Well, things are pretty much back on schedule. Comics are buffered, but we’ll keep working on half pages for a bit more till buffer. Still working on Tyler’s story, not sure what the cadence of that will be, maybe 2-3 a month.
It is unlikely that Ila needs to talk outloud to talk to Mium, if one spends too much time thinking about it. But I think she prefers to. Of course, in this case, it’s probably a bit more rhetorical, as Mium is a tad MIA lately.
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I get the feeling that Ila, while very close to human, does not suffer the same sort of cognitive dissonance that human’s experience everyday, which is why from her perspective they are just weird. My guess is that she basically (or literally) is a human running on a more optimized mental framework.
Humans can hold the conflicting ideas of going to war for petty reasons while thinking that killing people is wrong. To Ila, if you want to go to war, that means killing people is okay now. I don’t know that she actively wants to kill people, she just lacks the innate cognitive dissonance that is so normal to us humans we don’t even think about it.
I suspect this is a much bigger problem for Mium than it is for Ila do the sheer number of requirements he’s been asked to balance. As rational as Peter might be, he is still human, and then you add onto that he tries to make Miko, Naomi, Kally, and Ila happy too, he’s got to deal with a real tangle of illogical and conflicting desires.
Has anyone read Bartleby the Scrivener? He reminded me of Mium as I was reading it, because of the way that he and Ila are able to exercise free will despite being artificial intelligences, and how Bartleby always repeats that he “prefers not to” do things.
That’s the problem, Ilia. Humans can’t be debugged!
Personally, I find the idea of someone attempting to “debug” me kind of . . . creepy. . . .
Human brains get debugged all the time. Tons of mental disorders can be beneficially treated with drugs and therapy. We are just horribly inefficient at it, and tend to cause a lot of problems and damage in our clumsy attempts at debugging it through indirect methods.
I know some people that would jump at the chance for a proper debugging to clean up PTSD related bugs.
Keep working on the buffer and don’t spend it. Think of it like a banking tool. The more you spend your buffer the less you have to retire on. H
As people have told you repeatedly the half page is more than we get from a lot of other comics. You do a half-page twice a week!
Get 3-4 months of buffer, then you never have to worry about this in the future.
Imagine that!
Not having to worry about getting the comic out on time. The amount of stress relief that will give you over all. It will make you more relaxed about writing and drawing! The buffer will grow and grow! You won’t need to take a break from publishing the comic to do a chapter because you can just do the chapter when you get there in the writing and the buffer will keep updating the page as you’re working on it without having any sort of stress!
It will be regular and people like Comics that update on schedule without skips and stops or excuses. Once you are doing 2 halves in the space of 1half, then expand to a third day. Get a large buffer before you do that though!
Be the turtle not the hare brained!
I think PastUtopia is the sort of person who looks at comics like DumbingOfAge, and doesn’t realize that each update is only a quarter page for him, and wonders how David pulls off his ginormous buffer. But what you said, plus having a much simpler story and a willingness to copy and paste, along with the fan base one gets from over a decade of regular updates of a simple but entertaining comic allowing fulltime work is basically it.
Edit: Oh, and Past? If you really feel the need to share your whole buffer with people, just make it be the top Patreon tier that has at least the minimum number of people you feel comfortable doing that with, and announce that – and watch as the number of people who contribute more than a dollar grows. 🙂
Ehh. Mium *is* still hearing everything, I’m sure. He’s just caching all of it to deal with when he is no longer stuck in single-process mode.
I wonder how long in real time it will take Mium to process all the information he is banking for review…? That is going to be a dangerous few seconds as Mium suddenly processes hours of data all at once.