Comic for July 11th, 2022
Comic!
Once can make a guess that there may have been a few other humans that experienced rapid projectile deconstruction off screen between the ?! and now. Panel 7 is the somewhat obscured aftermath of what happens when Ila is charge of targeting the HVW strike. When she was firing earlier, she was using a single calculation, as when backed by MYM’s accuracy that’s more than enough to take out a threatening arm or two. Ila generally doesn’t see the point of using just one calculation when a bunch would do the job better, and if you aim for the top half instead of the small parts like arms that stick out, its easier to hit.
Ila may have a rather basic idea of cause and effect. She is probably correct that the number of humans she explodes decreases the chance of her getting ice cream on outing, but her rational may not be entirely correct in why that is, though from her point of view “because now the humans are freaking out and stuff” is basically the same thing if all outcomes lead to decreased chance of ice cream.
The worst part is she’s even had to take several of those shots using her vending machine food-tokens (it became clear that giving Ila large domination bills to buy snacks didn’t work so well after the last vending machine incident), so each humans he needs to use those blast is twice as annoying.
It’s a lot of work keeping a human around. Maybe they make a good excuse to get ice cream. Maybe you have to explode a bunch of goons that keep trying to kidnap them.
Will Ila get her stuff and her ice cream in the end? How many humans will she have to explode just to keep one other human alive and unkidnapped? Only time will tell in this story about the difficult life of I.L.A. F.10. and the case of the annoying humans.
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I’ve seen some notes about comments getting caught in moderation. Unfortunately the site is being hammered by spam pretty hard, so the automod settings are all high.
Word Press comment automated moderation is pretty archaic. I get the impression that it’s sort of a depreciated feature for the most part. At some point most people switched to a social media comment integration or disqus comments, but I remember not liking disqus comments for some reason, so I didn’t switch over when most people did (maybe just because it’d lose the archive, or because you had to log in, idk, but I didn’t like it), so they just expect anyone with a use case of using a lot of comments to just use something else.
Unfortunately a lot of things about the site rely on depreciated tools at this point – comicpress (the theme for wordpress for webcomics) itself isn’t really supported. This is going to make me sound old (…I am old I guess) but generally speaking the standalone wordpress webcomic is sort of old technology at this point. While online comics are still popular, most of them migrated to aggregators, social media, or more specialized site design, but migrating things now seems more trouble than its worth.
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Past, while I agree that logins are annoying, you might still consider them. I would suggest the Single Sign On route personally. That’s the log in with Microsoft, Google, Facebook, GitHub, etc. buttons.
My day job is literally dealing with SSO, so I can tell you that it works and users don’t need to have an account to press the button. That’s the whole point.
I’ve implemented FB and Google SSO as well. I’ll assume github is similar.
You run into similar issues when you outsource identity management to one of those federations as with Disqus. Now the content remains under your control, but your user base is under big tech’s thumb. There’s a time and place for it, but I’m not a fan.
Just my two cents. It’s definitely worked well enough for others, so I’m not claiming it can’t work here. I’m just saying I’m not a fan.
Ehh, the big thing is to make sure the account’s E-mail is set to the same one as the SSO provider’s.
Then someone could always use the “Frogot my password” link to reset the thing and log-in directly.
An alternative is to do what Freefall does and either outsource or run a forum. With a post per page.
Please don’t go the Disqus route. I, for one among many, do not and will not use it.
Not only do we lose access to the archives but you lose all control and ownership of the comments. In addition you subject all of your posters to the dangers and annoyances of Disqus’ monitization efforts and data breeches. I trust you. I do not trust Disqus. You only have to look at their business model to see why.
As a few people have commented about this I should clarify – my comment was merely noting that I decided not to go with Disqus a long time ago, and I don’t entirely remember why, but there was some problems. I have no plans to switch over (to it or anything else), and haven’t looked into for it years.
What I was getting at is to note why WordPress comments tend be a little rough around the edges in things like moderation and editing tools. They are ancient technology that most people don’t really use in the modern era, and I suspect mostly depreciated from WordPress’s point of view, as most people that are heavy users of comments use a more specialized solution.
I don’t even know if Disqus is still the popular one as I follow a lot less webcomics myself than I used to, I just remember it being the popular option back when I was looking into it, but the decision to not go with that was made a long time ago.
My strong preference is for systems that don’t require log in, user accounts, etc, because god knows I have enough of those in my life that I don’t remember the password to, so I don’t really want to inflict those on others. Unfortunately, that makes the comments section very vulnerable to spam.
For example, there were 12 messages in the moderate queue of spam comments that got through the auto-spam-mod, but were caught in the moderation queue between this comment and the last comment (which may explain why I miss comments sometimes; the vast majority of the things that get caught there are actual spam).
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at WordPress, but there were a few addons/mods that could prevent spam comments from being submitted that I’d seen other ComicPress webcomics use.
Usually by adding another field to the form, a common example was “write the name of a character” – but you may have a few too many of those.
And of course there was the rather common one (also with not-webcomics) of writing the answer to a random simple equation, like 2+11 or 8*2. Pretty sure that one was fairly high in the addons/mods/whatever list last time I looked at a WordPress admin panel (which admittedly was years ago)
Having a field that you just have to write a certain word in, even if you say what that word is next to the field, should reduce spam comments by a lot.
Many more years ago, so I no longer have the code, I wrote a bit with two extra checkboxes, one which had to be checked and one which had to be left unchecked for the comment to go through. That stopped all the spam comments I was getting. Pretty sure spam bots would either check everything or leave everythign unchecked when submitting spam. And because I don’t think anyone else did that, and I was a tiny target, no bots were modified to target it specifically.
I’ve moved the other way. So much of the spam I’ve seen is 3rd world nation cheap labor that I wonder if anyone benefits from recaptcha and the like these days.
Or maybe it is amazingly skilled AI? I don’t know how I would tell the difference.
The funniest thing is from what I understand a lot of recaptcha type stuff is used to train AI’s to be able to notice the differences and what not that humans pick up on. Which seems counter productive in the long run.
Artem is not getting the accolades that he deserves. He has demonstrated bravery and thoughtfulness on multiple occasions. Sorry, Arkady, your little brother shows that he is perhaps more worthy of being the Family Heir. The first time he exhibited brave behavior was put off to childlike brashness. However, multiple times after that he has shown a level of thoughtfulness, decisiveness and bravery beyond his years.
Yes, but unfortunately, we don’t get to see Artem really *nail* it by, after his vulnerable brother is safely away, soloing all of the goons kidnapping him. I mean, for all we know, earlier, maybe he’d just been waiting for them to take him back to their base so he could get all of them.
I mean, given who his father is, it’s worth a thought. Which is just one of the reasons why kidnapping him’s a stupid idea. But, well, stupid is as stupid does.
It’s implied that Artem is the Family Heir though. Or at least it isn’t Arkady. Camilla is a different Family, and if I recall correctly, Arkady is marrying into her family, which means he’s not the heir of his family.
Arkady himself seems to realize his not really cut out for this sort of thing.
Of course, Arkady does have his own super power: popularity. He’s one of the most well protected people in the country given Camilla (a Family Head, and maybe the strongest one left alive), Naomi (the closest thing Malsa has to a superhero), and Ila (our favorite little murderhobo) are all watching out for him. And by extension of Naomi and Ila caring about him, Mium is at least keeping an eye on him.
Thank you. I had to look it up but my new word for the day is murderhobo. It wasn’t familiar since I don’t participate in the RPG world. Yes, ILA is my favorite murderhobo. She is cute, wears a scarf, likes tasty food and does not have Mium’s defect.
Its a good thing that ILA is acellerating them. Mythbusters clearly proved that at their natural terminal velocity the are not likely to cause much injury.
That being said, finding a way to be able to shoot bad people with pocket money would be a great way to see some change in them.
Only briefly. At least, it’s my guess that Ila uses speeds sufficient to make said change be elsewhere in short order.
“to see some change in them.”
To coin a phrase.
It’s certainly a phrase that has currency….
Wait…
Your comment with my comment means it’s true!
There are enough electricity puns *and* money puns to fil a mint!
Yeah, I don’t think you want to be the “oh, there’s one left” one when Ila is already her ice cream is being delayed…
If he starts running now instead of shooting, she might not bother redecorating a rooftop with him.
The chances of ILA letting that last sniper live can be improved if he leaves his sniper rifle as a “gift” for ILA.
I don’t think he can *move*fast enough to be saved and I don’t think (as noted elsewhere) that he has enough communication/information to let him know he *ought* to run, even if he watched the HVI land feet first on our recently deceased man-in-black.
The problem is, she located said sniper by said sniper being foolish enough to get a bead on her. When dealing with someone like Ila, potentially giving them that warning is probably going to turn out worse for you than free-shooting. But leaving the country and changing your name’s probably an even better plan. Just in case somebody missed it, that name change and emigration is to evade the people who sent you. Ila won’t care enough to track you down so long as you’re not threatening her ice cream chances.
I would have thought the probability of Tasty Food was pretty high at this point; Arkady has a past history of providing Tasty Food and playing entertaining games with Ila even without the good reason of having saved his life yet again, plus all of the work she put in earlier.
Arkady is well aware that Ila’s fuel efficiency is low so would think a planned evac to a Family property with good, solid walls, and where ice cream and other Tasty Food can be provided to both Ila and Artem should be his priority now.
That seems perfectly likely to you and I. I don’t think Ila expects that though. I think she expects a rapid evac, or at least the sales people to go running away screaming from the carnage. You know, as opposed to serving her ice cream.
Now I want ice cream. I bet Arkady’s family has really good ice cream.
As a sensible Human though, I have ice cream in the freezer for just such a requirement. Specifically, a “magnum” choc-ice onnna stick, although there is now one less in the box for… reasons.
Looking at panels 7 and 8, ILA may have hit the black suit with her feet instead of her usual HVW shot. She mentions “squishing” him instead of shooting him. Also, in the last panel ILA has blood on her cheek. Arkady and Lisa are also blood spattered. Perhaps ILA thought an HVW shot that close could have collateral damage.
That’s sensible. After all, it saves wasting a token on a goon that could otherwise be used to obtain Tasty Food.
Does risk getting blood on their scarf though.
I vote for Ila to get lots of ice cream many days in a row from a grateful Arkady and Lisa (if she even gets a vote).
Archivist Past has revealed that ILA has been using her vending machine tokens for HVW projectiles. She won’t be able to get as many tasty snacks as she wants. I vote we start a GoFundMe for ILA to get her lots of vending machine tokens.
I’d donate to that. But Ila uses a firearm, which I think is a violation of their ToS. I suspect we’d need to use some other platform.
I was wrong about jelly beans for HVW “ammo.” I should have thought that through and known that ILA wouldn’t waste Tasty Food. LOL
Past revealed in comments above that ILA has been using vending machine tokens for her HVW shots this time around. She was disappointed when Mium informed her that her cool sniper rifle (appropriated from a bad guy) needed to be reloaded. I don’t think the ToS mentions anything about throwing tokens/change at anyone.
I suspect Ila might be about to pick up a new sniper rifle, and might remember to get ammo for it from time to time.
I guess it depends which is more hassle – obtaining and fitting ammo, or just looking around for the closest Rogue Families goon to “donate” her a fresh one?
Kind of a pity, really. If this keeps up, there won’t be anyone left for Naomi to smite. O.O
That is really sad. She has already been deprived of smiting when she arrived at Mium’s location. Apparently daffy David went with Arron and Rovak’s minions left the area also. However, I think the guy ILA splatted had been roughed up by Naomi since he was visibly injured.
Past, I think you’re doing a stand up job. I flat out refuse to use Disqus for a number of reasons. Yes, lots of other comics have separate social media channels. It’s easier. It also doesn’t build your own brand nearly as authoritatively, and places your brand to some extent at the mercy of someone else.
I like ILA more and more. I recognize the risk of teaching an AI that killing is acceptable. However this is a situation where the participants are not fluent in any language other than violence. Time is very critical. And center of mass hits are easier to calculate and more certain in effect. They are also are less likely to damage non-targets through over penetration, ricochets, etc.
If Ila’s thought process is so incredibly human, a better approach for her may be a more human style morality system. Yes, it would likely be more tribalistic, but once ingrained it might also be more resistant to “drift”. Very few humans seem to end up at “just kill everyone” as a global solution. Of course those who do are pretty memorable.
I’ve always liked ILA. She reminds me of Patrick Swazey’s character in Roadhouse … be nice until it’s time to not be nice. She goes from buying scarves to obliterating bad guys with guns in the blink of an eye. I wish she would walk down the violent crime ridden streets of some of our cities. She doesn’t have Mium’s “defect” of not being able to kill.
the sniper on Panel 10: *thinking* AAWWKK!!! I’m Dead!
I doubt it. The sniper scope provides too little width and we have already proven that their communication is piss poor. So, this last sniper doesn’t know what is coming or what else has failed already.
It would be most unsettling to have your target turn and scare directly at you through your scope as you have aligned your shot. I think the sniper should have been aware of how dangerous ILA is unless higher ups didn’t warn him.
Their communication is terrible, but their planning skills are far far worse.
There is a little chance Sniperscope Guy knows even enough to start running now, although if he abandons his rifle, there is a reasonable chance Ila will be more interested in recovering and playing with THAT rather than exploding his head like a balloon.
I’m now at the point of wondering how many feet deep the bodies will have to be for the Rogue Families to see the writing. Hopefully less than 6 feet.
Because seriously they are batting close to 0, and running out of talent on top. Each attempt is bound to get worse.
I feel like part of the issue is that communication is delayed. Things are happening fairly fast, lines of communication are impaired, and in some cases some individuals are refusing to check in until they can boast a “win”. All of it adds up to some parties acting on very dated info.
And of course dead people don’t deliver reports. Still if there was someone competent in information management, they might being getting the message and trying to push the stand down button.
Perhaps the Rogue Families are NOT using modern technology to communicate because of the knowledge the walking technological anomaly has “entered the war”.
Still underestimating him and his allies.
Last time Ila went “full Naomi” nothing survived to tell the tale. The air superiority drones probably didn’t report back what swatted them, Whatever is left of the Kor’s World soldier seemed more concentrated on Fluffy, and the CA goons never saw what was shooting at them.
A sensible SniperScope Guy would have figured out that the mission was FUBAR at this point, and the info on Ila more valuable to the Rogue Families than taking potshots. This is clearly NOT a sensible SniperScope Guy…
Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone here has ever accused the goons of being sensible. LOL
Fair enough; I mean, a Sensible Goon would have called in sick…
I agree with you, in a similar information management discovery..Back in World War II they plotted the bullet holes where all of the planes were shot in an effort to armor them the best way. When a statistician pointed out that there was a bias in the numbers. The bullet holes were distributed fairly uniformly across the aircraft except in certain areas. They suggested that instead they armor where there were no bullet holes since those were planes that weren’t making it back.
From the Rogue Family point of view, they probably feel they are backed into a corner. They are basically being exterminated at this point. Ashvalt killed one of the Rogue Family leaders, and Eliana killed another one (even if it was strongly implied it won’t stick with Saldur).
As those were two of the strongest, the rest are probably willing to spend basically unlimited minions on a chance to not get killed (even if its those efforts that are probably going to get them killed).
I think you read the Eliana v Saldur encounter differently than I did. She killed him, and then she used a tracer to track him down so she could make it stick.
You could be right, though – there’s no important family members clearly visible here. They may very well have written all of these minions off, and just gave them orders that would be distracting while they made their very hasty return to Arpon.
I mean, except for Elmon. Elmon put his fate in Ashvalt’s hands. I’m really not sure how that’s going to play out for him. Or, probably more likely at this point, how that played out for him. Whatever happened is probably over by now.
I read it mostly the same way, just that I don’t think she finished him off yet. She definitely planted a tracker on him and may have finished him off screen, I just assumed she hadn’t done that yet.
With Elmon, I think he put himself in Regin’s hands to avoid being in Ashvalt’s hands. Regin is clearly not neutral, but seems to be more diplomatically minded than Ashvalt, and at least in the same ball park of political power, if not magic power.
I get the impression that Eliana deciding to kill Saldur was her own initiative rather than Regin’s idea. In fact, one gets the idea that Eliana was killing off Saldur because she viewed him as too dangerous for the rest of the Family Heads, and potentially for her own reasons.
Eliana is a bit of a mysterious character at this point to me. Seems like there is more than meets the eyes with her, and I’m not eliminating that she might be an earlier prototype that was made more like Ila.
We don’t know exactly how Ila was made, but Peter, Mium, and Martin all seemed to think Ila was a dead end despite her being “successful”. One reason for that might be that she is follows a model they’d already used earlier to create Eliana (just wild speculation, but it does seem like there’s some connection there).
It’s also implied that Mium is protecting Eliana even before they made their current deal, though it’s not entirely clear who he sent Ila to protect when Atter hijacked Eliana’s construct.