Comic for Monday, December 3rd, 2018
Dec03
Am still sick. 🙁
There is part II of Tyler’s story for patrons here.
There is the traditional very important December poll below.
Still working on getting buffer. We are about half a comic buffered right now, which is pretty good considering I guess.
I am pretty sure that the idea of Naomi have ‘a list’ of ‘things to punch’ came from the comments, but I guess it stuck with me and is official now. I just wonder if this guy is higher or lower on it than Physics?
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I’ve had a sudden realization. I didn’t really think about this much before, because it didn’t seem to matter, since Naomi’s going to win the poll and the other thing never stood a chance…
But when you say Atter’s Monster, which one do you mean? The dragon he’s sort of merged with most of the time, the two-headed beast he sent after Peter, the sometimes scorpion-like thing that Nathan was fighting, the arachnid that Naomi fought, or the eye thing that Mium blew up with the bomb on his old tank?
Fortunately, I probably don’t have to figure that out either.
Does Naomi have a reverse list?
Also, the vote incentive is nice. And I don’t need context.
PS: I know that many of you are clever people, and that cheating on the poll isn’t that hard, but how about not doing that. Or at least cheat better so I don’t know about it, as otherwise I’m obligated to revert your votes and takes effort 🙁 . I’m not naming names for now, but I do have a pretty good idea who are you are…
If you want to vote for a character that got added late (like the Consul) I’m not going to count that as cheating, but if you vote for the same character 10 in the space of three minutes, that’s going to get a 🙁 from me.
Is that why Naomi always wins? . . .
Unlikely, it’s not what the person here was voting for. I keep a loose eye on the votes to ensure nothing blatant happens and the vast majority of the votes look legit. I just wanted to head this behavior off at the head, as while I get they were probably just being silly, it’s a fair bit of effort to revert invalidate votes without resetting the poll.
Naomi does get voted on a lot more by the silent majority voters (people that don’t comment) but that’s actually sort of expected, as she’s sort of the mascot character, while people that have read/commented longer mostly just want to see her lose at this point, haha (or, more fairly, just want variety or have picked a more niche favorite character).
Or are just voting for something they think will make the world burn.
The character that should be drawn wearing a Santa Hat this year is…the Consul. I think we need a write-in campaign.
I added the Consul to the Poll, but I don’t honestly know if people can change their vote once they’ve voted. Let me know.
Was hoping to find The Consul in the poll. I like her. And Kally. And Saria.
You have to understand – the Consul has better things to do with her time. Like wearing Santa hats for people who can actually vote to keep her in office. Besides, Past can’t include either the Consul or Saria in the poll; they could possibly win! If that happened, Naomi could leak the bridgepoint data to us and we’d all be able to make bridgepoints to PastUtopia’s home and wreck his privacy. I mean, I’d certainly respect his privacy and ignore it, but there are some people… I think Glider would go and pester him whenever the comic’s late.
I don’t think either of them would beat Naomi, but I guess we will never know now. The Consul definitely would have fit the bill as a more humorous option.
I am surprised how well Amy is doing though for a fairly minor character.
I suspect that it because she features in Tyler’s Story.
Hmm. Here’s a bit of dialog to point out a possible flaw.
Fake Ironman: “Control, primary objective complete: Bridgepoint data deleted.”
Control: “Uh, I know what the primary objective is. I’m the one who gave it to you. Why are you repeating it out loud like a moron?”
Either the primary objective had multiple options, multiple objectives, deleting the Bridgepoint data wasn’t the primary objective, or the author goofed slightly. Wonder which? …Wait. It says the primary objective has been RETRIEVED. You don’t retrieve something by only deleting it. Maybe Kor’s World didn’t have the Bridgepoint data and it’s useful to them?
Just because Kor’s World could open a bridgepoint to Central doesn’t necessarily mean they could open bridgepoints *from* Central to any other world that Central connects to.
My guess is it means the primary objective had two parts, with the second part being multiple choice. They wanted the data. But there was a question of what about the data that remained. If there were signs that the data had been copied, deleting one copy would be of little utility. It would be more useful for them, in that case, to corrupt the data, preferably via replacing it with faulty data that looked plausible and satisfied its file integrity checks, so that this would put into question what data was right. But that complication wasn’t apparently needed, so rm –wipe bridgepoint.dat.
This seems to me like they wished to go through Central en mass, and were temporarily stymied by Central being able to fight them off. It’s possible, having that data, they will now be able to open a bridgepoint to Central, and then immediately open a bridgepoint to a third place they were ultimately wanting to go.
More likely, the bridgepoint data wasn’t actually complete when Acalia stole it. If that’s the case, Kor’s World hasn’t won yet, but they’re a lot closer than they had been.
My guess is Mium was the secondary objective – but they only encountered F8 before, so F5 didn’t register as the virus person while the virus person wasn’t controlling it.
F5 and F8 look about the same, I just suspect he doesn’t match recognition passed out in a hallway to black hair. People see what they expect to see, even if they are watching for something. No one would expect to find Mium’s prototype passed out in a hallway with black hair wearing a ‘generic mook’ suit.
I think a lot of the Bridgepoint speculation depends on if Kor’s World already knows how to make them. I had always assumed they used on to invade Central originally, and that is where the IDS got the idea. I can see why Kor’s World would definitely not want anyone else to have them either way though.
It is also worth nothing that Bridgepoint data CAN be stolen, corrupted, etc. There has to be something in there the people researching it cannot just remake or reproduce from knowing how it works. If it was just a blueprint the IDS made, it could remade if they still had the people that made it.
You’re right, it’s probably more the passed out, dressed like a mook, with black hair. Additionally, second hand knowledge, as the soldier is not the minion.
As far as whether Kor’s World invaded Central with a prototype – the prototypes came from Dr. Martin. I have the feeling that Dr. Martin is from Kor’s World, and he left because he was wanting to do research that their laws forbade.
If the Bridgepoint Data included a specific sort of reading taken from both sides of hundreds of gates opened up from Central to various places, it may be something that could be reproduced, but it would take a while. What if it’s thousands or tens of thousands? This could be especially problematic if they’re wanting to make a bridgepoint to a world that they don’t have significant travel going to or from it normally because of the difficulty in doing normal gates to it. At this point, recreating the data would probably skew towards learning how to make a bridgepoint to a secondary choice where they do have a lot of commerce going, so they can leverage the commercial gates.
@PastUtopia Query is missing from the poll. Maybe that can be a sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer.
Haha, a gross oversight there. I just sort of typed out a random list of characters and ones I thought would be funny, as I wanted to see what would happen if I let people vote for multiple characters. So far the results have been interesting, if not particularly surprising.
We can now confirm that xenophobia, if not paranoia, is part of the motivation for Kor’s World. They’re attacking Malsa for bridgepoint coordinates. They don’t want anyone to know where they are, or where they’ve been.
Ok, So I know that half of everyone is going to vote for Naomi, but I have a proposition for everyone: Vote for Rovak too! Because Naomi and Rovak in Santa hats doing Naomi and Rovak stuff would be hilarious!
(also Illa failing to make it look normal, Fluffy trying to eat it, Kally trying to stop fluffy… Maybe others like Magnolia or Mium 6 with his above normal Mium levels of snark… etc…)
Other people’s opinions?
#IVoted #RovakForSantaHat
Wait… KORS WORLD wants the Bridgepoint data? Or at least wants it gone? Uh… FUDGE, now I think we can say that they are Peter’s primary enemies.
I would have thought the soldier would have a more sophisticated method for determining breathing/life.
Evidently not.
Meanwhile… “transmit data for analysis” rather than “trasmit…”
Naomi is doing more than just holding her breath in panels 3-8, it’s just not really expounded on because of paneling reasons and whatnot. She views things like her heart stopping to be a more perturbing than fatal in the short term. A detailed scan would probably show her brain behaving pretty abnormally for a dead person, but that’s a little harder to get on the fly.
Ultimately the… least believable part of the transitional time from “alive” to “dead” as people don’t usually just kneel over and die instantly, but it appears the Kor’s World Soldier chalked that up to excessive lethality of the gas in the air.
As for the typo… oops. I’ll fix the typo in the morning, thanks 🙂
Huh. Why would she feign defeat? She was winning, it looked like. Did she plant a tracker or tracer on him somehow? That seems outside her MO, but if Peter gave her something….
I wondered if her power would continue to increase in measure to what was used against her. If so, I wondered if the weight on top of her, rather than crushing her, would ultimately lead to knocking her through the floor to fresh air below. The story didn’t turn in that direction.
She probably has limits to how well she can survive the lethal gas. Doing an exercise routine while holding ones breath is generally not recommended. It’s a much better plan to consider ones survival, so one can report back later, *or* get abducted to a safer environment.
How would Kor’s World have responded if she had defeated the operative? They tend to be very “proactive” in dealing with anything they perceive as a threat. I don’t know if Naomi would think things through like that, but, in retrospect, it’s much better if they think she’s dead. Mium did something similar (burying himself underground) to try to avoid that kind of collateral damage.
Naomi uses Feign Death.
It is Super Effective!
This is Naomi. I’m shocked she has something besides *Smile* and *Punch*.
That’s only because you’re affected by her greatest power, Feign Ignorance. She’s done a bunch of stuff.
If you’re teasing, then: Of course! I wouldn’t want her to switch to Punching. (and to be honest, I get really worried when she uses Smiling.)
If you’re not teasing, then: I was quoting someone else’s description of Naomi. It went something like “Naomi has only two modes – smiling and punching…and she wasn’t smiling.”
I’m not teasing, I know the quote. The character who made the quote knew better. She was attempting to tell someone to back off in the most expedient, if not necessarily 100% factual manner. The audience was not meant to take it as gospel.
Naomi has demonstrated many more abilities besides punch and smile. One of these days I’ll get to updating the wiki with stuff like that. That said, her page already shows some of those things, because anyone with an account can update it, and PastUtopia will give any seriously interested non-spammer a wiki account on request, if I’m not mistaken.
She likes to project a facade of being a straightforward brawler just so that she can catch people completely off guard when she pulls this kind of stunt, doesn’t she?
I know that *I* keep forgetting how keen she actually is whenever she gets her manic fightin’ grin on.
It has been noted several times she is actually very smart and her air-headed attitude is entirely a put on. It’s scary that it works on us, even though we’ve seen proof of it several times.
She probably recognized she wasn’t going to win that fight and decided the gas was a good enough cover to drop out.
I don’t think she acts air-headed. She just acts carefree (with a side of maniacal). If you think about it, she fights smart basically always. You can’t play tennis (even magic tennis) if you are just going berserk.
It is just she doesn’t scheme like Peter does, but that is at least in part because she just knows he’s better at it and doesn’t want to interfere unless he’s violating her moral codes. And if being a worse schemer than Peter qualifies someone as airheaded, we are all doomed.
That honestly might be the most terrifying thing about her; she’s not just a brawler that insists on picking fights with gravity and extraterrestrial supersoldiers.
Things like ignoring lethal gas by reinforcing her body and slowing her metabolism, sleeping off a sniper round or using a mana pulse as sonar might just be because she’s a magical savant but you can’t ever tell for sure.
I’m beginning to suspect that she might pick fights with gravity because its one of the few things that constantly beats her.
Gravity doesn’t constantly beat her. It just manages to get some hits in now and then. (That is, yes, it always pulls her down, but never hard enough to actually hurt her.)
Gravity plays the long game and always wins in the end. Naomi has managed to land some solid hits against it, but she has not mastered flying yet, if I recall the subject of her frustration previously.
Entropy always wins the long game. Gravity is merely one of the players on Entropy’s team.
I think Naomi needs to take a different tact for flying… to paraphrase another author, she needs to fall, but miss the ground.
This has always struck me as the most efficient means to reach the goal. Apparently this method gets better with practice. Perhaps if I was somebody with Naomi’s reconstitution I could practice more often.