ChronosCat

Yeah, I would have been surprised if Dan had drawn her naked, and even more surprised if he'd then posted it on the main site. There definitely would have had to have been something blocking our view of certain body parts. And her outfit isn't "bad" (in fact I think it looks pretty good), it's just close enough to the typical fairy outfit that it make me want to see my idealized version of the typical fairy outfit. (Also, the default fairy doll gets a pass from me because I like body-covering but form-fitting outfits like catsuits and the like.) In the commentary, Dan suggests that this is part of a story Ashley wrote. In that scenario, presumably Ashley-the-fairy is Ashley's self-insert character. Of course that still leaves the question open: in the context of the internal story, was Fairy Ashley always a fairy? If not many of the possibilities you mentioned come back into play.

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-24

That might be difficult, considering that the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt metal, and the gas giants don't have surfaces to speak of, and their gravity would be enough to flatten a person. It's easier to kill something you can see.

Aside from this allowing for the fakeout of Grace planning to "talk" (or smile) at Sam only to have him not show up, I'm pretty sure it's probably Dan's intention that Salty Crackers hosts card tournaments regularly (in fact I get the impression they have one every Friday). Luke has the power to sense magical auras; there's no indication he has any other magical sight powers. And I doubt what gender one is or whether one is trans has an effect on one's magical aura.

I'm sure there would be some overlap there, but yeah probably not enough to count on an average freshman knowing about records. (Of course, as I believe I mentioned the last time this came up, you don't need to know what a common phrase references to know what it means in context. I suspect the phrase "broken record" is still popular enough that even those who don't know what a record is are familiar with it. In a similar vein, many people who were born in the last ten to twenty years may not have encountered a VHS tape or audio cassette, and have no idea that the term "rewind" once referred to actual winding, but still use the term...)

Before I read the article hkmaly linked/quoted, I thought maybe they were referring to the color of tarnished bronze. It is kind of bluish, and if the term encompassed more than the exact color of tarnished bronze I could see it standing in for the term "blue".

http://egscomics.com/sketchbook/2018-042 The magic scales return! ...I love non-canon continuity. Also, while breast expansion (or large breasts in general) isn't really my thing, I am a fan of tight clothing, so Rhoda's post-transformation look still works for me.

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-22 I'm wondering what you're doing there too, Elliot. Breaking the fourth wall to explain things is the Germahn Labs crew's job, why isn't one of them here? Are they all on vacation or something?

http://egscomics.com/sketchbook/2018-043 I don't know how much there will be to say about this comic, seeing as it's just a colorized version of the latest NP, but it's tradition to have a thread for each post on the main EGS site, darnit! Re: the commentary, I'm always amazed by how much trouble Dan has picking out colors. Does he picture the comic world in grayscale or something? I mean, I can see trying to get things perfect for a color scheme that's going to be reused a lot in the future, but for anything else my impulse is to just pick something close to what I envisioned that doesn't look horrible and be done with it. (Then again, I'm not a professional artist.)

Hmm... When I plan stories, I imagine the scenes visually - and color is a part of that. Similarly, when I go to make a picture, I start with a (color) image in my head that I then try to replicate on paper/screen. Occasionally, the picture in my head isn't quite detailed enough, or I change my mind during production, but in general the only decisions I have to make during the drawing/coloring process relate to how to realize my vision. Now that you mention it, though, it does make sense that Dan's way of planning stories and art could be different. Different people think in different ways, after all -- sometimes in very different ways (for instance, I think primarily in images and concepts, while some people can't even conceive of thinking without using words).

I know, it's just - if he pictures it in color, how hard can it be to pick a color on the computer to match that? As I said, I can understand fine-tuning things if the color scheme is going to be used a lot, but otherwise it seems like it ought to be a fairly simple decision. I mean, I've hardly ever had any difficulty picking out colors in my own works (not that those choices were always right, but you live and learn). I don't know. Maybe finding colors that look good doesn't come as easily to him as it does to me. Or maybe he's more of a perfectionist than I am (highly likely). It just feels strange to me that an artist far better than me (one I admire as an artist, no less) would consider the aspect of creating a picture that I find the most fun to be a challenge (at least when on a schedule).

I like this development. (I just hope the scenes are framed such that we get to see their feet from time to time.) I didn't even notice Nanase's hair got longer in the first place. And while I noticed there was something different about Gecko Sarah's hair, I don't think I thought about it enough to register that it was longer; at any rate I forgot it had changed.

Sarah's wavy-hands in panel four remind me of how Grace used to hold her hands up like a squirrel. (In fact, that's what I thought she was doing at first until I looked closer.)

I discovered TMNT thanks to the 87 cartoon, then followed them to the movies, video games, etc. of the early 90s. I was a bit of a die-hard fan of the show, watching it until the very end (although admittedly there was a period during season 7 when I grew bored with it and wound up missing some episodes). My favorite version however was the Archie TMNT Adventures comic, which used the first season of the show as a jumping off point but then went in a very different (and eventually relatively mature) direction. I wasn't able to track down any issues of the Mirage version until the late 90s, and I actually wound up collecting the Mirage and Image versions at the same time. However, between having a small allowance and living an hour's drive from the nearest comic shop years before I got a license, I wasn't able to get my hands on very many of either. By the time those things had changed, I had other priorities. Recently, I finally got the IDW collected editions of the Mirage TMNT, so at least I have the highlights of the series (as a completionist it bugs me that they skipped some issues, and I am not looking forward to the prices I'll likely have to pay if I want to get my hands on the ones they skipped). It is a really good series, but there's too much nostalgia around the '87 and Adventures versions for any other version to topple them from the top of my list of favorites. I really enjoyed the 2003 series and the 2012 series, hated "The Next Mutation" (though I've been toying with seeing if I now find it so-bad-its-good), hated the recent live action + CGI movies, and decided after one episode of Rise of the Turtles that it's not for me. I started watching with season 1, and watched through to the end of the original series. I loved Transformers the Movie, and watched it countless times over the years - so much so that my original VHS copy wore out. In fact, I'm sure nostalgia plays a large part in it, but it still vies for my favorite movie of all time with Princess Mononoke. I wasn't able to see many episodes of Beast Wars when it was on TV due to not getting a channel that played it, though I liked what I saw, and liked it even more when I got it on DVD as an adult. I saw one episode of the old "Robots in Disguise" cartoon and thought it was horrible. I watched the premier of Armada and was disappointed they hadn't written it to appeal to adult Transformers fans like I had become at that point; I caught a few episodes here and there but was never able to get into it. The only other Transformers show that has played on a station I had access to at the time was Prime (and only the first part of the first season), which looked pretty good. I tolerated the first two Michael Bay movies, disliked the third and fourth, and on the basis of that trend didn't even bother seeing the fifth. (I do love the score to that series though.) Most of my focus in recent years in regards to Transformers has been on the continuities I missed out on as a kid. I got the IDW collections of the Marvel comics (they were fun but tried to pack too many characters and too much plot in too few issues) and am now working on the UK comics (which are a huge improvement over the US ones) and the Transformers anime from the late 80s (Headmasters, Super God Master Force, and Victory).

I've never been a huge movie enthusiast. I learn about movies from the trailers played before the handful of movies I see, from commercials that happen show up during the small amount of time I'm watching commercial television, and through pop-culture osmosis. I have absolutely no idea how many movies are being made now, or how many were being made at any previous point in time following the invention of the medium. If you say there are more now than at some previous point, I'm in no position to argue. However I am curious if this is just your impression or if you have numbers. Ugh. How can anyone keep up with all their movies and TV shows, unless it's their full-time job? I watched the first couple X-men, the first Iron Man, the first season of Jessica Jones, but beyond that? Too big an avalanche for this poor pebble. Hence the "number of movies they're making went up". There was time when single person WAS able to keep up with all movies BEING MADE. I had assumed they were making the Marvel movies instead of making other non-Marvel movies, so the over-all number of movies being made stayed the same. But again, I'm completely uninformed in the matter.

Ironically, records are making a bit of a comeback these days.

You can reach the first pages of some of the threads on the first page of some of the forums via the wayback machine, but otherwise I would assume so. (Mind you, that's from 2016; I haven't investigated to see if any of the archives from earlier have anything accessible.)

Yeah, their only choices if they were going to continue publishing Sonic at all were a partial reboot or a total reboot (many of the characters that needed to be removed were too integral to the mythology to just "forget to mention" for very long, and the writer never got a "you'll have to stop using these characters in x-number of issues" notice). It hurt, but I understood why they did it. (It helped that I was following the behind-the-scenes drama as best I could, so I knew there was legal trouble for a while before the reboot.) Still, the way they did it left something to be desired. The new timeline started mid-story, with situations resembling where they left off before the reboot, and some of the characters actually remembered the old timeline (though that plot point was quickly dropped). I would have preferred more of a clean break (at least so long as they were able to keep all the legacy characters from the 90s cartoons; I'm a fan of Sonic more for those characters than for the game cast). Well, if you count an officially licensed product and a fan creation as part of the same continuity... While I enjoy a lot of fan works, I usually separate them in my head from the originals.

So the number of movies they're making went up? Or are you saying there are fewer mediocre movies now than there used to be? At any rate what I was saying was a slight simplification; there have been a few periods with more of my favorites than others. Part of the reason it feels like things have gone downhill for me was because one of the periods with more movies I liked was the mid 2000s to the early 2010s, so we're coming down from a high point. However, the reason that period had so many movies I liked was largely because of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, which while not perfect did maintain a relatively steady level of quality. And actually, I might still have as many favorites today if I hadn't gotten overwhelmed by how many Marvel Cinematic Universe movies they were putting out and more-or-less thrown my hands up at the entire MCU. It just occurred to me, another reason it feels like the quality of new movies is going down is that as I get older my standards for what I expect for my entertainment get higher - but I'm often willing to forgive flaws in things I came to love before my standards got so high. (Of course countering that is my love of "so bad it's good" entertainment; it might actually be the case that relative to what I look for there are more mediocre things than there used to be. I usually have to look to previous decades to get my fill of bad special effects, corny dialog, and silly plot twists.)

I love many (but not all) versions of TMNT, and many (but not all) versions of Transformers. And I don't have a problem with the idea of different versions of Star Trek, it just so happens the Kelvin Timeline is a version that isn't really to my taste (though as I mentioned before, I don't have a problem with the actors, just the writing). ...I'm also really annoyed by the whole "this is the same world as before, just completely changed" thing they tried to pull with Star Trek. It makes me automatically want to hate the new timeline for "destroying" the one I came to love (I've tried to work past that, and the fact that new stuff relating to the original timeline is still coming out helps, but why'd they think it was a good idea to do something so likely to push old fans' buttons in the first place?). And it also makes me more inclined to compare it to the original it's supposedly continuing/replacing, whereas if it were a complete reboot I might have been more willing to judge it on it's own merits. (Incidentally, the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic did a similar partial-reboot at one point, and it annoyed me too, but the new timeline managed to win me over anyway. And I was a lot more into the Archie Sonic comics than I was ever into Star Trek.)

Or if you want a taste of something a lot like it, just start reading stories at random from Fanfiction.net or pretty much any other site that lets anybody publish more-or-less whatever they want. I mean there are some gems on sites like that, but finding them takes a lot of luck and/or work (or recommendations from someone else who has had the luck or put in the work). ...This conversation reminded me of how every now and then I get to thinking about how these days there aren't a lot of new movies that interest me enough to see, and how usually the ones that I do take a chance on disappoint me, and I start to feel like Hollywood is going down the drain. Then I remember that while there are a large number of movies I like, the list is only so long because it spans decades; for pretty much any period of a just a few years, there are only a few of my favorites that were produced in that time. So while I may be annoyed with what they've been doing with a lot of my favorite franchises, over-all the good-to-bad movie ratio hasn't really changed all that much.

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-20 So, what the heck happened to Nanase's boots? Were they physically destroyed or by the transformation? Did the transformation shunt them to some pocket dimension only to forget to bring them back? Or are they waiting for her on the floor? I wonder if this means Nanase and Sarah will have to go through the rest of the crypt (or whatever you want to call it) barefoot? ...Actually, I'd enjoy that, but it might be a bit of a problem when they go to leave. (Well, at least for Sarah. Nanase will probably be fine so long as she has her scarf.)

Yep, like I said, most years during November we might get a couple of storms that drop an inch or two which melts in a day or two; we usually don't get serious storms or snow that sticks around all winter until half-way through December. Of course once it's here to stay it doesn't melt until half-way through March, so that's still roughly three months of snow on the ground (plus another three where it might snow, as we sometimes have a little snow fall in October, and often get one last big storm early in April). There's actually a fair bit of difference between what northern, central, and southern Maine get for snow. In December and March when we have several inches on the ground, an hour's drive south will get you to places where the ground is bare. And while I've never been to the northernmost parts of Maine, based on the weather reports they get significantly more snow than us (not to mention colder temperatures).

Actually, I doubt there's anything malevolent about these scales; it seems to me to just be a magical tool doing what it's designed to do. It's not the scales' fault their instruction manual was lost centuries ago.

So, Tedd came along too. I wonder if he's just going to be in the background, or if he has a part to play in whatever is coming next? There usually isn't a lot of responses in the first few hours after the comic is posted; apparently most of the current forumites are busy (at sleep, work, or whatever) at that time. Personally, I'm usually getting ready for bed when the comic posts, and on nights where Dan is late or I need to get to bed earlier than usual I don't get around to reading it until I have some free time the next day.