Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2013-04-17
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2013-04-17

by shaenon on April 17, 2013 at 12:00 am
Chapter: My House Is Me
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Discussion (24) ¬

  1. WuseMajor
    April 17, 2013, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    …I wonder if the robots will live up to Nick’s expectations/memories.

  2. Dave
    April 17, 2013, 1:01 am | # | Reply

    Does sapient mean the same thing as sentient? I don’t think it does? Unless I am missing something or the word choice flew over my head.

    • Huttj509
      April 17, 2013, 1:19 am | # | Reply

      No, though they are OFTEN confused. Sentience refers to awareness of surroundings, while sapience refers to abstract thought. The dividing line can be very thin and blurred (are apes sapient?), but most/all animals are sentient, while very few seem to be sapient.

    • Dave Van Domelen
      April 17, 2013, 1:35 am | # | Reply

      Sentience is literally the ability to sense. On an ethical level, it’s usually equated with the ability to feel pain…so you need to be more careful with how you treat sentient beings, since they can suffer. Plants are able to react to their environment, but are generally not thought to feel pain in an ethically relevant way.

      Sapience (a la Homo sapiens) is more about ability to think. If a sentient is aware of the surroundings, a sapient/sophont is aware of themselves as existing separately from the environment.

      • Norman
        April 17, 2013, 2:46 am | # | Reply

        Many SF settings use sentience as D.V.D. just defined sapience. If there’s a good story to distract me from that mistake (or the opportunity for me to shoot a bunch of rakghouls in the ruins of Taris ^_^) , I’ll let it slide.

        Authors that use sapience when they mean sapience get bonus points with me.

      • Dranorter
        April 18, 2013, 3:39 pm | # | Reply

        To me, language is however it’s used. Knowing Latin and a little Greek means I think sentience = thinking, sapience = wisdom. (Sentio means to feel as well as to think or understand, but of course ‘sententia’ means a thought, opinion, or just plain sentence. Sapio is to taste or understand, but sapiens is ‘wise’.) But these are English words not Latin ones, and the widespread use of “sentience” to mean something like “self-aware” means that’s a real meaning of the word.

        Dictionaries were originally created for documenting the language as it stood, not as wellsprings of correctness.

    • Katrika
      April 17, 2013, 1:04 pm | # | Reply

      To be fair, a sentient animatron would also be very impressive. xD

    • SotiCoto
      August 21, 2014, 12:19 pm | # | Reply

      Sapience essentially equates to wisdom, an abstract concept often favoured by unintelligent numpties with delusions of superiority.

      In the contexts where the word “sapience” tends to be used, its requirements tend to be far less than the prerequisites for having “wisdom”… in so far as only experienced people get to be “wise”, but even small children tend to be identified as “sapient”.

      Obviously I realised long ago that treating it like a Boolean… that one either IS or ISN’T sapient… is absurd. It is just another imaginary step in a gradient without visible ends.

  3. Altarboy
    April 17, 2013, 2:38 am | # | Reply

    Twee. Heh, perfect.

    Gotta start using that.

  4. Dan
    April 17, 2013, 2:44 am | # | Reply

    You are actually all wrong! Sentient is when Treebeard does your errands.

    • alurker
      April 17, 2013, 4:15 am | # | Reply

      Do we have a pun jar in this forum? That, sir caused me pain. :p

    • Wayne Zombie
      April 17, 2013, 11:33 am | # | Reply

      +1 to you, sirrah!

  5. Eddurd
    April 17, 2013, 6:45 am | # | Reply

    (TUNE: “Magic Carpet Ride”, Steppenwolf)

    Don’t want to go … no, no,
    But my boss says, “Make it so!”
    Gotta see Collodi’s sapient bots,
    Ties my stomach up in knots!
    So stark … so dark,
    Old run-down amusement park!

     [CHORUS:]
      Well, we don’t know what dangers hide!
      Why do we go to Illinois, to an old amusement ride?
      It’s disturbing, it’s so twee!
      We’re gonna go unwillingly,
      All except for Unity!
       Hear her sing now,
       Like a spring, now,
       See her bouncing up and down!

    See, WhimsyCorp all started here,
    The park that held the Little House …
    What made Collodi disappear?
    Some rumors say it was a big-eared mouse!
    No scream, no shout,
    Disney’s hit squad took him out!
     [repeat CHORUS]

  6. jdreyfuss
    April 17, 2013, 7:08 am | # | Reply

    It’s true. There truly is nothing creepier than a run-down amusement park ride with an earworm of a kids’ song. Cf. “Freddy’s Song.”

  7. maarvarq
    April 17, 2013, 9:13 am | # | Reply

    Ah, now the significance of the name “Collodi” becomes clearer.

    • jdreyfuss
      April 17, 2013, 9:21 am | # | Reply

      I don’t get it. What’s the significance?

    • Dewy
      April 17, 2013, 9:51 am | # | Reply

      As in the baby, the photo technique or the medical application?

      • matteo
        April 17, 2013, 11:08 am | # | Reply

        As in, the writer who gave us Pinocchio – a sapient construct. (I presume.)

  8. Wayne Zombie
    April 17, 2013, 11:34 am | # | Reply

    Speaking of run-down amusement parks, I watched Mystery Men again last night, it’s been quite a while since I last saw it. Coincidence?

  9. Shadowmehr
    April 17, 2013, 6:58 pm | # | Reply

    Anyone else see the appropriateness of a trained psychologist calling an action “crazy”?

    • Pseudowolf
      April 17, 2013, 9:20 pm | # | Reply

      In the same vein, a man who uses therapy puppets does not get to make accusations of “twee”

      • JET73L
        March 1, 2015, 8:16 pm | # | Reply

        There’s a HUGE difference between “insipid” and “twee”! Tip just doesn’t have the judgement to be allowed to make that distinction ^_^

  10. David McKenney-Barschall
    April 18, 2013, 12:33 am | # | Reply

    I just noticed that the font in the window looks a lot like GODOT’s text

    • awgiedawgie
      December 29, 2019, 8:28 pm | # | Reply

      That’s quite coincidental, I’m sure. The name of the coffee shop is “Ground Control”.

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