Comic for Monday, May 21st, 2018
We are still just sort-of buffered. Was supposed to catch more up today, but I opted to take a nap instead after around the third time I just zoned out starring at my tablet. Did not help. Somehow taking a nap made more tired. Apparently my napping skill is too low. Seems like a skill that would be pretty time intensive to level up though.
Tom’s dialogue is gonna be a little tricky to spellcheck, since he sort talks like his words all get stepped on ‘fore he said them, and they are squished out into a drawl with bits and pieces missin’. He can talk more proper like, but I reckon he avoids doin’ so for the sake of perservin’ his image.
Mayhap someday we’ll see how Tom got so Tom-like. I actually don’t know if his backstory will be included in the comic or not, he and Nathan are mostly at a tangent to this story.
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Can I just say that Ellipsis is a fantastic name for a technique to hide in plain sight or make people forget to notice you or whatever it actually does. Naming it after the ‘…’ which signifies that there is more stuff there but it’s not important enough to bother spelling out was inspired!
One gets the feeling that @PastUtopia spent all his writing skill points on clever phrasing and wording. That is why there grammar and punctuation is a mess, can’t have max skills in everything!
If you read it closely, then Arron’s comment to Tom actually tells you what Arron uses Ellipses to do.
Arrons say “if you are using Ellipses, I really want to know WHO the security patrols think is sitting on this bench” implying Arron uses Ellipses to make it seem someone else is there.
Tom’s reply indicates that either he is not using Ellipses or he is using it in a more subtle fashion. Instead of making it seem someone else is there, he merely makes himself seem like a crazy person (which you can do simply by dressing the part). Your basic hiding-in-plain-sight tactic!
Yes, I too think that it is COOL that ellipsis (pl. ellipses) has it root in the ancient greek for “omission”. Well played PastUtopia, well played.
I like how this displays Tom’s greater mastery of Ellipsis compared to Arron. He doesn’t just know how to use it, he understands how it affects people and how to make use of that. Arron mostly used it as a form of invisibility. Tom is exploiting the fact that it isn’t.
I don’t read it that way. In fact my take on it is that:
1. Tom did NOT see through Arron’s ellipse. Rather he was simply speaking randomly to _everyone_, and Arron ratted himself out by responding.
2. Tom isn’t using any magic at all. He’s just sitting there. The people who know who he is know he is permitted to be there. The people who don’t know him think he is a hobo, and aren’t aware that the area is intended to be secured.
Arron says “even you can…”. This doesn’t seem intended to be an insult. Rather I think Tom is closer in nature to Peter. Not magically gifted, but just gifted.
Arron actually used the same ‘trick’ on Tom when he was leaving Sophie’s office. He just started talking to Tom on the assumption that Tom was there. As we could see Arron’s thought bubbles at the time, we knew it was just a guess, but he just shrugged it off when Tom asked him how he saw him.
Tom may have picked up this very trick from Arron, with the added benefit of generally being seen as a crazy hobo.
It seems like Tom might having been using Ellipses though, or Arron wasn’t paying much attention. I doubt Arron would have just walked past Tom sitting on a bench in the middle of the night without comment.
…Well, maybe. It IS Tom after all.
You have to wonder about Arron’s decision to have Kally watch over Peter. While Kally herself pointed out the reason for it is that Peter will not kill or otherwise remove Kally, she is pretty wholly unsuited for a task that does not require the application of a dragon.
While Peter is socially inept, Kally is just a trainwreck constantly in motion when forced to deal with people. She cannot really get through any conversation without saying something she should not, and in general makes allies about as smoothly as trying to smooth concrete with the sharp side of a rake.
Now the second part is interesting. Arron’s dialogue implies that Tom is sleeping on the bench in a high security area, which is likely the same area that Nathan is visiting what-is-her-name. Is he trying to prevent Arron from interrupting Nathan’s booty call? Now that is true dedication to a bro. I could be entirely misreading the situation, but something odd is going on there.
It is also a little peculiar that Tom seems to sleep on a bench like an actual hobo. I mean, he looks like one, but he **is** actually an IDS Special agent, right? Something is definitely curious with him.
I suspect Tom is more than meets the eye. You don’t just carry around a crowbar and turn out to be a nobody important.
You may think that watching Peter doesn’t require the application of a dragon, we’ve seen it come out at least twice when it was needed while she’s been on the watching Peter assignment.
I’ve had thoughts, while writing out in prose what I could imagine might eventually turn into a web comic, of writing separate spell checking dictionaries for certain characters or groups of characters.
What I’m currently doing there is I have a file for each distinct accent, into which I put all of the dialog I’ve written in that accent, along with references to which character said it when. It’s annoying to switch to that file every time one of those characters speaks, but fortunately, they tend to not speak much. I mean, apart from the one character who is narrator for one particular arc. OMG.
I tend to think of Tom as the reincarnation of my late coworker Tom, in comic form. Tom had a better wardrobe, at least when he came into work, but he somehow gave off the vibe that his more casual than anyone else dress was his fancy dress. Oh, wait, he actually said that. Also, while I don’t remember him ever carrying a crowbar, it seemed like something that he might do, somehow.
“If you’re using ellipses,” is an odd phrase. Is that a magic effect or other technique, or is he literally referring to the “..” with which he trailed off in the prior panel? (Also, there’s no “..” that is proper. It’s either “…” for the middle of a sentence, or “….” if it ends a sentence.)
Ellipses is a skill that helps mask someone’s presence.
Yup. Magical effect. Sort of like the Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy “Somebody Else’s Problem” field. It doesn’t make you invisible, but it makes people tend to think you are someone who belongs where you happen to be.
And fails to work on Mium because as an AI he has near absolute knowledge of if the person he is supposedly seeing is really there.
And it probably has some kind of subconscious effect stopping you from questioning it, but that’s rather useless on something that literally does not have a subconscious.
I think saying Mium has absolute knowledge might be overstating it. More likely Mium is aware of the data he is receiving and does NOT ignore parts of it.
HUMANS on the other hand ignore information all the time… the top two reasons being infomation mismatch (your brain will ignore one set of data (eg from the ears) if another set of data conflicts (eg from the eyes)) and task fixation (eg you are asked to follow the ball… so your eyes follow the ball, and fail to notice the gorilla sneaking across your field of vision). Add onto this that most humans are open to suggestion… well it’s got to be easy with a little bit of magic to make people think you’re not there.
And of course, Mium probably has more data inputs than a human armed with all the latest sensing equipment…
Edit: I should realize if I reload the page and one of my responses is still the last response but not editable, the reload did not actually work.
“… if you know whom you work for”
This is someone speaking, so conversational grammarian rules apply. But I’m much more used to people getting this “entirely right” or “entirely wrong”. Like, “… if you know for whom you work” or “… if you know who you work for”. Technically speaking, conversational grammarian rules means that all three are fine, because people talk like that.
Apparently, 20 minutes or an hour and a half for a nap that will actually refresh you.
That sounds like quitter talk. I just finished a ten hour nap. Going to sleep for a few hours then try napping again.
Here’s a pro tip. It’s really hard to tell the difference between a perl hacker hard at work, and a perl hacker who wrote a one liner that generates random text and then props his head up and takes a ten hour nap.
Pro Tip: It’s not that hard if you are a Perl hacker yourself. While it might look like random text to the uninitiated, you can actually see pretty quickly if it’s (possibly buggy) Perl or random, even if you’re not able to figure out what it’s (supposed to be) doing.
Some perl programmers actually try to write legible code. I have so far encountered two in person who were not me, so at least three of us.
Though, to be fair, not one of the three of us wants to be called a perl hacker, as we perceive it to imply apathy or antipathy towards code legibility.
Also, back when I worked in an office, I apparently once demonstrated that it was hard to tell the difference between a programmer hard at work and a programmer who turned off his screen saver and went to sleep in front of a window viming a source file. The language doesn’t matter so much, so long as it’s something complicated enough that it could require a bit of time to study.
Napping is a skill that can be leveled up?
Pardon me. I’ma go practice.
I hear you need to be well-rested to learn things optimally, so better get there first, then take the nap.
This was how I spent my weekend.
Sleeping until 2pm was fun, but once I got to that point, it was really difficult to manage any serious napping.
More seriously, how effective a nap seems depends largely on what point in your sleep you wake up, just like with any sleep. If you wake up just before entering REM sleep or at the start of REM sleep, you’re going to have a very difficult time being awake for a bit. It doesn’t mean it didn’t help in the long run, which is why people who suffer from this repeatedly can go for months feeling more tired when they woke up than before they went to bed.
But having an alarm clock that could detect my sleep state and wake me up a little earlier or a little later to avoid that critical period would be really sweet. Probably not worth the thousands that would cost, once it was developed enough to be mass produced, though. :/
Edit: just to clarify, I actually did spend my weekend like that. But the comment about my having spent my weekend like that was lighthearted, whereas what followed was intended to be as useful as it could be.
The Zeo did that, for much less than thousands. They’re out of business now, but you can still find used units for ~$100. The big problem is the sensor pads wear out, so with the company out of business you’d need to make your own (though there are instructions for doing this floating around).
There’s an app for that… Sleep Cycle uses yr phone to detect motion & breathing. REM away!
Panel 2: “You do realize that the IDS *is* a megalomaniacal”
Since we’re helping, second last panel..
“must people don’t…” -> “most people don’t…”
🙂
Fixed, thanks 🙂