Annotated 22-22
Yeah, that’s right, this isn’t just a sci-fi style con and a trade show sharing tips for working professionals, it’s also a tech conference. Brother Homon is Stan Lee and Steve Jobs.
Apparently we once intended this to be a bit more on-the-nose as tech satire. I have a list of buzzwords we thought about working into this presentation (gamify, democratize, crowdsource, actualize, sustainable, ground-breaking, insightful, sin-ergy, lateral, innovative, unconventional, naturalistic, paradigm, synchronicity) as well as the logo “DED Talk – Ideas worth corrupting.”
But, y’know, you gotta rein in the humor at some point when you’re showing a man bleeding out on the floor while his best friend and personal hero use his corpse as a doorknob.
Awful noisy corpse. That’s just rude.
‘s a death rattle. You think it’ll help if you kill him *again*?
If there’s any references to tech conferences on the actual page, they’re not obvious.
Well, not this page, but page seven was showing off a bunch of Cultist tech.
The portal is the new tech. This is the cultist equivalent of unveiling the iPhone…
Ah, yes! The portal was behind the curtain and is unveiled only now. I kinda missed that, because the portal is such a familiar sight already. We’ve seen it before and we’ve watched it being set up for the convention.
A circle of stone blocks doesn’t actually freely stand upright like that, you know.
… they say, when talking about the portal connecting dimensions as the offering of a dying man is presented, floating enveloped by a dark energy.
You sure about that? I don’t pretend to be an applied physicist, but it seems to me that this design works pretty well, with each block keeping the others from falling out of place. It might not last for ages and ages: damage one block enough to move it and the whole thing would collapse. But then, it pretty much just has to last long enough for something destructive to come out of it, and at that point it’d get smashed no matter how it was built.
I mean, I could just wave my hand and say “Cultist magic keeps it up, OBVIOUSLY” or “They have mortar.” But I am genuinely curious. Can’t find a lot of comparable structures on Google Images, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there.
This page has pics of actual structures that are quite similar:
– https://insteading.com/blog/moon-gate/
I’m relatively sure that a structure like that, unless held together with mortar or similar, has to be held together laterally up to about the 3/9 o’clock points, otherwise the weight of the upper structure will push the bases outward. This appears to be the case with many of those images; of the rest, other means of holding the shape are apparent.
As to mortar, the later disassembly, transport, and reassembly of the structure (or another like it) led me to believe there was none. John’s comment below, though, is valid. Some interlocking slots or peg shapes, which would be concealed in the fully-assembled ring, would probably do the trick. And of course, “A
wizardcultist did it” works too.The upper half can be stable with flat faces between the stones, (as long as the bottom stones are held in place) but the lower half cannot stay in place in this way
Each stone has its own weight pulling it down, and whatever forces its neighbours are exerting on it. Since there’s an angle between the stone’s lateral faces, the pressure from its neighbours is pushing it out of the circle. On the upper half, that is counteracted by the stones’ own weight. On the lower half, the weight of each stone is also pushing it outwards, so it’s not going to work.
As John correctly says, of course: If the faces are not plain or are prevented in some other way (braces in the back?) from sliding off each other, it could still be made to work, although it’s not an efficient structure.
I know it’s not immediately obvious, Keiran, but the stone blocks are interlocking- each one using the tension of gravity to hold its neighbor in place. You might say it’s holding itself upright!
And there may also be unseen Cultist magic involved.
(By the bye, John, I’m flummoxed as to why your comments haven’t been showing up on the site until I approved them–that happens to new commenters, but you’re hardly “new” and you should have admin privileges. I just gave you a new password which should be sent to your email address: let me know if you haven’t received it.)
I’ve been wondering that too, T. My comments don’t show up immediately after I write them. They show up much, much later. ??? I have received the notice from WordPress about my password being changed, but it doesn’t say what it has been changed to. ???
I always have to refresh the page to see other people’s comments as well as my own. It will at first say “0 comments”, and then when I refresh they all suddenly appear.
Considered as flat sided blocks it should probably fall apart since each block is effectively pushed out from the center, and those triangular braces on the side would need to be a block or two taller to account for that. Making them interlocking would also cover it though, and I’m delighted that you can actually see that level of forethought there on the top in panel two. Well done!
squints Holy crap on a cracker, there are interlocking slots actually visible! Without your specific mention of it, even with John’s comment above, I missed it. Thanks for pointing it out, and John, I stand wholly corrected.
It’s easy to miss because the *interior* of the ring doesn’t show them. And if they are interlocking, those slots should be visible on the inside, too. Unless my geometric intuition is underdeveloped, there is no reasonable way they could have assembled the gate by pushing the individual blocks outward from the space at its interior; at bare minimum such an object needs the slots to be present on the inside surface, and be assembled from without – or you’ll have collisions between unintended surfaces as you try to assemble it.
I’m going to assume that, like the torches that are being shown in silhouette, there’s a stylistic reduction of detail for objects that aren’t the scene’s intended focus, and that’s a contributing factor in why we aren’t seeing them.
Oh, I had not seen those … although the steps are going in the wrong direction …
… but I just had a look at the gate during construction:
http://guildedage.net/comic/annotated-22-4/
and that looks solid to me. There’s retentions in all directions alright! And not just that, but the base of the gate extends far enough that even during construction, the lower blocks would probably not tip over while the next remaining blocks are stacked on them. It may or may not be physically accurate, but this is good enough for me.
Impressive level of planning, John! That is way beyond what I expected!
(but that doesn’t preclude some more internal geometry which can prevent the stones from sliding out
Alt text speaks wisdom. We’ve all been Ashok’d one too many times in our lives, I’m sure.
I don’t volunteer to do something until I know what it is. The last time I didn’t ask, it took me a week to get the stink off.
XD SIN-ERGY !
To be fair (and nitpick a little), Sustainable is one of the few meaningful terms among that mess. It just doesn’t mean much to industry, since industry is largely not a thing that can be described as sustainable.