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Post by imaginaryfriend on Nov 13, 2023 8:04:56 GMT
Nice to see the MC in the comic was also wondering if this can even happen with the Noobs. Comic up more than 4 minutes early tonight. Guess this is a thing now? |
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Post by blahzor on Nov 13, 2023 8:09:43 GMT
He gets to experience being dead. Gonna be egg on his face when he's still alive once distortion ends
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Post by jda on Nov 13, 2023 8:17:41 GMT
He gets to experience being dead. Gonna be egg on his face when he's still alive once distortion ends .. |
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Post by gpvos on Nov 13, 2023 8:39:59 GMT
Indeed, because she didn't die. Annie will probably draw that conclusion soon. Cookies for me! Nom nom. |
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Post by worldsong on Nov 13, 2023 8:41:12 GMT
I wouldn't be surprised if for New People death isn't as instinctively terrifying as it is for us meatbags.
Not that this makes it less tragic but I can imagine the New People having different priorities.
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Cori
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Post by Cori on Nov 13, 2023 8:48:56 GMT
I don't know how to put this gracefully, but the pacing in this chapter is such a dud. We spent several pages going from set-piece to set-piece (the ruins, the desert, the forest) for no real discernible reason. Every page is "oh look, here's a new setting, and the characters are going to say something about it, and now we move on". What does it provide to the reader, except to point at a scene and say "look! remember this part?". The coyote-prairie dog was pointless. Yes, Annie isn't going to play by his rules--that's fine, and we already knew that based on multiple past interactions between the two of them. It didn't need to happen here, when the goal of Annie and the New People is just "get to where Kat is". The tree elves--why where they here? They contributed nothing. If the significance of these scenes is to show the New People "Annie's story", then I feel like the pages should focus more on their thoughts and reactions to each thing that is happening. Everything is happening too quickly for any of the beats to sink in, for both the reader and the characters.
And I haven't even touched on the transition down to the Annan waters! This part of the chapter should feel tense and dramatic, but there is absolutely no build-up and the payoff is...one page of action? Action storyboarding has never been a strength of this comic, but I always felt like it handled drama decently. This was here and gone so quickly that I feel absolutely nothing about the encounter with "Jeanne", or the New Person who got murk'd.
This chapter feels like it should have been two chapters at least. There is absolutely no breathing room between the beats, there is nothing to indicate that one part of the chapter is more important than the other, and even though I know that this is meant to be a big moment--the culmination of all of Annie's story arc up to now, her resolve to help Jeanne, her deal with the psychopomps--the stakes do not feel high at all. We don't even know this New Person's name. He has been completely insignificant up to this point, and I do not care that he's dead. What is supposed to be a significant change for Annie is made less exciting by my lack of investment in the person she will be escorting.
Sorry to bring negativity into this forum. I just feel so underwhelmed about this whole chapter, and it's been bothering me for....weeks, at this point. I kept waiting for things to ramp up and become exciting and they never did. This most recent development is really disappointing.
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Post by gpvos on Nov 13, 2023 8:49:19 GMT
I wouldn't be surprised if for New People death isn't as instinctively terrifying as it is for us meatbags. Well, until recently they didn't have to think about it. Now they know it exists for them. |
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Post by Geekette on Nov 13, 2023 9:32:52 GMT
Hey, how are psychopomps made? Because, the most beloved but hot-headed friend of the creator goddess (she who spurns and banishes death from her presence, but welcomes Antimony with a smile), who favours that which is the antithesis of Kat's science and technology - that's got mythological precedence.
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Post by guntherkrieg on Nov 13, 2023 10:05:29 GMT
Comic up more than 4 minutes early tonight. Guess this is a thing now? I guess? Does it matter? |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Nov 13, 2023 10:43:10 GMT
Comic up more than 4 minutes early tonight. Guess this is a thing now? I guess? Does it matter? Just an end user here but a cron job running early a day or two around DST doesn't surprise me. More than a week? Might be a bigger problem than just the time. Maybe somebody downloaded more RAM. Or maybe there's no problem at all and this is just the time it's supposed to update now. |
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Post by Igniz on Nov 13, 2023 12:04:28 GMT
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Post by ctso74 on Nov 13, 2023 14:20:01 GMT
I wouldn't be surprised if for New People death isn't as instinctively terrifying as it is for us meatbags. Not that this makes it less tragic but I can imagine the New People having different priorities. Well, they've already "met their maker", so... |
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Post by bicarbonat on Nov 13, 2023 16:25:41 GMT
Indeed, because she didn't die. Annie will probably draw that conclusion soon. Cookies for me! Nom nom. Welcome, everyone, to the house that Columbo built. 🍪 |
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Post by Gemini Jim on Nov 13, 2023 16:54:18 GMT
I love that Saitama's now "dead," but his reaction in the last panel is concern for the CPUs. Like a mother worrying about her child. ( The box is wide open on this page.) Or else, he's not quite clear on the whole "death" concept. Maybe he thinks he can reboot, or something. Or he's not quite dead yet, because the distortion will fall and reveal. a) that death is an illusion, or b) that Saitama's not an NPC. Plenty of speculation about the true identity of the black-haired NPC (who is still getting in the frame an awful lot), why not him as well? |
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Post by Nnelg on Nov 13, 2023 18:33:50 GMT
We spent several pages going from set-piece to set-piece (the ruins, the desert, the forest) for no real discernible reason. I feel like this was deliberate. The Distortion is warping space and time, making everything feel off because there's no buildup or transition. Are they really travelling, or is the world changing around them? The latter matches up more with what we've seen. None of this is real, they're all dreaming or on a trip. Said trip took a sudden bad turn when they went to the waters, but we shoulf have known that could happen since it wasn't the first threat we faced. The coyote encounter gave us a false sense of security, after we escaped the Zimmy-monsters. We should have never let our guard down. I suspect memories of Jeanne are the least of our worries. How many bad and dangerous memories do Annie and co. have? What if we went into Renardine's memories, and memory-Eglamore attacks us? Couldn't that easily be the next memory, after Eglamore's office? And is baldie actually dead? We don't know, and we won't know for certain until near the end of the chapter. That dread may build in the following pages, we'll have to wait and see... (The drip feeding of updates is maybe interfering with the pacing, but that's the problem with all webcomics.) |
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Post by Gemminie on Nov 13, 2023 18:43:20 GMT
Annie says she hasn't seen "something like this" (meaning a ghost, I suppose?) in a while. The last time she saw a ghost per se was Jeanne, I think. Renard realizes that Annie must be seeing the bald NP's ghost (is he going to die without a name? Do the other NP know his name? I haven't noticed them calling each other by names either). The black-haired NP emotionally asks whether he's dead. The dark-skinned NP looks shocked. The one with the shoulder-length brown hair looks quite upset and has a hand to her mouth. Annie admits to not knowing how death works for NP – when Coyote ate Lana, she didn't see her spirit. Renard wonders whether this could mean that Lana might still be alive. But Annie turns toward the poor NP and takes his hand, sorry that this has happened to him. His reply, though, is all about whether the CPUs are safe. They're basically baby NP, so it's a valid concern, and noble of him to consider them. Annie has the opportunity here to make this a very memorable and perhaps legendary experience. For the moment, at least, they can communicate two ways with the departed and resolve any unresolved issues. Annie could, for example, check on the CPUs and answer his question. If some have spilled onto the floor (it looks as if some did), the others could make sure they're gathered up and put back safely in the box. If any of them has anything they'd like to say to him, they could do that, and Annie could pass along any replies he has. And Annie could even take him to the ROTD for a final message – maybe. Assuming the distortion allows ROTD access. And all of this is assuming that this is real – that he's really dead, that he was really a NP to begin with rather than an illusion or a fragment of Zimmy, Gamma, Annie, or anyone else, that any of this is real at all. I mean, there were NP around before the distortion hit, and there were still CPUs left to gather, but we don't know whether these are really those NP and those CPUs. The dark-skinned NP and the one with the shoulder-length brown hair may be the same ones who were around earlier, but all the other NPs we saw after that (but before the distortion) were all pretty backgroundy. |
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 13, 2023 19:48:56 GMT
I love that Saitama's now "dead," but his reaction in the last panel is concern for the CPUs. Like a mother worrying about her child. ( The box is wide open on this page.) Or else, he's not quite clear on the whole "death" concept. Maybe he thinks he can reboot, or something. I interpret this as a very relatable, human, reaction, honestly. He has no idea how to think about his own death, so he focuses on a problem which he can easily understand instead. Plenty of humans would probably do the same thing! Although, now that I think about it, in his case there ARE some other factors involved...
Robots aren't new to the concept of "death", per se. In fact, they're extremely used to dying, not only when their CPUs are destroyed, but also whenever they're turned off, however temporarily. They have a somewhat different perspective on life and death than humans, in general. To them, movement is life, and stillness is death, and the only conceivable purpose of life is to be useful to others. So Baldy's question here isn't just out of concern for his fellows, or even desperate clinging to a comprehensible problem in the wake of the unknown - it's single-minded concern for his latest useful function, i.e. keeping the CPU box safe.
Come to think of it, in a way, we've already had a scene in this comic where a benevolent psychopomp guided a dead robot into its next life, and the robot in question acted very similarly to Baldy here...I'm talking about the classic chapter " She Gave Us An Ocean". Robot had to explain to the little guy that he was offline, i.e. "dead" by NP standards, and his first reaction was "Oh no! Who has been checking the water pipes!"
Which brings me to what I think Baldy's really going to have trouble with: he's not just losing his functionality to others now, but the entire ocean that is his new mind - the complex ecosystem of emotion, experience, and knowledge which none of his kind have ever died with before. I predict that at some point in the next few pages, it's finally going to occur to him just how much he has to lose by dying now, and then he'll...well, for lack of a better phrase, he'll start taking this whole experience a lot more personally. |
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nyks
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Post by nyks on Nov 13, 2023 20:28:46 GMT
On page 132 Muut told Annie that the Psychopomps do not deal in electrical appliances when she asked about the dead Tik-Tok. So I am guessing they recruited Annie specifically to deal with this stuff!
In one of the earlier chapters Annie had to mediate a dispute between two Psychopomps who both wanted to claim the soul of a dead boy. I got the impression that the more souls one of the Pomps gets to escort to the ROTD, the merrier. So why would they be so eager to recruit a new Psychopomp and share their crop? At first, I thought Annie would help manage the moot cases, but now I think she, like every other Psychopomp, would have her own specific designation—the (ex) electrical appliances! Cause nobody wanted to take that job anyway.
This arrangement would work especially well since she is friends with the goddess of electrical appliances, Kat. Perfect tandem—the goddess of the living and the goddess of the dead. The one who welcomes the New People into this world and the one who meets them at the end of their journey.
Though I also have an argument against this theory, why were the Psychopomps interested in Annie's ancestors then? Did they know about the emergence of the NP? More probably, they just wanted to claim the soul of a fire elemental that seemed to slip from their hands for all those years, but it's fun to wonder! Annie can volunteer for the job herself annieway—join the Psychopomps, but on her own terms.
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Post by blahzor on Nov 13, 2023 22:33:09 GMT
We spent several pages going from set-piece to set-piece (the ruins, the desert, the forest) for no real discernible reason. I feel like this was deliberate. The Distortion is warping space and time, making everything feel off because there's no buildup or transition. Are they really travelling, or is the world changing around them? The latter matches up more with what we've seen. None of this is real, they're all dreaming or on a trip. Said trip took a sudden bad turn when they went to the waters, but we shoulf have known that could happen since it wasn't the first threat we faced. The coyote encounter gave us a false sense of security, after we escaped the Zimmy-monsters. We should have never let our guard down. I suspect memories of Jeanne are the least of our worries. How many bad and dangerous memories do Annie and co. have? What if we went into Renardine's memories, and memory-Eglamore attacks us? Couldn't that easily be the next memory, after Eglamore's office? And is baldie actually dead? We don't know, and we won't know for certain until near the end of the chapter. That dread may build in the following pages, we'll have to wait and see... (The drip feeding of updates is maybe interfering with the pacing, but that's the problem with all webcomics.) The attack on the court memory incoming and how all the NP were basically i mind prison when the shield protocol triggered |
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Post by pyradonis on Nov 13, 2023 23:40:03 GMT
So when does Annie learn to turn her visibility for mortals on and off at will, like the other psychopomps? I haven't noticed them [the NP] calling each other by names either Not often (same as they did when they were robots), but I found at least this occasion. |
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Post by drmemory on Nov 14, 2023 5:03:58 GMT
I always felt like Annie inherited her psychopomp abilities. Her mother had them, and she told a couple psychopomps that she was of no more use to them. We now know that is because her fire literally went to Annie. In a very real sense, there is only one fire elemental in this story! Annie = Surma = Surma's mother = Surma's grandmother. There is some variance in the specifics of their powers, which I assume is due to the human part of their line, but the fire is just the one fire.
As for the psychopomp abilities, I'm talking about those specifically, NOT the psychopomp job. That's a different matter. Annie has had her abilities all her life, and has been able to see the other psychopomps from a very young age, but she chose to take people into the ether only... 4 times? Surma, little burned boy, Mort, and Jeanne, right? Perhaps 5, if you could Jeanne's love separately. I'm sure Annie would have been happy to not take the job and just do the role when she felt like it if not for the extreme pressure.
As for the dead NP, well, it makes sense that that could happen. Annie and Renard specifically saw the NP in the ether, so they really are alive, as Kat had hoped. The mystery there is why Loup thinks they are not. He has stated that they weren't alive and he couldn't sense life in them on multiple occasions. It's actually a bit odd that Annie can see them in the ether but Loup could not! What's up with that???
When Annie helps Baldy to his rest, what will happen? Will he go into the ether? My guess is that he will, in some sense, go into Kat. I still think all of the NP are tied to Kat due to her "new contract". Maybe we'll finally learn what that means.
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Post by drmemory on Nov 14, 2023 5:11:24 GMT
So when does Annie learn to turn her visibility for mortals on and off at will, like the other psychopomps? I haven't noticed them [the NP] calling each other by names either Not often (same as they did when they were robots), but I found at least this occasion. Kat gave them each an ocean and a new body and even the gift of life, but I bet they have to choose a name if they want one. It may be that they pick one at the same time as they pick an appearance, but it also may be that many of them just don't bother. Unless it's required as part of "character creation", of course. 
As for the visibility thing, maybe it happens automatically when she fully enters the ether? Or not. It could equally well be one of those trade secrets we've heard tell about.
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Post by Igniz on Nov 14, 2023 9:10:26 GMT
I wouldn't be surprised if for New People death isn't as instinctively terrifying as it is for us meatbags. Or else, he's not quite clear on the whole "death" concept. Maybe he thinks he can reboot, or something. Completely understandable, as programs, databases and operating systems usually have backups and, maybe, thanks to Katechnology Microsystems its entirely possible that the Newest Persons of Them All still have as well (in the form of kats kits!). Or he's not quite dead yet, because the distortion will fall and reveal. a) that death is an illusion, or b) that Saitama's not an NPC. +1, though the most probable thing is that in the next page we'll see the opening of a door which exists on the highest plane.  |
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Post by guntherkrieg on Nov 14, 2023 12:24:14 GMT
Just an end user here but a cron job running early a day or two around DST doesn't surprise me. More than a week? Might be a bigger problem than just the time. Maybe somebody downloaded more RAM. Or maybe there's no problem at all and this is just the time it's supposed to update now. No, I meant in the grand scheme of things. |
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Post by gpvos on Nov 14, 2023 13:12:24 GMT
It may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but it is still interesting, at least to some of us.
I guess the server has lost network time synchronization somehow.
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Nov 14, 2023 13:20:50 GMT
Just an end user here but a cron job running early a day or two around DST doesn't surprise me. More than a week? Might be a bigger problem than just the time. Maybe somebody downloaded too much RAM. Or maybe there's no problem at all and this is just the time it's supposed to update now. No, I meant in the grand scheme of things. Other than when people can expect to see the new GC comic, none. So far. |
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Post by Igniz on Nov 15, 2023 6:37:30 GMT
I guess the server has lost network time synchronization somehow. Poor signal + leaving the "Adjust for daylight saving time automatically" option toggled on.  |
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Post by gpvos on Nov 15, 2023 8:03:31 GMT
The comic updated at midnight Pacific time sharp today.
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Nov 15, 2023 8:11:10 GMT
The comic updated at midnight Pacific time sharp today. I was refreshing the page and got it at 2:56am EST. will check my compy time [edit] Yep something's been messing with my time synch since DST; I manually updated the time for now. [/edit] |
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Post by pyradonis on Nov 20, 2023 18:20:22 GMT
As for the dead NP, well, it makes sense that that could happen. Annie and Renard specifically saw the NP in the ether, so they really are alive, as Kat had hoped. The mystery there is why Loup thinks they are not. He has stated that they weren't alive and he couldn't sense life in them on multiple occasions. It's actually a bit odd that Annie can see them in the ether but Loup could not! What's up with that??? A Zimmy-made Etheric distortion seems to be usable as the missing element for some God-tier improvements on reality. See: Annies getting combined back into one, Kat being enabled to create a living body from nothing (Torn Sea). Maybe this distortion was the last missing part to finally turn the NP into living beings in every sense. |
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