The Far Side of Utopia

Comic for Monday, November 6th, 2023

Nov07

by PastUtopia on November 7, 2023 at 10:32 am

Chapter: Chapter 18

Characters: Arron, IDS Minion #4, Kally, Nathan, Peter

I will probably a miss a comic later this month. Not exactly sure when yet, but will be travelling.

But not this one.

23 Comments

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Discussion (23) ¬

PastUtopia

November 21, 2023, 12:59 am | # | Reply

Hey Folks-

I had intended to do the comic today, but I won’t be able to finish before I leave to travel for Thanksgiving. Was trying to wrap up too many things before I headed out and ended up getting mostly none of them done instead. Unfortunately I cannot just stay up too late it get it done as usual given I have to be up for a plane at some god awful time of day tomorrow.

This means that we’ll have a bit of a break as I’ll be gone for awhile, so we’ll end up missing two comics.

The next comic will be up December 11th. You may now commence with the torches and pitchforks.

-Past
- Josh S.
  
  November 21, 2023, 6:22 am | # | Reply
  
  I hope you have a grand time!
  
  Or, I guess, I hope you have had a grand time!
Glider

November 18, 2023, 9:49 pm | # | Reply

It’s getting close to a Malsan holiday, and travel was threatened.

I think we should start voting with our pitchforks and torches right now.
- Stacts
  
  November 18, 2023, 11:50 pm | # | Reply
  
  Just to shake things up, I’ll bring the torches this time. 🙂
  - Glider
    
    November 21, 2023, 6:13 am | # | Reply
    
    Ahh man, Stacts. We need bigger torches and pitchforks!
    - Bob Kerns
      
      November 22, 2023, 10:56 pm | # | Reply
      
      We’ve got time to send these back and order new ones, but we’d better rush because of the holidays. We’ll probably end up with the Christmas-themed ones, though; that’s what the stores have been stocking since Halloween.
      
      On the plus side, this is the only webcomic that I check regularly even when I know there’s not an update, scanning the dates on deepest replies for any new messages. We’re a pretty committed mob!
      - Glider
        
        November 23, 2023, 2:00 am | # | Reply
        
        Yeah, well, most of us need to be committed. It isn’t clear that we don’t pose a risk to self and others when left unattended.
        
        Happy Thanksgiving to those state side, and a similar if less timely sentiment to those not.
EnderDDT

November 7, 2023, 2:57 pm | # | Reply

So let me see if I have the timeline right. Peter handed over the data to Nathan, then scheduled the excursion into the in-between, then gave the instructions to the group, then jumped over to the in-between, and Nathan is still (after all this) two hours out from meeting up with Arron? Perhaps there could be some “a couple hours earlier” between the “I’m two hours out” and Peter standing over where the Sky Carrier was going to appear (meaning that this stuff with Nathan took place immediately after getting the data and likely around the time that Peter was scheduling his little field trip). Can anyone help me figure out what is going on here?
- PastUtopia
  
  November 7, 2023, 7:10 pm | # | Reply
  
  These events actually are (mostly) concurrent. The skycarrier didn’t immediately attack Nathan. Travel time is just odd because it almost always gets cut and the actual location of things isn’t always clear.
  
  Remember that IDS has largely pulled out of Malsa. While this doesn’t really effect people like Nathan who go wherever they want, it does mean he’s cut off from the closest resources like gates or IDS ships blasting across the sky. Plus, Nathan has guessed he has the bridgepoint data, but would almost certainly want to verify what he actually has before bringing it to the attention of those up the chain. If he announced all the way up the chain that he has the Bridgepoint data, the IDS would probably have come in hot and caused some major diplomatic headaches, not to mention the potential ramifications if turned out that there was something wrong with it, and the questions that would bring up about where he got it.
  
  It’s also possible the Nathan is doing the same thing Peter was doing: seeing who can track the data. He just would have a different way of doing that, since he’s a lot less adverse to being attacked by demons and Kor’s World than Peter is. In some ways Peter and Nathan are similar, but they have key difference. The fallback of all of Nathan’s plans boils down to he’s Nathan Summers.
  
  The comic has always skipped around, but as more of the side events have gotten cut sometimes things are less clear.
  - Nivek
    
    November 8, 2023, 1:46 am | # | Reply
    
    So basically, the difference between Peter and Nathan is that Nathan tanks the shots where Peter sits back with popcorn while they shoot the (exploding) decoy?
    - EmperorArthur
      
      November 8, 2023, 2:38 pm | # | Reply
      
      Peter relies on plans on top of plans in order to find what’s going on and look like he has everything under control.
      
      Nathan has protagonist powers that mean everything just gets dumped in his lap with significantly less planning and research. Not that Nathan’s dumb. Just, he’s a lightning rod for trouble and everyone knows it.
      
      It says something that of the two, “evil” and Everon society probably fears Kally less than Nathan.
  - EnderDDT
    
    November 10, 2023, 11:49 pm | # | Reply
    
    I guess I’m just underestimating how big Malsa is. I was thinking at first it was the average europeon-nation sized but now I’m thinking more Florida size, which would mean that getting to a his car (25-20 minutes at most) and then out of Malsa completely would take 3-4 hours total (assuming he didn’t have to cross the entire country toward the far border). This begs the question of how big Malsa actually is? We had a map put up before but that could make it anywhere between the size of a european nation or smaller, if it is all on an isolated land mass, all the way up to a double digit percentage of the planet’s total land-mass, in a pangea-like one-continent world. I think this is the first time when things happening concurrently in different locations were double linked in the time-line. Normally there is only one link (a phone call or a place where the timeline splits or comes together) or none (we find out that something else happened at some point in the same day that is now important), that or there is an indeterminate gap of an hour or more for things to be shuffled around; but this is going to be the first time when both ends of the timeline are going to be important (the handoff of the data to Nathan and the return of the Skycarrier after the attack on Nathan with the data). That’s why I’m focusing on it so heavily to build my mental picture of what is going on.
    
    Also, let me just say thank you so much for the reply! Getting the author’s answer wasn’t something I even dreamed of. It brought up some things that I hadn’t thought of at all, like that Nathan would want to check the data himself before bringing it back or that he might be playing the decoy to catch anyone still following the data before bringing it back to Aaron. It will be interesting to see how his side of things plays out.
    - Tgape
      
      November 14, 2023, 12:01 am | # | Reply
      
      A map without a scale doesn’t really tell you how big anything is, except with relation to each other. That said, most maps are projections of maps rather than actually showing the real area, because they tend to be of globe things but they’re flat. As such, it doesn’t even give a good impression of relative sizes.
      
      All of that said, who said Nathan was in Malsa?
      
      My headcanon says that he’s in fact in Malsa, on a ring road around the capital. He could have gotten back to Aaron in half an hour in the car, it’s just that he was driving around to see if he’d get attacked since he had the bridgeport data. So that two and a half hours isn’t that bad of an estimate. It’s half an hour for the fight, an hour and a half to walk to the nearest Nav Trans station, and then a half hour on that to get to Arron.
      - Westley Roberts
        
        November 15, 2023, 3:33 am | # | Reply
        
        I’ve always kind of assumed Malsa was Taiwan sized… that’s about 395 km North-South and 145 km across at it’s widest point. Driving from Taipei to Kaohsiung takes about 4 hours… so still a valid comparison (yes, I chose Taiwan because it is a heavily industrialised island).
        
        We know Nathan was in Malsa when Peter “revealed” the bridgepoint data to him. We know Aaron has been moving between Malsa and Central: the last time we saw him, he was dropping off “toy soldiers” (David and his team – he collared them at the mall in Malsa) off in a holding cell: one assumes in Central because Colonel Ricci was there giving him some love. So it is likely Nathan is still in Malsa, and travelling to Aaron because it is likely Arron has access to a gate and thus whatever resources needed to secure the data.
        
        Tgape
        
        November 21, 2023, 5:08 am | # | Reply
        
        Somehow mentioning Taiwan reminds me of driving an hour to go somewhere to eat in Pennsylvania vs driving an hour to go somewhere to eat in the Dallas Fort Worth area. I’ve done both.
        
        The place in Pennsylvania was roughly 20 miles away. The place in the DFW area was 60 miles away. No, the average speed limit wasn’t over 60 MPH. Do you have a point? (In many jurisdictions on can get pulled over for “obstructing traffic” if you’re not speeding enough, so…)
  - Just_IDD
    
    November 11, 2023, 1:14 pm | # | Reply
    
    I find the easiest way to know which one to use is that something can be affected by an effect.
    Another way is that an effect is a direct action on an individual thing. While an affect has indeterminate scope.
    - Tgape
      
      November 14, 2023, 12:14 am | # | Reply
      
      But when you’re not causing a change you’re involved in and you’re not what’s being changed, are you effecting a change or affecting a change? It is possible to do both, you know. English is such a confusing nightmare of a language. It’s almost as bad as any of the others. I would probably have a different opinion of which was worse if my native language was different.
      
      To be clear: effecting a change means you’re making sure it happens, though you’re probably not the person doing it. Rather, you’re removing obstacles to the change happening. The change is probably the same regardless of what it would have been had it succeeded without your efforts, and if it isn’t, it’s because you affected the change you were effecting.
      
      When you’re affecting a change, you’re just changing it. If you didn’t get involved, the change would still happen, but it would not be the same change. Peter affects changes all the time.
      
      Also, as I’m thinking about it, a disguise can totally be effected by an affect. WHEEEE! At least that affect is pronounced slightly differently than the affect you were talking about.
      - Glider
        
        November 16, 2023, 1:51 am | # | Reply
        
        Sometimes I feel like living inside my head is burdensome. I would like to visit inside yours some day. I think it would make me feel a lot better about where I live.
        
        Peace Tgape. You are awesome.
EmperorArthur

November 7, 2023, 2:18 pm | # | Reply

Traveling is expected for the holidays.

I enjoy watching competent people be competent. Also, Arron’s acknowledgement that whatever vehicle Nathan is in explodes. Other people, like Minion #4 still aren’t used to the insanity.
- Khms
  
  November 8, 2023, 7:58 am | # | Reply
  
  Just like every house Peter lives in.
  - EmperorArthur
    
    November 14, 2023, 12:01 pm | # | Reply
    
    To be fair, most of those house explosions are probably because someone was tracking the bridgepoint data. Given how much Peter wants more of those cards used by Korish walkers, he’d have probably loved to be attacked so directly.
    
    It’s no wonder those two families work together so well. I think the reason Peter and his uncle have such a problem with each other is they’re just enough alike that the differences stand out.
eldestdawn

November 7, 2023, 1:24 pm | # | Reply

Should have spare cars for everyone it seems. They tend to blow up quite often. And if it survives the trip, you can save the spare for the next person.
willis

November 7, 2023, 1:21 pm | # | Reply

Hey pal, it’s ok. take some time off to pull yourself together. Spend some time with your family for the holidays. and to the mob, show’s over, take 5.