Comic for Monday, March 12th, 2018
Mar13
Sorry its late. For various reasons, the schedule got a little away from me over the weekend. At this point I’m suspecting the Thursday one will be end of day Thursday, but, well, frankly that’s just about normal schedule at this point.
I think the only other spoken line this character has had so far was back here, but I could be wrong, as the various IDS:CI people have appeared in random places throughout the comic. Someday we’ll get names for all of them. That’ll be the day.
Incursion Generation will be a term better defined in the future, suffice to say that at this point its not supposed to be inherently clear what that means, they I suspect some of your busy little theories will have your theories.
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Page’ll definitely not be up tonight. Tomorrow! I know, I know. I really might take off a day and try to do the whole buffer thing again at some point. It’d be a good idea, but historical evidence points toward buffers being an unstable material that quickly dissipates when applied to reality…. 😉
For reasons entirely related to work, I have not slept like a normal person in a week. This is not doing wonders for cognitive productivity.
Unfortunately I have a habit of making my schedules when I have free time and living with them when I don’t.
I would practice cutting your comics by one panel each.
You are really doing a bang-up job of keeping the information flowing.
Each page is extremely dense. I suggest lightening it up a little.
And, please, if i had a way to patreon, i would pay you to sleep the entire weekend.
I look forward to the next comic. And i will look forward to the one after that whenever you get it done.
I follow comics that update once a week, with 4 or 5 panels.
(correction, 2 panels)
So, keep us posted, is all i ask.
I’m envisioning him doing normal comics, then cutting out the last frame so we can’t see it. I’m not liking this plan.
And then putting that last panel on hatreon.
That is a most evil plan!
But not really what i meant. PastUtopia has talked about planning panel counts when laying out pages. And, he used to have a much smaller panel count. I feel that one less panel may be the right balance.
Page will be up tomorrow. Sorry ’bout that. It’s mostly done but didn’t get the chance to finish it.
Just skip it at this point. You’ve eaten too much into Monday’s time.
Looking forward to it, no matter when it shows up!
Hey,
Was just reading through from the start again (because the complexity of your story and worldbuilding is EPIC! :D), and noticed Ashley does actually say something here: http://pastutopia.com/?comic=comic-for-thursday-june-15th
That’s the page I’m back to now, so maybe there’s another one later.
(Also, someone recently mentioned the theorized high ratio of programmers in the reader demographic. Well, add another. :P)
Haha, you’re right. Good catch 😉
Sweet! What sort of programming?
A decent variety, since it’s been a hobby of mine for years, and now my job. In terms of languages: C++, C#, Lua, JS/ES6, Java, and a bit of Python. My job’s mainly front-end using React, and some back-end Java. Some of the other stuff I’ve enjoyed the most has been C++ game engine (school/hobby) work with OpenGL.
(Also, I apparently messed up my email, so sorry to whoever owns that one… :S)
Mostly boring middle ware / lamp stack stuff here. I kid you not, this week I wrote a(nother) mod_perl app. Still an excellent solution when you don’t have a hardware budget, and you need a simple script to execute blindingly fast.
Huh. Peter and Nathan using each other pretty well, there…with a pretty good understanding of each other, too, it seems. (It’s still interesting how they both seem to be so…..equally matched, for such completely different categories.)
And, pfft, Nathan…..why can’t be be both least and most sane? (It makes about as much sense as anything else does for actually letting anyone figure out “Grand Master Plan” while it’s in progress.)
Re: Late Comic, and discussion. To be blunt, I don’t think @PastUtopia realizes how ridiculous the pages are frequently. A lot of the comics I read we are LUCKY if the page has 5 or 6 panels, and they frequently have like 3 panels in a page. Sometimes its like half a page of someone yelling one word. Yeah, sometimes that art is “better” but that is a matter of taste. I actually like the art here better than the vector art that pops up a lot. And the plot of those is is glacial. This comic would go five hundred years at a normal pace with its winding complicated plots that I have to read the comments to understand.
That will be a trick if this ever gets a dead tree format. Keeping all the commentor ‘annotations’
I still think Past should try physical/dead tree layouts. Its what some of those comics use to keep the panel count down. Its a nifty little trick.
I think PastUtopia is well aware of going above and beyond the norm for webcomics, and how unsuited this is for print comics. But there’s a story to tell, and as mentioned on numerous occasions, it would go incredibly slowly and be even less comprehensible in a more standard format.
Past had publicly confessed to knowing what Agile is. Even confessed to committing it. Er, participating in it.
Agile at its core breaks complex tasks into simpler tasks to be delivered in a more frequent cycle.
One might suggest that 6 panels 5 times a week is easier than 15 panels twice a week.
Of course Agile also Incorporated the idea of programmers choosing their own schedule and work load, within certain boundaries. So I would only point out such a thing, and not presume to tell the developer what path to actually take.
😉
I guess we have our answer to how the Sophie and Nathan meeting went. Superficially she is denying responsibility like he wanted, but… what is this anchoring business. This seems like a possible clue that Atter could be less human than he seems.
We have seen some suggestion that he might actually be an Eidos construct that is more real than red (like when Mium exploded him, he did not bleed, he just had patches of red construct where his skin was missing). This combined with Nathan consistently calling him a demon (which in of itself could just be Nathan given his somewhat over-the-top persona) and the fact that he makes Rovak look well adjusted have me convinced. At least, until more evidence.
For example, from what we have seen, Kally’s dragon is basically instructable when she is present. The Witch Hunter (Nullcaster in white armor) shattered its tail, and it just reformed pretty much instantly. Atter is certainly different than Kally’s dragon, but if Sophie somehow is anchoring him so he can reform with Nathan destroys him, this would be point to him being an Eidos construct more than a human.
Of course, if that is true, and he can make red constructs in turn, that is sort of a new level of scary.
My feeling is that Atter started out as human, but he’s come up with his own version of I-code. Unlike Rovak, this was all his own thing. He’s taught others enough that they may be able to help him recover from injuries that would’ve otherwise killed him, but he doesn’t have the advantage of someone having pointed out that he’s still technically mortal. Also, he wouldn’t believe it if they did. After all, this is what he did. He survived certain death on numerous occasions. Nobody else understands it so whatever they say about it doesn’t matter.
I’m inclined to believe Atter is something truly inhuman. Infection, possibly deliberately, with some sort of Eidos based AI? Something more akin to an Eidos dwelling intellect possessing or sharing a human body?
TGape’s idea of a home spun i-code sounds like a likely concept. But the “anchoring” thing makes me think Atter is even less human than a war mage.
I love how Nathan is flipping back and forth between thinking Peter is the most sane and the most crazy. Depending on the point of view you take when looking at Peter either can be appropriate but he is definitely at the extreme! I think I would also add that Peter is the most consistent meaning he consistently hits his goals/targets whatever it is even if to an outside viewer he doesn’t seem to consistently go after the same thing. It’s simply because they don’t have the perspective that Peter has.
Speaking of harebrained this just occurred to me. Has Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers?
I heard that it was a peck of peppered pickles…
I like the “most sane/least sane” description of Peter. I think it is because everyone is thinking in terms of chess, pieces with certain powers and moves to be put into position to attack and/or defend. Peter, on the other hand, is playing Go where long-term strategy (longer than chess) is most important and a single piece placed in the right position at the right time (*cough* *cough* Kally) can shift the balance. In other words, Peter sometimes appears less sane because he is not playing on the same board as everyone else.
Which means there is some excellent writing in this story.
Peter isn’t playing Chess or Go. He’s playing life. A game that’s too complicated to depict in terms of game rules. It’s kind of like Magic the Gathering, where each card has its own rule. Except it’s that each person has their own rules, which tend to be more complicated than each person is aware of. (The whole know thyself thing – most people don’t, but think they do.) It’s certain that Peter doesn’t understand all of the complexity of the game he’s playing. He has more awareness of the board than most people, but there’s still many elements that he doesn’t even see.
Myself, I think the meaning of the term “Incursion Generation” is rather self-evident. It must refer to the generation that were just children in the period following the Kor’s World invasion. And it’s probably a term used often on Central, particularly among therapists, in talk about how severely these children were impacted or traumatized.
Think about what it must have been like as a child on a world much like our own that relied on technology and had no (public) knowledge of or defense against magic – a war-torn world besieged my magic-wielding non-humans (I’m assuming they’re mostly like the big robots and the armored, magic-wielding humanoid robot that invaded Levenworth) invading from another, unknown dimension. Some areas would be without electricity or even basic necessities. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
And didn’t a lot of people die – like over half the world’s population? A lot of kids would see their friends, classmates, family and/or parents die suddenly. Central did finally manage to drive off the invaders. Though, this must have been at a heavy cost and only after they learned of magic and developed autocasters.
So, yeah, I’m guessing many (most) children (and many adults) would’ve feared at the time that it was the end of the world. And I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the survivors – including children – were diagnosed with PTSD.
I’m betting something similar, but a bit farther. The generation after magic comes into the open.
The Incursion forced the Central Mages into the open and from that comes all of Central’s mix of magic and tech. The Incursion Generation is therefore the generation that was born after the Incursion that thinks of magic and tech in the same thought and knows how to blend the two.
What mindsword2 described is what I immediately pictured. I’m envisioning people born in this world after about about 1990. Pre-internet? Heard of it. They had black and white TV back then too, right?
This was more my line of thinking, because it certainly seems to be how Peter operates – as though the two had always been integrated. Could be either, though.
In particular, my thought was incursion => end of the world => people take whatever last pleasures they can => lots of babies [relative to number of people alive] among the survivors. (Although, like baby boomers, that’d be the start, not the whole thing.) But none of those kids would be old enough to remember any time pre-incursion, even if they were born during it (I forget how long it lasted, or if we even know).
I see the Incursion Generation the same way. Those either raised during or immediately after the Incursion. Not only would they be pretty messed up, they were likely raised to immediately combat an existential threat. And we see signs of this.
A few characters have obliquely referenced that Peter’s education was not normal, most notably his sister. Miko appears to have been an experiment with integrating a cybernetic autocaster (speculation only this at this point). Kally is only a tiny step ahead of Peter in social skills, and seems to have cripplingly overspecialized power that almost no one wants her to actually use as it is just too destructive to do things like fight wars or psychotic murderers with.
I think this might also go some distance to explain why Peter is the way he is, and why Arron is on the fence about stopping him. If Peter believes another incursion is coming (one theory of what he is actually doing), almost anything would be justified in preparing for it or stopping it. Arron is worried that Peter is right, but also knows exactly how messed up Peter’s worldview might be, as he is likely one of the people directly responsible for the Incursion Generation being what they are.
We already know Kor’s World isn’t done yet. Because of Peter, there were enough of the right pieces in place to counter their opening move on Malsa. Because of the comic’s focus, we don’t really know if that was all that went after Palindra or not. If it was all that went after Palindra, that raises the question, did Peter understand enough of the Kor’s World preliminary attack point decision making process, or did he just get lucky? If it wasn’t all, how did it go for the rest of Palindra?
As far as PTSD, I would say it could be assumed that every character from Central has it, even those born after the incursion, because even the children are being raised with the traumatic stress of knowing what happened. There may be some people who are sufficiently sheltered from those events to not have PTSD, but they would all be people not featured in this comic. (The same sheltering that protects them from that stress probably also protects them from PastUtopia exposing their private lives to us.)
Typos: panel 4 & 7- Malsans (no apostrophe needed), panel 5- dealing with Atter on your own. (Delete how), and panel 6- Hells above (again no apostrophe needed)
Love your story…
Fixed, thanks! Also, glad to hear you’re enjoying the story. 🙂