Comic for Monday, July 23rd, 2018
Jul23
Ah, that’s a lot of words, I know.
I’m all worded out, so I guess not too much to say here. Thursday might be a half page again, I’m not sure. I will be fairly busy this week.
Guess I’ll just leave a thank you to our newest patron! We are back up to 30 Patrons, and that’s incredible! Always appreciate the support from everyone – patron, wikiupdaters, commenters, readers, all-of-the-abovers, you’re awesome, and thank you so much for sticking around and being part of the fun 🙂
Guess I need to think of a new poll… the last one doesn’t make much sense anymore…
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Hey – page will be up end of day tomorrow probably instead of end of day today, sorry! As noted, its been a busy week – work has found impressive ways to break things in a way that takes me the maximum time to fix.
hey, take all the time you need to relax and breathe. I love your comic strips by the way.
Hey – page will be delayed a bit longer (tomorrow) probably. I know at this point I should probably just skip, but I don’t like skipping without announcing it ahead of time…
We probably going to have to skip a page next week.
Nothing really drastic, my work has just actually made a problem I don’t think I can fix, and it’s taking up a lot of my time figuring out what we are going to do it about. As it currently causing fairly major issues in various production environments, I have a whole peanut gallery of Important* People** being Very Concerned*** about it.
*According to them.
**Cannot be confirmed they are actually people. Extensive research and interaction reveals they might NPCs designed to parody people.
***Insofar as they are worried it might actually become their problem.
It’s a process I refer to as “The Hot Potato of ResponsbilityTM “, which is a game I always lose because as I haven’t built up my apathy callouses quite enough for proper developer support.
I’ve had luck at times in the past with the, “yeah, I’m dealing with this emergency, give that irritating task I’ve been ducking for six months to the other guy” sort of dodges sometimes. So it doesn’t have to be all bad.
Often success can be found in agreement with those concerned, and asking for their assistance with a specific non trivial task. It can be remarkable how quickly they stop signing into conference calls when someone asks them to work on the problem.
Also the delay in the comic is 100% the fault of Willis. Willis handed out permission to be late, and next thing we know, delayed comic! Clear cause and effect!
Where the hell did that giant magic mecha come from? Is it Kor’s World invading again?
I think that’s one of the “Special Units” mentioned in Panel seven of THIS PAGE
From where are you getting a sense that the armor suit is giant-sized? The nearest I can guess is we’ve gotten a few closeups, but I think that’s mostly so that we don’t notice the lack of a blue pony tail and realize it’s not Acalia. After all, it’s been at least a month since we saw that Acalia was put out of commission, but only about half a day to a day in comic time; it’s easy to forget.
I’d guess Delta-v’s guess is spot on. Personally, I looked at it and thought, “OK, that’s something. I don’t know enough about what’s going on to know where it came from, but we’ll find out.” and left it at that. But it’s almost certainly not a special agent, and it didn’t sound like Biana/Sophie were going to get those. And Arpon is the only other group that’s been talking about putting new units onto the field. Also, the magic coming out of that hand looks pretty sophisticated to only be the standard blue, and yet… I’m guessing the thing is really high on magitech for being an assembly of armor plating and autocasters around an ordinary soldier, but that’s basically what it is – more autocasters in it than I’d care to shake a stick at, to try to compensate for the versatility of a natural mage, but ultimately limited by what they can train the soldiers to use.
Does anyone else find it hilarious that Mium tells the Consul why he gives Tamara a nickname to beyond her authorization, despite having no real problem revealing national secrets?
I don’t. It’s merely being polite. That said, it is a funny way to put it. However, in this case, Mium knows damned well that Tamara would *not* give the Consul approval to know the reason, at least in the present company, and this way puts Tamara on the spot less than if he said, “It’s something personal between myself and Miss Porpita, so you would need to ask her.” Or even, “Sorry, Madame Consul, but that would tell you something about Miss Porpita that she does not want you to know.”
Personally, I go without the cutesy nicknames, because my ability to remember whether I found out about the thing I’d make the nickname about from them intentionally, from someone gossiping about them, or due to my Dina-like unobtrusiveness. (Though, unlike Dina, I’m not small. However, in my favor in terms of unobtrusiveness, I’m not wearing a dinosaur hat.) If I guess wrong, I’m suddenly a dangerous stalker. To be fair, I might already be a dangerous stalker, because when someone notices that they are standing besides somebody of *my* size they didn’t notice before, they sometimes freak out.
Another take on this:
National secrets are generally inherently useful things. For example, knowing how to make a dimensional gate detector is useful in its own right.
Tamara’s personal grooming practices are not inherently useful for other people to know. For them to be useful to Mium and Peter, she needs to know that they know. And other people need to continue not knowing. So long as Tamara got the message here and others didn’t, mission accomplished.
Now, whether that particular bargaining chip is actually worth the corn it was made out of remains to be seen. It could work as leverage against her should that need come to pass – or it could turn out that trying to blackmail her with it reveals that’s her berserk button. If it doesn’t work as blackmail, it’s more likely she’d call their bluff, declare she’s made enough to retire so it doesn’t matter, or assert that she’s confident she’s made enough good contacts like the Consul who care about their results, not about whether the people they’ve hired had excessively wealthy parents who paid a lot of money for something that may not have been as useful as it was supposed to be. But even if she just calls the bluff, if Mium/Peter choose to not be bluffing, that reveals their hand as people who blackmail others, which can have a chilling effect on their business. So it’s probably a bit of leverage that’s not explicitly invoked.
I think one possibility of why M.Y.M. can’t reveal why he calls her Porpita is because, perhaps, doing so would reveal her personal connection and/or history with Peter Kepler. If my hunch is correct, that would certainly make Madam Consul reconsider this woman’s position or, at the least, her trust in Tamara Anseli (aka, “Porpita”), which I presume Peter would not like to happen. It might also reveal a bit too much about Peter or his past.
I think we’ve seen Tamara before. Check out the very bottom of the Secondary Characters page. Notice the one with yellow-green-turning-blue-on-the-end hair and “???”? She was one of the two hackers/computer security experts that Ryn Koko hired to solve their “AI problem”, the other being Miko. She had blue hair then, too. It was revealed at that time that she has a history with Peter (which I can’t recall ATM).
Yep she is quite EXPLICITLY the character that got nicknamed Teally. Or Teal Haired Hacker.
Yup. I interpret it as Mium doing a little more chumming of the water. Going to be a good fishing trip.
I think that Mym has taken Naomi’s instructions to make friends and decided to classify Tamera as a friend. We know how dangerous but sweet that can be.
As to what he is not mentioning a porpita is not only a purple jellyfish but also an symbiotic colony. The clues point to Tamera being an chimera, a foreign designer child possibly from central, or a cyborg with an implant somewhat similar to Miko’s.
Amazing how MYM can just give all that information away and still leave them rather clueless.
Last two panels I presume are supposed to be exactly what panel 8 is saying might not exist? (Unless that’s a suit on top of it instead of just it, then I don’t think they’ve done a great job of making it able to blend in in plain sight…)
Considering what he is, and what he and Peter specialize at, I’d expect him to be able to dump a lot of info without effectively telling them anything.
It seems a lot more relevant to long time readers, because we know a lot more about what’s going on than these characters. Miss Porpita is a particularly good example of this. It’s possibly even better than I realize if the reference is to sea life from Central rather than something that exists somewhere the Consul and her advisors could possibly know about it.
The Snark is strong with that one…
I see something that MYM is going to be working very hard (relative to past attempts) to get through the ‘No Military Hardware’ limit. Because that suit/robot is apparently good. Not Ila good, but close.
Tamara Anseli is fairly well informed about M.Y.M., I suppose, but is very behind the curve on Peter Kepler, Interim M.S.B. Chief.
Panel 3: Better would be ” this is an ESTIMATION of a currentLY relevant threat”
panel 3: for a man named Peter Kepler. Panel 5: this is an approximation of a current relevant threat.
Fixed, thanks 🙂
First bubble, “Cheif… looking at the what hijacked…” Unnecessary “the.”
If you wanted a colloquialism, I’d add “thing” between “the” and “what.”
Fixed, thanks. 🙂
I thought that was spelled “navtrains“, not “navtrans”, though could be wrong.
(If you insist on a “the”, putting as “hijacked the navtrains” would work, though can also work without, I think.)
It is short for Navigational Transit (Network); it handles pretty much all traffic – trains, cars, air traffic control, etc.
lets do this thing
You mean the thing we just did that didn’t work,
this are the kind of moments that just make this comic fun to read for me, that and Mr. Peter
I love the contrast of the merely competent people with the unflappable few who are truly good at their jobs.