Comic for Monday, June 24th, 2019
Jun24
I know there are a few questions I haven’t answered yet in the comments of the last page. I will go back and answer them tomorrow. Had to pick between going through those and doing the comic, and figured I should do the comic first… and now it’s getting late, given that I have to be up at 5:00 am tomorrow.
But I will answer them tomorrow, so if you had an unanswered question, check back either late tomorrow or Tuesday (if you don’t have email notifications enabled).
Going to aim to go back to the Monday/Thursday schedule at least.
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Comic will be up late… probably tomorrow. Sorry for late notice.
So at this point Friday’s comic is missed; I will update tonight, but that will be Monday’s comic at this point. If I come up with an extra comic from somewhere, it will be a buffer comic.
I’m sorry about this, and I’d like to say I have good excuse, but it reality I lost my drawing pen. I’ve been distracted by a lot of things, and each time I couldn’t find it, I just figured “well, next time I have time to draw I’ll find it”… but I never did find it. I decided to get a new one, as this time I’ve dissected the house quite thoroughly for it, but I was putting that off because they aren’t super cheap I cannot imagine why it would be somewhere more than 3 feet from the tablet I use it with (it’s not a mobile tablet), and the pen is almost always in it’s holder… and yes, I checked all my pockets.
…So yeah, that’s a fairly dumb reason, and the page was mostly done, but it sort of stalled me out longer than expected as I kept thinking I’d just find it and was reluctant to buy a new pen as they aren’t that cheap and it literally has to be somewhere, but here we are.
…anyway, the show will go on, just wanted to update people and explain.
*hugs you* there, there, it’s ok. I’m not complaining. I still love the comic.
Oh, I totally understand. I ALWAYS lose my tablet pen if it’s not tethered to the tablet… the big problem with tethering it was once tethered it was only really useful as a pointing stick (it’s amazing how annoying a bit of string can get); as opposed to a drawing stick: which is really the WHOLE POINT of a tablet and pen right?
I blame the pen gremlins, who also steal my regular every day pens (which are thankfully cheap because they’re not the drawing pens variety)… which is what I thought you’d lost before I got to the bit where you mentioned a “tablet”, and then I realised exactly what you were talking about).
Dude, you should know by now none of us are upset with you. Frankly most of us think you are still overdoing it.
Thank goodness!
I was terrified that you’d taken Byzantine’s advice and were happily on your way to a once a month update schedule!
For everybody’s sake Arkady & Camilia need to formally adopt Illa. Elaina would like to be grandmother a decade early. Hopefully Arkady is out getting lots of food and ice cream to make that possible.
Arkady isn’t in seen. He could be off to the side, or perhaps Past just didn’t draw him.
However I’m not buying it. Arkady is nothing if not a man of action! He is clearly off screen fetching delicious snacks to fuel Ila and get her out of harm’s way! Or possibly to fuel Ila so she can get him out of harm’s way.
Either way there are snacks involved, and harm is going to be upset that nothing is conveniently in its way.
Tasty food seems like the best option at this point.
Based on past evidence, Harm is advised try to play innocent and not even look in that general direction, you know, nonchalantly…
I wonder if Mium will come to be fairly friendly towards the Consul over time. She’s competent, logical and probably makes near-optimal decisions. This would make her fairly easy to predict in comparison to other humans, so she probably comes across as relaxing company to Mium. (Also, useful enough that keeping her alive and friendly is worthwhile.)
I think so far Mium has shown her a bit of favor already. I believe he intervened on her behalf at least once at the start of this? Offering to seize control of the gates for her? Sure he has other agendas at play as well, but Mum seems to like Madame Consul so far.
I definitely agree with Glider’s assessment. Mium has been quite supportive of the Consul thus far.
Soooo. Did you folks get burned out on all that Q&A, or am I just not seeing new posts?
I think we’re just certain that most of our burning questions are spoilers. Maybe we’re giving Peter too much credit, or Past for spinning such an engaging tale.
I feel like I should know the answers to questions I think of, or everything is connected to plot points we don’t understand yet.
The Consul remains my favorite character. She totally gets it. And I love her reference to Peter.
So, Amy, Ryn, and now this new person speaking in panel 1 have unusual-colored hair but different-colored eyes. Ryn’s hair is close enough to certain dyed-red shades that I had taken it for possibly being dyed (and the matching sunglasses to vaguely impart a kind of sense of designer-kid-ness without actually claiming it), but I see now that Amy’s cast page says her hair being a different color without matching her eyes means she has genetic modifications but is not a designer kid. Are these people with unmatching eye-hair combinations what happens when designer children have children but don’t additionally modify them? That would particularly fit with the one on this page being called a mutt.
I think they are they are unmodified offspring of the Family mages, though that might be the same thing. I get the impression that the Designer Children tends to refer to the genetically engineered people that are not from the Families, and I don’t think the Designer Children have existed long enough to have second generation people running around (though that is just speculation from the political climate and commentary on them).
Naomi, for example, is a Designer Child, but not from the Families.
Marc was basically confirmed to be in the same boat as this person, and it was strongly implied he was a half-blood Family mage.
The question becomes do the family genes naturally match the hair and eye color of children, and the ones with mismatched hair and eyes are unusual, or due they more directly interfere in the genetic manipulation of their children? Not sure we have enough information yet.
Marc, Amy, and this person all have mismatched hair and eyes that I would group in the same category of definitely half-Family mage (or possible half designer child if they have existed that long).
There are some edge cases though. Ryn, as you mention, but he is confirmed to dye his hair and we do not know the original color of it. It is a bit weird though as if he was trying to pass as a designer child, why wouldn’t he dye his hair green? Ryn is probably a bit of a unique case due to his personality and station, and technically I think he is from Arpon, not Malsa.
There is the other character we know dyes their hair, Tamara. Tamara has blonde hair and teal eyes, and dyes her hair teal. In her first appearance she had it grown out and it was half-blonde and half-teal. This almost certainly puts her in the same category as Marc, Amy, and this girl, but blonde hair is neither normal in Malsa or the Families, so she is either half-Malsan Families, half-Foreigner, or entirely a foreigner from a different color schema passing as a local.
Mir technically has mismatched hair and eyes, but is whole different problem. I do not think it is meaningful to speculate her coloration has anything to do with her original appearance given how blatantly artificial it is.
The other possible exception case is Mione. Her eyes are light pink, while he hair is blueish-purple. This could mean she is a genetic mismatch, but given that she can “see” Eidos data, and usually keeps her eyes closed. I suspect her situation might be more complicated somehow. Especially when you consider that her eyes are roughly the color of the magic sparkles.
It was my understanding that Designer Children are the product of the advanced genetic engineering that Malsa has been capable of for around 20-30 years, with Camilla and Eliana being among the oldest to have benefitted from it.
But Malsa did not get to having advanced genetic engineering from nothing. They had some more basic genetic engineering before that. Mage-Commander Kahlek (Bluebeared, named by Past last page) and Regin are products of that less advanced genetic engineering.
Everybody knows that green-eyed redheads are hot. I know, that’s usually with the orange colored hair that’s called red in the absence of anyone whose hair is really the color we know of as red outside of natural hair spectrum. But it’s all I have at the moment to explain Ryn’s fashion choice.
I had the impression that Tamara is at least partially descended from some northern people, but I’m not sure where I got that from.
Hahaha! I love the Madame Consul! She gets it!
Somebody is picking up on the whats going on. Namely that everything is way more complex than he thought.
I think the mutter text is:
“You might be onto something, little miss fly in, fight your battles, and take a nap through all squabbling. Smart ???, don’t worry, they will all go away soon…then”
I can’t quite make out that one word.
Also: You are absolutely correct, Madam Consul. Work for Peter is building a calamity-class AI. Fun is convincing everyone that heads of state were murdered and watching everyone activate their contingency plans.
Ah, nevermind. Hovering the mouse over the image gives the text. Thanks, PastUtopia!
…I had most of it right. 🙂
I still appreciate the effort it isn’t easy reading it on mobile, and there is no way to do a mouse hover on a mobile phone.
Ah! Ok, here is the corrected text:
“You might be onto something, little miss. Fly in, fight your battles, and take a nap through all squabbling…smart girl. Don’t worry, they will all go away soon…then…”
Actually a long press on the comic gives me the mouse over. I’m not sure if that is Android specific or how that works.
That is browser specific, a function of code running on a page and how it is interpreted by the browser. When I long press i get a normal menu like if i right click on a PC.
Glider, What version of android do you have and what browser are you running? Or if you would paste here you’re user agent string, I can try that directly without needing to look it up specifically. My browser lets me change that string and i use that to validate different tests.
https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent
If you go to their main page you can see what a website “Could” learn about you based off the data from your connection. I only am interested in the agent string. Most smaller sites track a subset of that information…so called analytics reports.
Of course, the popup is actually alt text, not code, so bringing up a menu and checking image information will give you the information, though not necessarily in a very readable form.
It’s supposed to be title text; alt text is for a different purpose (what to display/read when images for whatever reason are not rendered); but since early graphical browsers showed alt text as a mouseover tooltip, the name stuck, as did web designers’ habit of duplicating the title text as alt text … even if every modern browser supports title text these days! 😛
Either way I don’t see it on my device which gets me back to the user string which will tell me what version and application it does work on rather than debating whit it *SHOULD* work on since I have no control over ANY arbitrary application decision.
I long ago learned in IT: Should doesn’t exist, there is either does or does not.
I used to read one site that had a zoned click navigation system. Left went back, the center displayed an overlay of the text, and the right went forward. It worked great on mobile.
You need your application to show you the image’s title attribute (or alt attribute); the user agent string won’t magic that up for you. Better that you read your application’s documentation on how to display it – or abandon it for one that makes it easier.
But well, I went and tried my Android browsers. They’re a sorrier lot than I had thought.
The Firefox family show a truncated version on long-press, and I can’t (easily) make them show the rest (there seems to be some add-ons that claim to address this problem; I haven’t tried them).
Samsung Internet (the pre-installed stuff) doesn’t show it on long-press, and I find little documentation.
Chrome is the exception: Long-press shows the full text. User agent is “Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-J710F) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.101 Mobile Safari/537.36”, if you’re still wondering. 🙂
I agree that it seems unlikely that changing the UA is going to change what the server hands you, save some sites will provide a mobile site. That seems less common now than a few years ago, and Past doesn’t seem to have that.
Worse, sharing my user agent is going to expose how old my phone is! (And how cheap I am!)
That said:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; Moto G (5) Plus) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.101 Mobile Safari/537.36
Thanks for the help, so it works in chrome…figgers.
Actually it shows how much older my device is…chrome is the one browser i just don’t like. I especially don’t like how its always sending usage to Google which you can’t turn off on Android. i leave private browsing running all the time. Actually the Applewebkit/mobile safari version is the exact same on my antique Samsung Note4. It was and still is a fine phone, I just long ago learned that by not updating and being careful what I install results in using the device more than fixing the device. Android Developers are particularly nasty about feature-itis.