I have been waiting on some of the lines in this exchange for YEARS.
Digger
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Digger by Ursula Vernon is powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS Feed
I have been waiting on some of the lines in this exchange for YEARS.
Digger by Ursula Vernon is powered by WordPress with ComicPress | Subscribe: RSS Feed
It’s about how long I waited in the DVLA queue yesterday. (Same thing as the DMV is in the US).
Ha-ha. She’s totally dissing you and you’re not gonna get it for a long time, Sweety.
Oh. BURN.
It really is mighty hard to impress a member of a species with an advanced science of geology.
Totally worth the wait.
VOTE! http://topwebcomics.com/vote/10180/default.aspx
Digger should so become a Goddess of something after everything she’d gone through. And yes I’m aware of the irony of her becoming a deity, it would just make it so much more interesting.
I am so using that last line of Digger’s. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way to work it into conversation at least once a month.
@Shadw21 – maybe as a side effect? 😉
@Xyon – poor you! But just think of the folk over in Orlando, out in the heat, waiting in lines for the Harry Potter experience….
That final line is a line worth waiting several years for 😛
Again, gotta say that the geology in digger makes my inner geologist do happy flips 🙂
good rock – is that not made with pressure, heat and time …
it is a Bloody Beautiful line there – a line worth saving indeed.
Rocks live longer than most gods. Also, they don’t often go insane after only a few millenniums.
I am going to use that line.
Us too, us too!!! And worth the wait!
Also: I don’t blame Ed for being frozen with terror. I mean, this’d be like…like being face to face with the Devil. For real. Worse even, since SGV right now is pretty PO’d and Ed can’t possibly NOT know who and what SGV is. Not after those lines. I’d be about to pee in my pants, figuratively speaking.
“I forget that it is difficult to be mystical and cryptic to a species with a highly developed sense of geology.” – The Statue of Ganesh
And you can form perfectly acceptable basalt in a couple hours. You just have to be insane to hang around for it.
“…this exchange for YEARS.”
We can tell – and we so very approve.
@abb3w: Well, if you’re willing to settle for basalt…I’m sure it has its good points, I suppose…but it isn’t all that dependable…sorta crumbly around the edges, like…little rough, but if you like that kind of thing, I suppose…(End disapproving gossip mode)
SGV doesn’t really get it just how tough Digger is, does it?
Actually, you can form perfect DIAMONDS in a few days, but they’re very tiny. R&D is still working on it.
Bigger diamonds can also be made in a factory/ lab, but they’re only good for industrial work.
Whole lotta talk, aren’t you, SGV? And what were you doing during those twelve thousand years? If you were so unhappy, and you’re so powerful, why didn’t you do something, hmmm?
You will all be subducted. Despair now.
@abb3w: Thank you for that link–I’ve been wanting for a while now to find the page that follows it, but I’d never mustered the requisite time and patience to track it down. (Not both at the same time, anyway.)
The next page shows a deity that died right near the statue’s current location, ages and ages ago–and I’ve always wondered whether it’s coincidence that its head looks as if it would cast a shadow quite similar to SGV’s head.
Well, it probably was another form of demon, and Ganesh was trying to make a point that the earth is so old that many strange magical stuff have happened. Much like that many strange creatures have come and gone.
@Madam Atom Nice catch regarding the shadow… and that deity was killed by the ghost of a bird.
Echo much? (see also kingfishers, Shadowchild’s birth)
Nice comeback, Digger.
Also, if SGV is here, what happened to Shadow?
@Shadw21: Digger, goddess of militant agnosticism. Frequently frustrated by her own state of divinity. Even more frustrated that she has any worshipers at all, who are clearly missing the entire point.
@Azure: not so. It turns out that modern labs can make big better-than-gemstone-quality diamonds very quickly and cheaply. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html is a bit dated, but has some information.
@Hunter – Shadow was pretty sure that it had only managed to take a chunk out of SGV, not destroy it entirely. Presumably Shadow’s off trying to find demons to convert that don’t already have a good reason to hate it, and SGV’s been sitting here fuming.
“Not long enough to make a good rock.”
“Not long enough to make a good rock.”
😀 *sits here in delight just examining that sentence fragment over and over and over.*
@Abb3w, Azure — she did specify *good* rock. Basalt weathers pretty fast, doesn’t it? and are the micro-diamonds even industrially useful?
*wanders off muttering “not long enough to make a good rock…”*
Hah, I can see Digger’s reaction upon being deified.
“Earth-Burrower, we of the divine panel have voted to make you a goddess!”
“No wait!”
“Too late! You’re already one!”
“Sodding hell…” >:/
“I know it’s not long enough to make a good rock.”
Man, aphanitic igneous rocks can’t get no respect.
Basalt’s not bad, for an igneous rock. It can form into neat and somewhat useful columns as it cools, so it can be collected readily and has an interestingly aesthetic appearance. In a pinch, it can serve in place of flint when making tools, as shown in archeological sites near Giv’at Kipod (Hedgehog Hill, in Hebrew, or so I’ve read). On the other paw, one can hardly compare it to a good limestone for tunneling or construction.
Wait… Hedgehog??? Nah… Couldn’t be the same guy.
Leave it to Digger to connect lengths of time spent being the epidimy of evil to geology.
I just finished reading through all of the comics and I love it!!!!!!! I’m so glad I found this!
“Twelve thousand years with a pain in all the diodes down my back, they were the worst…”
SGV sure talks alot. You’d think if it was really sure it could just swoop in and take out Digger there wouldn’t be so much verbage here. Of course the fatal flaw of any viallin is to get them monologing.
@Duck Whisperer- Granted, every evil villain (as opposed to a non-evil villain like Jhalm) talks too much. But if they didn’t talk far too much, it wouldn’t be fun for anyone. It would be boring for the villain when they kill their enemy in just half a second, and the hero wouldn’t like it cause… well, she’d be dead. But if you’re an evil villain and you’re killing someone that’s a serious threat to you, you’ve gotta relish it by talking about all your evil doings.
@Alondro – LMAO
SGV: Do you have any idea how long 12,000 years is?
D: I know its not long enough to make good rock.
SGV: Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? (rising hysteria at not being taken seriously enough)
D: Sorry, never mind me, where were we?
Definitely the way to handle the master villain is to get them talking, and you just know its SGV’s o’erweening pride which leads him/her/it to believe that her past proven methods for dominating apparently lesser creatures will work on Digger now. They do say pride goeth before a fall….
I’m beginning to think SGV is monologing because it’s the best available strategy… We’ve never seen it kill anybody, not straight off — only seduce. And seduction takes time (and talk) ((and, come to think of it, works better if the subject doesn’t realize you might be Up To Something)).
Aside from massive amounts of guilt, sorrow, and self-despite, we haven’t really seen anything very seducable about Ed (hush, you know what I mean!), and I suspect that the best SGV can do with that is leave Ed feeling seriously outgunned. And Digger would be likely to reject anything SGV can offer — even a trip home! — on the grounds of it being entirely too close to magic, and just Not Reliable. (“Seriously, I’d rather walk. It may take a couple years, but at least I know I’ll be my own shape when I get there.”)
I suspect SGV’s very, very best hope in this situation is to keep them talking until the Cold Servants or Jahlm can get there and take more direct action. I’m just hoping Ed’s “… yes. Ed goes” is followed *promptly* by both going and by taking a crow-bar to that chain.
Yeah, Ed’s going, all right…right down his own leg.
Digger, you rock my world
**flails happily** GEOLOGICAL HUMOR FTW.
This is one of those times where Ed needs to not look back. Of course his view may not be that great either in a few minutes(Story time I mean). Our time means maybe Thursday.
*tsk* Only twelve thousand years? Demons are just so bloody impatient these days….. 7@=Q
That exchange is brilliant, but half of me is hoping the next page begins with Digger getting sidetracked onto igneous rocks and such like how Ed and the Skins went on about dye earlier. It’s in character, really, it is! *wants even more rock nerdery*
Rock. On.
That is all.
@Nespin: That would be perfect.
“And Digger would be likely to reject anything SGV can offer — even a trip home! — on the grounds of it being entirely too close to magic, and just Not Reliable. (‘Seriously, I’d rather walk. It may take a couple years, but at least I know I’ll be my own shape when I get there.’)”
When I read this, I thought of the hungarian (mythology) Coachman, and Digger interacting with him. He’s the one that can take you where you need to go, sometimes where you want to go, but he always offers the Choice of if you get on, and which stop you get off. The trader we saw before was reminiscent of the Coachmen, in that he also offered a choice, but certainly not the wise, wizard drunk I’ve known.
@Xyon: yeah. it’s Swansea’s revenge on the rest of the country for shutting down all the mines.
@nzPhreadde: “and the next twelve thousand, they were the worst too. I’m a personality prototype, Can you tell? I’m’ not getting you down at all am I?”
Well, it depends on what you mean by “good”. Basalts’ are generally very strong in their original columns (look at the giants causeway), but crumbles around the edges especially when worked, and are generally a bugger to work compared to granite, marble or sedimentary rocks. Granite can form quickly, but it’s again never going to get a fine worked surface to it like a sandstone or marble. Volcanic glasses can form nearly instantly, but unless you need a sharp blade they’re not much you can do with them, good for cutting tools, but harder to work into cutting tools that slower forming flints or chert, and they are completely useless as a building material. However we are missing the point: Ursula has made it clear that Wombats have sever hundred words for rock at least, so clearly Digger just said one of the ones specially meaning SEDIMENTARY rock and our partial translation prevent the shere self-evident apocalyptic burn that comment was from coming across nearly as well as it originally did…
… and it was still the best come-back I’ve ever heard, except for maybe “yeah, well you fight like a cow.”
I quite like basalt. I know lots of people don’t. Its called bluestone in Victoria, Australia (which has an huge series of lava plains) and various convicts from Blighty were persuaded to fashion shedsful of it into blocks, which make for rather distictive buildings of a certain age around here. It doesn’t weather as badly as plenty of limestone and sandstone…
Although my favourite is either that wonderful ferruginous (that’s “red” to non-wombats) sandstone that Kenilworth is made from or the classic honey colour of Warwick…