Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2021-07-06
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2021-07-06

by shaenon on July 6, 2021 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon
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Discussion (52) ¬

  1. Alphaghoul
    July 6, 2021, 12:02 am | # | Reply

    Heh, in Douglas Adams narrative it was dolphins.

    • awgiedawgie
      July 6, 2021, 12:15 am | # | Reply

      Pretty sure that even here dolphins are smarter than humans. Probably smart enough to stay away from bees.

      • skullthetroll
        July 6, 2021, 9:29 am | # | Reply

        I’m not sure. They speak 1ee7.

  2. awgiedawgie
    July 6, 2021, 12:16 am | # | Reply

    I love that Gavotte has a slide show all prepared.

    • Bernerlb
      July 6, 2021, 12:23 pm | # | Reply

      That’s how you hold Sweetheart’s attention and impress her.

  3. chicgeekmsw
    July 6, 2021, 12:16 am | # | Reply

    LOVETRON!

  4. Kairamek
    July 6, 2021, 12:20 am | # | Reply

    Planet Lovetron is real? Hand to God, I did not see that coming.

    • BMunro
      July 6, 2021, 4:41 am | # | Reply

      Actually it’s Planet buzz buzz, buzz buzz buzz, buzz!, but the nuances are lost on humans, and the bees are fond of Tigerlily.

      • Robert Nowall
        July 6, 2021, 8:19 am | # | Reply

        It loses something in the translation.

        • waynezombie
          July 6, 2021, 8:58 am | # | Reply

          It’s not the translation, it’s our limited audio perception range.

        • awgiedawgie
          July 6, 2021, 5:18 pm | # | Reply

          Don’t you understand their ingenious native language?

          • Knuckles
            February 18, 2022, 7:54 am | #

            Can’t dance worth beans, so no.

    • Candace
      July 7, 2021, 12:52 am | # | Reply

      Hmmm, I posted a response to this yesterday with a link to a relevant strip, and my entire post seems to have gone missing.

  5. Venator Animarum
    July 6, 2021, 2:46 am | # | Reply

    Shouldnt that be octopi Gavotte? As a prim british entity you should be more accurate.

    • Chnapy
      July 6, 2021, 2:59 am | # | Reply

      From Wiktionary : “The plural octopi is hypercorrect, coming from the mistaken notion that the -us in octōpūs is a Latin second declension ending. The word is actually treated as a third declension noun in Latin.”

      • Frank
        July 6, 2021, 5:23 pm | # | Reply

        correct, it should be octopodes

    • Karretch
      July 6, 2021, 3:01 am | # | Reply

      Octopus comes from Greek, doesnt use the Latin suffix.

    • Bear
      July 6, 2021, 3:45 am | # | Reply

      The correct term, according to Latin grammar (and according to a few pedants in English grammar) would be ‘octopodes.’ Note that last ‘e’ is not silent as it would be in the standard English phonology for a word spelled this way.

      ‘Octopuses’ (pluralization as though it were normalized in English), ‘octopi’ (pluralization originally based on an erroneous guess about what the Latin plural would be) and ‘octopodes’ (pluralization according to actual Latin grammar) are all recognized as correct, because what the Hell, this is English we’re talking about. As we’re concerned people using a particular construction MAKES it correct.

      • Frank
        July 6, 2021, 5:24 pm | # | Reply

        You can’t have “inflamable” without “flamable”

      • Venator Animarum
        July 6, 2021, 6:18 pm | # | Reply

        Although an octopode would be anything with 8 legs (or feet technically), not limited to the octopus. Heck, a spider is technically an octopode. Octopuses just sounds wrong to me

        • Rimwolf
          July 6, 2021, 7:56 pm | # | Reply

          The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says: “Standard pl. in English is octopuses, although the Greek pl. octopodes is still occas. used. The Latinate form octopi is incorrect.”

    • Bruceski
      July 6, 2021, 3:47 am | # | Reply

      Hexidecapus

      • awgiedawgie
        July 6, 2021, 5:29 pm | # | Reply

        Sorry, but the first time I read that, it was hexi-decap-us, and my brain translated it as “a creature with six heads cut off”.

        But seriously, wouldn’t that be a creature with 16 appendages? And shouldn’t it be spelled “hexadecipus”? Someone actually made one on Deviantart.

        • Rimwolf
          July 6, 2021, 8:13 pm | # | Reply

          Octopus from Greek “oktōpous” (“oktō” 8, “pous” foot), via a modern Latin respelling.
          16 in Greek in “dekahexi”, so it would presumably be “decahexipus”.

          • Wallraven
            July 6, 2021, 9:07 pm | #

            In English, we call the base-16 numbering system “hexadecimal”.
            So, it depends if you are basing it off the original Greek, or off prior English appropriations of Greek.

  6. Daibhid C
    July 6, 2021, 7:27 am | # | Reply

    Pavane first refered to coming from Lovetron in “Mixed-Up Files” and reiterated it in “Figgs and Phantoms”. I think this is the first time Gavotte has confirmed it though, and we … trust Gavotte slightly more than Pavane, possibly.

    • skullthetroll
      July 6, 2021, 9:38 am | # | Reply

      She sort of confirmed it when the escaped from the extirpation. She said that Pavane wanted to go back to Lovetron.

      • Daibhid C
        July 7, 2021, 5:30 am | # | Reply

        That’s right, for some reason I misremembered that it had been Pavane in that storyline.

  7. Robert Nowall
    July 6, 2021, 8:21 am | # | Reply

    Ever notice how alien species come to Earth looking for intelligent life, but never seem impressed by humans? Even though they’re not much of an improvement on the idea…

    • BMunro
      July 6, 2021, 9:00 am | # | Reply

      OTOH, there are also a lot of stories with the theme “humans win because aliens are dumb” – it kinda balances out.

      • Lady E
        July 6, 2021, 12:32 pm | # | Reply

        I am rather pleased by the online stories where the humans win because we evolved on a death planet.

        • CFsoftie
          July 6, 2021, 7:42 pm | # | Reply

          If you can survive Australia (harmless animals: Some of the Sheep), then you can survive anywhere!

        • Frank
          July 7, 2021, 2:35 pm | # | Reply

          That’s the OG alien invasion story: The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. I know the movies don’t make it very clear

  8. s854
    July 6, 2021, 9:09 am | # | Reply

    Dolphins wouldn’t work because the bees would have been waiting around for ages for one to turn up. While that field doesn’t look like the most promising place to find an octopus, they were around somewhere.

    • Shadowmehr
      July 6, 2021, 8:56 pm | # | Reply

      Plus, they’re just mucking about having a good time, they wouldn’t care about trade talks and cultural exchanges with the bees. Plus, the bee colonies couldn’t surf or eat fish, so how much could they talk about anyway?

    • awgiedawgie
      July 6, 2021, 9:13 pm | # | Reply

      Given Gavotte’s remark about “a lot of wet one-sided conversations”, it sounds like they didn’t find any octopuses at all.

      • mechageist
        July 6, 2021, 11:15 pm | # | Reply

        Octopodes are asocial anyway (with one notable exception and that group is barely social), which probably explains the one-sided conversations. It’s tough to have a conversation with an aquatic creature that has no interest in socializing. At least humans are gregarious. (Inasmuch as humans have members named Greg.)

  9. Sheik
    July 6, 2021, 10:56 am | # | Reply

    Their patience is astounding.
    I guess they just waited around on this planet until a sapient species _did_ emerge. Apparently none of the dinosaurs were ever in contention and they had to wait for Nature to “shake the box” and allow the mammalian horde to come up with something.
    We already know of several related hominids that didn’t make the grade, and it is by no means assured that we aren’t next.

    • David B Huber
      July 6, 2021, 3:19 pm | # | Reply

      Everyone’s patience has limits. After another 150 million years the end of the dinosaurs was triggered by impact events. A simple thing to arrange…

      • David B Huber
        July 6, 2021, 3:21 pm | # | Reply

        I meant 45 million years (hasty counting the wrong way!) 😉

  10. jdreyfuss
    July 6, 2021, 11:10 am | # | Reply

    I’m gonna call “harsh but fair” on both octopuses rejecting the bees and the bees considering humans a last resort for intelligent life to study.

    • Lady E
      July 6, 2021, 12:34 pm | # | Reply

      In fairness, the octopodes are an intelligent bunch. We are lucky they have a short lifespan.

  11. Pygar
    July 6, 2021, 3:30 pm | # | Reply

    I swear I saw a bunch of them on the Net somewhere; but the story I loved most, involved aliens mistaking a joking reverence for MacGyver for genuine worship… their engine fried on the way home, and they invoked MacGyver, and lo, they were inspired to make an “impossible” repair successfully!

  12. Pygar
    July 6, 2021, 3:31 pm | # | Reply

    Lady E, that was for your reply…

  13. Frank
    July 6, 2021, 5:25 pm | # | Reply

    Waiiit, if all bees came from planet lovetron, why do we only know of two hives that can talk?

    • awgiedawgie
      July 6, 2021, 5:34 pm | # | Reply

      Blame it on reality blindness. Or maybe it’s only these two that have chosen to communicate with us.

  14. Robert Nowall
    July 6, 2021, 5:54 pm | # | Reply

    The bees came to study the Earth. But intelligence, there was a dearth. They tried calamari but that was too far-y. Then humans, for what it was worth.

    • CFsoftie
      July 6, 2021, 7:44 pm | # | Reply

      Bravo!

  15. D. Walker
    July 7, 2021, 8:26 am | # | Reply

    Tsk, tsk, Sweetheart – 100 million years is way, way, way, way too early for humanity. An elementary knowledge of prehistory would have told you that.

    Heck, it’s at least 99 million years too early for Neanderthals! In fact, it’s 90 million years before the earliest great ape ancestors existed! And it even predates the earliest primates by anywhere from 15 to 33 million years!

    Meanwhile, the earliest known octopus dates to almost 300 million years ago, so a mere 100 million years ago is well into their evolutionary cycle.

    • D. Walker
      July 7, 2021, 8:30 am | # | Reply

      Correction – the earliest hominids were “slightly” older than I remembered, meaning 100 million years ago was “only” 82 million years too early, rather than 90.

      • BRGR
        July 11, 2021, 4:42 am | # | Reply

        Hominids are overrated. Any species that can build computers should be considered a potential precursor to true intelligence. And a lot can happen and be buried in a hundred million years, including the deliberate causes of major and minor extinction events.

  16. Knuckles
    February 18, 2022, 7:56 am | # | Reply

    Naturally a species that communicates entirely by dancing would be from a planet called Lovetron.

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