08/01/12 A New Consensus



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Strip colored and uploaded. Yay! You can still view the b&w version I posted here.

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Hahahah! I’ve driven cross the country twice, done a convention, packed and moved everything we owned and somehow superhumanly kept up on the strip. But now that all that activity is pretty-much done, I relaxed briefly (mostly focused on unpacking and cleaning the new place) and I KNEW my mom and sister were coming to visit on Tuesday, and…. ta-dahhh, the strip’s not washed or colored. Oy-vey.

Anyhow, I like keeping the story rolling. I have no moves, no conventions, no anything scheduled for a while. I’ll get caught up on this and other not-quite-done-strips. Or work on my novel when I’m being bad. All in all it will be good results.

Hey, I have a question for you all. I have a friend who wants to work/live for a bit in Antarctica. She’s really smart, was a project manager in New York, responsible, hard-core hiker and traveler. but she’s applied two years running now for every and any job down there with no results. Anyone know a way in?

31 Comments

  1. Thomas S

    Maybe, just maybe a group consensus of Dustins thinking together makes a far better thinking creature than an individual Dustin. Just a thought. Another thought is that Angry Eebs look a lot like a collective of stumpy Roman orators … I wonder if they can do violence with their hands as well as with their minds.

  2. zack hoffman

    I was thinking the eebs were going to clone themselves…. you know “just in case”. but i’d guess they’re too smug to think about the “just in case” part?

  3. heng

    i am disappointed in the Dustins… i think maybe the Eebs forgot to implement the crazy gene.
    “Make a decision, go through with it – all the way… As long as this leads to madness, you’re still not there…”

  4. ronald

    Well, just because Justin’s a self-centered jerk and a borderline (?) psychotic, that doesn’t mean he’s EVIL.

    Remember, he was at least GLAD that Nog hadn’t abducted his brother Bill instead of him. He didn’t want Bill to have been forced to endure what he himself considers a hellish experience, or for Bill to be separated from his wife Janey.

  5. Night-Gaunt

    They are clones of Dustin but they aren’t Dustin. And thinking like him isn’t a sure thing. And it looks like the Eebs decided to sanitize their joke to pure carbon. Bye bye guys sorry to see you go so soon.

  6. Christopher

    @zack_hoffman, yeah, I’m not sure they’d want the competition, even from other themselves. 🙂

    @Heng, @Ronald is right. He’s not a bad guy in many ways. His initial goal was to get everyone home because he thought that was a good thing. A lot of his badness comes from an inability to abstractly think things like “others might feel differently.”

    @Thomas_Juntunen, thank you! That is so kind. I have passed it along.

    @Herander, that is the original. Doing something with the color to differentiate is a good idea.

    @Karyl, try shift-reloading. Or click on the RSS feed (same file, but from a different directory). Seems okay to me, file construction and format looks fine. so I’m not sure how I’d fix it.

  7. ronald

    On another point, even though Dustin’s made several anti-nonhuman remarks (can’t really say “anti-alien” since in GOB space for all intent and purpose HE’S the alien), notice that he balks at outright MURDERING them. Even before learning there are women and children on the planet, he’s hesitant. As a random real-world analogy, although H.P. Lovecraft was reportedly anti-Semitic, he was reportedly nonetheless horrified by Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews; the fact that he didn’t like Jews didn’t mean he wanted them eradicated.

    Of course, Dustin’s notion that, from the Eebs’ perspective, women somehow “deserve” eradication less than men do (I mean, from the Eebs’ perspective, all adults would be equally “complicit” in their enslavement, right?) is sort of chauvinistic, which shows that his jerkdom works on multiple levels. Similarly, he’s made prejudiced remarks about Asians to Yuri but IIRC has never made similar remarks about blacks to Pierrot; when he and Pierrot re-encountered each other on the GOB world (after Pierrot got Earth re-designated a dark planet), he seemed genuinely (albeit cluelessly) interested in being friends with Pierrot.

  8. EternalLurker

    I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to think of Dustin’s moral code after this page. o_O

    “YES, BURN IT A — wait, entities below a totally arbitrary age / of a gender whose cultural role varies wildly between species anyway? Guess we can’t!”

  9. Muzhik

    @James Austin, my guess is that they’re going to keep Dustin Prime around (or at least certain select parts of him) so they can keep cloning around with him. Think Head-in-a-Jar (from Futurama) crossed with “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison. (Although in Dustin’s case, not having a mouth might help him immensely.)

  10. Bill Kamp

    It was easier to understand which one was the original one now that you colored it.
    Crazy question:

    Was the color of the outfit of the original and the clones in anyway a reference to the color scheme of player 2 from the game Michael Jackson Moonwalker?

    Crazy, right?

  11. Joal

    I think that asking whether there are women and children on the planet is just Dustin’s odd way of realising that the inhabitants of the planets are innocents.

    Also, I came across this quote recently:

    “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”
    ? Robert A. Heinlein, The Green Hills of Earth

  12. Night-Gaunt

    Dustin Alpha (original) may be kept around as a kind of buffoon. Just as the Star Headed Old Ones depicted in “At The Mountains of Madness” did with the precursor of humans. In their later degenerate sculptures as a shambling sub-form of intelligence. (In comparison to the Eebs, or at least this crop of Eebs anyway.) So I misread it earlier, they are going to that nearby planet to what? Loot and rape? Just take over? I suspect that most of the bad clones will fail in the getting a wife and kids department

  13. Bad Science

    For your friend that wants to spend time in Antarctica, this is probably be the long way around, but has she ever considered joining the military? I mean, they supply that base with a variant of the C130, so maybe the Air Force?

  14. http://dmna.ny.gov/ang/nyang.php
    http://dmna.ny.gov/index.php?id=1318607040

    [img]http://dmna.ny.gov/home/images/thumbnails/thumb535_1318613398–111014-F-TJ681-048.jpg[/img]

    New York Air National Guard visits Antarctica a lot , because practicly no one elese in the in the US keeps large ski equipped aircraft.
    That is a lot of commitment , to visit as a scientist or Journalist might be better if you can get the National Geographic or a university interested in your work you might get sent that way.

    I am surprised at Dusty risking his health for aliens he has never met, pleasantly surprised, is Dusty discovering a better side of himself?

    That is a good way to spend the time of your last day of life.

  15. Pingback: Spacetrawler - 11/07/12 Dustin Makes Plans

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