Comic for Monday, May 13th, 2019
I’d like to think there is a timeline in which me skipping a comic last week meant that I was all caught up and everything was swimmingly on schedule. Unfortunately that is not quite that timeline we are living in. On the bright side, we do have a comic, so there’s that.
In theory I am taking a day off this week, so in theory I will get caught up insofar as having a Thursday comic and some other stuff then, but that day off is highly theoretical at this point, so we’ll see. It’s the thing where I say I’m going to take a the day off, everyone nods, and than promptly schedules meetings on that day anyway. As they say, never assume malice when you can just assume they are wankers.
The art on this page was very rushed, so I wouldn’t assume too much on anything based on background art or details here. Camilla’s brother is, for example, also there, I just forgot to draw him as he didn’t have line in this conversation. I had fully planned to draw him next to Arkady in the 4th panel, but I retrimed the panel to save time as he had no dialogue, but than realized only once I was finishing up he didn’t appear on the page, and thus there’d be no way of knowing he was on there at all – usually I try to show everyone in the scene at least once.
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Hanlon’s Razor is razorful. “Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” My other favorite razor is Occam’s. “The explanation that has the fewest assumptions is likely the correct one.”
Unless you are dealing with a person, or group that is known for malice.
Then you should assume malice, even if it appears it was incompetency.
The greatest problem in our world is that we are being taught that evil doesn’t exist, by a group of people that are evil.
Multiple groups of people that are evil. At least, I’m pretty sure they’re not all aligned, because a lot of them seem to be at odds with a lot of the others, with some of this being passive (that is, they only really rail against the other groups if something brings them up) and some being active (prone to spouting off about them with little or no provocation.)
I suppose it could be an orchestrated thing, but some of the factions involved have been around for a long time – much longer than any one person’s lifespan, unless somebody is really good at keeping exactly how old they are a secret.
I only agree that this is a candidate for the greatest problem in our world because multiple of these groups seem to be involved in every other candidate that comes to mind for the greatest problem in our world.
If they’re known for malice, then incompetence doesn’t adequately explain things, does it? Though it could be argued that malice is born of incompetence.
Most things that people known for malice do that is evil are petty little things that could be easily explained by incompetence. It would be very easy to make the mistake of thinking that 99% of the time, they were just inept, with only being truly hateful 1% of the time or maybe even less.
We tend to recognize that evil likes to stick within plausible deniability when possible, so once somebody convinces us they are evil, we see everything they do in a new light and realize they’re despicable. But sometimes it takes us a long time to get there.
Some people probably think my 99% petty is probably a little extreme, the evil people they know do a lot more overtly evil acts than that. I feel those people are the ones I’m trying to speak to, because there are some evil people who are really good at appearing incompetent much more often than evil even in times when they’re being incredibly evil.
Well it is certainly the case that a little unsolicited kindness comes back tenfold. It’s like PTerry says- you like to think of them as a friend, because you certainly won’t want to think of them as an enemy…
I wasn’t aware of the “favorite roof” thing but it is certainly in character for Mium 🙂
Pfft, she’s involved in Peter’s business. You either couldn’t make her life more complicated, or you’re not allowed to make her life more complicated. Depending on how busy they are and what Mium would think of your reports.
That said, as she’s probably barely in any system thus far, good luck even writing those reports, let alone filing them…
I think I speak for everyone when I say that we’re just grateful that you’re still producing the comic. Don’t let us readers become another stress point in your life.
Indeed. I am happy we are getting a decent sized post a week (and haven’t reached the point of breaking them up into individual panels to try and meet some arbitrary deadline)
Agreed!
@Past You previously said Monday & Friday. I think you should modify that to Monday and every other Friday. Do that for several months, till the begining of say September.
Enjoy the summer and build up a good solid buffer. Don’t be tempted to end it early if it is working out. We have seen you end it early before and then a month down the road you run into something which stresses you out. Stop doing that to yourself!
Agreed.
And if you build up a bit of extra buffer as a result, you have more buffer. If there are problems having that buffer scheduled properly, you can spend some time fixing that, but it’s not a huge deal.
You people are enablers. Before long, you’ll be telling him that it’s okay to take ice cream from the people he’s kidnapped as long as he is REALLY hungry!
Next week I expect double updates every day. Figure out a way to make it work.
And no looking for loopholes. There are SEVEN days next week, not FIVE!
If they’re just going to let it melt, I don’t see what the problem is. Ice cream really isn’t as good after it’s melted. Re-freezing it doesn’t help, either. (I’d bet there’s a process one could use to get a useful re-freeze, but re-freezing ice cream after it was served and then melted is one of those experiences from many years ago I still find more disturbing to contemplate than non-vegan ice cream despite the fact I’ve been a vegan for years, and I’ve long since learned making mistakes after ones gut has gotten used to this diet is ghastly.)
The way to make that work would be single panel updates. The first time Past gave us a single panel that was just a tiny angular sliver, promising probably a half dozen more like that coming in short order, I’d probably scream “Glider!” so loud they’d need to pan out to space to present it with proper dramatic gravitas.
Assuming the melted ice cream hasn’t gone bad the method of turning it back into ice cream is actually just making ice cream. Amazing right?
The trick is to keep it moving while it is freezing. Otherwise you end up with a block of ice with a bunch of sugar embedded in it. That’s not “bad” but it isn’t ice cream.
It’s called a popsicle.
*snerk* Mium has a favorite roof.
Were we readers able to tell this from previous comics? I definitely remember Mium dangling his legs off many different roofs, but were we ever given hints that he had a favorite?
We knew he tended to prefer taller buildings to shorter ones. On the other hand, Eliana tends to stay put (per author comment recently). As such, Eliana has probably just seen that he sits on her roof but not the Consul’s roof or the hospital. There’s probably a dozen other roofs she’s seen him not sitting on. But there are other roofs we’ve seen him on that she hasn’t.
I’ve seen a lot of people making this kind of mistaken judgment call, so it probably has a classic bias name, but I’m not really sure which one it is.
Are you talking about the logical fallacy ‘Appeal to authority’? Eliana said it, so it must be true?
You could be right. But on the other hand, PastUtopia hasn’t posted comics showing Mium every hour of every day over the course of several months. So while we’ve seen Mium on several roofs, I can’t help but wonder about all the times Mium sat on a roof that never made it into the comic.
And think of it this way as well: “The neighbor’s dog seems to like my flowerbed.” If someone said that to me, I picture the neighbor’s dog in the flowerbed about once a week minimum. So when Eliana says the neighbor’s Skynet seems to like my roof, I picture….ok, I picture multiple nuclear explosions. 🙂 But you get my point.
I think TGape was referring to referring to ‘sampling bias’ over ‘appeal to authority’.
That they are headed in that general direction does not dissuade her thinking.
I think it falls under a lot of things.
It is appeal to authority for us readers to believe that, it is natural to treat the characters as narrators of their world, but in reality PastUtopia writes almost all of his characters as operating with limited information, so just because a character says it does not make it true.
It is sampling bias from Eliana’s point of view, because she probably only seems him sitting on her tower’s roof and assumes that when he wants to sit on a roof, he picks that roof, when in reality he might just sit on roofs more often than she thinks.
It is also likely a degree of personification. Mium probably does have a lot of business in a building that connects to the Consul’s office, but he may or may not actually like the roof more than others. Knowing what we know about Mium, I would not rule out that he does have a favorite roof due to his quirks, but it is also possible it is simply a roof of convenience to him.
All that said, I suspect she knows Mium a little better than we have seen so far. She was able to piece together that Mium was probably Ila’s sister, and has clearly talked to Mium before. I also can’t help but notice her odd hair coloration matches what Mium’s was at the start of the comic before he dyed it uniformly (darker) blue, and that she wears a scarf of similar style to Mium. That seems too much to be a coincidence.
Given that she also appears crippled (wheel chair bound) in a society that is explicitly stated to have advanced medical procedures (Arron told Miko that she that medical procedures could help her without relying on the implant) makes me think there is more to her condition than a medical issue.
She is definitely a candidate in my mind for F1-4, 6, 7 or 9. We have only seen 5, 8 and 10 so far, and 8 was explicitly the least functional of them before he was integrated into MYM. F5 was able to walk around and talk, so it seems plausible that 6, 7 and 9 could be quite advanced.
It is not a slam dunk though, as I cannot see an earlier prototype being that human, given Martin and Peter’s opinions on Ila. That said, we do not actually know if Martin and Peter started the prototype program. It is possible that earlier prototypes were made by a different team with different goals and were more Ila like, which is why Martin and Peter treat that as a dead end.
Woah! I just assumed that the remaining prototypes were complete failures and/or scrapped. And you nearly convinced me…
But as much as I want to think you’re right, I suspect you’re wrong. Commander blue-hair doesn’t seem to know what Ila is. But Eliana is their tactical mage. And the way Commander blue-hair first talked about her with Arkady, it really feels like Eliana is a person with actual history with others in the mage families.
So why does Mium look like Eliana? It’s a great question! I’m hoping there’s an actual reason and not artistic ‘error’. In fact, if it was ‘error’, don’t tell us that, PastUtopia! If you can, make up a reason! 😀 We won’t ever know, and it makes another fun part of this universe to color in, should you ever want to.
Remember they are called “prototypes” not androids. There is no reason to believe that earlier iterations of the prototypes are particularly similar to the later types in actual creation process. They are attempts to create an AI that can use magic, yes, but given those attempts include something like Ila, I think it is far too much to rule out that they might have previously involved something more Miko-like of modifying an existing human or a process similar to however they make Designer Children. Who is to say F1 is not the first Designer Child? We have no real time frame for how long they have been working on this yet, and it seems to be implied the Families have been in this business a lot longer. Most Designer Children seem young, but that is not necessarily true of the Family mages (like the commander here).
Who is to say that F1 and F2 were not experiments done by the Families? It is implied Eliana is a member of the Families but I do not think there is any evidence to suggest they do normal things. Remember the Families all have chromatic hair colors, and that has become the symbol of the designer children. This strongly implies the Families were the original ones playing with genetic engineering. Almost all Family mages we have seen are better than normal. Even Arkady who acts like an easy going sort and clearly has not been in combat much before conjured a flaming tornado at the drop of a hat. Ash who seems like an even more helpless dope is a registered mage. If the Families believed that a prototype would be a bad ass mage, I get the feeling they would be all up in that. Combine the fact that the experiments were taking place in Malsa, and I struggle to think they were completely not involved.
If someone actually called Ila a prototype, it is quite possible the mage commander would connect her to Eliana, but I see no reason he would even know Eliana was a prototype, I doubt the Families share that much information between them (there is clearly political divisions between them).
I would bet dimes to dollars that the similarity in appearance is not a mistake. No other character has had multicolored hair (besides Tamara, but that was clearly an old dye job).
Plus, if you look at Ila’s out of cannon appearances, she is frequently seen wearing something that might look familiar. I am not sure what that implies exactly, but it does reinforce the connection in my mind there is some link between Eliana and the prototypes.
I think the connection between the Designer Children and the prototypes is that knowledge learned making the designer children was part of the seed knowledge for the prototype project.
To my eye, Eliana looks a little older than most of the other designer kids we’ve seen. I’m going to guess that she’s part of the earlier run on designer children, and the result of them cranking the efforts to get powerful mage kids a bit too far. She has the power they were looking to give her, more or less, but she also has the congenital birth defects that they’re trying very much to not give newer designer children. At least one of those congenital birth defects is why she’s in a wheelchair. According to her blueprint, she’s not broken, her legs are supposed to be that way. As a result, magical cures are a bit less able to do anything, because they like to do things such as restoring to a prior state.
It’s possible that IDS technology would work better for getting her to walk. But we’ll likely never know, because she’d be a fool to give them that kind of opening on her, and probably everyone in Malsa who knows her knows this.
I think that Ila is probably a lot closer to a designer child than Eliana is to most of the prototypes.
I definitely agree that Eliana was probably an experimental model – a prototype. In fact, I’ll even suspect that she’s an E series. E-liana. But I don’t think she’s an *Avon* prototype.
A very strong possibility is that Avon recruited one or more people from the family mage project to help them build their F series. And they started with the letter F because those people had just come from their E project.
So I think you’re technically wrong. But effectively correct in calling her an F series.
Having thought about it more, how sure are we that Mium Efaite’s hair color doesn’t go the other way? That is, the base color is white, like F5 and F10, but he chose to color his hair like the badass depicted here?
Sampling bias. That’s the one.
I’m not sure why that term wasn’t entering my mind. I just knew it wasn’t any of the ones that was occurring to me.
Panel 6: “what I can Arkady, but…” “at very least an unregistered mage” “at least a while” “in the families, and beyond.”
I fixed some of these. Some of them I think are probably bad grammar, but I guess are intentional for the speaking cadence. I’ve replaced the period with an “…” at least so maybe that reads better.
I did change “register” to “registered”; the mage-commander is either under the impression that she is registered somewhere, or thinks that she should be. Most mages are unregistered, but powerful mages don’t typically go unregistered, as it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep track of them. He’s using the term as more of a general level of power and concern, as that’s a fairly common usage for people to talk about mages.
Appreciate the help! 🙂
I love the work, art and story line. I do like to poke fun room time to time, particularly at references to real life corporate “things*. It’s perhaps a bit close to home for me.
That said, I question the need for bad grammar among most of those present. These are the aristocrats.
Because grammar represents things about cadence. Writing tends to ignore cadence in favor of there being a correct way to write things, but people don’t actually talk like that.
For example the one I didn’t fix:
“I’ll do what I can, Arkady, but…”
is different than:
“I’ll do what I can Arkady, but…”
The second is proper grammar for written text, but not how he said the sentence, they have a different spoken inflection to them (when I read them, anyway). It’s always tricky because a lot of things just are mistakes of how I write things because I’m not a very good proofreader, but I also don’t I also intentionally convert the characters dialogue to spoken words and back to writing, sort of like running a conversation through google translate and back, this introduces some errors, but in those cases (like above) the errors are somewhat intentional.
In the case of:
“a… Stir in the Families. And beyond.”
The best way to render that would have been:
“…a… Stir in the Families.”
New panel with speculative/troubled look:
“And beyond.”
Given that I didn’t want to draw another panel, and I just did the cadence with grammar by putting in full stop (period) between the two thoughts. While it doesn’t read as well to me, replacing that with an ellipses makes it at least somewhat proper grammar I suppose while still reflecting the manner in which he says it some degree.
Things like “awhile” vs. “a while” are things that I change that, while it makes no sense to me, I doesn’t matter to how the sentence is read – I read “awhile” and “a while” the exact same, so if it turns out that “awhile” is not the word I want in the sentence, it’s no harm to me to write “a while”, so I changed that one.
As for as register/registered/unregistered, I think Registered is probably correct there compared to Register Mage, but he’s intentionally referring to her as a catagory of mage rather than a mage-who-is-registered. Registered Mage is not explicitly a power level of mages, but a mage that is that powerful should be a registered mage. While he probably suspects that she *is* an unregistered mage, calling her that wouldn’t make much sense as most mages are unregistered. He would probably say that same thing about Kally, though technically speaking she is also an unregistered mage as that IDS isn’t part of same registry (though she’d be the IDS’ equivalent).
Now this is long and possible mostly off topic reply, as in general grammar and spelling things *are* things I try to fix, and usually just miss them, but maybe that makes sense in at least some cases of why things end up the way they do, particularly when I just use very irregular grammar rather than just wrong grammar at least.
I’d say for dialog purposes, Malsans would probably consider Kally a Registered Mage, as she’s clearly registered with the IDS, and she’s been presented to them as one of the IDS’ better mages. Sure, she’s not Malsan registered, but when talking about foreign government counterspies, James Bond refers to them as enemy secret agents, not enemy spies or enemy agents, and depending on the context, they may just be secret agents. They don’t lose their designation of respect for their capability and classification just because they’re not working for the same government.
I do understand it’s sort of a different situation, because Malsa has a high powered mage registry, but Arpon doesn’t, and it seems like most of the other countries don’t. Of those nations that we’ve seen, Orin is the one that seems to come closest, but they have something that reads to me like someone that graduated from a particular militaristic mage training program. So it probably seems a bit odd to recognize the mage registry of another country, but the IDS system seems to be a lot more similar to the Malsan system, and it feels to me like the IDS has tried to pitch their system as being as similar to the Malsan system as they can, presumably so that they don’t seem so foreign.
Actually, “I’ll do what I can, Arkady, but…”, with both commas, is the grammatically correct way of writing it the way I was taught, which I believe is the way things were taught to everyone then. I suppose they could be teaching different things now, but I’d be surprised if they were teaching the two-comma version was actively wrong. In fact, if I search for “commas addressing someone” or “vocative comma”, all the hits seem to confirm the way I was taught. (At least this applies to the US; not sure about elsewhere.)
You might be surprised at what is sometimes (and in some places or times frequently) taught as correct.
“I” is subjective, “me” is objective.
“This post was written by me.”
As I understand it, very few fluent English speakers disagree with this grammar, apart from the use of passive voice. That said, passive voice is perfectly valid grammar, it’s just inadviseable if it’s avoidable when trying to write commercially, because active voice is more engaging and less obtuse. There are times when it’s necessary, like when you’re trying to force a valid ‘me’ into a sentence and autistically focused on the subject at hand.
“I wrote this post in response to one written by Tim”
Still no disagreement of which to speak.
“This conversation about what is taught in schools these days was between me and Tim.”
Now you have people who were taught this is wrong, while others were taught it’s fine. From my perspective, it’s wrong, because JustJeff started it, so I think the list should be JustJeff, PastUtopia, me, and Tim, and possibly Glider (though they didn’t talk directly of grammar, just about whether aristocrats would get it wrong). However most younger people today, from my experience, would have the knee jerk reaction of saying it was wrong because it wasn’t “Tim and I.”
However, “I” is for the subject. “I’m complaining about how badly grammar is taught in schools today.” for example. It’s not valid to use ‘I’ in the object of a sentence unless you’re talking about the word rather than using the word.
This is all thanks to an improper correction that was fairly zealously applied back when I was in school.
The bad example I remember my teachers using repeatedly was “Me and Joey went to the store.” The ‘me’ here is definitely wrong, it should be ‘I’. My teachers focused more on the order and less on the fact that this is the subject where ‘me’ doesn’t belong. However, the order is just about being polite, it’s not actually a grammar rule.
My teachers still understood the difference between “I” and “me”, which led to many classmates being confused about why their sentence objects were marked incorrect, when they used ‘I’ instead of ‘me’ in lists. The problem is, many of those confused people never had it explained to them properly, but they went on to become English teachers. So now we have English teachers who don’t know the difference they’re supposed to be teaching. Additionally, because I’m past the 50% mark on my life expectancy (only just, but), we have quite a few of them.
PS: there’s never been a real “the way things were taught to everyone” ever. Different people are different, and despite any guidelines you set, regardless of what sorts of enforcement you attempt, so long as there are more than a dozen people teaching, at least one will do things differently. If you’re not trying draconian methods of requiring them all to teach things the same, you’ll need a lot more than a dozen teachers to get two who are teaching everything the same. If you talk about how people were supposed to be taught – at that point you’re talking about educational standards, which are much less varied than people. However, they’re still more varied than I would like to think.
Thank you, Past, and everyone else.
I’ve struggled to wrap my brain around this thread. Putting the comic off until Friday gave me more time to compose my thoughts. No, not really. It gave me more time to obsess.
There is a very big difference between awhile and “a while”. Those of us scoring higher on the math than the verbal might not grasp it, but that doesn’t change the reality.
And yes, they’re speaking a language that none of us have actually heard. But the language they are speaking? They’ve been educated in it and about it even more thoroughly than TGape was educated in English.
The “stir in the families” panel? I thought it came off very nicely. Maybe I’d feel differently if I saw it as two panels, but I felt it worked splendidly as delivered.
I get the importance of commas and other punctuation. For instance….
It’s time to eat, Grandma.
Is very different from…
It’s time to eat Grandma.
I remember, a while ago, back in the day, a while and awhile had somewhat different meanings. But along came the Internet, and slightly obscure things became much more well known, while some more obscure things seemed to vanish from all of human knowledge. More often than not, the one is typoed as the other.
Maybe awhile longer, and this too shall surface and become better known. Though it may be helpful if we use this word as much as feasible to try to make that come to pass.
Panel 1: TO an unknown location
Panel 6: WITH that power though…
I’ve heard people talking about going into unknown situations much more than to unknown situations. Also, they’re planning on getting involved, so into is definitely appropriate.
Panel 6: Agreed, plus…
Somehow, I think Mage-Commander Bluebeard would know the difference between a powerful unregistered mage and someone who actually registered. And *that* would be something he’d mention, too. Of course, when the issue is pushed, he’ll find out that Ila *is* registered, it’s just that her listed power level was a *lot* lower than her actual power. But she was registered when she just turned 16, which was a few years ago, and so there’s been time for her to get much more comfortable with her magic.
Yes, I know Ila’s age is more appropriately measured in weeks rather than years, but that’s not what the paperwork says. I don’t know how the Consul’s database could be *that* mistaken, but…
I realize there’s not room on this page for a full correction of the Mage-Commander’s assertion that Ila’s registered, unless Mium was faster with that paperwork than I realized. But some could be covered later.
Actually, panel 1 is correct as written: the unknown situation is AT the unknown location.
Panel 6 does need fixing though.
Fixed #2. Seems like the jury is out on #1 so I will wait for a verdict of consensus :D. It sounds normal to me, but then again, most things that are wrong do, so I’ll just wait and see what people seem to think.
Thanks! 🙂
For panel 1, I’d say either “Oh, perhaps” or “Or perhaps”, but not “Oh perhaps”.
How about just start the sentence with “Any….” You probably dont make mage commander if you sound wisy-washy in your thought process. He is breifing people. He may not know everything, but “Any questions or suggestions” has been uttered in brainstorming sessions many times.
It’s not necessarily wishy-washy.
“… any questions?” thinking, you know, the last time I went into a combat situation with Magus Weber, we went through the whole Q/A bit, and then when I announced the end of the meeting, he popped up with a suggestion that changed everything. I should account for that. “Oh, perhaps…”