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Post by djublonskopf on Jun 11, 2010 12:29:29 GMT
Well gosh golly, that was triple creepy. Also what's with the continual 'buzz'ing? I keep thinking flies in spider webs. I think he's got it.
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Post by djublonskopf on Jun 11, 2010 5:45:55 GMT
They could actually be in Birmingham . . . with no illusions taking place whatsoever. None of this Zimmingham or Birmingjack or what have you. There's a transporter on the door to outside the Court, and Jack got a lot better all of the sudden . . . and Zimmy's English improved substantially.
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Post by djublonskopf on Jun 5, 2010 3:53:05 GMT
Let's place a bet: [in order to do this, I create the Gunnard, the Gunnerkrigg Court monetary unit. Everybody starts with G100] I bet G25 that this is happening in a holo-simulation and that this Gamma is actually a program created to bring Zimmy to Jack; only the program is not intelligent enough, and just assumed the first person who shown up was Zimmy, and thus address Annie telepathically as if she was Zimmy, trying to cope with the fact that this person just told it she wasn't Zimmy, by being as friendly as possible. Annie addressed SimGamma in English because she was in a hurry and momentarily forgot about the whole being Polish thing, not being around Gamma everyday and all. It's about any minute now she'll start noticing she's been speaking English since the beginning. The Zimmy appearance at the beginning was either real Zimmy or another program made to lure away real Gamma. Just curious . . . is that a bet somebody else has to take? If you are wrong, does everybody else get G25, or . . . just the people who took you up on the bet? Or do you just lose G25?
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Post by djublonskopf on Jun 3, 2010 3:26:37 GMT
Wow, I am having an ENTIRELY different response to this then most of the comments here. Annie doesn't have the scar because this is, in no way at ALL, part of the hidden etheric world. Jack has repeatedly shown himself to be a literal genius with technology, I'm betting (though I wouldn't bet much, Tom is really good at tripping up all of us) that he has just created a simulation world the exact same style as Dr. Disaster's. Why did Jones not go with Annie? Jones doesn't ever seem to take the lead in much, just helps direct and influences, We've seen that she is nigh impervious to harm (or at least damn hard to hurt) and exceptionally fast and yet when Ysengrin attacked Annie for spanking Coyote it was Reynardine (jumped in front), Donald (cast a barrier) and Eggers (tried to cut his arm off) who jumped in to defend her, not Jones. Why did she tell Rey to stay behind? Because Jack demonstrated not 20 minutes ago (comic time) that he can do serious harm to Rey. Jack believes there is some link between Annie and Zimmy (and there might be after all) and so technologically creating an artificial world to trick Annie into finding Zimmy makes total sense to me. Also, the power station is still powering up so far as we know, it is drawing energy in but we haven't seen it activate its lightning discharge OR cause rain yet, so I don't think the effect is complete. That's a point; the transition on the page looks more similar to the Dr. Disaster simulation than to the static we saw when going in and out of Zimmingham: www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=581Indeed, but it still leaves the telepathy unexplained. And Dr. Disaster's simulations relied on force-feedback in the suits to seem real . . . Annie wouldn't feel holo-Gamma touching her hand without the suit on.
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Post by djublonskopf on Jun 3, 2010 3:24:55 GMT
Oh, that is a good point. I should have checked that.
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Post by djublonskopf on Jun 2, 2010 19:44:20 GMT
Gamma's thought bubbles are light purple-blue, just like her and Zimmy's regular speech bubbles always are, and Annie's speech bubbles remain light pink in every panel, just like they always are.
I think it really is Annie and I think it really is Gamma.
(Side-note . . . why do Gamma and Zimmy have exactly the same color speech bubbles, when every other major character has their own color?)
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Post by djublonskopf on Jun 2, 2010 13:25:18 GMT
For all the love of speculation, the best pages are the most confusing. This is off-topic (but on-topic for a few days ago): The link somebody posted about Annie's hand reminded me of this page. For as dangerous as Gunnerkrigg seems, Annie's mom is the one who sent her there. The same mom who promised she would never send Annie into danger. So I wonder: did Surma know something (relevant to the "danger") that we don't?
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Post by djublonskopf on May 31, 2010 7:12:39 GMT
Ah. Didn't someone already say that Jones wasn't a robot, though? Yeah. Both Renard and Tom.
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Post by djublonskopf on May 31, 2010 1:00:22 GMT
I still think she's huge, and the tiny body's an illusion.
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Post by djublonskopf on May 27, 2010 4:00:36 GMT
What about in Chapter 8 when she has fallen off the Bridge, the tracking devices let everyone know where she is but they just leave her to rot in the Anan Waters? Recall that in Ch 7, Annie set off an alarm as soon as she set foot on the bridge. Robot crossed the same bridge in Ch 1 without setting the alarm. And even without the tracking devices in her food, the Court knew that Annie was alive at the bottom of the gorge: Annie's contract over Reynardine would have been broken had she died, and Anja knew enough about the contract that she noticed that Rey was still bound and was able to connect the dots. (Hence why, for the print edition, Kat's last line on page 144 was changed to "They said you were okay!" or something to that effect.) Why didn't the Court swoop in to rescue Annie? Because Kat was already on the job. Oooh, if that's true, then I stand corrected. I didn't know about that little bit.
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Post by djublonskopf on May 27, 2010 3:56:50 GMT
Back tracking a bit onto the Food-Tracking... Maybe I'm missing something in the archives were it states that Jones cannot tell lies or make jokes, but does anyone else think that not only could Jones have somehow overheard Jack and Annie's conversation but is now joking about it? If the Court could really track people then a LOT of Annie's adventures no longer make as much sense to me. So the Court just LET Annie discover the location of Renard despite how dangerous he is? I know you can argue it both ways, after all there WAS the fortuitous train, and Eglamore DID show up just in time to save her, but in the context of Gunnerkrigg those being happy coincidences makes as much sense to me. What about in Chapter 8 when she has fallen off the Bridge, the tracking devices let everyone know where she is but they just leave her to rot in the Anan Waters? Well, "tracking" is not the same as "always actively monitoring". Just because they're recording locations doesn't mean there's also a person sitting in front of a monitor watching every little blip. And when she fell off the bridge . . . even without trackers, they would have had a good idea of where she was . . . straight down from the bridge. That's still a very long drop, and mounting a recovery into a steep canyon takes more than one evening (unless you invent a hovercraft overnight) . . ..
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Post by djublonskopf on May 26, 2010 13:56:52 GMT
Oh, I never said they were doing experiments on the same scale or to the same depravity as the ones I listed, just that the evidence so far seemed to point to a decided lack of ethical consideration regarding experimentation/research on human beings. I mainly cited those to prove the point that it isn't just "mad scientists" who do bad things for science. That said, you left out "did nothing to treat, alleviate or contain Zimmy's condition, in spite of its direct negative effect on both her and other children at the school (mostly Gamma, but also everyone she inadvertantly sucked into Birminghell)" and "ran power station experiments knowing full well that they would fuck with Zimmy's head (leading directly to aforementioned Birminghell trip)" in your list of experiments. Perhaps not on par with Mengle, but certainly not acceptable to any modern bioethics board I'm aware of. But they did do something to treat/alleviate Zimmy's condition: they left her alone. They don't subject her to surveillance because it puts her on edge. And they know that Gamma helps, so they let her hang with Gamma. That shows some regard for her well being, and it would absolutely fly with a bioethics board. It's never been said that the Court does or doesn't know anything more about what to do for Zimmy. But what Jones has just said is that they do know two things that help Zimmy, and they give her both. And they in no way have said or indicated or hinted that they knew that the power station experiments would mess with Zimmy's head.
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Post by djublonskopf on May 26, 2010 13:42:37 GMT
I would love for Annie to ask that question. Are there any instances of Jones dodging questions? She did dodge once, on the question of her allegiance to the court/forest: here.
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Post by djublonskopf on May 26, 2010 13:27:35 GMT
Well, it's hardly fair to say that such an aim is out of the realm of possibility. It is fair, however, to say that such an aim is outside of anything even hinted at within the comic thus far. The experiments we've seen so far involve draining water from a lake, lovingly caring for trees in a giant park, and NOT surveilling someone who's different (Zimmy). Oh, and trying to remove a body-stealing demon from its host without killing the host. This isn't exactly Nazi concentration camp science going on. (Yes, there was one awful thing done to Jeanne, by people who are no longer alive, and which is unknown to the people who are now alive.) The idea that the Court is doing horrible, torturous, debasing experiments on people is about as supported by the comic thus far as suggesting that the Court is actually run by Ancient Sumerian magicians who wanted to open a time-portal to the Wild West (to become cowboys) but missed a little and decided to open a school in England instead. It's possible, but it has not been suggested by the comic itself yet.
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Post by djublonskopf on May 21, 2010 15:04:43 GMT
Still not clear if he has Annie's symbol on his head again. I think it was more often shown when he was in big-wolf form. I glanced back at some old stories and saw doll-form Reynardine without a symbol all over. That said, Annie never owned Reynardine. She owned a toy wolf that Reynardine went into. Even after Jack's etheric-light-show-trap, she still owns the toy wolf, and he's still inside it, so my suspicion would be that Annie can still order Reynardine around. I suspect the author added this scene so he could revisit Reynardine's attempt to steal Annie's body back in Chapter 3, and show that Annie cares more about Reynardine's well-being NOW than she cares about whatever he did back THEN. Also so that Jack could get away.
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Post by djublonskopf on May 17, 2010 16:53:17 GMT
Is the anti-Buddha (the tall, skinny, stressed-looking woman with the super-long neck) related to Jack somehow?
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Post by djublonskopf on May 16, 2010 4:25:29 GMT
Jones is not a robot--she is two short robots in a human suit, with one standing on the other's shoulders. That WOULD make her twice as strong as any other court robot . . ..
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Post by djublonskopf on May 15, 2010 1:45:54 GMT
Wow didn't realize there had come to be so much drama in this forum . . .. What's interesting to me is that Rey and Coyote don't know what Jones is... but Parley seems to take some of Jones' skills for granted (http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=383) though she doesn't say what Jones is. Spacemilk, that's an interesting point, and something that I didn't notice before. Perhaps Parley knows something?
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Post by djublonskopf on May 14, 2010 15:32:40 GMT
The main reason I don't think she's an Android/Robot/Machine is that the VAST majority of Robots we've seen in the court are... well they are all kinda pansies. Unless she is an Original Court Robot I have a hard time believing a Robot as seen in Gunnergrigg could be that epic. Ah! Beat me to it by a minute!
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Post by djublonskopf on May 14, 2010 15:31:37 GMT
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Post by djublonskopf on Mar 27, 2010 14:25:07 GMT
I don't think that those are "Zimmy eyes". They're just regular worn-out eyes. Zimmy's eyes are hollows where the eyes should be - an etheric phenomenon rather than just ordinary exhaustion. When Zimmy got rinsed off in the rain, her regular eyes appeared through the black mess. They're in there, they just get . . . obscured.
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Post by djublonskopf on Feb 27, 2010 18:53:03 GMT
No. It means she has no accent. Tom has repeated this many times. He was very clear what he meant when he said that. "No accent" is meaningless; an accent is the specific way one pronounces things. You cannot have "no accent", unless you're mute. Even the "standard way/region-neutral pronounciation" (whatever we define it to be, and which is hardly ever really practiced by anyone) *is* an accent. And when people say "X has no accent", it is generally safe to assume the person really means "X has the same accent than me" (because the person believes he himself has no accent). But to the ear of New Yorker, someone speaking Standard English From England™ has hell of an accent. See this article for more informations: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accents_of_EnglishWhile it might be generally safe to assume this or that, the general case was not being discussed. This particular case was. You're right that there's no such thing as "no" accent . . . IF by accent you mean "an individual's distinctive or characteristic inflection, tone, or choice of words", Merriam-Webster's definition 2a. Since "accent" in that definition is specific to each individual, each individual has, by definition, an "accent" and nobody can be without one. If, however, we're instead talking about definitions 1 or 2b: "An articulative effort giving prominence to one syllable over adjacent syllables" and "a way of speaking typical of a particular group of people", respectively . . . then it's quite easy to have no accent. By definition one, if you don't stress any syllables over any other syllables, you have no accent, and by definition 2b, if your way of speaking is atypical of ANY particular groups of people, then you have no accent. I'm not claiming to know Tom's mind on this, but what "no accent" means does at least in part depend on what you mean by "accent".
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Post by djublonskopf on Feb 12, 2010 18:49:42 GMT
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Post by djublonskopf on Feb 2, 2010 15:07:59 GMT
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Post by djublonskopf on Jan 27, 2010 14:50:54 GMT
Yeah. It didn't click that Ysengrin should have seen that gigantic sign in the sky and done something about it.
I had noticed at the start of the story that the forest's response sign did not go up.
Then I forgot.
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Post by djublonskopf on Dec 5, 2009 2:29:14 GMT
Nature and technology are not competing ideologies, where one has to choose one or the other. A person can want to live in civilization without wanting to destroy everything that's natural. Humans are not machines. Diego fails to see that. The ideology of the court, it seems, fails to see that. Ysengrin's ideology fails to see that. There is a lot of failing to see, it seems, and I think it's hurting people. It's possible that, when the "other side" can bring trees to life and use them as death machines . . . you have to destroy everything that's natural if you want to live in civilization. Possible.
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Post by djublonskopf on Nov 23, 2009 20:37:08 GMT
We're talking about something more than just a Luddite rejection of new technology, nikita. Yeah, it's possible that you could project more onto radio (imagining the scene entirely) than you could to black & white TV, same as you are now discussing with regards to regular vs. high-definition TV.
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Post by djublonskopf on Aug 13, 2009 4:51:10 GMT
I predict there will be storytelling around a campfire.
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Post by djublonskopf on Jul 24, 2009 7:15:10 GMT
Yeah, I scrolled down fast enough that I was actually startled. I can't even think of another time that I was actually startled by a static illustration.
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Post by djublonskopf on Jul 20, 2009 14:08:16 GMT
I had an idea about Jones back when she sank into the bed.
Jones is huge.
Her human appearance is an deception of some kind, masking something that is, in reality, much bigger. Her image-altering powers also let her do the sword thing. Her emotionless face is the best mask she can manage.
I now imagine Jones as something very ancient and very large, heretofore unintroduced to the comic.
I am likely entirely wrong.
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