Sweveham

I have grown tired of EGS and it's pacing. The reason is that there seems to be no resolution, no ending forthcoming to the comic. Old plot threads like Lord Tedd are left ignored while new ones are added. So the comic keeps on sprawling incessantly. Dan recently said that he even has plans for when the characters go to college. It keeps on going and going. And it is starting to wear out it's welcome. It may be just me, but I feel that a story requires an ending, some kind of resolution. Another problem with pacing in EGS is the tendency to give us long bouts of boring exposition that just make my eyes glaze over. It may be good worldbuilding, but I doubt that is a good thing. I agree with the great SF writer M. John Harrison: "Worldbuilding is dull". Harrison in the blog post linked above also makes the great point that worldbuilding tends to rationalize fantastic worlds, stripping them of wonder and mystery: " This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake." The magic system in EGS is a great example of what Harrison is saying. It is too rational, utilitarian and orderly to be truly magical. Spellbooks in EGS remind me of car manuals. Compare the magic in Le Guin's Earthsea books which has a mystical, almost spiritual element to it. The present story arc in EGS is about preventing magic changing to become far less easy to use. I can't help but wonder how more interesting the comic would become if that change was to happen. I changed as a person and it seems as if I have outgrown EGS. Well, at least I have had fun with it over the years. It was fun spending time with you guys here too, I'll hang around for a while, at least to see what your response to this will be.

I must admit that I come to expect to live in a society in which I can loan books from a library without paying or get healthcare without it figuratively costing an arm and a leg. In that sense I'm "addicted the government". But that isn't really what you mean, is it? If you're talking about people on unemployment benefits, it is true that people can sadly come to rely on them for years. But in my experience this is in most cases due to a lack of jobs than any laziness on their part. For decades work has been hard to come by. We should also remember that living on benefits is far from a comfortable existence and working is often preferable. I must admit that as a disabled person, my need of outside help both from the government and others was something I struggled with and it did hurt my self-esteem. But eventually I came to accept that dependence is an unavoidable fact of life and nothing to be ashamed of. The myth of the "rugged individual" is just that, a myth. No matter how capable you are, you are always dependent on someone, will always need someone's help. "No man is an island" and all that. I am a individualist, but society is necessary in order for the individual to flourish. We should keep in mind when people are not dependent on the state, they tend to become dependent on family, charities and church. And they as institutions can be just as oppressive and hostile to the individual as the state. When I applied for disability benefits, I could do so without being asked to cut my hair or believe in a certain God. With a church, that isn't always the case. This is simply wrong. Government money isn't removed from the economy. The money from your taxes isn't thrown into a black hole, never to be seen again. When I received disability benefits, I used that money to pay for food, rent, clothes and books. In that way the money comes back into the economy. Same thing when for example a teacher receives his salary from the state. This could even be argued to stimulate the economy, as Keynes did. When tax money is invested in infrastructure, education and healthcare, that helps the economy. I probably don't need to argue for how a good infrastructure and a healthy, educated workforce helps the economy. And yes, people are expensive, but in my view the point of the economy is to provide for the needs of the people. We should reject economistic thinking, when we judge people and things solely on how much money they make, making money the measure of all things. Some things are worth paying for even if we don't gain any monetary profit from them. They provide value in other ways. Libraries are a good example. Human beings are valuable and worth caring for, even if they are disabled and will never make money.

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Well, what is the alternative to government involvement in healthcare and education? You see, it is simply the case that many who are poor, unemployed, sick or disabled will simply die or live horrible lives without a strong welfare state to assist them. Some conservatives believe that private charity will be a adequate replacement for social safety net, but that is a view that is lacking in historical understanding. History shows that private charity was wholly unable to care adequately for the unfortunate. It was the kind of horrors Dickens wrote about. I have no pretensions of objectivity in this. I have myself received a public education, uses government funded healthcare, visits the library weekly and has even lived on a disability benefits for a few years. My life would probably have ended rather quickly if I lived in a libertarian country. This experience informs my political views, an important part of which is the principle that society has a responsibility to care for the unfortunate and that taxation is acceptable to fulfil that responsibility.

I would actually like to know what happens if she walked into the barrier. Is she thrown out of the simulation? With the possible exception of Dan, who knows? Though, I must agree with Sarah that it is better to be on the safe side. That barrier is not only weird, but scary.

This is simply wrong. There is no other way to set economic, or really any political policy than by ideology. Politicians today like to claim that their policies is beyond ideology and solely informed by pragmatical concerns. Their policy is "whatever works", as Tony Blair liked to say. The problem with this is that a political policy can only be said to work if it achieves a result you want. And what results you want of course depends on your ideology, the values and principles that you hold. Denying that you have an ideology when you are a political actor is merely obscuring the values that underlie your actions. Conservatives, liberals and socialists all have different value systems and therefore want different results. Politics always raises questions and they need answers. These questions range from foundational and general, like "what is a good society?" and "how shall we achieve that society", to specific matters of policy. Answering them in a coherent and (nota bene) consistent way requires a system of values, an ideology. Philosophically, you can't consider each issue separately from the rest. Political action requires reasonable justification, and that justification must rest on a rational, coherent and consistent philosophical worldview,

Wow, driving with no hands. Somehow, the sentence "That is just not safe", while perfectly true, is not capable of capturing just how irresponsible this is. And yes, most of Europe has right-side traffic.

This is some heavy stuff, man. I didn't realize that this would be another reason why magic changing would be such a huge deal for Tedd. But now when it is pointed out, it is so obvious. It is even heavier when you think of the fact that Tedd's situation here is not far from the reality of genderfluid people in this world.

That was very clever by Rhoda. The plan worked perfectly and no one was hurt. Also, those big sleeves are indeed very cute.

I like that Rhoda is too nice to even make Kitty trip and fall. There is something touching and cute about that.

Adrian is telling the truth to Pandora here, and I admire him for it. It takes guts to stand up to a powerful immortal being like this, especially when she is your mother.

I was actually wondering what Akiko was doing on her own in the mall. Turns out she wasn't actually on her own, which does make sense. 8 Years old and only wants one cookie? I can accept magic and space whales in a story, but this is straining my suspension of disbelief. I'm pretty sure It's meant to be Akiko's thoughtbubble, or rather her thought caption (warning: tv tropes link). She may look as if she is listening to someone in the third panel, but I think she is just looking back at Rhoda. Granted, this is merely my interpretation and I know only too well how faulty it can be.

I'm also fond of DIane's response. It even made me like her more. That woman has spirit.

A good comparison is perhaps another Cage's piece: As Slow As Possible. The composition is only eight notepages long, and can be performed in 20 minutes. But as the name implies, you can play it slow. Very slow, in fact. 24 hours is the longest performance by a single person so far. And a machine can play it even slower and longer. So after Cage's death some interesting people have rigged an organ in a German church to play the piece for 639 years, starting in 2001. Let that sink in: 639 years. Organs are durable instruments, and can last that long with maintenance. The bellows are driven with electricity. Each single chord sounds for years. You can listen to the present chord on the official site of the project( which is all in german). It's the player on the right, under the words "aktueller klang". Again, this is a case of art where the idea and the very existence of the work is more important than experiencing the work itself. And personally I love the idea, it's delightfully insane and awe-inspiring in scope. Also, the sheer belief in the future the project represents warms my otherwise rather pessimistic heart. Well, I've gone really off-topic now, haven't I?

I have worked as a librarian and as such, had to deal with teachers bringing their entire class to the library. So I can sympathize with Tensaided here. Dealing with groups of clients or customers is hard. In fact, Tensaided has it even harder then usual, for he has to bring everyone in this group to the same conclusion. That's pretty much impossible. That film was probably inspired by Andy Warhol's film Sleep from 1963. It's the same thing, a man sleeping for six hours. Don't miss Warhol's exciting follow-up, Empire (1964), which is eight hours of The Empire State building. The films are of course not meant to be watched. It is the very idea or concept of the films that are interesting, not the films themselves. They were only filmed in the first place to make the idea of them more powerful.