![GHOST WARDROBE PREFERENCE
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A few of the projects that have had Max so buried lately! Naturally, these projects went through about nine million storyboard changes each (I’ve witnessed how fried Max looks at the end of each day) but the boards turned out great and so did the final results.
First, a new “Kevin the Carrot” ad for Aldi, a supermarket chain in the UK.
And also a new Minecraft promo.
Maybe I’ve been watching too much anime (like that’s possible) but given Japan’s apparent fondness for exorcist-type heroes and harem shows, I’m sort of expecting they’ll eventually have a series in which the MC is a clueless nebbish exorcist-in-training who – over the course of the series – ends up collecting a half-dozen gorgeous female spirits with the usual assortment of personality tropes.
Oh, who am I kidding. They’ve probably done it already.
As for Letoa, she’s already starting to assert herself within the group. She is, after all, the only one to have faced Countdown (albeit briefly) in person. And with a Spirit Guide to boot. But as Scales is quick to point out, that still doesn’t mean she knows all the answers.
And more below!
Bobservations
The Investigators
I think it’s part of our collective wishful thinking (at least here in the US) that there are actually brilliant teams of investigative types working to keep us all safe, no matter what. That if a homeless man is found dead on federal land the entire Bones team of the Jeffersonian Institute will throw themselves heart and soul into uncovering his killer, budget be damned. It’s nice to think so, though I remember my neighbor the Cop-Next-Door remarking that while he was a big fan of CSI-type shows, he himself, during his thirty years on the force, had never actually seen a CSI team show up to a crime scene.
They were probably too busy trying on sunglasses and rehearsing one-liners.
In any case, even amongst my more distant circle of acquaintances, there have been a couple of murders – or at least pretty damn suspicious deaths – and we all know who did it, and more than a few said so to the police, and yet – nothing. Admittedly there wasn’t really evidence that would hold up in court, and supposedly both cases are still “under investigation,” but still. From what we can gather there was nothing like a thorough sweep of the crime scene; no careful measurements of blood splatter or careful dusting for fingerprints. Just a cursory writeup of a “possible accident” or “robbery gone wrong” and everything more or less shelved.
It’s enough to make someone want to become a vigilante.
And yet, there must be some real hotshots out there. When Jihadi John was happily slicing people’s heads off on Youtube, he was so wrapped in black fabric that nothing was visible but his eyelashes. Despite that, a slew of high-tech investigative cleverness used his height, speech, skin tone, stance, and movements to not only identify him as a former British IT worker but also to hit him with a drone strike. Of course that involved the help of MI5 and Scotland Yard, but still. Those kind of investigators are out there. They do exist. And we’ll assume that the UD3 are among their ranks. Especially now that Letoa is part of them.
First step will be trying on sunglasses.
— Bob out
NEW: Max the artist has attempted to a “process GIF” of this page which may or may not amuse:
Hi Bob,
Sorry to further disillusion you. But you know all those courtroom movies and TV shows where brilliant prosecuting attorneys are fencing with clever defense attorneys in a high-stakes legal battle? That image got shattered for me the first time I sat on a jury. Both the public prosecutor and public defender seemed half prepared. Who knows how many cases each one was handling at the time.
Rather than brilliantly maneuvering the witness testimony, BOTH sides called witnesses and started questioning them, only to have the testimony end up bolstering the other side. So their questioning just sort of trailed off, and then the other side DID NOT pounce on it and take effective advantage of it. This happened both ways.
Maybe high-level legal jockeying goes on in the world of high-priced private lawyers, but definitely not on the public-defender level of justice.
Yeah, most sections of the Law Enforcement Industry operate in the red, since politicians would rather give themselves raises than spend the money in a way that improves public safety (see also Highway Infrastructure).
I wonder how close we are to someone setting up a private firm to take over the unfulfilled demand.
In fact, that sounds like a decent show too.
Robocop
Well the Toronto Police went with the car design unlit the public called them out on it – then they added white doors – uh yeah, that helps a lot on improving their public image. [sad headshake]
I would watch that anime that sounds good.
I am not sure if such an anime exists as yet but I have come across a Manga[?] that pretty much matches that premise – Demon Spirit Seed Manual
It is a mashup of several tropes. Can you list them all? XD
I had noticed how Sopie’s ghostly garb was not always the same. I wonder how long it takes her to change, compared to when she was living? (My bet is, “a lot less time”.)
By the way, while I don’t want to interfere with precedents/canon set for the purposes of this fictional story-universe, in our real world there is no such thing as “life force”. This was proved in 1828 –look up the history of a hypothesis called “vitalism”. A living thing has no more life force than a battery-powered toy.
However, the real world still has room for such things as souls and ghosts. By definition of “immortal soul”, it is impossible for any purely physical event (like the biochemical reactions associated with conception) to cause a soul to begin to exist, any more than it is (by definition) impossible for any purely physical event to cause a soul to cease to exist (or trap it in an energy bottle). If souls exist, they exist entirely independently from the properties of the physical realm, and begin to exist by some non-physical process. Their association with physical bodies is on their terms, not the terms of the physical world. Living things can exist just fine without souls, simply because living things are technically the equivalent of fuel-powered machines.
But don’t let any of that interfere with your excellent work involving a fictional universe here. I have no trouble suspending enough disbelief to enjoy it!
Thanks! As far as life/life force goes, I don’t believe we’ve come anywhere close to abiogenesis yet. A few amino acids are nothing. Sure, we can take living matter or parts that are alive or recently were alive and do all sorts of clever swapping around and come up with new living things, but even they – so far – require some living host to incubate. We can’t take stuff that was never alive and make it live. Not yet. I still think – as you say – there’s something special (though trapping it in a bottle may take a Madison to figure out.)
All this reminds me of the quote from Pratchett’s Thief of Time: “Building a human being was easy; the Auditors knew exactly how to move matter around. The trouble was that the result didn’t do anything but lie there and, eventually, decompose. This was annoying, since human beings, without any special training or education, seemed to be able to make working replicas quite easily.”
Too many people seem to think that just because we can’t do some particular thing right now, that somehow means it will never be possible to do. But we are making progress; when was the last time you searched for things under the topic of “synthetic life”?
Next, there is some evidence that life is older than planet Earth ( read this, please ), which if correct would imply life as we know it took a really long time to become as complex as we see even the simplest life-forms to be today. That obviously means we should expect it to take a great deal of very patient lab work to duplicate what happened naturally, and anyone wanting faster results should simply be sneered-at. There is no such thing as a right to immediate gratification.
I’d have to go through the entire archive carefully to come up with the answer, but I think that the only time Sophie showed up fully clothed was when Max was at his worst. If this is a direct correlation, then Sophie’s clothing may be a reflection of the power she has to spare for cosmetic purposes, and the more power she has to draw on, the more she can spare.
“fully clothed was when Max was at his worst”
I disagree. I think it is related to other things she wants to do more, like when she needed to slow that bullet, or when she protected Max from the explosion here, but afterward, like here, Max was in seriously bad shape yet that was when Sophie was fully clothed. And here Max was mostly recovered from that, and also Sophie was reasonably-fully clothed (different outfit).
For a little more regarding my hypothesis, consider this page, where Sophie pauses a bullet. She is wearing skivvies, perhaps due to lack of time, after arriving on the scene, to prepare some other ghostly garb. But then look at this page, which is just after she did all that ghostly exertion, holding the bullet. Those skivvies have become ragged-looking. And so I think her garb depends on how much effort she can put into maintaining it.
oops. sorry, left out second link
Obviously I’d love defenders of public safety and law to be highly skilled hotshots who give 110% 110% of the time, but I also know they’re human and have their own issues and LEOs and Lawyers of the Silver Screen are essentially superhuman. I’m also somewhat glad they’re a bit sloppy at times and not flawless. I mean, the idea of lawyers and detectives is supposed to be that they ferret out the truth and then the truth is presented to juries who decide what is just. But too often in stories you see someone “Winning” a case based on charm and oratory. At least if everyone involved is an idiot there’s more chance of an innocent person going free.
As for the example of Jihadi John, I’m put in mind of the times the people of Anonymous took a thirty second security video of a woman being cruel to a cat and tracked her down. Or the time they caught the ex-assistant who was messing with Jenna Jameson. A lot of stuff can be done with very little information nowadays if you’ve got people willing to spend time picking at details. Also, they say they figured out his identity by bringing lots of fragments of data together, but it might also be they have a mole inside Goat F**kers International and were just covering up the fact that they gave them a name.
Well, if I had an improbably photogenic female “onboard poltergeist”, my user preferences for her would definitely be “skivvies”. Even if nudity were an allowable setting, partial clothing like that is almost always more enticing 😉 Besides, you never know who might be watching.
Just checking my interpretation of the usage of the word “onboard” in the story. It means “in cahoots”, right?
‘Onboard’ as in on a plane or ship. More like attached.
Letoa saw Sophie move Max’s arms to the orientation where they signal return-teleport –Letoa was telling Sophie to not move, the whole time. That made Sophie an active participant helping Max, regardless of who she actually is/was. A poltergeist has the power to move things (like arms), but is also usually not something that can be reasoned-with. I think that’s the main reason Letoa doesn’t fully understand the true nature of Sophie’s involvement (a dead witch and a soul-binding spell). But we-the-readers can certainly understand how Letoa’s use of the word “onboard” might mean “in cahoots”.
QUINCY: It was moider.
I can see at least ONE of the guys thinking “Oh great, ANOTHER chick.”
The spook is mocking agent Scales. It’s doing the anime thing where it pulls down one eyelid and sticks out its tongue. I’ve never been able to quite figure out what that one is but it’s definitely a taunt.
yup!
Something not mentioned by these Feds, related to the kid seeing Sophie, is the strong likelihood that the kid saw Sophie affect the bullet that was going toward him. I know of no reason why the kid would not have mentioned that in his description of events –and therefore these Feds should have commented on that.
Another thing: When Letoa saw Sophie, Sophie was fully garbed (however ghostly the garb), but Letoa hasn’t yet told the other Feds that she can’t confirm Sophie appearing in skivvies.
And my complements to the artist regarding the fully-garbed ghostly Sophie. That was a very nice-looking outfit!
Aldi has been here in the Los Angeles County area for a while now. Haven’t actually been to one yet, but I noticed a couple days ago another had gone in next to the place I got my car. ^_^