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…oh good the secret is daydreaming out of boredom.
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Jan 12, 2022 17:23
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Moola posted:How is the armhair more gross than the arm with scales? I've been playing Shadow of the Colossus for the first time and that very furry arm, in my just woke up state, made me think "oh, climbable surface"
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Jan 12, 2022 17:42
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RoboRodent posted:I've been playing Shadow of the Colossus for the first time and that very furry arm, in my just woke up state, made me think "oh, climbable surface" Large flat surface around the nose, that must be where the first glyph is
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Jan 12, 2022 18:32
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Snout, who's defining traits are his curiosity and his love of books, finally discovers all he needed to do was read more than 5 pages of this magical text before he could start doing magic. It took him a real life year or several in-universe weeks or hours, hard to tell, to sort this out. Now, because Snout has taken the incredible journey of "went to a library, then went to another library, then forced himself to read a book for longer than 1 minute," he gets to be the special goodboy who gets the magic. Even in most bored, meandering fanfiction you still get plot beats. You get the author shittily recreating plot beats they've read or seen in other media. You get them trying to emulate things, poorly. With Mookie the game of telephone is so genuinely far removed I can't believe he regularly consumes any media other than his memories of anime and comic books from 20 years ago. He made it clear he doesn't even know what character tropes exist in the genres he's a "nerd" about, at this point the cultural dialogue his books are situated metafictionally isn't "current popular nerd stuff," it isn't "niche indie nerd stuff," it isn't even "anime and webcomics from 20 years ago", it's "his vague memories of how things were 20 years ago." I think Mookie mostly rereads his own work, honestly? With the way he tries to engage with and subvert tropes I honestly think outside of the rare comic or movie or whatever, I think he mostly consumes his own work, and communicates with what he can extrapolate about other works from his own works. Oh, in this arc of Dominic Deegan I must have been taking the poo poo out of this trope I hate! The trope was probably this, right? It's been 20 years but that sounds right. I still hate that trope! Let me bring it up again in Legacy! It's just, a man having a conversation with himself, over and over again. Which I guess makes sense with all his characters being either Mookie or ThingMookieHates.
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Jan 12, 2022 18:41
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SubG posted:In the real world a book full of mystical mumbo-jumbo repeated at tedious length is absolute fuckin' catnip to occultists. The best example is probably Trithemius' Steganographia, which is actually a text about cryptography and various methods of concealing messages. This content is concealed via various methods (e.g. by taking alternating letters from alternating words) in a cover text that contains page after page of elaborately detailed rituals for sending messages via spirits, recitations of the names of demons, their duties, their numerical associations, the celestial objects associated with each, and so on. All of it just nonsensical (and fantastically tedious) bibble-babble constructed entirely for the purpose of holding the hidden text. If anything, the "you're already doing it!" part should go first, then 400 pages of "learn to astral project by reading 100 slightly different variations on a misinterpretation of an ancient myth, and why it justifies antisemitism". Also I love that Snout is curious and smart and can barely get through the book lmao. Dominic is that boring
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Jan 12, 2022 19:24
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TheHan posted:If Mookie didn’t crap this chapter out in 30 minutes maybe he would’ve stumbled on the incredibly obvious idea that Snout’s curiosity leads him to find coded messages in the book. Once again my brain started writing a much better backstory for Snout, spurred by this observation. Snout lives in Mongreltown, but is misunderstood and rejected by society due to his deafness, so he retreats into books and spends all his time at the library. One day he comes across a very enigmatic book, possibly in a hidden area of the library, or accidentally dropped by someone (Arudak and/or Ink Witch, possibly on the run from the bad guys). He begins reading, and is confused at first, but starts to find coded messages due to his analysis skills from years of being absorbed in books, and uses the instructions in the code to begin unlocking abilities involving lucid dreaming. Through the dream realm, this catches the attention of his future allies and enemies, and he has to flee Mongreltown with his new allies, who begrudgingly take him along as he's the only one that's been able to unlock the code, and now they're on the run to evade the bad guys and learn more about the author of the book (Dominic) so they can unlock its secrets and keep them from the bad guys. There you go! A set up for an actual interesting story. Instead of, uh, this. Side note - why exactly is the wild edge library in the middle of nowhere instead of in Mongreltown? I know it's probably because of the early gag of it being an unlikely open-air library, but it actively hurts the worldbuilding as Mongreltown becomes an important location. Mookie probably hadn't even conceived of Mongreltown at that point or considered the implications of it being so close to Snout's original location.
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Jan 12, 2022 19:57
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Mongreltown, slightly more than one day's walk away from Snout's House. Our ultra-curious [prefix missing]tagonist has never been there.
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Jan 12, 2022 20:01
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Yeah. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes for Snout to be a hermit in the first place. He lives really near a big city, he was really excited when he learned about its existence, and he is curious about the outside world because of all the reading he does. It all smacks of, once again, Mookie making poo poo up as he goes.
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Jan 12, 2022 20:09
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Belle from Beauty and the Beast: Solitary by virtue of weird. Her dad's weird, she's extremely bookish and that's seen as weird. Basically she's alone in a crowd. Obtains books from the bookstore in her poor provincial town. It's a tiny town and she's friendly with the owner, so he lets her borrow books. Wants adventure in the great wide somewhere. Circumstances don't allow it until the plot kicks in. Bookishness is important to the plot. It made her seek adventure, and lot of the lead couple's bonding is her teaching the undereducated once-prince. Enemy-turned-significant-other through the power of human interaction, compassion, etc. Personality is intelligent, stubborn, true to her word enough to hang out in a castle until things got violent, compassionate, brave, doesn't give a gently caress what others think about her. Snout: Solitary because he lives in the middle of nowhere. Middle of nowhere is somehow like a day away from a major city. Obtains books from the inexplicable wilderness library that we see no evidence that anyone but him goes to. Does he know the owner? No idea. The place still has official library cards for some reason. Curious about the world. Not curious enough to go look at it. Plot forces his hand. Is barely able to tolerate reading a plot important book long enough for it to hand him information. Enemy-turned-significant-other through the power of "I don't know where I was going with this ship thing, I guess the ship is hers?" (and then randomly she does not become a significant other, what a mess) Personality is foolish, easily distracted, easy to convince, selfish, cowardly, requires excessive outside validation. I don't know where I'm going with this, I guess I just want to watch Beauty and the Beast again. I always liked that one as a kid.
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Jan 12, 2022 22:05
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well hell, now I’ve spent thinking calories on a version of Arudak who’s blunt and abrasive but still basically good-hearted, and an ink witch who’s good for anything other than casting Magic Jetplane (like, maybe she makes snoot a magical inkwell that just writes his thoughts in the air, but he has to choose his words really carefully as there’s only so much ink, which  ) and who will also respect snook’s boundaries goddamn it. I suppose it’s a decent kind of mental exercise, but it all feels so baroquely pointless in this case
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Jan 12, 2022 22:14
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Douche Wolf 89 posted:Also I love that Snout is curious and smart and can barely get through the book lmao. Dominic is that boring  That was 20 April 2020, almost two years and seven chapters ago.
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Jan 12, 2022 22:59
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SubG posted:That was 20 April 2020, almost two years and seven chapters ago. Interesting well hey so let me grab something from this manila envelope in my office real quick
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Jan 12, 2022 23:26
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"It's boring on purpose" -
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Jan 13, 2022 00:14
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Twelve by Pies posted:That's maybe part of it but it doesn't explain things on a fundamental level. What you're saying is how he writes, but it doesn't explain why he writes. People (usually) write what they believe, and so Mookie very clearly believes, based on his work, that people are inherently good or inherently evil, and can never change this. A bad person can never truly have a change of heart, because they are bad, even if they try to do good things they're still a bad person. Likewise, a good person can never do anything bad, even if they do bad things, they're still a good person. Mind you, 'my moral outlook is similar to that of Orson Scott Card' isn't exactly a great look.
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Jan 13, 2022 00:48
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Mookie posted:Somebody once said - "If left to their own devices, good people will do good things. Bad people will do bad things. But if you want a good person to do bad things, you need religion."
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Jan 13, 2022 01:13
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"What if we combined Orson Scott Card's awful binary thinking with a relatively pat atheist claim that religion is the only way to make good people act badly" is such an incredibly weird junction to think about.
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Jan 13, 2022 02:20
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"Incredibly Weird Junction" would have been a good title for the chapter about swamp loving.
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Jan 13, 2022 02:30
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Note that that's exactly what happened with Snowsong, in fact. She thought she was doing good, but only because she was blinded by her weird cult's ludicrous teachings. And the thing that snapped her out of it was a combination of "seeing people doing things that weren't Always Exactly The Same Thing Every Day Forever" and "SuperGreg saying 'no you're a murderer' and instantly losing all her remaining conviction"
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Jan 13, 2022 03:06
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SubG posted:And I mean Arudak and Ink Witch too. Arudak originally shows up as an antagonist specifically because he's trying to get his hands on this specific book. They fight over it until Snout pouts until they start cooperating: Actually, it was all the way back in the first chapter, when he was trying to recover the lost pages, which the Ink Witch had stolen from him. Snout and Ink Witch found the book in a Mongreltown porn shop in the second chapter, and though they weren't looking for it specifically, they wanted it because it was obviously relevant to their interests. Arudak showed up the next day and bought it before they could, which I think is genuinely the funniest sequence of events in this whole comic.
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Jan 13, 2022 05:44
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SubG posted:In the real world a book full of mystical mumbo-jumbo repeated at tedious length is absolute fuckin' catnip to occultists. The best example is probably Trithemius' Steganographia, which is actually a text about cryptography and various methods of concealing messages. This content is concealed via various methods (e.g. by taking alternating letters from alternating words) in a cover text that contains page after page of elaborately detailed rituals for sending messages via spirits, recitations of the names of demons, their duties, their numerical associations, the celestial objects associated with each, and so on. All of it just nonsensical (and fantastically tedious) bibble-babble constructed entirely for the purpose of holding the hidden text. That's hilarious because the book's game is given up by the title. That is, hiding stuff in plain site is what steganography is.
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Jan 13, 2022 05:49
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Twelve by Pies posted:That's maybe part of it but it doesn't explain things on a fundamental level. What you're saying is how he writes, but it doesn't explain why he writes. People (usually) write what they believe, and so Mookie very clearly believes, based on his work, that people are inherently good or inherently evil, and can never change this. A bad person can never truly have a change of heart, because they are bad, even if they try to do good things they're still a bad person. Likewise, a good person can never do anything bad, even if they do bad things, they're still a good person. quote:I'm curious where this outlook on life came from because it's so bizarre I can't even think of an origin. It definitely isn't rooted in mainstream Christian beliefs in the US, because mainstream US Christianity is all about the miraculous conversion from evil to good. Even outside of the people who brag that they "did every drug and had sex with all the women and did all the bad things," who are a dime a dozen, the Bible itself has those kinds of stories. Look at Saul, who executed Christians only to have a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus, look at Samson, who violated an oath to God only to repent at the very end and regain his lost strength. While Mookie doesn't seem exactly devout, it doesn't mean he avoided growing up in a Christian society and picking up some of its fleas during his formative years. The problem is he's not smart enough to have discarded them eventually, so they're still in his writing 20 years later. quote:The only thing I can think of is maybe some sort of weird influence from D&D? I know this sounds like a joke to an extent because we know how much Mookie's D&D sessions influenced the original Dominic Deegan, and it feels like just another "Ha ha Mookie thinks D&D is real life" thing. But early D&D editions were very much into the whole alignment being immutable and unchangeable thing. Orcs and goblins were always evil, always, no matter what, no such thing as a good goblin. Elves were always good (or neutral), never evil. So under the old system where a creature's alignment is inherently part of what they are as a living being, Mookie's view makes sense. Here's an orc being nice to the party, uh oh, we know orcs are evil so it can't be trusted. This elf is doing something that seems evil, that can't be right, elves are always good/neutral, so they must have a good reason we don't see for what they're doing.
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Jan 13, 2022 07:21
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I've always held that the way someone plays tabletop role playing games is significantly impacted by their first gaming group or DM. Of course, with Mookie, I don't think one can simply blame a bad DM early in his roleplaying career for the weird relationship he has with D&D. Has he ever talked about what his D&D group was like, outside of the characters he used for inspiration from it?
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Jan 13, 2022 07:34
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Breadmaster posted:I've always held that the way someone plays tabletop role playing games is significantly impacted by their first gaming group or DM. Of course, with Mookie, I don't think one can simply blame a bad DM early in his roleplaying career for the weird relationship he has with D&D. Has he ever talked about what his D&D group was like, outside of the characters he used for inspiration from it? We know that his D&D group was a major influence, but in reaction to them - they didn't think his characters, including Dominic, were cool enough, and so he set out to produce his own narrative and space where his preferences ruled. I think that says quite a lot, and frankly I would be amazed if Mookie was really much given to TTRPGs in practice, which require a degree of cooperation, creative compromise, and understanding the perspectives of others both in terms of behavior and in terms of aesthetics.
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Jan 13, 2022 07:43
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Jan 13, 2022 07:53
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legit the best punchline he ever made tbh
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Jan 13, 2022 08:31
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He has his own lovely-looks-like-a-teen-doodled-this-art framed on his wall. Holy poo poo 
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Jan 13, 2022 09:33
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Emrikol posted:Actually, it was all the way back in the first chapter, when he was trying to recover the lost pages, which the Ink Witch had stolen from him. Snout and Ink Witch found the book in a Mongreltown porn shop in the second chapter, and though they weren't looking for it specifically, they wanted it because it was obviously relevant to their interests. Arudak showed up the next day and bought it before they could, which I think is genuinely the funniest sequence of events in this whole comic. Also, I just want to point out how little our hero has actually accomplished here. The book is apparently a big McGuffin. How did Snout obtain it? When Snout and Ink Witch get to Mongreltown, Snout hands the first random stranger he sees a note that says, "Hello! I need to find a copy of A Beginner's Guide to Lucid Dreaming by Dominic Deegan". The stranger directs them to the sex shop. After looking around for a couple strips, Snout ends up showing the same note to the owner/clerk/whatever. The clerk then shows The Dream Realm of Asinotaph to Snout (apparently because he's just offering every book in the shop with the word "dream" in the title).   Then someone else (Arudak) buys the book and gives it to Snout. So so far the actual progress in Snout's bigass epic quest has involved:
BattleMaster posted:That's hilarious because the book's game is given up by the title. That is, hiding stuff in plain site is what steganography is.
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Jan 13, 2022 09:48
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Ague Proof posted:"It's boring on purpose" - Only time I've seen that work is in Undertale.
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Jan 13, 2022 13:03
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The book is literally doing all the work.
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Jan 14, 2022 09:16
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Mookie stumbles into writing a shaggy dog story and thinks he's the most brilliant author ever for discovering it.
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Jan 14, 2022 09:44
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Butterfly in the sky, I can fly twice as high...
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Jan 14, 2022 10:29
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I have a theory that every time he comes back from a break Mookie begins to resent The Legacy more.
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Jan 14, 2022 15:30
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TheHan posted:I have a theory that every time he comes back from a break Mookie begins to resent The Legacy more.
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Jan 14, 2022 16:28
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A couple of times on twitter he's mentioned stuff in Legacy being expanded on in his Patreon, so maybe he's just doing it as the world's worst advertisement.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:23
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TheHan posted:I have a theory that every time he comes back from a break Mookie begins to resent The Legacy more. That's fair, so do I.
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Jan 14, 2022 17:47
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Maybe he's going to visit Akira.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:14
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Robot Style posted:A couple of times on twitter he's mentioned stuff in Legacy being expanded on in his Patreon, so maybe he's just doing it as the world's worst advertisement. I cannot imagine reading this comic and being excited to see the artist’s Pateron. There’s plenty of comics that do better philosophy and lots of better porn.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:15
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SubG posted:The book is literally doing all the work. is he hard? can he get hard without spikin' out? he's gonna gently caress in the dream realm
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Jan 14, 2022 19:38
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Douche Wolf 89 posted:is he hard? can he get hard without spikin' out? He's going to run into the dream butthole. It will come into focus next comic Billy Gnosis fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 20:47
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| # ? May 26, 2024 21:12 |
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He's going to dead-rear end meet Dominic and I bet Dominic will talk and Snout will be able to hear him because of dream magic bullshit.
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Jan 14, 2022 22:08
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