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Post by znntqkumxh on Nov 12, 2012 14:20:04 GMT
A rock?! ...for other My Little Pony fans... I'll be going now. Oh, and it's perfectly normal to keep rocks/stones in your drawer sometimes. More from MLP, this time with the party hat! :V
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rama
Junior Member
Heh
Posts: 54
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Post by rama on Nov 12, 2012 14:25:09 GMT
Here Annie, pretend that that's a seed.
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DC
New Member
Posts: 27
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Post by DC on Nov 12, 2012 14:29:40 GMT
She must have the ability to feel compassion. I mean... This, with recent developments in mind. Oh my goodness. If she doesn't feel emotions, she definitely feels, like, the weirdest compulsions to seek out Jones-like critters and help unique beings.
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Post by konaya on Nov 12, 2012 14:37:14 GMT
She must have the ability to feel compassion. I mean... This, with recent developments in mind. Oh my goodness. If she doesn't feel emotions, she definitely feels, like, the weirdest compulsions to seek out Jones-like critters and help unique beings. Yeah, she seems to know how it feels being unique, or even how it feels being a creature of someone else's imagination (Jones vs the world, Mr. Wobbleshade vs Coyote). And for her to do that she must be able to, well, feel. Right?
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woppy
New Member
Posts: 21
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Post by woppy on Nov 12, 2012 14:50:01 GMT
Well, Jones....you rock.
Literally.
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Rymdljus
Full Member
Beautiful songbird
Posts: 207
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Post by Rymdljus on Nov 12, 2012 14:51:41 GMT
Maybe she does feel emotions, but not even close to as much as humans do? She might feel compassion, but not love, contentment, but not joy, annoyance, but not anger. She never laughs or cries, and what she does feel never clouds her judgement.
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Post by OrzBrain on Nov 12, 2012 14:56:25 GMT
Maybe she does feel emotions, but not even close to as much as humans do? She might feel compassion, but not love, contentment, but not joy, annoyance, but not anger. She never laughs or cries, and what she does feel never clouds her judgement. Exactly. I don't know why everyone is going on about how she doesn't feel emotions. She certainly doesn't say that. She says that she's unable to experience the "inner struggles present in all humans, the flood of emotions that well up in each one of them." That's not the same as not having emotions. Perhaps she only experiences one emotion at a time, and what she does experience changes slowly and is relatively weak by human standards.
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DC
New Member
Posts: 27
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Post by DC on Nov 12, 2012 15:13:08 GMT
It's because we're humans on the Internet, and on the Internet you either have a lot of feelings or none.
Having weak or carefully measured emotions seems more likely. Compared with Fire Head Girl, though, she does seem pretty emotionless.
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Post by Nnelg on Nov 12, 2012 15:43:56 GMT
I'd agree with the notion that Jones can feel emotions, just not very much. It seems to be in line with everything else that has come before.
Oh, and hello! This is an excellent comic you guys have got here. After reading the first few chapters I stayed up until ~3 AM reading it. Then I went back and read it again, and read the forum comments as well. ;D
(Interesting stuff back there, by the way. Would you believe that someone randomly guessed the true cause of Surma's death all the way back in volume 1?)
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quoodle
Full Member
Just a man on a planet
Posts: 168
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Post by quoodle on Nov 12, 2012 16:31:18 GMT
While it's possible for Jones to still have emotions on some level given how she described it - I think it's unlikely. I think she's saying she is emotionless - like the stone. If she has emotions, she is unaware of them - perhaps by contrasting them with the uber-emotional humans.
Yet - you all are falling into the modern man's trap - and perhaps that's part of the point (eventually) of Jones. What one does is not dependent on emotions. It's how *we* operate, but it's not how it has to operate.
Someone mentioned the "L" word - Love. Love ultimately is not an emotion, but a decision. It's an act of the will. Emotion may affect it for us, but is ultimately shown in what we do and how we act. I"m sure most of you will disagree, but it's a truth.
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Post by Eversist on Nov 12, 2012 16:42:49 GMT
One has to wonder how evolution fits in with all of the fantastical creatures that belong in the forest... hmmm... intedesting. -- Oh, and hello! This is an excellent comic you guys have got here. After reading the first few chapters I stayed up until ~3 AM reading it. Then I went back and read it again, and read the forum comments as well. ;D (Interesting stuff back there, by the way. Would you believe that someone randomly guessed the true cause of Surma's death all the way back in volume 1?) Welcome to the forums! We're glad you're here (and binged on the comic last night). There's a smart bunch of people here, but also... Tom said it really well once after he revealed that Alistar was turning into a bird... "Good job, the people who guessed. It was like a dartboard riddled in darts." Or something along those lines. People are a fan of their pet theories here. It's all in good fun. Edit: "Congratulations to those who figured this out. In my mind I am picturing a dart board with every available space riddled with darts."
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Post by Mitth'raw'nuruodo on Nov 12, 2012 17:16:45 GMT
So she thinks of herself as inanimate and unchanging...
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Post by atteSmythe on Nov 12, 2012 18:01:18 GMT
Maybe not unchanging, per se. She's been around on such a scale as to see stone change quite a bit.
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Post by ratgirl on Nov 12, 2012 18:41:22 GMT
Not so much "unchanging", but rather "slowly shaped by events happening around her, while the same at the core". A stone is still a stone, but will externally change (at least in appearance) based on what happens around it. I think that's basically how Jones is. At her core, she's still the same, but she allows the world to shape her, little by little. Like when she said she would use the name Jones "for as long as I can". I don't think she's completely EMOTIONLESS, but she doesn't have emotions the same way people do. They're slower and not as strong. She feels a sense of companionship for Shadow-2 because he's "unique", just like she is. She has no fear of Coyote because she knows that even after he's long gone, she'll still be around, etc. I'm still curious about why he calls her Wandering Eye though. And about the "stars in the sky" comment. Man I love this comic.
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Post by artezzatrigger on Nov 12, 2012 18:50:20 GMT
She can clearly feel desire, so I'm going to join the people that say she can probably feel base emotions. Enough to give oneself some motivation (instead of just lying around doing nothing, like an actual stone), but perhaps not enough to be "moved" or disturbed, or even to be pleasured.
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Post by zimmyzims on Nov 12, 2012 19:05:52 GMT
Oh my goodness. If she doesn't feel emotions, she definitely feels, like, the weirdest compulsions to seek out Jones-like critters and help unique beings. Yeah, she seems to know how it feels being unique, or even how it feels being a creature of someone else's imagination (Jones vs the world, Mr. Wobbleshade vs Coyote). And for her to do that she must be able to, well, feel. Right? I think there is some conceptual mess here probably due to terms going for many things. For example, you can feel what it is to be hit in the head with a rock, without having a feelings like joy or sorrow about it, just the pain and conscience about losing half your face and what that means for your future. Not having emotions probably just means something to that effect. It does not imply that she would not understand what is happening and what that may mean for what would happen in future, and care about that in some sense. A bit like in Kantian rational morals that imply a sort of caring that is completely free of any emotions. One may legitimately protest that this is unrealistic and even contradictory, but in a fictitious world where magic is true, it is not so unimaginable that some of Kantian philosophy would hold as well.
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Post by zimmyzims on Nov 12, 2012 19:09:44 GMT
Someone mentioned the "L" word - Love. Love ultimately is not an emotion, but a decision. It's an act of the will. Emotion may affect it for us, but is ultimately shown in what we do and how we act. I"m sure most of you will disagree, but it's a truth. We have a good amount of conceptual mess here as well. Start by adequately defining 'emotion', 'will', 'act', 'decision', 'truth' and of course, 'love'. Then we talk.
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maximkat
Full Member
Look at my face, my face is amazing
Posts: 111
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Post by maximkat on Nov 12, 2012 20:10:56 GMT
You'd think that she would learn to pretend to smile, at least, over thousands of years...
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Post by TBeholder on Nov 12, 2012 20:43:50 GMT
I don't think she's completely EMOTIONLESS, but she doesn't have emotions the same way people do. They're slower and not as strong. She feels a sense of companionship for Shadow-2 because he's "unique", just like she is. She has no fear of Coyote because she knows that even after he's long gone, she'll still be around, etc. That, and if she ever decides to follow Coyote and try to bore him to death, it will hurt him more than her.
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Post by GK Sierra on Nov 12, 2012 21:51:34 GMT
Yeah, the illustration for floods of human emotion look a lot like Jeanne and her Elfish lover. Very cool. I'll lay my bet now. That black stone is probably sedimentary, and it's worn smooth and round and pockmarked, like a river stone. In other words, it is both younger than Jones and has weathered more in its life than she has, but it has undergone these changes much more slowly than a human lifetime. Jones is saying that she experiences things like a stone chipping slowly away, in contrast to the rushing flood of the human psyche. Since it's got a sheen and isn't layered, I'd say it was an igneous, probably onyx, but I think that is indeed the basic metaphor. I wonder if she has no emotions naturally, or just never had the opportunity to develop any? JS was a pretty cool dude once you get past the whole "golden plates" fanaticism. Didn't like authority or hypocrisy and made no bones about it ('cept of course for his own religion, but we all have our blind-spots).
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alexh
Full Member
Posts: 113
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Post by alexh on Nov 12, 2012 22:01:27 GMT
Perhaps the stone is a piece of something from where she first "awoke" and she's kept it around for all of this time. She just doesn't see herself as any different than that. It hasn't changed and neither has she.
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Post by Per on Nov 12, 2012 23:30:15 GMT
I think it's important to keep in mind that billions of years of Jones history has led up to this moment. Seen in slow motion with the introduction from Also Sprach Zarathustra playing.
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Post by Marnath on Nov 13, 2012 0:20:33 GMT
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Post by palevalkyrie on Nov 13, 2012 2:03:13 GMT
Can't fight it...geology knowledge...struggling to break free... I'll lay my bet now. That black stone is probably sedimentary, and it's worn smooth and round and pockmarked, like a river stone. In other words, it is both younger than Jones and has weathered more in its life than she has, but it has undergone these changes much more slowly than a human lifetime. Jones is saying that she experiences things like a stone chipping slowly away, in contrast to the rushing flood of the human psyche. Since it's got a sheen and isn't layered, I'd say it was an igneous, probably onyx, but I think that is indeed the basic metaphor. I wonder if she has no emotions naturally, or just never had the opportunity to develop any? I'm thinking basalt is more likely. Most of the other rocks that you get that are solid black (obsidian, shale, etc.) don't wear that way. You sometimes even get little bubbles in basalt that, when weathered, look like pock-marks. That would be basalt, but if she just broke it off of the rock she emerged from, it'd be jagged. You can actually get a really good sense of how far a rock is from it's source material by the roundedness of its edges. That rock has traveled a very great distance to be worn *that* smooth and ellipsoid--a pretty good metaphor for her indeed, this wandering, eye-shaped stone. Ridiculously, this page has been the hardest one to suspend my disbelief for. It's true that she didn't say she had NO emotions, but the implication that she can't experience them to any strong degree makes me wonder what Tom was trying to tell us with all those initial pages. The idea that she's just going through the motions of friendship/whatever else with multiple people over the years makes those pages seem very hollow now, and I just don't think that's where Tom is ultimately trying to take this chapter, or Jones. I'm totally not going to be able to wrap my brain around this chapter until the "chapter-over" symbol finally appears.
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Post by blahzor on Nov 13, 2012 2:55:24 GMT
Pfft. I'm not buying it. We've seen, even in this narrative, Jones act to honor the dead, fill a hole in Eggie's heart--she clearly cares about things in some way. Maybe she's not the same as a human, maybe she and we can't access what's in her black box, but if she walks like a duck and talks like a duck, she's a goddamned duck. Possibly a robot or golem or divine or time-travelling duck, but still a duck. she's had a lot of time to learn to mimic emotions, but not care to do it where people don't end up thinking she's a robot
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Post by aaroncampbell on Nov 13, 2012 5:07:54 GMT
Perhaps the stone is a piece of something from where she first "awoke" and she's kept it around for all of this time. She just doesn't see herself as any different than that. It hasn't changed and neither has she. I was thinking this myself, wondering how old this rock is. Obviously not as old as she is, but more along the lines of "how long has Jones had this particular stone?"
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Post by Refugee on Nov 13, 2012 6:48:06 GMT
fill a hole in Eggie's heart This, of all we've seen, is the most disturbing to me. What role does she play for Egg, and the other men we've seen in her life? For Egg especially, though, when a human girl proved herself to be...all too human, Wandering Eye steps in. Is he satisfied with her? Is she his lover? She can never be his wife, for that implies (for most of us) the mother of his children. Is life with her all that fulfilling, or is there some shortfall in Eglamore himself, that lets him go through life wanting nothing more than her?
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Post by GK Sierra on Nov 13, 2012 6:52:54 GMT
Ridiculously, this page has been the hardest one to suspend my disbelief for. It's true that she didn't say she had NO emotions, but the implication that she can't experience them to any strong degree makes me wonder what Tom was trying to tell us with all those initial pages. The idea that she's just going through the motions of friendship/whatever else with multiple people over the years makes those pages seem very hollow now, and I just don't think that's where Tom is ultimately trying to take this chapter, or Jones. I'm totally not going to be able to wrap my brain around this chapter until the "chapter-over" symbol finally appears. Someone said earlier that they just couldn't buy that Jones didn't have emotions, and I am starting to agree. I mean, why else would Jones hang around one human being from birth till death? She did seem at least somewhat aggrieved that the manor house owner was dying, although that could just be her standard dour expression. It's really hard to tell.
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Post by silverware on Nov 13, 2012 6:56:20 GMT
If we assume her definition is correct (and it really IS a rock she just gave Annie.) Then Jones must also be a tooth. Here (Don't think anyone here actually needs this link. XD) So, then Jones is part of Coyote... bringing us back to Humanity made her. Just slightly more abstract.
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Rymdljus
Full Member
Beautiful songbird
Posts: 207
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Post by Rymdljus on Nov 13, 2012 7:47:10 GMT
Someone mentioned the "L" word - Love. Love ultimately is not an emotion, but a decision. It's an act of the will. Emotion may affect it for us, but is ultimately shown in what we do and how we act. I"m sure most of you will disagree, but it's a truth. We have a good amount of conceptual mess here as well. Start by adequately defining 'emotion', 'will', 'act', 'decision', 'truth' and of course, 'love'. Then we talk. Don't forget 'life'. I understand that she isn't alive in a biological sense, but my mind still identifies her as alive, because she walks and talks and thinks and reacts. She acts alive, and I have trouble taking in that she isn't.
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