PaRARGdox 209
FWIP!: So… Kaycee couldn’t contact Olga through reverse telepathy after all, oh well, worth a try. But never say never, right?
Families… I’ve been working on the final few pages of Families (the incentive voting story)… you can read pages 1-16 here… pages 17 through 20 will be available in a few more weeks.
Patrons: Page 7.213 is now up on Patreon… 7.214 published soon…
Next update: October 15, 2023: Olga!
I am looking forward to potentially seeing Ornuk demonstrating some heroics! I don’t know why, exactly, but something about Ornuk just tells me that there will be some stepping up to the challenge, despite the odds.
Maybe I’m wrong, and Ornuk will be a coward . . . but Ornuk chose to veer off from the main group of fleeing students to be with Brelvis. That says a lot about Ornuk’s character, even without the full context.
That, and I have a soft spot in my heart for the truly “freaky” and unique characters. The ones who don’t fit in, even amoung other exceptional peers as super-hero cadets.
I get that feeling about Ornuk as well. He’s loyal enough to stick with Brelvis when he’s called over and while neither of them seem happy about going towards the Rarg, his immediate reaction isn’t to go “Okay, have fun with that, I’m gonna continue to run away in terror with everyone else!” A lot of the cadets have been shown one of the reasons they got into the academy at all was their courage, determination, and willingness to step up in a crisis.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of aliens?
The Nose knows!
Follow your nose Brelvis.
Looking at the bottom middle panel, it looks like Brelvis has been working out some! He looks a lot more muscular and physically built than when he first blended himself together two years ago.
Well, I would expect physical fitness would be part of the superhero high curriculum. So what if you can’t break the sound barrier (See Fast Club), you still have to be in shape. You won’t be able to help anybody if get winded when fighting a psychotic telepathic serial killer; you would become just another victim.
Regular physical fitness training is also a way to instill discipline, and we all know how much Ken likes to scream at cadets about that.
Tex’s horse “Ehgebackere” quietly chewed through it’s halter and a solitary tumbleweed rolled frantically away down the dusty street as Tex “Ghost’im” Barren stood in the middle of town.
“Dang, looks like everyone just up and moved the town while I was out on the range, AGAIN”
šµ”bury me not on the lone prairie”šµ
What does Ehgebackene mean, is it Swedish?
At a guess, a slurred form of Hey Get Back Here.
Exactly correct.
If I had a mulligan I would rewrite it as:
Texās horse āEhgebackereā quietly chewed through itās halter and bolted as a solitary tumbleweed rolled frantically away down the dusty street.
Tex āGhostāimā Barren stood alone in the middle of the empty town.
Tex is a homesteader who lives quite a way out of town. He normally supplements his crops with hunting but his recent hunts have failed to provide anything. There seems to be no animals anywhere near his homestead or any for as far as he has roamed, even Tex’s horse has been acting up and trying to escape.
Tex went into the nearest town to resupply but found it empty. Tex decided to go on to the next nearest town and that is where we see him now. Tex hasn’t realised it yet but he has been cursed, or blessed, with a very large repulsion field.
I’m not sure how this happened to him, maybe he picked up the wrong rock, defiled a sacred site, cosmic ray, drank from a cursed spring. The idea for the repulsion field comes from a combination of The Empress Wave in Traveller and a movie called Radius. I’m pretty sure most of you would have come across people that made you feel uneasy and want to get away from them. This is the same effect, with the knob turned up to eleven, welded in place and the knob chiselled off. Tex’s AOE is many kilometres/miles wide and engenders an ineluctable feeling of unease and a desire to flee.
Tex will soon enter his super-villian phase as he decides “screw-it” and just takes whatever he wants from the empty town.
So why did I write this? I saw that there had been no activity on the site for over a month. Usually the comment thread ticks over while we wait but this time it looked like everybody left after October 9. I wondered if the comic had moved site and I just didn’t hear about it. I know Grace has been putting stuff up on Issuu(?).
So my imagination went on to ghost towns and tumbleweeds and stuff and it just kinda snowballed from there pulling in tidbits from other places and ending up in the birth of Tex Barren and of course his not so faithful steed
“Ehgebackere”.
So, was October 15 next page 2023 or 2024?
Neither apparently, sad to day but looking like we got dead ink here (what I call web comics that stop updating)
is author still alive?
Why don’t you ask her yourself? Her e-mail is right up there. Frankly, making snarky comments about content which is produced for you for FREE is not going to make the pages come out any faster. There could be a multitude of reasons why the pages aren’t coming out. Grace’s output has been a little slower this year in general and it’s the busiest time of the year for many people as it stands.
I’ve read webcomics a long time. I’ve seen some of them go stagnant for up to three YEARS before they resume production, so unless God forbid someone on her behalf comes on here to make a sad announcement, just keep checking in on a regular basis and do so with a nice attitude.
I vote daily on TWC for this one too, despite the reward never changing. When we update again, it will be awesome.
It would be considerate for her to at least update with a note about either what is going on or something about stuff being too busy and she will be back roughly around a certain time and update then if anything changes.
We’re worried.
yup, half a year radio silence does no good
now been almost 2 years I think it’s a fair question
Eight months is nowhere near two years. As noted in other posts, Grace is very busy with the work that actually pays the rent right now.
Well, Merry Christmas for all who celebrate it.
Hanukkah, Kwanza, Diwali for them that celebrate it differently, although a couple of those have already gone past. Retro-active celebratory well wishes.
For those who don’t celebrate it at all, meh, have a good day as you burn in the fiery pits of hell. (I JOKE, please stop hitting me)
A hoppy blue beer for the upcoming new year to all as well.
Take care Grace and fam, see you in January sometime.
Some tidings for those interested. Grace did not respond to my DM, but I noticed that she cancelled subscription payments on Patreon again for January, *but* with a msg that that they will resume in Feb. I’d call that good (and welcome!) news.
Happy New Year to y’all and your loved ones!
Michael, thanks for the tidings.
Good to know Grace is still kicking.
Happy Perihelion to those who celebrate! š
Sounds at least unsurprising to me, regular December day job craziness. Reassuringly familiar, if somewhat worrying from afar.
I too was getting concerned for Grace. Thank you for the update
I had dinner with Grace a few weeks back. Please don’t feel concern for her. She’s safe and well.
Thanks very much for the update, miguel!
Glad to hear it! The only time I really worried for her was the time she went radio silent is the period of about a year where she didn’t respond to ANY messages or update the site since she was going through some personal stuff but I’m always glad to hear little updates when she takes some hiatuses here and there.
I will accept that things are not horrible and Grace is fine.
I will not accept comments to “not feel concern”, it’s in my nature to be concerned for people I feel are worthy of that concern, just as it’s in my nature to feel contempt for those unworthy of my concern.
Grace is quite certainly worthy. Therefore, I will feel concern.
we are now well past half a year silence mark, hard to believe xmung is alive even considering not even update on whats holding comic on not updating
Yeah, keeping the faith is largely tedious and thankless, but it’s part of the expected duties of the job š
As a creative who is in a doom-spiral of my own, I get it. I care deeply about the projects I have sitting in limbo, but I also know I just don’t have the energy to give them the attention I feel they deserve. I wouldn’t be surprised if Grace is feeling the same way. She probably still loves Magellan immensely, but feels like any time she puts energy in to it, it’s never enough, and it ends up feelings not worth it to be unable to give the art the attention it needs.
It’s only a guess, of course. I don’t know if Grace is doing okay, but I’m hoping she is.
At the risk of sounding parasocial, I do hope she has the friends and support she needs.
While we wait for Grace to finish that Epic Rap Battle with the Dread Dragon Real Life, how about we revisit our theories on how this will end.
I accept Vile Terror’s theorem that the Rarg don’t understand that everybody else isn’t a hive mind. Which explains their behavior in a fight. You don’t worry about damaging the skin cells on your knuckles when you punch someone, and you don’t make a distinction between the marrow in their left ulna and the right Achilles tendon. It’s all part of a single entity.
Which means Olga’s telepathic gambit will likely smash their worldview. Galaxyview?
Hopefully that buys enough time to talk with them, because no trickery is going to work on an astronomic scale. They can detect Earth’s gravity and see every time there’s a transit.
How to resolve this? Honestly, I think the best bet is if whoever it was at Prometheus that leaked the Jupiter video to Force Magellan comes through again with the location of the hydrogen tank. The Rarg may want to kill all humans after that F###ing CEO decided he didn’t need to scan a planet for any one of the thousands of alien species known to be in the universe, but they may be willing to put a pause on that to recover the remains. Even better odds of a truce if not all of the Rarg were killed when they got portalled.
Also, I put the odds at about 50-50 of Cadet Paz ending up depowered, because time powers are really disruptive to a narrative. Hopefully she has a chance for Kaycee to take her surfing to build some happier memories.
I eagerly await to see just what Grace has in store for us. I continue to percolate ideas.
I also eagerly await word from Grace that she’s doing okay and that Magellan is still something dear to her. But even if that’s changed, I will continue to wish her the best, and hopefully remind her that we fans look up to her and her storytelling skills.
Insects. It’s not that they have a hive mind, it’s that they’re completely active to outside stimuli. And the (scrolls back to the beginning of the chapter) Prometheus Corp kicked the ant hill.
Okay, so while we wait I thought I would toss out a thought for the day.
Why do no current species of birds have teeth?
There are extinct species of birds that apparently had dentition.
What environmental conditions caused them to develop teeth as the optimal path forward?
Why did they then go extinct? Was it because of their teeth?? Was having a beak a better survival characteristic at that point?
Birds supposedly evolved from reptiles,, most reptiles have teeth. I will get to the reptiles with beaks later.
Do birds have beaks because they fly? Probably not, bats have teeth, although beaks would probably be more aerodynamic. Why then do non-flyings birds have beaks?
Was there a bottle-necking event in history that killed all toothed birds and reduced genetic diversity in birds to only those ones that had beaks, much like the reduction in human diversity during the last long ice age? Why did they not re-diversify after the event?
Given sufficient time, nature always fills every niche.
On the matter of other beaked species we have turtles, tortoises and squids, octopuses and some fish. Finally, of course, we come to the platypus and echidna.
The last two can not be considered exemplary. They are just natures little joke that proves that for every rule there are exceptions.
Turtles have beaks, does that make them seabirds? Why didn’t they evolve teeth? Incisors to chop off sea grass and seaweed and then molars to grind it up for easier digestion.
Tortoises also have beaks. Are they the eagles of the ground, or perhaps just armoured chickens?
Squids have both beaks in their mouths and denticles on their tentacles.
“Grandma Squidward! What big teeth you have.”
“All the better to eat you with my dear. Nom, nom, nom”
Octopuses also have beaks. Which is the only really solid component of their body.
Squids and octopuses, the squishy chicken of the sea?
Fish are hard to define, some are beaked, some are toothed some are both, some are neither, some have pharyngeal teeth which are not really teeth but function like teeth.
The sea is natures laboratory where everything is tried at least once. Nature is miss Frankenstein off her meds.
Anyway, the question still stands. Beaks and teeth coexist within many clades.
Why then do birds not have teeth and only have beaks?
A 500 word essay is due in two weeks, remember to reference, and yes this will be on your final exam.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Interesting. I’m very limited in my knowledge of biology, so I will simply store this question in the back of my mind for when I get the opportunity to engage with someone more knowledgeable.
For anyone wondering, my Patreon membership was suspended again this month. Looks like Grace is still alright, just likely overwhelmed with real life like so many of us are. Thinking good thoughts until she’s able to come back and restart it all.
I have been wondering if perhaps it might be more prudent during this extended hiatus to repost the pages of Gifford: Hero during this hiatus since those are already done and presumably stored somewhere safe, or to focus on the side comic Families right now since presumably those comics take less time to produce, but perhaps even posting that much still is too much for her to deal with right now.
Our wonderful author responded to me on Patreon, so is still out there and will be making an announcement at some point.
We just all need to be patient.
Google “goose teeth”. You’ll f likely be surprised. And terrified.
I had a dream last night that Grace had updated the voting incentive comic.
. . . dang.
I miss this comic soooooo much!
My Patreon subscription was not suspended this month, so perhaps it’s a sign Grace might have an update for us soon. A girl can dream!
July 1 – notified that my Patreon subscription was suspended again. Grace is alive, but not resuming this month.
Past the one year mark without word. Not so great, that.
over the one year since mark was given
5 days late but Happy 1st anniversary of the next update not releasing (sorry I’m late I only check this page about once a month
Patreon considers my membership as lapsed since the subscription has been suspended for so long. No responses to comments as far as I can tell, though.