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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

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CNash

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Posts posted by CNash

  3. Posted

    Honestly, that last panel speaks to me on multiple levels. I think the combination of the human desire for physical contact (hugs), and specifically from someone who is taller or larger than  I am, must trigger some kind of latent memory or instinct. Not to get too scientific, but you see it in animals like cats - when you do things like picking them up by their scruff (disclaimer: don't do this to an adult cat) and they go limp, or when littermates who've grown up together wash each other by mimicking the behaviour of their mother.

    The Old Hack reacted to this

  5. Posted

    Yeah, I see your point. Unless Sam looks so drastically different when presenting female than when presenting male, and (as you say) is leading a double life with both "personas" named Sam, which does seem unlikely.

    However, if he is presenting as male, it's at odds with what he told Sarah (where he seemed to imply that he is only able to present as male on Friday nights). And getting to the comic shop in daylight while presenting as male might be something he considers risky - he could be recognised by people he knows, and "Say, I thought I saw your daughter Sam out in the mall the other day, but it looked like she had a goatee or something! Kids these days eh?" could lead to a very awkward conversation at home later.

  6. Posted

    I'm laying odds that Sam is presenting as female right now, including voice. Remember what he said to Sarah  - "I pretty much play a role every day", "Friday nights are when I'm at my most real" - I took this to mean that he's not "out", i.e. presenting as male, other than on Fridays at the card tournament.

  9. Posted

    The key here, I think, is that Tedd, Arthur and Van had no idea that Magic itself was actively working to keep itself secret, or to what lengths it was actually going. They must've just presumed that only humans could influence how widely Magic was used. For that matter, did Pandora know? If so, would her original plan (to mark or awaken as many random people as possible and create a magical "dam" to increase Moperville's ambient magic) have even succeded? We know that it would have eventually caused a "change conversation" with the Seers, of course.

  10. Posted

    22 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    Just because it seems more similar to computer system than to human intelligence doesn't necessary means it's an computer system itself.

    In fact, as a humans, we are quite good at recognizing when something is not thinking as humans. We are worse at recognizing when something is not thinking as computer.

    In fact, flair for drama? Not something computers usually have, even indirectly.

    I don't think it's running on a physical computer system in any reality. On the other hand ... you may have point that it was programmed, as opposed to naturally evolving that way. Those objectives seems to be at least partially forced to it from outside.

    Haven't we established that magic doesn't have a "flair for the dramatic" but rather a lack of subtlety which appears to casual observers as a fair for the dramatic?

    I do stand by my notion that its parameters are programmed rather than something it chose itself. How can it judge how much widespread knowledge is too much when it can't directly observe the world and doesn't understand human motivations anyway? And yet it somehow knows that Pandora's final act caused X number of people to "notice" magic, and that this meets the criteria for "too much". It needs seers to advise it on what to do next, but has no problems making the initial decision to invoke them. It does sound like its threshold of "knowing" is forced upon it from somewhere else.

  12. Posted

    I'm calling it now: Magic is an advanced AI running on a computer system on an upper level of reality. It has a pre-programmed set of parameters for the task it was built to perform: give humans "supernatural" abilities based on their personality and desires, monitor the results, and trigger the "change procedure" when magic reaches a worldwide exposure level above X. It's been programmed to read these qualities from humans, and this is in fact the only way it can perceive the world and how humans (and Immortals, and other magic-users like the Griffins and maybe the Uryuoms) interact with it.

    Instant percentage-based calculations (seemingly on-demand with zero latency), talk of spells being given to humans as part of an "automated flow".... just little bits and pieces of how Magic has been speaking.

  13. Posted

    2 hours ago, Scotty said:

    Dan stated that this meeting isn't a democracy, there isn't going to be any vote, and I don't think the options that were given are the only two options but more like extreme ends of a spectrum, and depending on what the three say, the WoM could make a change that falls somewhere in between.

    Magic might not treat it that way, but we (presumably) are going to see this argument played out between Arthur and Tedd... and if not, maybe my ability to predict EGS's plotlines isn't as good as I think.

  14. Posted

    So, all questions of parentage and relationships aside.... looks like we're heading towards Tedd advocating a reveal, Arthur arguing for a severe change, and Van being the tiebreaker in the middle. I wonder how he feels about magic, and especially about his mother's "line of work". And also whether any of their opinions will change when they learn about Pandora's final act.

  15. Posted

    1 hour ago, Illjwamh said:

    Because all the obvious reasons that everyone is pointing out (and that I immediately thought of as well upon reading the strip) are too obvious.

    Dan tends to loudly shout about things that are false, while only vaguely hinting about the truth. There's a very good chance that Van and Tedd are at least related, not least because we know nothing about him and the hints that have been dropped are very light - Tengu's pointed reference to Noriko's "first born son" - whereas we were repeatedly hit over the head with half a dozen theories in-universe about how Susan and Diane were related and, although they are related, none of them turned out to be the case!

    It's the old "plan misdirection" thing again. Explain how you're going to rob the casino vault in great detail, and nothing will go to plan. Show no details of the plan ahead of time, and everything will go off like clockwork.

  16. Posted

    Wait, isn't Arthur skirting disqualification from the second rule on a technicality? He's had an interest in magic changing for a long time now, and would use it for his own ends - even if they're benign. I understand that it is technically not "premeditated" - his last scene, where he explicitly rules out "hoodwinking a god" , proves that. But what if it wasn't Arthur, but someone else with less benign goals and who also had no idea that they were a seer, thus rendering them eligible for the second rule by default? They could cause a lot of damage. Are we to accept that magic didn't think of that loophole?

  18. Posted

    I'm not sure how to feel about this. On one hand, this is clearly what everything in this arc has been leading up to. It's been signposted repeatedly. I shouldn't be surprised about this.

    On the other... I wanted to be surprised. I wanted Dan to defy expectations and not do the thing he'd been so clearly teasing for months. (I also would've liked him to have gotten to this point much earlier, if this was the way it was going to go all along, but I'll avoid this subject.) Is there still room for things to go differently? Oh, most definitely, Pandora isn't going to "just reset" - that's a narrative trope; if a course of action has been verbalised or shown ahead of time (like a heist in a casino), things aren't going to go exactly to plan. If we'd heard nothing about the breaking of Immortal law and forced resets, then it would probably go normally. But this is the culmination of Pandora's - the most compelling character in this entire comic - arc. It's going to be something special...

  21. Posted

    I'm not usually one to mention comic timescales but wow it's been three years since Ashley first appeared? It's like that feeling where you look up a movie you remember watching in the cinema back when it was first released, and you look up its information on the EPG and it say "Released in 2010".

    ....The Avengers is five years old now. I feel old.

  24. Posted

    On 17/07/2017 at 11:44 PM, hkmaly said:

    I'm not sure why you think Sarah would be better than Grace for helping him. In any case, Grace is MUCH CLOSER and her parents wouldn't object to her going to hug a boy in middle of night (because they are all dead).

    Sarah is a friend to them both. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Pandora hasn't actually met Grace - interfering with her dreams doesn't really count. We lean on our friends for support.