Recent Comments

1. about 3 hours ago on Bad Machinery

   Amy built her antiquing career on being a “divvy”, someone with a magic power that allows them to sense items of value. However, she confessed to Shauna in “Missing Piece” that she lost her power when Walt was born, which was about a year and a half ago, during the winter break after “The Case of the Forked Road”.

   Shauna believes that Romesh is a divvy, based on his actually finding something worth stealing when he and her brother robbed Amy’s shop, and they’re here to test that out.

2. 1 day ago on Bad Machinery

   Linton and Mildred had… something going in “Wen-Tack”. I don’t think it was romantic, but I’m not going to say it wasn’t. They may have just been hanging out while the other girls were busy with Go-Kart Conspiracy, and the other boys were… I’m not sure, actually. Not going to the movies with Mildred, anyway.

3. 1 day ago on Bad Machinery

   Claire characterized Nero as a “himbo”, and he frankly didn’t give me any reason to dispute her assessment. He seemed like a decent enough guy, but he was literally the live-action model of the boy-band posters teen girls pin to their walls.

4. 2 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Sonny may know a thing or two about keeping your options open.

   “The Big Hiatus” wasn’t just about searching for fairies and sacrificing your friendship. There was a lot of conversation between Lottie and Shelley Winters, who’s been her mentor since she was 7 or so, outside and around the story Lottie was telling her. At one point, the subject of Lottie’s love life came up. Lottie’s response was, “Um, well, no. I have a rich fantasy world of lust, but in real life, non.”

   I had previously assumed that Lottie was ace. “Mystery is her boyfriend,” and all that. By this point, all of the other mystery kids had had some romantic connection or another, but in all of Bad Machinery the closest Lottie gets to a romantic relationship is one platonic hug with Tuan before literally saying, “Goodbye forever,” and walking away without looking back. So at the time, just the idea that Lottie had fantasies startled me so much that I didn’t stop to consider who might feature in them.

   More recently, Lottie’s reaction to both Maggie and Billie in the Steeple crossover “Author Unknown” got me to revisit that conversation with Shelley, and I noticed that Lottie didn’t, at any point in that conversation, use any gendered terms.

   I think one of the reasons that Lottie is, as she puts it in “Circus Windows”, “behind the curve on love”, is that, due to her late birthday, she’s most of a year younger than the other mystery girls. But I’ve started to wonder if maybe Sonny’s onto something here, if maybe one of the reasons that her love life has been non is that the girls she’s been into have been inconveniently straight. Her reaction to Shauna spending time with Blossom in the last story may make more sense if there’s more than just friend-jealousy there.

   In a recent Solver story, Lottie got a boyfriend, but he was not a man of substance and didn’t last long.

5. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Try googling “portrait of Charlotte Grote”.

   And I watched Shelley Winters fight Batman one time…

6. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   The evil time boys that disintegrated at the end of “Forked Road” weren’t the real ones — who never actually went through the time hole in the dark timeline — they were just some kind of temporal echo. (I wrote a couple of lengthy comments on this on the June 29–30, 2023 strips.) And as Rob says, we saw the actual Troll Doll and Twins in the present day after the time hole collapsed.

   In the timeline as it currently stands, I don’t think anyone even remembers that “The Case of the Forked Road” happened, because in some sense it didn’t. The time hole collapsed, the timeline has stabilized, and everyone’s memories have stabilized to match the repaired timeline. The mystery girls said they’d make records before they forgot about it, but even those may have been destroyed in the fires in “Modern Men”.

   We found out in “The Big Hiatus” that Shauna had digitized at least some of their records, including the beasts book that Lottie was trying to recreate in that story, but Daz destroyed Shauna’s computer in the last case…

7. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   In the story Lottie told in “The Big Hiatus”, which was set in the summer before this, between “Modern Men” and “Space is the Place”, Cecile, Lottie, and Mildred disappeared into a portal in pursuit of fairies, leaving Sonny outside. Sonny went to get the other mystery boys to help, and found them down by the river.

   Jack was reluctant to come with him, though, because the day before Kylie (who we have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever actually met) had taken her top off there and Jack had missed it because he was at the dentist.

   Oliver Spain you may remember as the pointy-haired evil time boy in “The Case of the Forked Road”.

8. 5 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Yeah, that was Sonny.

9. 6 days ago on Bad Machinery

   I actually had a friend who tried wearing a top hat all the time. It worked pretty well. If you can get their attention, that’s half the battle.

10. 8 days ago on Bad Machinery

    I’m sure they’re a right good laugh… once you get to know them.