ChronosCat

Regardless of what she decides to do with this information, we still need to see more of Diane's reaction, and in particular what her thoughts on the matter are. That's going to take at least an entire comic, most likely more than one. I wouldn't expect to see Diane asking Lucy out or otherwise attempting to resolve things with her until at least next Monday, and maybe not until sometime the week after next, assuming there aren't any interruptions and we get a resolution to the Diane/Lucy thread in this story at all.

Well, at the very least (based of my reading of the Keenspot forum archives from before I joined, as well as a little bit of some other EGS forums I was able to read before they went offline) the early-to-mid 00's forums had several people who were very outspoken in their perversion; every time anything sexy was posted in the comics, they'd be talking about how much they loved it, often in an exaggerated and/or juvenile manner. These days a lot of sexy things come and go without anyone commenting on them, and we're a lot more reserved in how we express our appreciation. In the late 00s, around the time I first joined the forums, the most vocal of those people had left, and a few people had joined who didn't appreciate the fanservice. At first it was just respectful criticism and/or pointing out that not everyone was interested - but by early this decade it had devolved into repetitive and often heated arguments, which is why it's listed along with pacing and scheduling (other big subjects of argument) in the Pacing/Scheduling/Fanservice thread... ...At any rate, it turns out it's not just old stuff that makes Dan think "that ship has sailed"; in a reply to a question on Patreon, Dan said:

Just speculation here; if you wanted to know for sure you'd have to ask him and hope he actually answers, but... I suspect at the time he was thinking something along the lines of, "So long as I don't show nipples or genitals, I can't get into too much trouble for this." (Or if he wasn't concerned about the comic being labeled as adults-only, that was just the boundaries of what he was comfortable with at the time.) As for why he felt more confident about such things back then, I think it's a combination of factors. For one thing, there was probably an element of the arrogance of youth involved (if I recall correctly, he was just out of High School when he started EGS). Also, his primary communication with the his fans (besides email) during the '00s was the forums, and for many years they were an echo chamber with many outspoken people in them who were as perverted as Tedd seemed to be at the time. Most importantly, he wasn't relying on the comic as a source of income at the time - nowadays if he looses too many readers (or rather too many patrons) it will affect his way of life, maybe even make it hard for him to get by.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/justin-in-sudden-21861228 http://egscomics.com/sketchbook/2018-028 [space for reaction] Now, this is the sort of "loose clothing falling off" I can really appreciate. Justin has a very nice heel. (What? )

Yay for starburst background in panel one! ...Or is it a sunburst with the disc hidden by Spider-Grace? Eh, whatever.

Yeah, it's at times like these that I am reminded just how strange this comic is. (Although for me the strangest part of this strip is that the reaction is so positive; even if no one feels like making fun of her on the spot, there should be awkward silence and/or laughter.) ...I'm also wondering how long she has before a teacher yells at her to get off the table. ... Anyway, yay for starburst backgrounds in panels three and seven!

I noticed the change in Liz's nose while first reading the comic, before even setting out to look for changes (though given the subject matter and Dan's habits I planned to look the moment Ashley mentioned change blindness). When I started looking, the next thing I noticed was Liz's lipstick, followed by her measurements, followed by Ashley's measurements, and finally the length of Ashley's ponytail. Everything else I didn't notice until I read the list in the commentary. I would have tried to spot the differences in the superimposed panel, but it looks so similar to the results of having unfocused eyes that it was making my eyes try to adjust to "fix" the image, and made a minor headache I had worse. Do you mean qualitatively or quantitatively? And do you mean the original, or the Donkey Kong Country games? Because there were a lot of barrels in the DKC games (at least the original trilogy; I haven't played any of the new ones).

Well, I've always had the impression Diane is the leader of the group; if that perception is shared by her schoolmates, the kids may think, "If Diane never did it, Lucy probably didn't either." Also (and this works even if no one believes her), Diane is drawing all the attention to herself and not even mentioning Lucy and Rhoda; she may be figuring that if no one is thinking about Lucy no one will be thinking bad things about Lucy. Of course those are just guesses as to what might be going through Diane's mind; I'm rather skeptical they would actually work. EDIT: Oops, I missed it at first. Yay for starburst background in panel one! (The starburst in the other panels don't get cheers because they're superimposed over what's actually there in-comic. But speaking of the other panels' backgrounds, those are some pretty nifty crowd-shadow figures.)

Yay for starburst background in panel one! ...Yeah, I kinda figured Dan wouldn't be exploring the analogy between Bubbly Tea and real-life mind/mood altering substances. This is a section for quick joke strips, after all. I still can't help but feel that Tensaided ought to be treating this situation more seriously, but in his defense he hasn't seen Susan acting particularly distracted and absent minded (and neither have we) and running has been her only instance of poor judgment he's/we've seen besides coming to work bubblied in the first place. This raises the question of if he/we just haven't seen the worst of it yet, if the mental effects are not as strong as I've been assuming, or if it's like the Disguise Form spell and Susan can override it when she needs to.

Yay for dramatic line background in panel two, and off-center starburst background in panel three! My guess is the "cheerleading" aspect is confined mostly to what we see in this strip - acrobatics and getting everyone's attention. I expect that next she'll make a public apology to all the boys at once, and/or tell everyone that none of the boys actually had sex with her.

Grace notices things, but she's hardly infallible. For instance, she noticed Sam's body-type, but not that Sam's beard was fake... Also (and I know we were just talking about this, but it's important), Sam is no more "really female" than Susan was "really male" when transformed for Grace's party. When it comes to gender, what matters is what's in a person's head, not what's between their legs.

I wouldn't expect a deity or other intelligent entity to be involved if a causal loop was ever discovered in real life; however in fiction it wouldn't surprise me. (If nothing else, the author created the loop, so there's an intelligence involved in the meta-sense.) The primary theoretical example of a causal loop I've seen outside fiction is a billiard ball sent through a time portal at itself, in which case out of all possible outcomes, one in which the past ball is sent through the portal shall occur, even if one where it would be knocked away from the portal would otherwise seem more likely. This sounds pretty similar to your explanation. From this scenario, it's easy enough to see that anyone traveling to the past who attempts to change history or otherwise interacts with events important to their past will merely reinforce the history that led them there. What is a lot harder to understand is a scenario where the events leading to the time travel could not or would not have happened if it weren't for the results of the time travel. For instance, in one episode of Gargoyles a character is about to die when his future self shows up and saves his life (eventually leading to the character going back in time to complete the loop). Another example would be the plot of the first Terminator movie. Does your quantum-physics based explanation justify the existence of that sort of loop?

The individual in question is pushing something; presumably a cart with videos to put back on the shelf. This not only suggests that's really Susan, it also means she's on the job right now (if she were there bubblied on her own time I wouldn't have such an issue with it).

I find it unlikely Diane is that delinquent (or are you suggesting the school has a "miss two classes and you're expelled" policy?), and at any rate it wouldn't matter that far in the future whether the reason she missed the class was because she was arguing with her inner child in this story or if it was for some other reason. More importantly, while whether she missed a class might have been in question for us fans, it was never in question for Dan; even if he hadn't made the edit (or the tweets) he would have continued to write it as if she hadn't missed a class. Therefore, what I should have said is that it wouldn't have mattered in the long run (in this case however long it took us to stop discussing it) whether we knew that she hadn't missed a class.

Sometimes someone needs to point out the obvious, even to the intelligent. Also, sometimes an employer decides to give an employee a warning rather than firing them after their first offense. If we take the implication from her single non-flashback appearance that she has a drinking problem at face value, there is a good chance that she's doing it for the mind/emotion altering affects. Assuming she isn't physically addicted or can push past that, a mind-altering tea might be just the thing for her (if not Bubbly Tea, then maybe one of Tea's other products). And of course Bubbly Tea doesn't harm the liver, Dan designed it! ... Incidentally, I apologize for bringing depressing reality into discussion of what was obviously intended as a lighthearted and silly strip.

I was under the impression that threatening people with a deadly weapon (or what they have every reason to believe is a deadly weapon) is a crime, even if you never actually hurt someone. It certainly would have to be in a society where the police could be relied upon to stop things before they went any further. Perhaps an authoritarian regime run by computers and/or people from so far in the future they aren't even homo sapiens? But whatever the type of government, if the alternative is anarchy so bad that causality couldn't be maintained, causality itself would help prop the government up. Presumably the hyper-competent trans-temporal government would set up laws for what constitutes sufficient evidence that a crime "would have been" committed if the police didn't show up. Also, as mentioned above, they could wait to step in until a crime had been committed but before serious harm was done. That said, after shutting down my computer for the night, it occurred to me that if there was a crime where all the details were known and in the records the police didn't show up to stop it, there'd be nothing the police could do about it. So whether a crime was allowed to be committed would be entirely at the "whims" of whatever phenomena/deity causes causal loops to form. In a world where causal loops only reinforce things people would have done without a causal loop, there really wouldn't be any less serious crime. By "not viable on a large scale" I meant not viable on a scale large enough to make it worth the effort to pull it off. If that's something that wasn't suggested by my earlier mention of time tourism, that's because I hadn't thought of this issue yet. ...In case it wasn't obvious, I haven't thought about this scenario before, and am making it up as I go. (At least I haven't thought about a society with public time travel under these rules; in the stories I've applied the "no history alteration" rules to before there were always good reasons why the protagonists and antagonists were pretty much the only ones with access to time travel.)

Sometime later, Mr. Tensaided informs Susan, "No drinking bubbly-tea on the job, or coming into work still under the influence!" On the plus side, Susan is able to help her mother replace her drinking habit with one that isn't so damaging to the liver...

And then police armed with equally or more advanced weapons show up to arrest him, because they knew he was going to be there. Frankly, a society that had publicly available time travel would by necessity be very different from ours. They would probably have to have a government that is coordinated across the centuries (or however long the society lasts); a tall order, but causality itself would keep things from falling apart completely. Most crimes would either be stopped the moment there was enough evidence a crime was being committed or would remain unsolved. And either a major effort would need to be put in place to prevent too much knowledge from flowing past-ward, or there would be very few surprises in life. Getting back to tourism, it occurs to me that any temporal tourists that have visited recorded history as we know it appear to have been very good at passing as people from the era they were visiting. This really doesn't seem viable on a large scale; likely travel to periods between the start of recorded history and the revelation of the reality of time travel would have to be restricted to historians and others on official business. On the other hand (keeping in mind this is in a scenario where there's no risk of changing the timeline), I don't see any problem with tourists visiting prehistory, particularly eras prior to the rise of humanity. ...Of course all of this is only tangentially related to EGS; if Dan did change his mind about time travel (or had never said it was impossible) it would likely be done by magic, and probably only a relatively small few over the course of history (past and future) would have access to the power. (Or at least, only a small number of individuals with time travel powers would ever be relevant to the story.) And that's a problem?

As I said, it's not really a paradox if predestination is the natural state of the universe. That said, it's possible to have a story where someone goes back in time and both does not change history and also does not bring about events leading to their traveling through time. And I don't know about it being "uninteresting", but "trying to change history only to find out it's impossible" certainly could get old pretty fast; you really can only get away with it once per world (which was one mistake of the Gargoyles writers, as they did it twice) and I suspect the only reason I'm not completely tired of that scenario is I haven't seen it very many times. But there's no reason a time travel story without history alteration has to follow that scenario; in fact if the time travelers understand the device or technique they're using to travel in time properly they would know better than to even try to change things, so that plot hinges on the characters being uninformed. As for for why they might travel through time, in addition to your idea of recovering something from the past that would be lost, one could go to the future to learn about it or get artifacts from it then return to the present with them, and of course there's always temporal tourism. Also, one could visit people in the past or future, including friends and family (though one would need to take into account whether they know about time travel and how much time they have to spare to visit with someone from another time). Furthermore, time travel could be used to produce similar results to faster-than-light communication, and in conjunction with effective suspended animation and/or time dilation, faster-than-light travel (of course the EGS world presumably has actual FTL, but I'm partially talking about hypothetical stories here). How about a few days EGS time, and/or the end of this story, whichever comes first? I mean unless Diane would have gotten a detention or some other punishment for missing that class and the punishment would have been important to the story, whether or not she missed a class seems like an unimportant detail to me.

Well, I used the term "predestination paradox" but that wasn't really accurate; if you accept the idea that the timeline is unchanging there's nothing paradoxical about a causal loop. So there's nothing logically wrong with including them in a story (so long as the story/world doesn't also include instances of history being altered). I'm just tired of writers using them to show off how clever they are. And if the timeline is unchanging, then breathing or reflecting light in the past isn't changing anything, as you were "always" a part of the past. Well, it's something to argue about discuss, but will it matter in the long run?

Both are practical concerns, not moral ones, however, and ones that can be solved at that. Regarding the first argument, its' really only a problem if you have a small population or if a large part of the population is specifically practicing polygamy with the only other option monogamy (or alternately with polyandry and monogamy the only options). If the number of groups practicing polygamy and polyandry balance out, if polyamory with more than one partner per sex is the most common kind, or if in a large population only a small number are practicing whatever variety of polyamory, it really isn't an issue. As for the second argument, as the argument itself makes clear that requires a specific set of societal rules plus an inability to perform modern paternity tests. If the good of the family is valued over that of an individual's direct descendants, it isn't an issue. ...And also, while this is no more fair than only allowing men to own property and privilege, there isn't any need to worry about paternity in societies where the women hold all the property/titles/etc.!

As a fan of Gargoyles, it's a little odd Dan hasn't thought of the obvious solution to this: make it so the chains of causality can't be broken (in other words, make it so it's impossible to change history). ...Preferably without the blatant predestination paradoxes the Gargoyles writers liked to throw in. I'm not sure about the caption; it messes with the composition of the panel and sounds a bit clunky. The part of me that always wants to know when things happen is glad to have the timing clarified, but strictly speaking I'm not sure it was necessary: does it really matter if Diane missed a class entirely or was merely late for two classes? I'm very happy by the change to her reflection though; while it's not super important whether this is taking place in a hallway with windows or a bathroom with mirrors, the fact remains that it was meant to be windows and the art did not reflect that properly. (Pun not intended.) And Susan blatantly hit on "Ellen" (FV5 Elliot) when they first met!

If you want Word of Dan, the text for the first link in the commentary of the December 12 2014 comic reads, "Yes, Sam is trans male" As for evidence in the comic, Sam was the one that pointed out that Tess would be a good feminine name for Tedd, and when Tedd told Grace this she explained that Sam probably thought Tedd was transgender (thus leading to Tedd learning both the real meaning of the word "transgender" and that there was a name for his own gender identity). Furthermore in the flashback in the July 16 2014 comic, Sam went to a lot of trouble to keep Grace from saying he was a girl, and it's indicated this conversation led to Grace learning the meaning of transgender herself; the logical conclusion is that Sam told her the basics (or at least enough for her to know she had something to look up). In light of all this, it would be quite the red herring if Sam turned out not to be a trans guy. (Plus, even if Dan says that only things in the comic itself are truly canon, he's not likely to change his mind on this, and Sam is supposed to show up again, so I'm sure it will be fully spelled out in the comic eventually.) Justin isn't attracted to women; this is the reason he broke Melissa's heart. I meant, it puzzles me why it makes a difference to Susan (in regards to how comfortable with and/or interested in touching others she is). Of course, I can think of a few possibilities - one, the TFG tends to enhance feelings of attraction, so that would at least help explain the incident at the Birthday Party; two, she might not think of her male form as "her body", so she's not so concerned about what (or who) it comes into contact with.

A link I wanted to post earlier but didn't have the time: Susan realizing she's equally uninterested in sex with men as she is with women. Of course, given the way it's presented, it's hard to tell if it's a true lack of interest, or an extension of her dislike of touching. Dan has talked before about Susan possibly being Ace, but on the other hand the fact that she seems a lot more interested in participating when in male form suggest it might just be her aversion to touching at play. (Why being in male form would make a difference puzzles me, but brains are weird, so I'm not going to argue with it.) That does vaguely imply she has some interest in romance, but it doesn't tell us what she's looking for in a romantic relationship. Barring her saying she wants a monogamous relationship and/or to one day have a physical relationship, I'm not ruling out the possibility of her being a romantic but not physically sexual partner in a poly relationship. On the other hand, if it doesn't work out between Justin and Luke, I could also almost see her and Justin getting together - but only if he's willing to settle for someone who isn't male mentally and is only male physically on occasion. There is no way Susan would want to stay in male form long term... Unfortunately, I'm not sure the sacrifices they would both have to make to making this relationship work would be truly worth it. They'd probably be better off trying to find better matches. Cecil? I suppose it's possible, but he's played such a small role I'd forgotten he even existed. I had to look him up on Shiveapedia, and they don't even mention him in the "minor characters" list - I had to follow a link from the complete list of characters (which has no descriptions) to one of the comics with him to even find out who he was. Oh, and Sam is not a girl who wants to be a boy. Sam is a boy who was born with a body type (including genital configuration) more commonly associated with girls. To use the commonly accepted modern terminology, a trans boy or trans man.

I don't think Diane would be; she's clearly still looking for "her true love" or the closest realistically possible approximation thereof. As for Susan, I can't remember if she ever expressed interest in romantic relationships and if so what she said about it, but we do know she enjoyed watching Catalina kiss Elliot, and at least as of her conversation with Diane in the mall she isn't interested in "doing things" with anyone. That could possibly change (or she might decide to do "things" despite lack of interest for the sake of someone she loves), but a the moment it seems like the ideal relationship for her would be one in which she could get the benefits of an emotional relationship but only be an observer when it came to the physical.