across the top of the page with the others there. Nope.
Searching, I find the only ways to go BACKWARDS are 1) jump backwards to the beginning of a story … which may have 165 strips in it (oh, and the link there for Big Bad Wolves is out of place, it’s positioned under My House Is Me) – or 2) go backwards a day at a time, which is doable for most comics but here if you’ve missed two weeks of the comic too much new stuff will have come in to catch references, AND the pages load slooooowly to begin with.
Thus, I sumbit a request to add Archives for the comic that let you pick the day you want to go to and read that comic, or read forward from there, or whatever. Pleeeeeeez?
–Dave, we don’t want to make U.N.I.T.Y. cry, do we?
A fully navigable archive is in the works. As people who have been visiting the site for the last week or so can attest, we’re in the process of moving over to the new version of ComicPress. Unfortunately, the new ComicPress doesn’t currently have an archive feature like you’re describing. FORTUNATELY, it will have one in, like, a week. So keep watching the skies.
Also, having read back to where I was, I found halfway down one of the comment threads the answer I’d originally been looking for: the archive-by-date is _currently_ in that “Chapter” link right above the Like button.
I then had a whipsaw of reactions: “Oh COOL it actually shows the strips, that’ll be so useful when scrolling back to see where I left off!” followed by “Oh dear, this is gonna take forever to load, isn’t it…” BUT THEN “– but if I’m going backwards from the current strip, it’s loading the ones I need first. Hmmm.”. I approve (and I see you get to other chapters by first using the ‘select chapter’ button).
Caveat: clicking the “Skin Horse” link there, which presumably would try to load all the strips from the archives, ends up giving an Internal Server Error (possibly not enough bees available to process my request).
So I shall mutate my request to “Um… can we make it a wee bit more obvious that the “Chapter” link is where you go for strip archives right now? Maybe label it “Archives – by Chapter: (link), All Strips (link)”?
She’s so reality blind that she apparently hasn’t noticed her skin is corpse grey.
Perhaps she is meant to be one of the saffron-skinned daughters of the Orient? 😀
Alternately, she’s a zombie. Thus the lack of reality-blindness.
She isn’t reality blind, she is a random bystander who happens to be a character whose arc finished. Remember the two of nick’s friends who broke into skinhorse to rescue him? that is those two.
No, they aren’t!
Here they are: http://skin-horse.com/comic/todays-comic-897/
And here are these two: http://skin-horse.com/comic/that-was-the/
And as it turns out, she eventually gets interviewed by them: http://skin-horse.com/comic/2014-08-12/
Probably better not to leave spoilers like this for potential new readers going through the archives.
Clearly, the Shield of Boringness has infected this world as well.
Nothing left but to put them all in Redactive Custody until the next administration.
mnem
No, my feet were always that big.
I thought that was just for unicorns. Or can dragons use that too?
Magic is magic… and you know the old saying: “Magic is just technology sufficiently advanced that we don’t understand it yet.”
I’m thinking something along the lines of “Memespace-borne Apathy Virus”. Sounds EXACTLY like Anasigma to me; particularly the part of deploying technology even though they don’t fully understand it yet. :p
mnem
I thought so.
The quote is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
It’s Clarke’s third law, and it’s stating a comparison, not an equivalence.
Ummm yeah. And it’s a meme (damn those tricksy li’l things) that is probably older than you and me put together; it has long ago become part of the cultural subconscious, which means it’s fair game as fodder for further thought, not some absolute quote which must be enshrined. Personally, I think picking that particular nit is like stepping on ants; petty and serving no useful purpose. Or were you actually going somewhere with this?
mnem
When we stop thinking is when we die.
if this is the end of reality blindness, then i’m all the more distressed about tech 2’s recent discussions with nick.
I guess he really is that desperate!
Maybe he just wants someone to talk to that doesn’t roll their eyes at everything he says. Sometimes people aren’t just looking for sex.
So one can be cured of reality blindness?
Not necessarily.
After all they are part of the Whimsy gestalt entity, who has just experienced a lot of emotion in a few hours. Perhaps, the same way that adrenaline or other hormones can affect our cells the Whimsy equivalent can affect its employees (aparently, without them even noticing)
I’d argue that at least part of the filter can be bypassed by sufficiently strange events. Consider mad scientists in this setting….they’re quirky and do strange things, but they don’t actually see into the abyss of wierdness until they ‘crack’….mostly thanks to Those Fools at the Institute or Helen Narbon Sr.
Therefore it’s possible that while a certain level of filtering is genetic, the rest is a social conditioning/other psychowhateveryoucallit thing….which can be broken if you whack it with a nice hammer of stuff that can’t just be explained away. It may not last all that long though unless it’s a REALLY big hammer, since the brain might try to repair things (thus why we don’t see constant references to Madblood taking over the moon).
……ooooooooor…….these two are good enough actors to fool the Skin Horse peeps.
woah…
Now I really want it to be that they are fooling the agents!
its NOT genetic. its a malevolent force placed on humans by outsiders
it has to be! come on, why would humans (and only humans) evolve a selective blindess which prevents them from seeing possible predetors, and has weirdly specific standards for what they can and cant see, and yet doesnt (presumably) block things that are weird but logical
(like the auora borialis, presumably they can see that, right? but thats pretty damn weird if you hadnt heard of it! if your brain evolved to block things that would be too weird for you to handle, surely it would block that.)
conclusion, long clunky theory, theres no way this is natural. its an attack and some peopel are immune
but the auora borialis’s are really u.f.o.’s!
By Mage: The Ascension rules, Reality Blindness strengthens the Gauntlet, the barrier between this world and the spirit realms, and therefore protects if from the Nephandi.
You’re silly. Why would OUTSIDERS be needed when this world has perfectly genial MAD SCIENTISTS that might have induced that effect as a mad psychology experiment ?
oops duh
ok new theory, mad scientists did it
actually that can just be all my theories about skin horse ever
Well to be fair most people did not notice Retia from power rangers even though she took over the moon and sent giant monsters constantly from the moon to that one city.
As for the reality filter… its mostly affected by how stubborn a person is.
The girl has started to notice some stranger things mostly because of everything that happened while the guy is unaffected even though he went through even weirder stuff…
In fact I’m willing to bet he didn’t even hear the “I like girls instead of boys” much less the robot airplane line.
Nah — “I like girls (said by a girl),” and, “I’m really a guy, even though I look like a girl” are entirely “normal” things for Internetty people nowadays. Which the non-helicopter guy in question is, assuming Nick’s assessment (probably based on offscreen time together) is accurate.
I would bet that anyone who was, say, turned into a helicopter would be cured of reality blindness.
I think there’s different levels of reality blindness, and she’s at the level where she can perceive reality on the periphery of her senses, but her brain won’t let her perceive it consciously. That kind of cognitive dissonance can’t be good for you.
(TUNE: “Putting On The Ritz”, Irving Berlin)
Techies just
Are packing up,
“But I don’t trust
That talking pup,”
The guy admits …
Puttin’ down the Spitz!
Job is done,
They pack their gear
And then they run
Away from here,
They call it quits …
Puttin’ down the Spitz!
New non-human running a corporation!
Unknown consequences, a complication!
Consternation!
They’re not blind,
Though we may think
That each one’s mind
Is wearing blink-
-Ers, what nit-wits!
Puttin’ down the Spitz!
I’m looking forward to going to Phoenix next week to hopefully find a copy of Taco’s album that has this cover.
Ah, It’s always good to be reminded of the old masters!
Tip’s boinking has reached supernatural levels, breaking down the reality blinders.
Hey, where’s Sweetheart’s shirt?
I seen plenty of dogs wearing cute ‘lil t-shirts in my life…
Jeff being Jeff, I’m kinda surprised about that too.
Sweetheart being Sweetheart, he wouldn’t dare.
Secrets and lies, it’s all secrets and lies with these people!
They are not reality blind in reality; Sweetheart is secretly doing her Father’s task, conquering USA through bureaucracy; Nick never was a boy; and the true reason behind Tip’s reluctance to mingle with Greendrone is that Tip [i]is[/i] Mr. Green.
Secrets and lies!..
… and difference between bbcode and html, apparently I do not know.
… and english.
Use instead of []
Oh for… the symbols you get when pressing SHIFT comma (,) and period (.)
You mean < and >?
She’s not actually taking over the United States, but she’s definitely bogging it down in paperwork, and using the bureaucracy against itself, though that part isn’t really that hard.
Nice payoff — two punchlines in one panel. Tamar called it yesterday (“Nobody’s perfect”), but they put their own spin on it.
Mind you, I would say that Sweetheart herself is being reality-blind in one regard – Just because something has gone unnoticed doesn’t mean that it can’t have a profound effect. You’d think that someone who works in covert ops the way that she does wouldn’t need to be told this. >_>
Technically they didn’t “help a nonhuman lay claim to a Fortune 500 company.” The nonhuman is question was already the Fortune 500 company to start with!
Another one! Welcome to my tribe, fellow pedant! 🙂
One could argue that freeing oneself from slavery IS, in fact, laying claim to oneself. Or, more pedantically, removing someone else’s claim upon yourself.
The Whimsy employees are probably somewhat de-blinkered on the specific point of nonhumans talking, given where they work. Even so, notice how the guy dismissed the incident, with a derail even! — in a few minutes, it’ll fade into the mass of “wierd stuff she sees at work”.
Also, Tip is rocking the schoolgirl look.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who loved the outfit!
I’m sorry, but the schoolgirl outfit is the first garb that freaks me out when Tip wears it – I really like his other dresses, though.
I’m glad someone agreed. Tip dressing like a preteen girl is exactly as creepy as any other attractive 33-year-old dressing like a preteen girl.
*Agreed with me.
Q. Since when has WhimsyCorp Employee #2 had blue streaks in her hair?
A. Since we went full-colour, idiot.
Talk about reality-blind….
yeah, i kind of imagine the start of color signifies the end of reality blindness.
We’re definitely over the rainbow now.
Whoa, one of the agents is totally rocking the Mako Mori hair.
Indeed.
Now, if this means that we’ll be seeing some kaiju at the next Transgenic Anti-Defamation League gathering, that would be awesome…
I’ll second that! I imagine the kaiju would be seeking legal help from Skin Horse with all the reparation suits the government has filed against them in regards to their rampages.
It would be helpful to know if this was a one-off joke or a plot point. There’s a lot that could be read into it if it’s the latter, but otherwise…
Suppose there’s a chance we’ll know tomorrow if they continue on this plot point….
Or the Potential Plot Point could lurk ominously for months, another clue that this entire strip is an experiment in mind manipulation by Mad Artists.
Oh, come on, you know you’ve been thinking of the concept…especially since we have an example, in Collodi. His technological skill was clearly only developed in order to realize his artistic creations, after all.
I thought it was well-known that this is an experiment in mind manipulation by a Mad Cartoonist. There were plot points in Narbonic that lurked in the background for YEARS.
Okay, a comment on the website organization… Finished my archive binge a couple weeks back, love the comic, have recommended it to friends, have started Narbonic, you know the drill. Coming back today to read the last couple weeks’ worth? I naturally expected to find an ARCHIVE link across the top of the page with the others there. Nope.
Searching, I find the only ways to go BACKWARDS are 1) jump backwards to the beginning of a story … which may have 165 strips in it (oh, and the link there for Big Bad Wolves is out of place, it’s positioned under My House Is Me) – or 2) go backwards a day at a time, which is doable for most comics but here if you’ve missed two weeks of the comic too much new stuff will have come in to catch references, AND the pages load slooooowly to begin with.
Thus, I sumbit a request to add Archives for the comic that let you pick the day you want to go to and read that comic, or read forward from there, or whatever. Pleeeeeeez?
–Dave, we don’t want to make U.N.I.T.Y. cry, do we?
A fully navigable archive is in the works. As people who have been visiting the site for the last week or so can attest, we’re in the process of moving over to the new version of ComicPress. Unfortunately, the new ComicPress doesn’t currently have an archive feature like you’re describing. FORTUNATELY, it will have one in, like, a week. So keep watching the skies.
I shall!
Also, having read back to where I was, I found halfway down one of the comment threads the answer I’d originally been looking for: the archive-by-date is _currently_ in that “Chapter” link right above the Like button.
I then had a whipsaw of reactions: “Oh COOL it actually shows the strips, that’ll be so useful when scrolling back to see where I left off!” followed by “Oh dear, this is gonna take forever to load, isn’t it…” BUT THEN “– but if I’m going backwards from the current strip, it’s loading the ones I need first. Hmmm.”. I approve (and I see you get to other chapters by first using the ‘select chapter’ button).
Caveat: clicking the “Skin Horse” link there, which presumably would try to load all the strips from the archives, ends up giving an Internal Server Error (possibly not enough bees available to process my request).
So I shall mutate my request to “Um… can we make it a wee bit more obvious that the “Chapter” link is where you go for strip archives right now? Maybe label it “Archives – by Chapter: (link), All Strips (link)”?
–Dave, having a slow brain day
She is! n_n I was wondering if someone had mentioned it before me but only now did I scroll all the way down to check.