Comic for Monday, May 1st
May01
Going to be a short one because I should have been asleep an hour ago…
Wasn’t going to have the chance to wrap it up tomorrow so maybe the time was a bit tight on drawing this one. Decided to keep the interlude short, because after additional reflection, I decided that it was not actually discernibly different than the chapters. I reckon that says more about the chapters than the interludes. I always imagine that I will reorganize them to something making more sense, but that’s not the sort of thing that will happen.
Just a heads up that next week might updates from the bonus comic instead of the main story. I haven’t decided what I’m doing there yet, but want to let you guys now I might do it, so no one is surprised 😛
Loading ...
Comic’ll be up Friday end of day probably. Sorry.
It’s ok.
This one is such a giggle fest that its worth re-reading.
Re-reading several times.
* Remembers Rovak speaking of icecream, and giggles some more.
Huh.
Just noticed that the title on the text/blog post section says “Comic for Monday, March 1st“, when it should be “May 1st”.
I’m going to say that’s due to either a brainfart, or an autocorrect/autocomplete screwing things up.
Haha, yeah. Oops. Last I checked it was March. Basically same month.
…anyway… thanks!
Mium could have left a clear trail across several national borders. Does the retrieval force really want to attack both Resh and Malsa? That would undermine their attempt to rally everyone against Orin rather severely.
I suppose 1 a.m. is as good a time as any to die laughing. *lots of laughing (obviously)*
The shades just seem like trying to hard, at least for these two, but that just makes it all the more comical.
…I’d point out the panels I thought funny, but they’re all funny. And ones with just Kokato talking are lead-ups to the funny parts that just make them all the better. He’s probably the most serious person in the room right now (the shades knock down their apparent seriousness by like, 30%) and has the least amount of readiness for it.
And Ila’s trying to take the ice cream because it’s melting. From her kidnapping victim. (The head of a state kidnapping victim. They aren’t taking this seriously at all, are they? (Past making sure he’s….inconvenienced…on arriving to that meeting, I mean.) I mean, they’re even taking Rovak’s inspiration on what “tasty ‘food'” to get.) And she’s even smiling when Mium just gives her a bowl of her own! (Though I doubt she’ll still be quiet about Kokato letting his melt.)
*cough* *cough* …can’t…*wheeze* stop…laughing….
(PS: Archive page seems a bit wonky. Right now the order is Chap0, Interlude 1, Chap 9, Chap 1-8. Not as intended, I presume?)
Archive order should be fixed. The archive page occasionally develops a case of the stupids when I create a new chapter from the publish page. Thanks for the catch!
I’m gonna be honest here: I don’t really see the point of the sunglasses. They look cool, but I don’t see a purpose to them…
Mium can be peculiar. Maybe there is a point… maybe there is not… who can say… 🙂
lol 😀
Because that is what one DOES when being a secret agent! You MUST wear dark sunglasses and a nondescript hoodie. All the best secret agents do, and Mium would know. He even got Illa to do it!
Mium probably has a whole list of observations on the style and behaviors of secret agents. Unfortunately he’s had some… not great examples to work with from what we’ve seen.
Or else he thinks it is funny. Probably that one.
ooor all of the above. i mean mium has access to data we can only guess at… on 2 planets. well maybe 1 now, maybe…
any way i think hes taking a bit from peter, arron, and kyle. in the “negotiation” side. style is a cross of tom, ren/otte, and rovak.
Right now President Kokato should be feeling some real trepidation about just what he’s up against, here:
Let’s start with “…hijack my motorcade…”. The WHOLE motorcade? O.o
Ila is completely unimpressed by His pompous warnings.
Mium knows as much about his preparations as he does.
And Mium isn’t impressed with him, either, even going so far as to critique his plans. 🙂
Personally, I love the “Special Agent Nick Otte” style dark glasses. ^^
The slow building sensation that you’ve stepped beyond the bounds of rationality is a common side effect of talking to Mium.
An interesting bit of fridge logic for El Presidente: He said, himself, that the people good at the profession these two seem to have taken up are people you’ve never heard of. And yet his first assumption is that, because he’s never heard of them…they’re new?
He has lots of reasons to be worried, if he stops and thinks about it.
But then, as a negotiating stance, supreme confidence with a touch of concern only over how bad the inevitable rescue will be for his press (to give the kidnappers some hope that he has a reason to negotiate at all) is not a bad one.
Highly misplaced here, though.
You’re right that his point doesn’t make a lot of sense, but he could also just be assuming that since they are clearly pretty young, and don’t seem to have a whole covert ops team behind them.
Of course, that they can pull off whatever they have pulled off without a team should speak the volumes he seems to be missing from his current situation status.
On one hand, he should be safe as Mium isn’t supposed to kill people to make his plans work better, on the other, one wonders exactly how Rube Goldberg a plot has to get before Mium has internal plausible deniability.
If you really want to go for a nightmare AI scenario things could get very bad very quick. While I do like Muim quite a bit, I also worry about what could happen. Especially considering Muim’s ability to predict events, things could get horrifying, quick. My hope is that Peter and Miko have their heads in the game regarding keeping him on the side of “good”, or at least the better villains.
The prospect of our technology escaping our control is very scary. Of course there’s potential for bad, scary stuff. (Grey Goo and Skynet are just two examples.) It’s good that sci-fi explores such and warns us before technology has us deal with them in real life.
However, AI would not quite be human. They would not possess a biological basis for certain human traits, such as primal instincts and desires – things like a fight or flight response or a biological imperative to reproduce. I’ve even read that greed has a biological basis (i.e., Primal Competitive Instinct). Granted, it may be possible to program AI with such things. But wouldn’t that be a human choice?
Recently, I heard an interview with political science experts who explained how certain extreme political views stem from individuals who are obsessed with bringing about homogeneity by either exclusion or inclusion. They go further to say these extremes can be explained by their relative level of compassion (or lack thereof), which they claim evolved from the parent-child pair bond.
My point is that AI may not think like humans. Hopefully, they’d be able to see the bigger picture – such as cooperation instead of competitiveness – and not react out of base human instincts and emotions like fear, bigotry or greed.
As scary as the prospect of self-aware AI is, an even greater danger may be entrusting individuals or small groups of humans with such powerful technology to use however they please. I’m reminded of the Freefall webcomic. The main plot revolves around one incredibly stupid and greedy human who ordered a robot to make him filthy rich, heedless of the consequences. The events that followed nearly destroyed their world.
Very well said.
However like humans, an AI could easily fail to grasp the bigger picture. Especially considering how much harm could be done by an inexperienced AI who thinks “I need more processing power -> I should take over every computer in the wold” training wheel safe guards seem wise. Also considering how impressionable AI often seem to act, having good role models is essential.
(By the way I like Freefall too)
I think you’ve a lot of good points. The danger with Mium isn’t that he is (or likely ever will be) evil. It’s that Peter may or may not be trusted with Mium.
Think back to when Kally was in danger… Peter told Mium to “Find her. Do it. Find her.” That may seem innocuous but… Mium had not seen her be abducted, was standing on the top of a building no where close to there, and didn’t at any point see the car she was in previously. It took him… maybe a second to do it? A few pages later, Tyler’s boss refers to a “navtrans smash and scrape”. This is almost certainly Mium hijacking the nation’s navigation grid to find Kally.
Think about it. Mium is capable of infiltrating pretty much any system without people noticing. They knew instantly that he’d done this, as it probably disrupted the whole system for that second while Mium turned it’s full power to operation Find Kally.
I reckon Mium is a lot stronger than we’ve seen. The only interaction Kor’s World dared have with him was the equivalent of “nuke from orbit” and these are basically the people that make everyone else shit their pants.
And it’s under the control of Peter, who likely does not even consider “losing” to be a thing he does. Peter is annoyed when he thinks they tried to kill Miko with what the suspected was a assassin capable of teleporting. He didn’t give any real indication that he thought Miko was in danger in either this case or when she was in a building where there was a battle mage and the IDS fighting… because she wasn’t. One of the options Mium gives Peter is “you could lower the priority of Miko’s safety”. I don’t think that’s the one Peter takes him up, despite the fact that Mium than does indeed intercept Kally personally… and that’s my theory of how was able to generate the circumstances that got him F5 temporarily, and then permanently.
Peter seems aware of how dangerous Mium-commands are, but that awareness seems inversely proportional to how much his plans are in danger. If Kally or Miko (the only people Peter seems to really care about) was about to die on the other side of the world from him from a nuclear blast, do you think Peter would have the restraint to not tell Mium to “save her” and what exactly would happen if he tells Mium to do something that explicable would require him to be essentially all powerful?
And it’s not just Peter. When Naomi realizes she might be in actual trouble, her thought isn’t “oh-uh, now I might die” it’s “if Mium has to come get me, Peter will complain”(paraphrased). And than Mium remotely destroys or disables anything resembling technology the IDS has near her (the IDS being the second most technologically advanced group we’ve encountered, mind)… and only gets distracted by when he as to go temporarily delete physics around Miko because of the aforementioned teleporting assassins.
“It’s rude to abduct someone and also take their ice cream.”
😀 I love that line! To bad it’s virtually impossible to work that one into everyday conversation.
Though, now I’m reconsidering whether Mium is a good influence on Ila. She is, after all, only a few days old. I assume that this makes her very impressionable. Also, I’m trying to decide whether Mium is serious or telling a joke.
P.S.: My guess is that Mr. Kokato is being held either next door or underneath the very building which was his destination: the meeting place. And they will probably release him promptly after the meeting ends. That, or maybe even before. All they really need is for the tide of conversation to turn the way Peter wants it to or for certain key facts to be revealed.
Nah, my guess is he’s somewhere in his own country. Either in a government building or one he or someone connected to him owns.
OR in an IDS safe house belonging to one of the misbehaving factions or somewhere owned by PACT or one of the corporations.
Point the finger for the abduction at an internal rival or someone working against Peter’s goals.
It is a hilarious line though – like abducting someone isn’t rude and what crosses the line is the taking of their ice cream. Made funnier since we know Mium said it as though totally serious.
I think they’ll hold him JUST long enough for his hidden aces to be on the table for all to see.
Suddenly, he’s the leader of a rogue state, and they can let him go.
Hmm, having them attack the IDS is a reasonable option, but given what we saw from the last page I’m putting my money on wherever the Orish are. If the Orish are fighting Apron, then the IDS isn’t intervening in a conflict between two countries, they’d be choosing sides in a major war.
Alternate explanation: They kidnapped him using a gate and are in the IDS home dimension. Good luck to Apron forces even finding him. If they could, I wish them the best with getting there, without causing a major incident. Imagine if an armed group arrived in what passes for the IDS capital (via a smugglers gate*) and starts shooting up a restaurant.
*Keeping in mind that one of the primary purposes of the IDS is to monitor and stop smugglers.
😀 If they actually are holding the kidnapped Malsan president either in an IDS safe house or somewhere in Central, that’s be hilarious (from my point of view). Good luck to IDS trying to explain that one away.
well if your going to hide, the best place to hide is where noone will search for you, or for that matter -can- search for you.
but if i was to place a bet… the “secret” hideout for the msu on the levenworth acadamy would be where i would put him.
Well, no need to add insult to injury. Just because we’re opponents doesn’t mean we have to be actively malicious, y’know?
Also, panel 5: anticipated *an* outcome.
p.s., last panel.. “the crossing of international borders and any force necessary.”
along with “the issue in the first place.”
Haha, what I get for posting a page after I should be asleep. I think I got them all, thanks! 🙂
you’re welcome. I had to post 4 comments to help you out.
this isnt about the wording but, a small critique of your drawing.
now dont get me wrong its good, and i know hands are hard to do, and kokato’s hands are great in panel2, and in panel6 miums are fine, but ila’s left hand is a bit creepy bending backwards like that…
Her hand is palm up, or at least, that’s the intention. That makes it a somewhat more natural angle, but I can see the problem/confusion.
Hands are not a strong point. I mean, art is not really a strong point, but I have a special dislikes of hands and their inability to stay on nice 2d planes 🙁
There is a cool app for the phone where you can rotate a 3d hand that helps a lot, but that only applies to when I have a lot of time buffer to draw with, which has not been recently. Something to work on definitely, but art progress is sort of hiatus 😛
Your art is getting better as time goes on and truthfully was passable when you started. The characters are all easily identifiable with your art style/color choices. The plot and subtexts in the plot are very interesting. Stop kicking yourself on the art, it is fine and the comic is very enjoyable. 🙂
panel 3, “and that you are going to show them all up and make a name for yourself.”
and panel 5, “there will be no ransom…”