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Swords The Webcomic | Bluesky
Transcript Image 1
4 Panel Comic with title banner across the middle
Title Banner: Choose Your Weapon
1: A sword that is stronger the more books you have read [A golden curved sword with a hole in the middle, a brain sits on the back of the sword, the handle is the brainstem. Lighting crackles around the brain. Loose pages are seen just off frame. Barely visible in the background is “42”, “LXIX”, “33”, “M”, “XLII”]
2: A sword that is stronger the more lies the opponent has told you [The sword resembles Pinocchio, his body stretched out like Superman. His nose spirals out from his face like a whip.]
3: A sword that is stronger the further you are from home. [A large grey beaten up single sided sword with a hole in the middle. A brown backpack hangs from the hole. There are several bumper stickers on the sword, two read “Lake Tang” and “SWRD”.]
4: A sword that is stronger the more your back hurts. [A sword so massive it doesn’t fit in frame. Energy bursts from the blade]
Footer text: Episode CMXLV © 2018-2025 ~ MATTHEW J WILLS ~ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE USE OF THIS IMAGE TO TRAIN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS IS PROHIBITED
@SWORDSCOMIC
Transcript Image 2
4 Panel Comic
1: Choose Your Cursed Sword
2: Curse where every third word you say is an antonym [A sword with a blade that resembles a purple and slightly silver tongue curls outward. The cross guard resembles a lower jaw with teeth. The handle is pink with pink stripes wrapping it and a black pommel]
3: Curse where you can only see through the eyes of people who can currently see you. [A orange elvish-looking blade, long with a narrow base like a waist, with a white chevron across the middle and a white stripe across the cross guard. The pommel is a safety cone.]
4: Curse of smelling smells from three minutes in the future. [Sword with a blade that resembles a long nose with too many holes. The cross guard is the nostrils with teeth below it and a tongue for the handle.]
Footer text: EPISODE MIII © 2018-2026 ~ MATTHEW J WILLS ~ MADE IN NZ ~ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE USE OF THIS IMAGE TO TRAIN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS IS PROHIBITED
@SWORDSCOMIC
How is smelling smells three minutes into the future a curse?
I mean if it works similar to other time powers like seeing into the future, that future would be preventable.
Smelling the future and acting to it seems like pretty awesome, and three minutes is pretty long… You have enough time to act and escape you death maybe, if you suddenly don’t smell anything anymore… Or you can make sure that you only eat the best food available… Since tasting food is mostly about smells… You could become an awesome cook… you just have to deal with the five tongue senses…
Is the sense of smell fundamentally enhanced? My MIL can’t smell anything and hasn’t been able to since a teen. I on the other hand have an over sensitive sense of smell.
Depends on if can you can still smell current smells or if everything is fast forwarded by 3 minutes.
Like lets say I smell a bakery down the road (within viewing distance but too far to actually smell) but I don’t like what they’re baking so I flip over a garbage can and cover myself in rotten eggs. Now if I changed the future, the baking smell should be replaced by the egg smell the moment I commit to tipping the garbage can. BUT if I instead smell rotten eggs 3 minutes before approaching the garbage can than my decisions are decided independently of the smell preview.
All the same situation would happen with future sight. My point is just that if you assume that future sight has resolved those questions, situation and paradoxes in a beneficial way, because it is a super power, the future smell would be a super power as well, and not a curse…
If future sight has resolved them is a bad way, then it would be a curse, just as any other future sense.
Just imagine always having to see all possible sights three minutes into the future at the same time. There always is a miniscule chance of all air molecules bunching up in the corner of your room or you falling through the floor…
Future sight is almost never portrayed as the viewer’s vision being permanently fast forwarded such that they cannot see the present. I honestly can’t think of an example where it is tbh.
People with future sight always see the present at some point. This ‘curse/power’ is fundamentally different if you can only smell what is 3 minutes in the future and not the present.
Sure, my argument is that not the modality of the sense matters, but the circumstances of that power. The resolution, the filtering and the agency someone has over that experience.
Smell compared to sight would also cause generally less of a brain overload, since smell is low bandwidth compared to sight. So if future sight as a curse might be worse than future smelling.
Doubling the amount of information you sense just in two moments, now and the most likely future in 3 minutes, might be more bearable with smell.
Are you even reading what I’m writing??
I think the smells from 3 minutes in the future would be full of paradoxes if you try and use it to game the system.
You smell your toast burning, so you pop the toaster early, now theres no toast to burn. But you still smelled the toast burning, so now youre just having a stroke.
More like you can never actually act on the information without creating a time paradox. So if stop the toast burning it actually means your house is on fire instead. You prevent yourself from shitting your pants, but the toilet explodes the moment you sit down.
That would be the same with future sight… Which people would argue is a super power…
Are you well? Maybe you should sit down, get out of the sun and possible call your local medical emergency number.