|
Post by saardvark on Dec 26, 2018 1:19:14 GMT
Welcome, penguinguy! I'm kinda new around here myself.
I suppose it's a mistake to overanalyze a single panel, but I'm really intrigued by Reynardine's reaction. He's clearly surprised, but (if I'm reading him right) not exactly startled. His "wolfie sense" is tingling for sure.
Could that be an indication that he's long suspected that there's something wrong with court!Annie, and he has suddenly realized what it is?
My current guess is that both Annies are real, but each is incomplete in some way. Maybe Rey senses in forest!Annie the bit that's been missing from the Annie he's been around for the last six months.
Like "Oh, that's where the rest of you went!"
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 24, 2018 21:47:48 GMT
I'm interested in seeing what the Rey/Tony dynamic is now. I kinda think they are still going to butt heads, Tony seems like all the things about the court Rey doesn't trust wrapped up into one guy. ...and yet Tony doesn't trust the court either, and has a rather jaundiced opinion of their schemes. He works behind the Court's back to do what he thinks best (tho his choices are not always wise!). And they both love Annie. They may have more in common than one would first imagine, and may eventually grow to be odd allies in some ways....
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 24, 2018 21:25:09 GMT
I really wonder what Anthony thinks about all of this, the few words he's said so far have been in support of Forrest Annie. Its hard to get a read on him with his nearly expressionless face. He seemed very open to the idea that each Annie is real, he probably doesn't like the Annie's hurling barbs at each other, and is continuing to defend Forrest Annie. welcome to the forum, penguinguy! He has been subtly supportive of Forest!Annie, and this irritates Court!Annie. He could have followed Kat's suggestion, and set Forest!Annie up in a nearby house; but instead offered for her to stay with him. It will be interesting to see how the situation evolves... especially how Rey perceives things.
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 22, 2018 13:06:23 GMT
I mean, she looked pretty ready to attack Parley the first time, and only stopped herself for a while because Parley's cowardice disgusted her that much. Considering how quickly Jeanne seems to have gone through everyone she's faced who was not of the court, was she really attacking Parley? Or was she sparring with her? The way she complements Parley's foot strike in passing www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=779and Parley's own assessment - " could have killed us in a heartbeat" www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=781suggests that Jeanne was just sparring with her, perhaps out of an odd respect for/awe of Parley's intense love for the Smittster....
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 21, 2018 14:54:28 GMT
More to the point, the arrow did not directly trap Jeanne's spirit. It trapped her green guy's spirit - and held it at the bottom of the river. Her bond to him held her, but gave her somewhat more freedom of motion. It wouldn't do any good to trap Annie's spirit in one spot - consensually or otherwise. By the way, freedom of motion - have we ever learned why Jeanne was able to cross the river when Annie fell from the bridge? Or why she did not kill Annie (twice)? Or why Kat did not see Jeanne when she came to pick Annie up? Did Jeanne cross the river only in the Ether? I haven't read the discussions of back then (before I joined up!) so this has probably all been speculated on before but... You might be right - Jeanne crossing in ether only could also explain why her sword cut on Annie's cheek only appears in the ether. Jeanne might have been drawn by Annie's natural "ether-attractiveness", and didn't kill her because she was so unusual in that regard... how could she (Jeanne) be so attracted to something she usually hated (humans from "that place"). Jeanne cut her slightly as if to test "are you flesh and blood? what are you?" Perhaps she could sense the fire-elemental part of Annie too(?)
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 21, 2018 0:25:52 GMT
The buildings and roofs in the lower right make me reasonably sure this or something very close to it is Tom's reference picture. Kind of super weird that I should stumble across this on the same day the relevant page is posted. Are you sure you don't have etheric abilities? kind of a Smitty of the internet!
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 19, 2018 15:07:29 GMT
To the extent GC maps onto the real world, it seems likely they've moved/evacuated from the main part of the Court, on the W side of the Annan near the bend in the river around Hoddom and Brydekirk, south to the sea (on the Solway Firth) just south of the town of Annan itself. Maybe...! If that was indeed the same river shouldn't it have dried up after Loup closed it back at the Court/Woods border? Also, it's nice seeing a real world parallel on where the Court would be. The sad part is that with Coyote not being there we have turned Gillitie mostly into farms by now... I speculate that the Annan flows underground now, at least along part of its border with the Court. Basically Loup just pulled the clifftops together, letting the flow continue underneath. Otherwise, a lake would start forming as the upper Annan continued to flow into the area from N of the (former) gorge, and would provide a new barrier of sorts between Court and Forest. And yes, there is precious little forest left on the east side of the lower Annan these days.... mostly Scottish farmland now.
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 19, 2018 13:13:31 GMT
Aside from the actual villains of the comic, is there anyone Tom wants us to like less than Eglamore? He's always got some off-color remark or behaves awkwardly in every scene he's in. Today's Stupid Jimmy Commentâ„¢ makes me want to smack him across the face. Everyone else is evidently fine with Forest!Annie so chill tf out He's security specialist, after all. Probably still keeps expecting forest Annie to sprout branches at any moment. ha! or drop seeds....
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 19, 2018 11:14:28 GMT
To the extent GC maps onto the real world, it seems likely they've moved/evacuated from the main part of the Court, on the W side of the Annan near the bend in the river around Hoddom and Brydekirk, south to the sea (on the Solway Firth) just south of the town of Annan itself. Maybe...!
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 19, 2018 10:43:34 GMT
Some of your posts make me indeed wonder... Why does no one involved, neither Kat nor Tony, Jones, Eggman, or Courtney or Fannie themselves think of asking questions that only the real Annie could know? Would it not be a much more obvious method of determining the realness of one or both Annies instead of thinking about a "Renard test"? If Loup did a complete "memory copy" when he made the new Annie (however he did it), its possible that the copy_Annie would have identical memories with the original, so there would be no differences before they separated.
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 16, 2018 19:33:18 GMT
We've always seen Annie and Surma referred to as a fire elemental. Nowhere in the comic is it stated or even implied that there is only one fire elemental. The Forest denizens even recognise her as one of a type. Just the fact that someone is a fire elemental does not mean she is "the real Annie". Interesting... so are you proposing that one of the Annies is a fusion of a fire elemental from the Forest and perhaps some part of Annie lacking her elemental? The Forest fire elemental would probably have been forced by Loup into such a fusion against its will... possibly explaining the wonky, tattered appearance of Court!Annie's elemental, since the elemental is trapped unwillingly in Court!Annie. In turn, this implies that the more "real" Annie (consisting of most of normal-space Annie and all of her elemental) is Forest!Annie.
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 16, 2018 17:43:48 GMT
I had been operating under the assumption that Forest!Annie's experiences during the time Loup was challenging her reintegrated her fully with her elemental nature, and her regrown hair was a result or signifier of that. I think we see that Court!Annie is not showing the same level of reintegration. Its why Court!Annie's elemental is so patchy and fragmented....
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 15, 2018 19:32:15 GMT
I'm just wondering when they're going to take Forest Annie to get something to eat..! Girl, if I hadn't eaten in six months, I'd be demanding to be fed chocolate cake and pot pie. Hmm, there is another part of physical Annie (her stomach) which must have only experienced the one day of Loup's Forest altered time. Otherwise she'd have starved to death.... Is it only her hair (fire elemental connected!) which continued on "Court time"?
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 15, 2018 19:27:54 GMT
On a more mundane note, I wonder where Forest!Annie will live? With Court!Annie and Tony? Will the Annies be roomies? That could be awkward.... Or with Kat? Jones? Assuming it is with Tony, they might have to buy a whole new wardrobe for Forest!Annie since Court!Annie has outgrown all those things... I think those questions should wait until when they no longer have a mad wolf trickster-god threatening the Court. If Loup destroys the place, it obviously won't matter what they're going to wear. I don't know... Forest!Annie has been wearing the same clothes for 6 months now... they might be a bit fragrant by now! (Actually, since only a day passed for her in the Forest, she's probably OK on that count.) But that points up a possible inconsistency - or puzzle at least - Forest!Annie's hair grew as if 6 months had passed, but her body didn't grow, otherwise she'd be the same size as Court!Annie. So why did some parts of her feel Forest time, and some feel Court time? Did her hair grow because it is the part of her physical self most linked to her fire elemental? If so, that would suggest her fire elemental was not under Loup's time alteration control. Are some other aspects of Annie's fire elemental outside of Loup's ability to control? Might prove interesting down the line....
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 15, 2018 11:53:05 GMT
On a more mundane note, I wonder where Forest!Annie will live? With Court!Annie and Tony? Will the Annies be roomies? That could be awkward.... Or with Kat? Jones? Assuming it is with Tony, they might have to buy a whole new wardrobe for Forest!Annie since Court!Annie has outgrown all those things...
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 12, 2018 23:13:25 GMT
The answer is obvious. One copy is for the Psychopomps. The other copy is for Loup (or so he thinks). welcome to the forum! that would be a neat solution for the problem of the Pomps drafting Annie out of the story at some point... the copy!Annie works for the Pomps and the (more?)real one continues @court...
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 12, 2018 13:01:56 GMT
I LOVE this artist, and his "Icarus and the Sun" series (which this is presumably part of) are works of beauty. Yup, thats the series - about the tragic love of a wax angel with a fire girl... Ive posted a couple of them in the past.
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 10, 2018 18:26:45 GMT
"Enjoy the view" - ha! That would get Eggs all hot and bothered, if he wasn't looking slack-jawed at forest!Annie.... the "come-hither" suggestion is very un-Jones-like tho.
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 10, 2018 15:39:26 GMT
Tony: eglamore please I'm finally repairing my relationship with my daughter and a second one shows up! that's like. double good karma bro. don't look a gift horse in the mouth man. I'm gonna be -tears up- such a good double-dad. I suddenly got the very weird image of Tony with big teary anime puppy dog pleading eyes. Aggggh! Too bizarre...
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 10, 2018 15:36:43 GMT
Now I'm wondering just why Jones's clothes burned off during reentry. The obvious implication is that Loup put her in orbit, left her there undisturbed for six months, and then de-orbited her similar to the way our real-world spacecraft operate. This would mean that Jones entered the atmosphere at near-orbital velocity, which would produce a shock wave and enough heating to destroy the clothes. But there doesn't seem to be any particular reason for Loup to treat Jones like a human spacecraft. He obviously has the ability to give matter any velocity he wishes, without the constraints of the rocket equation. The reason our spacecraft reenter as they do is that it would be prohibitive to launch them with enough fuel so they could slow to comfortable speeds before reentering. Loup doesn't have that problem. He could have decelerated Jones before bringing her down. For that matter, he wouldn't have had to put her in orbit at all. He could have just shot her up with enough speed so it took six months for her to fall back down. But it doesn't look like he did that, since her clothes didn't burn off on the way up. So, did Loup do it this way merely to embarrass Jones? She doesn't seem embarrassable, really, but maybe her nudity would embarrass others (like Eglamore). You're right of course. I (totally) guessed that violating physics/the laws of nature would actually require a bit of effort/thought, which chaotic Loup might be too lazy/unfocussed to bother with. But I certainly could be wrong!
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 10, 2018 12:19:02 GMT
Part of me so wishes those marks on Jones indicated that something finally dinged the old girl. Probably just a little carbon smudge from her incinerated clothes (burned on up reentry, hence the blanket)
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 10, 2018 12:17:21 GMT
actually, it turns out you could launch Jones to geostationary orbit on any of the currently available heavy launch vehicles (Ariene 5, Proton-M, Delta IV heavy), assuming she weighs a "mere" 1100 kg (almost 75% more than the heaviest ever human on record). Comment remains highly amusing tho!
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 10, 2018 0:58:32 GMT
The US Sacagawea $1 coin is made of manganese brass, is mostly copper (so about the right density) with some zinc and manganese alloyed in and has a nice golden color... A surprising number of people haven't even heard about small-size gold-tone dollars. About a year ago I got one of the presidential ones in change and tried to spend it at the grocery store. It took them almost 20min of deliberation to 1. not call the cops and 2. actually accept it. One person asked if it was actual gold. [edit] Also, the people behind me in line at the checkout were ultrapissed. It took more than 5x longer than writing out a paper check. After 5min delay/debate I offered to take it back and give them another dollar or change amounting to same but they refused, thinking I'd tried to pass a counterfeit. [/edit] yeah, they are used so infrequently that the US mint has scaled back production considerably. They were trying to get people to stop using dollar bills and switch to the golden coins (much longer lasting and so cheaper to produce), but it was an epic fail...
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 9, 2018 1:01:50 GMT
The US Sacagawea $1 coin is made of manganese brass, is mostly copper (so about the right density) with some zinc and manganese alloyed in and has a nice golden color.... That's a tiff file. It's the first time I've seen someone use a tiff file. And that includes me, since I've seen it in the "Save as..." options and thought to myself "what? Is that a Tiffany's file type?" can you view it? I can convert to jpeg or something else if needed...
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 8, 2018 17:49:23 GMT
Jones might be like a super-iridium, since she has more of a golden than silver tinge. But if I'm honest she may just be the concept of mass. In any case, she is still super cool. I wonder if she just said something in this last page, and that is why they are all looking at Fannie, or whether she's just been staring this whole time and so the others are. In any case, Courtney has a really unsavory face right now. The US Sacagawea $1 coin is made of manganese brass, is mostly copper (so about the right density) with some zinc and manganese alloyed in and has a nice golden color.... sacagawea_dollar.tiff (383.31 KB)
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 8, 2018 13:30:30 GMT
OK, you put me into total nerd-out mode... [nerded-out] A bit wild-spec-y next: I rather think that instead of being made of a solid "something", Jones probably has a very thin shell/skin of something exceptionally dense, and a somewhat more normal interior. For nerdy fun, lets say she has a thin skin made of electron degenerate matter (like what white dwarf stars are made out of). This is matter so compressed that the atoms are crushed, and you are left with bare nuclei held in a sort of crystal lattice of free floating, mutually repelling electrons. Density of this stuff is about 10 9 kg/m 3. If a cylindrical Jones was covered by 1 cm of white dwarf matter, the rest of her volume (about 90% of it!) could be of something much less dense... iron would be about right (density 7860 kg/m 3). So Jones could be made of iron with a white dwarf star skin! edit: fixed the exponents... I think you'd want to tune down that white dwarf estimation there if you don't want to implode the planet! Just kidding, a 1cm layer of white dwarf like density wouldn't create a black hole, but Jones would weight a few megatons and combined with her 1.5m height (not 1.8m, that's almost an Eglamore and as far as I remember she's shorter than Annie) she probably wouldn't be able to be at the Earth's crust level. If you lower the scale to the microns I could accept that, but then there's the fact that it would protect her only from cutty/stabby damage and she would be susceptible to impact damage (which she's clearly not) But I agree that she might not be made from a single dense substance as much as we're not made of 100% skin or bone. She's just made of a lot of dense stuff incomprehensible to modern physics and that stuff for some reason has less mass than any known material with such density would have and are almost non reactive (with the only reactions being a stoic expression towards the lab people and a demand to be informed when her presence is not needed anymore) you are entirely correct! The white dwarf (WD) layer thickness seemed too thick to me too, but I didn't see my nerdly error - a goof in the formula for the volume of a cylindrical shell. The WD skin on Jones should be about 300 microns thick, and the rest of her made of something like copper (8960 kg/m 3). And yeah, WD matter is too dense to work, but I couldn't think of anything natural that was in a reasonable density range. Even the Earth's core is "only" 12800 kg/m 3 , not much more than lead!
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 8, 2018 1:08:16 GMT
As I got closer to the bottom of saardvark's amazing nerd out, I swear I could hear Renard starting to shout ethereal tenant at all of us. "What is with you people and needing to explain everything?!" yeah, sorry sorry! I got carried away... I'm a scientist by trade after all (betcha couldn't tell!) so nerding out comes so naturally....
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 7, 2018 23:58:46 GMT
Just for fun: A woman of her built would weigh about 55 kg, I guess (yes I have first hand experience with women of her build; I married one) . So her volume is +/- 55 litre. The density of lead is 11kg per litre. If her density would be anything like that she would weigh +/- 600kg. Then she could still get on that boat to America without capsizing it. And on the other hand it would give her enough stopping power to take on a bison. A normal 600 kg meteor would probably do a lot more damage than this because it would explode on impact. (Well, most 600kg meteors would not even reach the ground, but that is beside the point.) Jones would just be extremely hot (yes The Anarch , she is always...) and probably a small explosion would take place if she came in contact with groundwater, but other then that her impact would be relatively mild. So I think Tom Siddell drew a realistic amount of damage. OK, you put me into total nerd-out mode... We now have enough information (from the impact crater and Jones' approximate sizes) to estimate her weight, believe it or not! Stony meteorites (density 2600 kg/m 3) with 4m diameter have a terminal kinetic energy (KE) of 0.75 kt of TNT (they produce an airburst, disintegrating at ~42.5 km). This assumes an average initial reentry velocity of 17 km/s and an impact angle of 45 degrees. Jones is presumably much denser and would not airbust but would rather impact. Assuming it is at the airburst equivalent KE, we need to scale from the meteorite properties to those of Jones. Jones has much smaller volume than a 4m sphere, Im guessing she's equivalent to a 0.2 m diameter cylinder 1.8 m high. That gives her a volume ~0.0017x of the 4m metiorite. The KE varies linearly with mass = density x volume. If Jones has the density of lead (11300 kg/m 3) she will have a mass 0.0074 x the 4 m meteorite. So her terminal KE is 5.5 tons of TNT - that is the equivalent energy she hits the ground with. Crater diameter scales linearly with the diameter D_imp of the impactor, with D_crater = 14.65 x D_imp (based on my average of the data in Wikipedia). With 0.0017x the volume of the 4m meteorite, Jones would have the equivalent "spherical diameter" (i.e., diameter if she was rolled into a sphere) of about 0.48 m. That suggests the "Jones crater" should be about 7m in diameter. The actual crater diameter looks to be about equal to 4 floors of the building adjacent, or about 12 m. So that implies Jones must have a density of 70% higher than lead, and impacted with a KE of about 9.4 tons of TNT. Osmium is the densest known element, about twice that of lead. So Jones' density is not outside the realm of physical substances. If my volume estimate is reasonable, Jones has a weight of about 1100 kg, 20x a normal human of her size Lots of assumptions in here, so a large margin of error on all this! All thanks to Wikipedia for the data needed. A bit wild-spec-y next: I rather think that instead of being made of a solid "something", Jones probably has a very thin shell/skin of something exceptionally dense, and a somewhat more normal interior. For nerdy fun, lets say she has a thin skin made of electron degenerate matter (like what white dwarf stars are made out of). This is matter so compressed that the atoms are crushed, and you are left with bare nuclei held in a sort of crystal lattice of free floating, mutually repelling electrons. Density of this stuff is about 10 9 kg/m 3. If a cylindrical Jones was covered by 1 cm of white dwarf matter, the rest of her volume (about 90% of it!) could be of something much less dense... iron would be about right (density 7860 kg/m 3). So Jones could be made of iron with a white dwarf star skin! edit: fixed the exponents... edit2: see later post for corrected white dwarf skin thickness (should be 300 microns) - thanks to nether dan for pointing out the error! edit3: for a sense of scale, 300 microns is about the width of adult 2-3 human hairs.
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 7, 2018 20:07:33 GMT
I thought I'd seen Antimony use her fire as a ranged attack before but couldn't remember where. Finally found it. Also here. She destroyed the beacons remotely too. Fireballs for the win!! Annie shoots & scores!!
|
|
|
Post by saardvark on Dec 7, 2018 20:01:12 GMT
Shadow 2 was born in the Court, though. I agree with you that it did not look like an attack back then. Still, we see they defended themselves violently (on one of the pictures, there is a destroyed chainsaw robot). Had the shadow men had the ability to control robots, they would have most likely resorted to using it. Which leaves three possibilities: 1. They need Forest wood in order to control something. 2. They learned only later how to possess robots. Or 3. Only certain shadow men are able to possess robots. 1 is IMHO the most probable. Hmm, OK, but still, Forest wood is now available in the court, from the mega-treesor the trans-former-Annan roots. If the shadows could plant a sliver of the tree or root into a robot (stick a toothpick in its joint? poke it in the eye with a twig?), they could then possess it. Perhaps the difficulty is for the shadows to do that planting of a tree sliver(?) Letting shadows wander the Court would not seem a totally risk-free prospect, so Kat & Tony's nonchalance about some escaping the train still puzzles me. But then, I am easily puzzled!
|
|