October 3rd, 2017
3 Oct 2017 · page 736 of 1306
Sid has now twice misplaced an entire large German man.
Cast: Benjamin Thackerey, Sidney Malik, Verity Cunningham
Comments (40)
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The Sid's key-words: "I can't just keep doing the same thing over and over".
He's just jumped to the possibility to stop doing it... Unrationally.
Imho.
"Sid has now twice misplaced an entire large German man."
I think it would be more disconcerting had Sid only misplaced part of him.
Or more saucy, depending on the part.
Oh... It's bad - one of the blue swirls starts to entangle Ve (in the last panel) :(
Oh no... Don't leave Ben alone, Ve!!!
But at least the swirl isn't wrapping around her. Not like they wrapped around Sid's arms and legs. : P
Yeah! It's our only hope :)
Ooh, I hadn't noticed that there was a coil of mist snaring Sid's ankle in panel 3. Good catch!
I like the way Vee and Ben both have this family trait of "never give up," but it manifests quite differently. Vee drives it with energy and unquenchable optimism about her own abilities, while Ben keeps going on sheer teeth-clenched dogged persistence despite his own certainty that he's not ever going to be good enough. My hope is that they solve this one together, as cousins, and each of them learns something.
Wolfe and Sid were both vulnerable to Sloth for similar character reasons, too: if one thing doesn't work, they back off and try another approach.
It's interesting that Wolfe was the first to fall. His kind of flexibility... keeping the goal in mind, but being very willing to consider other approaches to success, even options that most people wouldn't, like deserting the army... is often a great advantage, especially when dealing with the complexities of other people. However, in this situation, it made him vulnerable to the temptation insinuated in his mind, by Sloth, that perhaps it would be wiser to rest for a while. Just a little while... This way didn't seem to be working, so they should back off and figure out what else to do.
Sid's weakness is that he is too easily distracted. Ben was right, he has the attention span of a mayfly. That's who he is.
He's not lazy. He's full of energy. Launch him on a course with twists and turns and instant surprises, and nobody can stop him. But Sloth isn't just about laziness. Slogging endlessly through mists towards a goal that didn't seem to get any closer was exactly the kind of task he could not sustain, not even when he knew it was life-or-death save-the-world urgency, not even when he had just seen Wolfe taken. Faced with mounting boredom with no end in sight, he became desperate. You can see it on his face in panel four. He had to do something different. Anything different, any excuse to do something different, it didn't even matter how stupid it was, as long as it was different. The temptation to plunge off into the mists to rescue Wolfe was irresistible. His response to Sloth's challenge was action in the wrong direction.
In the real world, it can sometimes be smart to look for another option. It's not that easy, though, to tell the difference between that, and giving up too soon on a course of action that will require a sustained effort to work.
Here, where they know they're fighting Sloth, turning away is giving up. It is giving in. It is definitely NOT the right answer.
Gosh I wish I could upvote this more than once!
I will for you, Kate :)
Oh no! Now we can see the nature of the trap that they face. If only they had Alexa's smartphone.
Vee: What's this? "Playlist (loop): Power walk anthems"? jab
Smartphone: starts playing
Ben: Somewhat tinny... but it seems to help!
Vee & Ben & Wolfe & Sid: group up into power walk formation, power walk forward
Sid: :-D I feel like I could keep this up forever!
Sloth: sigh Well, I tried. yawn _Eo domum._ demanifests
>:=)>
...Sloth would destroy me. I would belong to it, completely, and I would never know why.
"Well .... bye."
That's right Sid, Persisting in doing the same thing without variation when it has no effect is dumb. You're on to it.
Uh-oh, the voice of Sloth speaks in the comments! ; )
They're chasing an uncatchable lure - it's not even being dangled by an angler fish, it's attached to them, just out of their reach.
It's a trap. A subtle trap designed to keep them occupied until exhausti0on.
If Sloth wants them to go in that direction forever then the sensible thing to do is to go in another direction, any other direction, or at least stop chasing.
Even if they're really in Mal's mind they should find something that Sloth is keeping from them.
And they should all take a rest, they need it.
"They're chasing an uncatchable lure" -- how do you know that? : D
Sid assumes that it's been hours since they starting walking toward the light. It may have felt like hours to him, but it may have been less than an hour.
Going back to your original statement, "persisting in doing the same thing without variation when it has no effect is dumb". The problem is that, sometimes you need to keep doing something even when you can't see the effect happening, because it will have an effect eventually. For example, I study Mandarin. Most of the time when I study, I don't see that I'm getting better (in fact, some of the time I feel like I'm getting worse). However, I'm convinced that if I continue studying for thousands of hours (even at the pace of one or two hours a day) I will learn to speak Mandarin.
The group here needs a rest, they all need it. But not under the influence of Sloth, when resting is what Sloth is tempting them to do. They shouldn't strain themselves, either; don't run, walk. But if they keep going, however slowly, they do not give up. What Sloth wants them to do is give up.
They shouldn't give up, of course not. They should husband their resources and redirect them somewhere where they will be effective.
Despite (subjective) hours of walking a distant light in fog doesn't appear any closer - It might be the fog bank that's moving with them and the light is extremely distant (not the setting sun or rising moon, they would move) but if so you would expect it to be occluded occasionally so more likely is a mobile light just a few paces away.
Learning is usually feels like intemittent leaps in knowledge with long plateaus of little apparent change - but there is change; you pick up a new word, a little new grammar or an idiom then suddenly one day it comes together and you find yourself bantering with new chums.
Our heroes are getting nowhere, they accrue nothing but fatigue. You might describe carrying on in this state as slothful thinking.
=== You might describe carrying on in this state as slothful thinking. ===
Luckily Sid's thinking wasn't slothful, he changed his tactic! (He was wrapped in the Sloth's whirls at once, oops. But does it matter, honestly?)
I wouldn't say slothful thinking so much as perhaps rigid or inflexible thinking. Some of us types who are good at persevering are not so good at being flexible, and it takes years of painful experience for us to learn that sometimes you need to figure out why plan A is not working and try to come up with plan B. What kind of plan B could we suggest to our heroes now? All I can think of is for Ben to see if there is anything he could possibly summon that might help... given that he's better at desummoning things than summoning, that might be a bit of a stretch : /
Also, it hasn't been hours, Vi stated that her little glow light things don't last that long. Sid's just become impatient
Sid, you are no longer allowed to babysit.
Well, Ben and Verity, hang in there. You can do it. I believe in you. You got this.
...
Vee, if you guys get to a lamppost and the lamp oil knocks out Ben, hang in there. You can do it. I believe in you.
Ben in the last panel: "Honestly, if you want anything done right around here, you have to do it yourself..."
Ben : "I bloody knew this would happen"
Sloth can't exhaust you if you're already sick and tired of everything all the time. taps nose
this page brings this little ditty to mind.....
[https://www.youtube.com/wat...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waa2ucfgVgQ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waa2ucfgVgQ")
XD I'm now highly tempted to translate the Widdershins cast into 3.5 just for laughs. Wolfe would be the bard, no doubt about it, though he'd probably be cross-class fighter as well. Let's see....Mal would likely be a rogue, the troublemaker. Possibly a chaotic-neutral druid? Harry's a ranger with Gren as her animal companion of course, while Nicola's definitely a barbarian. Ben's a wizard. (Duh.) Sid is.....a low-level bard? Hmm. Any more suggestions, folks?
[advertising-mode on]Kate's Patreon sketch-blog has sketches of some heroes (Wolfe, Ben, Mal, Nicola and Harry) in their D&D roles.[advertising-mode off] :)
As a police officer, wouldn't the role of Paladin fit her better? (i.e. _Lawful_ Good?)
"Sid has now twice misplaced an entire large German man."
Apparently that is much easier to do than we think it is.
You keep doing the thing. I don't think it's as easy as you make it out to be.
Hm. On the one hand, turning back seems like giving up seems like a bad idea. On the other, it's not necessarily slothful? Since he's searching for his friend.
Sid chose an easier (for him) way to do it, Ben said about it before "If we give up, if we look for an easier way.. Sloth wins".
And I think the clue is Sid's words "I can't". It's a form of despair, giving up, stopping of trying.
Ben's turn to be The Hero.
To misplace a large German man once may be regarded as a misfortune. To misplace him twice looks like carelessness.
I can see why Sid had trouble with school- can't handle having to do the boring stuff for ages :P
Sid is now going off to DO something besides walk along this foggy treadmill. Someone else said this a day or two ago, and I think they're right that the best thing to do is give up trying to find that light and do something constructive.
While I recognize it probably is that heading to the light is the right path at this point, and that Wolfe and Sid have "fallen" I still find a random light far in the distance that never seems to get closer really trapish, like an angler fish. Because if it wasn't a trap why else would it be there? Sloth isn't going to just show the way to defeat it? or at least I wouldn't think it would? Maybe it's because of how quickly Ben decided that's what they needed to do despite not a lot of stated thought on why it's what they needed to do + the angler fish parallels I guess?
I also kind of find Sid's reaction in his last panel kind of sudden, he went from concern to manic panic in a moment.