Eddie, Kyle — move closer to the camera, please, so we can resolve your features. It’s harder to kill a character with a name and a face. Steve, why don’t you pull your phone out of your pocket and show everybody the pictures of your three month old daughter?
In the URL story, there is this line: “The shelter had a mascot, a tortoiseshell cat named Cinnamon, who patrolled the halls and usually stopped to lick herself in an indelicate area right in front of Sweetheart’s Plexiglass.”
It’s kind of messed up, since tortoiseshell cats are almost always female, while orange tabbies are almost always male. But I suppose a creation of mad science can be whatever color its creator wants.
Tortie males are only possible because of genetic anomalies. Female cats can be orange in just the same way they can be black, only there’s less orange genes floating around in the populace and she needs two of ’em because it’s an X-linked trait.
Apparently, if you cloned a tortoiseshell cat, the fur pattern would not be the same as the original because there’s a large element of chance involved. If Cinnamon was a tortie here, we could have a whole elaborate Epileptic Tree about how she is being cloned and replaced /after each and every panel/.
She’s genetically enhanced, so we can just say that she can change the colour and pattern of her fur at will. It’s a very effective camouflage technique.
Unless I’m misremembering, Artie has NEVER shown any indication of identifying as even remotely human. He sees (and experiences) all of humanity’s flaws (and the occasional virtue) from an outside perspective, despite being able to transform into one because his genes have been spliced in arcane ways.
He has a certain fondness for the ground apes, but he knows he’s not one of them.
…ya know, he’s basically Spock. Even being half-human, he’s still firmly Vulcan.
Okay, since most humans are experiencing reality blindness, what do the people of Berkley think they are seeing if they aren’t seeing soldiers in the streets? Cause they would not be okay with military check points. And can’t be a police checkpoint because then what would police see?
Jurisdictional rivals. There are probably a half dozen courts cases being spun up over the idea that “those other guys” (other cops, the military, whoever) moved in and set up shop illegally. (And that’s assuming they see soldiers at all!)
Remember, these aren’t normal soldiers, they’re pseudo mad-science soldiers. They wear outfits that look like something out of a B-movie, they talk and act like something out of a B-movie, and they carry literal laser guns.
People probably just see a bunch of weirdo cosplayers.
Well, we don’t quite have military check points yet IRL in the U.S., but many cities do have or have recently experienced rather overt suppression of their First Amendment rights by police and/or the National Guard, and no, most are not OK with it, but seem to have little power to stop it. When troops (or police) are rolling in with tanks and wearing body armor, even if they are only carrying various crowd control weapons, there is not much the average person can do to oppose them. What are they going to do, yell at them? That’s likely to result in getting tear-gassed or pepper-balled, if they’re lucky, also possibly arrested, and that’s assuming the soldiers or police are not carrying lethal weaponry (that they intend to use).
Based on recent law-enforcement patterns, checkpoints may not be far behind, and the local citizens, or even a city or state government, may not be able to prevent it. So, within the context of the comic, things have reached a point now that, even if most people were not experiencing reality blindness, they wouldn’t be able to do much about Anasigma troops anyway, at least not in the short term. They may think these are National Guard troops, or perhaps the Army, and, even if they are not OK with the situation, it takes organization and resources to oppose a superior force. I’m pretty sure if the residents of Berkely (and likely other cities), have noticed anything unusual, they will have been taken by surprise by armed troops suddenly showing up and enforcing checkpoints.
Mr. Green has clearly been preparing for this moment for a very long time, and was prepared to act quickly once the general populace had been “nerfed”, so to speak.
Oh hey, we found the Fascist Bootlicker who argues that there’s no such thing as police brutality or excessive use of force, because bad things magically only happen to bad people, so if the cops are beating peoples skulls in or putting children in cages, it’s must be that those people are -criminals- and therefor deserve anything that happens to them, up to and including extrajudicial killings!
You can’t deal with the facts I presented, so you get insulting. The uncooperative ones do risk what you complain of- but they seem to be volunteering for it in droves. Meanwhile the peaceful non-resistors seem to be doing just fine.
Where would YOU put the babies? Just leave them in the desert, or where just anyone can walk in and grab one?
Respect for law and order is not “bootlicking” And you seem unfamiliar with the word “fascist”.
How many times does Shaenon have to tell you not to discuss such bilge in the comments here? You wanna discuss that stuff, go over to Dilbert. That’s pretty much all that goes on in the comments over there.
…That just made me come up with an interesting theory about the reality blindness. Maybe the general populace doesn’t actually replace any of the weirdness, but instead filters bits of it out until it makes sense. For example, say there’s a little goblin thing running around knocking over trash cans that happens to have some canine DNA (or just looks like a dog, whatever), so anyone looking at it filters out all the non-dog bits and fills in the blanks. Even if it happened to also resemble a lizard, people would still filter that out because a dog would make more sense contextually. If the weirdness doesn’t resemble anything that would remotely make sense, then the whole thing gets filtered out.
In keeping, people can still see Sweetheart even though she’s technically a monster, but they just filter out the voice and some of the behavior that they don’t expect.
Going back to the checkpoint, maybe the guns and uniforms are filtered out and- hey presto! They’re certified public accountants. I’m pretty much just spitballing here though.
Well, you’ve pretty much described exactly how we’ve already witnessed the reality blindness working. Except for your follow-up comment.
People see H.T. as an ordinary tiger when he looks like an ordinary tiger. They can filter out the talking. But if he covers up enough of himself with ridiculousness, they don’t see him at all, because their mind can’t resolve a talking tiger in a clown costume.
At the checkpoint, those are reasonably normal-looking soldiers. So people won’t see them as CPAs. They will still see them as reasonably normal-looking soldiers. Most people would assume they were on maneuvers of some kind, performing occasional animal control duty.
I was under the impression we were thinking of it more as a replacement then a filter. As a contrast, a pteredactyl (for example) could easily be replaced by a helicopter based solely on context, even though they don’t resemble each other very much. Under my theory the hypothetical pteredactyl would either have bits filtered until the observer gets a large bird or something, or it wouldn’t get seen at all.
I think Artie may be mainly concerned with his current lack of ability to alert others in his network to the situation. He does truly care about other sapients, and some of the other non-human sapients may have more trouble slipping past a checkpoint than a cat and a gerbil.
It is. There have been multiple adorable drawings of Artie the last few days, but that may, indeed, be the best yet.
And I see Artie may have gotten Cinnamon’s attention over the “pocket gap” situation. I understand how they feel. Most women’s clothes don’t have pockets, either (or not good ones, if they have them at all. And not all of us can wear mens’ clothes.)
Useful pockets are a surprisingly recent innovation. My friends who do military re-enacting often lament the lack of pockets in 18th and early 19th Century (mens’) clothing. Hence the ubiquitous haversacks; they are a place to carry one’s car keys, phone, reading glasses, etc.
Meanwhile, women in the 18th and (very) early 19th century did have pockets – pockets the size of small handbags, tied at the waist as a separate garment and accessed through slits in the skirts. (Those ginormous hip pads from the late 1700s could also double as pockets.)
It’s not about how recent it is, it’s about whether fashion overrides practicality. Same reason we don’t wear fanny packs, despite their convenience.
Women (and even some men) in the 20th century also had similar pockets, tied at the waist, but worn outside the other clothing. They were called “aprons”.
I beg to differ with you. Some men’s 18th century clothes had pockets. They are just hard to notice because the vest pockets were hidden by the coat. The coat had pockets but because men were fashion victims, the pockets were moved toward the back and had vertical slit openings. Even some 18th century men’s trousers had pockets, hidden behind the front flap.
Next time, recruit marsupials.
You almost made me accidentally inhale my beverage with that comment, sir. Well-done!
So. Tony and Mercutio?
Sasha: There may be pockets in the suits Tip had made for them, I suppose. Robert was probably thinking of someone like Mrs Opossum, though.
I started to write “kangaroos” but thought more generality was called for.
Star Trek still hasn’t learned how to replicate pockets, so don’t feel too bad.
Pockets would distract from the girdle lines . . .
Eddie, Kyle — move closer to the camera, please, so we can resolve your features. It’s harder to kill a character with a name and a face. Steve, why don’t you pull your phone out of your pocket and show everybody the pictures of your three month old daughter?
And here – for all the time he spends in human skin among humans – we see Artie self-identifying as his native species.
Perhaps Cinnamon can distract the checkpoint operatives by putting on her most ingratiating airs while Artie sneaks into a pocket to borrow a phone?
Did we ever discuss whether Cinnamon was a guy or a girl? I thought “guy,” mostly ’cause of the thick bull neck…but that’s hardly an absolute guide.
In the URL story, there is this line: “The shelter had a mascot, a tortoiseshell cat named Cinnamon, who patrolled the halls and usually stopped to lick herself in an indelicate area right in front of Sweetheart’s Plexiglass.”
…but -this- cinnamon isn’t a tortoiseshell. It’s clearly an orange tabby.
It must the from the mirror universe where Tip was a woman.
Maybe a tortoiseshell cat was too hard to draw.
It’s kind of messed up, since tortoiseshell cats are almost always female, while orange tabbies are almost always male. But I suppose a creation of mad science can be whatever color its creator wants.
I know Kleinfelter’s syndrome (XXy) is the genetic exception that allows for male tortoiseshell cats. What’s the one for female orange tabbies?
“Maybe a tortoiseshell cat was too hard to draw.”
This is the sad truth. It’s just easier to keep an orange cat consistent from panel to panel.
Tortie males are only possible because of genetic anomalies. Female cats can be orange in just the same way they can be black, only there’s less orange genes floating around in the populace and she needs two of ’em because it’s an X-linked trait.
Apparently, if you cloned a tortoiseshell cat, the fur pattern would not be the same as the original because there’s a large element of chance involved. If Cinnamon was a tortie here, we could have a whole elaborate Epileptic Tree about how she is being cloned and replaced /after each and every panel/.
She’s genetically enhanced, so we can just say that she can change the colour and pattern of her fur at will. It’s a very effective camouflage technique.
A dash of chameleon thrown in for good measure… :p
Unless I’m misremembering, Artie has NEVER shown any indication of identifying as even remotely human. He sees (and experiences) all of humanity’s flaws (and the occasional virtue) from an outside perspective, despite being able to transform into one because his genes have been spliced in arcane ways.
He has a certain fondness for the ground apes, but he knows he’s not one of them.
…ya know, he’s basically Spock. Even being half-human, he’s still firmly Vulcan.
That’s a very good analogy, D. Walker.
It works on multiple levels, even! He’s also super intelligent and hot!
Indeed!
Maybe the reason Artie spends so much time in human form is because mens’ clothes generally tend to have good pockets.
Well, that and his interesting obsession with Hispanic human males.
Good point. Probably hard to get dates with Hispanic human males when you literally look like a gerbil.
It would limit the pool of candidates somewhat, yes.
Okay, since most humans are experiencing reality blindness, what do the people of Berkley think they are seeing if they aren’t seeing soldiers in the streets? Cause they would not be okay with military check points. And can’t be a police checkpoint because then what would police see?
Jurisdictional rivals. There are probably a half dozen courts cases being spun up over the idea that “those other guys” (other cops, the military, whoever) moved in and set up shop illegally. (And that’s assuming they see soldiers at all!)
Remember, these aren’t normal soldiers, they’re pseudo mad-science soldiers. They wear outfits that look like something out of a B-movie, they talk and act like something out of a B-movie, and they carry literal laser guns.
People probably just see a bunch of weirdo cosplayers.
Well, we don’t quite have military check points yet IRL in the U.S., but many cities do have or have recently experienced rather overt suppression of their First Amendment rights by police and/or the National Guard, and no, most are not OK with it, but seem to have little power to stop it. When troops (or police) are rolling in with tanks and wearing body armor, even if they are only carrying various crowd control weapons, there is not much the average person can do to oppose them. What are they going to do, yell at them? That’s likely to result in getting tear-gassed or pepper-balled, if they’re lucky, also possibly arrested, and that’s assuming the soldiers or police are not carrying lethal weaponry (that they intend to use).
Based on recent law-enforcement patterns, checkpoints may not be far behind, and the local citizens, or even a city or state government, may not be able to prevent it. So, within the context of the comic, things have reached a point now that, even if most people were not experiencing reality blindness, they wouldn’t be able to do much about Anasigma troops anyway, at least not in the short term. They may think these are National Guard troops, or perhaps the Army, and, even if they are not OK with the situation, it takes organization and resources to oppose a superior force. I’m pretty sure if the residents of Berkely (and likely other cities), have noticed anything unusual, they will have been taken by surprise by armed troops suddenly showing up and enforcing checkpoints.
Mr. Green has clearly been preparing for this moment for a very long time, and was prepared to act quickly once the general populace had been “nerfed”, so to speak.
They see Covid-19 enforcement teams.
Duh!
…in America? Fat chance!
Much more likely would be anonymous federal agents sent out in response to protests against racially motivated police brutality.
… to which law-abiding people who don’t resist arrest, seem oddly immune… almost as though it was behavior, not race, being the determining factor…
Oh hey, we found the Fascist Bootlicker who argues that there’s no such thing as police brutality or excessive use of force, because bad things magically only happen to bad people, so if the cops are beating peoples skulls in or putting children in cages, it’s must be that those people are -criminals- and therefor deserve anything that happens to them, up to and including extrajudicial killings!
You can’t deal with the facts I presented, so you get insulting. The uncooperative ones do risk what you complain of- but they seem to be volunteering for it in droves. Meanwhile the peaceful non-resistors seem to be doing just fine.
Where would YOU put the babies? Just leave them in the desert, or where just anyone can walk in and grab one?
Respect for law and order is not “bootlicking” And you seem unfamiliar with the word “fascist”.
Knock it off, you dolts.
How many times does Shaenon have to tell you not to discuss such bilge in the comments here? You wanna discuss that stuff, go over to Dilbert. That’s pretty much all that goes on in the comments over there.
Okay, sorry to come here late, but everybody please chill out and/or take it elsewhere.
…That just made me come up with an interesting theory about the reality blindness. Maybe the general populace doesn’t actually replace any of the weirdness, but instead filters bits of it out until it makes sense. For example, say there’s a little goblin thing running around knocking over trash cans that happens to have some canine DNA (or just looks like a dog, whatever), so anyone looking at it filters out all the non-dog bits and fills in the blanks. Even if it happened to also resemble a lizard, people would still filter that out because a dog would make more sense contextually. If the weirdness doesn’t resemble anything that would remotely make sense, then the whole thing gets filtered out.
In keeping, people can still see Sweetheart even though she’s technically a monster, but they just filter out the voice and some of the behavior that they don’t expect.
Going back to the checkpoint, maybe the guns and uniforms are filtered out and- hey presto! They’re certified public accountants. I’m pretty much just spitballing here though.
Well, you’ve pretty much described exactly how we’ve already witnessed the reality blindness working. Except for your follow-up comment.
People see H.T. as an ordinary tiger when he looks like an ordinary tiger. They can filter out the talking. But if he covers up enough of himself with ridiculousness, they don’t see him at all, because their mind can’t resolve a talking tiger in a clown costume.
At the checkpoint, those are reasonably normal-looking soldiers. So people won’t see them as CPAs. They will still see them as reasonably normal-looking soldiers. Most people would assume they were on maneuvers of some kind, performing occasional animal control duty.
I was under the impression we were thinking of it more as a replacement then a filter. As a contrast, a pteredactyl (for example) could easily be replaced by a helicopter based solely on context, even though they don’t resemble each other very much. Under my theory the hypothetical pteredactyl would either have bits filtered until the observer gets a large bird or something, or it wouldn’t get seen at all.
I’d have to go hunting for it, but it was established a long time ago that reality blindness is indeed a filter.
UFO occupants commonly mask their identity, often as owls or deer, but sometimes as sewer maintenance crews in urban areas.
Of course, the difference between camouflage and reality blindness is the point of origin.
I’m wondering why the checkpoint is a problem.
Goon #1: Hey, look. There’s something you don’t see everyday: A mouse riding a cat.
Goon #2: Eh, they probably have a Youtube channel.
Goon #3: Don’t be distracted. We’re looking for a tall black man with long dreadlocks. We don’t have time for cute animals.
(Does anyone think Echo Bravo would be competent enough to report that the tall black man turned into a gerbil?)
Does anyone think that these soldiers would be competent enough to actually read such a report anyway?
I think Artie may be mainly concerned with his current lack of ability to alert others in his network to the situation. He does truly care about other sapients, and some of the other non-human sapients may have more trouble slipping past a checkpoint than a cat and a gerbil.
That last panel is definitely one of the cutest images of Artie ever.
It is. There have been multiple adorable drawings of Artie the last few days, but that may, indeed, be the best yet.
And I see Artie may have gotten Cinnamon’s attention over the “pocket gap” situation. I understand how they feel. Most women’s clothes don’t have pockets, either (or not good ones, if they have them at all. And not all of us can wear mens’ clothes.)
Useful pockets are a surprisingly recent innovation. My friends who do military re-enacting often lament the lack of pockets in 18th and early 19th Century (mens’) clothing. Hence the ubiquitous haversacks; they are a place to carry one’s car keys, phone, reading glasses, etc.
Meanwhile, women in the 18th and (very) early 19th century did have pockets – pockets the size of small handbags, tied at the waist as a separate garment and accessed through slits in the skirts. (Those ginormous hip pads from the late 1700s could also double as pockets.)
It’s not about how recent it is, it’s about whether fashion overrides practicality. Same reason we don’t wear fanny packs, despite their convenience.
Women (and even some men) in the 20th century also had similar pockets, tied at the waist, but worn outside the other clothing. They were called “aprons”.
I beg to differ with you. Some men’s 18th century clothes had pockets. They are just hard to notice because the vest pockets were hidden by the coat. The coat had pockets but because men were fashion victims, the pockets were moved toward the back and had vertical slit openings. Even some 18th century men’s trousers had pockets, hidden behind the front flap.
At least they don’t have to worry about the mineshaft gap.
One of the downsides of being able to pass for regular animals, I guess.
Maybe one of their members is an Opossum?