ChronosCat

Wow, that must have been pretty scary. Nice to have you back, and I hope you'll continue to get better.

I tried to, but circumstances kept conspiring against me. If it wasn't real, why would I feel nostalgic for decades prior to my birth?

Sounds like you had a bit of an adventure there, CritterKeeper. Around here we have about a foot of snow on the ground, deposited over several storms over the past few weeks. There have been a some days with dangerous roads, and some snow removal to do, but nothing too out of the ordinary, except for one small detail: this weather is a month early! I mean, we occasionally get snow in November, but never more than an inch or two, and it never sticks around for more than a few days. I'm still pretty baffled by it all (not to mention annoyed; I've never been much of a fan of winter). (Incidentally, I don't usually bother to talk about any details about myself that aren't relevant, hence my joking around in the "location" part of my profile, but since it is relevant to this discussion: I'm in central Maine.)

Just checked it out; that's some really awesome music. Great work!

So, Dan decided he didn't like the look of the soul patch (and apparently a number of fans agreed with him), so he edited the comic to give Luke his original facial hair back. Personally I don't really like either look all that much, but I don't think the soul patch looked any worse than the mini-beard he has now.

Meh, as dead as this forum is right now, a little necromancy is probably good for it. Speaking of which, something I've been worried about recently is how inactive the forums have become. I usually click the "go to first unread post" button but apparently I had never actually read this thread before as it took me to the beginning of the thread; it was a little reassuring to see people complaining about how inactive the forums were as far back as 2016.

http://egscomics.com/comic/tsos-07 I can definitely sympathize with Grace working herself into a panic (or near-panic) here, though for me it would usually be trying to plan out a potentially stressful conversation rather than trying to decide what expression to wear. In fact, I hardly ever think consciously about what expression to use, and when I do think about it in real life (as opposed to when picking smileys/emoticons/etc. online) I almost always decide it's safest to go with a neutral expression. :|

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-18

But if you tug too hard on a gecko's tail, it comes off! Anyway, I suspect only one of them needs to solve the puzzle for both of them to be transformed back.

When has she ever NOT been in that state? I'm fairly sure I've seen her on TV with clothes on before. I wasn't really paying attention, though, so I can't speak to the rest.

I hope that A. Grace makes sure that the conversation is somewhere where no one will overhear, and B. she goes into it with a plan as to what she wants to accomplish and how she's going to approach the situation. This conversation has a lot of potential to upset Sam (which will upset Grace as well) if Grace isn't careful.

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-17 Nanase is so close, maybe she can jump to the switch? I was going to suggest she use her tongue, but it's Chameleons who have long tongues, not geckos (unless that's another difference between the gecko forms and real geckos).

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-16 I really like Nanase's poses here; the way her limbs are spread out looks very lizard like, while the exact positions of her hands and feet looks very deliberate (which is appropriate given the circumstances).

http://egscomics.com/sketchbook/2018-041 Reminds me of Mona Lisa. (No, not the painting by Leonardo, the girl Raphael has a crush on.)

Well, there are some similarities in the face, and they have similar body shapes, but of course all of that applies to the grayscale version as well. The color, however, really brings out Gecko Nanase's similarities to a much earlier crush of Raphael's, not-so-coincidentally also named Mona Lisa...

Well, geckos do have tongues long enough to lick their eyeballs with, they just don't have tongues longer than their legs (which is what Nanase would need in this situation).

Thanks for the link (I was feeling too lazy to look it up myself).

But did Pandora's spell use ambient magic, or just the power of the Immortals? At any rate, Sarah and Sam's maybe-a-date took place Friday night, the same night as the vampire attack on the mall and Magus and Sirleck "borrowing" Elliot and Ellen's bodies to go visit the magic warehouse (I'm not even going to attempt the acronym). So if Pandora using up magic led to Sarah being unable to cast her spell, she probably would have lost access to her spell partway through the maybe-a-date. That was how I read it at first too. However I'm pretty sure Sarah meant that Sam waved goodnight. Either that or it was a three-person date, and Grace should be asking who "Popcorn" is.

I believe that people's personalities are the result of a combination of "nature" and "nurture"; the new timeline completely changed Kirk's "nurture" (though I was never very clear on what happened to his mother), but it shouldn't have altered his "nature". And maybe that's all that happened but (and I'm going entirely on intuition and emotion for this judgement) the difference between Classic Kirk and Kelvin Kirk feel like more than just a change in "nurture" to me. And while everyone touched by Starfleet would have their lives changed somewhat, it seems to me that barring unusual chains of events the effect of the loss of the Kelvin on those who had no friends or loved ones on board shouldn't have been all that great in the long run (at least as far as personality goes). It's been years since I last watched the first of the reboot Trek movies so I'm probably forgetting some things, but I don't understand how the alteration to the timeline led to the changes in the personalities of the cast (particularly Spock and Scotty). Of course, all of this is subjective, and depends on what sort of things you believe happened off-screen, hence my disclaimer above that the changes being too much was debatable. Well yes, but I was specifically referring to changes in personality. And if those changes in personality are the result of a chain of events leading from the Kelvin's destruction, I want to know what that chain is. I know that's a lot to ask from a movie (and an action movie at that, though that's an issue in itself - I don't watch Star Trek for action) but that's how my mind works. Frankly, I would have been a lot more forgiving of the movie if they hadn't tried to present it as an alteration of the classic timeline, but had made it a complete reboot.

http://egscomics.com/sketchbook/2018-040 The color-test saga continues! Yay for color starburst background in panel one and panel one!

Well, I may have been overstating the difference when I said "vaguely similar". There were a number of moments across all three movies where the classic personalities were captured very well, the problem is that there were other moments where they acted in ways I could never imagine the classic characters acting. Given that it was presented as an alternate universe, I almost could have forgiven that, if it weren't for the fact that they presented it as a simple "one change in the timeline led to all these later differences" situation (I suppose this is debatable, but I didn't feel the change was far enough back to justify the level of changes seen), and far worse that most of those changes made the characters less likable.

Ideally, these iconic characters played by actors who are now deceased would be allowed to rest in peace. However, if someone new had to play them, I think the cast they got weren't a bad choice for it (at least in the first movie; I like Benedict Cumberbatch but he was totally wrong for Khan), the real problem was that the writers weren't really writing the classic characters, they were writing vaguely similar characters with the same names.

I think Dan planned on giving Nanase Craft one (or perhaps a fake English accent) at first. It hasn't really made it into the way her speech is written, though I seem to recall a few moments early on where her phrasing hinted at one to me.

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-15

http://egscomics.com/sketchbook/2018-039 I really like the colors here. Even the simple backgrounds are enhanced by color. Speaking of which, yay for starburst backgrounds in panels one and three, and yay for simple gradient background in panel two!