ChronosCat

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/nanasecraft-03 Just so long as the artifact won't destroy the world. We kind of need the world.

http://egscomics.com/comic/tlod-027 Not what I was expecting to see, but still not quite Diane asking Lucy on a date. (Incidentally, I knew the forum was quieter than usual, but it's very strange to be the one starting the story thread, particularly when I didn't exactly rush to start it the moment the comic was up...)

If Dan wasn't avoiding doing non-canon things with Pandora until she shows up again in the story, the climax of this arc would be a great time for her to make a cameo!

http://egscomics.com/sketchbook/2018-031 https://www.patreon.com/posts/cheer-charlotte-22126400 Meh, not bad. I'd like it better if it featured cats, though.

Well, the physical indications of the "ditzy" card are blonde with a bigger bust, and Diane does have a bigger bust than usual. Of course in EGS any number of transformations cause that... (Interestingly, this is one body detail I guess I don't pay a lot of attention to. I didn't really take note of how big her breasts were here until I specifically looked for it, and even then I had no idea just how much of a change it was until I compared it to the recent story comics. ...Then again, my failure to taken note of the change might just be the result of years of reading comic books with multiple artists who couldn't be bothered to be consistent with one another on character design, with breast size being one of the most variable measurements.)

Horned helmets are most useful in battle to those who like to fight by headbutting their opponents. He also didn't realize he'd "discovered" anything; he thought for sure he was in "the Indies".

Of course, those adventuring archeologists often have a lot more than lawsuits to worry about when one of the people who thinks the stuff still belongs to the deceased is the deceased...

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?