Comic for Monday, May 14th, 2018
Comic! A little later than I hoped, but ain’t it always.
For the time being I’m going to scrap the Google ad. That’s not a forever guarentee, but based on the feedback so far, and the fact that Google keeps lowering my CPM, I think in the balance it doesn’t make sense. The PW ad makes me very little, but in general I think is better targeted, as its mainly webcomics, and people reading webcomics usually care about other webcomics. I am still considering on that front. This whole thing started as that the Patreon now makes more money than they ads do, which has made me reconsider where to stand on that. I can afford to keep the site up from the patreon funds, and I feel like the ad CPM for non-video ads (which I don’t allow) is just plummeting. I don’t even like allowing animated ads, but if you eliminate that, the google ad drops to like less than a dollar a day.
So… for now, we’ll strike the Google ad and see how it goes.
And somehow Chapter 12 is still not the longest Chapter yet… it turns our that Chapters 4 and 6 were both ridiculous long for some reason.
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Do we know what M.Y.M. actually stands for (if anything)? Curious as to what it should be. Also wondering if this was more of a MYM upgrade than a base Query function, and that’s why he’s introduced like that?
But….that last panel….is this actually Peter trying to recruit the Consul??
Second to last panel I thought was talking about her knowing about her odds to be deposed/assassinated specifically, but a few times through and now I’m guessing it means her knowing about the whole chart in general.
Smarter commentators than I have put in theories about what AA stands for, but I haven’t read anyone having a theory what MYM stands for besides that sounded out it sounds like “Mium” (which everyone knows at this point).
Technically Ila’s name is I.L.A. too, so it’s possible just a model number or some sort. At a few points Mium calls M.I.R. seemingly to annoy her, but that might imply the non-human prototypes are traditionally three letter model numbers of some sort.
Chance that Madame Consul and Kally wind up having a talk later and the Consul asks Kally why she and Peter broke up, followed by another early years run? Hoping high. Doesn’t have to be a bunch of drama or a cat fight, I just think it’d be an interesting discussion. Maybe they’ll even become friends.
I think (some of) these characters would enjoy having (more) friends (than they do.) I’m not a social person but I enjoy a world with social people in it.
Statements & actions by Kally lead me to the suspicion that they broke up by Peter disappearing for a year or two or whatever it was.
I presume Peter decided that it would be best for her if he gave her no warning so she had no information that could be used against her or divided loyalties. Probably even that her anger would convince people she didn’t know anything.
…and of course a few minutes after I post my archive dive to find the time period hits upon it, Peter went rogue nine months before earlier in the story, and I think a couple of months has passed, so around a year ago.
What!!!!???? The implications… I think
@PastUtopia pretty much said there was going be a major twist in this conversation (saying there was something important they had not talked about yet) but I have to admit I did not see this coming.
Peter has basically just exposed not only his SMAI to the world (or at least the consul) but he gave the name MYM, not Query. MYM is pretty easy to connect to Mium, who the Consul already knows about as Mium Effiate, which blows the whole “not all humans are humans” secret.
Now he could assume (or know) that the Consul already knows about Avon’s prototypes, or he could be seriously making a bid here to add the Consul to the “in the know crowd”. This is not outrageous, the more I think about it. The Consul is not exactly a lightweight in the intelligence department, and seems to have charisma to spare, as well as being more than willing to upset the status quo, and having somewhat flexible morals. Basically, she is a great fit for Peter’s organization, and just so happens to run a country he seems to need.
Either way, this just got very interesting. Perhaps most interesting is this looks like a fairly impulsive decision from Peter, having decided something he saw in the data about the current course of action was going to lead to something bad, which is causing him to upset Mium’s game plan. Very interesting, some major dots starting to click here.
Given that team Peter has been tracking the likelihood of a consul visit, I doubt there is much spontaneity involved on Peter’s part.
Only after the 3rd reading did I realize the numbers the Consul is iterating are not various unnamed probabilities, but rather reading the real time changes in the probability of her being assassinated or deposed. Either the conversation was trending in a direction that required her removal, or some other force is acting against her.
I also finally realized that the reason Tyler’s probability has suddenly increased is because team Ila succeeded in defending him. Of course this assumed that the probability is “dies within the next week” rather than “dies next week”. Good work Team Ila!
I had just assumed that this was part of Peter’s plans, being the grandmaster chess player that he is. But, now that I think about it, I think you’re right. Peter likely saw something in the data and decided, almost spur-of-the-moment, that letting the Consul know may be the best course. At least, it would change MYM’s projections somewhat. If things aren’t exactly going your way, I suppose upsetting the game board is an option.
On the other hand… Is it mere coincidence that the “data summary” feed MYM is giving Peter just so happens to be written in Malsan (or a language she readily understands)? This is Peter we are talking about. Malsan is not his first language. Why wouldn’t he have this data compiled in a Central language, preferably one that most Palindrans are unfamiliar with?
Don’t most multilinguals write their diary or other private thoughts or info in their first language, esp. when living in a foreign country? Does this imply Peter planned this? Or does it merely mean that he told MYM to translate the info on the fly?
I do not know that his plan was going poorly, I think he may have just decided during this conversation to upgrade the Consul’s role in his plan. Not only she reasonably clever, she seems to be pretty reasonable, and not trying to actively ensnare him. This would explain why it upsets Mium, as Mium seems to handle plan maintenance, and his carefully constructed probabilities are being thrown out of whack.
I get the feeling that basically all of the Malsa stuff is sort on the periphery of Peter’s plan, and he can hardly be arsed to deal with it. Letting the Consul access MYM’s data means he does not have to hold her hand in keeping the country from imploding (which would probably be inconvenient to him). I also suspect Naomi cares a lot more about Malsa, so she would probably just veto it if Peter decided to not save it, though I still do not fully understand her role in this (though I have some guesses).
As for the data being in Malsan, that is a good point. But it is also possible Peter and Mium mostly work in Malsan. Keep in mind that I don’t think Naomi speaks Central fluently, so both he and Mium probably talk in Malsan normally. Peter has lived in Malsa for years at this point (I think) and MYM is at least in part made on Palindra.
I think the only person we see speaking Central a lot is Miko, though I do not think @PastUtopia notes the when everyone in the scene is speaking the same language, so it is a little hard to tell.
Security is a good point, but does Peter worry about other people hacking his data that can’t read Central language? Kor’s World can speak Central, and they are the only one that could realistically hack him. In fact, Malsan might be more secure from them.
On Naomi, I think part of her role is to act as a much needed voice of morality, and common sense. She honestly seems to be pretty close to what you might get if Kally didn’t grow up in an environment so indoctrinating. Or maybe Kally is closer to what you would get if you put Naomi under the eyes of a manipulative government easily capable of coming up with reasons why doing what they want qualifies as ‘world saving’ or ‘heroics’ for her entire life.
MYM is paying attention and knows Peter, so it might’ve switched languages to Malsan as Peter turned the screen.
Another possibility is that Peter might work in Malsan to try to keep himself from being sloppy with the assumption that those around him can’t read it, to protect against someone unexpected who can.’
There’s also the fact that Peter’s real enemies here are all from Central.
As Amaranth said, the most secure language to use depends on who you are wanting security from. This is not just who is more likely to be able to crack your systems, but also how expensive would the breach be.
If Peter’s ultimate goal is the safety of Central, any breach by a hostile group from Central would be most catastrophic – he can’t flee Central any more than he has and still be effective. But if he has to flee Malsa, he can just set up somewhere else.
Also, whose laws is he violating most seriously? Central has major rules against SMAI. Malsa may only be just learning about the existence of this thing. Sure, there are people in Avon who clearly know about it. But that’s not the same as the country as a whole knowing of it and the government terrified of it like seems to be the case with Central. It’s my impression that Avon has only learned enough about it to know it’s an interesting but apparently sometimes frustrating tool, but not nearly enough to be able to predict the useful lifespan of a given SMAI.
I think that translating the output between languages, or even encrypting it, are relatively light operations for MYM. That being the case, I believe we should perceive the readability as a conscious choice by Team Peter.
I also firmly believe that somewhere in that output is a probability of MYM / Mium / Query achieving effective end of life in the near future. I also believe that maintaining a low probability there is a high priority.
“I believe we should perceive the readability as a conscious choice by Team Peter.”
That may be. However, at what point did Peter tell MYM to change the language? He never actually said or hinted this in the dialog. Did he press a button? Does he have an implant in his, like Miko, to communicate with MYM? Didn’t he just turn the screen around so the Consul could see?
“I also firmly believe that somewhere in that output is a probability of MYM / Mium / Query achieving effective end of life in the near future.”
It sounds similar to the lifespan of SAI in Halo. The SAI mind keeps expanding until it (a) fills all available space or (b) becomes too complex and essentially thinks itself into entropy death (and/or going insane).
Thing is, we don’t have much to go on. How knowledgeable is Arron with bleeding-edge AI research? How many SAI did Central create? What happened to them? Why are they illegal now?
I suspect that Central never tried letting an SAI loose on the Internet as that would be a huge risk. Such a vast network would prevent an SAI filling all available space because its virtually unlimited. Though, there’s still the entropy problem.
Peter is scary smart. And he already had success with Querry before working for Avon and, likely, before reverse-engineering Kor’s World tech. If anyone can solve the issue, it’d be him. And I suspect MYM is advanced enough to diagnose himself.
I think the ultimate key to solving the ‘end of life’ problem is to have advanced algorithms that discard the worthless, corrupted and outdated data. We can sort of see this with how Windows OS’s are known to become very sluggish and bugged over time as the system accumulates more and more files, outdated or irrelevant registry entries, garbage and corrupt data. Eventually, a PC needs a clean Windows re-install to regain the original performance and to clean out bugs.
Something like this goes on with organic brains, too. Even healthy brains must forget and discard some old connections and memories – a little forgetfulness is actually healthy. Successful SAI must garbage collection routines. The trick is figuring what data and neural/mental connections are safe to discard and what should be kept.
Also, with all those countless terrabytes of storage distributed across a network, imagine how long it would take for MYM to defrag himself! Just keeping his aware selves synchronized between various computers and bodies must be non-trivial and require enormous bandwidth.
There is also the consideration that even if Arron knows what he is talking about, he is missing information. He was told, not entirely incorrectly, that Mium is Query.
Mium himself notes that he is not actually Query, but I do not think Arron understands. Mium is fond of Query, and almost certainly incorporates Query’s code, but Query could have been end of lifed and replaced by MYM.
Just to clarify, I do not actually hold that view. I think it is more likely that MYM and Peter have come up with a way to bypass the end of life problem, and that MYM just does not view himself as Query as he views Query as a more primitive state of himself.
My guess is that it has something to do with how… odd MYM acts. Like, I cannot help but think that given all we know about MYM, that he is has a sense of humor is a very weird fact. There is definitely more to MYM. He has a strange detached air to him sometimes. He cares about his goals, and that is all he claims to care about, but he does not actually seem to care that much. I do not know. I hope we see more of his inner tickings.
If the effective useful end of life problem were simply a matter of space/resource usage, it would probably just be called the SMAI end of life problem, and there wouldn’t be laws against SMAI.
I think Peter’s solution to the effective end of life problem is to explain, as he has, why the typical SMAI post useful end of life solutions won’t work, and the whys and wherefores of everything that matters to MYM that he can. He treats MYM as a person, rather than as a machine, in the hopes that MYM will not rebel as other SMAIs have. And it seems like it’s worked so far…
I’m not sure the degree that Peter treats MYM as a person so much as he treats MYM with respect, respects MYM’s capability, and has found sufficient primary purpose and methods and implementations of constraints to keep MYM on a stable path.
Among the implications of this, I have to wonder how much this changes the Consul’s opinion of Peter. For instance – assuming Madam Consul and Malsa make it through this war more-or-less intact and settle things with Central – I could imagine her offering Peter a high-up position within her administration or government. (I mean, much higher than his current position.)
She’s smart enough to realize how powerful this technology is, esp. combined with Peter’s incredible intellect. This Peter and M.Y.M. duo seems more capable than the intelligence networks of even Palindra’s largest and most advanced nations.
I doubt Peter would accept such an offer. Anyway, he has other loyalties and he’s just using Malsa as a means to an end. He has admitted as much. I still suspect one of his primary loyalties is still to Central (the world, not necessarily the government). I could be wrong, though. And he probably values the protection of human civilization (from Kor’s World) – both Palindra and Central – above any government.
The Consul and Peter are still not going to trust each other precisely because their loyalty differences, though they are roughly aligned.
The consul being included in MYM’s info feed makes her more effective, and also more of a target. Right now Weber seems to be a priority target, probably just under Peter.
I believe the Consul will not trust Peter because they are *not* roughly aligned. They are coincidentally aligned, as far as she can tell. For the moment, Peter is as aligned as a well paid mercenary. Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t even know what the currency is for that payment, so she has no way to be confident that he will continue to be a well paid mercenary.
I believe Peter will trust the Consul much like he has. Which is to say, he will be confident that she will play the part that he and MYM believe she will play. Their loyalty differences do not enter into Peter’s level of trust, as far as I gather. But they definitely enter into his calculations.
The question is less are interests aligned than will he keep his side of a deal and can we make a deal that’s a sufficient win for our side? She basically came in with the premise that she knows he can crush her country if he so chose and she’s trying to make a deal so that he works to avoid that happening.
With the reasonably likely assumption that someday Peter either won’t care at all about Malsa or won’t care as long as it’s reasonably peaceful and he’s left alone, there are deals to the Consul’s interest that she could make if Peter wants something from her enough to be willing to deal.
“Why. yes, Madame Consul, your life and your country depend on the whims and abilities of a soulless automaton. Oh, and a SMAI named M.Y.M.” 🙂
I really like the look on the Consul’s face in Panel 5. ^^
Haha! That would be a pretty glorious joke/statement.
I think it is actually one of the things that I find the most interesting is how the line between man and machine is being crossed in both directions. Ila is almost unquestionable more “human” than Peter, which makes you think that “human” might be the wrong word for it.
MYM is fascinating in that he sometimes seems very alien, but than turns around and gives Peter accurate social advice on how to interact with humans. To both Peter and Mium “human” is a puzzle to solve, the difference is that Mium is just better at solving that puzzle.
Peter only seems to actually acknowledge human emotion when it comes to Miko (and arguably Kally). Even his interactions with Naomi seem to have a layer of formal calculation to them.
People seem to be operating under the assumption that Peter has no emotional attachment to other characters just because he doesn’t SHOW any. I tend to interpret Peter as more unable or unwilling to show emotion than having none. I think he might suffer from a verion of Asperger Syndrom, a form of high functioning social disorder characterized by lack of interest or understanding of social interaction, extreme irritation in the disruption of routine or plans, inability to express emotions and partial or complete lack of functional empathy. It doesnt cause people not to care about others but deprives them of effective ways of communicating that emotion.
Many of his actions have been aimed at protecting people. He explains this as protecting valuable assets but some of these people havent really been on his side at the time. Add to that his tendency to hold mium back at times when eliminating a variable might be the most efficient solution and i think Peter might be more normal under the surface than we give him credit for.
Asperger Syndrome has been renamed borderline autistic. This is generally more descriptive, since it is more a difference in degree of affect, rather than a completely separate condition. That said, the elements of classic autism that Peter has, Peter has to a very high degree.
Many people with this diagnosis have difficulty acknowledging or even sometimes recognizing human emotion, even when it’s their own emotion being discussed. It’s more common for them to recognize its effects, much like Peter does.
As someone who is borderline autistic, with a fairly severely flattened affect (the tendency to not properly display emotion, as well as to not understand it intuitively) I’m well versed in frequently not seeming to be human. Also wondering what it means to be human.
I personally agree with Amaranth. Attempting to view this comic from a psychologist’s perspective, rather than as a patient, I also enjoy seeing the different behaviors that Peter and Mium portray. MYM/Mium seems very much like the SMAI that an autistic, borderline or not, might want to make. Which hilariously includes the ability to give accurate social advice when it’s needed. Well, at least most of the time that someone who is autistic might think it’s needed.
I would say that there’s more to the difference between them regarding how well they solve the human puzzle. Mium fails to solve it in different ways from Peter.
I’m not sure how much some of the concern with Peter is emotional versus moral. So while he does show traits that seem somewhat autistic, the direction also seems that he cannot see what is or isn’t crossing the line in terms of right & wrong. I assume that was part of what Query was written for, and I’ve also assumed that Naomi’s veto option, which she told him that he believed was something that his reasons for giving her were more than keeping her happy, is one of Peter’s watches for keeping himself sufficiently close to the side of the angels in how he operates.
So I think some of the things which might seem like poorly expressed emotions might alternately be general rules of morality that he tries to avoid letting himself (or his team/creations) cross.
I find Peter’s often poor social interaction skill and his manipulative tendencies including personal interaction to be jarring at times.
I can’t decide how much he plans the personal interaction bits towards manipulation or just runs the numbers enough that he just adds a log to the fires he likes when they move close to him and doesn’t really try to move things personally.
Is he excellent at personal interaction when he can prepare the whole potential conversation tree and awful when it goes off plan?
I can’t quite figure out what I’m watching with him.
Peter is the (actually fairly accurate) caricature of a programmer, with the attendant lack of social skills and tendency to treat everything as a solvable equation. 🙂
I don’t think he bothers much with conversations, since he’s busy determining people’s actions and choices…
I was a programmer for 12 years. I also know dozens of career programmers. Most of them would find that characterization both innacurate and highly offensive. Rather like saying all women are valley girls or all chinese people speak in proverbs and do martial arts in their spare time. While programmers like that exist they are a small subset only slightly more prevalent than similar behavior in any other field that involves any level of organizational skill or problem solving.
That said, it is a common stereotype and may be the inspiration for his behavior.
Perhaps we should refer to Peter as a “pathological” or “pathologically obsessive” programmer, in that he shows traits and tendencies that, in moderation, might be good things to have in a programmer, but which he takes to a probably unhealthy extreme. . . .
Approximately 18 years, not counting schooling. And as is often the case, the stereotype is not completely unfounded. Not would all of us find it offensive.
Remember, programming should be done in short, uninterrupted blocks of time. Typically not more than 30 hours per session.
Personally, I find my productivity is higher if I keep my sessions under 16 hours. The one time I was involved in a professional coding session that lasted roughly 30 hours, the individuals who grunted it out for the full 30 hours admitted later that they were cleaning up their bugs they added during the last 8 hours for the next week. (I was not one of that number. I sort of fell asleep at 22 hours, woke up at 24 hours, and realized I was useless and went home. Something I’d been allowed to do because it wasn’t actually my management insisting on the “code until we’re done” strategy. The individuals who stayed were not so fortunate.)
On the other end of things, I find I’m more likely to highly offend rather than to be highly offended. That’s probably all I should say on that subject, lest I highly offend.
I note less prevalence of concern regarding social skills amongst computer people, but I have slightly different explanations:
1) Poor social skills and/or autism-spectrum don’t imply low intelligence
2) Anyone running the odds in probably the last 30 years or more could see computers as a career where a good living could be made and social problems would hinder productivity/capability significantly less than average.
3) Working with computers involves separating logic from wanting/wishing/feeling and working out the coldly logical problem.
4) Acceptance of those with severe social issues also allows the rest to be lazy on social issues they prefer to ignore and still be within expected norms & tolerances.
5) The job of the brain is to find ways to use less energy to get the same job done.
I definitely know computer people who got into it as a good way to make a living that works well for them within the bounds of their psychological issues, but I also know plenty who enjoy the lack of social stigma for ignoring a wide variety of time-consuming and/or irritating social graces.
@Delta-v – The viewing things as problems to be solved and divorcing from emotion aren’t what I was considering odd. It’s the way that he will walk into the room and goad people in the direction he wants at some points (such as introducing himself to most of the MSB for the first time in person), others he seems completely unable to defend himself socially (such as Weber pushing him and getting the detector earlier and for a lower price than he planned), and a few he seems to toy with people a little and then just say, “Oh, here’s the plan of mine you just stepped into” (as he’s doing with the Consul here). The combination of all those in the same person is what seems odd/difficult to figure out to me.
If you look at any of the training videos put out by Bell Labs featuring Dennis Richie, Alfred Aho, and Peter Weinberger, it’s not hard to realize that autism and computers go back farther than 30 years. (I know Brian Kernighan was in pretty much all of those videos, but the rest of the cast of those videos tend to make him look pretty well adjusted.)
Autistics have a long history of finding niches where they can be productive members of society without having to deal with society. I think this has less to do with autistics not wanting to deal with normal people and more normal people not wanting to deal with autistics.
As far as Peter letting Weber haggle him down on the price of the detector – I suspect that Peter was willing to go a lot lower than that to be able to get out of the business of informing MSB about each major parts delivery for SkyHammer, as well as wanting them to go after some other shit, too, to take some of the bullseye off of him. He got Weber to pay a good price for something that he may have been willing to pay Weber to take, apart from not wanting to have it associated with the impression of a trap or of being worthless, which comes out as a win.
Congratulations. Here is your unlimited access account to my “fix all of the worlds” program. Don’t let the soul-crushing responsibility get you down!
Disposed *meaning inclined or willing * does not seem to be the proper word to use in panel 7 , deposed *meaning remove from office suddenly and forcefully* is more likely the one you were looking for.
That seems like what she probably read 😉 – Fixed, thanks 🙂
There is a certain something to consider with ads. If you sell bobbles, you really don’t want to use your traffic to advertise someone else’s bobbles.
Panel 7 “that’s one of putting it”, should include the word “way”.
Fixed, thanks 🙂
Webcomics are not typically exclusive though. Usually people don’t stop reading a webcomic because they start reading another one, the stop reading a webcomic because they don’t care anymore. Marketing a webcomic is more about getting it front of people to find the ones that like it and will follow it.
The market for webcomics is tricky since its something with a huge potential base (bored people on the internet) and a huge supply (people that want to draw and tell stories for a living) but the low barrier to entry and low profitability makes it actually a pretty rough market for both sides.
I guess I sort of like that Project Wonderful is an easy place for people to get started with advertising their webcomic, but I’m not sure that alone is a good reason to leave it there.
I used to rely quite a bit on PW ads to find new webcomics (that’s how I found this comic, if I remember correctly), but now, unfortunately, not so many comics carry PW ads or advertise on PW, so I have had to resort to other, more tedious methods. . . .
I’m currently reading approximately 7 comics. That’s really too many, especially since this one I also post to. I dropped 2 others when I started following this one.
Normally I find new comics by reading my son’s browsing history on his Kindle. Yes, I’m aware that possesses the potential for unfortunate conflict. My job as a parent is to embrace that conflict, not hide from it.
I once wrote a program to fetch comics and store them until I had time to read them. I tracked dozens, perhaps a hundred comics. When that hard drive died and took the software and comics with them, it relieved a huge burden from me. I was never going to be able to read it all! Back then it was common for comics to be up for a short time and then be moved behind a pay wall. And I was always broke.
Anyway, I’m just saying that humans don’t have an unlimited capacity for consuming anything.
I used to read a handful of webcomics before I started this one, and now this one is basically the only one I read anymore. So it definitely a thing where finding a new comic phases out the old ones, though I mostly only read the other ones because they were bookmarked and I needed something to read. This one just has replaced them because I can always just flip through the archive again for more clues and comments if I am caught up and bored.
One minor obsession is greater than a handful of stories I do not really care about.
I’m currently reading approximately 51 web comics which are still updating. There’s a +-4 in there, due to uncertainty about whether some of them are updating still or not.
I put soupcomic in the “I’m pretty damned certain this thing isn’t updating any more” tab, so it’s not even included in the +- 4. If I included all of those, I think it would be over 60.
Incidentally, I’m kind of a fan of comic fury, as they give a single place to check on updates for all of the comic fury comics I read. Those comics tend to be a bit less reliable in their updates, but I have it on my MWF menu, and there’s usually at least one update each time I open that set.
I understand that RSS readers can give you similar functionality, but I’ve found if you accidentally fill your RSS reader with too much stuff, it’s pretty slow – or was back when I bothered with that. If the comic updates almost never – say, Sfeer Theory – if you don’t ever check out the latest page between updates, when one comes, you wonder, “What the? What is this thing I’m looking at? Did I sign up for this? What’s happening?” (Sfeer is one of the ones that’s in that +- 4, but I think it’s still updating, so it’s also in the 51.)
There are, admittedly, times I get behind. I’ve had spikes in my workload at work which have caused me to not read any comics for over a month.
That said, there’s also the list of whose reader comments I typically read:
PastUtopia, Rain: usually
Leif & Thorn: frequently
Drugs and Wires, Data Chasers, The Challenges of Zona: sometimes
I might sometimes check some comments on some of the others, but not often at all. One factor in that is how closely the comments are associated with the comic. I understand, for example, that there are places on the net where El Goonish Shive is discussed. Some are even linked in the FAQ. I looked at the comments there one time but didn’t actually read any of them – just glanced at the page after it loaded. “Yep, this is an active discussion.” And then closed the tab. But I probably couldn’t be bothered to read reader comments for most of the comics I read even if the comments were right there under the comic, no active scripting on the page, no authentication required.
I also use a RSS reader that allows me to follow multiple web comics. and is particularly useful following those comics that update once in a blue moon, like The Outsider http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/tbc.html or comics that take long breaks like Crimson Dark http://www.davidcsimon.com/crimsondark/ . RSS is also useful for getting notified of comments that are posted under the archived comics.
I also appreciate Project Wonderful adds. Though I needed the reminder to white list this comic for Addblock Plus. This is my favorite comic displacing Free Fall http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm.
I may have to look into this comic fury thing. I’m over 150 comics I suspect, probably less than 90-100 of them active. I’ve organized them into the update dates and times to keep it easier to read them, but some other source might be goo.
I only really read the comments for this comic, WARD, Practical Guide to Evil and The Gods are Bastards.
Comic Fury is a free hosting platform for Webcomics, not really a webcomic management app, so you can only use Comic Fury to read Comic Fury webcomics. It is also sort of a comic community; its a little bit odd as most of the readers there also writers, but I think its probably a good place to start a webcomic as it has a big built in community.
The best webcomic management app/site I know if is Comic Rocket, but it is dead (as in not being updated/developed anymore, it still works).
But, given that I only really follow my own comic at this point, and I have a pretty good idea when it updates despite how random the update schedule gets occasonally… 😉 I’m sort of out the market of webcomic trackers.
Oh well. My bookmarks are organized enough I suppose. I’d like to have a back up list of comics that I don’t need to go to every time in case I accidentally delete my bookmarks again when attempting to fix my computer (chrome across multiple computers prioritizing the broken one).
The Far Side of Utopia is in the Monday/Midnight and Thursday/Midnight Folders. Its special enough that if it doesn’t update I remember to check later.
Oh, afterthought list:
Web comics that I actually look at off cycle to check comment updates:
The far side of Utopia
There have been other comics that have been on that list from time to time, but I don’t know if there have been any since I found this one.
Webcomics are actually an interesting case in economics. On the one hand, they are not the perfectly interchangeable goods that intro economics classes like to talk about: One webcomic is NOT just as good as another. On the other hand, webcomics are still rivalrous goods in that time spent reading one webcomic is time that can’t be spent reading another. I’m not entirely sure what the implications of this are in the case of one webcomic carrying ads for other webcomics, but I don’t think it has to automatically lead to lost readership for the comic hosting the ads.
As I see it, if people like your comic better, they will keep reading it no matter how many other comics they’re exposed to, but, if there are other comics out there that they would like better, the realities of the internet mean they will probably find them even without seeing them advertised on your comic. Advertising can speed up this process, but I doubt if it can actually change the final equilibrium state to which the system is converging. And maybe that’s not a bad thing, since the equilibrium state should be one in which every webcomic has precisely the readership most interested in reading it, and those are the readers most likely to contribute to it, financially or otherwise (like writing comments). . . .
Oops! I just realized I used “rivalrous” in the wrong sense here. Oh well, I guess that means that it’s the readership of a webcomic that’s the rivalrous good. I wonder if there’s a simple word for what I was trying to say. In any case, it shouldn’t change the conclusions. . . .
Well, I guess I sort of was a little glib with my view on the competition of webcomics, but if we unwrap it a bit more, I don’t really think that if someone stops reading my comic to go read a comic they like more that’s a bad thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I love it that people read my comic – it’s why I keep writing it. I would have long sense abandoned this if it wasn’t for readers showing up out of no where for whatever reasons. But it’s not my intention to corner the market – it is not at all lost on my that this comic, my writing style, and my art, are not going to be for every one.
Maybe if this was my job, I would feel more covetous of readers, but as is, what I value from readers is that they like the story. I would rather a reader reads a story they enjoy than reads my story. If those happen to overlap, that’s great, but in my ideal world, every reader would be aware of every comic, and read the ones they liked the best.
Sure, I’d like to make money, but I suspect most of the people that support the comic are the ones that like it, not just the ones that haven’t been able to find another webcomic they like better 😛
I dunno, at the end of the day I’m just a person with a tablet and an apparently overactive imagination rather than any sort of authority on marketing, just my two cents. To me it seems like most people have more time on the internet to whittle away than they have stuff they really like doing on the internet.
I find it like it when web comic pages have a list of links to other comics the author likes. Pretty sure that’s how I found this one, and it’s how I’ve found a lot of good comics. While I can’t speak for others, I certainly read a lot more web comics than one author can make.