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<   No. 2040   2008-08-27   >

Comic #2040

1 [caption]: Cragfoot, western side of the Orcrift Mountains
1 Alvissa: I thought someone would be here to meet us.
2 Mordekai: Quick! Let's vanish into the Swamp of Terror before they arrive!
3 Alvissa: You mean the Swamp of Terror they're going to banish us into anyway, after they give us horses, food, and money?
4 Mordekai: Well, when you put it that way...

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The teleport portal effect is quite fun to generate. It's a couple of layers of rendered cloud effects in Photoshop with contrasting saturated colours, blended in screen mode with partial transparency and the top layer expanded a bit to give a glow to the edges.

If you know Photoshop, that's probably enough information to duplicate it. If you don't that was probably complete gibberish. :-)


2020-02-15 Rerun commentary: It feels like you should just be able to say "teleportal" rather than repeat the fragment "port" in there. Does it come from the same root...?

Some investigation later:

Well, "portal" comes from late Middle English, from Old French, from the medieval Latin portale, which is the noun version of portalis, meaning "like a gate", from the Latin porta, meaning "door" or "gate".

"Teleport", on the other hand, is actually a back-formation from teleportation, which was coined by Charles Fort in his 1931 book Lo! as a modification of transportation using the Ancient Greek prefix tele- ("at a distance" or "far away"). Transportation is a noun form of transport, which comes from the Middle English transporten from the Old French transporter, meaning "to carry" or "to convey across", from the Latin transporto, combining trans ("across") and porto ("to carry").

So in fact the "port" in "portal" means "door", whereas the "port" in "teleport" means "to carry" or "to move". So they're completely different! Although I wonder if they are related in Latin, in that one could porto something through a porta. It seems plausible.

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