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Vorlonagent

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Posts posted by Vorlonagent

  1. Posted

    17 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

    Yes. Magus was talking to Elliot and had his hand raised ready to cast a spell, when Elliot decided he'd heard enough, transformed into Super Elliot (Cheerleadra made to look like FV1 Elliot) between panels, and tackled Magus, which is why Magus cuts off mid-word and winds up lying on the floor.

    Minor quibble I spent too much time researching: Not a FV1.  I agree entirely with the rest of your post. 

    The body in the costume looks like the standard-issue Cheerleadra form to me (FV5) just wearing a much-improved version of Elliot's "So a Date at the Mall" costume.  Also reminder: By default Cheerleadra looks like Ellen.

  2. Posted

    1 minute ago, Tom Sewell said:

    Perhaps the reason our Elliot is what he is is because he's linked somehow to all the other Ells, most of them female. No wonder he still has such a strong female side even after spinning off our totally-female Ellen. Before that, and even now, our Elliot could be more of a woman than one woman can contain.

    Despite being a fictional character Sarah suddenly finds herself unaccountably angry.  :)

  3. Posted

    14 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

    Balletmage. Or maybe soccermage.

    Or TransforMage if personal inclination enters into it...

    14 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

    The reason is that all the Ells are hot.

    No argument.  With EGS Prime Ellen the hottest of the bunch.

    Appropos of nothing, of the universes we know about Dunkel children born Ellen now outnumber Elliots.   The ratio is either 3:1 or 3:2 depending on how you count the AF04 Universe in EGS: NP.  I think it's a canon universe despite appearing in non-canon EGS:NP, but I couldn't fnd the NP comic that lays out what is canon NP and what isn't.

  4. Posted

    3 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

    Ashley might become a balletmage someday, but I think you had something else in mind.

    I think the sparring match was likely Magus trying to prove to himself that he hadn't made a mistake and that Terra is the stronger mage. Why else would he be  using a potion? That's always sounded like a cheat to me.

    However, you did not guess the reason I had in mind in my last post which, I repeat, has nothing to do with magic, ballet or battle.

    I'm not sure why Ashley would suddenly be a great battlemage candidate...

    Magus made a presumably permanent change to his default form.  He had a big change to defend.  Dunno if it was cheating...

    No I didn't guess it because I don't think his family and friends told him the switch was a mistake.  I think they told him he didn't have a choice.

  5. Posted

    5 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

    I'm guessing that most of the boys and all of the girls told her she was making a big mistake. I think you can figure out a reason that has nothing to do with magic.

    I don't think so.  based on magus' dialogue in today's strip, he had it beaten into him that he had to be male to be a battlemage.  Mentally squint a little at his dialogue and gender invert the pronouns, then correct this for Magus' life.  I think he's telling us what happened to him.

    "What does everybody do?  Railroad her into staying a man....She was pushed into adopting a gender identity not her own to fit an identity that was created for her....Pressured to be anyone but herself...her only options for becoming female were temporary ones that could easily be dispelled without warning...always knowing what her default form had become."

    yeah, I'll be Magus says he likes being male.  he has accepted it as his only option.

    I don't get why being a ballemage is such a male-centric job, but if I'm reading Magus right, they brought it down like a sledgehammer on him and he made the switch while Terra bulled through as a female.  Presumably their magical battle was an attempt at settling the gender argument.

  6. Posted

    1 hour ago, Scotty said:

    Magus could still feel like he's had to give up a lot in order to be successful, he may have spent a number of years convincing himself that this is who he must become if he wants to be great. A lot of people fall into the trap of hiding things about themselves rather than embracing them, but it's usually because of their own perceptions of what other MAY think rather than what others WILL think. You say Magus has been hurting because he's been forced to become something he shouldn't be, but shouldn't Terra also be suffering from ridicule and such for choosing to stay female in a male dominant career? In Hidden Genesis, Terra looks confident in her abilities without having to change sex, so either Terra's done a better job of handling it, or Magus is seeing issues that aren't actually there. Remember, Magus has argued with someone over the pros of becoming a man to be a battlemage, it's safe to assume that one such conversation was with Terra, but what if Magus has had to argue this point more than once and with other people? It'd seem more like he was trying to convince others that this would be the best course of action, even though it doesn't have to be. Maybe he's taking flak for that. Our Tedd for a long time assumed that transforming into a girl was just a natural thing that anyone who had the ability would do, and even used the excuse that it was like a vacation, but you remember when he found out about what being Genderfluid was, it was like a weight was suddenly lifted off him. Elliot's had issues with being introspective but has been getting better, it's quite possible that Magus is suffering from that lack in introspection as well.

    Pretty much   Magus spent  a number of years as a girl.  10, 12, maybe even 15 or 16.  Which means when he gender-reversed, he had to have the same damn conversation with a whole lot of people either leading up to the change or afterward. 

  7. Posted

    2 minutes ago, Scotty said:

    There's still no real indication that Magus was forced to conform, in our world discrimination between sexes stems from assumptions that one sex is better at doing some things than the other, in Magus' world where magic makes it easy to switch sex. Maybe a group of people actually did a study where they did a bunch of tasks as each sex, and they came to the conclusion that each sex was more optimized in performing different tasks. A set of guidelines would likely be drawn up that people don't have to follow but if they want to excel at a particular career it'd be recommended they use the optimal sex, it's efficient, and there are probably very rare exceptions when the opposite sex outdoes the recommended sex (Terra may have turned out to be such an exception), but the system works.

    The only drawback is that some people may take it too seriously, like Magus wanting to succeed soo much that anything less is a waste, he's friends with Terra but he's at odds with her because she didn't want to become male. that whole "your potential is wasted!" comment would be evidence of Magus believing that Terra is squandering her chances of being a successful battlemage by not becoming male like Magus did.

    Magus lays exactly this out in Friday's and Today's comics.  Yes, he's talking about Ellen, but he's also talking about his experience as Ellen.  His motivation is admirable: he wants to spare Ellen the pain he went through, likely as direct atonement to Ellen for willingly letting Sirleck possess her. 

    Ellen carries a lot of pain from her first day and suddenly having to come to terms with the fact that she wasn't Elliot, an identity she felt every bit as as deeply as Elliot himself.  Also from starting life sure she was going to simply disappear in a month.  She's carried some anger at Tedd for the series of mistakes that led to her creation and that pain.  Magus thinks he has an insight into Ellen's pain that has not only eluded everybody else around her but they worked to suppress, just as Magus' world worked to suppress who he really was (which comes back to why I use "he" for Magus provisionally)

  10. Posted

    14 hours ago, Haylo said:

    I'm beginning to wonder just how much choice ur-ellen was given, most likely being hurried into "doing the right thing" with no consideration for how painful she would find it in the long run.

    I'm getting that vibe too.  That m!Ellen (magus-Ellen) was forced by his world's rules to be physically male in order to follow the path he wanted (I use "he" and "his" for Magus with some hesitancy.  Magus himself would argue vehemently for it, but I suspect that vehemence might be fueled by genuine gender dysphoria at being male).

    If Magus got Elliot's Cherleadra spell along with his new body, that could be an eye-opener for him.  Cheerleadra is far more physically powerful than any unmodified human body, male or female, invalidating the logic that forced Magus to masculinize himself.

  11. Posted

    4 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    Magus will push.

    ... and I'm not entirely sure this will build down the confrontation, no matter how good point it is.

    That's what I expect too.  And a Cheerleadra transformation is likely to follow.  The question then is if we get a second one.   :)

  12. Posted

    1 minute ago, hkmaly said:

    This definitely needs to be said, if for nothing else to make Magus say why he's in rush.

    However, it would be better if it wouldn't be only argument. Elliot turning to cheerleadra and saying that he doesn't mind being woman now could be more effective in making Magus doubt his decision ...

    I think Elliot's fine unless magus pushes the issue.

    Better still is something that builds down the confrontation.  "It's ellen's choice..  You'd want that choice in her place.  You wouldn't want even the right thing done TO you without your consent or control."

  14. Posted

    39 minutes ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

    I'm not believing this.

    CD Baby ran out of stock of the Calibrations CDs on April Fools' Day. I've talked to them and to Disc Makers, and it seems like they'll be restocked on Friday the 13th.

    What did I do to deserve this?

    You're an artists and you've been suffering.  How can it not be that you've produced good art?  :)

  15. Posted

    16 hours ago, mlooney said:

    It was used a lot by people making embedded systems.  If Wikipedia is to be believed that was it's primary market. The Dialogic voice / telephone boards that I spent about 10 years working with used an '186 as it's on board chip.

    My first job out of college was doing assembly programming on a 186.  Burning my code onto an EEPROM and plugging it into a chip socket on an industrial computer.  Debugging that code was awful.

  21. Posted

    4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

    As long as he isn't a lost Sherman tank. That one was awful. I'd rather think of the Prof as a Pershing.

    I was going to ask if Mr Peabody had more than one Sherman and it just got edited out.  Some of his timeline fixes were a bit sketchy...

  22. Posted

    2 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

    Assembling a car from scratch is not putting together parts manufactured by someone else. Scratch building means building from basic raw materials. In building models, it means no kit; you decide what you want to make and you craft the whole thing yourself, not assembling a kit. In furniture, it doesn't mean buying a flatpack from Ikea and assemblying it; it means gathering deadwood or cutting down trees and curing the wood, carving all the wooden pieces, obtaining fiber for any fabrics and making the fabrics, learning how to smelt durable metals from ore, learning how to smith that metal, smithing, inventing the Allen wrench...

    The principal of the computer is easy to explain? Okay, what's the difference between a digital and an analog computer? How do you make a chip? What's a semiconductor? What is valence? Who was Boole? Why is Lord Byron's daughter considered the very first computer programmer?

    Nobody knows. 

    ...as in "no single individual in the Real World knows how to build a recognizably current car from a pile of iron ore, tree sap, etc" To make a classic car (1940s - 60s, say) you first have to reinvent the Industrial Revolution.  To make a 2018 sort of car you also have to replicate the Information Revolution.  And iterate significantly on both technologies. 

  23. Posted

    26 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Remember, Rhoda may have been more shy and meek than she normally would have been, due to hiding from all the attention she got after seeing the creepy-little-girl live on TV.  She may have been more outgoing all along if it weren't for that trauma (mild but still a trauma to her).  Having supportive friends and being in a good, healthy relationship has helped her get over her sort-of-PTSD.  So, Rhoda wasn't going from a naturally very shy and timid person to a Domme, she went from her normal self to an emotionally wounded person and then back to her old self (and likely carried on even beyond her original personality).

    And personally, I can definitely see Catalina being the sort who is a dominant personality to the outside world, but loves to be able to relax and let someone else be in charge if it's someone she really, really trusts.  And somehow becoming the dominant one in her private life fits Rhoda, too.  ;-)

    I was thinking along these lines.  Catalina is mercuric and ready-fire-aim reactive but she's actually very meek those times she isn't reacting to her world.  Rhoda seems to be the reverse.  timid in public because people are huge and she's tiny.  But in private when she's comfortable a more aggressive side comes out.

  24. Posted

    34 minutes ago, Haylo said:

    A new question: We know that an Uryuom "egg" with no Uryuom DNA produces a Roaisol Seyunolu, one Uryuom DNA and one Non-Uryuom DNA source produces a Tolougal Seyunolu, and two different Uryuom DNA sources produces an Uryuom, but the number of DNA sources can be more than two (Grace having four sources). What results with two Uryuoms and one Non-Uryuom DNA source? Is the rule "more than one Uryuom always breeds true?" That would sure be handy for adapting second-generation Uryuom settlers to a new planet by producing true Uryuoms with extra, localised DNA.

    http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=415