Sorry for the delays on the comic. Hopefully next week will be on time. I’ve gotten a bit of a start on it, so we’ll see but I’m hopeful.
The progress of the comic pages and the general consequent progress of the comic as a result has been a bit slow; this would normally be the point where I think I’d have to consider hiring out an artist or some sort of solution like that – it’s something I’m considering, the issue stems from uncertainty. My job is a bit up in the air all things considered, and while I’ll be likely fine if I get laid off, it does mean it’s not a great time to commit to any sort of long term plans… particularly as if I get laid off, at least in the short term, there’s a good chance keeping to schedule wouldn’t be so hard 😀
I feel like I’ve been punting on figuring out the details for awhile now, but I’m going to have to for at least a little bit more as we see what happens with the world. I would actually like to spend more time on the comic in general, particularly on the writing side – I want to get back to finishing Tyler’s story, and I’ve wanted to write a novelization of the comic for awhile as a cross between a summary and fun extra, but right now time for either idea is fairly unlikely. Heck, there’s a handful of stories I’d like to write in the setting. I also feel like the art in general has been something that has suffered from the fact that it’s always under a deadline – I almost never get time to just doodle and sketch things currently, which is something I quite enjoyed doing.
This isn’t all the fault of my job – as many of you know I have other hobbies that have nom’d large chunks of what free time I do have, like running D&D games and working on custom D&D content which is a particular hobby that’s grown far beyond expectation, and many other little things and projects I like to dabble in here or there (or less productively various video games here and there, though they’ve gotten squeezed from the schedule even more than the comic). Unfortunately I’m not quite to retirement yet, so we’ll have to see how things play out with the day job for now, as it tends to lord over everything else like a hungry time devouring dragon.
We will march on either way, it’s just sometimes a slow plodding march. At very least we will finish the story arc the comic set out to tell, and from there we’ll see what TFoU 2 or whatever (it would probably not be called that for reasons that would be obvious, but you never know, legacy names and all that 😀 ) looks like in future prospects… that’s all a few years off either way still at the rate we are going though.
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Why does “I should note I do not intend to press a legal claim due to confounding factors.” read to me like, “That said, I understand you have a history of tying things up in court for ages, and I really need to resolve this before the end of the day if possible, so could we all just work together on this?”
lol. Yeah, I can see that too. When I first read the line, I assumed Mium was meaning “I’m not a legal citizen here in central, and your laws don’t allow me to be one, so it would be a waste of time to rearrange your legal code, when I can just reference an obscure precedence and be on my way”; when everyone else heard “you have a history of tying things up in court for ages, and I really need to resolve this before the end of the day”.
-meoi lass
Page should be up tomorrow.
And just wait until you see it! Boy is it a doozy this time!
I don’t like doozies when I’m dizzy…
The last time we saw scarfed MIUM Effate was back on July 5 of last year when he showed up on Palindra to talk with Kyle and informed him that being there was ok because Kyle “had a very good alibi”. Everything that has happened since then has taken only a few hours. This comic really does have really big things that happen interspersed by very long breaks of time.
MIUM showed up right after Kyle asked his councilmember friend to look into the issue with the gates and such, which seemed to be the same day that the gates went down, so Aaron coming through them from the other side within a day or two of them going down (with certain people trying to hide it) should cause something big to happen.
Also, after the council meeting, with the vote and the Consul walking in and Tyler barging in and then outing the rogue families for working with their enemies and then them running off only to be caught by Naomi, things should be very different in Malsa as well.
Also there was that whole thing with Cali’s dragon on the roof which was only after the previous day’s shutdown of all gates, fighting a PRT invasion force, fighting Atter, and getting Illa sweets and a nap (without a side of disection).
Like I said, a lot of stuff tends to happen ALL at once.
“Both family and body? So, he’s not just likening Query to a pet, but himself as well? Or is he saying Peter is his pet?”
I think it’s extending “family” to include “pets” and “body” to include “non-human body” i.e. pets’ bodies.
I suspect that, beyond the court merely stating “pets of family,” they had justifying reasoning that would more properly also lead to Mium’s claim here. Say, thinking of the expansion of “family” to include not just blood relations or formal adoptions, but also “informal adoptions” of entities which don’t have formal adoption processes (such as pet adoptions), at which point Query falls into said category for Mium.
(And a similar extension – a logical conclusion not from the law itself (where interpretation by courts would be required) but from the courts’ existing statements of their interpretation of the law – for the definition of “body,” presumably.)
Actually, I think Muim is saying that the extension should justify him claiming Query because
1. either Query is considered a pet due to his lower processing power compared to the F8 chassis.
2. Query is considered a brother as they both run the ‘parent’ synchronization program.
Lily is doing a better job of understanding Mium than Kyle is. All predictions are based on facts and assumptions. Mium is stating probabilities without explaining the facts and assumptions that he is basing them on. Mium knew that his destination was the location of Query, that Kyle had access to Query after it was damaged during the attempted assassination, and a location for query. Based on these facts and information about Peter’s relatives, he was able to come up with a probability of 53%. Lacking most of this information, Kyle was only able to establish a probability of one divided by the number of possible locations.
Lily has knowledge of the fact that Query was associated with Peter, and that any strange individuals or devices have a good chance of being associated with Peter (either ally or enemy). Therefore that Mium’s destination was in the apartment, Mium (strange individual) was likely associated with Peter, it seems likely that the causative relationship between Mium’s destination and the apartment was likely Query. As Mium has stated before, stating all of the facts that his predictions are based on would require more time than the lifetimes of Kyle and Lily combined.
Despite all that, I get the idea that Mium is “trolling” and giving information that will increase the quality of his predictions rather than providing information that the recipient desires.
I see four possible answers to Muim’s speech patterns:
1. Peter told him to answer the spoken question and not the meaning of the question. Peter being Peter, whatever question that was asked is a specific request for info Peter needs. Not told otherwise, Muim applies this same output to everyone else…much to Peter’s amusement.
2. This is a calculated manipulation by Muim. For example, when Muim ‘accidentally’ mentions Atter’s spyware in Director Kepler’s arm, it’s because the question asked could be twisted into giving that answer.
3. Muim enjoys trolling.
4. All of the above.
I suspect #4.
Definately number 4.
We have seen countless times that MIUM answers any and all questions, never lying but not always giving a direct answer either.
As for the second thing MIUM has repeatedly shown that he curates the answers he gives in order to get the outcome he wants with the least problems therefore giving this sort of an answer is FAR more likely to cause Poppa Kepler to let him fix Query peaceably than most any other solution might (threatening, bribing, stealing, breaking in and fixing it while they slept, etc.)
Finally MIUM has what can be considered a wry “sense of humor” despite the fact that he will fervently deny the possibility of having such without “emotions” despite the fact that, regardless of the experience of “feeling” emotions, the end result of emotions is to weight options toward or away from certain choices and to bring remembrance to past choices that did or didn’t work wholly as intended. By that measure a neurochemical adjusting the likelihood of the firing of synapses is functionally identical (if a bit less stable) to an aggregated list of soft-coded priorities/habits with different weightings based on successful achievement of more hard-coded priorities.
It feels worth mentioning that #4 tends to describe Peter as well… with some adjustment to the included #1 for it to make sense from Peter’s perspective.
There’s also an element of ‘giving this answer allows him to evade answering in ways that would be both unpleasant and more honest. Also, thanks to the fact that his current audience is both very familiar with Peter and also certain that Peter is not a robot, by acting in a Peter-like fashion, he may seem both more likely to be Peter’s associate and less likely to be a robot.
(That is, as someone who has been accused of being a robot from time to time, it feels like being accused of being a robot is a risk that both Peter and Mium would have from time to time. But not as much here.)
You mentioned the “accidental” mention of the spyware in Arron Kepler’s arm. Could the mention of critical damage in the security system at Kyle Kepler’s house be a similar event.
Naldu, you and Old Dan are picking up details in the Lily Mium interaction that I missed, so I will defer to your judgement. However my read on it is that Mium pretty much beat Aaron up with the piece of information that Aaron was missing, the bug in his arm.
In this case it seems more like the Mium interaction with the Consul where he is claiming things (database hacks) weren’t his fault, but there is no expectation of anyone believing he didn’t have his fingers all over it.
Specifically I think the damage to the home security system was a direct result of Mium doing something, coordinated his distracting the people sent to watch him.
Did he directly damage the home security system? Probably not. Was it the direct result of something he set in motion, where there was a strong probability of damage, but non damaging outcomes also allowed Mium to bypass it? I’d bet money on that one.
Reading this again, I think the damage to the security system is that Query is nonfunctional. Query was likely supplementing Arron’s security system, but with it broken, it’s just a simple “dumb” security system that Mium can hack without a second thought.
But even if Query was still active, Query would likely not have stopped Mium for obvious reasons.
I really have to agree with Naldru as to Lily’s assessment of the situation. She seems to have a way better handle on this than does Kyle. Takes us back to the previous comic and her reference to what tech Peter might have, followed up by her initial question to Mium, “Are you a friend of my son, Peter?”
Something about Mium’s repsonse to Lily’s inquiries is different than Mium’s response to any other set of inquiries posed to Mium in the entire comic. I checked, by rereading the entire comic.
I wonder: Why does Mium speak to Lily Kepler in a completely different style than anyone else he has encountered?
Mium admitted to Aaron that he exposes a unique personality interface per person, depending on the needed level of interaction/manipulation/value placed on that individual.
He also confessed that Aaron gets a pretty much default template because while Aaron is valued by those Mium values, Mium does not himself place a high value on Aaron and the Aaron-Mium relationship.
That being the case, it seems likely that Mium perceives a value in exposing a more sophisticated, more computationally expensive, personality interface to Lily.
I don’t pretend to know the motivation here, but it might simply be that Peter’s relationship with his mother is a much higher priority than Peter’s relationship with his father.
I suspect that there’s also something factoring in along the lines of Lily likely being more of an active ally as opposed to a more passive asset. Kyle and Peter may love each other, but they also seem to treat each other as having largely separate agendas. While I think Kyle believes Peter is intelligent and well intentioned, Kyle is likely to behave like Aaron. Wait it out to see where Peter is going, possibly even attempt to direct events themselves. Lily may be more inclined to drop everything to lend Team Peter support and not question why a favor was requested.
Yes, his personality is unique in speaking to Lily.
But I meant Mium’s style or method of response to inquiry changes, not the personality of his responses to Lily. The most blatant example: Is chronology of query to response.
Lily query:
1) Introduction flag
2) Are you […] here in relation to this device?
3) Are you a friend of […] Peter?
Mium query response:
1)A friend of Peter? You could say that.
2) Yes. I am here, because of that device.
3) You may call me Mium Efiate.
There are several other, more subtle stylistic changes, as well, but they hinge in part on this query response chronology change.
Mium always, in every other instance, answers inquiries chronologically.
And as far as politic goes: “You could say that.” Is a negative response. As he cannot answer the question: Yes. If politic was Mium’s intent, he would have placed that response in the middle.
Panel 3: But it was in fact highly *probable* as well.
Happy for the update, thanks!
Last bubble in third panel. Please change. Probable replaces probably.
And panel 3 is probably “probable”…
So, Mium’s here to fix…”Query’s original shell” or whatever it’s going to end up getting called, with the signal it was sending out being some kind of locating beacon I guess.
“Confounding factors” yeah no kidding.
Suppose the curious things would be….well, sounds like he’s probably going to be repairing Query instead of just salvaging something, but is he returning Query afterwards? And something I expect Kyle to ask about….”mission“?
I think yes, he is returning it. The mission Query was on remains valid. That mission including among other things collecting intel and body guarding Kyle.
The bigger question is, with MIUM’s “one body” restriction for each of his nodes and the fact that all of the hive mind must follow all restrictions, where is Query right now?
There wasn’t an explicit statement of repair in the future. Only the assertion that the Keplers could not repair the unit.
It is entirely possible that the unit is in fact beyond repair and this is simply a salvage of the Kor eidos card.
In fact, the reference to needing to inspect the unit prior to determining priorities suggests that Mium doesn’t know for certain if Query is repairable.
Agreed.
It isn’t necessarily possible, but repairing Query’s old body seems to be one of MIUM’s priorities considering that he mentions that it “holds sentimental value to several people”. The only non easily replaceable part of it would be the Edos Card, the rest of it should be fairly standard (if high tech) hardware. After all, Peter did build it before he went missing which was before the MIUM collective came to be and the only addition to the F5 that we saw that was needed for it to be properly part of the collective was another Edos Card.
The software should be backed up in half a dozen other places if for no other reason than that we know Query is still part of the MIUM collective (because of all the stuff that happened with Miko). Assuming enough of it can be reassembled in order to let it connect, the whole thing should be able to regenerate the rest (as we have seen MIUM do on several occasions).
If the edos card isn’t intact then he would probably need to steal one from somewhere to reassemble the little bot, though I wouldn’t put it past MIUM to upgrade the bot while he has access to it.
Yup, makes perfect sense.
I suspect that at least the eidos card is still functional, as that seems to be what Dr Lily was examining, and I believe how Mium was alerted to the damage.
I suspect at least part of the eidos card is still functional. I’ve found that wireless communications hardware can be surprisingly non-functional, and yet still send out a beacon of sorts.
On a similar note, just because your wired NIC is critically damaged doesn’t mean it can’t flood the network with bad packets… even while your computer’s offline. Gotta love the consequences from “Wake on LAN”…
Well. That last panel… I don’t believe I’ve made that sound before.
Thank goodness I wasn’t drinking something. Although perhaps it would have cleared out my sinuses.
A page like this one is why I love this comic; especially Mium’s dialog. Minor nitpick; sometimes your character’s dialog sounds a little stilted, but you nail Mium’s dialog perfectly, along with Peter’s and Naomi’s.
This would be a great watch as a T.V. show, but you’ve heard that plenty of times, I’m sure…I wish you had time to write a prose version expanding the universe; it’d be a hell of a read.
I doubled my Patreon, small as it was; you deserve more. Carry on, madam or sir!
I can say with certainty if you ever publish a book I will buy it without a second thought. I’d love to read a novel set in the comic setting, or likely anything you come up with.
As someone that enjoys both the comic and the D&D stuff, I can understand why the D&D stuff takes up more time with it being much bigger than the comic at this point in supporters, but I’d love a book as the depth of the comic of world seems near limitless, and I’d just really enjoy seeing more of it.
Also… I love Mium. You can never tell how much he is deliberately trolling when he takes things hyper literally. He is literally an AI that answers questions, but on the hand his social routines are more than capable of determining what people are trying to say, so he is almost certainly being selective in his application of them.
I agree about the book; I wish the author was inclined or in a position to crank one out, even if it’s a prose epub without illustrations. Or maybe especially if it’s a prose epub… The way the strip started in media res, I assumed that there was an established backstory that I didn’t know about, and I wanted to read it badly. It took me a while to figure out that there wasn’t a sourcebook, and I was pretty disappointed to learn it.
I believe there IS a source book. But as you mentioned, it is not published. I’ve googled for it more than once before remembering that it’s only on Past’s desktop.
… So you’re saying I just need access to his desktop?
hmm
Just meet us outside his apartment Thursday around 7:15. We’ll sneak a peek when he goes to dinner. Just like we do every week.
As Glider says, I think there is a sourcebook, it’s just not published, and that’s why it gives that feeling. PastUtopia has referenced that originally there was a story about Nathan and Tom, and a least one commenter that seems to know Past has referenced similar things.
I do hope that someday Past publishes more material though. I like the comic, but it obviously is heavily limiting the amount of content we can get through the time it takes him to draw. I’ve come to like his art, but I crave more story and world building than we’d be able to get from the comic.
It was also clear from the Tyler story that an actual novel version fleshes things out in way more detail. A few chapters of that were a goldmine of world lore and setting details.
Regardless of the pace, we will all be along for the ride. And certain that every page is worth the wait. The old guys just hope the arc is finished before they are….
In the last panel, Mium’s first sentence, “in at least” there is an extra “a”.
“The old guys just hope the arc is finished before they are….”
You got that right!
Thank you, Past.
Last panel, “I should note”. Note the E, not the not.
Did I say thank you? Thank you.
That’s a typo I make surprisingly often I’ve noticed. I mean, I make a lot of typos, but that one seems to show up a lot, and is unfortunate because spell check cannot get it, and it significantly changes the meaning of a sentence sometimes.
Anyway, fixed, thanks 🙂