I have no idea how long this arc will last
January 10, 2014
6:36 am
We’re past 200 strips, I think it’s about time you guys got some Commander backstory.
Manly Guys Doing Manly Things
Updated Mondays or whenever I feel like it
Yes, time travel is always bullshit. The rules are never consistent. Also I like the commentary on veteran services.
Not just that Veteran Services ARE like that, but that they will CONTINUE to be like that.
They got worse. They did use time travel to send it back within his lifetime! Timetravel is used irresponsibly to make bureaucracy seem less dumb.
Always will have been like that. Retroactively. In chronological order.
Listen as I bellow out a nice, hardy, “Rowthdower!”
VA is so backed up even time travel can’t solve the problems.
THANKS FUTURE OBAMA
I believe you mean “Thanks, Future President Shia LaBeouf”.
I’m pretty sure felons can’t become president, and the song does go Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf, so he’s out. :P
Felons can’t become presidents? Then how are we supposed to find a suitable candidate at all?!
Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy strategy. Find an intelligent, sensible person too crazy to notice anything strange about being asked a lot of very specific questions, and MAKE THEM PRESIDENT WITHOUT TELLING THEM.
Yeah, just what we need, Zaphod Beeblebrox as president that Betelgusian is one whacked out dude …. person …. THING . With him at the Helm what could possibly go wrong?
No, not Zaphod, he’s the distraction. I’m referring to the man with the cats who philosophically disbelieved in the existence of anything other than his own body that Zaphod was trying to meet.
I don’t remember that part
I did read the ultimate hitchhiker’s guide to the galexy and I watched the movie, but I don’t remember the man with the cats
To be fair, he only had one cat.
In a perfect world, a president is chosen for intelligence, compassion, skill, and an education in the social sciences, preferably politics, but in a pinch, a law degree. He/She would have some experience in a smaller scale political position.
But we’re not in a perfect world. We’re in a world where preferably we elect someone not insane. But many times we fail even that.
We live in a world where we elect our leaders based on how nice they make us feel.
LOL he can count on my vote!
you are aware the president doesn’t run the va correct?
The rules are consistent. Time travel is always Timey and Wimey.
Is wibbely and wobbliness only circumstantial?
Wibbly-wobbliness is a side effect of timey-wimeyness.
Its conditional on the amount of Sciencey-Wiencey used to initiate it.
“Sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.”
~Agatha Hetrodyne, Girl Genius
Amazing! Absolutely true. Huge fan of Doctor Who, and I absolutely agree with that last statement. Even lampshading it with wibblies just isn’t enough, sometimes.
Anyway, that’s a great strip, this week. Haven’t laughed that hard at a webcomic in ages.
The wibblies justify everything!
Anyway, what I like about Doctor Who is that it’s consistantly inconsistent. It’s live-for-the-moment writing. No matter what’s happened before, anything can happen next. It keeps it interesting.
So basically, the bullshit keeps it interesting.
To be fair, it’s implied that there /are/ rules, they’re just very complicated and the Doctor doesn’t want to put up with everyone who isn’t a Time Lord going ‘huh?’ every time he tries to actually explain them.
To be unfair, there is a set of quite logical and consistent rules regarding time travel out there that nobody ever seems to use.
The trouble is there are about /three/ sets of quite logical and consistent rules regarding time travel out there that contradict each other. Some people use all three.
funny thing. I just watched Timecop yesterday and thought the same exact thing.
Then you must watch any movies about time traveling. Back To The Future is a good one, imho.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeTravel
Pretty much sums it up.
I was sure the joke was gonna be about bureaucracy. They have time travel but their laws say he has to wait X years in line so they will only time travel to after he waited those X years.
No-one can argue that time travel is 99.9% bullshit certainly … Poor CB tho’… Even in the future vet’s don’t get the services they deserve :/
Am I the only one that thought that ‘Commander Backstory’ might’ve been a new character? :P
Now that you mention it…
He’s BFFs with Commander Exposition. They met back in Commander School when then Cadet Backstory was having a quite detailed and thoroughly fleshed out military-college social drama, which involved lots awkward non-coversation with Cadet Interest, her first name was Love. Which his help Commander Backstory built up his confidence with long winded monologues, won the Convoluted Assistions you Never Explained Before competition, and Love’s heart, and graduated to join Commander Command. He embarked on ambitious and revolutionary project of defining what Comamander Command was really about, who its founding members were, the dark secrets and conspires connected to everyone invoked — which have no impact on modern day CC what so ever, and even created the rational behind CCs rival evil organization the Choas Cabal. Today Commmander Backstory guides young Commanders on establishing the never before important and continually irevlevent deep and complexis histories of their lives.
Where Commander Backstory’s story will end rest in the hands of future Backstories.
You, sir/ madam/other, do Commander Backstory proud with that backstory dissertation, though it’s factual (or pseudo-quasi-time-flux paradigm) is of questionable merit, it truly is a backstory of note!
If I could give this comment a thumbs up I would. Oh, here you go (^_^)-b
I say we should learn about Jared’s background first. I am sure it is full of secrets and surprise twists like…
…..
…
..
I got nothing
We kind of already know Jared’s backstory.
I love Jared’s backstory. Best/worst Pokemon trainer ever. Mr. Fish might have a cool backstory though. As in, how did a Magicarp end up in the Tall Grass?
On the other hand, perhaps that’s a mystery best left to the ages…
I like to think that his backstory he’s given us is a big fat lie. Jared is a biker that’s been surviving through illegal back alley bare knuckle brawls for cash. He’s beat Mr Fish to mental retardation to use the original definition so that the threats of him eating people keeps them from welching on their gambles.
In that time, he almost settled in a small town with a beautiful woman that owns a small time greasy spoon but was thrown out of town by a corrupt sheriff with problems over Jared being a championship class boxer while being just that wiry. Then he found Commander Badass and came up with the story to cover up his broken heart.
That’s the power of immmmmmmmagination!
Go catch some jellyfish, Squarepants!! XD
I would have accepted that or a South Park reference. :D
When he says “immmmmmmmagination”, i’m thinking about Spongebob ^^;; LOLs
The yard at Jared’s parent’s house had all sorts of pokemon in it. I bet some more experienced trainer was emptying out a box on their PC and that’s one place they go when released.
well considering how it may have been Jared’s duty to mow the lawn, it could have easily been that the grass grew tall enough, and due to the fact that tall grass not supposed to be there, a supernatural effect happened that caused such odd effects as Magikarp popping up in tall grass.
Well, to get Mr. Fish’s backstory might be a bit problematic. For one thing, he may have wound up in the Tall Grass when he was too young to remember it for this long. For another thing, Jared’s “training & competition strategies” may have left Mr. Fish with enough blunt-force trauma to make him forget what he *might have remembered*
Some things were never meant to be known by humankind…
Do not call up that which ye cannot put back down…
To know Mr. Fish for who & what he IS means that we really don’t need to know who or what he WAS before he first met Jared.
I can’t be the only person who gets ridiculously excited every time we get to see Jonesey.
It’s parallel time progression. Like how time travelers going into the past don’t change things automatically, it takes as long for them to change things in “real time” for the actual change to happen.
So Future Space Navy starts paperwork process. This process lasts 3 months. Back in the past, 3 months goes by, and finally they get the paperwork. As for why they didn’t send the paperwork back immediately?… This is tough Brando future, instant gratification is for suckers.
Makes more sense in a “Past <- Present" scenario than a "Present <- Future" scenario, but that's my take on it.
The problem with that is that it shouldn’t BE parallel. If you change something in the past, it should instantly change the future. But more importantly, changing the past shouldn’t be possible, and attempts at doing so will result in things happening exactly as they’re supposed to. There’s also the debate as to whether or not a “past” and “future”, or even time, actually exist or if they’re simply a construct of conscious perception.
Sounds like the theory that the great discoveries in science would be made even without the people that made them. For instance, if you went back in time and killed, say, Isaac Newton, the future would change, but not as drastically as one would think. We would still have Newton’s Laws, they would just be ascribed to someone else. As a result, technology would have progressed to the same point independently, only the names in the history books and textbooks would change.
that is, IF when travelling to the past, you are able to change the future at all. let’s take your idea of going to the past and kill Newton for example. You try to kill Newton but fail, and inadvertenly trigger a series of events that make him investigate physics and produce Newton’s Laws. Therefore, all time travels and attempts to change history have always been predetermined and the timeline cannot be changed.
I am ALL for beating up Isaac Newton, dude was an ass… Can we do that? Can we go beat up Isaac Newton?
I think it’s actually more an issue of no one fine tuning the process when sending stuff to the past. It gets filed from x years ago, 3 months go by before they reply by sending it back same number years. that or the time machine just has preset buttons…
You’re describing “San Dimas Time” like in Bill & Ted. Frustrating time travel interlock system caused by either lazy writing (which isn’t a bad thing when how it works isn’t important) or hilariously inefficient time travel.
San Dimas Time can also be effective when the people using it are so stupid that they give the universe a headache, such as in the fore said movie. They also rigged things up by saying they would do them afterwards breaking the whole concept itself with a weaponized plot hole twice.
I just choose to believe that Rufus was lying about San Dimas time.
It’s all a big Timey-Wimey Ball ?
I don’t even watch Dr. Who, and I can provide a pseudo-science explanation for that.
As any student of quantum mechanics knows, the observer influences the observed. That many people observing the future can throw it entirely out of whack, so jaunts past what would be the present in your relative timeline need to be very heavily regulated-you certainly wouldn’t get to observe the result of a court case before you filed, and why increase entropy to give you the results any earlier when the only problem here is your own impatience?
Therefore, the commander’s newsfeed thingy is set to his own ‘relative present,’ and won’t give him information about anything happening in the future. No, warnings of apocalyptic futures need to be hand-delivered by expendables with names like Kyle Reese.
Heh heh heh heh heh heh.
Oooh, this is gonna be good.
I still think it was all caused by the Jenova’s Witnesses lobbying and bribing the politicians of the future into forcing all men into being pretty.
Who is ‘Jenova’? o_O
I think it’s a final fantasy boss.
Oh right, remember ‘her’ now
Sephiroth’s ‘mom’.
Name of the alien parasite villain from Final Fantasy VII, half-merged with infamous prettyboy Sephiroth. “Jenova’s Witnesses” would be worshippers/cultists of Sephiroth.
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=199
Naw, Jenova’s Witnesses are too busy killing people to lobby and bribe politicians.
Besides, they already have their pretty man to worship.
Spacefuture navy will probably reject his claim, based on his visiting an ‘out of network’ doctor for treatment. Even if it was by proxy.
Also, Jonesey looks staggeringly cute in an off-center batter’s helmet.
Looks on-center to me, she just didn’t tuck that mass of hair behind her ear
:)
… insert pun about the Doctor being “out of network” here… :)
Softball or baseball?
Wooden bat. So….
Pro-level baseball?
Hurrah for CB backstory. Also the more CB in my life is always a cause for celebration. Also am I the only one who thought: Damn that must be a hell of a smartphone. He is literally receiving texts from the future.
Normally I don’t care about how inconsistent Doctor Who is, but when you use those inconsistencies to write two of my favorite characters out of the show forever, then I just start growling incomprehensible fragmented threats at anyone associated with the show.
Amy and Rory?
I was trying to avoid spoilers, but yes. Do you know how many paradoxes he gleefully created back in the Dickens-with-flying-fish Christmas special? But not this time, oh no. This time paradoxes unravel reality!
Moffat is a lazy writer, and MS’s Doctor suffered from it. A lot of people are hoping there will be a new show-runner soon.
I’m hoping we don’t get a repeat of what Colin Baker’s show-runner did way back when and that we lose Moffat before the show loses the majority of its audience . . . again.
Only watched 3 episodes of Doctor Smith because of the craptastic ‘writing’, ans consequently the 12th doctor is the one liked the least (and that does not take into consideration the whole ‘bowtie & fez’ bollockshyte)
Hey now, fezes are cool XP
I thought it ran on “the ambient bullshitium of the universe”? It more or less prevents time paradoxes
In the spacefuture, nobody can hear you file a T4 form (in triplicate).
The problem with time travel is usually when a story tries to be super consistent with how it works it ends up head-up-the-nethers complicated. Whenever I write time travel, I do it in the “time travel created an alternate universe” way so I don’t have to worry about that Grandfather paradox crap.
I adhere to all time travel creating stable time loops. Nothing changes because it always happened.
Me too, and If I were made aware of the possibility of time travel, I would always position myself in a way such that if a problem were to be solved by future me traveling to my current present, I would not notice the exact methode of execution of said solution.
This way quantum mechanics increase the probabilities of future me actually having traveled back in time to solve my problem, as present me seeing future me do something is a very, very low probability event due to overconsciousness on how to do that.
I default to that too, but the time travel in Neal Asher’s Cowl was quite intricate and fasctinating (and evil, but that’s a given with this author).
The best (and most hilarious) way the Grandfather Paradox was fixed was in Futurama.
I love how we actually have word of Coelasquid that CB’s time travel literally works on Bullshittium. Was in one of the Ganondorf/Link commentaries
This should be fun. The future bureaucracy basically picked an arbitrary date to send the info back, relative to the amount of time they worked on it. Red Tape must be an active currency by then.
I always love how everyone assumes having the ability to travel through time automatically means you will have pin point accuracy in doing so. “Within 30 days” of a targeted time frame is still amazing, and you gotta figure that bureaucrats wouldn’t risk the possibility of showing up before you file the forms, so they aim 30 days after, so its “Between instantly and 60 days”
You know, the Commander used to sound like John DiMaggio in my head, but now he sounds more like Michael Rooker. I’m gonna go ahead and call this an upgrade.
Another story arc huh? I never knew what frustration was until a one comic strip a week webcomic starts a story arc, but man that archive binge, loved it
You perhaps need a more interesting sex life.
You mention telling us a bit about the Commander’s backstory. I have only one question. How did he loose the one tooth?
Clearly, it was surgically removed to make him look even more manly and badass.
Or maybe it regrows and he punches himself in the face every day to dislodge it, just because.
That could be. In comics where we see a younger him, the tooth is already missing even then.
This page made me wonder. Is the commander drawn shirtless then one is put on later?
All things considered i have to agree. Bullshit is probably the only never ending power supply strong enough to fule sustained time travel. Nerd rage is good for short bursts but even it dies down after a few decades
I know it’s unrelated but did anyone like Kristoff in Frozen? Is he manly enough for this comic?
Hmmm. I can see how it would happen. There’d be a “parallel time” regulation for the VA to prevent fraud or paperwork snarls. The “time” is not set to the time the Commander is in, but the chronological time his body is set to. If he had never time traveled in his life his body would be set to C Time January 11th 2XXX. He puts in a request to the VA three months prior to that (his C-Time parallel, AKA his natural future time). They take three months to process it and transmit it back to him three months later. Things like this prevent, say, sending someone a disability payment before they’ve been injured, or sending someone paperwork, having them go back in time and prevent the incident, and still claiming benefits.
In other words, C-Time Parallel is probably the only sane way to run a bureaucracy. If you go into the past for three months you return to the future three months later. If you go into the past for a year you get paid for a year only AFTER a year in the future. You cannot cash all your future paychecks during your first paycheck period and then quit. The process flattens and simplifies things and prevents time snarls and fraud.
It’s sad I know how to think like this. I can already imagine what the paperwork would look like.
An arc? I can barely wait.
ah… TT.
Reminds me how 12 Monkeys was such comfortable viewing.
And how Looper was like wearing itching powder briefs… on your head.
Oops… excuse me a moment, I have to travel back in time and do something quite trivial, so that nothing happens. (whew, we’re all still here)
That last line is one of the best things I have ever read about Time Travel. EVER.
That’s a lot of bull. They must have a breeding factory somewhen to ensure a healthy supply. Oh wait…future tea party repoolickans. Right.
That statement about time travel tech is pretty much the reason I don’t like Doctor Who.
My new favorite quip is now..
TIME TRAVEL: Running on bullshit since 1963.
If you can pin a date on it, you’re doing it wrong.
Time travel: Running on bullshit since.
As a major Whovian, now that you’ve made mention of the Doctor, I WILL be expecting a cameo in the near future. Tennant (10) would be nice though the War Doctor would likely fit the MGDMT image more. Capaldi (12) would be interesting since we’ve not seen much of him and won’t until August.
I need to go see Blink, again.
Y’know, I kinda wanna see Buck from Time Squad in this comic now…
This needs to be made to happen. Somehow.
If you ever want to bring back Lysandre, you should have him work for Kars.
http://jojo.wikia.com/wiki/Kars
You know, I have to say, I’d love to see a comic with the Commander bumping in to the Doctor. It could even be something so simple as to take it literally; they accidentally bump in to each other on the street and just part company with a simple apology. Just so you could say it happened.
you should set up message boards. I read this comic religiously, it is pretty amazing.
I WANT A SPACEFUTURE NAVY PIN. THIS IS A THING WHICH MUST TAKE PLACE SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE.
Well, the commander missed the rule of time travel, in short…
Choose two: (relativity, time travel, causality)
I was kinda expecting a kiss … but that works too…
Cool! On another note, for some reason I was expecting the commander to get his guns and join Jared in kicking white Ganondorf’s butt.
I was just reading through the old comics for like the 90th time, and I was looking at the one from 8/30/10, with his kids, and in the comments, someone posed an interesting question about Commander Badass and his wife, and the reasons they’re no longer together. Dunno what parts of the Commander’s backstory you’re intending on exploring in this arc, but I hope that this is part of it. :D
My mom loved this comic when she was alive. She liked her men manly. I found this one as witty as always. I needed a laugh after her recent death. Thank you for entertaining the both of us and giving us something to laugh at and talk about together.
I am sorry for your loss, but glad to hear that your mother had excellent taste in men (and web comics!).
My boyfriend refuses to watch Dr. Who because it’s not hard sci-fi. Which I can kinda understand, what with cold-burning stars being a plausible idea and whatnot.
I, on the other hand, love the idea of a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey ball, so this story arc is already right up my alley.
many things run on bullshit, timetravel bieng the prime exampel
Finally, a Doctor Who reference! XD
Good jibe, dear friend! Jolly good jibe!
I am also in the military and work in the Navy, so that’s an extra bonus there! Wonderful strip!