1869: Positive and Negative Reviews

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Positive and Negative Reviews

Title text: This restaurant is great! I was feeling really sick, but then I ate there and felt better!

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: New page If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Positive and negative customer reviews are explained like matter and antimatter. Physically, antimatter can be seen as matter going backwards in time.

In the title text, Randall gives an example of a positive review, which seems to actually be a negative review backwards in time.

The people giving negative reviews are Merlin (as seen in the novel The Once and Future King and many subsequent works) and B. Button (from the short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and its film adaptation). Both characters did not travel back in time, but Merlin remembered his future life instead of his past and Benjamin Button grew younger as time progressed. Such "Merlin Sickness" is a fairly common trope in fiction. Merlin was mentioned earlier in 270: Merlin.

So it gets philosophical and subjective: Are there only positive experiences in life - some going forward, some backwards in life. Or actually only negative ones.

Or is the positivity of an event not the only deciding property, whether one should see it as going forwards or backwards in life, like electric charge in antimatter: positrons, the antimatter counterpart of electrons have positive, i.e. reversed, charge, but there exist positive and negative matter, and positive and negative antimatter at the same time.

The use of the phrase 'physics tells us...' may be alluding to the way people use 'physics' or 'science' to justify nonsense. See 1240: Quantum Mechanics and 1475: Technically.

Transcript

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Discussion

This page is now available for discussions. Sorry for the delay. --Dgbrt (talk) 14:42, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

About the Trivia item "The use of the phrase 'physics tells us...' may be alluding to the way people use 'physics' or 'science' to justify nonsense.", I seriously doubt it. If there were no connection to real physics, this comic would be pretty devoid of content. And lacking much of a joke! I've been figuring that this is referencing SOME aspect of physics and applying it to real life in a silly way. I've been wanting to read about it. There must be something, maybe theorizing about time travel, maybe saying something is measured backwards? I'm reminded of the British sitcom, Red Dwarf, the episode Backwards, where they visit a future Earth where time has turned backwards, so everybody speaks backwards and everything is done backwards (where I learned that "Bitter" backwards sounds like "Erskib"). NiceGuy1 (talk) 05:05, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Am I the only one that would likely agree with the "backwards" reviewers? Those sorts of sports drinks like Gatorade, etc taste terrible to me, and would likely result in me drinking much more water to rinse out the flavor! The same is true of soda for me. I feel like this comic might also be referencing that aspect, and an absurd attempt to justify considering even the negative reviews positive. PotatoGod (talk) 18:54, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Fridge genius: First I thought if they live backwards, how come they have no numbers attached to their username? It should be something like Merlin99999999999999, just try to register your first name at any popular website even today. Then of course I realized that they would simply create their account as soon as the site goes up (shortly before it goes down, from their perspective), remembering that it was a popular site and having posted there.Ruffy314 (talk) 19:06, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Um... wouldn't Merlin and Benjamin Button perceive it as regurgitating the drinks? I mean, they perceived the reverse results, so ingesting things should have the same effect. OriginalName (talk) 16:52, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Merlin in Once and Future King perceives individual "scenes" in his life normally, but they're in reverse order. I haven't read "Benjamin Button". Nitpicking (talk) 20:05, 15 April 2022 (UTC)