Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2019-03-14
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2019-03-14

by shaenon on March 14, 2019 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Green Noah
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Discussion (71) ¬

    • All His Fault – Mythusmage Today
      March 15, 2019, 2:29 am | #
  1. ngmatt
    March 14, 2019, 12:03 am | # | Reply

    guess it works on electronic vampires as well, does silver short him out too?

    • awgiedawgie
      March 14, 2019, 12:32 am | # | Reply

      Silver solder, at a sufficiently high temperature.

      • Shadowmehr
        March 14, 2019, 10:24 pm | # | Reply

        Silver ingot, also at a sufficiently high temperature and poured over him. Shorting out the electronics and sealing him away so some mad necromancer technician can’t revive him.

        • warpzone32
          March 14, 2019, 10:37 pm | # | Reply

          Silver bar, dropped from a height of like 30 or 40 feet.

          Less if that’s a concrete floor as opposed to dirt.

  2. Robert Nowall
    March 14, 2019, 12:03 am | # | Reply

    The lore eludes me. Why is this working?

    • Michael
      March 14, 2019, 12:18 am | # | Reply

      Traditionally vampires have OCD that forces them to count scattered grains of rice.

      • Towering Barbarian
        March 14, 2019, 12:22 am | # | Reply

        Japanese vampires that is. Don’t try this on Dracula. ^_^

        • Barrbara K
          March 14, 2019, 1:07 am | # | Reply

          …and Tamagotchi are Japanese!

        • evilmidnightlurker
          March 14, 2019, 1:42 am | # | Reply

          No, it’s also Romanian.

          • Chameon
            March 14, 2019, 2:08 am | #

            And Pratchett’s variant as well, although with them it’s only because they believe that’s the case, they run the scale gamut.

          • jdreyfuss
            February 4, 2020, 2:36 pm | #

            It’s one of the few traits that carries across virtually every vampire myth from every culture in the world. Some kind of collective unconscious thing.

      • Owlrageous
        March 14, 2019, 12:37 am | # | Reply

        Rice, seeds, salt, it’s usually something small.

        It’s also why the Sesame Street has the Count. Ah! Ah! Ah!

        • s854
          March 14, 2019, 2:55 pm | # | Reply

          Owlrageous: Thinking about it, it seems pretty cruel to have him live somewhere called “Sesame Street”.

          • The Occupant
            March 14, 2019, 6:14 pm | #

            It’s a rather seedy neighbourhood

        • wizard4169
          August 25, 2021, 8:08 am | # | Reply

          Another variation involves throwing a fishing net over a vampire. The vampire won’t be able to escape the net until they’ve counted every knot.

      • Gyrre
        March 14, 2019, 2:28 am | # | Reply

        Hence Sesame Street’s The Count.

      • The J is Silent
        March 14, 2019, 5:02 am | # | Reply

        Michael,
        Until the Vampires have been diagnosed by a medical professional, all they have is a quirky personality, not OCD.

        • warpzone32
          March 14, 2019, 10:48 pm | # | Reply

          What if Michael is a medical professional?

        • awgiedawgie
          March 15, 2019, 3:23 am | # | Reply

          Not true, J. Just because something has not been diagnosed doesn’t mean someone doesn’t have it. For example, a person can die of cancer without ever having been diagnosed. A diagnosis is merely a professional confirmation that they do indeed have whatever condition they happen to have.

      • woozy
        March 14, 2019, 1:08 pm | # | Reply

        “Traditionally vampires have OCD that forces them to count scattered grains of rice.”

        This is like the third or fourth time I’ve seen that mention this year where it was assumed this was a known fact, whereas before I had never heard of it.

        This entirely based on Sesame Street, isn’t it? And that was just a pun on the title “Count” wasn’t it?

        Or is this a Japanese vampire thing with grains of rice?

        It’d be cute if Sesame Street is influencing lore.

        • Rimwolf
          March 14, 2019, 1:46 pm | # | Reply

          From the Wikipedia article “Vampire”:
          “Other methods [of vampire control] commonly practised in Europe included severing the tendons at the knees or placing poppy seeds, millet, or sand on the ground at the grave site of a presumed vampire; this was intended to keep the vampire occupied all night by counting the fallen grains,[27] indicating an association of vampires with arithmomania. Similar Chinese narratives state that if a vampire-like being came across a sack of rice, it would have to count every grain; this is a theme encountered in myths from the Indian subcontinent, as well as in South American tales of witches and other sorts of evil or mischievous spirits or beings.[28]”

          (References are to a 1996 Skeptical Inquirer article and a 1967 publication respectively.)

          Word for the day: “arithmomania”.

        • Toby Fernsler
          March 14, 2019, 2:02 pm | # | Reply

          Never heard of it in my Mandela-verse. I’ve gotta stop sliding so fast.

        • Rick
          March 14, 2019, 6:14 pm | # | Reply

          I think Special Agent Mulder dumping all his sunflower seeds to get away from a pizza delivery vampire shoved this little known quirk of the legend into the public’s consciousness

        • shikomekidomi
          March 17, 2019, 1:20 am | # | Reply

          Other way round. Sesame Street is making a pun on centuries old vampire lore. It’s a double pun, since A) Dracula pretends to be a count in the book by Bram Stoker, B) vampires are compelled to count small objects in several pieces of folklore, including Romanian, and C) the Count teaches children to count.

      • Micher
        March 14, 2019, 6:31 pm | # | Reply

        It’s a fairly common motif in folklore that devils and other malign supernatural beings can be controlled by ordering them to complete an impossible task, such as counting the grains of sand on a beach, or emptying a pool with a sieve. Personally, I’ve never heard of it in the context of vampires, or beings doing it from internal compulsion, but there you go.

      • DaisyFM
        March 15, 2019, 4:45 pm | # | Reply

        Works on witches too.

    • Rimwolf
      March 14, 2019, 12:21 am | # | Reply

      I learned that bit of lore from the great X-Files episode “Bad Blood”.

      • Moe Lane
        March 14, 2019, 12:24 am | # | Reply

        I learned it first, I think, from Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula. Which is a series that everybody with even a mild taste for the vampire genre should read.

    • Brian
      March 14, 2019, 12:22 am | # | Reply

      one of the ways to stop a vampire was to put a pile of seeds , usually poppy, on the path to your home and the vampire would be compelled to count them before they could go on

    • Michael
      March 14, 2019, 12:22 am | # | Reply

      Some vampires have an obsessive compulsive trait. If you throw seeds in their path, they will stop to count them all. At least that’s how I remember it from a book I read 30 years ago.

    • Robert Nowall
      March 14, 2019, 9:22 am | # | Reply

      To all: nope, never heard of it before now. Of the works mentioned, I did read “Anno Dracula” but that particular bit must have not sunk in.

  3. Thenardyr
    March 14, 2019, 12:07 am | # | Reply

    The toaster will have wings after it enters the VR

    • Ritzbot
      March 14, 2019, 4:01 am | # | Reply

      It has aspirations to become the old Windows screensaver.

      • The Occupant
        March 14, 2019, 6:16 pm | # | Reply

        After Dark started on Macs, actually.

    • jennibrock
      March 14, 2019, 1:08 pm | # | Reply

      Or it will look like Caprica Six

    • awgiedawgie
      March 14, 2019, 10:47 pm | # | Reply

      I was thinking of this guy, from Hardware Wars.

  4. casimir
    March 14, 2019, 12:31 am | # | Reply

    And the winner is…
    equisetophyta

    • equisetophyta
      March 14, 2019, 12:53 am | # | Reply

      Yay!

  5. Leslie
    March 14, 2019, 1:50 am | # | Reply

    Thanks for the lore. Hard to feel anything but disrespect for mere thuggy cowardly parasites skulking around. If silver will do for them, then, yes, silver bullets. Like the Lone Ranger. White horse optional.

  6. David B Huber
    March 14, 2019, 2:44 am | # | Reply

    One can hope Cammy can only count to 255, then have to start over! (talk about a personalized hell…)

    • Sparks
      March 14, 2019, 2:57 am | # | Reply

      Imagine if Cammy’s counting code worked in signed integers, rather than unsigned…

    • Christian Rose
      March 14, 2019, 6:12 pm | # | Reply

      Depending how old it is, it might be able to count as high as 1999.

      • warpzone32
        March 14, 2019, 11:01 pm | # | Reply

        Actually, the Y2K problem had nothing to do with hardware max_integer length and was more rooted in the problem that the software was designed to store the year specifically as a 2-digit number. The 19 was left implied, so it rolled over to 1900.

        Y2K-vulnerable systems *could* count higher than 1999, they just *didn’t* when it came to keeping track of the date.

        So even if the tomagotchi is somehow running Windows 98 under the hood, or something, if he doesn’t keep track of the date in the first place, or if keeping track of the date doesn’t impact critical systems, it might be fine. It would just think it’s 1919 right now.

        Which actually dovetails nicely with the whole vampire shtick.

  7. David B Huber
    March 14, 2019, 3:17 am | # | Reply

    And now Baron Mistycorn disqualifies Nick for bringing in outside assistance! Is there any difference in principle between popcorn and a bazooka?

    • warpzone32
      March 14, 2019, 10:43 pm | # | Reply

      Sure.

      Popcorn’s not a machine, so it can’t compete.

  8. Bruce A Munro
    March 14, 2019, 3:34 am | # | Reply

    I think Baron Mistycorn is pretty much making up the rules as he goes along. (Which should eventually lead to some trouble with the robots: I certainly see the Madblood ‘bots as being rules lawyers. )

    • Bruce A Munro
      March 14, 2019, 3:34 am | # | Reply

      Meant to reply to David B Huber there

    • Robert Loughrey
      March 14, 2019, 12:33 pm | # | Reply

      I think the Madblood robots all got turned into gerbil suits. (yeah I typed something that has never been typed before!)

      • Bruce A Munro
        March 14, 2019, 3:11 pm | # | Reply

        There appear to be some Madbloods in the crowd: http://skin-horse.com/comic/face-registered/

        Are they gerbils planning to infiltrate the VR for their own sinister purposes?

      • awgiedawgie
        March 14, 2019, 3:31 pm | # | Reply

        Out of the 15,000 robots, only a handful were turned into hamster suits. Dave only took two dozen with him, and if even twice that many found their own way up to Canada, that’s still fewer than one percent. The rest seem to have disappeared quietly into society.

        • warpzone32
          March 14, 2019, 10:45 pm | # | Reply

          “Tell me why you’d be a good fit for Olive Garden.”

          “DESTROY.”

  9. Bruce A Munro
    March 14, 2019, 3:48 am | # | Reply

    The robot on the right in the last panel looks familiar.

    • casimir
      March 14, 2019, 10:16 am | # | Reply

      Danger! Danger Will Robinson! Well… not quite, but close.

  10. Robert Nowall
    March 14, 2019, 9:24 am | # | Reply

    I suppose it’s fortunate they could use Moustachio’s popcorn tins—would’a taken a couple of minutes to microwave some, and who knows whether the microwave would have cooperated with them against his fellow Machine Union brothers and sisters?

  11. keecoyote
    March 14, 2019, 9:34 am | # | Reply

    One pop corn, two pop corn three no one popcorn kernel two popcorn three no one
    no 4 popcorn ARGH!!!!. How to drive a vampire crazy

    • Barbara K
      March 14, 2019, 9:59 am | # | Reply

      Should the different flavors each be counted separately, and should the popped and unpopped ones be sorted by color, as well? And then should Our little Cam-pire need totals, for popped vs. unpopped, for each flavor, and a grand total? Just deciding on the proper taxonomy could be crazy-making. And if the sums don’t match, what probability of error would be tolerable?

      • David B Huber
        March 14, 2019, 12:50 pm | # | Reply

        +1

  12. Dr. Steve
    March 14, 2019, 10:22 am | # | Reply

    When it comes to a fight, Nick knows what really counts.

  13. warpzone32
    March 14, 2019, 11:04 am | # | Reply

    Um.

    You realize computers can count a lot faster than humans, right?

    Like, I could write a program in a couple of minutes that could count to a billion in a couple of seconds.

    What I’m getting at is, I respect the tomagotchi’s dedication to the character. That’s some solid kayfabe!

    • Lunar
      March 14, 2019, 3:33 pm | # | Reply

      Can you write a program that can count to a billion in a couple seconds on Tamagotchi hardware? I remember the standard way to implement a one second delay on a Vic-20 was a do nothing loop that counted to 1000. That was in BASIC, which of course introduced some overhead. How much overhead do you suppose an AI running on Tamagotchi hardware introduces?

    • Rimwolf
      March 14, 2019, 3:46 pm | # | Reply

      There’s a difference between counting and just incrementing a counter, the former requiring object recognition and persistence, with some strategy involving spatial placement to avoid counting the same object twice.

    • awgiedawgie
      March 14, 2019, 4:22 pm | # | Reply

      And as was mentioned above, Cammy may only be able to count up to 255. The counter would either restart at zero, or it could cause a catastrophic failure. Either way, regardless of how quickly she could count up to 255, she could never count all of the items.

      • warpzone32
        March 14, 2019, 10:40 pm | # | Reply

        Oh, snap. I forgot about the max int size. Gonna gonna go back to the well on that Sam & Max gag from yesterday:

        “That’s impossible. That would require calculations in excess of ERROR_NAN.”

  14. Pygar
    March 14, 2019, 12:32 pm | # | Reply

    I only hope we see the heroic Boilerplate the Robot among the background characters…

    • OneUniverse
      March 14, 2019, 3:08 pm | # | Reply

      What other robots should we see in the background? The one from Lost In Space has already been mentioned, but what about Rosie from the Jetsons? Or Bender?

      • Micher
        March 14, 2019, 6:24 pm | # | Reply

        I have occasionally pondered asking Shaenon to draw the full version of the Know Your Robots poster sometimes seen in the old SH offices.

        • warpzone32
          March 14, 2019, 11:10 pm | # | Reply

          Fun fact: there’s only robot in the background of panel 1. It’s Silhouettatron, the world-renowned shadow puppeteer!

  15. Robert Nowall
    March 14, 2019, 1:52 pm | # | Reply

    “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…all good children go to heaven…”

    • warpzone32
      March 14, 2019, 10:42 pm | # | Reply

      “…You can’t count to eight, can you.”

  16. Panda
    March 16, 2019, 7:38 am | # | Reply

    Looks like someone was house-ruling their V:tM. Or maybe someone had a flaw from a really obscure splatbook?

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