ChronosCat

I wouldn't be shocked if he showed up, but I can't imagine what his motive would be. As for other antagonists, a new foe could always be introduced (either setting things up for a future plot, or a one-shot foe like Not-Tengu). And while I don't expect them to be outright villains, Luke's former group and Jay all seem capable of causing trouble. (Also, I don't expect conflict with him any time soon and it would be pretty strange for him to show up right now, but Magus is still at large.)

Presumably she's embarrassed that the fact that Grace knows she want to see Grace spiking the ball hard. As to why that's embarrassing, it might just be because she hadn't been upfront about it and now her deception is revealed. Alternately, she really has a thing for balls being spiked.

While forcing a Magic Change was one of Voltaire's goals, the more important aspect of his plan was to convince the other Immortals to change their laws, and last we saw that part of the plan was still on course. He also didn't believe that it was Tedd who prevented the Magic Change. So I doubt he's going to be showing up looking for revenge anytime soon. (See: https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2018-02-19)

So, even with Dan's pacing, I can't imagine we're getting all this time spent on choosing the party to meet with the Griffins unless the party composition was going to be important, which makes me wonder why it would be. There's also been a lot of focus on making sure the party is ready for a battle, which also feels like it ought to be important. A few possibilities that come to mind: 1. The meeting will be interrupted by some foe attacking. 2. The griffins have some exposition to deliver regarding Grace (possibly relating to the mysteries surrounding Uryuoms). (Of course this on its own wouldn't explain the focus on being ready for battle.) 3. The griffins are going to object to someone being in the party (or to Nanase not being in the party) leading to verbal or physical conflict. I'm starting to worry it might be a combination of 2 & 3, with the Griffins considering Uryuoms enemies or something.

Except when baking, my family uses Smart Balance rather than butter. As far as I'm concerned it tastes just as good as actual butter, but I'm not a butter connoisseur.

I handled public school very poorly. I was very slow with my school work, had no more than one friend at a time (and often no friends), and was constantly being teased by other kids for every little thing; I absolutely hated the experience. However, it took my parents years to realize there was an alternative and then do something about it. I was too burned out after my failure at college to consider trying again for a while. And now it's been so long that I've forgotten much of what I learned and what I do remember is obsolete. So it wouldn't be "finishing" my degree so much as restarting it. Still, remote learning does have the benefits of not needing to find housing and not standing out for not being "college age", so I'll have to consider it. On the other hand I don't see myself getting a job that requires a degree, and it's relatively easy to learn things without being in school, so I don't really need a degree; it would just be so I could say (to myself and others) that I finished college.

My morning ritual these days involves checking twitter and these forums. (When EGS is posted on time, I usually read it in the evening just before I go to bed.)

If college had been anything like middle school, I wouldn't have been able to handle it as long as I did. Luckily, my classmates were friendly and well behaved, and the teachers had time to help out students individually. Unfortunately, I was going to a small college without dorms which didn't offer all the classes I needed for my degree locally. When in the space of a few months my chronic depression flared up, I discovered the hard way that browsing the internet when one is supposed to be doing school work is a good way to not get that school work done, the Aunt and Uncle I had been staying with told me they'd be moving and I'd need to find another place to stay, and I discovered that I'd need to travel halfway across the state to take my last few classes, things fell apart.

I was homeschooled from 8th grade through to the end of high school. During that time my only "classmate" was my younger sister, and I still see her roughly once a week so there's no need for a reunion.

Kindergarten was half a day for me as well. My memory of it is a little vague (I haven't thought much about it in years) but I'm sure we had chairs and either desks or tables (I remember finding depictions in fiction of kids sitting on the floor in school a bit odd the first time I encountered them). We also must have had recesses where we could do whatever we liked outside, as I don't remember recesses in primary school feeling novel compared to kindergarten.

Dan has said before that after a few last plot threads were tied up (the biggest being the return of the Griffons), there would be a time skip to around the time of their high school graduation. Based on this, and assuming we're nearing the climax of this story and there won't too many stories or any long stories between the time skip and College, I expect them to make it to college some time in 2023 or 2024. ...And if I'm correctly interpreting comments Dan's made in the past about expecting the kids to make it college pretty quickly when he first started the comic, that's when the "Prelude" phase of EGS will conclude and the real story will begin... I only read two web comics these days, and the other one updates slowly enough that I usually check back on it every few months. (I'm actually overdue to check back on it; hopefully it will have a nice chunk of material for me to read.)

I mostly watch science & futurism videos, and lets plays of Zelda games.

Just for old times sake: Yay for starburst background in panel four! (I probably will cheer if Dan uses some more imaginative special backgrounds in the future, and definitely would if he brought back the flowery backgrounds, but I honestly don't have much enthusiasm for the starbursts anymore, thanks to Dan using them so often.) Or, you know, her actual father could have died, never been around, or just done such a poor job at being a father she latched onto someone better at it. Dan hasn't really done big bads since Damien was defeated. Lord Tedd and/or General Shade Tale were set up for the role but haven't been important in years (and we have reason to believe when they return Lord Tedd at least will be portrayed fairly sympathetically). Magus was originally the "mastermind", but now we know he's a fairly good guy who crossed a few lines in his desperation; while he may come into conflict with the main cast again he's hardly a supervillain. Pandora seemed like a big bad for a while, but went out as a hero. Sirleck was never redeemed and fulfilled a role similar to a big bad, but I don't think the comic focused on his threat enough for him to really count. Voltaire seems like a big bad right now, but we don't really know much about him yet and haven't seen him in a while. On the other hand, it does feel like Bishop is being set up to be a major adversary or at least an obstacle for the main cast at some point in the future (particularly if as Arthur implied the plan is for her to become the next head of the Paranormal division of the FBI).

Yes Back in the 90s he was in his 20s; I'm not sure how old he's being portrayed as now. He's actually lucky to not have reverted to a kid, given there have been at least two partial reboots of the DC universe that greatly compressed the timeline (and dropped and/or rewrote a lot of events) so superheroes could once again be a fairly recent phenomena and to help justify the characters who started as adults not growing old. I get that keeping a story set in something like the real world in sync with the real world is difficult when you only have so many installments a year to work with, and many writers and readers wouldn't like what started as set in the modern day becoming a period piece because things got out of sync (though personally I'd be fine with that). But as a fan of stories showing the progression of time, it really bugs me when writers (or executives) go out of their way to slow, stop, or reverse that progression in a story. (In fact, the feeling that I'd have to read for decades and get lucky to get the amount of change in the comics that happens in just a few years in real life is one of the reasons I stopped reading superhero comics.)

In addition to the use of the unforgivable curses, one thing that really bothered me was how Harry promised to give Griphook the Sword of Griffindor in return for help getting into Gringots, and deliberately left out that he intended to keep it until he was done with it before "honoring" the deal. And then somehow Harry and the narrative acted like Griphook was the one being treacherous when Griphook grabbed the sword and ran as soon as he got them where he'd agreed to take them. EDIT: I just double-checked the book and the end of the incident didn't go quite the way I remembered. Griphook didn't just run away, he joined up with the goblins trying to catch Harry's group, and any feeling of betrayal on Harry's part is implied rather than stated (at least in the section I read). So the scene was slightly worse than I remembered in one way, and slightly better in another. I've noticed this too with several authors, though I can't remember all of them off the top of my head. One author I noticed it with was Anne McCaffrey, though her works at least didn't get too bloated or crazy, just a little more rough-around-the-edges. Another was Akira Toriyama, leading to the jarring shifts in direction following Dragonball's Cell saga, and contributing to the Buu saga being so tedious (even for Dragonball).

Dick Grayson was in the role for over 40 (real world) years in the comics (and grew from child to young adult along the way), and remained the default person for the role in material not canon to the comics well into this century. Tim Drake also managed to keep the role for 20 (real world) years (incidentally spanning the entirety of my period of seriously collecting superhero comics). Damian Wayne has now been in the role for over 10 (real world) years. Admittedly, others to fill the role tend to be much more temporary (or consigned to rarely-touched-upon AUs).

You didn't miss much; as the series went on it got more dark and serious and lost a lot of what made the early books fun, and the final book was a mess in multiple ways (the most glaring for me on the first read being how bloated it was with plot threads that didn't go anywhere and scenes that seemed to exist mostly to make sure we felt just how tedious everything was for the characters; Harry also made a number of decisions I considered immoral but the text never called him out on it, which has bothered me more since I began to more critically examine the series).

Nanase seems to take more initiative in their Scooby-Doo adventures (from what we've seen), and is also the more powerful fighter and mage, so I think she would be Batman and Ellen Robin. Of course it would need to be one of the versions of Batman and Robin where Batman treats Robin as more of a partner than an inexperienced apprentice, and isn't constantly trying to push Robin (and all of Batman's other allies in Gotham) to the sidelines.

I wonder if Grace has given up on describing what she's saying before saying it, or if she just forgot/isn't bothering in this strip.

Two hours of snowblowing in the snow (the places I started with had almost an inch of new snow by the time I was done), followed by an hour of shoveling (and clearing off my car) in the rain (it's not warm enough for all the snow to melt, and waterlogged snow becomes a problem when it freezes). Not fun. It's still raining out; hopefully I don't need to clear a layer of ice off my car tomorrow morning.

I forgot to mention: Dan isn't in the habit of taking suggestions from fans (other than for Pinup/Sketchbook images), I'm not the sort to try to threaten an author to write things my way, and I'm not skilled enough at manipulation to make him think it was his idea. So time-travel or not, I really am just in it for the ride with EGS. Anyway, as I said, I trust Dan to write EGS in a way I'll enjoy. (I would have traveled back and put this in my previous post before I posted it, but just creating a new post is easier.) Unless she has multiple personalities, she isn't the only mind out there, as the mind who thought me up does not fit that description.

It's snowing right now (we're supposed to get several inches); late this afternoon it's supposed to change over to one or more of sleet / freezing rain / rain.

The fact that there are supposedly no time travelers in our era or history could mean a few different things: It could mean time travel is not possible. It could mean that time travel to the point in time prior to the creation of the time machine is impossible. It could mean that access to time travel is extremely limited, and those who use it to travel to our era or earlier have not made any major changes (or if they have we don't realize time travel was involved in history as we know it). It could mean that history cannot be changed (and since the form history has taken to this point does not include obvious time travel, anyone who bothers to travel back to our era is unable to make waves). Or it could mean there is a multiverse (with each act of time travel to the past being the origin for a new set of timelines), and we live in one of the timelines where few if any time travelers have yet arrived. In my personal experience the multiverse explanation is the primary one, but some universes have different rules of time travel in addition to that which provide additional reasons for the lack of apparent time travel (and of course, there are also plenty of timelines where the existence of time travel is quite obvious). Of course, I'm a fictional character, so my experience may not apply to the so-called "real world".

When I first read the strip, my thought was "Why are we getting more of Grace's classmates talking about her, we've already had that when Justin overheard them!". Hence the speculation about stalling for time (though Dan hasn't done that for while, and I think he has this story already pretty planned out, so I'd be surprised if that was the case). Now that you mention it, it could be to show what else they're saying (and not saying) about her. But if it was specifically supposed to emphasize that they aren't close to figuring out her secrets, it didn't really work for me as that point didn't even occur to me. It was an honest question! I never use my time travel to get spoilers for series written by authors I trust (such as Dan).

I wonder if this strip is part of a buildup to something, or just Dan stalling for time?