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Eeevil posted:If the demon possesses somebody until they die and then goes away, I wonder how they found out about it. Klara didn't point it out so I assume there's no visual cue. because Mother Diane told them it's there and obvs anyone found touching her loot cabinet is lying about not being a demon
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Jul 18, 2016 14:53
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Predictable and accepted outcome of my lifestyle of jerkin off + never trimming my pubes
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Aug 18, 2017 23:46
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Zinkraptor posted:That felt like a bit of a cop-out, but he did kinda write himself into a corner there. It's the current plot of the comic in miniature, with tentacle-nipple Shreks
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Sep 23, 2017 08:19
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Gonna be egg on all y'all's faces when Audrey gets the power of Heart
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Sep 26, 2017 22:36
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DACK FAYDEN posted:It will be very tragic! "He wasted most of his life in a bathroom," people will say. #relatable
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Nov 13, 2017 21:25
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:There is going to be a lot of Thorsbying going on with a gauntlet that switches brains if you touch someone and a guy whose limbs can be stretched to touch anything. And a big crate of lunatics.
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Dec 15, 2017 22:52
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Bobulus posted:He "finds it hard to believe" that they decided just two hours ago what to do. If they had information coming from that conversation (bug/informant), that comment makes no sense. I assumed they have a copy of the same diary, but that might be too straightforward
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Dec 18, 2017 16:50
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the Traditionalists bought the death sceptre through a proxy and keep giving it to vice presidents, who keep getting killed in artifact-related mishaps. They've actually bought all of Trixie's artifacts, bankrolling her campaign all along.
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Dec 18, 2017 |
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Dec 18, 2017 22:40
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vyelkin posted:Unless they knew he would say no, and wanted him to think there wasn't another traitor, or wanted him to say no but then be suspicious of everyone else in the group because he would then wonder who else had been approached. This is too close to being a clever bit of deceit for a Thorsby comic
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Dec 19, 2017 20:15
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cant cook creole bream posted:So, it's a conspiracy and Samantha was never insane in the first place? Very interesting. She's the queen like there's a dozen-odd Napoleons and Jesuses running around the sidewalk right now. Don't think the physical eyes have much of anything to do with it.
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Mar 9, 2018 17:48
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it's a good punchline
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Mar 12, 2018 06:58
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I'm the replica asylum
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Mar 24, 2018 01:28
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DACK FAYDEN posted:I like how parrot dude is actively shouting about his presence instead of just stealthily flying away. Good plan, idiot. If you're not bursting into every conversation you encounter screaming "I HEARD WHAT YOU SAID! YOU CAN'T CATCH ME!" you're not living man
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Mar 26, 2018 16:18
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Dr Christmas posted:I'm not convinced that having your mind transferred into an animal, no matter how sober it is, would be the best way to confirm to yourself that you aren't hallucinating. So long as that doesn't actually occur to Trixie they're golden
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May 16, 2018 16:50
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I appreciate the deep characterization that goes into realizing Audrey would just automatically mentally insert "...and then we murder them" into a plan explicitly about not murdering someone
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Jul 9, 2018 18:56
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Bobulus posted:Honestly, the way to game this system would be to obfuscate the way they die such that they can't plan for it. The scepter only shows a few moments prior to their deaths, after all. Like, subdue them by drugging their food, and then tie them up (and gag them, of course, so they couldn't shout a warning to past selves), and then kill them after they wake up, so it isn't obvious in any future-visions that they were ever drugged. Why overcomplicate things, death by poisoned death scepter handle
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Jul 16, 2018 18:37
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His Divine Shadow posted:Yeah but the plan has worked already, what would happen if they now let her kill them? Would it retroactively erase this timeline? The scepter didn't show the traditionalists getting murdered then and there by Audrey, for whatever reason. The most obvious reason would be because Trixie and all didn't let her, but it's not the only possible one; they don't know all possible outcomes here, all they know is if they stick to this specific plan the traditionalists don't die, so they can't forsee it. If Trixie and the gang had changed their minds and decided to let Audrey loose after the traditionalists were unconscious, then that would just mean the real reason the traditionalists didn't get murdered right then and there was something else stops Audrey from killing them, very likely something that'd gently caress up the actual goal of just getting the hell off the island.
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Jul 17, 2018 19:09
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Android Blues posted:The idea of someone proposing to me after five weeks actually makes me angry. Honestly I'm impressed that Audrey has shown this much restraint. Audrey has been shown to be pretty sharp and emotionally mature, it's just she knows what she truly wants out of life and that's murder.
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Aug 4, 2018 00:26
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Desperate Character posted:because if he dies here all the other zombies and the characters who don't suck stop floating about which might be a bit of a problem are there any characters whose situation right now wouldn't improve if gravity went back to pointing down right this instant which is why it won't happen
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Oct 19, 2018 16:53
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She isn't at all invested in Trixie's politics and is only involved because Klara keeps risking her life to prop up her perpetually failing campaign when the last big treasure haul wasn't enough. Also they're good cupcakes
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Nov 7, 2018 19:47
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lol they're still trying to save that panther, huh
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Nov 13, 2018 19:05
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It certainly doesn't look dead. It's looking at us in the last panel Not gonna make a difference in a moment though
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Nov 24, 2018 18:22
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cant cook creole bream posted:It's kind of a weird dynamic between those four. While Audrey isn't really loyal to Trixie, Clara certainly is. And from what I've seen Audrey tries to support her sister as best as she can, so she's been loyal by association so far. But now that she has a really good offer, she'll gladly sell Trixie out. But Clara will be incredibly disappointed when she finds out about this. Clara will be disappointed but alive, as far as Audrey's concerned Trixie has been the problem for a while now
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Dec 3, 2018 06:05
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DACK FAYDEN posted:The hitmen have no reason to kill more - they're off the Destiny train after all they did. Fun?
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Dec 31, 2018 16:46
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Android Blues posted:Hitmen for Destiny is very good and holds up. Accidental Space Spy has some amazing segments, but is probably the weakest, and has a conclusion ("cultures go to war when the reproductive partners of their leaders are limited and as such the leaders subconsciously feel that a war will cull reproductive rivals in their own society, this is the Ultimate Secret Truth that could be used to prevent war if it were known," which holds up to no scrutiny and doesn't hold half the water of the comic's other evolutionary thought experiments) that undermines its otherwise fun and relatively credible evolutionary biology spec-fi. You're reading it as a literal dissertation on comparative  , like it is seriously proposing that if women are able to choose who they get pregnant by this will inevitably lead to prisonlike harem houses and this is a persuasive argument, when in fact it is a silly satire about how the crazy places people end up when they operate from unexamined biases, and the silly part comes from how none of the biases are our own and all the aliens are doing totally ridiculous nonsense things any outsider can see are pointless, but they mirror dumb things people actually do.Thorsby is perfectly aware that wars are not actually about some caveman instinct to steal your own tribe's women and that people haven't evolved an anti-dissidence trait that makes them hallucinate God in the last ten thousand years, but like, if only the real motivations behind the Iraq War were that reasonable. 
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jan 21, 2019 |
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Jan 21, 2019 18:28
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Android Blues posted:My issue is that the other planets aren't hypotheses we can "test" - they're about bizarre aliens from other planets who have evolved in highly, ridiculously specific ways - so you can enjoy the story and take the exposition about how these creatures evolved to do this or that as relatively credible within its universe. When it then showcases as its climax a highly testable, easily falsifiable hypothesis about human nature, the curtain is pulled away and it loses some of its interest as speculative fiction. dude you are gonna get hosed up when you read Gulliver's Travels and learn about the tiny rear end in a top hat people
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Jan 21, 2019 19:53
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You seem to be having a tremendous amount of trouble with this one very specific interpretation that is the only one you're willing to consider, and I don't think anyone can help you with that. If you need it to be a comic about how valid the skull-calipers wing of sociology is, and there's nothing else going on there, you're just going to have to accept that's going to inevitably be Problematic and also kinda Stupid. If you accept that something can sound sorta sciencey and also not be being advocated as the literal truth (say, the wife-stealing stuff is a pulp sci-fi play on the old "war is not between nations but perpetrated by the rich against the poor" position), your options open up.
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 17:24
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the alternative reading is thisOtherkinsey Scale posted:The aliens in rear end are ludicrous thought experiments, but those thought experiments also serve a purpose as a literary device to deliver the message "poo poo really sucks for everyone involved when society is based on catering to our worst impulses rather than mitigating them." with each chapter lampooning a different behavior that really sucks. the evopsych is there to sell the idea that the people caricatured are behaving animalistically (also because Thorsby fukken loves coming up with contrived situations and then playing out how they'd develop, or coming up with absurd outcomes and then working backwards to "logical" conditions that'd cause it), not literally "people are just instinct-driven animals and society is ultimately all polygynous rutting behavior or something". It's social satire masquerading as a travelogue in the same tradition as Gulliver's Travels, or Gargantua, or Utopia, or the Divine Comedy, revolving around Thorsby's broadly socialist critiques of society. And like in a lot of those stories it's part of the joke that the narrator is kind of an idiot and comes up with pretentious pseudointellectual rationales for everything novel they see mirroring (in this case) the popular trend of pseuds in pop media promoting quack theories about why human nature says the status quo is the only true way we can be. The whole point of the big reveal is that you've been rolling along with this kind of nonsense going "yeah that checks out" about all the weird space aliens' societies being totally consumed by some throwback caveman instinct that makes their lives hell, because you're (clearly) primed to accept this kind of explanation at face value as sufficient, and then he turns around and pulls the exact same reasoning on us and suddenly it's heeeey we're more complicated than that! Except it's about something we have no more valid excuse for, it's just people at their worst and most unreasonable that we've structured much of civilization around and accepted as the natural order of things, and it makes our lives hell. I'm not a fan of the entire last chapter being Lies, Sisters, and Wives all over again, the whole thing's got much jankier pacing than his later stuff, but it's a pretty funny joke that the fate of the world really just hinges on whether president gets laid and decides maybe he doesn't feel like starting a nuclear war after all, and if he doesn't everyone's just gonna shrug and kill each other. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 20:33
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Android Blues posted:It still has some credence within the setting, and there's nothing in particular that questions or undermines the "polygyny prevents war" thing other than its own apparent ridiculousness. You have to rely on the audience's perception to go, "oh, actually, despite the amount of mental real estate the text devotes to this idea, it's silly enough that it can't possibly be at all sincere." the comic that opens up with a guy getting abducted by a workshy Mr. Potato Head and whisked off to The Castration Planet isn't under any illusions that getting the word out about its climax about world leaders needing more mistresses is the IRL key to ending war, it's all extremely silly. Satire generally isn't in the business of prescribing sober and reasonable social policy, and yeah I am going to draw the line at that that is a very weird thing to expect of absurdist MSPaint alien sex comedy. The serious part, inasmuch as there is one, is that all these terrible things come from people just assuming whatever they're doing is perfectly reasonable because it's what they feel like doing/what everyone's always done, and if they actually stopped to interrogate their own motivations their lives would be immensely easier. But probably they won't, so here's the ridiculously contrived Plan B for how to keep powerful people from ending the world through their dumbest and pettiest impulses (there is no plan B) A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 23:08
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that Lyndon's having it should be taken as a terrible warning that this is actually the worst idea
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Feb 11, 2019 08:49
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Dr Christmas posted:If they're simulating an entire universe, wouldn't there still be billions of years worth of starlight still heading to Earth? Pretty shoddy worksmanship IMO. why would you assume that stars here are billions of lightyears away instead of holes in the firmament a few miles up, or maybe some kind of weird glowing sky monster
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Apr 22, 2019 15:05
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photons are actually weird monsters that evolved to be subatomic for reasons, they're avoiding the earth now cause they know what's coming
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Apr 22, 2019 17:50
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It's not, that's not what's going on
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May 21, 2019 16:49
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He literally says it's culturally constructed right up front, it's called a thought experiment
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Jun 1, 2019 14:37
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:I wonder if pacifism magic works like plausible deniability magic did, where you get a chance to keep your spells by arguing that you didn't really do any harm. Plausible deniability magic relies on convincing other people and pacifism magic relies on convincing yourself, Lyndon's a natural at it because he's an unreflective moron.
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Jul 22, 2019 14:18
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RandomFerret posted:I bet it works the same as plausible deniability magic, only the person you need to convince is yourself. So a really good magician could summon a meteor over a building and then rationalize that it was the falling rubble that killed the occupants and not the spell itself, but a Lyndon could lose all his spells because a cigarette he lit at a party while showing off twenty years ago may have hastened somebody's death by a few hours I still think he's probably a specialist in pacifism magic exactly because he's too dumb and self-absorbed to process those kind of second-order effects unless they're staring him right in the face
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Aug 15, 2019 13:56
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i would like someone to further unpack the alternate reading where the plot of Trixie Slaughteraxe revolves around the fact that its primary characters bear an immutable, supernatural soul granted by the Lord Jesus Christ
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Aug 27, 2019 |
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Aug 27, 2019 19:27
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wiegieman posted:When you're running down a hallway from Audrey, no amount of foreknowledge is going to save you from what happens next.
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Nov 18, 2019 18:55
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:it’s extremely weird to me that you can see the insane panopticon police state Aisha created, as well as the complete annihilation of her humanity, as a happy ending. the one genuinely human connection she had forged is gone forever, she is a deathless god-empress completely immune to empathy for any individual’s suffering. It’s a nightmare world. it's a happy ending inasmuch as the entire comic is a thorough argument against the possibility of any happier ending!
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Nov 26, 2019 21:53
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Android Blues posted:Brain Chip is a perfect thesis statement on Thorsby's mastery of absurd escalation of stakes from a simple, transformative premise. You start out with "a man is capable of sharing information with minutely different versions of himself in parallel universes" and end up with an authoritarian utopia established after a hard-fought struggle to prevent toxic religious memes propagated by a handful of instances from establishing a theocratic technological dystopia as the sole political entity in all known realities. well, the billionth of a percent of possible realities that didn't end in nuclear war over something inconsequential
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Nov 26, 2019 23:35
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