Comic for Monday, June 4th, 2018
Alright, so here’s what we are going to do.
There is a comic today! Rejoice, and what not! But there will not be a comic here Thursday… there will probably be a comic on Patreon Thursday, though, that will make its way here Monday… then the same thing next week. Monday, almost certainly, Thursday, probably not. It’s a new tactic, so rather than taking a week off, I will take two-half weeks off. I don’t plan on going to a Monday-only schedule long term, just for the next two weeks.
I apologize for the slack of content, but I think it’ll be better for everyone if I have the better process of updating through a buffer. More consistent publishing times, better art polish, better writing polish, and people from Patreon tend to help me a little with grammar and the like, so less raw sewage hits the fan on the front page. All around, I think its better. It also helps my work flow as I can afford to work on a few pages at once, which helps storyboarding and things.
At the same time, taking a week off has always had a pretty negative impact on readership and things. While we’ve never suffered a long term downspike and, at the end of the day, readership count is not my foremost goal, it is also hard for me ignore that consistently taking a week off has been a not-so-great tactic. So, we’ll try this and see how it goes. I know that it seems like it shouldn’t be rocket science, but making a comic page takes a fair chunk of time, even with the art the way it is.
So, we’ll see how it goes.
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted, but no comic Thursday! Will have an update on Patreon, and more just like art updates. I really would like to update more art. One of the original goals of the comic was to learn to draw, and it’s something I want to move from the back burner a little more to front burner at some point, and work a little more on the art again, but that seems ambitious for someone that can’t even keep to the schedule right now 😀
If you didn’t see either on the vote or on Patreon, well, the bonus art for the vote incentive is probably not unrelated to the current page… 😉
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Madame Counsul reminds me of myself when I played speed chess with a chess master (almost grandmaster). All I could do was smack talk because I, an unranked chess player, was hopelessly outclassed. Peter and Mium are being so helpful, like my opponent was with me. “Maybe you don’t want to do that particular move.” This whole conversation is hilarious.
Re: Votey: The protective glasses are a nice touch. Shorts and t-shirts are fine – but you need the glasses!
(Seems like the kinda thing some bureaucrat would come up with after being faced with criticism over a specific eye injury. Not that I’ve really dealt with that side of bureaucracy, myself – thank goodness I’m on the *theoretical* side of physics, where we rarely have to think about things like “safety equipment” and “OSHA”!)
From personal experience I can assure you that a scratch on the forearm compared to a similar magnitude scratch on the cornea are two very different creatures.
I think that from context, one of the contest was paintball. Safety glasses would be an absolute minimum of safety equipment full face mask are more normal.
I would assume it was to paintball roughly as airball was to tennis, which is to say… probably a little bit skewed due to the whole “everyone has magic” part of the sport.
Not going to lie, I’d be happy follow a magic paintball arc. I mean, there are things I want to see more, but I would be okay with magic paintball.
The last time I played paintball, I sort of had some magic going for me, which was kind of fun. After my first experience, I decided to go with some heavier clothing than I’d normally wear. To my great amusement, all the shots that hit me just bounced off, and I was able to pick up the intact ammo to use it in my gun. Unfortunately, after getting a half dozen or so more people like that, I accidentally knelt onto a ruptured paintball, and so was out.
That said, by that point, I was actually moderately glad to be out, because I was not dressed appropriately for summer weather…
I am glad we finally got the confirmation that the hair color thing has important social and legal ramifications. It is very interesting to have a world where people are required to signal some personal characteristics with their hair.
This has actually been known for a long time, as far back as when Peter joined Levenworth Naomi referenced that Peter was a foreigner from somewhere without the same laws, and thus she did not know if he was a designer kid or not.
From what I understand, the law does not specify anything about personal characteristics per se, but that genetically modified humans have to have unnatural hair colors as a form of identification and segregation.
Two thoughts on that though: first, it seems like it something of a failed policy. “Designer Kids” call themselves that and if anything they seem biased against non-genetically engineered people. Second, it might tie into the Families of the old aristocracy, as they have unnatural hair colors and seem to be differentiated from run of the mill Designer Kids like Naomi.
I think that PastUtopia has said somewhere the actual color does not matter beyond the range, and that green is the most popular hair color overall, and teal is the most popular female hair color, but I cannot find the exact reference for that.
Jeez these two make (presumably) sarcastic remarks about swapping from digital to stone tablet and don’t even let it sound weird…
….these people are weird and I LOVE watching them go at this nonsense. ^.^
I get the feeling the Consul will be a major player going forward. At least, I hope she is. She has some of the best reactions to all of this, balancing both actually comprehending what is happening, not flipping out, and giving roughly as good as she gets.
Definitely can see why she has gotten where she is, as she has the social grace that Peter’s group lacks and enough wit and sheer intellect to put the pieces together enough to at least follow Peter’s game of nation-stakes-speed-chess, if not actually play against him.
I don’t think we’ve really seen an indication of whether or not she has what it takes to play against him. She certainly knows well enough to not play against him *yet*. After all, that would be a losing gambit. I would guess we will never see if she has what it takes for certain, as it seems like their goals are in sufficient alignment right now for that to be a poor move on her part. My guess is, she does have what it takes, and if we get to see that, it will be because by the time their goals are no longer so aligned, she will have arranged the board to such an extent that he can no longer actually play. But that would be less about his inability to beat her, and more that he’s working on something else right now, which gives her the liberty to shore up her defenses against both the threats that he is concerned about and him.
She is staying safely on the edge. If she were to make herself an issue then she would go away. Either on a trip or get killed depending on how far away they felt they needed to take her. They’ve already shown rather High reluctance to kill anybody but that might just be Miss Naomi’s input. It’s a good thing that she doesn’t know about Mium’s license scooter sniper licenses. Although I guess it wasn’t a concealed carry permit.
funny page
Panel 5 “Maybe I feel asleep.”
Panel 7 “All information is will be chiseled into tablets and stored away from anything that connects to wireless.”
Fixed, thanks 🙂
It still reads “I feel asleep” rather than “I fell asleep”.
Also: “Misremember.” No hyphen, one s.
Actually from my point of view, doing the comic looks way harder than rocket science. I can do that (it’s just a job), but the creativity in the comic….
Well, my math education got up to discrete mathematics/linear algebra, but my physics education… well, I can’t actually remember the last actually educational physics class I took. Do youtube videos count? I watched some youtube videos about physics I think… 😉
I just assume that its complicated, or else we’d be landing stuff on the moon and mars more often.
The easiest/fastest part for me of making the comic is the is the dialog bits; the story writing goes quickly, but takes me a lot of editing steps to get what I want to tell/show in the comic. The story boarding or sketching/”pencils” probably takes the longest (when I’m doing a good job) because I am not a natural artist. The line and coloring takes while, but is doesn’t require as much thinking, so is easier to do – that’s sort of relaxing, or I can do it awhile listening to an audiobook or something.
Ultimately I guess the comic, or any story for me, takes a big effort of “creativity” at the start while I built out the starting conditions for the world (the setting, lore and mechanics) and characters, and from there, well, frankly I’m mostly just along for the ride the same as everyone else while I see what they do. It only needs my hand for pruning and fleshing out new actors as the scope grows to include them. I mean, sure, I guess I have to think out the details, but that’s mostly a chain reaction of “so I know this character, I know what just happened, what would they do” and subtle steering things toward to keep the general story fitting the outline and where I know it’s all going. Sometimes I have to tweak the outline if I realize that it’s pinned a character with something they wouldn’t actually do, but that’s mostly just tweaks and pruning.
Depends on how you define rocket science, really. The rocket equation and stuff like that isn’t particularly hard, but building a complete, successful rocket needs quite a bit of chemistry and materials science, and while orbital mechanics basics are easy, plotting a complete course to a pre-existing object or pre-defined place and orbit takes a bit more, especially if you need to use gravity assists and stuff. And don’t gorget the communications, (electrical) power, …
The complexity with all these things is not so much in the basics, but in combining enough of those basics in sometimes rather tricky ways into a complete whole.
Most of my professional life has been in aerospace. khms has it right, the science (physics) is relatively easy as much of it is very well defined. The engineering is the hard part. We should probably stop using “rocket science” as the standard for measuring difficult work. Thanks for the description of the process. I get the “natural artist” part as my wife is an artist and can do that sort of stuff with ease. Your comic is fascinating because is so multi-dimensional. I follow a number of comics and none of them have the level of political complexity or for that matter the subtlety you bring. And a lot of that subtlety comes across in the artwork. You have a style and judging by the comments I read, it works. Thank you!
So instead of saying comparing something hard to “rocket science” we should use “aerospace engineering”? I vote for that, since it even sounds complicated (even though it is essentially the same thing).
I have some friends in similar areas and they say something similar, getting stuff into orbit isn’t technically hard. Getting it there with as close to 100% reliability and safety isn’t even impossibly hard, mostly it is just really really expensive. Most things become easier if you throw literally unlimited amounts of money at it, assuming you have and are actually willing to do it. Getting it up there safely and reliably and cutting the cost to simply the astronomical (see what I did there), that is where the math and science start getting tricky. I’ve always wondered about that, though. At what point does “unlimited money” stop being the ultimate work-aid and things get exceptionally difficult regardless (rather than just being “rocket science”)?
I have to admit that I have never been on the “unlimited money” side of it. Though I have seen fairly large amounts of money seemingly disappear into a project. Safely and reliably and cutting the cost reminds me of the days of better, faster, cheaper. We always responded that you could pick two.
If you’re lucky, you can pick two. You may not even be that lucky.
Also, technically, there has never been an “unlimited money” aspect of it. It’s just that precise aerospace is very expensive, and imprecise aerospace is even more expensive, in a different way.
That is, incidentally, a large part of why we don’t have moon bases and mars bases and stuff: it’s all really, really expensive, and unlimited money was always a myth.
Though, all that having been said, the good news regarding the advance of technology is that eventually, you actually can get all three. It’s just that the time it takes for that to happen is a different form of ‘much slower’. Also, you can’t just wait for it to come; each area can only advance when it’s actively being used or when a new wunderkind comes along with a completely revolutionary way to do it that actually works. Also, even if you’re choosing the waiting for the random super-genius, you *still* have to throw money down that rabbit hole, because there’s no other way to determine if the super-genius with the latest scheme actually has a viable better + faster + cheaper approach.
Note: I said super-genius. If the person with the idea is not a super-genius, there are probably other ways to tell that they’re not right. Though sometimes one needs to be careful, as the person doing the presentation may not be the person with the idea, and an idiot fronting a brilliant idea can easily accidentally present an obvious failure by accident.
Unlimited money doesn’t work the way people think it does. No matter how much money is involved, the amount of useful stuff you could buy is limited.
I have to repeatedly explain to people at work that unlimited money cannot always even solve their IT pipeline development issues.
Unlimited Money + Unlimited Time + Talented People = Basically anything you want, sure… but only one of those doesn’t get you all that far, and most people are forced to make due with 2 out of 3 at best.
I’ve had more than one project that was just like “so lets just hire 5 more developers and get this done by next month” and I’ve had to try to explain the hundred reasons why hiring 5 more developers would put us a month behind schedule, not gain a month. Especially when the chances are most of those developers would, at best, show up to work wearing their underpants on their head and drooling on their keyboard, and more likely what they mean is offshore developers who will be basically impossible to integrate into the project with a positive net value.
…and I work in business software which is basically automating excel monkeys and their typewriters, not… uh… aerospace engineering…?
Frederick Brooks of IBM described the time problem perfectly in his 1975 book, “the mythical man-month.”
The Mythical Man-Month is my go-to for this situation as well. Doesn’t usually gain me any ground, but it is a nice concise explanation of the problem.
Lately I’ve been like, yes, that will work! Full well knowing it won’t, but at least I might have sufficient staffing for the next project. Probably not.
“Eventually” and “fast” are normal friends, Tgape.
I’ll have to look that up. I’m generally a little further down in the tree howeverIm the lone hardware guy for a pool of programers. It happens to me all the time where “we need your help to plan out the hardware side of this project and then about 2 days into the project new equipment arrives that somebody decided needed to be in but nobody thought that I was important enough to tell even though I was the one that had to put it in. Just two weeks ago we bought cabling for the rack before we knew where things were going to be in the rack. We have an entire rack diagram that shows where everything goes except for these two switches that somebody ordered literally the day after we did the planning for the rack. They also like changing the cable design on the Fly and then wondering why what we talked about and print it out doesn’t match up with what they wanted. I may be slightly frustrated.
There must be a maximum depth to these replies. I want to comment on Just_IDD, but it doesn’t offer me a reply link there.
A dedicated hardware guy? Like I don’t have to rack my own servers? Diagrams!?!
Some people are really lucky. 😉
@Glider I have seen websites that didn’t have a limit to their depth. Either they start widening the page or the replies get skinnier and skinnier until the entire reply is one letter wide going a dozen pages down. It may be entertaining to see once or twice but it is definitely not legible. Neither one. The page widening throws off all the aspect ratios and can do wierd things to anything placed in relation to it (including overlapping, pushing it out of the viewable range, and other even stranger artifacts). The single letter replies are usually far worse, though.
I have seen some pages that hide replies past a certain number and require they be shown before they can be viewed, but that solution is seen less and less these days. A lot of commenting threads are just in-line with no reply function at all, which almost seems the worst of both worlds.
I usually go with “It’s not exactly rocket surgery.”
For what is it is worth, from the point of view of someone that has been reading close to the longest (besides like @Delta-V and @xSpacetrue) I do not really think there is a point where the art has stopped getting better. It is a little more gradual but if I ever go back and few months, I can always see the art getting better.
That makes me wonder, how long HAS everyone been reading this? I managed to track down when I started to between March 18-20th of 2015, though I didn’t follow as closely or comment back then. I remember because of the quote “Sages mercy, it really can use magic.” It is kinda really odd to think that I have been following this comic for that long.
And yes, Delta-V LONG predated me.
There are actually a lot of commentators that predate me, but most of them have stopped commenting. Egneil, Eldestdawn, Xiphon, MayW… are the other ones I remember that commented on early pages (as I have gone through and read all the comments on all the pages on archive binges), but I do not think any of them still comment very often. Harder to tell now as people have gone and commented on old pages, especially near the start (though a lot of them are just spelling corrections).
There is a whole era of the comic that has just Delta-v and PastUtopia’s comments though.
I actually do not remember when I started reading. I thought I did, but going back and looking through the archive, apparently I do not remember as the event I thought was where I started was way later than I started reading. Some time in 2015 though.
@Amaranth: Yeah, it got sort of lonely there for a while. You couldn’t have been more than a few months behind me, though if you started reading in 2015. 🙂
I started reading before I started commenting, but you were already commenting by the time I started reading, pretty sure. You and Egneil at least. At the time, I read literally dozens of webcomics, though I have since dropped all of them but this one, which is why I have so much time for commenting here now. And reading it. Over and over again.
There is one person who has been here WAY longer than any of us. Even “back before it was cool”. That would be PastUtopia. It really makes me wonder how an artist, especially a webcomic artist, can keep themselves going before they manage to get a regular audience. Any word on that from the most senior person here?
To be honest, I probably would have stopped updating by now if no one had reading even 2-3 years in, but that’s because goals and priorities shift. When I started making the comic, I really did not expect it to be something people would really read, I figured I’d draw it for a couple years to get better at drawing, then go do something else. At the time I was working in video games, so in particularly I thought I’d make a indie-rpg or visual novel style game, integrating the comic style drawing or something. Or else I would start a new comic, or I’d flit off an do something else entirely as I am generally want to do.
Part of the original point of the comic was literally just learning to draw; it gave me something a little more structured to work on and forced me to try to draw things I could clearly not draw. If you look at the original pages, you can see that I really just published basically whatever I had done at the time of the update, some of the early pages are just flatly not finished. This isn’t because I didn’t care, but because it was a way to force myself to abandon the “crumple it up and throw it away” approach to practicing something. A lot of people (me included) draw something and think “well, that’s shit, I guess I can’t draw” and go play video games or write a book or something… so the comic was really just a way to work best that, and I think it’s had mixed success in that. It definitely helped me get better, but it’s also sort of stagnated because better art takes longer, and with time being always the primary factor, I think I spend less time on getting good at art, and more time just trying to stay on schedule (and usually still failing, like now!).
That said, priorities do change, and the comic really isn’t so much about learning to get better at art. That’s still present, but I don’t have a future goal for drawing at this point besides working on comics. I’m not in the video game industry professionally anymore, and I don’t plan to make my own indie game anymore (the window for that sort of thing is sort of gone – these days the competition is intense compared to when I was considering it), and I’ve become a little more invested in the comic in the sense it actually makes me money and, more importantly, people care about the story and care about the story not just getting orphaned because I get distracted.
Frankly it still baffles me that people read this story, or that at least as many people as do read it. I started this endeavor really not expecting that anyone would read it, so it wasn’t that oppressive to me that no one was really reading it. Even pretty early on though, traffic started picking up a little, even before anyone was commenting, which is when I realized people were reading it, and you can see that I started making the blurbs under the comic; I think the blurbs under the comic are actually a fair bit of the reason behind the engagement, as silly and pointless as they are. Media is getting more interactive and connected to its audience, and I think that’s part of the premise behind webcomics is that they seem more the product of an actual person, that helps people engage with it.
90% of the creative work I ever produce will never be seen another person; most of it things I write or draw don’t really make it off the cutting room floor (or more likely I had no intention to publish or post it anywhere in the first place). That this comic didn’t end up in that bin is mostly coincidence – I didn’t pick this from the list of ideas I had purely at random, but it certainly wasn’t the only option. Even now, I have half a dozen half written ideas that will never make it anywhere.
It was actually sort of big decision for me to do what little active marketing for the comic I did (Project Wonderful banners in the like); the first probably 10-15 comments or replies I got to the comic were pretty much all just “you suck”; you don’t see those in the archive because I usually delete ones that contain no merit or people feel more compelled to communicate that form of opinion via email (I have some that are literally 5 pages of reasons why the comic is terrible, though the vast majority were just “you suck a drawing, just quit”). I think the barrier to survive is less “can you withstand the crushing silence” and more “can you with stand the vitriol of a bored asshole in the internet, especially when they sort of have a point” (given that, objectively, I did suck at drawing, and sort of sucked at writing when I started). So basically the waves are crushing silence (which I don’t really mind), waves of vitriol (which I like to think I’m immune to, but am not really, because no one really is entirely immune to), and finally reach a point where the majority of the comments are positive and engaged, where you’ve gotten to the quality point people start appreciate the work, as well as they’ve been following it long enough to view it as something worth engaging with. I think that last step (or the monetary equivalent…) is required for something to survive long term, and that making it there is pretty hard. I think it will be a lot easier for my next comic if I do another comic after this one because I’ll start at a much higher skill level, and probably with a small nucleus of readers that will follow me from this comic to that one, even if it’s just 1 or 2 people, that’s really all it takes to start a comment community as we see here.
Anyway…………. you’ve gone and asked one of those questions that triggers me to ramble, so I’m not going to take all the blame here…… haha, it’s been a journey. Ultimately I guess the answer is “circumstance and expectations”. If I was doing this for money, I’d have quit a long time ago, only sort of recently has the comic become actually profitable again thanks to Patreon after ad revenue crashed, and even then, it’s not really a source of income yet (and I don’t really expect it to be unless I get a lot better at it). If I was doing this for the readers at the start, I’d have quit after the first year of basically only negative feedback. If I was doing this for the art practice, I would have quit by now where I view I’m not making much progress. But, given that it was for all three of those reasons in shifting importance, it’s still here and here it shall remain till we get to the end 🙂
1. Embrace the vitriol. Apathy is far worse. Someone cared enough to write!
2. Good art doesn’t always have to be time consuming, and creating art is the same as getting better at creating art. Every time you create art, you succeed. Failure is not trying.
In my defense I didn’t intend to start a rant, but I really was interested in hearing what you had to say.
Also, I don’t know why more places, especially webcomics, promote a comment community more. I understand that with Far Side of Utopia it may work a bit better than others (just because of the cerebral nature of some of the topics) but it seems like something that could boost audience involvement for a LOT of medium.
@EnderDDT: Not as long as you think. I actually started reading the Archive on March 8, 2015 and first posted on the following day.
That is ironic, I just saw that you had been commenting for a while before me and just figured you had been around for that long. It all kinda makes me what exactly it is that keeps some people around regularly, what makes some people come back to a comic intermittently to catch up, and what makes others who have had one of those levels of greater interest just disappear?
For me, it’s a commitment to a comic I like, to let the comic creator know that there is someone out there who appreciates what they are doing. I have also learned that commenting encourages others to chime in, and once a certain level of involvemet is reached, people will comment for the pleasure of being a part of the community–like here. I am mainly attracted to the story, but I also appreciate when the art improves as time goes on.
As to why some people quit, most folks don’t know it but other comic creators will sometimes comment early on to offer helpful tips to the newbies, or to offer encouragement, and then move on to help other comics. Some people have a hard time thinking up things that other commenters haven’t already said, some have short attention spans, some have became physically ill or even died… There are lots of reasons. 🙂
Panel 7 an extra “given.” I almost lost it reading panel 7. The Consul gets better with each installment.
Fixed, thanks 🙂