Comic for Monday, December 7th, 2020
Quarantine + No Internet… Do not recommend. Didn’t even have time to like… download new books to read. What? Books made of paper? What are those? Well… maybe I’d have had to resort that far if it went any longer. Apparently the internet connection to where I live “broke”. I did still have cell access, but I have a pay-what-you-use plan on that, so…
I’d have posted the comic from that, but I realized I didn’t actually have a way to get my phone and computer to talk easily… as I set out to sort that problem, I realized I cannot log into the backend where I post comics from my phone anyway, my log in from that is just for approving comics (security set up from back when it was hacked).
Anyway, a bunch of nonsense.
Finally a comic!
I’ve talked before about how many mages can fly in the sense of “fling themselves into the air”, it’s the steps after that most cannot do. A pretty good mage can usually do a few stacked calculations – meaning they have limited control, they just cannot go that far. I think we’ve seen Kally use fancy jumping before a little bit like this – as her inner monologue suggests (and its been awhile since we’ve had one of those hasn’t it? – she views three stacked calculations during flight as relatively safe for her.
She ends up here doing four, but one of them isn’t stacked – it just uses normal physics, which would be pretty easy for her. The last one would always be needed to stop – unless your Naomi, impacting that ground at high speed is usually considered a very bad thing, and why most mages don’t try flying.
Kally’s usually flying trick relies on how quickly she can summon her dragon – she just either summons it, or jumps up into the air and summons it on the way up. The dragon operates under somewhat different rules, and is another way some mages fly – using an ethereal constructs (less ethereal constructs are typically anchored relative to the caster, so moving the caster with them is challenging and gives most mages a headache – sometimes the fatal kind if you’re trying to use it to fly), but it has its own reasons for being a little tricky and is usually slower, excepting things like dragons.
The yearly Santa Hat Pool is Up! Scroll down to the bottom of the page to cast your vote! It looks like the voting is fiercely contested this year!
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Well OK then. I guess the gloves needed to come off. GO TEAM KALLY!
Honestly, I totally want Fluffy to win. But I’m realistic: so I’m backing Kally & Fluffy all the way!
Finally! A sensible candidate who can manage the playing field!
Ages have past since this went up! Naomi may be faster than Kally expected, but my fellow readers have fallen down on the job.
“She is really is pretty fast” should have one fewer is in it.
“Not enough”? Did she, a-heh, miscalculate the distance? Or is she in mind of racing, and finding that she needs more speed to catch up to Naomi?
… so, either way, she drops “positioning”, and adds “speed” & “physical construct (blue)”, closing with “stop” as she was planning already … which is the unstacked one?
That’s the trouble with mindreading – a whole lot of context is unstated …
I suspect the blue tether is the unstacked one.
Not fast enough. It’s not super clear because I didn’t want to resort to charts and diagrams (…I did consider it…), but essentially her original plan called a slower and more arcing jump. Realizing she was definitely going to lose with that, she changed to a more direct flight plan – the issue with that being that she would either overshoot the target or have to stop herself mid-air above the roof and fall down.
So instead of angling the second calculation to position her to land on roof, she just went for a flatter high acceleration jump and used “physics” to pivot to the roof giving her a collision course so she stop right as she’d hit without falling. This results in coming at the ground at a fairly tight angle and high speed, but not enough to be particularly dangerous to someone with the calculation speed of Kally – particularly when she already knows ahead of time what she’ll need to calculate.
This would probably be a fairly impressive magic for a lesser magic – it’s a clever improvisation that would be pretty useful in some cases. The main issue with flying comes down to maneuvering, as each one made traditionally is sort of exponentially difficult.
Kally’s historical problem is most of her magic is overly specialized to her tactical mage role – this is her sort of trying to use magic with more thought and less brute force. Still impressive magic in a way, but mostly in application and speed rather than impressive in the number of city blocks destroyed in an instant way.
I bring simple message: Vote Naomi! Be on the right side of history! Don’t let their scheming win!
That is all.
Assuming blur to left of Kally in panel 7 is Naomi, pretty sure Naomi had feet-on-roof first.
Good eye, pretty sure you are right. I think Kally could have won by virtue of taking the shorter route, but probably underestimated Naomi’s ability to just run up a wall.
Ila could probably beat both of them though. She just needs to know to challenge them to the right sort of contest.
Wow, that is some good seeing. I think there’s no question, that’s Naomi.
Or is it? Perhaps THIS is why she’s keeping her hair black? Did she use a body double?
Panel 8, technically, since there are two panels in the upper-right, if I understand what you’re referring to correctly
Pretty sure Kally would have won if she didn’t set there to ponder for awhile at the start. If it takes her as long to think that as it takes me to read it, she gave Naomi a few seconds head start.
When I do this sort of thing with my own characters, it takes me a lot longer to read their thoughts than they would take to think them. At least for me, reading is inherently slower than just thinking, because I have to first recognize that it’s text, identify word boundaries, and process the letters. That sounds a lot slower than it is, but it’s still steps that happen instead of otherwise thinking thoughts.
Moving into possibly more ‘we have different experiences’ territory, many people with whom I’ve talked feel like the semantic separation of words is a good approximation of how they think. But other people don’t think like that. Some may think in sentence fragments, others may think in sentences, and at least a couple think in paragraphs.
I’ve learned to think in words for purposes of communicating, but only sort of. There’s still concepts I have for which I don’t have words, and concepts I have for which I have paragraph translations that don’t feel right to me. But if I’m not thinking for communicating, I think in pictures, kinesthetics, proprioception, choreography, and processes. I can try to describe those things, but if really pushed to do a good job of it, I could be hours at describing a thought of a moment.
Then there’s other times, I’m just sort of existing and I’m not sure if there’s thoughts or not. I could look at a clock, glance away, look back, and five minutes have passed, while I’m not aware of thinking anything. This happens much more frequently since I’ve gotten MS, but it was a thing on rare occasion even decades ago.
I’d be willing to bet that most of these mages think magic thoughts in concepts that don’t readily translate to words, and any such translation that was made would suggest something that was far more unwieldy than the actual thought.
That said, I think she did let Naomi get something like half-way there before starting, so of course she lost. The recognition that Naomi would be to the finish line before she started was sort of recognition she’d taken too long to start and had thus already lost, even if Naomi had not technically won quite yet.
Naomi would have to work at it a lot more to win in a more formal race, where contestants have to wait until a signal to start moving. Of course, with this world’s magic rules, such a race favors mages.
Dammit, I keep voting, but do does everyone else!
Awesome comic! Unfortunately now I’ve got all these pitchforks and no where to go.
And I’ve already paid a lawyer…
Now I need to find someone else to sue…
Hm. The way voting works for this confuses me. I *sometimes* see the ability to vote again (which I’ve never used), other times I see it just showing me my previous vote. Looks like it creates a vote cookie with an expire set to next year, which seems like an intent for one person one vote.
It depends largely on whom you’re voting for. If you vote for Ila, it’s once and done. For Naomi? Well, there’s a reason she wins every year. Her close personal friend is an expert computer hacker.
I’m not saying the election is rigged. Oh wait, yes that’s it!
So what you’re saying is, Miko should have a thousand votes? Except I guess Miko doesn’t *want* to be voted for and would probably troll by forcing someone like Minerva.
I thought we had a chance for a bit, Naomi had actually fallen behind, but with the comic posted she’s gotten a huge surge. I think the casual reader just votes Naomi as a matter of course. She’s got too big a lead by being the “mascot” of the comic.
Ila seems like she has the best chance of unseating her and Kally is doing very surprisingly well, but it was always going to be uphill battle.
Miko is still in it and the Consul is the dark horse candidate that’s doing a solid job. Naomi’s little sister is getting an impressive vote total for a maybe 1 panel character, but I assume that’s because she’s essentially guaranteed to be weapons-grade-cute being a miniaturized Naomi.
Impressed by some of the down ballot candidates, but don’t think anyone else is in the running at this point. Both Rovak and Tyler had okay but ultimately disappointing showings.
Peter coming in at the highest human male character (Fluffy’s gender is I believe still unknown?) and Mium right behind him, but doesn’t seem that have what it takes to make it to top of an art poll.
I think to some extent it depends on ones browser. On my laptop, I used a different browser, which tended to honor prior cookies only intermittently. I generally did not vote again, though there may have been once or twice where I honestly didn’t remember if I voted before or not when I may have. That cut way down with being able to vote for more people, as it became a more memorable event. Also, going in and seeing votes on a dozen minor characters would tend to remind me, “Oh, yeah, I voted for 90% of the candidates. So I’m done.”
On that note, this year, I’m certain I only voted once, because it was notable that the limit was 10 people. I’m not sure how Vera got more than one vote. I think it’s unfair she gets so few votes. I mean, she goes out and busts her butt to bring Malsans the news every day, and it’s not her fault that the characters are mostly not watching TV.
It amuses me that Vera is even on the poll. I wouldn’t have recognized the name without your comment. 4 votes is pretty good seeing as long it has been and how ridiculously small her appearance in the comic was.