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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
Howitzer

Story: Wednesday, April 20, 2016

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1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Gotta agree that Abner is very Humphrey Bogart, a la "The Maltese Falcon." I fear that this might be his only appearance, though.

If Dan's "Abner's D&D alignment: Rick Blaine from Cassablanca." is to be trusted, he's Chaotic Good.

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7 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Not exactly.  The world would hopefully start filling up with *inexperienced* superheroes just as fast as it does with *inexperienced* supervillains, perhaps even faster if you subscribe to the "more good people than bad" outlook.  People seem to be quick to point out how many bad guys might get powers, but then assume that they'd somehow be more competent more quickly than their good-guy counterparts.

I think the problem is less of being more bad people than good people, and more that, the bad ones are significantly more likely to get spells that would be useful in a 'hero vs villan' clash. the system is biased in favor of aggressive individuals on that front.

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16 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

pandora isn't so much evil as actively throwing caution to the wind for shits n' giggles, while trying to do something that has unfortunate side effects she may or may not be aware of.

I tend to think of Pandora as Chaotic Bored.

7 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Not exactly.  The world would hopefully start filling up with *inexperienced* superheroes just as fast as it does with *inexperienced* supervillains, perhaps even faster if you subscribe to the "more good people than bad" outlook.  People seem to be quick to point out how many bad guys might get powers, but then assume that they'd somehow be more competent more quickly than their good-guy counterparts.

A bad guy just needs to succeed once to cause harm, the good guys have to succeed every time in stopping them. Furthermore good guys are often hampered by morals, which can make stopping the bad guys harder. Of course a good guy without morals is just a bad guy with good PR, so...

 

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Pandora is insane due to not having reset in far too long (I actually can't help but wonder if Pandora is WHY immortals reset- they saw she went insane, so set a point to reset at which they could guarantee no other immortal would go insane) Voltaire is definitely evil of some variety. (trying to kill someone who is not currently a threat is inherently evil.)

 

the question is, what's Voltaire's motives?

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3 hours ago, Ser Pentrose said:

I tend to think of Pandora as Chaotic Bored.

which is probably worse than evil in the long run considering she's already demonstrated she can make someone 'power-drunk' and wreak havoc without actually breaking the rules, and she's willing to give powers to almost anyone as long as something interesting happens.

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21 hours ago, Matoyak said:
23 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Is there someone who wants it to stay the way it is?

Magic.

... at least according to dream wizard. Who might be as trustworthy as Voltaire AND/OR might be misinterpreting something.

Wait. Dream wizard wants the world to stay as is. We have one.

20 hours ago, Scrapyard_Dragon said:

Voltair wasn't trying to get Elliot killed, he was trying to get Tara (or maybe Andrea) killed BY Elliot. Why? Presumably so that Elliot & co wouldn't find out about the whole alternate universe/world deal. My guess is that he is trying to merge (or something similar) the worlds and the clog is a part of that. The problem now is that because Elliot, and likely the rest of the main 8 knows, they won't play along with Voltair's plan. Thus we come to plan complicated mess.

The main problem with this idea is that I don't believe Elliot will be able to kill Tara.

Otherwise, I agree that it seems possible that the plan A was actually rejected BECAUSE griffins told main 8 the informations.

Hmmmm ... if not for the "solved with one murder", I would suspect that he would want Elliot to be killed by Tara and THEN Tara being killed by rest of main 8.

20 hours ago, Scrapyard_Dragon said:

TLDR: Voltair was going to use one of the main characters to do some universe reshaping stuff (that will somehow fit into his view of a better world) but now that the main crew know about the alternate world they won't play along, so he needs to use magus instead, which requires that he gets the guy a body, hence giving info to sirleck, and then he needs to get magus to cooperate.

Maybe it wasn't supposed to be Elliot who needs to do the reshaping. It could be Tedd or Nanase, although it would be harder to explain how can Magus replace them.

12 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:
17 hours ago, Alwaysnewguy said:

Yeah, except for the hundreds of not-Tengus that will emerge. Pandora wants to make magic an everyday thing; if magic doesn't rewrite the rules, then every bully, bigot, manipulative jackass, socio/psychopath, serial killer, etc. will be able to develop powers that reflect who they are. Technically, they can do that now, but no one knows how easy it actually is to develop magical abilities. If Pandora's idea worked, everyone would know how easy it is to get magic, and then the world would start to fill up with supervillains, with few superheroes to counter them.

Not exactly.  The world would hopefully start filling up with *inexperienced* superheroes just as fast as it does with *inexperienced* supervillains, perhaps even faster if you subscribe to the "more good people than bad" outlook.  People seem to be quick to point out how many bad guys might get powers, but then assume that they'd somehow be more competent more quickly than their good-guy counterparts.

Also, Pandora may think she can influence the situation. Maybe if she marks enough "good" people - like Catalina and Rhoda - and give them headstart compared to the "bad" people, the not-Tengus will be caught fairy quickly.

The results will be certainly more interesting and less safe world, but might not be as bad as if the reveal of how easy is to get magic happened without her plan.

1 hour ago, sstabeler said:

I actually can't help but wonder if Pandora is WHY immortals reset- they saw she went insane, so set a point to reset at which they could guarantee no other immortal would go insane

I don't think she is THAT far from reset.

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10 hours ago, InfiniteRemnant said:

which is probably worse than evil in the long run considering she's already demonstrated she can make someone 'power-drunk' and wreak havoc without actually breaking the rules, and she's willing to give powers to almost anyone as long as something interesting happens.

Yes, the fact that she could dominate Dex's mind to the point where he would comply with an order to commit the magical equivalent of a suicide bombing and yet still not be violating the letter of Immortal law is quite frightening.

As for how long Pandora has gone without a reset, she has admitted to being well over 500 years old (claiming to have described herself as 299 "for centuries"). Beyond that, we have no further information.

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I keep wondering if perhaps Voltaire, Pandora, or Magus are not themselves working towards their goals from a flawed premise?  Inaccurate information or incorrect assumptions that will doom their grand schemes from the beginning.

If the best chemists from the Phlogiston Theory era were working on a problem.  They could show internally consistent equations and even demonstrate some results.  But they would keep missing what (to anyone with some chemistry training from a later era) would be the obvious conclusion.

Could "Dangerous Rarity" Tedd be the Lavoisier for a new generation of Thaumatologists?

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46 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

 

If the best chemists from the Phlogiston Theory era were working on a problem.  They could show internally consistent equations and even demonstrate some results.  But they would keep missing what (to anyone with some chemistry training from a later era) would be the obvious conclusion.

 

What were they trying to achieve?

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3 hours ago, partner555 said:

What were they trying to achieve?

Possibly transmutation of lead into gold. In the late Mr. Pratchett's masterpieces, this was one of the primary objectives of Ankh-Morpork's alchemists. Unfortunately, the only process they mastered with any degree of consistency was the art of turning gold into less gold.

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1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

Possibly transmutation of lead into gold. In the late Mr. Pratchett's masterpieces, this was one of the primary objectives of Ankh-Morpork's alchemists. Unfortunately, the only process they mastered with any degree of consistency was the art of turning gold into less gold.

Well, that is vastly easier.

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On 4/21/2016 at 4:44 AM, ProfessorTomoe said:

Gotta agree that Abner is very Humphrey Bogart, a la "The Maltese Falcon." I fear that this might be his only appearance, though.

Doubtful. Dan has a habit of reusing even very minor characters, and this appearance puts him in the thick of things

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1 hour ago, Wildcat said:

Doubtful. Dan has a habit of reusing even very minor characters, and this appearance puts him in the thick of things

What happened to Phil?  (The service station attendant, not Carol's camera operator.)  What about the Goon?

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29 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

What happened to Phil?  (The service station attendant, not Carol's camera operator.)  What about the Goon?

The Goon was intended to be a one shot gag. I have no idea who Phil is O.o . Link?

He has a habit of it, not does it with every character. I doubt all of the random extras will show up again, but sometimes they do 

But anyway, Abner is important to this storyline, and could very easily become important to others. I doubt he'll just disappear 

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8 hours ago, partner555 said:

What were they trying to achieve?

Phlogiston Theory was the theory that heat/fire is a substance unto itself, which was released/generated during combustion. The theory was created in order to explain how combustion could occur in the absence of oxygen (since "oxidation" was believed at the time to require actual oxygen--it was only with the discovery of electron bonds that it was understood that oxidation is based on positive and negative charges rather than oxygen atoms). Anyway, Phlogiston Theory could make reasonably accurate predictions of chemical reaction products while being entirely mistaken about the processes taking place.

An analogous example of the "mistaken paradigm leading to useful results" would be the geocentric universe model. By including epicycles (circles within circles), pre-Rennaissance scholars could make very accurate predictions of the apparent motions of the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets.

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33 minutes ago, Wildcat said:

The Goon was intended to be a one shot gag. I have no idea who Phil is O.o . Link?

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=196

30 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Phlogiston Theory was the theory that heat/fire is a substance unto itself, which was released/generated during combustion. The theory was created in order to explain how combustion could occur in the absence of oxygen (since "oxidation" was believed at the time to require actual oxygen--it was only with the discovery of electron bonds that it was understood that oxidation is based on positive and negative charges rather than oxygen atoms). Anyway, Phlogiston Theory could make reasonably accurate predictions of chemical reaction products while being entirely mistaken about the processes taking place.

Actually, Phlogiston theory is older than the knowledge of oxygen and when oxygen was first discovered, it was thought to be dephlogisticated air. The Phlogiston theory was invalidated when they realized that the phlogiston must have negative weight.

33 minutes ago, ijuin said:

An analogous example of the "mistaken paradigm leading to useful results" would be the geocentric universe model. By including epicycles (circles within circles), pre-Rennaissance scholars could make very accurate predictions of the apparent motions of the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets.

Not only that, the Ptolemy's planetary model with epicycles was giving better results than original Copernicus theory, because until Kepler added elliptical orbits, it didn't really matched.

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Phill has been a minor running gag in EGS fandom for quite a while now.  He was only ever seen in one panel, yet people cite his appearance as often as possible and speculate on what he's been up to or when he will return.  Probably thanks to his name being right there on his coveralls, making him easy to refer to.  Plus, by the Law of Conservation of Detail, any character who the writer bothers to name *should* turn out to be important some day....

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and then two years from now our time when Tara and Andrea make another appearance, it's discovered that Phil was the one who caused the clog in the first place! 

...By spraying grafiti in his teen years, which unintentionally wound up in the shape of a magic seal, that Edward and his people have been maintaining ever since thinking it was there for a good reason and sealing away something important/dangerous.

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48 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

Phill has been a minor running gag in EGS fandom for quite a while now.  He was only ever seen in one panel, yet people cite his appearance as often as possible and speculate on what he's been up to or when he will return.  Probably thanks to his name being right there on his coveralls, making him easy to refer to.  Plus, by the Law of Conservation of Detail, any character who the writer bothers to name *should* turn out to be important some day....

I'm sure he's a janitor at either MNHS or MSHS, maybe both? ;)

 

I know I was pretty certain that when Andrea first appeared in the flashback sequence in "Identity" that she was just a one off because of how ridiculous the moment seemed. That might have the side effect of looking at everything that may look like a one off and believe they're more important to the story.

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19 minutes ago, Scotty said:

I'm sure he's a janitor at either MNHS or MSHS, maybe both? ;)

 

I know I was pretty certain that when Andrea first appeared in the flashback sequence in "Identity" that she was just a one off because of how ridiculous the moment seemed. That might have the side effect of looking at everything that may look like a one off and believe they're more important to the story.

"In retrospect, that griffin was probably noteworthy." is pretty good foreshadowing though:P

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In hindsight, yeah it is. But at the time is was like "Oh, some random griffin asking for directions to show Elliot doing things that people take notice of", even Elliot's comment "She was just asking for directions." made it sound like there was nothing special, at least in terms of "weird things happen in Moperville" sense. It's like "we've had goo, evil green monkey things, fire golems, bulldog dragons, a griffin is just par for the course around here and at least she wasn't violent" ;)

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