Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, March 23, 2020.
We have a new place, but no internet yet, and all cafes and libraries are closed. So, I’m uploading this from my car, tethered to my phone. Wheee!
Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, March 23, 2020.
We have a new place, but no internet yet, and all cafes and libraries are closed. So, I’m uploading this from my car, tethered to my phone. Wheee!
Chris, even if the library is closed, you might be able to get a WiFi signal just outside of the building. I have seen people doing that here by neighborhood libraries.
Seconded. We’ve done that successfully when we’ve been camping and the tiny local library was closed. p.s.: More money for public libraries!
@Julia, true! At this point I can just tether my phone to my laptop, it just means I have to go down the road in order to do it since there’s no cell reception at the house. But if I run out of tethering bandwidth, the library is next!
Ditto most fast food places. But you will need to park close.
If only the googly-eyed menaces would have asked, they would have found that 5 out of 6 humans are perfectly fine committing various atocities as long as the order is given by legally construed authority and is interpretable within relevant cultural context. Yep, it’s dark. It’s also reality. No mind control drugs needed, just an extension of the bystander effect and extrapolation from appeal to authority: “Befehl ist Befehl”.
Brrr.
The “just following orders” mindset is powerful. Trying to prevent soldiers from following illegal orders is actually harder than making them follow orders.
As the Germans who owned looted art said to the commission people who seized them, they had all the appropriate paperwork saying such-and-such artwork was properly seized by the authorities and they paid good Reichsmarks for it. The Holocaust was perfectly legal.
Christopher, I haven’t been commenting for a long while, but I still read spacetrawler and love it, and all your characters. Thanks!
The area I live in, just 30 miles South of Raleigh in NC, has no internet. So much of NC is farming. All we have for what most folks think of as infrastructure is single phase electric power. There used to be landline telephone, but the copper wiring deteriorated and the phone co won’t replace it due to not enough customers. Even the road is dirt, and not up to State standards, so we have to maintain it ourselves. So, since 2005 when we moved here, the best option for internet is a cell system bridge.
As far as the bug goes, my wife and I already had it in November. I work in electronics R+D and so am always in contact with folks who go back and forth to China. In November, no one cared as to just why we were so sick. But, I can tell you all, you don’t want it. Unfortunately, it will be a while before there is a vaccine. So, the only way to become immune is to get it. Sigh.
And even that apparently doesn’t mean you won’t get it again….
Well, that is uncertain since it could mean that or it could mean they test for viral load has too high of bottom threshold.
Well, there are two strains now. So, having had the first strain and so the antibodies means I might or might not get the second strain. What having the antibodies do is make my system go to work sooner so the second time is fairly mild. This is what the yearly flu shot does for that virus. It is for last year’s strain. You might get this year’s mutation but it is then milder. Hence some folks get the flu shot and still wind up with the flu. There is no test for antibodies at this point.
Earlier strips made it sound like they wanted cheap labor. Not sure why they don’t just use robots. Robots seem to be smarter than most species anyway.
Maybe they want to control something more easily than they could control a robot… see tomorrow’s strip. Also robots are probably not good at original scientific research.
russell styles raises an interesting point. In a Galaxy where robotics are so highly advanced, why bother with organic manual labor at all?
Two reasons come to mind. For one, organics may possess specialized knowledge that is difficult or expensive to acquire for robots. Such things as emotional interactions and connections, very delicate things to manipulate without a good deal of experience, for example.
For another — and quite the more likely here — the puppy-people have an affinity for making people do what they wouldn’t do without compulsion, chemical or otherwise. The chemicals make it simply easier. What they’re looking for is not merely control but the distortion, distension and rupture of personal feelings when the compelled are told to do something to another being that they wouldn’t let themselves do otherwise. The essential core of evil, after all, is not power but forcing the good to be even more evil, even to the point of self-destruction. That’s an immoral triumph with very deep and dark roots. At least among humans.
There are problems with maintaining this sort of control, not least of which is what to do with the controlled after achieving whatever evil goal they wanted, but I think I’ll hold such speculation until we learn more about what the puppy-people want. But we can be satisfied at this point that it is monstrous and evil — deeply, fundamentally evil. My loathing for them grows apace.
I dislike thinking about genocide, but I am willing to make an exception in this case.
The puppoids on that ship are certainly evil, but not necessarily the whole puppoid species. That one group might even be outlaws back on their home planet. Would we condemn all Kryptonians because of the actions of Phantom Zone criminals?
There’s a small typo in the fourth panel. It should be “wouldn’t”.
I don’t think it has anything to do with her parents’ trained scientific minds. Weren’t the Evil Puppoids collecting specimens of various sexual orientations?
They were. And now the darkness thickens.
I hate to say this, russell styles, but there are some things worse than genocide. No, I won’t go there. Not on your life.