Summer time 2018-06-11

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Atomic
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by Atomic »

To help Cass appreciate her mammal bumps, she needs to consider:

It used to be a woman would spend her years from late teens to early 40s giving birth about every other year. Of about 12 babies, assuming she lived through birth:
  • - 2 would die at birth
    - 2 would die in the first year
    - 3 would die before puberty
    - 3 would die from injury or animal attack
leaving two survivors to reproduce and carry on. Such was disease, infection, famine, and wildlife.

Her mammal bumps would be in mostly continuous use for nearly 20 years, feeding her infants and her neighbors orphaned babies as well.

They're not decorations, their survival tools. People have an enormous luxury to treat them as anything resembling a toy!
Don't let other peoples limitations become your constraints!

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jwhouk
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by jwhouk »

According to this little time skip, Castela should "only" be about five years younger than Atsali.

And Atsali would have just turned 20 this past year.
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Warrl
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by Warrl »

They aren't "mammal bumps". They're "human bumps".
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lake_wrangler
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by lake_wrangler »

jwhouk wrote:According to this little time skip, Castela should "only" be about five years younger than Atsali.

And Atsali would have just turned 20 this past year.
This was a roughly 2-year skip, so Atsali should be nearing college graduation, depending on the length of her program.

Incidentally, Castela is now one year older than Atsali was, when she first appeared in the comic.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by jwhouk »

No, she's roughly the same age Atsali was when she first appeared in the comic.

And Sali's boobs came on along within a year after Mapimi.
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lake_wrangler
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by lake_wrangler »

jwhouk wrote:No, she's roughly the same age Atsali was when she first appeared in the comic.

And Sali's boobs came on along within a year after Mapimi.
I hadn't bothered to look back, before making my statement... I was sure Atsali had said 14, but she indeed said 15 (I knew where to look, just hadn't bothered...)

(And for the record, denial notwithstanding, I think she was, indeed, a naive schoolgirl... But she grew up rather quickly, on that adventure!)
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by ShneekeyTheLost »

One wonders, though...

Her native form is not remotely human. She's not even mammalian. As was established canonically, many years ago, her human guise is just that... a work of artifice that she created. Remember when Monica and Shelly got chewed out by Phix over being too caviler about their para races, and pickle came in saying how she would maybe one day learn to look like a human so she could go out and play? Yea. That.

So WTF is going on here? Her 'mammal bumps' should be no more or less than vestigial parts of the disguise she created, and should be able to modify them at her leisure. It should be no more difficult for her than changing out of a monkey suit into flannel and jeans.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by Dave »

ShneekeyTheLost wrote:So WTF is going on here? Her 'mammal bumps' should be no more or less than vestigial parts of the disguise she created, and should be able to modify them at her leisure. It should be no more difficult for her than changing out of a monkey suit into flannel and jeans.
Paul commented (in response to a question about this on the main site) that her DNA is partly human. Apparently, in canon, that's relevant. She's not just a plant - she's a planimal.

Also, although she's a shape-changer, she's not endlessly protean. Pickle has had a reasonably consistent para-humanoid form ever since she was infant-sized... she's been recognizably Pickle since well before her human-form reached what's often called the "age of reason". She also griped (years ago, her time) about her feet being blocky and that she couldn't affect this. This suggests that her para-human form isn't entirely a matter of voluntary choice - at least some aspects of it are apparently rather "hard-wired" and out of her conscious control. And, the fact that she's been deliberately living in humanoid form (and using glamour to pass as human, much of the time) may have created a pattern or habit that's really hard to override.

She can choose to "unweave", but when she weaves up her para-humanoid shape, she gets what she gets. Possibly she might be able to briefly and consciously suppress her "mammal bumps" now, but as soon as her attention wandered, she might pop right back out.

There's at least some precedent for this, in what happened to Atsali at puberty. Although she's a shape-changer (wings, feet, face, and her very body size and mass can shift) she complained quite bitterly that she was stuck with her newly-busty form both in human-form and in siren-form.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by jwhouk »

Notice that she stopped coming undone after the whole cleavage cookies incident? I wonder if it took her more stress and/or strain to turn into that fun ball for Luci than it had in the past.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by jwhouk »

As a side note: Pablo apparently did not realize he'd thrown the continuity off by saying Castela was 15.

She is actually 14, and if you check the comic again for this day, you'll see it's been changed to reflect this.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by lake_wrangler »

jwhouk wrote:As a side note: Pablo apparently did not realize he'd thrown the continuity off by saying Castela was 15.

She is actually 14, and if you check the comic again for this day, you'll see it's been changed to reflect this.
I don't know... I keep hitting Refresh, and it still says "fifteen"...
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by jwhouk »

lake_wrangler wrote:
jwhouk wrote:As a side note: Pablo apparently did not realize he'd thrown the continuity off by saying Castela was 15.

She is actually 14, and if you check the comic again for this day, you'll see it's been changed to reflect this.
I don't know... I keep hitting Refresh, and it still says "fifteen"...
Do one of those CTRL+F5 thingys or equivalent on your browser.
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Dave
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by Dave »

jwhouk wrote:Do one of those CTRL+F5 thingys or equivalent on your browser.
On my tablet (running Chrome) doing a refresh of the page didn't help.

However, if I used the "Open this image in a new tab" feature, went to the new tab, and did a refresh in it, I saw the new version.

Apparently, in Chrome, doing a refresh may not immediately see changes in resources (eg images) that are referred to by a page, if the page's own HTML hasn't changed.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by lake_wrangler »

Well, I see it now. All it took was for me to happen to reboot my computer from running Windows to running Linux... (I was in Windows because I had used Skype, yesterday, and it works better in Windows. At least, it works better in Windows than in Ubuntu Studio 14.04... There is a better version of Skype that will only work with 16.04 and forward, but I haven't upgraded my Ubuntu Studio yet...)
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by Catawampus »

Dave wrote:
ShneekeyTheLost wrote:So WTF is going on here? Her 'mammal bumps' should be no more or less than vestigial parts of the disguise she created, and should be able to modify them at her leisure. It should be no more difficult for her than changing out of a monkey suit into flannel and jeans.
Paul commented (in response to a question about this on the main site) that her DNA is partly human. Apparently, in canon, that's relevant. She's not just a plant - she's a planimal.
The working theory I have about Castela's various forms is that her variety of mixed genes gives her a spectrum of possible base forms, ranging from just a pile of vines to a fully human form. When she was a young'un, she used to “unravel” when she fell asleep, so presumably it takes more concentration and energy to maintain a more complex form.

Given her ability to re-arrange each individual one of her composite vines as she so chooses, though, she also has the option of modifying her genetically-determined base form (sort of like how we can choose to hold our arms over our head instead of hanging down by our sides). Rather than being a messy heap of vines sitting on the floor, she could be a bunch of vines arranged in a nice double-helix, or woven into a ball. Rather than being her usual tendril-eyed humanoid form, she could stretch herself to be twice as tall. But these modified versions of her base forms take extra concentration and energy to maintain, and she'll revert back to the unmodified base form when she gets tired or distracted.

So the reason why she couldn't easily fix her ankles when she was a pre-teen, or be rid of her annoying mammal bumps now, is that those features are part of the entire genetically-determined package of that particular form. Her vines naturally weave themselves into that particular configuration. While she could probably re-direct some vines from her chest region to elsewhere and thus flatten out her front, she'd have to constantly concentrate on keeping those vines rearranged. Every time she didn't, then the vines would go back to where they are supposed to be and the bumps would return. It would be sort of like a normal human trying to make their belly look slimmer by tensing the muscles around their stomach; sure, it would work for a little while, but it would be uncomfortable and can't be kept up for all that long.

I'd imagine that not only the bother of having to keep concentrating would be a problem for Castela, but it would also probably be very embarrassing for her to keep having her mammal bumps “grow” in public every time that her control over them slipped. That would tend to draw even more attention to them. She might figure that it's less hassle and embarrassment to just leave them be.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by jwhouk »

... :shock:
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by TazManiac »

(we beez FANs and weez be figger'n stuff out...)
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by Catawampus »

TazManiac wrote:(we beez FANs and weez be figger'n stuff out...)
Until the author mentions some new detail that totally derails all previous speculation. At which point the cycle starts all over again.
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by FreeFlier »

Catawampus wrote:
TazManiac wrote:(we beez FANs and weez be figger'n stuff out...)
Until the author mentions some new detail that totally derails all previous speculation. At which point the cycle starts all over again.
That's the fun of it!

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Warrl
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Re: Summer time 2018-06-11

Post by Warrl »

FreeFlier wrote:
Catawampus wrote:
TazManiac wrote:(we beez FANs and weez be figger'n stuff out...)
Until the author mentions some new detail that totally derails all previous speculation. At which point the cycle starts all over again.
That's the fun of it!

--FreeFlier
And that's kind of the relationship between science and God. (Or between science and Reality, if you prefer.)
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