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Chapter 5: Lit, page 58.
Back. Sorry for the break, it’s been busy over here.
59 thoughts on “Chapter 5: Lit, page 58.”
she sure does know how to lighten the mood, doesn’t she?
Black Trash bags are actually fairly transparent to IR light, so depending on the temperature of her surroundings she could be quite cold or at least dissipating a sufficient amount of heat through radiation.
Then again, a fact that I keep forgetting, Templar is quite a bit warmer than what I’m used to. Right now it’s -15 Celcius (5 Fahrenheit) outside. She’d freeze to death in less than half an hour. :-P
In the first place, she does not sweat; she perspires.
In the second place, she does not perspire!
1) Curio was a pretty pathetic/unlucky girl – even more so if she landed Tuesday as her friend.
2) I wonder if Curio’s phonecall to Tuesday (leaving the message) was her trying to get Tuesday feel sympathetic to her again and/or apologize, or whatever.
3) Is Tuesday trying to imply that Merry would be unhappy and end up isolated and miserable, possibly trying suicide when she comes to the States and knows only other Nile people?
4) If Merry’s letters really were in hieroglyphs (or maybe it’s the other side of the paper, don’t know), how could Tuesday read it? XD
…why would a modern-day young girl use a writen language that has been dead for thousands of years? It was a LONG time ago since anyone used those as their written language, since a bit into the time the romans decided they could use the space available in Africa. Sure, the templar-verse is different, but i was under the impression that these differences were somewhat modern-day, and by no means this far back.
Latin is a dead language, yet some people still speak it. Its taught in certain colleges too, I think. I’m not sure thats the letter hes holding either. If you look closely the book it says “New Texan Ver” so it could just be more of uncle Shep’s religious paraphenalia.
I went to a private humanities high school and we had Latin through grades 10-12 – since it’s pretty much influenced a LOT of languages and is a huge factor in the development of European languages. In my home country and probably elsewhere, if you study any Romanic language, you have mandatory Latin and in many other language studies as well. Not to mention it’s mandatory in law and medicine studies. (Just fyi)
Also useful for biologists, as knowing at least some of the language makes remembering the Latin names of creatures quite a bit easier.
OK, but also in this universe, ancient egyptian religion is still observed and the culture remains, though modernized. It wouldn’t be that surprising if some still wrote in hieroglyphics; remember in an inbetween comic, where Sunny’s speech bubbles have hieroglyphics when he attempts to speak “Nile”?
Also keep in mind this is alt history and we don’t know how obsessed the Nile folks are with keeping the ancient traditions alive. Though just judging from Shep and what little we know of the immigrated Nile culture, it’s pretty strong.
She’s still holding the letter, which is presumably in english based on the layout we see in the previous page, and the fact Thutmose doesn’t really seem like the type to bother learning them anyway; the papers with the hieroglyphics are something else.
Or they’re the other side (not one written on) of the letter paper. When I was a kid, I had letter paper with writing space on one side and pictures on the other.
Just want to note that it is possible to kill oneself with a full bottle of asprin, and “fake suicides” are generally a sign of authentic pain and mental distress. Tuesday kind of sucks as a friend. I’m interested in where she’s going with this, though.
I think that’s more or less her point in bringing it up. She mentions the “kill herself” part before the “fake” part.
My money is that she’s leading up to something like “Curio needs a friend more than I need a beercan-dick.” From the beginning this struck me as a really weird breakup speech.
True — but there’s also the call-for-attention / “HELP ME!” suicide attempts, where succeeding isn’t necessarily the intended goal, or the person changes their mind before they go. This is in contrast to the despair / methodical suicides that don’t call anyone, and do a very good job of ensuring they won’t be found until it’s too late. Having the suicide -attempt- as a goal, vs. having death itself as the goal.
Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but… I think she’s means that first kind as the “fake” kind. Because if nothing else, spoiled catty drama queens (male or female) are willing to take some drastic responses to things that they don’t like, sometimes, even when seriously over-inflating the seriousness of the matter. The distress may be real, but not always justified.
In real life or when in doubt, it’s always best to assume that a potential suicide is going to be that second type, the “real” type, because people who are overdramatic enough to do it over tiny things are probably much rarer than unhappy people. But, I think that’s the kind of thing Tuesday is thinking of in terms of “fake” suicide attempts. I also think that, unless Tuesday reveals a few Curio suicide attempts that happen to coincide with drama BS, Tuesday might be the kind of person who would call ALL suicide attempts “fake” because she either can’t believe it would happen to any of her friends, or she can’t concieve of someone being that upset / despairing without some over-the-top Lifetime Drama problems going on. I guess we’ll find out in the next couple of pages.
Nah it is definitely a thing for a certain class of late-teenage girl. Tuesday ain’t exactly a psychological authority here but it’s pretty easy to distinguish the whole ‘call somebody up and get them to talk me down from killing myself’ phenomenon from a serious and dedicated act of total despair, especially if you’re stuck in a crowd that does that sort of thing like every fucking week like Tuesday could entirely plausibly have been.
“people who are overdramatic enough to do it over tiny things are probably much rarer than unhappy people”
No, no. People who are really committed to dying are far rarer than people who are merely very upset. Both groups can be described as unhappy. But statistically there are far more poorly planned suicide attempts by people who hadn’t been planning suicide or weren’t sure they wanted to commit suicide when they started drinking alone before the incident.
You don’t need to be being overdramatic to attempt suicide without really wanting to die. There are people who genuinely need help but aren’t taken seriously until they self harm. Making an insincere suicide attempt if you’ve just ended a relationship might be overdramatic, but is it insincere for someone to half-ass cutting their wrist, then call the hospital immediately if they’re being abused and nobody believes them?
Anyway, the clarity of really wanting to die is very rare, even among, say for example, the terminally ill.
Aspirin can be lethal in large doses. It looks like the potentially lethal dosage (according to an ’81 study found via Wikipedia) is over 500mg per kilo of body weight, which means a $20 bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol is enough to kill Moze…let alone some teenage girl with an eating disorder.
52 people died of aspirin poisoning in 2000; of those, most were suicides. I wonder how many of them thought it was “fake”.
Both can kill you in large doses, but acetaminophen is the one that seems to do the most damage. Mostly because people think tylenol is somehow safer to “fake” suicide on when in reality it can really mess up your body.
It’s awesome how people keep using the comments section here to Explain How Things Work to characters who’ve been repeatedly shown to be so dumb or mean that they wouldn’t give a damn if they even actually existed.
While aspirin in large quantities can be lethal, I think the “fake” part comes from her calling Tuesday instead of 911. It’s the sort of “cry for help” that people with various mental conditions actually do commit; start a suicide and then call for help. But when you call a friend instead of the emergency number, I’m thinking you don’t really think you’re going to die of it anytime soon, since your friend might or might not believe you, for example.
Kinda gives the “Spoiled King Street Girl” thing a bit less weight.
Well, it does for Curio, at least.
I like the “And then she called ME.”
Can’t help reading it as though Tuesday felt really inconvenienced about her frienemy’s call for help. Like, jeez, Curio, don’t you know that Tuesday was probably busy or something? So inconsiderate.
Am I the only one interpreting Tuesday’s rant as accusatory towards Curio? It’s obvious Curio has had some pretty serious medical and mental health issues, and Tuesday’s describing the situation as though it’s a reflection on Curio’s character. It’s as though she’s righteously angry at Curio for having the temerity to be fucked-up.
Tuesday doesn’t strike me as super great at directing her anger, she just *has* it. Honestly though it seems she is getting to a point about how her inability to meld with American culture was the single most destructive influence on her life – and it would be even worse for Moze’s ‘wife’ if she hits the US at 18, enclosed within Nile society and already married off in a fashion not appreciated by the people around her. It’s actually not an unintelligent observation – separate from the moral/ethical/cultural side of things, the base ability to get along in society is impaired by the culture clash. I think she’s putting too much stock on that, but it’s not the easily-dismissed self-aggrandizing bullshit we’ve gotten used to from Tuesday.
I don’t think Tuesday has the chops to pick up on what’s wrong with arranged marriages on any level beyond vaguely Knowing that they’re Wrong, and she’s pissed off at Curio for having a stupid accent because she’s foreign, oh my god why would you do that, etc.
This is mostly just her retaking the conversation after Mose left her flatfooted; she expected to come off as impressive based on how much smarter than his native culture she is, but he didn’t really take the bait at all for good or bad and just moved on to show her letters from his betrothed in the way a teenager might show another a stuffed pet. She didn’t get anywhere he wasn’t prepared to wall off with her platitudes, so she’s moved on to proving that immigrant girls are terrible / taking that as granted and trying to harangue Mose for sleeping with one.
As the phone call showed, her trump card with Curio is “bitch, you still brown”. That didn’t really do anything with Mose so she’s kind of resorted to gossiping in an oddly accusatory way. At least it makes the conversation about her, right?
Serious look at this aside, Moze’s continuous smile even while he curiously asks how someone would fake-kill themselves caused me inappropriate laughter.
I think Tuesday is pissed that she has apparently “gone through so much” with Curio and her efforts have not been received with the gratitude she feels is due to her ie: The rant in her voicemail. Seems to me that it has been sitting on her brain and just rankling the shit out of her until she finally couldn’t hold it in anymore.
it’s all about Tuesday here, “look how much better I am than Curio and Nile people and everyone else!” I’m pretty sick of her shit, not sure how even Moze can stand it.
This. This is what makes Spike’s writing so great. When somebody knows another person with issues/baggage/problems, they think they’re above having issues/baggage/problems themselves.
she sure does know how to lighten the mood, doesn’t she?
How long is she going to wear that sexy trash bag? I am certain there are sweat issues by now.
Tuesday NEVER sweats.
Well, as thin as she is, I think her body NEEDS a plastic wrapping just to retain some warmth.
Black Trash bags are actually fairly transparent to IR light, so depending on the temperature of her surroundings she could be quite cold or at least dissipating a sufficient amount of heat through radiation.
Then again, a fact that I keep forgetting, Templar is quite a bit warmer than what I’m used to. Right now it’s -15 Celcius (5 Fahrenheit) outside. She’d freeze to death in less than half an hour. :-P
In the first place, she does not sweat; she perspires.
In the second place, she does not perspire!
Horses sweat. Men perspire. Ladies glow.
You’re calling Tuesday a lady?
That’s right, Tuesday. Let that anger build, into a full-on rage.
What does this have to do with anything, Tuesday?
I’m wondering the same question too, but I guess we’ll just find out in the next page, or the one after.
I’m thinking something about cultural isolation of immigrants and their children who are in f*cked up marriages
You forget the topic of the phone call – “I fucked Thutmose first!!
If Tuesday’s not taking this well, it will devastate Curio!
There was a full ten minutes when the conversation wasn’t centering around HER. Her attention-eating mind-parasite was starting to starve.
LMAO. (Sorry, can’t think anything more intelligent to say. XD)
1) Curio was a pretty pathetic/unlucky girl – even more so if she landed Tuesday as her friend.
2) I wonder if Curio’s phonecall to Tuesday (leaving the message) was her trying to get Tuesday feel sympathetic to her again and/or apologize, or whatever.
3) Is Tuesday trying to imply that Merry would be unhappy and end up isolated and miserable, possibly trying suicide when she comes to the States and knows only other Nile people?
4) If Merry’s letters really were in hieroglyphs (or maybe it’s the other side of the paper, don’t know), how could Tuesday read it? XD
…why would a modern-day young girl use a writen language that has been dead for thousands of years? It was a LONG time ago since anyone used those as their written language, since a bit into the time the romans decided they could use the space available in Africa. Sure, the templar-verse is different, but i was under the impression that these differences were somewhat modern-day, and by no means this far back.
Latin is a dead language, yet some people still speak it. Its taught in certain colleges too, I think. I’m not sure thats the letter hes holding either. If you look closely the book it says “New Texan Ver” so it could just be more of uncle Shep’s religious paraphenalia.
I went to a private humanities high school and we had Latin through grades 10-12 – since it’s pretty much influenced a LOT of languages and is a huge factor in the development of European languages. In my home country and probably elsewhere, if you study any Romanic language, you have mandatory Latin and in many other language studies as well. Not to mention it’s mandatory in law and medicine studies. (Just fyi)
Also useful for biologists, as knowing at least some of the language makes remembering the Latin names of creatures quite a bit easier.
OK, but also in this universe, ancient egyptian religion is still observed and the culture remains, though modernized. It wouldn’t be that surprising if some still wrote in hieroglyphics; remember in an inbetween comic, where Sunny’s speech bubbles have hieroglyphics when he attempts to speak “Nile”?
Also keep in mind this is alt history and we don’t know how obsessed the Nile folks are with keeping the ancient traditions alive. Though just judging from Shep and what little we know of the immigrated Nile culture, it’s pretty strong.
Particularly the glitter pens.
Mind you, hieroglyphs written in glitter would make for a great visual, even if you didn’t understand them.
Why are you assuming that a language that’s dead in our world is dead in an alternate reality?
Or, as Moze would put it: ” ‘S a Nile thing.”
When you see Moze shuffling the papers with the hieroglyphs on it, it looks like Tuesday is still holding the letter.
I like where she says “Until someone told on her. (Not Me.)” yeah right…
There were multiple letters, I think Moze just handed her the latest.
Tuesday still has Merry’s letter in her hand. I think those papers are something else.
I think this is Shep’s place. Would make total sense for him to write in hieroglyphs.
Yo they just said on the previous page that she wrote in cursive and her english is better than Moze’s.
She’s still holding the letter, which is presumably in english based on the layout we see in the previous page, and the fact Thutmose doesn’t really seem like the type to bother learning them anyway; the papers with the hieroglyphics are something else.
Or they’re the other side (not one written on) of the letter paper. When I was a kid, I had letter paper with writing space on one side and pictures on the other.
Her face in panel 5 is just begging for somebody to stuff her mouth.
Curio and Tuesday seem to deserve each other as friends.
New Texan Ver.? Spike, your Clutch is showing. Hee hee.
Just want to note that it is possible to kill oneself with a full bottle of asprin, and “fake suicides” are generally a sign of authentic pain and mental distress. Tuesday kind of sucks as a friend. I’m interested in where she’s going with this, though.
I think that’s more or less her point in bringing it up. She mentions the “kill herself” part before the “fake” part.
My money is that she’s leading up to something like “Curio needs a friend more than I need a beercan-dick.” From the beginning this struck me as a really weird breakup speech.
I get the impression that Tuesday understands that, she just isn’t expressing it in the best way. Could be wrong, though.
I agree with Owen. I thought the implication was that Tuesday was saying Curio -was- in pain, but didn’t actually want to die.
True — but there’s also the call-for-attention / “HELP ME!” suicide attempts, where succeeding isn’t necessarily the intended goal, or the person changes their mind before they go. This is in contrast to the despair / methodical suicides that don’t call anyone, and do a very good job of ensuring they won’t be found until it’s too late. Having the suicide -attempt- as a goal, vs. having death itself as the goal.
Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but… I think she’s means that first kind as the “fake” kind. Because if nothing else, spoiled catty drama queens (male or female) are willing to take some drastic responses to things that they don’t like, sometimes, even when seriously over-inflating the seriousness of the matter. The distress may be real, but not always justified.
In real life or when in doubt, it’s always best to assume that a potential suicide is going to be that second type, the “real” type, because people who are overdramatic enough to do it over tiny things are probably much rarer than unhappy people. But, I think that’s the kind of thing Tuesday is thinking of in terms of “fake” suicide attempts. I also think that, unless Tuesday reveals a few Curio suicide attempts that happen to coincide with drama BS, Tuesday might be the kind of person who would call ALL suicide attempts “fake” because she either can’t believe it would happen to any of her friends, or she can’t concieve of someone being that upset / despairing without some over-the-top Lifetime Drama problems going on. I guess we’ll find out in the next couple of pages.
Nah it is definitely a thing for a certain class of late-teenage girl. Tuesday ain’t exactly a psychological authority here but it’s pretty easy to distinguish the whole ‘call somebody up and get them to talk me down from killing myself’ phenomenon from a serious and dedicated act of total despair, especially if you’re stuck in a crowd that does that sort of thing like every fucking week like Tuesday could entirely plausibly have been.
“people who are overdramatic enough to do it over tiny things are probably much rarer than unhappy people”
No, no. People who are really committed to dying are far rarer than people who are merely very upset. Both groups can be described as unhappy. But statistically there are far more poorly planned suicide attempts by people who hadn’t been planning suicide or weren’t sure they wanted to commit suicide when they started drinking alone before the incident.
You don’t need to be being overdramatic to attempt suicide without really wanting to die. There are people who genuinely need help but aren’t taken seriously until they self harm. Making an insincere suicide attempt if you’ve just ended a relationship might be overdramatic, but is it insincere for someone to half-ass cutting their wrist, then call the hospital immediately if they’re being abused and nobody believes them?
Anyway, the clarity of really wanting to die is very rare, even among, say for example, the terminally ill.
Aspirin can be lethal in large doses. It looks like the potentially lethal dosage (according to an ’81 study found via Wikipedia) is over 500mg per kilo of body weight, which means a $20 bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol is enough to kill Moze…let alone some teenage girl with an eating disorder.
52 people died of aspirin poisoning in 2000; of those, most were suicides. I wonder how many of them thought it was “fake”.
Just sayin’.
Aspirin isn’t Tylenol. Acetaminophen is Tylenol.
Both can kill you in large doses, but acetaminophen is the one that seems to do the most damage. Mostly because people think tylenol is somehow safer to “fake” suicide on when in reality it can really mess up your body.
It’s awesome how people keep using the comments section here to Explain How Things Work to characters who’ve been repeatedly shown to be so dumb or mean that they wouldn’t give a damn if they even actually existed.
While aspirin in large quantities can be lethal, I think the “fake” part comes from her calling Tuesday instead of 911. It’s the sort of “cry for help” that people with various mental conditions actually do commit; start a suicide and then call for help. But when you call a friend instead of the emergency number, I’m thinking you don’t really think you’re going to die of it anytime soon, since your friend might or might not believe you, for example.
spike i MISSED you. thanks for coming back. :)
man, who knew curio had such a rough time growing up.
and tuesday had such a rough time being her friend.
Kinda gives the “Spoiled King Street Girl” thing a bit less weight.
Well, it does for Curio, at least.
I like the “And then she called ME.”
Can’t help reading it as though Tuesday felt really inconvenienced about her frienemy’s call for help. Like, jeez, Curio, don’t you know that Tuesday was probably busy or something? So inconsiderate.
Or maybe she’s just sort of “What the f*** she called ME for when she should have called 911?!”
Am I the only one interpreting Tuesday’s rant as accusatory towards Curio? It’s obvious Curio has had some pretty serious medical and mental health issues, and Tuesday’s describing the situation as though it’s a reflection on Curio’s character. It’s as though she’s righteously angry at Curio for having the temerity to be fucked-up.
Tuesday doesn’t strike me as super great at directing her anger, she just *has* it. Honestly though it seems she is getting to a point about how her inability to meld with American culture was the single most destructive influence on her life – and it would be even worse for Moze’s ‘wife’ if she hits the US at 18, enclosed within Nile society and already married off in a fashion not appreciated by the people around her. It’s actually not an unintelligent observation – separate from the moral/ethical/cultural side of things, the base ability to get along in society is impaired by the culture clash. I think she’s putting too much stock on that, but it’s not the easily-dismissed self-aggrandizing bullshit we’ve gotten used to from Tuesday.
Well, not *all* of it.
I don’t think Tuesday has the chops to pick up on what’s wrong with arranged marriages on any level beyond vaguely Knowing that they’re Wrong, and she’s pissed off at Curio for having a stupid accent because she’s foreign, oh my god why would you do that, etc.
This is mostly just her retaking the conversation after Mose left her flatfooted; she expected to come off as impressive based on how much smarter than his native culture she is, but he didn’t really take the bait at all for good or bad and just moved on to show her letters from his betrothed in the way a teenager might show another a stuffed pet. She didn’t get anywhere he wasn’t prepared to wall off with her platitudes, so she’s moved on to proving that immigrant girls are terrible / taking that as granted and trying to harangue Mose for sleeping with one.
As the phone call showed, her trump card with Curio is “bitch, you still brown”. That didn’t really do anything with Mose so she’s kind of resorted to gossiping in an oddly accusatory way. At least it makes the conversation about her, right?
I saw it that way, too, kind of; I think she’s trying to describe how pathetic and attention-hungry she thinks Curio is.
Serious look at this aside, Moze’s continuous smile even while he curiously asks how someone would fake-kill themselves caused me inappropriate laughter.
I think Tuesday is pissed that she has apparently “gone through so much” with Curio and her efforts have not been received with the gratitude she feels is due to her ie: The rant in her voicemail. Seems to me that it has been sitting on her brain and just rankling the shit out of her until she finally couldn’t hold it in anymore.
it’s all about Tuesday here, “look how much better I am than Curio and Nile people and everyone else!” I’m pretty sick of her shit, not sure how even Moze can stand it.
This. This is what makes Spike’s writing so great. When somebody knows another person with issues/baggage/problems, they think they’re above having issues/baggage/problems themselves.