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He's the point-of-view character, which is not the same thing.
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Apr 7, 2019 04:55
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A big flaming stink posted:Similarly, if u like awful hospital you should check out All Night Laundry for a reader driven comic that has a ton of complicated time travel in it. I'm like a tenth of the way in to this so far (judging by the page count) and I'm pretty gripped. How long has this been going? I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before. Also kind of amused around the end of chapter 2 where the author estimates in the notes he's about half way through the story. Page 150 of 2148.
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Apr 7, 2019 15:10
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Tenebrais posted:I'm like a tenth of the way in to this so far (judging by the page count) and I'm pretty gripped. How long has this been going? I'm surprised I haven't heard of it before. It literally started on the mspaintadventures forums in May 2013
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Apr 7, 2019 19:12
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witchy is still good, im interested in the recent dramatic change in coloring process
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Apr 7, 2019 21:16
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In other news, Giant Days continues to be really good, and I really like Max Sarin's take on The Boy (fat version).
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Apr 7, 2019 23:05
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A big flaming stink posted:Similarly, if u like awful hospital you should check out All Night Laundry for a reader driven comic that has a ton of complicated time travel in it. All Night Laundry also appears to be winding up for its finale, and so far it's been an exciting and not-terribly-difficult-to-follow story about time travel and fighting an inter-dimensional cosmic entity in its sleep, so it should have a pretty crazy ending sequence coming up soon.
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Apr 8, 2019 04:10
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something horrible is about to happen to this man
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Apr 8, 2019 06:39
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oh yeah absolutely
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Apr 8, 2019 06:45
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Ashcans posted:Wait what the hell, this made me realize that my RSS broke or something when Unsounded went on a short break - I thought the dude had just ghosted because no more updates filtered through, but apparently it was just my feed? If I had a dime for every Web comic I've rediscovered five years later because they changed their RSS address and never told anyone...
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Apr 8, 2019 10:17
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FronzelNeekburm posted:If I had a dime for every Web comic I've rediscovered five years later because they changed their RSS address and never told anyone...
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Apr 8, 2019 10:31
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RE2 Intensifies.
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Apr 8, 2019 10:56
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Morbi I know the comic is on indefinite hiatus but I demand the yearly April Fool's announcement that secretly contains one or more actual plot spoilers
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Apr 8, 2019 12:55
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So it's looking like the answer may just be "The Author is bad" but I'm really not getting what Howard Taylor is doing with the immortality stuff in Schlock Mercenary. The series has gone from pretty generic sci-fi medical care (if they can get your brain in a jar before it runs out of oxygen you're gonna be okay) up to approaching The Singularity and having people on digital archives from which replacements can be grown in the event that a person suffers the kind of loss that can't be recovered from, like being vaporized in a ship-to-ship engagement. The series also takes some time to examine the philosophy around these arrangements, and it makes it very explicit that making a copy of a dead person is not the same thing as saving them from death. Lately, the series has vaporized or otherwise killed the majority of the core cast, had their surviving comrades mourn their loss, and then tried to have its cake and eat it too by making copies of everyone who died, giving the clones their old jobs back, and having business generally carry on as usual aside from the occasional punchline. It's creating some powerful tonal dissonance, and I'm not clear what the author is even expecting me to feel or what purpose was served by these deaths.
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Apr 10, 2019 03:23
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I think the purpose is that the comic is attempting to track epochal social change, including changes in the nature of consciousness and life, in its setting. In comedy form. Remember that the entire 'main story' really began with the invention of the teraport, totally warping galactic civilization, and now they're discovering that previous civilizations underwent something similar and also all abandoned ship on the galaxy. So I think that dissonance you notice is in fact a very intentional part of the comic: Society is rapidly changing and becoming different from how it was, and the punchline is that either the protagonists are going to get made obsolete and retire, or they're going to keep doing petty mercenary work, forever. It's interesting; if he sticks with it, the question is going to be 'what do you do with mercenaries in a society that no longer recognizes death, may not have war, and is dealing with far larger concepts.' You can question how well he's doing it, and I would - I think his strength is not describing a realistic, living society - but there does seem to be some social SF intent. Also I suspect the comic will have to end after the current deep history arc. All the themes of the recent stories aim towards The End sooner rather than later.
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Apr 10, 2019 03:48
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Death is real in the Schlockverse, though, even with the beginnings of the Singularity. Having your personality on file somewhere does nothing to ameliorate the fact that you, personally, are dead. The narrative acknowledges this, the characters acknowledge this, and story arcs have taken pains to make it absolutely explicit that, for instance the current Captain Tagon is not the same person as the Captain Tagon who used a ship-to-ship warhead as a suicide bomb. Some of this is very much what you've described - the author is exploring these philosophical concepts by having the characters in the setting experience them. I'm griping about parts of his execution and how it's impacting the pacing and emotional beats of the narrative.
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Apr 10, 2019 04:01
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I've said it before elsewhere but it bears repeating, from what I've hear of him and his writing processes via the Writing Excuses podcast, Howard is sometimes prone to some galaxy brain thinking when it comes to Schlock Mercenary and tends to get out over his skiis a bit in places.
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Apr 10, 2019 05:13
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Voyager I posted:Death is real in the Schlockverse, though, even with the beginnings of the Singularity. Having your personality on file somewhere does nothing to ameliorate the fact that you, personally, are dead. The narrative acknowledges this, the characters acknowledge this, and story arcs have taken pains to make it absolutely explicit that, for instance the current Captain Tagon is not the same person as the Captain Tagon who used a ship-to-ship warhead as a suicide bomb. Some of this is very much what you've described - the author is exploring these philosophical concepts by having the characters in the setting experience them. I'm griping about parts of his execution and how it's impacting the pacing and emotional beats of the narrative. Death may be real, but the effect is going to be pretty blunted by the degree of continuity involved! It's also a hot philosophy of mind question whether the 'teraport' would be killing everyone that used it and just assembling copies, so, the comic has long taken the position that people are going to react to their loved ones dying and being copied as 'dead but also not dead' rather than 'who is this new person.' You can disagree with the presentation - again, I think it's very much something worth criticizing - but it's pretty clear that the point is that death is ceasing to mean anything socially. Tagon's experiencing a weird friction that comes from forking, sure, but everyone present just copied off themselves for a one-way trip, and it's clear that the author thinks people will more or less just... get on with their lives in the direction they're currently moving. E: Yeah, I agree that Howard is a competent writer but bit off more than he could chew with galactic-scale social science fiction. However, the current arc is actually much less fragmented than some of the stuff leading up to it, and I've been enjoying the Deep History Conference and so on; I think he's handling this round better than the last few. Of course, if he DOESN'T end the series around this arc, I have no idea where it can go.
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Apr 10, 2019 05:15
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I completely lost the plot for the latest arcs and apparently everybody else did too because there was that Sunday comic a week or two ago which summarized everything that has happened recently. It really does look like he is winding up for the big finale, I wouldn't be surprised if he's decided on an even 20 years of comics. The nature of mind and what it means to be a person has probably been the most commonly reoccurring theme in the comic, which is weird considering it started out as a fourth-wall breaking nerd comedy thing.
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Apr 10, 2019 05:48
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It's better than the storylines a year or so ago where they were either jumping between 4 different loosely related plotlines every week, or when they all got so wrapped up in the impossible amount of wealth available to them that they lost all perspective. The best storylines in the comic have been the smaller-scale ones with clear terms and characters to follow, but I guess he's gotten really wrapped up in fermi's paradox and wants to do some grand scale speculative science fiction, which is a shame.
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Apr 10, 2019 06:21
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I know a lot of you dingdongs liked Cheap Thrills back in the day, well guess what the creator is making it again but the characters are humans speaking as one such dingdong this pleases me greatly
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Apr 10, 2019 09:28
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Voyager I posted:So it's looking like the answer may just be "The Author is bad" but I'm really not getting what Howard Taylor is doing with the immortality stuff in Schlock Mercenary. The series has gone from pretty generic sci-fi medical care (if they can get your brain in a jar before it runs out of oxygen you're gonna be okay) up to approaching The Singularity and having people on digital archives from which replacements can be grown in the event that a person suffers the kind of loss that can't be recovered from, like being vaporized in a ship-to-ship engagement. The series also takes some time to examine the philosophy around these arrangements, and it makes it very explicit that making a copy of a dead person is not the same thing as saving them from death. It's not very well written and being slaved to delivering some kind of dadjoke every four panels does it absolutely no favors, but nobody in the comic knows how to feel about all their friends/themselves being 'dead' but also walking around just like normal either, and at a certain point they just kinda shrug and get on with their day cause what else is there to do; that's the point.
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Apr 10, 2019 12:13
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Grantaire posted:I know a lot of you dingdongs liked Cheap Thrills back in the day, well guess what the creator is making it again but the characters are humans AAAAA! AAAAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
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Apr 10, 2019 12:57
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Three Word Phrase is updating again
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Apr 10, 2019 16:19
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Grantaire posted:I know a lot of you dingdongs liked Cheap Thrills back in the day, well guess what the creator is making it again but the characters are humans in my heart frank will always be a canid mange-beast
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Apr 10, 2019 16:23
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On their Tumblr the artist mentions having trouble redesigning Frank as a human without making him horrific and alienating to look at, lol
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Apr 10, 2019 16:34
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Oxxidation posted:in my heart frank will always be a canid mange-beast extreme same, she shoulda redone the other characters but left him a totally unexplained chinese crested meth mascot
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Apr 10, 2019 16:59
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Grantaire posted:I know a lot of you dingdongs liked Cheap Thrills back in the day, well guess what the creator is making it again but the characters are humans Is there an RSS feed? I can't find one on the website.
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Apr 10, 2019 23:21
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This is what my chrome extension grabs when I hit my browser's rss button. It's there if you view the source, but isn't linked anywhere that I can see.
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Apr 11, 2019 01:38
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Well drat, something happened in Questionable Content.
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Apr 11, 2019 12:45
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habeasdorkus posted:Well drat, something happened in Questionable Content. Lesbian relationships happen in dog years.
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Apr 11, 2019 13:09
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Yeah. At least based on the lesbian couples I'm friends/acquaintances with* the old joke about what a lesbian brings to the second date was definitely true.** * (who are all of the same level of fairly high social status/extremely high educational attainment, so biased and also fairly small sample) * (q: what does a lesbian bring on the second date? a: a U-Haul)
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Apr 11, 2019 15:11
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habeasdorkus posted:* (q: what does a lesbian bring on the second date? a: a U-Haul) third date's the turkey baster. edit: in comics news, menage a archime finally died. dunno if anyone was tracking that, but it happened. collapsed under the weight of neverending dad-horny. anyway please enjoy our new comic, exactly-the-same-as-every-other-one-of-our-comics. gutterdaughter fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Apr 12, 2019 |
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Apr 12, 2019 18:37
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 same lucy
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Apr 12, 2019 19:31
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I mean to be fair, Tai and Dora have been dating for years of real time now. I have no idea how much time is meant to have passed in strip years, though.
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Apr 12, 2019 20:41
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Dangerously Chloe finally ended, and I'm almost impressed by how it managed to grow steadily more horrifying with every update no matter how often I thought it had hit rock bottom. Even its own dedicated forum hates it, good Lord.
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Apr 12, 2019 20:48
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Rand Brittain posted:Dangerously Chloe finally ended, and I'm almost impressed by how it managed to grow steadily more horrifying with every update no matter how often I thought it had hit rock bottom. I'd ask if the dimly remembered thing I thought happened happened, but I'm going to assume A) it did and 2) it was worse than I thought.
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Apr 12, 2019 20:55
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I would like to know more. Feed me the trash, laughing at bad stuff nourishes me.
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Apr 12, 2019 21:57
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Rand Brittain posted:Dangerously Chloe finally ended, and I'm almost impressed by how it managed to grow steadily more horrifying with every update no matter how often I thought it had hit rock bottom. how chloe did it get? did it become too dangerously chloe, or did it remain in unhazardous levels of chloe
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Apr 12, 2019 21:58
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Mors Rattus posted:how chloe did it get? did it become too dangerously chloe, or did it remain in unhazardous levels of chloe I don't really want to go into a list, so I'm just going to say something I realized the other day, which is true of that whole oversized shared universe, which is: It's basically every supernatural sexy anime comedy from the 80's and 90's, except that everything that was only implied in those shows, and that led Rumiko Takahashi to tell people, "I don't think about that and neither should you," is completely explicit here and getting right down into it is exactly what the author wants to do.
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Apr 12, 2019 22:20
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checks unsounded for updates oh cool, child landmine death man unsounded is a hosed up comic to be in
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Apr 12, 2019 23:36
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