Endtown by Aaron Neathery for August 11, 2014

Sarah: “Would it throw a wrench in your plans to say that my cat is a ditto whisperer?”

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Veteran, responding to one of my posts yesterday, noted that this entire world may be, in fact, unsustainable. Or words to that effect..Topsiders have everything, or so it would seem. But they’re the bad guys..Mutants have nothing. They have to go out and scrounge..Veteran noted how scrounging missions used to last days, now they last months on end..Veteran also concluded that Topsiders will run out of resources, as well..If we thought the “great war” was terrible, it may look like a cakewalk compared to what may be not very far down the road..In this world, the light at the end of the tunnel is always an oncoming train!

This may be a good sign. Maybe the dittos Wally brought from Endtown are stronger or at least have figured out a weakness in the lizard dittos. I hope so.And Sarah thinks, “we are not impressed”.

Ditto Here, Ditto There, by JennerTo the tune of Ob La Di, Ob La Da by Lennon and McCartneyPiotr is a worker in security.Pauli is a doctor in the lab. Piotr says to Pauli: “How secure are we?”And Pauli says this as he’s staring at the slab:Ditto here, Ditto there, Ditto no-where!Ah, the silly Ditto’s wrong!Ditto here, Ditto there, Ditto no-where!Ah, the silly Ditto song!Piotr takes his Sarah to the storage bay.Show her all the rack of empty shelves. Says: “We’re lost without invisibility,And now it seems we’ll have to do it for ourselves:Ditto here, Ditto there, Ditto no-where!Ah, the silly Ditto’s wrong!Ditto here, Ditto there, Ditto no-where!Ah, the silly Ditto song!In a couple of years, they’ll be made of skin and boneWith a couple of sticks, trying to rub a fireTo light up their lizard home.Big disaster looming in security.Piotr asks if Sarah wants to stay. Pauli goes on tackling obscurityAnd every now and then you’ll hear him sadly say:Ditto here, Ditto there, Ditto no-where!Ah, the silly Ditto’s wrong!Ditto here, Ditto there, Ditto no-where!Ah, the silly Ditto song!And if you sing alongThe silly Ditto songHa ha. Thank you.

Now where was I.. Oh, yeah.. New auctions this week over at the Endtown Auction Block. Has it only been five months since the last one? How time flies..

http://endtownauctionblock.wordpress.com/

Please bid or help advertise the actions to keep Endtown running.Looking ForwardLooking Backward

It has dawned on me that perhaps Chick is the result of “accelerated de-evolution” Given the fact that today’s bird species were once the rulers of the prehistoric world for nearly a quarter billion years. If Chick is the offspring of one of the lizard people, then perhaps the Amesworth radiation is causing chromosomes to evolve with each successive generation. So far we have seen no other “children” in their society. It is possible there is a ban on breeding until they can figure out whats going on.The current problem is however, looming large for not just the lizards, but for all colonies and the Topsider’s.The abundance of manufactured goods before the war, I’m sure was like our own. An over abundance of foods and products, in a staggering array of diversity filling stores and shelves.The war changed all that, with what it looks to be roughly 90% of the physical world has been turned to dust.No more stores, warehouses, factories, malls, shops, or flea markets…In a nuclear exchange we would face similar problems, what wasn’t destroyed would be contaminated. But at least nature would recover, there may be pockets of land and civilisation still mostly intact despite the collateral effects of a worldwide conflagration.We could recover..They cannot, (barring a breakthrough in food synthesis or replication by Mallard)Theirs is a world of very rapidly dwindling resources. Perhaps there may be pockets of stashed goods, like a buried warehouse or store.But how long will that last?There will be fights for these little bits of sustenance and comfort. All the while only buy the victor a little more time to themselves become the last to survive.. For a time..Nothing lasts or runs forever, without hardware, software, tools or wetware to perform repairs and maintenance, all mechanical systems will eventually break down and become useless junk.The last ones to survive will become the leaders of a junkyard/graveyard, with none left to bury them.

An ally!

My heart bleeds for the bandits and their woes.

Cat got your dittos?

I wonder if the dittos Mallard gave to Wally are in contact with dittos back at Endtown. Wally’s dittos could be “spies” for Mallard, or at least a means of communication if necessary. The dittos would report back to Mallard on the state of the world outside Endtown, and if Wally encounters intelligent life, they can talk through the dittos. Marx may have given them the dittos for this greater good.

Land of the Lounge Lizards :)

I’d be surprised if Sarah chooses to stay..I’ve been thinking for days now that perhaps Piotr wants to leave, as well..And if he didn’t, yesterday, maybe he has changed his mind since then….“A nice climate.” Is that the only thing that’s nice about it?

With mutant healing abilities… I still don’t understand the need for vision correcting glasses. Binoculars and Telescopes are one thing, so’s video magnification…but glasses?

If the lizardpeople treat their dittoes the way they’ve treated Chick, or the way they’ve treated Our Heroes, well, no wonder they were so easily corrupted by dittoes that once belonged to A. Marx…

One question is how far does the great waste extend and what’s beyond it. Jim suggested that one of the reasons the Topsiders are fighting so hard is that they know that there is more to this world than white powder. The compressed powder mountain ranges our heroes were traveling through seemed a lot like a boundary to me. I suspect that the Eastern Alliance (or whomever fired those missiles) targeted the major population centers like Hillside and left the surrounding countryside alone. Thus the cities probably all have interesting geography http://www.gocomics.com/endtown/2009/08/27#.U-lXaPldVqUand are surrounded by a lake of white powder and maybe a mountain range on the outside. The question is what are beyond the compressed powder mountains? I’m guessing some sort agrarian society. The land and stuff may be untouched, or effected only by the mutagenic plague. The land may be good for farming, I imagine that tractors, combines and other such implements may be down due to a shortage of parts and fuel, and the farming may have a distinctly 18th century feel to it. There may even be a few blacksmiths beating old car parts into knives, axes and plows. According to Jim these places may be outside the Topsiders’ reach. I wonder what is limiting said reach.

Though not touched on all that much in the strip, other than Amesworth weapons were also used, so it may be possible that outlaying areas might not have been powdered, but may have received more conventional nuclear fallout. So even if left relatively untouched, still might not be useful. But even if it was mainly Amesworth, vast areas may have been exposed to the equivelent of fallout, and even if not totally powdered, could have had ground cover and top soil in effect stripped off by limited exposure. The acreage of a whole planet is really big, and it seems unlikely that there could have been enough weapons to burn/powder everything, (at the height of the Cold War, there was not actually enough weapons to burn everyone, not counting fallout) but still likely that the areas not struck would still be in poor shape.

Of course I hope that this world is big enough to have lots of land that is being farmed, and the ones affected don’t have a clue.our own world is being covered by the still continueing leaking of neuclear contaminated water from fukushima. I believe that earthquake, and building a nuclear energy plant on a fault line (in the ring of fire, no less) is going to cause the 7th great extinction. Half-life is a witch, and humans are included in that extinction.

One of the men on the Enola gay said, after dropping the bomb said something like “OMG, what have we done?”

The sad thing being, is not learning from that mistake.We could have laid down weopens and cooperated with healing, but more than ever those in power want continuous war. Because greedy people make such fine profits from the war machine.

Piotr looks like a Microsoft salesman trying to get Samsung to support windows OS on their smartphones.

Jim and Sarah were certain there was better land beyond the great waste, and as the Topsiders had satellite surveillance technology, they would presumable know this. Maybe the world will not starve after all. On the other hand, even with the sat-maps, they seemed not to know anything about the Forest Of Deadly Shards And Certain Punctures, so if they got that wrong, who knows what other information is incomplete.Surely if there was green and fertile land outside the desert, the Topsiders themselves would be flocking there. If Hillside and the other domed colonies were sentry outposts serving the purpose of mopping up the last of the mutants, surely there would still be aerial supply lines with the bigger Topside nations in the distant lands. And surely Jim, Sarah and the other residents would know this as a matter of course.In fact, if those hunter-killer drones are anything to go by, the Topsiders have good aircraft. So I wonder what gives, and why they haven’t spread themselves to more favourable regions.Or maybe Jim and Sarah have been totally lied to, and their city was an Orwellian 1984 nightmare.

Jenner,If the existence of the drones suggest one thing, it is that Topsider society is far larger and has more resources than I would have imagined. I realize that Aaron is not an engineer but everything about those enormous rotary winged ships suggest that they were created by somebody who had resources out the wazoo. Those would have seemed extreme if they were built by Apex but my reading of Jim’s words is that they started taking flight during the last year or two. This suggests that the Topsiders have designed and built them from scratch, which suggests that they have an abundant raw material supply, probably including mining ore, refining said ore into metals and access to petroleum (for use in making plastics). The other curious thing is that Jim had suggested that they were heading for areas beyond the Topsider’s reach. Given that they were traveling in a PT, transportation could not be the issue. That suggests that there is somebody out there who has the ability to hold the Topsiders at bay. Now THAT would be worth seeing.

Totalitarian governments tend to care more about bombs, not butter. The Topsiders may be spending more resources than they can afford in their obsession to be the top.

In Steven Boyett’s Ariel books and in “Revolution” and the books it’s based on, the world’s physics are changed in some areas so that technology is limited or works differently. The forces unleashed in The End may have changed the world beyond the wastelands so that Topsider technology doesn’t work too well, confining them to the wastelands.

I wonder if Prof. Mallard’s dittos from Aaron Marx had managed to regroup and come to Lizardland. Maybe Pauli has that group of dittos and can’t do a thing with them because they only know Wally’s voice and commands.