Gunnerkrigg Court

[Moo]

Tony's vehement reaction to Annie's makeup is interesting now...

[Quercus]

Putting aside all story issues for a moment, the latest page is soooo cuuute!

[doogly]

Tony's vehement reaction to Annie's makeup is interesting now...

oh snap I had not connected that at all, that is totally a thing

[Zohar]

About eight years ago or so I went to the UK for a couple of weeks (met up with a bunch of fora people too). I also went to the Thoughtbubble comics convention in Leeds. I met Tom there and commissioned three postcard-sized drawings of each of the canines. They were very pretty, and I lost them immediately upon my return home.

This year my brother went to Thoughtbubble as well and again Tom was there. My brother was willing to commission another drawing for me of the same subject matter, and last night I picked it up. I love it so much! It's about letter size, by the way.

Spoiler:

[Moo]

About eight years ago or so I went to the UK for a couple of weeks (met up with a bunch of fora people too).

Sounds like a great investment of your time ;-P

This year my brother went to Thoughtbubble as well and again Tom was there. My brother was willing to commission another drawing for me of the same subject matter, and last night I picked it up. I love it so much!

Wow, that is frigging fantastic.

[Moo]

http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1915

Screw you, Tom; you've made your point. You can pull my heartstrings with a swish of your drawing tablet stylus and make me sad for the rest of the day. No need to rub it in!

[Quercus]

The missed opportunity to use an interrobang in the latest comic is making me slightly sad. (On a related note, why on earth won't my phone keyboard let me enter such an excellent piece of punctuation‽)

[Moo]

http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1939

Eeep... regarding Ysengren in this new Chapter ("Memories of the worthles")... This is... not good... right?

Also I THINK on that first page of the chapter (one back from the link above) those are all Annie but I'm not 100% on the middle one. Annie or Surma?

[Zohar]

I'm pretty sure they're all Annie

[doogly]

oh my word

[Quercus]

Spoiler:

Is this all part of Coyote's plan or did he just fuck up bad?

[Moo]

bad

[doogly]

Spoiler:

One of the comrades was lobbying hard for part of a plan, esp with Chekhov's Dead Goose. But I was very surprised.

[Quercus]

Spoiler:

oh, I think it's part of a plan, just one that is in the process of backfiring spectacularly

[doogly]

Spoiler:

Right, the question is whether "Neck in mouth" is part of the plan. I thought not so much, but I will give Coyote significant props if he planned this.

[Quercus]

Yep, those are my feelings too.

[Yakk]

There are two important parts of the trickster god trope.

The first is that they are always 3 steps ahead, even when they look behind.

The second is that one day, they go too far and pay the price.

---

On an aside, has anyone read about these old myths:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ysengrimus

Here Reinardus is the trickster and Ysengrimus the buffoon.

[Zohar]

On the subreddit people talk about how Coyote in myth often dies because he goes too far and is then resurrected, so it's possible that's what we'll see here. He certainly seems surprised at Ysengrin's bite, but I suppose it could just be a "WTF do you think you're doing" sort of expression.

[Quercus]

There are two important parts of the trickster god trope.

The first is that they are always 3 steps ahead, even when they look behind.

The second is that one day, they go too far and pay the price.

There's also the theme that their one blind spot is the idea that not everyone is just out for themselves. Therefore you trick the trickster by showing altruism, loyalty, kindness etc. when that's against your own interests (annoyingly I can't bring specific examples to mind here). I wonder if Ysengrin is going to surprise us here...

ETA: Whichever way it goes this storyline is awesome. I haven't been this excited about GC in a long time.

[Moo]

It's also possible that

Spoiler:

Coyote underestimated Ysingren and will be ok because trickster god but our human friends won't...

Then again, the chapter started with Coyote seeing the seething hatred in Ysingren just under the surface so he must be planning something. Just not necessarily something good. And he could still have underestimated Ysingren's hatred for him...

[Yakk]

I guess as a demigod, you don't get to floss often. You take the chances you gets.

---

Ah, the rage memories are breaking free?

[Quercus]

Oh, this is bad, this is very, very bad.

[Zohar]

On the one hand - kind of an adorable picture? On the other hand I'm worried about what remains of Ys.

[Sableagle]

My first thought was "You're adorable!"

Then I wondered whether I'd be saying that to Ysengrim or Coyote. It's not really clear.

Then I wondered whether we're going by d20 rules and rolling a 20 is always a critical success and a charm attempt involving a hug and double ear-scritchies could actually have a 5% chance of working.

[Quercus]

Adorable? I guess, once you peel your eyes away from that terror-inducing grin.

[Sableagle]

That's terror-inducing? An image search for "cute anime girl smile" to find another like it produced many pages of much scarier grins ...

... and this:



What's that gesture supposed to signify?!?

Ugh. So many people tagging irrelevant images with the things I'm trying to find, so much creepy shit and Firefox's fantastic habit of humping down two screenfuls when I hold the scrollbar too long have caused me to give up.

Given the circumstances, sure, either one of them suddenly looking that happy is cause for alarm, but I don't think that grin itself is all that scary.

It's a little bit this:


... and a little bit this:


... with a lopsided smile that shows some teeth:


That's just nowhere near as scary as ... spoilered for shudder-inducing horror:

Spoiler:

Oh no, a happy wolf.

[Quercus]

For me it was a combination of teeth showing on a wolf/dog being a sign of aggression (when not combined with submissive body language), and also, anthropomorphically, it saying to me "ha! Now I can do whatever I want", when "whatever I want" might very well include destroying the court.

[Sableagle]

The top lip being down over the front teeth makes it into a human smile, not a wolf snarl, to me. I did spend time looking for pictures of a typical, asymmetric, natural human smile, but people photograph more symmetrical mouths more often (yes, Miranda, you look lovely, but today I want to see someone else for research purposes). Here, here's a famous one:



That and these eyes look more like "excited and very happy" than "out for blood" to me.

Of course, as I said, in context either of those two canids being that excited and that happy is kind of scary, but I still think that still image is fluffy and adorable on its own.

[Quercus]

Of course, as I said, in context either of those two canids being that excited and that happy is kind of scary, but I still think that still image is fluffy and adorable on its own.

That's fair, I think I just have a difficult time divorcing it from its context

[Moo]

http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1959

FUUUUU

[Zohar]

Yeah this bodes well. They could use some firepower right about now. Get it?

Firepower?

Because Annie... has fire powers?

[Zohar]

I liked that building!

[Moo]

http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1978

Good bot

[Zohar]

I think the bots might just be watching? On reddit someone mentioned the purple color and that sound effect were how Anya's shield works.

[Moo]

Re: http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=2069

Interesting that other!Annie is wearing makeup...

[Quercus]

I really need to get my comic reading systems sorted out again... it just hasn't been the same since the effective demise of RSS. I've missed nearly an entire chapter!

[Zohar]

I really need to get my comic reading systems sorted out again... it just hasn't been the same since the effective demise of RSS. I've missed nearly an entire chapter!

Demise of RSS? I use feedly and my RSS feeds seem to all work fine.

[Quercus]

I really need to get my comic reading systems sorted out again... it just hasn't been the same since the effective demise of RSS. I've missed nearly an entire chapter!

Demise of RSS? I use feedly and my RSS feeds seem to all work fine.

Okay, this is embarrassing. It turns out that the only thing which had died was my own RSS setup.

I kind of assumed that as more and more of my feeds stopped updating that they were being switched off by site owners. Turns out that I just needed to resubscribe to them through feedly's interface and they started working again. Not sure why the original ones had stopped working, but those subscriptions were years old and were imported from Google Reader before Google killed that, so it's not especially surprising that something would be screwy with them.

TL;DR Reports of my RSS's death have been greatly exaggerated.

[Moo]

TL;DR Reports of my RSS's death have been greatly exaggerated.

X-D