2017-06-03
Shaenon: This storyline was co-written with David Blake, who pledged at the Arbiter of Reality level of our last Kickstarter and thus gained the privilege of doing Jeff’s job. Thank you, David!
Skin Horse
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
I’d hate to think of some of the vapors that should *NOT* be sapient.
What you’d really hate is for them to think of you.
“Chemical test for ghosts?” No, but there is a test for sapient vapors.
I bet Unity would be killing it on Girl Scout cookies sales.
Are they made from real Girl Scouts?
Only if she uses her own recipe. The standard fare is more benign.
Sapience is interesting, but in isolation wouldn’t amount to much.
The vapor also somehow manages to remain cohesive instead of being dispersed by air currents. Probably the same mechanism is also how it manages to speak (vibrating the air) and to animate corpses (manipulate them like puppets from the inside). Without this ability, a merely sapient vapor would disperse, and presumably stop being sapient in the process.
Hm, since it’s not a “real” ghost – do such actually exist in the Skin Horse universe? I was wrong – how it reads remains open to question. I suppose I’ll just chant “mad science” until the urge to figure it out passes.
We’ve seen Remy channeling the spirit of Venus’ ex-husband, so I would go with a wary “maybe” at this point. There’s mad science, and then there’s outright weird.
Ghosts definitely existed in Narbonic, although ISTR Shaenon has apologised for that, so I don’t know if she’s quietly retconned them.
Why would she change her mind on having ghosts? Narbonic also contains literal angels and demons, with one character transforming from a stereotypical pimply nerd into a demon-slaying badass after he has to fight his way out of hell.
I think the fact there is a test presumes the existence of real ghosts.
Depends how you define ‘ghost’. Clarke’s Third Law remains in effect.
Well, the Mad Science corollary, anyway.
Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Mad Science corollary: Mad technology is _usually_ indistinguishable from magic regardless of it’s level of development. (See, clockpunk)
I was messing around with the random character generation tables in the old TSR Marvel Superheroes game a while back, and produced a sapient hallucinogenic gas. Who was a lawyer.
John: Gamma World could produce some wierdies too. One of my “random encounters” was (iirc) a two-mile high tree that psychically controlled more mobile trees to defend its territory.
Bruce A. Munro: The previous strip, Narbonic makes it clear that “real” ghosts do exist in this world, it’s just they’re not necessarily the weirdest thing in the room.
Sapient fluid that can animate dead tissue? Unity has a brother!
Or at least a distant cousin. We know who Unity’s parent is but since she is supposedly not really “Mad” others of Unity’s type could exist, and perhaps not just modern versions.
what would mad pseudoscience look like?
Visit the comments page of any Youtube page about the Apollo program, and see. Apollo deniers, flat-Earthers, outer space deniers, Oswald deniers, chemtrail faithers, 9/11 terrorism deniers… they all show up.
My wife is an astronomer, and among the many things she does, she manages a lunar laser ranging program where she shoots a laser through the observatory’s 3.5 meter telescope and bounces it off five retroreflectors on the moon. I took a video editing class and made a 10 minute video about it. It’s absolutely staggering the number of people who deny things like this. One person said that because I made a joke about the Flying Spaghetti Monster that it meant that the entire video was fake. He completely missed my comment about Marv Newland and the short Bambi Meets Godzilla.
My video, Shoot The Moon, is at my photography web site, which is linked through my avatar. (theoretically)
OK, it was linked through my user name, Cloudster, not the icon, and I shouldn’t have listed it as https, my bad. Anyway, it’s at http://waynewestphotography.com.
That was an interesting watch. I was familiar with the existence of the lunar retroreflectors, but had never given any thought to what the point of bouncing laser beams off them was. Shooting lasers at the moon is just one of those things scientists do, I thought. But of course it would be rangefinding, I don’t know why that never occurred to me.
It sounds like this man has just become … vaporware
His memories are on cloud storage
Unity only wears them ’cause Sweetheart hasn’t got clothes to pin them on.
“Unity, we need to talk about your flair…”
Skin Horse needs help!! They shouldn’t be part of Anasigma, where truth obfuscation is a goal. Why are they there, really? And how they get back to where they belong? ?????
Maybe a rooftop concert…
Moustachio might have some pretty cool music on 8-track…
Sadly, the true answer to that question has been, well, obfuscated.
Hey, Shaenon?! Such buttons might be popular merchandise… maybe one realistic version, one hand drawn?
Chemical, alchemical, what’s the diff?
Of course there’s a chemical test for ghosts: if you have chemicals, you’re not a ghost.
Yes, and apparently it requires skin but not eye protection.