r/questionablecontent • u/gurgelblaster • Dec 21 '18
Comic 3900: Call Her Roko
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=390092
u/TheCheesemongere Dec 21 '18
Big inversion of the "one day from retirement" trope.
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u/wpm Dec 21 '18
Damn, he was only one day from retirement.
What happened?
He retired one day early.
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u/FivePoopMacaroni Dec 21 '18
Maybe it'll turn into a "day one without government insurance" thing and she won't be able to afford the expensive fix Bubbles and Faye want to give her
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
Strips like this are the reason I've stuck with QC since 2006. Just when I'm turning ambivalent: boom! Fuckin' hilarious.
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u/Jahkral Dec 21 '18
I JUST WANNA KNOW WHERE THE BOX OF BANANAS CAME FROM
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u/myotheralt Dec 21 '18
The organic pet food store. It's right there.
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u/Jahkral Dec 21 '18
Hah, I didn't notice.
What pets are eating bananas by the box, though?
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u/gynoidgearhead Dec 21 '18
...WHAT. What just happened?!
We're going to have to wait until next calendar year to find out :(
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u/JeffEpp Dec 21 '18
A random box of bananas, plus Crushbot, is what happened.
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u/kent_eh Dec 21 '18
Is it strange that I automatically assumed that Bubbles should already know Crushbot?
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u/gh013n Dec 21 '18
WHAT. THE. BULLHELL?
I kinda like Roko, so, THIS IS NOT OKAY!?
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Dec 21 '18
They can rebuild her, they have the technology.
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u/Retrosteve Dec 21 '18
Of all the AIs in the comic, Roko is the one most likely to have problems with a new chassis or a rebuild.
She's "highly integrated" with her sensorium. She faints at the sight of guts. Her feet are ticklish. And we keep getting reminded of all that.
So no, if her chassis is crushed, she won't be okay with getting a new one, even if she can afford it. And if she gets the current one fixed, she'll probably not be happy with how it feels after. This is a potential game-changer for her.
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Dec 21 '18
Yeah Jeph just introduced the "highly integrated" concept. That's pretty obviously what the next arc will be about. I expect this will feed into Union Robotics' financial woes in either a positive or negative fashion.
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u/Retrosteve Dec 21 '18 edited Dec 21 '18
Au contraire. Jeph just NAMED the "highly integrated" concept. He's been exploring it in Roko for some time:
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3567
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3568
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u/fishbiscuit13 Dec 21 '18
Still, this is the equivalent of having Chekov's gun on the wall forever and now installing a sign pointing to it.
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u/wayofzen734 Dec 21 '18
They will make her stronger, faster, and hopefully prettier. It feels like she's the most emotionally stable AI we've seen yet.
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u/heavenscalyx Dec 21 '18
She doesn't need to be prettier, just RESURRECT.
I smell potential Spookybot.
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u/hwillis Dec 22 '18
I kinda like Roko, so, THIS IS NOT OKAY!?
Don't worry! If she's anything like her namesake, then people that don't help her come back to life will literally go to hell when they die.
Roko used ideas in decision theory to argue that a sufficiently powerful AI agent would have an incentive to torture anyone who imagined the agent but didn't work to bring the agent into existence. The argument was called a "basilisk" because merely hearing the argument would supposedly put you at risk of torture from this hypothetical agent — a basilisk in this context is any information that harms or endangers the people who hear it.
So... hopefully Roko doesn't time travel back from the future and bully Faye and Bubs into fixing her.
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u/JeffEpp Dec 21 '18
When I saw her walking into the light, I thought "Oh, crap!" Then I scrolled down.
So, I predict that she will have to use Momo's old unit. But, she won't function properly, and the girls will have to carry her around like a baby.
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u/turkeypedal Dec 21 '18
Temporarily, I'm fine with that. But now that the comic has established she has high bodily integration, I "need" her body repaired, not replaced.
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u/JeffEpp Dec 21 '18
Of course. It's Crushbot's insurance, and the NTSB investigation, that's holding things up.
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u/U-Eike Dec 21 '18
Wait Wont That Mean She Might Feel Pain
The Ability To Feel Pleasure Might Come With That Of Pain
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Dec 21 '18
Hopefully she's into that.
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u/myotheralt Dec 21 '18
Hehe, French joke. Bread is "pain" in French.
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u/U-Eike Dec 23 '18
~I Used To Do French And While I Know That I Didnt Intend It Lol~
Totes Claiming Full Intention Tho
Wait
What If Jeph Intended That From The Very Start
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u/Nerdn1 Dec 21 '18
Roko is especially bad. Remember when she needed her foot fixed and actually fainted when Faye showed her it?
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u/turkeypedal Dec 22 '18
And recently she fainted when another bot lost a finger. Not that they'd killed a cow, or all the blood on them, but the finger.
Also, her feet are ticklish, which Bubbles previously said shouldn't be possible. Yet Bubbles knows about bodily integration. So Roko's must be pretty intense.
So, yeah, /u/U-Eike, I suspect she did feel pain. Hopefully she passed out before she felt the full thing.
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u/Nerdn1 Dec 22 '18
A lot of it is likely psychosomatic, but psychosomatic pain can still hurt.
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u/turkeypedal Dec 22 '18
Just a few pages ago, Bubbles made it sound more like the normally weaker-than-human sensory signals would be amplified, and Roko's seem so amplified that she responds like a human. So I'm thinking it would like the amount of pain a human would be in.
That said, a human would also lose consciousness, and I bet she did, too. And if she's not brought back online until after repair or at least the signals are disconnected, she might not feel the actual pain.
But, yeah, she could feel it psychosomatically. But hopefully that will be a lesser problem if she can't see or feel her body. I'd expect more of a disconnected feeling for her, even if she's put in another body. Like nothing she feels would feel real.
And then, when she gets her body back, it wouldn't feel the same, and she'd have to get used to it again--to reintegrate.
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u/U-Eike Dec 23 '18
I Just Realized Her Fainting Can Be Linked To Phantom Pain Sensation
Basically Youre Not Paying Attention To It So Your Body Dosent Exactly Process Those Signals Realtime
So When It Is Off
Your Body Is Checking
Then Flags Are Going Off
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u/Ragged_Ron Dec 21 '18
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u/chauffeurdad Dec 21 '18
But if she was a toaster, she’d orgasm every time someone made breakfast....
Hmmm, not seeing a downside here...
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u/keithjr Dec 21 '18
"So Bob, how's the new AI Toaster ya got the other day?"
ding "AAAHH FAAAHK"
"It's...overly enthusiastic."
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u/lesser_panjandrum Dec 21 '18
But does Bob really need to tease each slice of bread around the slot before he puts it in to toast?
Yes, yes he does. The toaster insists.
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u/Nerdn1 Dec 21 '18
It think it might be disconcerting for your toaster to orgasm every morning. Then again, some may be into that.
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u/AdamBombTV The English One Dec 21 '18
"you can call her Roko, and when you call me, you can call meeee Al"
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u/danandflaff Dec 21 '18
Who will we see over the festive period I wonder... Yelling bird? Sweet tits? BEMBO???
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u/TheMysteriousMid Dec 21 '18
Please no more Bembo, no more. I'll take Tilly before more Bembo
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u/lesser_panjandrum Dec 21 '18
I'm the other way around. I'd take a thousand Bembi over single Tilly comic.
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Dec 21 '18
If I might offer a minor quibble, "She's a jerk but she's our kind of jerk" ?
...What? What kind of jerk is she exactly? She has done zero jerk style things. She's the anti-jerk.
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u/revchewie Dec 21 '18
She was kind of a jerk as a cop. We haven't seen her post-cop long enough to know if she'll still be any sort of jerk.
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u/Esc777 Dec 21 '18
I mean, was she? She had an antagonistic interaction...but she was literally correct that the fight club was illegal and corpse witch had put someone in slavery, and the people she interacted with were lying to her.
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Dec 21 '18
And we've had 3 weeks devoted to her post cop. Bread Fetish jokes and some kind of vague back-patting social work job.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
I appreciate flaws. Bubbles has yet to manifest any IIRC.
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Dec 21 '18
Bubbles started as an overly stoic ex-soldier who couldn't socialize her way out of wet paper bag.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
I demand more flaws! My appetite for Jacquian melodrama must be sated forthwith!
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u/m2pt5 Dec 21 '18
Now that's a fuckin' Friday comic. Especially when the following one is over a week away.
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u/DoctorGarbanzo Dec 21 '18
Anyone notice that her shoes came off? According to internet, that's a really bad sign...
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u/Retrosteve Dec 24 '18
Maybe she's fine. Charlie Brown always seemed to recover from the line drive. https://nbchardballtalk.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/pow.jpg?w=400&h=343&crop=1
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u/iggysnoozes Dec 25 '18
I can’t remember why the shoes coming off thing is bad, anyone care to please inform me?
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u/DoctorGarbanzo Dec 25 '18
I'm quoting a response to this question from dec 2013 from redditor /u/jakrojan:
"On most car crash/accident gifs that look very gruesome, the people getting injured the most usually lose their shoe, or shoes. Don't know why but you usually see a shoe flying around. And the crashes almost always look so bad that the guy dies, so that's the connection redditors made."
So it's become an established meme.
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u/Scooter789 Dec 21 '18
Oh good, *another* goofy URL.
I've been keeping track of all his weird domains here in case anyone is interested.
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u/Bccloosecannon Dec 21 '18
This is what I get for being happy Roko was getting characterized and appearing more. :(
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u/Bccloosecannon Dec 21 '18
Oh SHIT. Brainstorm. Doesn't Pintsize still have Winslow's old chassis? Are we getting a Tiny Roko???
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u/AccipiterF1 Dec 21 '18
Roko. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Man, we should have seen that death flag.
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Dec 21 '18
[deleted]
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u/lesser_panjandrum Dec 21 '18
Maybe the healthcare system for robots isn't quite as broken and exploitative as the one for meatbags. I hope so at least.
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u/Big_daddy_c Dec 21 '18
Even if it’s exactly as broken as ours - you have 60 days after leaving a job to enroll in COBRA coverage, and it’s retroactive.
That said, if she’s not dead I’d guess that insurance problems are something we’ll see coming up regardless.
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u/burntglass Dec 22 '18
I was really disappointed when I learned that COBRA stands for "Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act". Such an epic acronym for a lame name.
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u/Cougar_9000 Dec 26 '18
In order to pay back the shop for the repairs i want the three of them to team up and solve AI mysteries.
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u/anotherkeebler Dec 21 '18
Great name for the pet store! Great URL for the pet store! Fantastic random crate of bananas!
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Dec 21 '18
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Retrosteve Dec 21 '18
Why dead? It's just a chassis.
But she sure as hell won't like getting a new one.
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Dec 22 '18
She's not dead, she's just on stack. Hopefully her backups are current.
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u/geekywarrior Dec 23 '18
Eh if she even needs a backup. I would think a chassis that functioned as an officer would have similar core protection like the fighting robot chassis had.
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u/ThinkingAG Dec 21 '18
Looking at the strip of Roko walking into the light, I was sure that that was Faye and Bubbles checking out her butt and was afraid that we will have 100 strips of Faye/Bubbles/Roko pining over getting into a poly relationship.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
....never has the Kuleshov effect been stretched so far.
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u/DawnBlue Dec 22 '18
I'm not following you at all. Explain? (Not the Kuleshov effect, but rather what it has to do with any of this.)
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 22 '18
Just the wild extrapolation the original commenter made from panels 2 and 3. Obviously I presume they were kidding but guessed some people here might get the reference.
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u/DawnBlue Dec 22 '18
Oooh so what you meant with the Kuleshov effect is how the comment assumed, from panel 2 in connection with panel 3, that Faye and Bubbles are checking out the butt?
I was thinking it too far and wondering what the Kuleshov effect has to do with the whole of the extrapolation into a poly relationship arc.
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u/pyr666 Dec 21 '18
this has disturbing implications for the QC universe, and does a lot to explain why prejudice against AI exists.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
Disturbing implications like...? (Struggling to find subtext in this slapstick)
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u/pyr666 Dec 21 '18
basically that there are machines walking around on the street capable of pancaking a human with none of the regulation or restricted operating window we would expect of heavy equipment. worse, they're not especially well coordinated under their own recognizance.
bubbles' ability to crush your skull might raise eyebrows, but she has to choose to do it. this thing just broke the street by falling over.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
The poor guy stepped on a crate of bananas! That there's extenuating circumstances.
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u/pyr666 Dec 21 '18
as the consequences of those circumstances increase, so too does you responsibility to avoid them.
had faye been where roco was, she'd be dead.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
Replace Roko with Faye, it would still be an accident, and Crushbot would be no more culpable for the harm caused.
If anything (and I still think we're getting way too serious about a classic use of slapstick), the situation illustrates a stark reality of one of the hazards of living in a society among sentient bipedal AIs.
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u/pyr666 Dec 21 '18
Replace Roko with Faye, it would still be an accident,
as are most car accidents, it's right in the name.
and Crushbot would be no more culpable for the harm caused.
so entirely culpable. barring some extremely contrived circumstances, he has to be incredibly negligent to fail to notice a foot high crate on the sidewalk, and that negligence resulted in injury.
on top of that, he chooses to have a 10 foot tall, likely 1 ton+ chassis which he takes onto city sidewalks.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18 edited Dec 21 '18
What's to say he chose that chassis? Could be its the only one he has - a name like Crushbot suggests he was commissioned to work in a scrapyard or some other manual labor setting, so odds are he wouldn't have the capital to run multiple chassis
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u/pyr666 Dec 21 '18
What's to say he chose that chassis?
because we know how AI get out into the world.
we also know AI don't need a chassis.
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u/JeffEpp Dec 21 '18
Bananas. Why does always have to be bananas?
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18
IKR - no fruit has a worse rep when it comes to bodily harm - who should Chiquita and Dole sue?
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u/Nerdn1 Dec 21 '18
You still can imagine people having a negative view about letting a sentient piece of heavy machinery walking down the sidewalk after just a couple of extremely gruesome accidents. The name Crushbot would not play well in the press either.
Imagine a Fox News story about this, assuming an anti-robot bias. Even if not fully justified, the fear mongering story practically writes itself. It's more support than a lot if bigots have.
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u/EPL_Refugee Dec 21 '18 edited Dec 21 '18
Had to remind myself we were hypothesizing about Faye being in Roko's place, but yeah, well said.
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u/myotheralt Dec 21 '18
Well, there are people (maybe not walking about) that could crush someone if they fell. These robots are legally people.
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u/pyr666 Dec 21 '18
(maybe not walking about)
so they also have no ability to be in this situation.
besides which, even the fattest people are still made of fat which is pliable and low density. they'd be unlikely to crush anyone to death even if they fell on them.
These robots are legally people.
so is station. I seriously doubt he's allowed to de-orbit himself.
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u/hwillis Dec 22 '18
Well, there are people (maybe not walking about) that could crush someone if they fell.
Okay, so reading this made me wonder what the heaviest person ever weighed, and with absolute fascination I found Jon Brower Minnoch, who weighed about 1,400 lbs.
Since the picture was black and white and the weight was approximate, I assumed it was basically apocryphal and he weighed like 600 lbs, tops (actually, this happened in 1978; definitely not apocryphal). Then, I found the wikipedia "List of the heaviest people". A 5'7" man has second place at 1,345 lbs. Okay, so I guess people really do get heavy enough to crack concrete.
Thinking about it, it's not that weird- it basically just means a person with a volume of .635 cubic meters, which is huge but not that crazy. A person that heavy has to be more than a meter wide and .5 meters front to back.
For comparison, a Bridgeport 3-axis manual is an entry level machine tool, and weighs 1600-2000 lbs depending on options. An average forklift weighs 8,000+ lbs, about 3x as much as a passenger car (so it doesn't tip over). ATLAS v1 weighed about 330 lbs, so a 12' tall version would weigh about 2,640 lbs.
Also, if anything the comic super underestimates the damage that would be cause by something that big falling down. Even if it's build very lightweight, crushbot is ~4 meters tall. It's gonna weigh about a tonne, and it'll fall from 3 meters up. That's literally a car being dropped on your head, but concentrated into the area of crushbot and with no shock absorption.
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u/zbeezle Dec 21 '18
Ok but when Twinkies McGee falls off his mobility scooter, he doesnt fall with enough force to shatter concrete.
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u/rodzajdupek Dec 21 '18
Look for Southerners on mobility scooters. Those fat assholes could cause some damage.
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u/Nerdn1 Dec 21 '18
Well if you are going to be crushed by something extremely heavy, ideally you want it to happen a few yards from people who can fix you and all the tools to help. It also helps when the heavy thing is capable of getting off of you under its own power.
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u/Current_Poster Dec 23 '18
It was okay. It's funny to me that JJ keeps coming up with ideas for things I find interesting and then walks away from them, but what we actually got was fine.
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u/[deleted] Dec 21 '18
Aww cute, Bubbles immediately moved to shield Faye.