Comic for Friday, June 7th, 2019
Thought I’d have this comic early? Buffered? Haha… Wait? What’s that? You didn’t? You know I’d be late because I always am? Oh… I’m sad now… 🙁
😐
Sorry about that. Same ol’ same old. Thought I’d get ahead, but work reared it’s ugly head. They pulled a dirty trick this time and flew a bunch of people from offshore to meet me, and while it’s sort of dumb I’d feel bad about blowing off people that flew half way around the world, which means I’ve spent a bunch of time out of my schedule on this. It’s complicated, but mostly stupid. It’s always one thing if it’s not the next. They go home at the end of next week… so maybe… then? Nah, it’ll be something new. I’m not that behind on work and stuff, just didn’t have the time get further ahead like I hoped. I expect we’ll do the Tuesday/Friday thing again next week.
We are getting near the end of this chapter, though still a few scenes left though 🙂
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Do we know the name of that hunter? I like him. I don’t think I’d be able to stand in between two mages of any sort, let alone talk so casually with a *dragon*.
I was going to add taking of my helmet in that situation, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t do all that much against dragon fire or whatever Sophie has (minus Atter).
I believe that in the previous page’s commentary Past provided the hunter’s name as ‘Kurun’.
Ah. That would have been a good place to look…
Oops. And thanks. :S
Hey guys – if you notice your comments being stuck in moderation queue more than usual, I apologize. We have been hit by a ridiculous wave of spam that’s been slipping through the filters. Literally had 20+ comments hit my moderation queue that were various dating/porn/virus/whatever ads and unfortunately a few that got through the laxer setting (due to not having links and just being pointless spam, but stuff I still want want to see in the comments), so we are back to the harsher setting.
This doesn’t mean you need to avoid links or VPNs or accept more cookies or whatever makes it decide your not a spammer, but it does mean there may be a bit of delay occasionally. I usually approve them through in an hour or so of them being posted.
Apologies, and just wanted to give a heads up.
That’s unfortunate, I think we may have set a record yesterday with the number of posts in a single day.
Or maybe it isn’t unfortunate, maybe it’s cause and effect. Active page? We spam you harder!
There is a very impressive number of comments on this page. At some point I’d like to read through the comments (as in all of them), but with so many pages, and some like this one, that’s going to take a while. Maybe I’ll eventually have the time for that. There’s so much theorizing and lore. I don’t think I’ve seen another comic with something like that.
Kally’s well reasoned decision aside, if Sophie won’t banish Atter, apparently the only way to get rid of him is to kill her.
Sophie doesn’t strike me as a particularly reasonable person, so it may come to that…..
It’s a tricky problem, because it’s not like Kally didn’t come here for a reason, even if the plan was maybe not fully considered. However, Kally knows people that fully consider plans better.
As for Sophie, well, its hard to say, as we’ve seen just enough of her at this point to make her personality seem a bit confusing 🙂
I’m oddly certain Fluffy only offered to eat him as a way of testing his claim (of not being tasty). I think that interpretation makes Fluffy even more frightening.
Odds of enough ketchup being present are low, though…
I’m not so sure that Fluffy is a ketchup kind of dragon though… Looks more like a hotsauce guy to me.
I think it implies that, at the moment, Fluffy isn’t really hungry enough to consider eating people with whom Kally is on good terms, without it being suggested.
This seems reasonable to me. Fluffy hasn’t been materialized long, and has already had an arm to eat as well. Presumably, a newly materialized being is not immediately hungry, unless hunger is part of its nature.
I think it makes Fluffy more frightening, because it suggests that even if they’re not normally inclined to want to eat you, all it takes is a slip of the tongue, and they’ll start to consider it. Also, the type of slip of the tongue that it would take to get that to happen is one that would probably be very tempting to make for someone in Fluffy’s presence.
I think maybe hunger IS part of the nature of a dragon.
Also, maybe, we should not call him Fluffy anymore. I’m not sure how he feels about that.
I think you’re looking at the wrong end of the dragon. 🙂 You’re looking up into the mouth, when you should be looking down into the eyes.
1. Kally was caught saying to Fluffy: “Who’s a good dragon? You’re a good dragon.” (If I remember correctly.)
2. Peter.
Those two things together make me think the following scenario is very likely:
In the Minus Years, Peter and Kally are hunting criminals. At some point, Kally forgets to dismiss her dragon and runs off to either beat up criminals or yell out proper form-filling procedures.
Peter turns to the dragon and asks him what name he would like should he ever become permanently summoned. The dragon blinks in surprise and doesn’t say anything. Peter then suggests the name Fluffy, so that people will accept him more easily. The dragon thinks about it.
Later, the dragon asks Kally if he could be named Fluffy because Peter likes the name. Kally gets mad because dragons aren’t supposed to be named Fluffy. And because Peter annoys her.
Peter actually warns against calling her Dragon “Fluffy” to Tyler.
“But if I can offer you a piece of advice…. trying to push Mium to do something he doesn’t feel like is a worse idea than calling Kally’s Dragon “Fluffy”.
Least with one of those you’ve know you’ve pissed her off when she’s ripped off your arm…
With the other you have to spend the rst of your life guessing if every minor inconvenience is him screwing with you”
Which confirms that canonically “Fluffy” is a nickname for the Dragon, just not one you want to use. It is also notable that Peter’s arm looks like it’s been reattached at some point… though I do not actually think that is intentionally connected.
Very true, and good point on the arm! Heh! But:
Calling the dragon Fluffy makes KALLY mad. Not the dragon.
AKA: The only reason we are safe to call Kally’s dragon Fluffly is that we are on the other side of the fourth wall and she can’t here/see us doing so.
Or so we hope, anyway…
^_^
I think that Peter did offend Mium at one point and that is why his escape plans include things like jumping out the window of a tall building.
And Peter did call Kally’s dragon Fluffy when she was irritated for the purpose of irritating her more and got his arm ripped off for it. Of course she was deeply sorry afterwards but it put a great strain on their relationship.
And finally that is why I continue to call that dragon Fluffy as punishment, contrition, and warning.
Dragon if you tear the arm off of people you arn’t suppose to you get a nice non threatening name. And do not even seriously think about about eating that brave monster hunter. If you do we will change your name from the serene
Fluffy Clouds Beneath My Claws
to the ridiculous
Fluffy Snugglebums the III.
So…
1. Don’t irritate Mium.
2. Don’t irritate Fluffy.
3. Don’t irritate Samantha.
Got it, thanks for the warning!
If Fluffy wishes to not be called Fluffy, Fluffy needs to provide an alternate name. Without providing a reasonable alternate name, we don’t really have a reasonable alternate choice.
I mean, I could try using the name Füfinàtor Lûmnôts, but it wouldn’t really work, because too few people would know who I mean. Plus, I have a suspicion that Fluffy would probably dislike that name more. We could try Thoraxinabog, Sapsuckafrog, Fouryaksandadog, Thorozipog, Whatchimozog, or even Susan. But without active input from the subject being named, we’re unlikely to happen upon something that will really be agreeable. This, more than anything else, is why people who are passive aggressive are doomed to unhappiness. Even if people *don’t* get annoyed with their manipulative behavior, manipulation doesn’t really work well unless the people being manipulated understand what is desired. But more often than not, it’s worse than that, because a lot of what they want is literally theirs for the asking, because it’s stuff that others won’t feel is a big deal. This naming business is a case in point. Calling someone by their preferred name is generally something that polite people are already inclined to do, so long as they can know what it is and can pronounce it.
But in this case, we have no clue. And so, Fluffy remains Fluffy, because Fluffleupagus just seems like something that would annoy further.
Ah, but he did provide an alternate name, as he introduce himself to Atter just now: “I am Dragon, foolish demon.”
Not “a dragon” – “Dragon”.
Interesting that Kally takes the viewpoint of how Peter would find Sophie to not be a threat, and how she could never kill Peter.
Not Arron, not herself….just what Peter would think.
(I mean, I realize to some degree she’s probably got her convoluted problem solving down to “what would Peter do”, unless it’s a day when she’s just going to dragon all of her problems away….but still.)
I’m confident that this stems from her very strong belief (faith?) that Peter is her generation’s best hope for a brighter future.
I don’t think “what would peter do” is a question that anyone who isn’t peter/mium could ever correctly answer. Because like half his plans wind up working when someone else tries to do so, and inevitably fails. It’s more just asking what he _wouldn’t_ do in a given situation.
This response suggests to me that you think of plans differently from both me and Peter.
By my way of thinking, Peter has plans within plans, and the vast majority of those plans fail. Most of them fail at the outset, as their preconditions are never met. But he works as a mastermind planner, because he always has at least one plan in every stack that works.
As I understand Peter’s way of thinking… He currently only has one plan. That one plan has many layers of contingency planning wrapped around it. Minus years excluded, for the duration of this comic, he has only had this one plan. Over the course of time, he has tweaked this plan here or there to adapt to the ongoing situation, but nothing has happened that caused him to scrap his plan and start over.
Kally will assure you that Peter’s plans never fail. It’s possible that has been accurate in all of the time she’s known Peter, but in her minus years experience, none of his plans were ever this big. He was undoubtedly working on formulating this plan most or all of that time. It’s possible that he still only had this one plan, and what Kally thought of as his plans always working were just elements of his overall plan.
Peter’s plans don’t always work because his enemies fail to anticipate what Peter does, but because he anticipates everything that they might do, and works out how to account for it in advance. Likely most of his time missing was spent on doing exactly this. They were already working in Malsa when he disappeared, so he knew most of the players, at least. Amaranth might have been new to him. Um, wait a moment, I mean Magnolia. But he wove her in pretty quickly.
Taking the time to work out these plans like he has, he’s gotten good enough at figuring how to fit things together, so that when somebody throws him a curve ball that threatens to change everything – like Tyler naming him acting MSB chief – he can simply adjust things on the fly. So even *if* you manage to do something he didn’t anticipate, chances are good he can work out how to weave it in before you capitalize on having done that.
Putting it a different way, Peter and his opponents are playing different games. In trying to counter Peter, his opponents are thinking of him as having moves, since he’s “just an individual”. But Peter mostly doesn’t make moves, he makes scenarios. Admittedly, they make scenarios, as well. But he has profound impacts on the scenarios they make, while they don’t even understand that he’s making his own, and doing so in part with theirs.
Over time, it’s possible that being the acting MSB chief will be detrimental to this advantage, because the longer people have to get use to him having an organization, the more they will admit that he has the ability to arrange things on the level that they are, so the more likely they are to notice. But until such time as that happens, he has the major advantage of constantly being underestimated.
> Amaranth might have been new to him. Um, wait a moment, I mean Magnolia. But he wove her in pretty quickly.
This is hilarious, because I call that character Amaranth more often than not too. I don’t know why, I don’t confuse other commenters with the icon character, but for some reason that one sticks in my mind.
Probably I see the actually characters name so infrequently, but the commenter all the time.
Peter outright says that his plans have to adapt all the time. It is early on where he talks about how this whole comic (basically) started months before he planned, and his been adapting some fancy footwork to keep his plan on track.
This war between Arpon and Malsa was not ever really his plan it seems like, but I’ll be damned if he hasn’t shuffled into his deck and are playing the cards like they were his hand all along.
I think its more that he knows where he is trying to get, and has laid a lot ground work, and uses Mium to process more plans then should be possible to keep it on track.
I think Mium is why people tend to underestimate him more than anything. Peter is clever, but being clever requires knowledge, and Mium is the reason he is borderline omniscient, as Mium cannot only perceive all the data, but figure out what is relevant to Peter’s plans.
And, if need be, fight off a god damn demon. Like, Sophie had no reason to believe that Atter would fail to kill Peter. Even with his preperation of getting out of his building and his escape plan, Atter still would have gotten him if Mium’s F8 hadn’t shown up. We don’t see him fight as much as everyone else, but the fact that F8 can casually curb stomp demons and mages is sort of a key point of Peter’s operation that no one really seems to be aware of.
Kally has seem Mium stop spells and block (disintegrate) bullets with his hand, but that’s just sort of scratching the surface. Just like the assassination of Miko should have worked, besides Mium just possessed her, disintegrating some bullets, and considered disintegrating the assassin. Kardus/Rovak/Martin’s anti-Ila safeguard should have worked, besides Mium just possessed her and was like “nah, bro, no tanks or arms for you” before peacing out again.
If Ila had been shut down there, Arkady would have been killed, and likely Camilla and the rest too, as Ila held off Atter long enough for Kally to show up.
I don’t think Kally quite realizes this either. She seems to get that Mium protects Peter, but I don’t think she quite grasps the level of protection that provides. It is implied that Mium cannot just possess Peter (Miko says she is harder to kill than Peter) but I’m willing to bet (based on Peter and Miums conversation in front of Atter) that trying to actually kill Peter would probably just result in the world getting destroyed around him. The upper limit of Mium’s actual combat strength is something I don’t think we have seen; he treated his fight with Rovak more as a curiosity than a challenge.
I thin the anti-Mium device would have worked if it was used on Mium first. Because Ila is a separately motivated individual, Mium was able to stand outside the problem to fix it, without being directly affected. Once a protection from the capability of the device was both necessary, required, and implemented, then Mium was able to enter and correct the situation. Rovak/Kardus was unaware of the separateness of Ila so further instructions were not provided.
I think the anti-Mium device would’ve not fared much better against Mium, because he’s distributed and made of diverse parts. It would’ve shut him out of one prototype, but he would’ve been able to step back, assess what happened, bring up AA, and go in again. It’s possible that it would’ve been more effective before he had F5 on board, but I really think that it’s thanks to the addition of the AA system and Query, which Martin doesn’t really understand because they’re not entirely his, that Mium was able to disregard it.
To be more precise, I think Martin has at most seen Query, but had no hand in making Query. It’s unclear how much of the AA system is Martin’s work, but I have a strong suspicion that it wasn’t working until Peter got involved.
Well, that, and the fact she clearly has a “thing” for Peter (but will blush if you point it out) 😀
But to be fair, a Dragon *is* usually a solution; possibly not always the best solution, but if all you have is a Dragon, everything looks crunchy and good with ketchup..
I think Stacs may be right; Fluffy looks more like someone who’d be a fan of Sriracha sauce or possibly Tabasco sauce.
This makes me wonder: How does one imprison a mage in the long term?
Physical walls would do very little to stop someone of tactical/registered mage level.
Powerful wardens? Might work in the short term but humans are failable and tying up large amounts of magical power just to guard a prison would cause problems.
Some sort of anti magic technology? Perhaps, but technology has been shown to have a hard time interacting with magic unless there is a human with an eidos key there too.
Perhaps just a large amount of normal wardens with specialized auto casters would work? Depends on the limitations of magic-disrupting magic. Maybe you could create some sort of magical turbulence over the prison that disrupts attempts to cast magic. Something that amplifies environmental interference?
On the other hand you could just exile them all to an empty dimension, but that has plenty of ways it can backfire too.
C. Dale Brittain’s “Is This Apocalypse Really Necessary” has an interesting take on this question. I don’t think it was a novel idea at the time, but that’s the only reference I can remember offhand for the concept in a magical setting.
And, yes, of course it had ways it can backfire also. It fits within a larger concept whose backfiring is an entire trope. I’d call those other things references for the concept, except they’re not of using the method like this, they’re about the thing failing after a time.
Tgape is a crafty bugger, and I learn a lot chasing his hidden clues.
This time though, I’m calling him out. A Google search for: C. Dale Brittain’s “Is This Apocalypse Really Necessary” yields THIS page! And frankly not much else. Nice red herring, Tgape!
Search instead for: C. Dale Brittain’s “Is This Apocalypse Necessary”
Sorry buddy, I couldn’t let this one slide.
Lol. To be fair, it’s an obscure book, and I knew that. But I didn’t realize it was *that* obscure. Specifically, I expected one other link.
The series starts out with “A Bad Spell in Yurt”, and a rather nasty spell that was. I think you’ll probably have better luck searching for them on Amazon, which is specialized for finding books, and doesn’t search pastutopia.com. 🙂
I am not intending to shill for Amazon, but that was the only place I found a link when I was verifying the author before posting, because I couldn’t be bothered to dig through all of my books that are still packed from my last move. (They’re mostly still packed because the bookshelf I’d stored them on prior to the move did not survive the move, and I have most of the books in eBook form now.)
When I dropped the extra word you put in (‘really’) it came right up.
I’ve already have the first book ordered. I’m still fixated on dead trees.
… Sigh. Some days, my mind feels fine, other days, it’s clear that it’s going. I didn’t even notice that I’d put the “really” in there, I didn’t notice that you quoted it, and thus the two names you put in were different.
I do, at least, remember where the “really” came from. A few months before that book came out, there was a situation at work that prompted one of my coworkers to ask a lot if it was really necessary. (Spoiler: it wasn’t. In fact, it was a horribly bad idea, that was bad enough that not only did upper management eventually decide to not require it, they did a complete 180 and gave the directive to not do what they’d been requesting.)
This does, however, remind me of an effect I’ve noticed. It’s sort of related to Dunning-Kruger. However, this is entirely contained within one person. I’ve no idea if it applies to others or not. But my competence is generally inversely proportional to my confidence. If I’m completely on top of my game, I will feel the need to disclaim like the wind, use all the weasel words, do all the research, and come out with product that will stand the test of time. But if I *feel* like I’m completely on top of my game, I’ll whip out some crap that even I might realize is complete poodoo as soon as it’s too late to hit the delete button.
For a more TFSoU specific answer, I think your last Perhaps is probably more or less the way to go. While null casters are rare, it may be possible to make autocasters that produce the same effect to a lesser degree. Given something like that, one could make a prison that was basically just saturated with magic interference.
This would work well as a prison, until one of the prisoners managed to work out how to cast magic despite constant interference. At that point, you’re kind of up a creek without a paddle, because they’re now basically immune to null casters who aren’t calculating their interference effects (basically all of them except Mium.)
That having been said… it could potentially work as a prison for millennia until that happens.
There could also be locations where this effect just happens to already be present. I would imagine that these would be places of power. *Near* these locations, one has plenty of ambient energy that one could use to power their spells, allowing much greater effects than normal. But at the location itself, there’s just too much random ambient energy for any but the most capable casters to be able to do anything.
Depending on stuff, it could be that Central’s equivalents of nukes left that sort of thing as residue, so that most of Central is now such locations… which could also mean that it’s a sort of prison that reduces ones life expectancy considerably – an effect that Sophie might be more concerned about if she were older.
A couple other possibilities come to mind for a mage prison.
1. Induced coma
2. Babysitting by Mium
3. Babysitting by Fluffy
I don’t think there is much call for prisons for tactical mages. If they survive the arrest attempt, the arresting officer didn’t.
A smallish satellite of their own.
Sure, they can break out. But unless they can long-distance teleport (uh-oh!) they would not want to.
Interesting question. I suspect Kor’s world may have the magical technology capable of producing walls resistant of even a tactical mage’s assault. But for Central, I suspect there is no technological solution: natural mages just seem much too powerful for Central’s technology to handle.
This leaves two solutions:
The easiest way is keeping them unconscious. We already saw how even Kally was easily susceptible to knockout gas. With hospital like care, such drugs can potentially be applied indefinitely, perhaps with short exercise breaks with powerful warden’s on guard.
The next solution is basically parole. This may be more practical considering tactical mages are such important assests in warfare. Just keep a tracker on them, let them go whatever, and if they break the rules of their parol, then someone like Nathan Summers goes and tracks them down and brings them under some stricter sort of regime, such as option one. There is an interesting possibility that this is actually close to Nathan’s job description. I suspect that he may be responsible for tracking down and eliminating rouge mages and demons. His powers of intuition for danger and magical resistance and manipulation seem very well suited for this role. Plus his title of Ervon’s Warden seems to suggest something similar.
I suspect Kor’s world is turning entire dimensions into something intended to imprison something they consider worse than a tactical mage.
I mean, Nathan Summers is called the Warden Wizard (or something like that). While Nathan did not want to fight Sophie, I don’t get the feeling he was particularly scared of her.
Notable this comic also seems to reference Arron Kepler executing someone in a similar circumstance, which would imply that if you don’t agree to go to jail they will kill you.
I get the feeling that just agreeing to go prison for awhile is part of it. Sophie basically implies she might go for awhile if she had to face the consequences of what she’s done, but it wouldn’t be all that long until someone needed her again, which means she mostly finds it annoying or tedious rather than an actual threat… she just seems like she wants to fight Kally out of curiosity to see if she could win more than anything after seeing her dragon.
So, maybe they have to accept a geas that uses their own magic as its power-source?
This is a question we will probably see an answer to at some point 🙂
Still, none of them suggesting another way. Not unless Sophie suddenly cooperates.
OH $%&! I just realized something! What happens when you call a crazy person ‘pointless’?
Kally, we’re proud of you for taking the high road, but don’t drop your guard!
Well, if you’re good, what happens after you call a crazy person ‘pointless’ depends a lot on them, but it’s generally either a trip or a throw.
Or, if you’re me, you get a fist in the gut, followed by getting picked up and slammed against a wall. But I don’t think Kally’s very much like me.
I don’t think Sophie is crazy. All of the characters, including Aaron, seem to portray her as calculating and logical (remember how everyone was surprised that she was supporting Biana). Just because her motivations are a little out of whack here doesn’t mean she will do anything stupid. She realizes that if Kally calls off the fight, there will be no additional consequences because of this agressive behavior, and so she sees this as a risk free opportunity to live a little.
Sparring matches could probably be arranged with fewer consequences. But I think she’s looking for an opportunity for a life or death duel, in which case the consequences don’t really matter so much. If she loses, she’s not around to worry about it. If she wins, … basically the rest of the Ervon Society comes and rubs her out, and she’s not around to worry about it.
That’s kind of the reason why I’m going along with the idea she’s crazy. To have this contest without being crazy, she’d need to do something like SiliconWolf suggested on yesterday’s post. That’s probably something that she could have arranged very easily without killing anyone. But since she did, at least in as far as she’s guilty for the actions of the demon she was anchoring, Kally would be less interested in playing along with that.
I do not expect you to be late. I do not expect you to be early.
I check early and regularly, in the hopes that it will be there sooner, because I *love* reading your tale. I check late, because I know it will get there eventually if it wasn’t there early.
And on days when it is not going to be there, I may check in to read the commentary, because your readers put a lot of good thought into both the current situation and how it fits into the whole.
You have created both a rich world *and* a rich community that reads your world.
As I am teaching a course on worldbuilding this summer, I have been taking copious (mental) notes!
Though, of course, I wonder which other worlds you and my fellow readers find particularly rich in how they have been spun.
It’s been my experience as a voracious reader that the deepest worlds have at least one of two possibilities. And more often than not, it’s both.
1. The author is just that amazingly talented and/or skilled.
2. The author has a lot of prequel stories to the current story. Maybe published, maybe not. But they exist, and the author has them written down somewhere to reference.
Well, from inference, we know there is a ton of unpublished TFSoU stuff. PastUtopia or other people have mentioned a few: Minus Years was an adaption of an earlier story, Nathan and Tom come from an earlier prequel story, Tyler’s Story fully plotted out and what was published was very indepth about the world details (seriously i hope that continues, I really enjoyed it).
I always read this comic getting the impression that was are seeing a small snip of the author’s world. I would very much instant buy any novels or other stories PastUtopia published, in this setting or otherwise. He does not tell the cleanest story, but that is part of what I like it about. It doesn’t feel like his trying to tell a story, it feels like we are watching events of a world unfold. Even those it’s a fictional world, it seems like lacks artificial story telling things (like powers being whatever the plot demands) I find so distracting in a lot of fiction. I never get the feeling that world is being changed to suit the story.
This. I check in here most days simply because I like it, even though I know there’s no update.
So the general consensus I’m hearing is that Past should quit his job and update 5 days a week? Sounds good, glad we had this conversation.
It may be worth mentioning that our points of view aren’t so very different on this subject. While I’d prefer to have the sort of quality updates we’ve been getting to something like David Willis’s 7 days a week, 365.24 days per year quarter or less comics, more updates would be better.
However, I also think about the sustainability of such things, and PastUtopia really needs a lot more supporters before this can be a viable day job. Currently, PastUtopia’s Patreon pledges amount to barely enough to eat, assuming that one has time to buy groceries and cook for oneself. That doesn’t cover rent, possibly not utilities (despite that they’re practically required to be able to cook), ISP costs, technology costs, medical, clothing, quality of life costs, retirement funding, and so forth.
Note that this doesn’t even cover the costs of hiring a team of artists and a personal chef, but if we could raise that much money, it would be helpful to getting daily updates.
I’m not saying you need to cover all of that. Collectively, there’s really not enough of us. 44 patrons is way too few to be adequately taking care of our artist. We really need to get the word out about the comic if we want to be able to expect more.
I don’t have a good list of ways to do that. Topwebcomics is one. It’s somewhat less effective than it should be due to the appearance of prevalent bot voting, but it is what it is. TFSoU is only at 268. I suspect you’re already voting, But we could use more people voting, if we could somehow get them. We could also use more ideas about how to get the word out, since Project Wonderful is no longer a thing
I hear what you’re saying. I’m confused on a detail though.
Are we offering him the opportunity to live in our basement until his webcomic career takes off? Or are we not offering him a choice?
…
…
So… does this basement have like, heating and AC? Running water? What sort of amenities are we talking about here….? Internet? Does it have off-shore developers that are going to try schedule meetings on a Sunday night?
…
Jokes aside I got pretty close to leaving my company last month, but didn’t end up pulling the trigger as it didn’t make sense after some renegotiation.
I reckon webcomics and my other hobbies are my eventual retirement strategy, but I’m not quite there. I don’t expect the webcomic patreon to grow too much currently as I haven’t really promoted the webcomic too much recently (I’m not quite sure there are many good avenues for that at this current juncture, as it’s pretty hard to get into it – statistically most new readers bounce off the archive, likely mostly due to the original art being very rough). Retention numbers are pretty good despite my flakyness, but even perfect retention will not equal growth.
But I always run the various numbers in my head every few months. In general, I assume that if I went full time on my hobbies I could probably make roughly double what I make currently off of them after a year, but that may be an optimistic calculation, and still currently would leave me a bit short of the fancy word people use called “sustainable income” 😐
Life takes an unreasonable amount of money between all the things. TFoU at this point does make money (over server costs and the like), though I wouldn’t necessarily call it a good hourly wage in money/time (which is fine, as that’s not necessarily the point 🙂 ).
…probably all a bit TMI for an online comment, but hey, it’s something I give thought to. Patreon has slowly moved from a way to defray the cost of running the comic to a source of income to consider, and that’s something I’m always grateful for.
What do you need to hear?
Most basements have terrible cell reception, and we can unplug the router if that helps seal the deal?
In a serious note, none of the decisions you are looking at are easy to make. All of them carry potential heavy downsides. And of course we readers don’t have to suffer the consequences!
Unless one of the consequences is the cessation of the comic.
On the other hand, you have two big things working in your favor. First even should things not go according to plan, most people that make that leap find that it was worth it.
Second you possess significant skill in a highly demanded field. Should you find you want to re-enter the work place, that reentry should be fairly straight forward.
Whatever you decide, I wish you the very best results.
And a rapid return on investment based off your most optimized ARPU projections and TCO.
For what it is worth, the Far Side of Utopia used to be in the top 100 for TWC when PastUtopia actively promoted it. As I recall, he basically confirmed it was mostly being manipulated by bots, and told people that he appreciated the support, but didn’t want people to feel they had to try to outvote bots. I still vote occasionally, but not every day anymore.
I am also not sure if I’m supposed to say it here, but I am pretty sure PastUtopia has another patreon for his D&D stuff (I don’t know if it’s confirmed it’s him, but I’m like 99% sure), so he’s a little closer than it might seem (and of course this means he is truly an insane person given that he does both those and his day job, and it makes me wonder if he does even more stuff I’m not aware of).
I don’t mind, it’s not like a great secret, they just don’t really have anything to do with each other.
There is probably some overlap between people that read the comic and people that play D&D, but as that doesn’t really have much to do with either my writing or my art, and this doesn’t have anything to do with D&D, it makes sense to keep them apart for the most part.
I require a link to this D&D patreon you speak of. I love D&D but this is the first I’ve heard of anything more than PU just playing it and drawing the occasional alt-art character.
In other news, my budget may soon come under enough control that I can start supporting the comic properly again.
I’m with LordRowyn. Marketing 101, if you’ve found paying customers, offer to sell them more. What else do you have for us?
Well, it’s not really a secret, as a fair number of people have already found it (apparently it is not super hard to identify my writing style in comments, a unique grammatically fingerprint of mistakes and blathering…), so this is it.
It is a lot like the TFSoU patreon in that it doesn’t actually provide anything you can’t get for free for the most part, and in fact I hadn’t intended to make a D&D patreon, I’d just been posting stuff I used in my games on a reddit for D&D, but people bullied me into it.
It currently is just character options, not adventures or anything, as it really is mostly just the stuff I make for my players (and now my patrons).
I do understand marketing (in that I know that it exists), one of my best friends is
the devil incarnate…err a marketing analyst. But its a bit weird for me to view my hobbies as monetizable things. While the webcomic made a bit of sense, as there were costs to defray with hosting and stuff, I honestly never considered making the D&D stuff a patreon until people convinced me to, and definitely never expected it to do fairly well. It’s all a little weird to me, to be honest, though I’m always happy that people tell me they are having fun playing stuff there, just the same as I’m happy people read the comic 🙂PastUtopia: “one of my best friends is the devil incarnate…err a marketing analyst”
So this is why half the comics in the old gag comic were making fun of marketing people…
Speaking of other hobbies, why did that one stop? I loved those.
Pretty much. It made fun of four things – marketing, corporate business, the pointlessness of being a philosophy major, and that I frequently missed updates. Guess what things were relevant to my life at that time being a philosophy major that had recently gotten a corporate job? 😛
As to why it stopped, well, #4 + I ran out of graph jokes to fill space.
I’m 90%….no, 70%…..hmmm….40%…………..ok. I’m 25% sure Fluffy is joking. Haha, good joke, Fluffy! heh heh.
(Psst! Kally! Fluffy is joking, right?)
Finally: whew! PastUtopia said end of chapter. Not end of story. I was getting worried that all this action was the climactic end.
I am thinking making a Dragon wonder if you taste good or not is not a good idea. The obvious next step WOULD be a taste test…
The longer I think about this, the more I’m thinking that this is Fluffy’s way of indicating that they’re offended, in a way that will hopefully curb the offense even if the person doesn’t realize what they said was offensive.
If somebody made a racist statement like that to me, it’s possible that I to would be offended. I mean, seriously. Thinking that someone would be so unthoughtful as to eat ones friends just because that person happened to be a dragon? Come on people, not all dragons are like that! Some of them only eat people they don’t like.
Fluffy never has eaten someone that we have seen. We have not really confirmed that he eats or not in this form.
I’m still not sure if everyone recognizes it as a Dragon because they have the same fiction we do, or if Dragons are actually a thing that exists in this world.
Like… is it a Dragon just because Kally imagines a Dragon? Various clues suggest she was (is) sort of a nerd. Or is it a Dragon because those exist and she just replicated one? If its the former, it probably thinks whatever Kally thinks Dragons would think would taste good…
Panel Last: We are just weapons…
Fixed, thanks 🙂