Comic for Monday, April 12th, 2021
So, as it’s a ridiculously late a perfectly reasonable time of day, I’ll keep this short.
Miko’s comment on the hair. Given that was apparently back in 2018, I won’t expect people to remember that Miko had intended to get it cut before being seen by Peter. In Miko’s defense, there’s been a lot to worry about in that time period.
Anyway… g’night. Or hopefully g’morning by the time you see this, unless you are in a part of the world where being awake at the time this posted is even a tiny bit reasonable.
Oh, and as for the comments… I know something is screwy with them (replies going to the top level instead of who you replied to), but not sure what. I don’t think I changed anything, not sure why they suddenly don’t work correctly. There is two ways to fix it so your comment appears as a reply correctly:
- Hit reply twice. When the reply box is under the comment you are replying to, it will work.
- Click “Comments” under the page (next to the buttons). This will put your in the comments, and clicking reply will work like normal.
I don’t see an obvious way to fix it, as I don’t know what’s wrong with it… it’s just the basic largely unmodified word press comments for the most part, not sure if other sites are having the same issue or if it’s somehow unique to mine yet, haven’t had a chance to look into it too much.
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There are a number of things that the Javascript/ECMAScript defines as undefined, but people try to add code that will determine the actual behavior for different combinations of operating systems and browsers and then try to make it consistent. Of course, that means that updates to the operating system and browser can make them inconsistent instead. I’ve often found it best to rely on the behavior of the system being usable rather than try to force the system to do something else.
By the way, the reason they refused to define the behavior for certain circumstances is often because they knew that it would cause problems.
Why does this remind me of a magician’s act I once saw where the guy repeatedly demonstrated that there were absolutely *no* cards hidden up his right sleeve, seemingly trying to do everything he could to avoid revealing what was up his left sleeve. There was a snake up his left sleeve. The cards actually were up his right sleeve, he just managed to hide them well. Well, *some* of the cards. Others were hidden around the set.
Been awhile, but unfortunately update will be late. I’d expect it be end of day tomorrow (monday).
True, but using an autocaster when he doesn’t need one would ALSO be very Peter. If he ever shows his hand, it’s to distract from the cards up his sleeve…
Miko doesn’t seem to count herself among “people”. It is interesting and a bit sad how Miko just assumes everyone that is not her and Peter is out to get them. A bit messed up, that kid.
Also somewhat interesting that she *does* include Ila.
I mean, it fits how Mium has described her, so it’s not like it’s *surprising*, but still.
I remembered about Miko saying she should cut her hair so Peter wouldn’t ask uncomfortable questions the moment Peter brought it up in that second-to-last panel. I was all “Oh yeah! She said she was going to cut her hair before he saw her!”
Concerning Peter using magic… Maybe he has an autocaster (he’s been known to make them IIRC)…
Miko seemed to be trying to move it into the air, then have it float there somewhat stationary. Peter seems to have just locked down it’s spacial coordinates so it can’t move (relative to the planet, or the table, or whatever)
His speech, about how the calculations get more fuzzy as the Edios Key does it’s thing, means I wouldn’t be surprised if he could do magic on his own without an autocaster as long as it’s restricted to a single relatively “simple” calculation, with anything more than that messing too much with the way he thinks.
Miko is probably having a similar problem – she’s relying too much on the pure calculations and not the “instinct” that most mages seem to use. The difference being that Peter seems to know he’s unsuited, and well, he doesn’t really need to cast spells himself with all the pawns he keeps around for those situations.
As far comment threading, my experience is that using a script blocker consistently fails to thread properly unless I disable it, so there’s probably something bad about the javascript associated with the comment software.
The traditional issue with replies that we had to deal with here is that the URL for the reply link is not based off of the page link. I don’t know if that is the root cause behind the current behavior, but I expect that the current issue is related somehow.
At least before posting, the presentation looks consistent. From the page for the specific comic, the reply link has the expected visual effect, but from the main page, it just takes you to the normal comment block on the page for the specific comic.
I can see two fairly simple solutions.
The first is to dynamically generate the reply link based off of the URL the person used to see the page, rather than where the page actually sits. For example, if I were viewing it from the main page and tried to reply to Meoi Lass’s first comment on this page, the link would be http://pastutopia.com/?replytocom=70280#respond.
The alternate solution would be easier to implement, but would frustrate people who wanted to bookmark the main page. That would be to have the main page just redirect to the current comic instead.
For likely to be fairly complicated solution, one could change the wordpress code so that the page rendered from going to the comic page with a `?replytocom` parameter by moving the comment block in the HTML, with any other tweaks to the form that would normally be made by the client script code to place the comment there. Of course, one would need to test that one could then reply to a different comment after either hitting cancel or posting that response, because changing the HTML the browser got could change the underlying assumptions in the client script code fairly drastically.
Note that I don’t do web development anymore, and even when I did, I considered ECMAscript to be intolerably inconsistent so I avoided it whenever I could. (Which basically translates to I never wrote any of it from scratch, because I could always figure out a way to make my effects happen from server side code.)
My main concern is that it seems to have gotten worse – it used to work sort of spotty, and now just doesn’t ever work without clicking twice or going to the comments first.
I dunno how badly I want to delve into the WordPress code as it’ll just nuke any changes when it updates anyway unless I fiddle with it a lot. Having to click reply twice isn’t the worst thing I guess, it’s just not particularly intuitive. Seems like WordPress comments should probably work better than that, and I’m under the general impression that they do work for other folks, but I haven’t had much time to look into it yet.
I know there are a number of software products that are touted as working well out of the box, but simply do not. Instead, everybody who is using them successfully has made a number of fixes to crap the package has gotten wrong, and most of them have fixed the same 5-8 major bugs, but have all fixed them in different ways.
This tends to be more frequently a thing with commercial products that are open source.
WordPress could be one of these for all I know. :/
The biggest issue I have with any Javascript variant is its forced pollution of the global symbol table.
As Delta-V pointed out, something changed. Likely your hosting company updated something that fixed a bug that some piece of your site was leveraging as an undocumented feature. It could be a browser update, but so many of us on what I assume is a wide variety of platforms saw it at perry much the end time.
TGape, if you’ve ever looked under the hood of WordPress? I use it a lot myself, but I’ve never seen such a patchwork of code that still manages to hold the apex predator position in its econiche. I might be making up words now.
None of the above is intended to be construed as advice. I’m just attempting compassion and empathy. If it didn’t come across that way… well I don’t claim to be skilled at it.
Test response. Testing.
In which we see that even at her snarkiest, Miko is still no match for Peter. ^^
@Past: I’ve run into the reply glitch problem before, but not on WoirdPress. My go to supposition is that if some feature suddenly starts acting up, it usually means that someone, somewhere, has discovered A Better Way To Do Things. I suppose hacking is not out of the question, but most hackers have the good taste not to fiddle with such little stuff….
Of COURSE it’s blatantly cheating. It’s Peter, it’s what he does…
Hmmm, did Peter have an apple AND an autocaster in his pocket? With Peter’s tendency to use distraction and misdirection, this is a distinct possibility. However, just because we don’t see Peter using magic doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t. Perhaps he is just very, very good at hiding his ability.
Peter also states here that he believes the use of an Eidos key actually hinders, not helps, the performance of magic calculations, because it translates inaccurately. That hints at the idea of performing magic directly, not via the key, which may be how Ila and Mium’s new platform can do magic without one.
It feels notable that this comment was made on this page when we’re finally actually seeing Peter using magic.
In this case, I think the autocaster was in Peter’s pocket. The “apple” was in his “pocket”.
We might do be on the same page here, but if it looks like Peter is finally doing magic, my money is on Peter is definitely not doing magic.
First off:
Panel 2, first sentence “…made of up small simple…”
Should be “…made up of small, simple…”
And secondly, I remember miko’s hair. How could I forget? Wait…’18..
Was that really 3 years ago?!
Anyway, absolutely beautiful. Stunning. Thank you.
Peters explanation is great, and pretty much fits everything I assumed and knew about this form of magic.
I suspect a tree for the calculation he is using would look something like:
Edos
-write to local layer
-edit object properties
–object:”pen”
—properties
—-position: ~ ~ ~ ~
—-weight: (mass•gravitational_atraction)-(mass•gravitational_atraction)
—-velocity: 30kph
-translate
–write to edos
Anyway, that’s just how I would mentally express it. I hope that comes out of the comment mechinery right. If not… It’s going to be horrible.
I hope you get some sleep, Past. Again. Thank you so much for the story and art!
-meoi
Fixed, thanks 🙂