Comic for Monday, August 24th, 2020
Sorry this turned out a little late. I will continue to blame moving, though there were several factors. Fortunately we do have a buffer again, so next week we should be set.
The speech bubbles are also a little awkwardly placed as I ended up re-scripting parts of this page. This happens occasionally, but this time is a little more awkward placement than usual, but as I was running late didn’t want to redraw too much. Re-scripting doesn’t necessarily mean changing the pages plot, but just sometimes I find the characters say too much or too little, or just don’t necessarily sound in character after rereading it, and here I wanted to do a little tweak.
I am somehow still not done with moving hassle stuff. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through this time. Moving the stuff has turned out to be only 2/3 of the battle and the world is remarkably good a inventing new hassles. Still… almost there.
____
It can be a little confusing to remember who has met who, and who knows who. For example, Tyler and Naomi have only actually met a handful of times, and while Tyler knows who Arkady is, he doesn’t know Arkady particular well. Amy knows both of them much better, but isn’t close to Naomi like Mione is. And we haven’t actually seen Mione for awhile, so who knows when the last time she and Amy talked (though clearly they talked after Mione unproductively interrogated Naomi on why she was working with Peter).
Consequently, Ashvalt knows Naomi better than Tyler does, really.
I will note the it if it seems like the MSB has relatively few true Family scions in it, that would be an accurate perception, and puts Tyler’s comment in some context in the 4th panel. He views Ashvalt’s comment (not entirely inaccurately) as that the Families are taking a more direct interest in Naomi (which is true, though they’ve had some interest in her for awhile, which is what Amy is referring to obliquely via the comment on sports). Tyler is worried someone else is going to recruit Naomi before him, as he doesn’t seem to count her working for Peter already as a conflict of interest there.
I suspect that Tyler views the MSB as something of his base of power as he is in a unique and awkward position of being part of the Families now, but lacking a Family. There are precious few people that would represent a real basis of power he could recruit to bring them more onto the level of the Families, if he wants them to be taken seriously by the Families in the terms the Families tend to understand (powerful mages).
Perhaps he could recruit Ila with cookies though.
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Pedantic editing note: There should be a comma in, “She seems pretty loyal to Peter’s cause, whatever that is.” I would also suggest a slight stress indicator on “that,” either bolding or italics, but that’s probably just my mental voice on how it would be spoken.
On the subject of “only cheating if you get caught,” that goes hand-in-hand with “rules against cheating” in a logical, practical sense: if you don’t get caught, then no rules can be invoked against you because all adding a rule against cheating does is ensure that any cheating results in at least two rules being broken. If you can’t prove the cheating, you can’t prove the rule against cheating was violated, either.
Now, what an official “it’s only cheating if you get caught” rule does is allow otherwise-honest people to guilt-free cheat and consider “being caught” to just be part of the game, rather than feeling like cheating makes their victory invalid. The spoof card game Munchkin has that rule, precisely because it’s designed to emulate a certain kind of bad play behavior in a humorous way. So good-sportsmanship-cheating in that does involve breaking the rules of Munchkin, but laughing and copping to it if you’re caught and stopping doing so.
The conversation from there seems to have gone into the notion of a “fair fight,” which always fascinates me. The definition of “fair” seems to always favor the one demanding the fight be made “fair,” when it’s called up. A thug jumps a scrawny kid, but the kid pulls a weapon to defend himself? The kid didn’t “fight fair.” A ‘fight of champions’ where the apparent underdog uses unconventional tactics to win? He “cheated.”
“Fair” always seems to include the weapons or tools or tactics that the one insisting on a “fair fight” feels they’re best at, in particular if they know the opponent is skilled only in other areas.
I think Ila prefers raw drink powder 🙂
Given the extent sports in this world involve/require magic, I would think they are seen by the Families as a proving ground for comparing magic power, speed, and tactical thinking without the danger real combat would give. Peter clearly thinks the same thing, hence the match between Naomi and Kally….
That may be the first time Naomi ever lost 😀
> Given the extent sports in this world involve/require magic, I would think they are seen by the Families as a proving ground for comparing magic power, speed, and tactical thinking without the danger real combat would give.
They really are; this is why a lot of people seem to know who Naomi is, but Naomi herself probably doesn’t quite get the extent to which that was true. Naomi defeated a lot of the various Family scions of her generation at sports, which isn’t unheard of, but is rare enough in Malsa that it garners attention.
But it is unlikely Naomi understands that exactly. While other people were playing sports with the understanding they were something of an aptitude test, Naomi played them because they were fun, and when she wasn’t have as much fun… she just walked away from them to do something else, which many people in Malsa find perplexing.
Naomi is intelligent, but relatively bad at perceiving the ways in which she tends to stand out, which leads her to be poor at picking up on certain societal or political threads… partially because she just doesn’t care about them most of the time. If she stopped to puzzle about that sort of thing, she might understand it better, but she can be intellectually lazy when it comes to things that don’t seem important to her.
Naomi wouldn’t think twice of beating someone like Arkady in a sporting contest, it wouldn’t even occur to her that it was politically relevant… but it would be (particularly if it happened in an official capacity of tournaments and so forth).
Playing Kally isn’t the first time Naomi has lost – the world is a big place full of many people with many talents after all… but it might be the first time she’s lost to someone roughly her own age that didn’t know how to play the game. Of course, Kally did cheat.
If Kally needed to cheat or not is debatable (and might be something we’ll see more about in not too long, actually). But Kally wasn’t willing to risk losing, and has a fuzzy idea of what fair play involves – it’s one of the differences between how Kally and Naomi fight in general. To Naomi, winning by cheating would be pointless because her idea of fighting is competition. To Kally, winning meanings not dying, so you win and you win as hard as possible as fast as possible. Obviously Kally did understand it was a game, so wasn’t treating it like a fight, but Kally doesn’t play many games, so her understanding of what would be cheating or not to win would be a little fuzzy.
Kally’s understanding of cheating doesn’t seem any fuzzier than Peter’s.
I think Peter understands cheating very well. He just doesn’t view it as bad.
“[C]heating isn’t against the rules, being *caught* is. If you don’t even know *what* she did, that’s not exactly *catching* her do it.”
Accurate, in my experience. While a rule forbidding cheating probably exists somewhere, I have never encountered one.
I’ve encountered them. That having been said, the people who enforce these rules aren’t exactly popular, especially since in many cases, their idea of cheating is “winning when you’re the underdog.” Accusing underdogs of cheating when it’s not clear that they did tends to cause hard feelings beyond just the person who knows they didn’t actually cheat.
That having been said, I’ve not encountered such people outside of contexts in which they have limited power. For example, I ran into a high school coach like that. Oddly enough, his team faired rather poorly in competition for some reason, despite him stacking his team with athletes who were from families with high reputations in sports. It’s almost like he passed up on enthusiastic underdogs with unexpected talent who were sufficiently interested in competing in sports and whose parents were sufficiently supportive of said interests to move to school districts with better coaches. Of course, that can’t possibly be it. Those runts clearly had to cheat to get on those teams.
Sigh.
“If Kally needed to cheat or not is debatable (and might be something we’ll see more about in not too long, actually).”
Woohoo! Kelly / Naomi rematch on,the horizon!
Whether or not Kally needed to cheat depends on your definition of ‘need’. Judging from the previous four points, the results without cheating would be pretty close to a coinflip.
Dry drink powder is difficult to consume. It goes down much better when mixed with water. Say, 1-4 parts drink powder to 1 part water. In general, the higher the sugar percentage in the drink powder, the less water you need. No, 5 parts sugar to 1 part water will *not* dissolve the sugar. But it’ll get it wet enough it’ll be fairly easy to chug. (I do not remember exact ratios, as I am more than twice the age I was when I last made Hi C mix slurry and drank/ate it.)
Why, yes, I *do* have ADHD, including the sugar-stimulated feature that’s not as much of a given with ADHD as some people would have you believe. Nor is it the complete rubbish others would have you believe, since they just came to their conclusion from only being exposed to the other set.
Making use of sugar as a stimulant was pretty much required for me to get through college, since I’d consumed so much caffeine from over-indulging in caffeinated sugary beverages that I’d apparently rendered myself temporarily immune to caffeine. For me, sugar doesn’t appear to have such a limit. Though there *is* a limit to how much my body will accept… which is probably a big part of why I don’t have diabetes now. But the sugar acceptance limit appears to only kick in sometime after I’m bouncing off the walls hyper.
I suspect those limitations may not apply to androids with a strong preference for tasty food 🙂
The easiest way to tell if someone is ADD (and ADHD, of course) is to give them caffene and see if it calms them down. The ADD medications, Aderall and Ritilan etc., are nothing less than time-delayed stimulants. They are even under the same type of legal restrictions as Speed. People with ADD and ADHD are defined as being distractable while the H (for hyperactivity) determines how they deal with that distractability.
Sugar has weird effects on people with ADD because the issue isn’t with the body’s physical energy control or distribution, it is with the brain’s “gear shiftier”. People with ADD can take in and process vast amounts of diverse information but getting them to stick with one thing despite the distractions is the real issue. The medications speed up mental processes by increasing blood flow (and nutrient distribution) to the brain, including in that part of the brain that is often overly taxed. This allows for hyper focus if the person is ADD or letting the natural processes of being “jazzed up” happen otherwise.
A lot of people who are diagnosed as ADD really aren’t, they lack the mental pull towards diverse inputs that are the hallmark of the disorder; rather they just are held back from focusing for some other reason. The most common, unfortunately, is assumed to be laziness; but a lack of diet, sleep, and internal distractions are also common. Unfortunately these are often hard to diagnose since no single person needs the exact same things, such as how dietary needs can vary wildly in things so seemingly basic as necessary caloric intake for their body weight due to differing metabolisms. More troublingly, things leading to a lack of sleep or other outside distractions are often things that people tend to hide (even if it is little more than a gaming or reading addiction). Finding a bad home situation or outright abuse in these false ADD cases is not uncommon.
Strangely enough there is growing evidence that ADD is not actually a disorder but rather a difference in natural mindset and learning style. The issue is that it does not fit well with the “sit down quietly in a room and learn this one thing for this one hour then immediately switch to the next thing” style of most schools. People with ADD tend to be above average intelligence and have the ability to integrate new and diverse information well beyond that. Their focus on subjects of interest, for periods of time, is unmatched but their kinesthetic (hands on) style of learning, especially for the ADHD variant, causes them to significantly under preform their true capabilities.
One successful method of learning for this type of person is to take an area of some interest and then do a deep dive into learning and utilizing the subject matter over a period of time tending to be no less than a few hours. Take some time to decompress, usually with food or sleep, and then dive back into another hours long session. The biggest issues tend to be finding ways for the subjects to be immediately utilized, as opposed to them being treated as foundational ideas that are only useful as building blocks for later use, and engendering the initial interest in the subject with the student.
It feels to me like there’s two ways to get an attention deficit:
1. Have a lower than usual amount of ability to focus.
2. Noticing too much.
I tend towards the latter. Not as bad as the depictions of Sherlock Holmes’ attention in some ways, but then, on the other hand, worse than they could really show, because by zooming in on things, they suggest that movement in ones peripheral vision isn’t distracting. And, for what it’s worth, I have found caffeine to be more relaxing than stimulating.
Personally, I don’t generally feel like I need to get hands on to learn something. But I do come up with a lot of possible associations I want to verify before I forget them that other people tend to not understand why they’re potentially interesting.
I have had instructors who managed to hit those points fairly soon after bringing up the information that made me wonder about them, and encountered documents which managed to predict more or less what questions I’d come up with. Both of those options worked well for me to have a good learning experience without really needing interaction. But that’s very rare, because even people with awareness surplus disorder don’t always come up with the same questions… especially if we have the more commonly discussed ASD as well.
One bag of chocolate chip cookies, Ila: “I’m listening”; 2 bags, Ila “Sounds interesting”; 3 bags, “OK, so if I keep listening do I keep getting more cookies?”. ALL THE COOKIES later, Weber “Um, Miss Ila, you ate all the cookies.” Ila, “Well yes, I did say I wanted the cookies.”
“and now I get MORE cookies, OBVIOUSLY…”
Um, I know this is a weird question, but does Illa poop? We know that she can take in energy through sugar, but how does a robot body get rid of the waste products or does it simply use some type of matter annihilation process that is near 100% efficient for a type of mass to energy conversion.
This question obviously applies to all the F series, including MIUM and his ‘gross’ bars as well.
There are a number of ways to handle this.
The first is the Star Wars/Star Trek (along with many other works of science fiction) which essentially says that certain bodily functions will not be displayed or discussed, nor will the facilities used for carrying out such functions. With a few exceptions going by the rule of funny. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/main/ruleoffunny
In the Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, R. Daneel Olivaw contained a removable container that could be emptied into some type of disposal device (toilet, garbage can, etc.). Since it was not acted upon chemically, he once mentioned that the food was still edible, if anybody was hungry. In Ila’s case, the food is digested chemically so the remains of the food would no longer be edible. R. Daneel had internal mechanisms to emulate the excretion of liquid, but not solid, waste. I believe that Doctor Mir would consider the emulation of solid waste excretion a ridiculous waste of her time.
We do know bathrooms themselves exist in the world, as we saw Peter fixing his hair in what appeared to be one in the last arc.
For the more localized question of Ila and Mium, I would guess that if they eat human food, they’d need some sort of disposal mechanism. I think the entire point of Mium’s food was that it was just ultimately efficient food for what the prototypes need to run. Ila doesn’t like it though, so eats human food, and even if they can likely process more of their food than humans due to higher efficiency, it seems unlikely the process of eating human food would be 100% efficient, just because of what is in it.
I would go as far to say that the prototypes are pretty human like though. It is likely they physical age/grow to an extent (which might explain why Ila eats so much… I think it was also mentioned that prototypes need more energy than humans). They can also bleed, and Ila at least seems to need sleep and oxygen.
Hahahahahaha
Yes yes yesssssss
Cookies, and punching bad guys.
Be careful though, Naomi may want ALL THE COOKIES.
Of course she would share with Ila, but still…
-meoi lass
(Theory I’ve had for a long time:
Naomi is actually related to Ashvalt. And/or, he made her through genomancy and other wizardry. Secret hidden child?)
I was under the impression Naomi was “just” a designer child that happened to work out much better than expected. That said, it seems fairly reasonable to suspect that the process to make a designer child makes use of genes or the equivalent which are commonly found in Family members. That could very easily mean she’s effectively related to the Families even without any illicit between the sheets (or on top of the sheets or wherever seemed sufficiently interesting at the time) action.
I also got the idea somewhere that the Families have been doing something like the designer child thing for a lot longer than Egenus has been in business. That said, I think they’ve been more of the, “let’s try this one gene here and oh, maybe this other one over there” approach, where the designer child approach is more of a, “You want an improved child? Sure, name all the things you want your child to be extra good at. Want a particular body feature or shape? Want several? Why not all of them? It’s only money…” approach.
Given time, the former adds up to a formidable set of capabilities, and the risk at each step is minimal. There’s still some risk, just not that much. The latter approach can make somebody formidable, too, but there’s a lot of unknowns, and you could wind up with someone who’s rather less fortunate than Eliana as a result. Possibly not even with the power she was supposed to get, either. (“We’re sorry to hear your crippled daughter is attacked by demons every night. We promised she’d probably be able to conjure. We didn’t promise she’d be able to learn to control it.”)
I like to think it happened in the elevator.
It probably did. Though, I think only Past knows for sure.
“This fellow with the almighty AI is working with Naomi? Well that’s a relief; he can’t be all bad then.”
… took me longer to parse than I liked …
It’s fair enough; Naomi sees herself as a paladin, and wouldn’t put up with working with a bad guy, even for expediency…
Fortunately, she doesn’t appear to be quite as lawful stupid as most paladins I’ve encountered.
Maybe. she is intelligent, but a lot of the characters are both intelligent and a bit oblivious to social cues. Was reading PU expounding on the social implications of competition above with interest 🙂
I feel like a lot of people are both intelligent and a bit oblivious to social cues. Even the people who complain to me about my obliviousness to social cues tend to be oblivious to some social cues – just not necessarily the same ones I am. (I have met a few people who complained to me about my obliviousness about social cues, despite the fact the only social cues they seemed to be aware of were the ones they were intentionally providing. Which tended to be fairly obscure, according to a panel of other people around me at the time.)
On some level, a sufficiently advanced intellect sees the social cues, and rejects them as irrelevant before the conscious mind even gets a chance to act on them.
Come to the Dark Side, we have cookies!
… Later, in a darker place…
Are you surprised that we lied about the cookies?
Lying to either Naomi or Ila about cookies would end up being extremely dangerous. . . .
I feel like Naomi has a sense of proportion about the cookies.
– Would not join the dark side for cookies.
– Would not obliterate the entire Dark Side in retaliation for being lied to about the cookies.
Naomi tends to be very reasonable like that. Sure, she may *like* cookies, but she doesn’t go overboard for them. Well, not unless there were literal cookies literally thrown literally overboard, in which case, sure, she’d dive in for them. I mean, who wouldn’t? They’re cookies. Well, OK, if it’s salt water, I wouldn’t, but that’s largely because I have a low tolerance for salt.
I would add a comma in panel 4: “the families probably would, considering…”
It sometimes hits me how little time has really passed during the events of the comic. The whole comic has been… two-three weeks?
Tyler meeting Naomi again with more context should be interesting. Last time he didn’t quite seem to know what to know what to make of her, but this time he’ll be going in more prepared.
He seems to have a good instinct for how to get people to work with him; I’m not sure cookies will work (I do not think Naomi has talked about what she eats) but bad guys to punch sounds like he has gotten it a little figured out.
He may be a little confused due to Naomi hunting for treats for Ila.
That said, it’s possible right now they’d both at least be willing to listen to a recruiting pitch in exchange for a sufficient quantity of sufficiently sugary goodness.
I’m curious whether Tyler’s first line in the second panel is an excuse to get stories straight, or if he genuinely has some confusion about the sequence of events.
I think it’s a deliberate dodge to avoid Ashvalt’s question. While I think it was meant to be subtle to a third party, probably because he didn’t want to antagonize a sometimes ally too much, I think it was meant to be an obvious dodge to Ashvault. No, not now; maybe I will answer you later.
Or maybe just a sense of obligation; Naomi literally saved his life, and may not want Ashvalt to know she was involved. It would seem reasonable for Tyler to check with her before disclosing anything to Ashvalt (while of course the Consul would be told immediately if she asked, but she almost certainly knows already)
That’s a good point. Tyler still can’t be 100% sure which team everyone is playing for.
Well… let’s do an experiment. Who wants to volunteer?
We’ll shoot you with a high caliber pistol. And then freeze your wound. And introduce you to people you’ve met rarely, or never, before. Later, you can remember all those people, who they were, what they looked like, where they were in proximity to you physically and politically?
The fact is she wasn’t threatening him. He needed to focus on threats to himself, so he wasn’t, probably, concerned with who his “ally” was, but only “if” she was an ally.
Mium would be concerned with all that, but humans have a limited focus.
I’m not liking this experiment. It sounds painful.
No! Not again!
This sounds even worse than the crossbow bolt one. Just no already!
That said, I’m pretty sure I can extrapolate the answers to your questions from the last time.
– Can remember? Sort of.
– Who they were? In a sense. Probably not the one you’re thinking.
– What they looked like? I bet you’re one of those people who likes 3D reality snaps. Those can be difficult on a good day. Just in case you can’t determine this on your own, I’ll tell you: this was not a good day. But as a 4.5D mana blot? Sure. No problem. They were all pretty distinctive.
– Where they were in proximity to you physically? Absofrickinlutely, to the bloody inch. (Back then, a lot of people used inches.)
– Where they were in proximity to you politically? This is one of those things that’s a lot easier to tell from looking at a 4.5D mana blot. And they really, really weren’t. But they were at odds with some people with crossbow bolts that didn’t really care at all about me personally, apart from where I happened to be, despite the fact that they didn’t leave any signs to that effect. That was quite enough for me.
– Re: she wasn’t threatening him. She? What’s this she business? I mean, if you’ve ever looked at a 4.5D mana blot… I mean, that’s a thing that you may be able to figure out for *some* people, But not really any of those people.
(Disclaimer: I’m not really quite this crazy, but sometimes it’s fun to reply to crazy things with crazy things.)
Personally, I think I’d have answered the same as Tyler in this particular case, because I understand perceptions made while in a state of shock are untrustworthy at best, and he was in a double state of shock. Sure, he may have innate ice powers, but I’m sure freezing his wound did not do anything to signal his body that everything was once more OK.
There’s also another aspect of it: Tyler was shot by someone he probably thought was a trusted ally (despite Peters words of caution from chapter 8, page 17, which weren’t really directed at Tyler or worded as advising caution). After something like that, you take a bit of extra time to reassess everybody. Naomi almost certainly passed that reassessment with flying colors, to the extent he was confident it was her. Amy? Maybe; they have been through a lot together. He probably trusts the Consul herself because he’s firmly on her side, she knows it, and she has no reason to attack others who are apparently on her side, too. Everybody else? That’s probably still on the TODO list. Especially whomever this guy is.
I mean, we have 6 updates where I think Tyler and Ashvalt are in the same room, but only 3 of them actually show both of them, and exactly none of them are in a context where Tyler could get a proper introduction. Amy certainly knows who he is, but I’m less certain about Tyler.
Even if Tyler recognizes him as a known ally, it doesn’t seem like he’d know him well. Before chapter 15, we didn’t know Ashvalt at all. But we could guess based on how well people know his son. Tyler and Arkady are on two pages together. Completely different scenes both times. (6/1, aka comic for Monday, March 14, Peter’s already at the MSB, while Arkady’s finding that Peter left Naomi sleeping in Lisa and Mione’s care. 15/22, Tyler’s talking with the mages and the Consul while Arkady’s stumbling upon where Naomi’s waiting for him.)
I don’t know this comic that well…
But first, Marc didn’t shoot Tyler. His girlfriend did. This, however small, is an important distinction.
If Tyler saw the black haired girl rip off Acalia’s (spelling?) arm, (which by his own assertion, he did) then the list of known (to Tyler) people the black haired girl could be is rather short. (In fact, probably just her, Naomi.)
Ashvalt has the opinion Naomi took Tyler to the hospital. On what grounds did he base his opinion? And why did he reveal his “secret knowledge” to Tyler? I think it was to indicate Ashvalt understands the “power of friendship” quite well and probably understands Naomi’s relationship to Peter better than anyone else in the comic.
Correct, Acalia shot Tyler. But it was my impression that Marc hung out with Acalia a lot, and Marc hung out with Tyler a lot, beyond just the MSB stuff. She’s around the age of the crowd of people the MSB are part of, and many of them are Family members. As such, it’s likely that Tyler was familiar with Acalia, more than just being able to add her surname without anyone telling him between then and chapter 15, page 21.
Sure, she’s a member of the Exiled Families. But it’s my impression that this is “exile lite”, where these people are certainly not popular with the current administration and are not happy about the current administration, but they don’t need to fear the administration when coming to a large Family meeting on short notice in the capital. They’re probably not “exiled on pain of death”, to be “shot on sight” if they ever return. Considering the mechanisms of how that stuff works in this world, that would probably not work very well in any event.
I seem to recall reading the Exiled Family members even send their children to Levenworth. It’s possible that Acalia has graduated, but it’s my impression that of the Exiled Family members, she’s probably the one who got around the most, for some odd reason. Maybe she didn’t demonstrate her power openly very often, but the Kardus did point out once she started using her power in the open, people would know it was her, with or without a helmet.
I don’t think that Tyler was necessarily aware enough to have clearly noticed the arm getting ripped off (on chapter 15, page 22 he did not indicate which limb), but Marc recognized her and name-dropped before that. It wasn’t clear what Tyler’s condition was at that point, apart from ‘shot’ and ‘self-triaged’, but I would guess his hearing was still working fine. It’s also not clear how much perception he has of eidos, but I get the feeling that Naomi in action presents a rather distinctive eidos fingerprint. Similarly, I would guess Acalia in motion presents a rather distinctive eidos fingerprint.
Tyler has not mentioned since waking up that he noted Naomi’s social faux pas, but he’s not really been in a position *to* indicate that, So I’ve no idea if he noted the black hair or not.
I hope we might learn more about Tyler’s actual perceptions if Tyler gets a chance to talk to Naomi alone, and Past depicts it.