Wapsi Square Forum

Oh, my! It was a long bus ride, but the Greyhound is back in town!

http://wapsisquare.com/comic/fill-her-in/

<tennant>what</tennant>

How old is Roxanne?

"LET'S... DO... The TIME ...WARP... AGAIN!!!"

Well- now we know for certain 1) that she is fully human and 2) Why she is soooo TALL!

AnotherFairportfan wrote: ↑Wed Feb 10, 2021 12:20 am How old is Roxanne?

Word of Paul (in the last few minutes) is that she's 23. There have apparently been some time-gaps in the strip which were implied but not explicitly stated. Paul said he started writing the story in 1994 (and it went onto the Internet in 2001).

So, one could say that the 1994-to-now our-world timeline is now pretty well synchronized with the "from when he wrote it, to what we see today" Wapsi timeline.

Sgt. Howard wrote: ↑Wed Feb 10, 2021 12:32 am Well- now we know for certain 1) that she is fully human and 2) Why she is soooo TALL!

Unless Lakshmi is a Naga in hiding.

I now have whiplash. In a good way.

First reaction: Well, we know where she got her stature from...
Second reaction: Is that Lakshmi? Maybe... That could indeed be Owen...
Third reaction, after confirming Lakshminess via labels: Has it really been that long?
Fourth reaction: maybe Roxanne is an intern, and therefore younger than I had thought
Fifth reaction, upon reading comments and seeing Paul's confirmation of Roxanne's age: Ok, if he says so. I don't recall how much time happened between Owen and Lakshi getting married and the start of the calendar saga (i.e. non-mentioned time skips possible), plus multiple explicit time skips after Atsali and Castela came on the scene... I guess it's possible.
Sixth reaction: Neat! Owen and Lakshmi!
Seventh reaction: Art shift! Lakshmi's head used to be taller and narrower. Compare with Lakshmi on bowling date. (This explains the uncertainty of my second reaction...)

Eighth reaction: Second panel, first speech bubble is missing a word..

"But just know that I [am] working"

You know a comic's good, when the typo is only noticed on the eighth take...

After being sufficiently surprised, I had to go back and look:

These two's last appearance in the comic was... March 20 of 2012.

If she's 24, that means comic-time is... 2036?

And... dear God, that'd mean Kath is past retirement age?

If I followed Pablo's explanation right, events in the strip happened about 8 years before the strips appeared. So, Owen and Lakshmi hooked up in 1997, but that strip ran in 2005.

As I often explain things, it only seems confusing because it is.

THIS IS A MAJOR REVELATION!!!

My 2nd take had me actually say all out loud and loud; Mind Blown!

Then I told the Kid about it and pasted a link some strips back from this one
http://wapsisquare.com/comic/04112003/ , where Shelly gets friend-zone'd and when I sent the text the preview description said

"You are entering a place totally devoid of fulfillment"

Typeminer wrote: ↑Wed Feb 10, 2021 10:30 am If I followed Pablo's explanation right, events in the strip happened about 8 years before the strips appeared. So, Owen and Lakshmi hooked up in 1997, but that strip ran in 2005.

As I often explain things, it only seems confusing because it is.

Just think of it this way: the relationship between Wapsi time and our time has always been flexible and a bit nebulous. There's no firmly-fixed time ratio. There's an elasticity built into the system.

We have good, practical evidence that this is (and must be) the case. If it were not, the known time-skips in the Wapsi timeline (those that Paul announced in-strip) would have shaken our own space-time fabric quite violently. So would the ones he simply implied but didn't actually talk about.

Those massive space-time disruptions would have been easily detectable by the LIGO and Virgo gravity-wave telescopes. They'd also have played merry hell with satellite orbits and atomic clocks and would have thrown the whole worldwide GPS system out of whack. We'd have seen this in the papers every time it happened.

Since none of those things happened, we can be confident that the Wapsi timeline... in fact, the whole universe... is only loosely coupled with ours. It's wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff (Dave starts scribbling fifteenth-order differential equations) and we shouldn't stress out about it too much.

Actually, timequakes from other causes are so prevalent that we think that they're normal and therefore don't notice them.

--FreeFlier

I was wondering when somebody was going to say wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

Somewhere a blonde woman in a blue coat is wandering out of a blue police box and saying to no one in particular, “Sorry.”

“Shelly, I’d like to introduce you to my new assistant, Roxanne Albrecht-Prasad.”

“Nice to meet yo... uh, what did you say your name was?”

Oh, yeah. 'I'm Aunt Shelley, & youd'a been _my_ daughter, had I played my cards right..'