August 19th, 2022
19 Aug 2022 · page 1122 of 1306
Return trip.
Cast: Lei Feng, Pemberton Pryce
Comments (65)
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Thanksfully, while part of the masts are gone due to a smaller radius (?), it didn't also munch on an extremity of the bottom of the ship :D
I think they just broke off last page from getting hit by a wave. Though getting cut by a teleport bubble would be an interesting way to break them too.
Chin up Mr Pryce! You may have failed to acquire the fourth anchor, but you have demonstrated the near instantaneous transport of large cargoes across long distances. That will still give you a healthy return on your investment.
The Department of War in particular will be by later to talk about exclusive licensing rights. Entire ships sent across the continent, you say? And all you need is certainty? Well, that's an attainable resource for the US Navy.
We’re not giving the military an exclusive licence. They might pay well but their budgets are always unreliable and in peace time they won’t use it much. I was thinking using it for mass transport across the continent by land - all this stuff with cables and ships is only necessary for Pryce’s Grand Theft Anchor. As the west is opened up it can be used to transport all the new raw materials, including wheat and beef, back to the East Coast and then take manufactured goods out west where they are needed. There’ll be hundreds of tons to ship everyday, and that’s where we’ll make the big bucks. For us, the farmers out west and the manufacturers in the east.
I’m over thinking this again aren’t I?
You say that like overthinking is a bad thing. ;)
‘Overthinking’ as in this page is full of pathos as the consequences of Pryce’s scheme are brought home to him, and here am I talking about sustainable business models.
Not used in peace time? Well, now, there's a simple solution for that.
Now you mention it, the Mexicans are being very unreasonable about the US citizens who have emigrated to Texas...
Apparently Chile feel that they have a cassus bellum, with some US citizens at least.
It's not "overthinking" short of eliminating distances by moving entire landscapes around, and maybe not even then. :-P
(... after all, as long as we're talking agriculture, we might need to take a step further to keep it connected to its original microclimate, solar irradiation, ...)
President Jackson is a hard man to say 'no' to.
...Assuming he's President in this timeline, of course. It's pretty darn high-inertia, considering how the social changes didn't do anything to affect the British succession - or, indeed, the formation of the USA. Personally, I suspect that some of the stars on the flag represent Native American-controlled states with semi-sovereign parallel governing structures, but I'm not the one who gets to say what the history of this world is. :)
Don't even bother with the ships - just send the ordinance peacemaking directly!
"Ordnance" {[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance")}
We're not sending warheads. Just ordinance telling them what to do if they don't want us to start sending ordnance. :-)
no no, "ordinance"
Well there goes the Erie Canal and the rise of Buffalo, New York. Alternate history indeed! Heck, they may not even have to cut down all the trees in Michigan . . .
I've got a mule her name is Sal... As someone who grew up in Buffalo when it was the butt of many jokes, I was shocked to learn that it had once been a city with cachet.
Geography nitpick: the Eastern US coastline runs north-south so you should not be able to sea both land, sea and the sun rising from from the east at the same time.
Artistic license trumps your mad science.
Also, Boston sticks out a bit from the rest of the coastline.
[https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/july-23rd-2021 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/july-23rd-2021")
So does New York City and Long Island. They could be just south of NYC.
They've been meddling with cosmic forces. Are we quite sure that's the sun we are looking at?
It may be a sun.
Just not our sun.
For that matter, are we quite sure the traditional four cardinal directions still apply?
Are you suggesting they've turned Zorth?
They might be near Provincetown, MA.
Looks a bit built up for that. Been a while since I've been, but I don't think it's that built up now.
It's not; it's basically just a tourist trap last I knew. But if it's basically on a major international rail line I can see it developing more. /shrug
The map isn't terribly detailed, but it looks like it comes out of New York harbor and goes straight into the Atlantic.
[https://www.widdershinscomi...](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/july-23rd-2021 "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/july-23rd-2021")
The East Coast actually has a significant northeastern tilt, making such a vantage point entirely possible up and down the entire coast, much less specific locations that other folk have pointed out.
if I hadnt included any of them the panel would have been incomplete- coast is necessary to show they are near to one, sea is necessary because uh.... boat, sun is necessary to signify a new day and change. that's all a lot more important to me than geographical accuracy, sorry!
Nothing wrong with your Geography, Kate. The East coast of the USA runs Southwest to Northeast. Also, the lower 48 being much farther South than England, the sun rises and sets North of due East and due West in the Summer.
As Kate pointed out, narrative sometimes beats good sense -- and, in this case, both are possible
(a) (Unimportant, but still kind of interesting.) Microsoft's main campus (in Redmond, WA, USA) is almost exactly due west of Dublin. One of my friends used to work at MSFT doing international work. It turns out that the weather in Redmond is eerily similar to the weather in Dublin.
(b) Also, the Sun is always in the southern part of the sky in the US -- even the Florida Keys lie about 120 km north of the Tropic of Cancer. As a result, the Sun is never directly overhead anywhere in the mainland of the US, even on the Summer Solstice.
(c) This does not make Kate's images in any way impossible, however: if the image is taken from the north looking south towards the end of an island -- and there are a lot of those -- or a similar geographic feature, then the image is possible. This violates the reader's expectations, which is that the viewpoint is from the south looking north, but there's no law which mandates that.
Otherwise...yeah, no, not at all.
"Microsoft's main campus (in Redmond, WA, USA) is almost exactly due west of Dublin."
Only if you have some other definition of "almost exactly" that includes being off by ~5.7 degrees of latitude.
Redmond, WA is at 47.67 degrees NL, well south of the 49th parallel which forms the border with Canada. Dublin lies at 53.35 degrees NL, and like the entirety of the British Isles is well north of the 50th parallel that runs through Mainz, Germany (a bit south of Frankfurt).
Almost exactly due west? You can fit all of Ireland into the difference.
Also, it's not as though the East Coast is a straight line. There's plenty of areas where the coast goes east-west, or even dips south. North Carolina, Connecticut, Rhode Island....
The coast of Maine is so convoluted it would be longer than the coast of California if you somehow managed to straighten it out.
Me, I saw that coast and immediately thought New York Harbor because you just know a go-getter like Pryce would be based in New York City. There's many places along the NYC waterfront where a view like this would be possible.
How can one theoretically infinite fractal coastline be longer than another theoretically infinite fractal coastline?
Plus (relatively) smaller geographical shapes could make anything possible, eg in a bay or something.
Eh, that's nothing. Xanadu opened with Gene Kelly playing the saxophone on the Los Angeles beach as the sun rose over the Pacific. And in Bird on a Wire, Goldie Hawn took a ferry trip from Detroit, Michigan to Kenosha, Wisconsin that lasted just a couple hours! Maybe they had a certainty engine. (BTW do not watch Bird on a Wire it's awful. Xanadu is also awful of course but it gets a pass for being so bonkers.)
And Planet of the Apes ended with the sun setting over the Atlantic.
Then again, there's absolutely no way that rocky, low-lying, mainland beach was ever Liberty Island, so one could make a case that a portion of New York City was physically transported to the west coast for unknown reasons and reassembled on site in the centuries since those astronauts went missing.
Geometry nitpick: Whoever created those coasts needs to get a better idea of what a straight-_edge is. (Looking at _you, Mr. oh-and-let's-just-name-that-one-"Long-Island".)
Could easily be off the coast of CT or RI, where the coastline runs mostly east/west
This page is an example of Cubism. Not restricted by mundane perspective and exact depictions of nature, it shows all the two dimensional elements necessary to tell the story in a single frame. It's the way Picasso would have drawn it, had he ever got the hang of doing faces.
The Pryce has been paid.
Looks like Lei's kind enough to have sympathy for Pryce even...
also everyone cool news we reached 150 Widdershins fics on ao3 ! (well it's 151 now actually) that's a big number wahoo :)
How many of them are PWP involving Nicole and O'Malley?
don't be weird -_-'
None as far as I know (assuming you don't mean Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner). There is clearly a gap in the body of work. But there may possibly be a story or two where Nicola and Ben are surprised in a highly compromising (but entirely innocent) situation.
"Porn Without Plot"
Thank you, I was wondering.
I’m not going to dignify this with a proper response.
This made me curious about if there even are any widdershins fics rated higher than T on ao3, so I went to check. There's a whole TWO of them! Sadly neither of them feature that pairing, but if you wait around another decade or so maybe one will turn up eventually.
the filters section is always a really fascinating part of any given ao3 category. always interesting to see which characters show up the most and which relationships are written about more than others
She'll be back. One way or another.
Hmmm. Lei might want to make sure she doesn't get spotted by Pryce. Just in case...
Looks like someone found Pryce's gun in that last panel.
Okay . . . Now what do we do?
Stay tuned. You'll find out. (evil chuckle)
Same Bat time. Same Bat channel.
I wonder if Pryce is realizing that his ambition may have cost him the only person he seems to care about at all.
maybe ask Mal about that
excuse me, sir? This is about lei and her character development and how far she's come and willing to go to do the right thing. not your worst father of the year award ceremony.