Comic Genesis Forums

Ooh, I really like this one. You manage to tell his entire story in one page with a minimal amount of explanatory dialogue. Very good. ^^

And... yeah. I'd go into more depth, but it's Friday and I'm utterly brain-dead. I'll try again later.

--RS

This is probably the best page in the entire set of "chapter one" pages. I have all sorts of rambles on this one, but I'd very much like to hear what everyone else has to say before I put my twenty millicreds in.

You know, I have to wonder... are there any specific importances to:
the formula over "RELEASE ME"
7.360
The symbol over Arnold's right chest (right on his side)

Any meaning behind these things?

Nyamaza wrote:You know, I have to wonder... are there any specific importances to:
the formula over "RELEASE ME"
7.360
The symbol over Arnold's right chest (right on his side)

Any meaning behind these things?

Interesting. Now to take all the mystery and any possible magic out of the text employed in the pictures:

The formula is really just some basic calculus and sumnation notation. It struck me as "kinda hard" to have integrals and sumnation in the same place since, for me at least, the integral is more of a continuous-time thing and the sumnation is more of a descrete-time thing.

"Release me" is the angriest way I could think of saying "let me out", and probably comes from the movie Independance Day, where Brent Spiner's keen mad scientist character buys it to show how evil the aliens are, and to trigger gollum-based fears in the viewer by having another being speak -through- his dead body.

Hm. I wonder if there isn't some symbolism to that after all. Arnold -is- a cyborg...

The 7.360 miliseconds just seemed like a "really short" time to me, and I can imagine a complex equation flashing in front of Arnold, and the wires reccording the exact instant (to a resolution of at most ten microseconds) at which he thought of the answer.

The viewer can arrive at his or her own conclusions reguarding a being who can calculate the probability density function of the sum of three uniform random variables in his head in less than a hundredth of a second but who suffers routinely from hallucinations of glowing apparitions of his own subconscious.

allan_ecker wrote:"Release me" is the angriest way I could think of saying "let me out", and probably comes from the movie Independance Day, where Brent Spiner's keen mad scientist character buys it to show how evil the aliens are, and to trigger gollum-based fears in the viewer by having another being speak -through- his dead body.

How about Stargate? O'Neil is locked up in the SGC because they don't think it is really him (I think the episode with the blue crystals?), and he keeps saying "Get me out of here." over and over. Then he looks up at the security camera and goes "Okay, I'll say it politely. Get me the heck out of here!

You never addressed the symbol on Arnold's shirt. Symbol of the Commandant of La Resistance?
Or possibly just a random "we make this t-shirt" mark some companies put on there?

"La Resistance"?

Mm, more like, Confederacy.

Although the hostile parties in the American Civil War both used the issue of slavery as a "wedge", the principle cause of the war was a trade imbalance, exacerbated by a population imbalance.

In the world of Unit Zero, the circumstances were all too similar. Of course this time the "wedge issue" was whether or not genetic engineering should be permitted as a field of study again, and in this instance the more liberal way of thinking actually belonged to the agrarian colonies, but the symmetry more or less holds. Clearly, Arnold didn't win.

A shame, too. The Directorate is going to really wish it had some good scholars working on all those Earth texts in a few months...

Wait... are you saying his side was the one fighting FOR genetic engineering? I would have thought he was would be the one against experimentation on life, having been on the VERY buisness end of it already.

Or am I jsut confusing myself again?

It wasn't genetic engineering. Notice that in Aldus Huxley's novel Brave New World, there is no mention of genetic engineering. So too is it with Arnold. He was not genetically modified from his original human-given template.

And, yes, fighting on the side -for- genetic manipulation. More on that subject later, but basically we're talking more about uncovering lost secrets than inventing new ones.