OK, the probability that this is real has just dropped 99.9 percentile points and only remains on the board at all because that seems like the sort of madness a place like St. Charlie might indulge in. @_@
Maybe soft boundaries. You can go anywhere, but you cannot afford to go anywhere. Your destination is limited only by your imagination and determination. Impossible is not a word in Melanie’s dictionary! That is why she cannot describe her predicament.
So extripation is endless petty frustration? You’ll either never get enough tickets, you get enough but then lose them, you get them only to miss the bus…and the sand is always getting into uncomfortable places.
No, the water is cold… as in frozen. And the bottles have that little sippy lid that you can’t screw off, so even when it starts to thaw out, you still can’t drink it because you can’t squeeze the bottle with the ice in it. And when you finally can drink it, it’s so cold that it sends your body into shock and you pass out. Then, by the time you wake up, the rest of the water has thawed, and it’s all leaked out into the sand while you were out.
(As an aside, this is exactly why I keep my Gatorade bottles in the garage instead of the refrigerator. When you’re body is all hot and sweaty, it really is quite a shock to drink something that is only 35°F. But when the beverage is at room temperature, you don’t have the problem of shock, so you can drink more of it faster, and you more quickly rehydrate and replace your lost electrolytes. And even at 70-75°F, it’s still 25-30° lower than your body temperature, so it still helps cool you down.)
As good a definition of perdition as I’ve ever heard. A good way to break them down too, depending on how the sense of time operates in the simulation.
Was wonder if this was the Narbonic daughter, but it hasn’t been long enough for her to be a teenager yet, maybe not even born. Still wondering if this is Dave’s Island.
I seem to recall an arc in Narbonic where Artie was reaching the end of a normal gerbil lifespan and was depressed because he was convinced he was going to die any day?
And then both Mel and Helen pointed out that since he’s human now, he could have a normal human lifespan. None of them, however, took into account the possibility that when he changes between human and gerbil, he could very well revert to his original age at the time of his mutation, effectively making him immortal.
We know the comic doesn’t run entirely in real time, since some story arcs take months to complete, yet cover only a week or two of in-universe time. But I don’t know if it has ever been indicated anywhere what the in-universe time skip was between the end of Narbonic and the beginning of Skin Horse.
Outside of individual stories though, the comics do run in real time. Narbonic ended at the end of 2006, so by this point she can’t be older than eleven. And that’s assuming that Dave got pregnant immediately after making up with Helen.
This reminds me quite a bit of that VR sim into which Sweetheart was placed: one which operates off the fears and insecurities of the person into which it’s inserted.
These fears and insecurities might also include walnuts. It’s a surprisingly common concern.
Virginia, your skin tone is lighter than the blonde’s. You need a tan, and you need to learn to body surf. The waves are probably about the right size for that. Sure, it’s not brain surgery, but it can’t be too easy, because somehow most of the people you see trying it aren’t much good. It’ll be a change of pace, but you’ll get used to it in no time, or rather, over a very very long time. Have a waffle cone and think it over. Then do the same thing tomorrow.
Also, don’t aim for the upper left and right pockets. Too little reward for too high risk. Just keep plugging away at the center hole. That is, unless the ticket payoffs are seriously exponential. In this case I imagine you get a special golden ticket for a perfect score, and the ball starts taking funny bounces if you’re one shot away. Also, the skee-ball operator is somehow always watching when you want to take a short-cut, every single moment from open to close. Cheaters don’t win tiki heads.
Yeah corner pockets are too risky. My favorite trick was to bank the ball against the side railing about 80% of the way up as it seemed like coming into the center hole at an angle reduced the chance of it bouncing the wrong direction. Bouncing it off the side gives an angle that’s impossible to roll just straight. And then I’d adjust based on how the balls reacted to that mark similar to how arrows are used in bowling.
The challenge – undoubtedly by design – is that the scoring area is wider than the lane, so the corner holes can’t be hit with a perfectly straight shot. My trick to the corner holes was to start about one ball-width from the edge of the lane, and fire at the inside edge of the hole. The ball would jump fairly straight up, with just enough lateral motion to drop it right in the hole. The more of an angle you’re at makes the lateral motion of the jump more unpredictable. It’s possible to adjust for it, but you waste far too many balls in the process. When I was younger, I could hit any hole I wanted, every time. Then about 10 years ago, I broke my arm, and I never retrained my hand/eye coordination for that particular activity. Now I play Skee-Ball once a year (on my son’s birthday), if that, so I don’t get nearly enough practice to get good at it again.
So I didn’t think anything of it before, but now the usage of “Shut your gob” has me wondering… could this actually be some English seaside resort town, like Brighton?
It can’t be Blackpool, though, as you can’t see the tower. It’s not that prominent, but you can’t draw a picture of the seafront there without including it. I think there must be a law or something.
I’ve heard others say “shut your gob”, and I use it myself quite often, and I’ve never been to England. So that’s not really a good geographic indicator.
Yes, I know it’s used in British television. It’s also used by British agent Trelawney Thorpe in the comic Girl Genius. But it’s also used by a lot of non-Englanders.
Ah yes, I keep forgetting this strip’s produced by the Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (a movie that probably won’t make it into Shaenon’s “Horror Every Day” canon)…
The general shoddiness of this place, and the potential for a bus ride out of it, reminded me of Lewis’s “The Great Divorce,” which opens in a peculiarly British version of hell: drab, rainy, generally boring, a place where you can get anything you want as long as you don’t mind the terrible quality. A few pages in the protagonist encounters a bus that takes people on day-trips to heaven. And you thought centaurs and satyrs and a talking lion were weird…
OK, the probability that this is real has just dropped 99.9 percentile points and only remains on the board at all because that seems like the sort of madness a place like St. Charlie might indulge in. @_@
Between Tip, Ansigma’s HR policies, the voodoo and the notary monks, this is still well within the realm of possibility, even discounting Mad science.
The bus just goes to the other end of the beach, where the only game is Whak-a-Mole.
Maybe soft boundaries. You can go anywhere, but you cannot afford to go anywhere. Your destination is limited only by your imagination and determination. Impossible is not a word in Melanie’s dictionary! That is why she cannot describe her predicament.
Doesn’t Delaware have a lot of islands? I wonder what the ferry driver takes
Ok, so is this VR or just the place Anasigma ships its spare weird?
YES!
(what? you wanted an either/or response?)
As I grow older, I find that more and more either/or situations can by answered with “and”.
Go for the inflatable tiki head! It’s filled with see ball tickets!
I had an inflatable penguin once, it left me blowing a raspberry.
When you stop and think about it, that’s pretty impressive for a bird without lips, even if it was its final act here on Earth.
So extripation is endless petty frustration? You’ll either never get enough tickets, you get enough but then lose them, you get them only to miss the bus…and the sand is always getting into uncomfortable places.
Not sure how the walnuts fit in, though.
Well, you get hungry you get to eat candied and salted walnuts. In the hot sun. On the beach.
And the bottled water is Evian, and it isn’t cold. Not to mention the price!
the price is actually pretty good. Just five skee ball tickets.
No, the water is cold… as in frozen. And the bottles have that little sippy lid that you can’t screw off, so even when it starts to thaw out, you still can’t drink it because you can’t squeeze the bottle with the ice in it. And when you finally can drink it, it’s so cold that it sends your body into shock and you pass out. Then, by the time you wake up, the rest of the water has thawed, and it’s all leaked out into the sand while you were out.
(As an aside, this is exactly why I keep my Gatorade bottles in the garage instead of the refrigerator. When you’re body is all hot and sweaty, it really is quite a shock to drink something that is only 35°F. But when the beverage is at room temperature, you don’t have the problem of shock, so you can drink more of it faster, and you more quickly rehydrate and replace your lost electrolytes. And even at 70-75°F, it’s still 25-30° lower than your body temperature, so it still helps cool you down.)
Well, you know sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.
As good a definition of perdition as I’ve ever heard. A good way to break them down too, depending on how the sense of time operates in the simulation.
Was wonder if this was the Narbonic daughter, but it hasn’t been long enough for her to be a teenager yet, maybe not even born. Still wondering if this is Dave’s Island.
I think the comic runs in real time, so assuming Skin Horse and Narbonic timelines don’t overlap, Narbon III is… 10? 12?
Does Artie age?
I seem to recall an arc in Narbonic where Artie was reaching the end of a normal gerbil lifespan and was depressed because he was convinced he was going to die any day?
And then both Mel and Helen pointed out that since he’s human now, he could have a normal human lifespan. None of them, however, took into account the possibility that when he changes between human and gerbil, he could very well revert to his original age at the time of his mutation, effectively making him immortal.
It’s possible. We know that changing form doesn’t heal him like it does with some shapeshifters though.
We know the comic doesn’t run entirely in real time, since some story arcs take months to complete, yet cover only a week or two of in-universe time. But I don’t know if it has ever been indicated anywhere what the in-universe time skip was between the end of Narbonic and the beginning of Skin Horse.
Outside of individual stories though, the comics do run in real time. Narbonic ended at the end of 2006, so by this point she can’t be older than eleven. And that’s assuming that Dave got pregnant immediately after making up with Helen.
Dave and Helen’s daughter is named Rosalind.
Thank you for linking that. I knew I had seen it somewhere besides in a fanfic story, but I couldn’t remember where.
If this is actually a brain-in-jar retraining VR, what are they trying to train Melanie to operate? An artillery piece?
This reminds me quite a bit of that VR sim into which Sweetheart was placed: one which operates off the fears and insecurities of the person into which it’s inserted.
These fears and insecurities might also include walnuts. It’s a surprisingly common concern.
Couldn’t they just hitch-hike?
If this is made up of “evil” people, why hasn’t anyone just stolen the bus?
Well, the bus driver would be evil too. Admittedly, it could be hard to tell the difference, but would you want to take on an evil bus driver?
It’s getting hard to tell the difference here, especially after Ira.
Heck, if it’s VR, the driver could be a passenger-dominating Gorgoth.
( http://skin-horse.com/comic/2014-07-09/ )
What prevents people from just walking out? I’m pretty sure there is something but it’s not like the bus is only form of transportation possible.
Given the scenery, I’m guessing heat stroke.
It could be like that Twilight Zone episode where when you walk out of town, you just walk back into it from the other side.
I felt like I grew up in that town when I was a teenager…
Virginia, your skin tone is lighter than the blonde’s. You need a tan, and you need to learn to body surf. The waves are probably about the right size for that. Sure, it’s not brain surgery, but it can’t be too easy, because somehow most of the people you see trying it aren’t much good. It’ll be a change of pace, but you’ll get used to it in no time, or rather, over a very very long time. Have a waffle cone and think it over. Then do the same thing tomorrow.
Also, don’t aim for the upper left and right pockets. Too little reward for too high risk. Just keep plugging away at the center hole. That is, unless the ticket payoffs are seriously exponential. In this case I imagine you get a special golden ticket for a perfect score, and the ball starts taking funny bounces if you’re one shot away. Also, the skee-ball operator is somehow always watching when you want to take a short-cut, every single moment from open to close. Cheaters don’t win tiki heads.
Bleach?
Yeah corner pockets are too risky. My favorite trick was to bank the ball against the side railing about 80% of the way up as it seemed like coming into the center hole at an angle reduced the chance of it bouncing the wrong direction. Bouncing it off the side gives an angle that’s impossible to roll just straight. And then I’d adjust based on how the balls reacted to that mark similar to how arrows are used in bowling.
The challenge – undoubtedly by design – is that the scoring area is wider than the lane, so the corner holes can’t be hit with a perfectly straight shot. My trick to the corner holes was to start about one ball-width from the edge of the lane, and fire at the inside edge of the hole. The ball would jump fairly straight up, with just enough lateral motion to drop it right in the hole. The more of an angle you’re at makes the lateral motion of the jump more unpredictable. It’s possible to adjust for it, but you waste far too many balls in the process. When I was younger, I could hit any hole I wanted, every time. Then about 10 years ago, I broke my arm, and I never retrained my hand/eye coordination for that particular activity. Now I play Skee-Ball once a year (on my son’s birthday), if that, so I don’t get nearly enough practice to get good at it again.
Sensei!
So I didn’t think anything of it before, but now the usage of “Shut your gob” has me wondering… could this actually be some English seaside resort town, like Brighton?
Does Blackpool still have a zoo? If there is, is the lion named Wallace?
If he is, don’t poke him, even though he’s got no teeth.
Blackpool has a zoo. It has some elephants, apparently. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-lancashire-45426437/blackpool-zoo-elephant-pair-arrive-at-new-home.
It can’t be Blackpool, though, as you can’t see the tower. It’s not that prominent, but you can’t draw a picture of the seafront there without including it. I think there must be a law or something.
I’ve heard others say “shut your gob”, and I use it myself quite often, and I’ve never been to England. So that’s not really a good geographic indicator.
Yes, I think of it as old-time gangster or tough-guy talk in the US.
It features prominently in several Monty Python sketches.
Yes, I know it’s used in British television. It’s also used by British agent Trelawney Thorpe in the comic Girl Genius. But it’s also used by a lot of non-Englanders.
Hmm… all this talk about some form of hell and now a bus shows up… has Shaenon been reading C. S. Lewis?
There was something from Lewis back in the VR Whimsey World story, but I thought it was said it came from Jeff.
Ah yes, I keep forgetting this strip’s produced by the Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (a movie that probably won’t make it into Shaenon’s “Horror Every Day” canon)…
The general shoddiness of this place, and the potential for a bus ride out of it, reminded me of Lewis’s “The Great Divorce,” which opens in a peculiarly British version of hell: drab, rainy, generally boring, a place where you can get anything you want as long as you don’t mind the terrible quality. A few pages in the protagonist encounters a bus that takes people on day-trips to heaven. And you thought centaurs and satyrs and a talking lion were weird…