The Old Hack

Mrs. Prof's best friend at work passed away early this morning.
It wasn't unexpected. She'd suffered from lord knows how many problems with her liver and other organs for years. Back when I was in the hospital in 2009, she and her husband advocated for me when Mrs. Prof had to leave town for a few days. The lady had already undergone several operations of her own even then.
The last blow came when her liver shut down on her. It wasn't a quick process—several months have passed since Mrs. Prof found out. Despite this, the lady continued working, almost up to the end. Mrs. Prof knows the exact details and hasn't shared them with me yet.
I need to take my considerable bulk to the local Big & Tall store and obtain at least an appropriate pair of pants tomorrow. For the service (not sure if it's been scheduled yet). She deserves at least that much respect from me, for the moral and mental support she gave me when I nearly died.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Prof is taking it like a trooper. She'd been expecting this, and I think she was actually sort of relieved when she found out the lady's misery had finally come to an end. She's out of the house now, passing out cat food and medications to volunteer feral cat colony managers. I think she's using this to keep her mind off of the situation.
Mrs. Prof did say one thing about it to me that stuck. She's glad the lady didn't pass on our son's 30th birthday. (Mrs. Prof's father passed on the day in between my birthday (Nov. 19) and hers (Nov.21), turning what used to be a day of silliness and levity into a day of remembrance forever.)

I like that page. It shows that, as desperate as he is, Magus still has a conscience and refuses to participate in murder.

Hot off the presses, it's EGS Faces - Identity! (Also 2 faces from the preceding Q&A, plus a handful from Summer Memories)

Also, I might have a bit of a crush on Ashley. Right up there with Sailor Mercury and AndrAIa from ReBoot.

So... I discovered EGS a few weeks ago, and since then, I have probably read through the archives about 3 and a half times (at least 2 complete read-throughs, but, thanks to all the links in the commentaries, I've gone back and read several storylines numerous times).
Anyway, one of the things I noticed on my readthrough(s) is that the characters make faces that are, well, exaggerated and over the top, and, frankly, hilarious.
So I decided to go back and catalog what I consider to be some of the best faces, starting with End of an Era, the first storyline after the timeskip. I didn't want to start all the way at the beginning, and I knew there was one face in that story that I had to capture. (You probably know the one).
Anyway, I've been using a Chrome extension called Awesome Screenshot, and each pic can be found on my imgur page. 
Without Further Ado:

 

Part 2: Family Tree

This one kind of got away from me. I had been planning to only do a few, but, well...
Suffice it to say, this is when I realized I should be doing these in batches. I'm currently about halfway through Identity, and will add more as I complete each storyline, until I get to the current one, at which point I'll probably work my way backwards through the archive.

Damien was also narcissistic in the extreme and dumber than a sack of rocks. Even with what little I knew of him, I would consider him incapable of an acting job that would so convincingly portray a completely different person.

"Fortunately, buckshot is universally accepted currency." -- Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind

"Fortunately, buckshot is universally accepted currency." -- Gordon Freeman, Freeman's Mind

Damien was also narcissistic in the extreme and dumber than a sack of rocks. Even with what little I knew of him, I would consider him incapable of an acting job that would so convincingly portray a completely different person.

Yes, Pharaoh RutinTutin gets annoyed when people pray to him.

Damien was also narcissistic in the extreme and dumber than a sack of rocks. Even with what little I knew of him, I would consider him incapable of an acting job that would so convincingly portray a completely different person.

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2236
 
So, I had noticed that the NP story "Question Mark" had been added to the menu for main story comics, but I guess I'd just assumed it was a link to the regular NP pages.  Turns out, it's been copied into the regular Story comics section, four to a page, and there are brand new commentaries with each page.  
They're all dated Tuesday May 17, 2016, which puts them, not immediately after "Squirrel Prophet" when they take place, but after the end of "So A Date At The Mall."
I thought that, since I'd missed that fact, others likely have too, plus the new commentaries deserve a place to discuss them.

This reminds me of all the old conundrums of how to prevent WWII. Any viable solution I could think of invariably involved preventing WW1 as well. To do that you needed to go further back... it got quite headachey.
I did find a much simpler way of preventing Hitler from getting into power, one that did not involve shooting him. All you needed to do was to look for him while he was still a painter, pretend to swoon over how magnificent his paintings were and buy them for enough money to set him comfortably up. If you wanted to make sure, surround him with admirers of his art. He'd be ensconced in the burgeoisie and live isolated from the poverty and want that originally lured him into politics. By the time the key years rolled about he would not have the apparatus he needed even if he changed his mind by then.

Edward is no where near "nigh invulnerable".

It's worth remembering that Europeans were expanding everywhere else in the world at the same time, and weren't nicer about it, but didn't manage much in the way of population replacement anywhere the natives didn't drop dead from disease.  South Africa is about the closest they came, and it's less European than the Valley of Mexico, and nowhere close to North America.  I suppose the genes of the population of Singapore are less than half indigenous - of course they mostly aren't *European* either, but still, a marginal success.  There aren't many others in the Old World.
 

Maxima might well let Sydney do it...once.

I'm just waiting for the first time Sydney tries to put a gold star on Max's wrist communicator.
C'mon, you know it's inevitable now.  Only question is whether she'll sneak it on, or try to do it openly.  And, I suppose, how many other team members will be sporting gold stars by then....

Hmm, gets me wondering how a time traveler could save all those civilizations.
Vaccinate everyone on the east coast where the Europeans first arrived?  The first European attempts at settling generally either set up trade on equal terms (or even took what was basically charity), "went native" and joined the pre-existing culture, or were wiped out if they made trouble. Keeping those civilizations strong long enough to set up relations as equals might delay things a little while, but the diseases would still be out there.  Even if the entire continent were vaccinated, that would only protect that current generation.  Even if they'd known the technology to make their own vaccines, they'd need raw materials to work with, which would mean risking exposure to the diseases.
Teaching them epidemiology alone would, as you said, still result in a horrific death toll, especially since we're talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of independent nations and confederations, many of them mobile to one degree or another.  If your hunting frounds and crops for the next season are in an area disease has been occurring, do you choose to starve instead of sicken?
Perhaps the best way to save what we now call the Americas would have been to help the Europeans defeat the key diseases before ever crossing the ocean.  If a time traveler had access to the sort of technology that could vaccinate an entire continent, doing so in Europe might bring the diseases to extinction before they had a chance to spread further.  Of course, who knows what trouble Europeans would have caused if they'd been healthier and more numerous...

I have serious ethical questions about Homo sapiens treatment of h. sapiens.

Well, yeah, that's a given.

"Cock's Cable"?

Good. You keep an eye on it. If it tries anything again, threaten it with a big hammer.

At least the dish washing machine has stopped chanting when I run it.

To easy of a target.  It's like taking a magic marker to the name tape of some one named Flick.

Max' response to what was in Syd's utility belt was, pardon the expression, golden.
My evil twin /me adds mlooney to the list, with elder sign, just because of the dishwasher.