The Lux, Page 2
Shaenon: The next page from the pitch sample for The Lux. Tina Kim only colored the first page to give editors an idea of what it would look like in color.
Man, I love this comic.
Channing: Nothing to do with this otherwise-lovely comic as such, but anyone else a big enough Garrity nerd to instantly and fondly recall Helen using the flammable/inflammable gag back in “Narbonic”? Man, good times.
I just checked the date and was shocked to find that that strip ran like eleven and a half years ago. Time continues to baffle me.
He’s either an overly conscientious employee who happened to be passing by or he’s the demon/ghost you just summoned.
Possibly both, I guess.
That Narbonic reference rings no bells for me. I just instantly and fondly recall Mordin in Mass Effect 2: “Flammable! Or inflammable! Forget which! Doesn’t matter!”
It was a panel of Dave near the beginning of his relationship with Lovelace. He was blissfully walking to his computer lab, and Helen was running past him in the opposite direction screaming “These chemicals are both flammable and inflammable and may open a dimensional vortex!” or something of the sort.
Good times.
Given that nitrate film is an explosive and can burn underwater, I’d say he strikes me less “overly conscientious” and more “only sane employee”.,
The overly conscientious bit is that he’s there at all.
flammable! and also inflammable!
Also igniferous and hypergolic!
…
Okay, probably not hypergolic.
hypergolic bad.
Worse than Highlander 2 and Star Trek 5 bad. And that’s saying a lot.
I think the final Highlander movie made 2 look like a masterpiece. 2 actually had a decent story, but they ran out of money and the completion bond company took it over and hacked together something to release.
I’m unsure of the meaning of your statement. Are you saying that hypergolicity is bad (which, unless you’re a mad scientist, is objectively true)? Or are you referencing something from pop culture?
yes to all of the above. Two movies so bad they should not and do not exist – includes Highlander 2, and Star Trek 5. And hypergolic reactions (save those carefully controlled for rocket science) is worse.
I’ve always preferred using “flammable.” Adding an “in” leads to confusion…
I always try to use Combustible and Non-Combustible. Very little ambiguity there, as long as people know what combustible means.
but “inflammable” makes things easier on the translators
Hey, it occurs to me…is this the guy they wound up conjuring up?
I never understood why the prefix “in” was ever added to “flammable” in the first place, as “flammable” is pretty easily understood, and the prefix “in” is usually added to a word to mean “not”, such as in the word “invulnerable”. Defining “inflammable” to mean the same as “flammable” lead to too much real world confusion and some very tragic outcomes. As such the word “inflammable” has been abolished by safety culture.
Now, if the prefix had been “en”, such as in “enable”, that would have been different. If something was “enflammable” I would readily intuit its meaning as to catch fire easily, where as “inflammable” intuits to be not flammable or non-flammable. Very critical difference.
Interestingly enough, it’s not a prefix! The verb is actually “to inflame.”
In fact, the world flammable doesn’t exist in many other languages, and so inflammable is the only one around. IIRC, the world flammable was ignored when it was coined (in the 19th century) but was brought back into usage by safety officials after WW2 who thought someone might interpret “inflammable” as “fireproof”. Funny how people now think that inflammable is the original word, after it’s been in use for less than a century.
Chrysler more or less invented the word “availability” in the 1930s as a portmanteau of available and ability to help sell trucks. It’s more or less eradicated the original word “availableness” in its entirety.
Just when is this set? Nitrate film stock hasn’t been used since the early Fifties, and safety film stock (which can still burn but can’t actually substitute for rocket propellant) has been available since the Nineteen-Teens.
Most places which still store old nitrate films are climate controlled and equipped with extensive automatic fire extinguishers.
Of course, if this is some tiny specialty theater – perhaps on a college campus – they might be a little less conscientious.
Back in the early ’80s I was working in the PR office at a small college when I involuntarily became the custodian of a collection of 16mm B&W movie film — commencements, football games and the like — from the ’20s and ’30s. It was nearly all on nitrate stock and some of it was already crumbling into powder. For decades it had been kept in its metal cans in a forgotten filing cabinet in a basement storeroom. I was able to persuade the college to spend a little money to copy what could be saved onto acetate stock and to safely dispose of the rest. I still get the heebie-jeebies when I think about what somebody with a cigarette could have done if they’d gotten curious about the wrong film can.
It’s a theater that shows old movies.
>Funny how people now think that inflammable is the original word, after it’s been in use for less than a century.
I assume you meant “flammable” there. 😉
Well, damn. Yes, that’s what I meant.
Sexy voodoo shenanigans I can take or leave, but movies shot on sodium nitrate? Man, that gets my attention.