Comic for Monday, November 7th
Nov07
Dear god so much word! (For the record, that is intentionally said stupidly, unlike the countless grammar and spelling errors I’m sure I made in the page! :P). Someday I’ll find an editor or something 😛
Somehow I expect telling someone they don’t have to worry about something has almost the exact opposite effect in all cases? I don’t know for sure, but it seems like that’d be the case to me…
I notice that Peter did a lot more answering of the first part of the “who” part of the question than the “doing” part of the question… 😐
Have to decide what do next for voting incentives, though it’ll probably be a little lighter as I need to get the buffer prepped for the later half of this month.
Loading ...
So I missed a couple of updates, and I come back to these three pages.
I think my brain may have exploded from something about them, but I can’t figure it out, as I’m too busy working very hard on not laughing too hard to breathe.
Also, holy glorious awesomeness, those last three pages were great.
Welcome back! 😉
I think instead of making an essay here as I make comments on almost every single panel for the last three pages I’ll just stick with the last sentence of the previous comment. (‘Cuz, yeah, that’s about how much I want to comment on all this. Much comment. Soooo much.)
Good! We need you here. 🙂
Are… are… we just going to ignore Peter casually referencing that he has been to space??
I do not think I can ignore that.
We know that Central wants to migrate people to Palindra. Maybe their planet is so screwed up by the Incursion that some or all of them live in space around their planet? In the Lore section nuclear weapons are mentioned, if the Incursion triggered a nuclear retaliations against Kor’s World, Central could be a lot more screwed up than I’ve been assuming.
Eh, these things happen. Sometimes you end up in space. Sometimes you end up on strange distant worlds. Such is the life of the Interdimensional Rogue Agent… 😉
Mayhap we will see more about Central in time. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to detail the Incursion or something, as that’d be a pretty big project even if we do eventually get the bonus comics rolling.
I assume Corporate Affairs is a singular entity. In the big, middle panel, in the last bubble, because Corporate Affairs is the noun being modified by the long list of adjectives there should be no comma after corrupt.
“And the actually vaguely dangerous, misguided, arrogant, corrupt Corporate Affairs.”
If you care about grammatical accuracy, this will clarify the entity is Corporate Affairs, not Affairs, which happen to be corporate. I suppose it really does matter what you are trying to say, though?
Actually Past Utopia got this one right, you CAN put a comma at the end of a list of adjectives (though you usually use an AND before the last term in that case).
I split the difference and added the ‘and’ and removed the comma. How badly does that mangle it? 😛 I did it that way cause that’s apparently what I did in the speech bubble above it…
I dunno about all this fancy grammar stuff, I just write it so that it reads normal to me when I try to read it ‘as’ the character, so my commas are more based on where I put pauses then any rules of sentences. Sometimes these line up, sometimes they don’t 😉
hmmm…
tinfoil hats! get your tinfoil hats here! they keep ids and kworld radio wave ai’s from performing brain scans!
They come in all shapes and sizes! Tinfoil Fedora! Tinfoil Wizard Cap! Tinfoil Baseball cap! We got ’em all! Hell, we even got Tinfoil Parasols for daintier folk! Get them while supplies last!
Peter is being very open and honest. I wonder what skullduggery he’s up to. ^^
Indeed, Peter being open and talkative is generally not what you want. Cagey, quite Peter at least isn’t trying to manipulate you with the truth. Though that brings up an interesting question that I’ve never really gotten a solid answer to; If someone tells you the full truth and it influences you to a different path than not knowing the truth would, is it really manipulation?
If it really is the FULL truth, then it isn’t manipulation, but if anything important has been left out, then it is manipulation. The problem is, how would you know if anything was left out if you hadn’t heard the information before?
Telling someone the literal truth and leaving nothing out can still be manipulation, because you have made the decision to tell them the full literal truth in order to provoke the response you want.
Pretty much all communication can be manipulation. I think it has more to do with intent than content. Consequently, we can assume that anytime Peter does tell the literal full truth, it is still probably manipulation, because it is Peter.
That said, I think Peter is leaving a lot out here. He does not even bring up Criminal Investigations which is fairly active in Malsa, and the department that likely most overlaps with Tyler’s job.
I think Peter is being pretty straightforward for Peter (in that he is telling Tyler fairly bluntly what he wants and partially why), but he is hardly in the running for Paragon of Innocence here.
Peter said “as far as you’re concerned, the relevant factions are the … H.Q. Branch and … Corporate Affairs”, as part of his commentary on “the evil space people who are blowing things up”.
Criminal Investigations, so far as we’ve seen, does not appear to be involved in blowing things up in Malsa, the way HQ Branch and Corporate Affairs are, and as such, are not one of the factions of evil space people who are blowing things up.
I agree with Amaranth, manipulation is about intent, not specifically the action you take. If you are telling someone something specifically to get them to do something, it’s manipulation, even if you use the truth to do it.
I don’t know if Peter is trying to manipulate Tyler here or try to gain his trust by actually sort of answering his question, but probably both being that it’s Peter.
The “and probably a whole list of references on the evil” bit still seems slightly off 🙁
Fixed-er maybe? Soon we’ll get to fixed-est. 😉
Hopefully complete list of grammar edits:
Panel 3: “A whole list of references on the evil probably”? Not even sure what, exactly, this is supposed to say, un-word-salad-ed.
Panel 5: “I am *a* bit more”; “interdim*e*nsional”; “relev*a*nt”, “b*ur*e*au*cratic”; comma after “dangerous”; arrog*a*nt
Panel 7: “like *a* meteor”; technically, after “is fine” should be a semicolon rather than a comma (I think).
I hope that’s a complete list too, because that’s quite a list 😛 Fixed ’em all I think, thanks! I do appreciate it, and I reckon the other readers who get here after to do to 😉
I am not sure on the semi-colon vs comma, but I’ll take your word for it. I’m not sure how spoken semicolons work.
I got a new spellcheck method, but apparently it is not as foolproof as I was hoping 😛
It just feels like a stronger break in the sentence than the other commas, mostly.
Also, really technically, I believe it should be “‘evil space people,'” rather than “‘evil space people’,” – i.e., comma before the quote; this is based on a rule my grandmother (a retired English teacher) told me years ago, though.
A google gives the full rules, which is that comma/period always before the quote is US grammar, whereas UK grammar involves placing it before or after the quote depending on whether it is a part of the quote or not. In any case, semicolons/colons always go outside and question marks/exclamation points can go in either place depending on whether they are part of the quote; the rule my grandmother taught me was “short goes inside; medium goes outside; tall depends.” Grammarian esoterica!
Well, I will take your word for it, but it just looked weird to me when I did that, so I didn’t make the change. I’m sure it’s correct grammatically speaking, but idk, looks weird. The reason I use the single and double quotes in speech bubbles isn’t because they are quoting things necessarily, but because I tend to read it with a different inflection when it it’s in quotes, like a little phrase?
It just looks weird to put punctuation markers in side the quotes in a speech bubble, or at least it makes me read it wrong 😛 This probably reflects more on why I have so many grammar errors though 😛
A semicolon follows similar rules to that of a period but continues a sentence with a fragment.
I know that my tendency to use ‘-”s and ‘;”s almost constantly gave anyone that may have tried to teach me grammar endless consternation. I could go a whole paragraph without using those pesky periods.
Let’s just say my dubious relationship with grammar is not new… 😉 Welcome to the comments section, btw 🙂
Trust me, you’re not alone on that front. I used to write like that, too; although I’ve gotten better since, I would still say that my sentences tend to go on longer than they should (case in point: this one, which is two lines already and is only extending as I write more, which perhaps indicates that I should stop, but I feel obligated to continue (and I can’t stop writing without using double-parenthetical structure just for the sake of using it))…
I prefer to just replace all references of bureau with endtable.
Such as the Federal endtable of Incompetence.
Considering I believe I misspelled and subsequently had to correct the word ‘bureau’ more than twenty times near the beginning of the comic alone, I can second this motion. Let’s just strike it from the English language.
Tyler can report to the ol’ “ET of Internal Affairs” now.