Comic for Thursday, December 29th
I strongly suspect that man has a death wish. Well. People that view themselves as heroes frequently do. I am not entirely sure who Naomi saved there, but when Naomi’s intervention results in a likely less violent finale to conflict, you know things are bad.
A talented null caster’s general main weakness is that it almost always has a shorter range than magic, and there are a lot of flexible ways to use magic that do not rely on directly applying magic to null caster. Kally’s reluctance to engage from long range (likely due to the level of collateral damage that would involve) gave him major advantage. Naomi’s interaction with the null caster… well, it certainly came as a surprise to the null caster.
Ila’s grammar seems to be decaying rapidly. I don’t even know where she gets those bad habits. Speaking of which, without Mium aim assist, she is a bit more limited. But firing while standing still isn’t that hard for her, as she can effectively root herself against the recoil by flipping around the weight shift she was using previously. Wasn’t so easy on the roof she was standing on though.
Speaking of grammar, that’s the first time I’ve used that particular swear (vulgarity?) in the comic. Typically I use more made up ones or just don’t translate it depending on the character, but I decided to stick to the script on this one. Sometimes it just sounds more heartfelt with a proper crudeness to it.
Naomi may, in fact, be somewhat more aware of Mium’s nature than she generally acts. She tends to be somewhat more perceptive than she may seem at times. Of course, that she understands certain things and still acts the way she does may indicate more screws loose than the alternative…
We are up to 5 buffered comics. I think this means no break in January! Will schedule them all to auto publish while I am out of the country (12th to the end of the month next month).
Typically speaking as calendar years flip over people have all sorts of ambitions for their little projects (such as a webcomics). I am not necessarily any exception to this rule, but considering that I will be gone for more than half of January, I will save any ambitions till February. Step one is to keep updating, and we’ll figure out what comes next in February. It sounds like a golden time of paradise where I get to spend more time on the comic right now, but then again the future always sounds like that to me and rarely turns out like that.
Oh… and we just passed the 3rd anniversary of the comic being posted. Holy damn. I have been doing this for 3 years?? That’s sort of a sobering thought. 3 years of 2-3 updates a week. Huh. We also just hit 300 comics. That’s a lot of stuff to hit at once without really noticing. Damn. 3 years and 300 comics? I don’t even know what to think about that. While I started with the story mostly in mind, I don’t think I could have comprehended either of those things when I started this.
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“tactical” must mean something entirely different here – usually it would imply Kally acts as fire support for forces on the ground, which is precisely where you don’t want “everyone is dead”.
Well, in maybe sense of a “tactical nuke” (not to imply that was ever not a silly idea). Tactical air support or artillery support can be quite destructive in the target area. The dragon clearly can target things, but the way I view it, she does not even want to kill the IDS armored soldiers.
Wow these last few pages have been great, very nicely done with them.
Hmm, on the interaction between Naomi and the null caster… I don’t think I know enough about how null casting works to know why that happened, past a guess. Is null casting similar to how Naomi broke Kally’s barrier in the air ball game? What normally happens when two null casters fight? What Mium can do has been called null casting by some, but he seems to have a much more efficient way of doing it, perhaps the difference between stopping a clock by hitting it with a sledgehammer vs by jamming one of the gears? Likely all spoilers but its still fun to theorize!
Well, two nullification clashing would result in some hard to draw graphics, but probably not much else, as mana doesn’t directly interfere with matter (though that is only true technically in some cases). That said, an actually battle between two null casters would be a different story as they can typically use magic other than nullfication (at least via autocasters) so it would depend a lot on the stats of the mages involved.
Naomi came up with her tactic in the airball game by having seen what Mium does before, but mechanically it was somewhat distinct from either more refined techniques, and closer to how an anti-mage burst round works. At the core all of the tactics rely on that magic has structure in Eidos, and only works so long as that structure is not destroyed or corrupted (generates nonsense that reality can’t work with).
Well. That was an interesting clash. It was the most intense deescalation I can imagine. You managed to one-up a dragon blasting magic and come up with a final clash that wraps up the “what about X” questions with Ila and Naomi, does not level a city block, and was still badass. Well done!
I do wonder where F5/F8 are though. We know Mium was helping Ila and Miko, but he has two prototypes running around unaccounted for, and I can only imagine that means very bad things for someone.
“…very bad things for someone…”?
Oh, I hope so! ^^
Nah, I’m sure they were just being good little prototypes out for tea or something… 😐
Since she was ready to kill Peter when she first woke up in his house, we know that Ila has no prohibition against killing humans, but Naomi seems to suggest that Mium doesn’t either. A SMAI that can kill is a daunting concept. O.o
If Mium’s version of morality is all that stands between humanity and an extinction-level singularity, then Naomi’s last bit of advice is particularly important.
Mium is too complicated a creature to really be truly bound to a rule without the context of some sort of morality I think. We have already seen him navigate around his restrictions when it suits him. Frankly, I think putting something like “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm” into Mium would be terrifying if you think about it.
I mean, that works fine when you are talking about a robot, but imagine if that was Mium’s top level priority? That would sound to him like “Please take over the world and rule benevolently” to him (as Naomi would say). His top level restriction almost certainly has to be whatever it is that governs him not taking over every system he gets near, and we have seen him leap that one via conflicting programmatic goals… conflicts that I am almost positive he intentionally introduced himself to get around his restrictions.
Mium has really become one of the most interesting things in this comic, from his start as an “anime-esque” android to being a pretty hard deconstruction of that. We still have Ila for the “anime-esque” android, so best of both worlds I guess.
Ila really is an interesting case of an AI. Where as Mium/M.Y.M. acts like an AI as we would build them, Ila acts like a child who has been raised in a lab all her life, and to whom no one taught anything about morals. She’s a humanistic AI to the programmed AI of Mium.
And somehow both of them think the other one is an inferior fake 😀
It seems we have AI speciesism already.
They both are inferior for the purpose the other was designed for. Unfortunately neither (Well maybe Mium does, but he certainly doesn’t display understanding it around Ila) can recognize differential capacity and design.
Okay Naomi’s line in the last part is great. No murdering to future proof things does sound like a sane protocol for super smart AIs.
There will be internet headlines in the future “10 Things You NEVER Want To Say to an AI”or “5 Things Stupid Programmers Told an AI that Almost Lead to Extinction!”
An evil AI is, as Mium notes, nonsense. An AI that is very good at what you’ve told it to do, however, can be real trouble.
And as far as the swears go, it fits more your typical soldier, who may or may not be well educated (granted college grads tend to become officers, but still) but often have to talk to the lowest common denominator. So yeah, I think it’s fine.
Most of the people I’ve known that were ex-military had a habit of including at least one vulgarity in a sentence containing any reference to bureaucrats, so this one’s for them 😉
Really the question to me wasn’t if he would swear there, but if I would leave it “untranslated” as occasionally I just leave in what amounts to nonsense words where the content can be… safely assumed as impolite. Fortunately there is no such thing as CCA for webcomics though 😛
So… how many people noticed the swish of purple hair running off in panel 2 while everyone else is gawking? Nice touch even if it’s only foreshadowing 4 panels into the future.
Congrats on 3 years. Here’s to 3 more?
It’s a hell of a thing. I don’t actually know how many years are left. I’d originally hoped it’d take under 5 years, but didn’t give it much thought as I figured I’d give up a long time before then. I think it will probably run more than 5 though, unless we wrap up at the earliest possible point (and if I do that, I’d probably continue in a sequel of some sort).
There is some temptation to do that, as I would very much like to truncate the archive of the dark-times, and the archive is already intimidating long to new readers. I would like a model where that is opt-in instead of necessary, but just setting an arbitrary point of the story as the new “first” page would probably not work. Plus, I’m not really happy with the artwork till chapter 7 starts, and that’s probably just because its the most recent and by chapter 9 I hope to hate the chapter 7 artwork… 😐
Second to last panel has “paper pushes” instead of “paper pushers”.
Last panel has “prospective” instead of “perspective”.
Awesome, as per usual.
Fixed, thanks 😉
> Typos
> Awesome, as per usual.
Yeah, I really like typos too! 😀 /s
(Strangely, the typos do add a certain charm to the comic, even (especially?) when they get edited out quickly. I guess it’s the feel of being in a work-in-progress and getting to be part of the authorial process by helping out, even if it is in such a minor way.)
Haha, well, we only have as many commenters as we do because half the commenters are playing “Typo Hunter, The Game: Webcomic Edition”. It has it all – easy low hanging fruit, complicated grammar issues, “is that intentional or not”‘s, speed challenges… 😉
I swear I don’t do them on purpose just to get more comments… *cough* I would never do something like that! (…I don’t, I just suck at proof reading).
I do appreciate that people help out though 😉
IF you still have the PDF files, in panel 6 the thought boxes “sound” like Naomi but are tinted in Ila’s eye/hair color hue. If The PDF files didn’t survive 3yrs of comp crashes/hacking then perhaps someone with better color theory/photo manipulation can suggest an easy fix.