Comic for Monday, December 6th, 2021
Dec06
…I’ll add the Santa Hat poll later. Probably with next comic.
Polls
2024 Santa Hat Poll - Who will claim the Christmas Crown this year?
- Naomi Atarah (11%, 38 Votes)
- Fluffy (11%, 38 Votes)
- Kally Summers (11%, 38 Votes)
- Ila F-10 (9%, 31 Votes)
- The Consul (7%, 26 Votes)
- Miko (6%, 21 Votes)
- Avi Atarah (6%, 20 Votes)
- Kor's World Soldier (5%, 16 Votes)
- Mari Kepler (3%, 11 Votes)
- Dr. MIR (3%, 10 Votes)
- Rovak Stas (3%, 9 Votes)
- Camilla Canthi (2%, 8 Votes)
- Magnolia Dai (2%, 8 Votes)
- Nathan Summers (2%, 7 Votes)
- Lisa (2%, 6 Votes)
- Arron Kepler (2%, 6 Votes)
- Dr. Martin (2%, 6 Votes)
- Tyler Weber (2%, 6 Votes)
- Saria (1%, 5 Votes)
- Vium (1%, 5 Votes)
- Amy Selah (1%, 5 Votes)
- Kyle Kepler (1%, 4 Votes)
- Maia Ethi (1%, 4 Votes)
- Arkady Arduni (1%, 3 Votes)
- Elizabeth (1%, 3 Votes)
- Ryn Koko (1%, 3 Votes)
- Ashvalt Ardunni (1%, 2 Votes)
- Control (1%, 2 Votes)
- Tamara (1%, 2 Votes)
- Artem Arduni (0%, 1 Votes)
- Alex Fairway (0%, 1 Votes)
- Ashley Thomas (0%, 1 Votes)
- Lucy Harper (0%, 1 Votes)
- Biana Beyer (0%, 1 Votes)
- Gate (0%, 1 Votes)
- Jayce Myer (0%, 0 Votes)
- Ikirium Avon (0%, 0 Votes)
- David (0%, 0 Votes)
- Nick Otte (0%, 0 Votes)
- Joid (0%, 0 Votes)
- Yoav Cao (0%, 0 Votes)
- Varilem (0%, 0 Votes)
- Gelon Level (0%, 0 Votes)
- Marc Idunni (0%, 0 Votes)
- Blake Shoreman (0%, 0 Votes)
- Regin Enkari (0%, 0 Votes)
- Nelson Otte (0%, 0 Votes)
- Toshe (0%, 0 Votes)
- Frank Marsh (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 115
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Past,
I forgot to check early this morning but the comic didn’t make it up anyway. Is there going to be a comic this week?
Thanks,
Jim
We’re probably just waiting for Past to finish the poll. Or the pool.
On the Santa Poll, can we have a ticket with Kally wearing the hat and Fluffy pulling the sleigh?
Yeah … and can Artem and Naomi Jr be riding Fluffy? LOL
Oh oh oh! This! Definitely this!
You don’t require incredible motor coordination, just the ability to catch it at a point that you can glance at the coin and roll it in your palm swiftly so it lands desired face up. Tricky, but not remotely as hard as even the most basic sleight of hand stage tricks. Simple enough a kid can pull it off. Better to call the coin post flip, when it’s still covered, than pre flip, since there’s no desired face at time of flip that way.
Naomi / Kally joint ticket.
> I don’t think Kally trusts Mium.
I disagree. However, she’s asking Peter, who’s you know, her boyfriend. She had motivations beyond he mission and her personal curiosity. There relationship status might be “complicated”, but there more or less going on a date.
Plus, it’s been clearly established that between Peter, Kali, and Mium/Query, Mium is in many way the most normal one who “gets” people. That’s something I really appreciate from this comic. What it means in practice is that there relationship and how they interact ad a couple may not fit our norms. That’s not a bad thing, and is actually really fun to read.
Would someone please the meaning of Panel 5 to me? I can’t decide whether it is a close up of Peter or of Aaron. TIA
So, last time the game was Kally’s idea. Interesting that she seems resistant to it this time.
https://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-wednesday-january-6th/
I think she is more generally resistant to things she doesn’t suggest herself 😀
But I also think that the last time they had this arrangement, they were on different teams, and now are in both a working and a personal relationship, so it would seem reasonable she was hoping it would be less work to get a straight answer out of Peter. Perhaps not EXPECTING, but at least hoping….
Hmmmm … Kyle’s description of Mium Effiate “he goes basically wherever he pleases, and I’ve found it a fool’s errand to try and stop him” could also apply to Peter.
Since no one else has mentioned this… How is Peter’s flipping of the coin going to be unfair?
Does he do the trick where he does a flat toss and then catches and then flips the coin over.
Does Peter have a nefarious method where he somehow sabotages the other persons’ in the air call to control the outcome of their guess?
Maybe he pretends to catch the coin and has two one with each face and hides the other with Elipsis?
Does Peter call “edge” and get that result from some sort of Shaolin Soccer magic?
Kally is convinced that Peter can control the weather. In comparison, controlling a mere coin flip is trivial.
The real issue is that Kally wants to be important enough to Peter to just ask and receive information. We’ve seen Mium do that for her.
I think perhaps Kally would like such a thing so she has an excuse to give Peter blanket forgiveness. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into coin flips.
The weather thing was an analogy for his attitude about problems and solutions. I think the coin toss is a deeper issue.
As far as we know Kally didn’t meet Peter until after he was living in Malsa so coin toss issue could be something that he picked up after moving.
Mym’s answering of questions has to do with Kally’s experience with Query. Maybe a fondness or a recognition that Kally is good for Peter Remember MYM also resided in the computers in Malsa branch office.
Kally, who likely falls into “friends and family”, asking questions now and getting answers without needing to play the game, Peter can’t do that as long as Kally has operational ties to Central. That reason is why he had to disappear from Kally before starting this stage of the project. Kally, at that time, was really focused on the ‘rules’, following them and doing all the paperwork. The impression that I get now is Kally is more flexible on those points, partially because she has been asked to get close to Peter and partially because she wants to be close to Peter. As she said herself, back when she was reintroduced, the only spy that Peter would allow near him was one he wanted around. Anyone else would just vanish. The “Friends and Family” status is why she is able to evoke MYM’s presence in machinery. if you go back to the discussion with the analysts at the Malsa Branch they said that MYM was more of a rare spawn for them.
I think Kally believes that MYM would not answer the questions since they have to do with the operational project that Peter is currently engaged in. Peter has been careful to not disabuse her of that notion, or make her aware of the F&F status lest she make use of it.
I don’t think Kally trusts Mium. Also, while Mium might be somewhat compelled to answer if she asked, Mium (as we have seen many times) is fully capable of giving detailed, correct, and entirely unhelpful answers essentially indefinitely he if he doesn’t think answering the question will help him.
As for the coin toss, Kally has repeated referred to Peter as magician. Miko immediately suspected some sort of sleight of hand when he made the pen float. Plus, it is Peter. I think you just sort of assume he’ll cheat. I don’t know how he’d cheat, but I wouldn’t bet the coin he was flipping against him, let alone something more important.
Well I was thinking, Peter couldn’t possibly have the fine motor control to control a coin flip, Mium sure but Peter?
But than I remembered, wasn’t there one scene where he had his shirt off, and he has some sort of implant in his shoulder?
Depending on what he has it is possible that he could in fact flip a coin such that it lands how he wants it to.
Coins flips are pretty poor randomizers (if you don’t have a true random source, you at least want a mechanism with a large chaotic element, such as a dice throw with multiple bounces), and learning to reliably flip a coin so it tumbles exactly N times is more a magic trick than something that requires amazing general coordination.
Yeah, Kally already noted that Peter wasn’t a mage, but a magician. He uses tricks.
Would you trust a coin toss performed by a magician?
Peter will cheat, just on general principles, just because not cheating would be boring.
Trying to work out HOW Peter will cheat, in advance, would also not be boring though. You probably wouldn’t get it right, but would consider a scary number of possible ways to be wrong 😀
I keep getting confused by this. Just how many ‘human’ bodies does Mium have? I can only remember F8 and F5, and I was under the impression that F5 had been given to the ‘parallel’ instance of Mium and was last seen trying to get off world in the company of a very shifty individual. F8, at least I hope it was F8, was last seen in the spirit world.
Is there one I missed?
[edit: This was meant to reply in a thread I started, but it ended up here. Not sure how that happened.]
How it happened was you clicked on ‘reply’ while on pastutopia.com, rather than on pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-monday-december-6th-2021. When you do that, the link just takes you to the page for the current day. You’d need to click reply again on the current day’s actual page to have the reply link thing happen.
Mium currently has exactly two humanoid bodies (F5 which is in the spirit realm and F8, depicted here), one floating terminal, and an unknown number of stationary computers. The number of stationary computers is one less than it used to be, because Mium no longer has lab 5, as that’s now Vium’s. Vium’s in F11(?) and on an adventure with Dendrin and Tom.
Okay, let’s see if this goes to the right place.
There was my source of confusion. I somehow missed that Vium was given an entirely new body. Somehow I thought he ended up in F5. My bad.
It’s not immediately obvious as we’ve yet to see Vium next to the F5 or F8, but Vium seems to be in a more Ila sized body.
The easiest way to tell them apart is:
-F5 currently has blue hair and no scarf.
-F8 currently has black hair and a blue scarf.
-Vium currently has white hair and white hoodie.
This is dangerous way to rely telling them apart, as they have a tendency to change their hair color. I think F5 and F8 look essentially identical, while Vium looks like a younger version of them.
All of them original have white hair, so any other hair color they tend to adopt seems artificial to fit in.
The other confusing part is that only Peter, Niome and Ila, know about the multiple bodies/chassis for Mium. Everyone else calls him Mium Efiate which is phonetically similar to MYM F8. The Consul knows the F8 chassis and MYM are the same, but they have been careful to never have the F8 and F5 chassis anywhere close to each other. Having one in each world would simplify that a great deal.
oh and Peter’s sister, Miko who of course has the highest F&F position.
Miko is Peter’s cousin. His sister is Mari (the girl here in the pink shirt).
The “parallel” instance of Mium (aka Vium) was given a new body, presumably similar to the F10 (ILA), since that’s what that version of Mium was created to run.
… I can’t tell F8 and F5 apart, but one of them is in Central and the other is in the spirit realm, so if the new one (F11?) gets off Palindra before either of those returns, it seems there will be a distinct and unprecedented lack of ambulatory Miums in Malsa …
I believe F8 is in Central, and pictured above.
F5 is in the spirit realm.
Vium, now contained in the chassis of yet another prototype, is roaming free somewhere. Presumably waiting to be betrayed by someone neither from Central nor Palindra as best as I can tell. But definitely headed off world. To somewhere.
I think Mium could probably explain “Well, it’s like this. Peter wanted to let you come *back* to Malsa if you wanted to also. You wouldn’t be able to manage that with the gates shut down if I weren’t here. Plus, Mari hasn’t finished packing yet.”
But I think he probably won’t. Mostly on principle, rather than the fact that it would not go over well at all.
I note that she didn’t suggest the idea of champions. I guess the whole bit of Naomi being Peter’s champion didn’t sit well with her. Though, to be fair, it turned out that was all just an elaborate ruse Past used to establish the mechanism that she would be disabled by a mere two to four appearances later. As such, it wouldn’t need to be any sort of feelings about how their relationship had changed.
Are you doing the Santa Hat poll to see who comes in second each year? I’m pretty sure Naomi has won every year so far.
I believe Peter insists on a poll, so that his narrative about a fair “vote” has more substance.
Make a difference this year, vote Summers and Holmgren!
Joking: Sigh. It looks like Naomi already won again. I don’t even remember voting on it this year. :/
Slightly serious: If I recall correctly, Naomi didn’t win back in 2013. So it’s not like she has a total guaranteed victory.
Logically, through the gates that he sealed. He showed up to fix Query a bit ago.
Here’s the last comic with him – https://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-monday-june-15th-2020/
Aha! You thought to get me reading a lot of back issues of the comic and getting tied down for hours. I resisted and only went back to May 25th comic when Mium Efiate appeared at Kyle’s house on Central to retrieve/fix Query. I quit when the thread changed to Naomi fighting Eliana’s forest spirit … I read from that point a few days ago. LOL
I would love to know how F8 got here, considering where we left him.
I think it is F5 who has wandered off into the spirit world.
Tried to reply to the original. This one has been over in Central since before the Spirit Jaunt.
If you don’t put a link in your post, *usually* you’ll get a decent amount of time to edit your comment, which includes the option to delete it, if it didn’t target correctly.
That said, if you’re thinking enough to do stuff like that, you can just click reply enough times so that it moves the reply box up to the message you’re replying to, which generally indicates that the comment will go to the right spot. (Yes, those two quirky phenomena are related.)
As such, follow whatever strategy works best for you. Which could include making oops comments later on when you find your response didn’t go where you wanted it and the edit window’s entirely exhausted because it spent that whole time in moderation. To be fair, that could happen anyway, because when the spammers are especially bad, Past will put the whole site into moderation for everyone.
Thanks for the rundown.