Latest Page Discussions/Comic Update Chitchat

[thorny]

I don't think most people have such deep meaning in mind when they discuss zombies.

Oh, I didn't mean consciously.

I don't think Shelley's Frankenstein took off with such thoroughness and such legs because people who read it and people who re-wrote it were thinking 'Aha! An allegory for science/technology possibly out of control!' either. But I do think it did so in significant part for that reason, on different levels of the mind.

[Mr_Plinkett]

These pages have been a gift.

[wavewright62]

...although Minna had mentioned a chapter break is coming 'soon'.
If we have the traditional landscape painting, will it be of fire on the prairie in Emil's dream?

[Sc0ut]

These pages have been a gift.

Oh gods yes. We've needed this for so long.

[Hrollo]

It just occured to me: Emil knowing about how his dream goes, and Lalli finding himself in that dream before Emil even appears. This is not an ordinary dream: the implication is that Emil is having the same dream every night. It's not just random childhood memories, it's something significant.

[Imogen]

Does anyone find it interesting that Emil and the nanny only ever mention Emil's father but never his mother? And I also find it interesting and telling about Emil's character that he said "the dream always ends long before the fire spreads here". I've been thinking about 'the flower incident' with Lalli where Emil was trying to get Lalli to focus on the positive side of things and Lalli and many others in the comments thought he was being insensitive, but what if that's just Emil's way of dealing with horrible things? He has this dream every night where something terrible might have happened but he doesn't focus on the terror in the distance but instead on the food and the relative normalcy before whatever happened, happened and he had to change schools, his father/family lost all the wealth and he eventually joined the army. I also think that the only way Lalli would ever open up to Emil is if he shared first. Emil had to say thank you first before Lalli understood that there was a benefit to it so I think it's the same with talking about the past or anything about who Lalli is.

[Grade E cat]

I had an interesting thought of my own last night. Emil's dream happens in a room with a sink in it, and it's been mentioned that the fire eventually spreads to the house. I wonder if he was still in that room when the fire arrived, and the sink helped create some kind of safe spot.

[Ana Nymus]

I had an interesting thought of my own last night. Emil's dream happens in a room with a sink in it, and it's been mentioned that the fire eventually spreads to the house. I wonder if he was still in that room when the fire arrived, and the sink helped create some kind of safe spot.

While Minna has some artistic license to work with, that's not how fires work in real life. Even if you can avoid the flames themselves with water, the toxic gases and smoke will choke you, and the fire will burn up all the oxygen in the air, making it impossible to breathe.

More likely, I think, is that a planned burn gets out of control, and they're forced to evacuate once it's clear that the cleansers can't stop the fire's spread.

[Grade E cat]

Ha, ha, good point I had completely forgotten about! I'm still wondering if situations where access to water can help can technically occur during a fire (storytelling tends to have little regard to probability as a rule). I remember once reading a fantasy story where someone really, really, had to go inside a burning building, so someone else drenched them in water before they went in so that at least, they wouldn't catch fire themselves. Maybe it can help when trying to escape a burning building as well. Or is that an artistic license thing as well?

[Ana Nymus]

A quick internet search yields mixed results. Holding a wet cloth over your nose and mouth can help reduce smoke inhalation, which is good. But if you drench yourself, the water will quickly heat up and you'll get scalded by it (house fires are really, really hot). Nobody said anything about whether or not it would keep your clothes from catching fire.

[Noodles]

A quick internet search yields mixed results. Holding a wet cloth over your nose and mouth can help reduce smoke inhalation, which is good. But if you drench yourself, the water will quickly heat up and you'll get scalded by it (house fires are really, really hot). Nobody said anything about whether or not it would keep your clothes from catching fire.

If my year-old recollection of general chemistry is accurate, the way being wet keeps things from catching on fire is more or less that it takes a Lot of energy to heat up and boil water, so the energy from the fire goes into that instead of burning the thing. So, yes, being wet would probably keep your clothes from catching fire for a bit longer, but it'd do that by cooking you.

[Róisín]

More useful outdoors than indoors. A last-resort act in bushfires is to go into the dam or the river or lie in an open space under soaked woollen blankets until the fire goes over. While we were evacuated from the edge of the Sampson Flat bushfire a couple ofyears ago, our yard caught fire from embers blown in the storm, then the storm that broke that fire put it out. But if you get a huge firestorm nothing works.

[JoB]

Even if you can avoid the flames themselves with water, the toxic gases and smoke will choke you, and the fire will burn up all the oxygen in the air, making it impossible to breathe.

To play the cleansers' advocate here, though, the presence of caustic and toxic gasses in a house fire has gone way up with the ubiquity of plastics - which the post-Rash society doesn't have anymore, magically still-watertight plastdunke notwithstanding.

(What did not change is that even when a person survives a house fire, the gasses they breathed can easily have been hot enough to cause lethal damage to the lung tissues they'll die of a day or two later. Soaked cloth can definitely be a life-saver there.)

[Ana Nymus]

A fair point! Though the issue of the fire using up all the oxygen in the space is still a serious danger that a wet cloth can't help.

[JoB]

Though the issue of the fire using up all the oxygen in the space is still a serious danger that a wet cloth can't help.

Yes. The recommendation to get down and crawl out of a burning room is supposed to help with both the heat and the oxygen problem; few rooms are airtight to the point that the draft from a large fire won't pull some outside air in under the door(s). Which also keeps the fire going in the first place ...