Comic for Monday, May 27th, 2024
May28
Comic.
I bet you guys had thought I’d forgotten about you, but here we are. Hopefully the next page will take less than four weeks for what amounts to endless talking.
Regarding Mium’s personality, Mium himself as several times that its just an artificial performance he puts on for certain people. What Vium is pointing out is that despite that, it might impact Mium’s behavior more than Peter would assume, because Mium might take actions inline with his artificial personality purely because people like Naomi or Miko would expect him to, making the illusion of having a personality increasingly indistinct from actually having one.
Anyway, next comic should be June 10th.
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@PastUtopia
At this point my expectations on a comic are a zen state of indeterminate availability. I periodically check if Schrodinger’s cat has escaped the box by absent-mindedly clicking on the links in my bookmark list. Sometimes I find the old cat and sometimes I find a new one. Either way, there remains a page to be seen. This mental gestation occasionally generates new ideas or plausible explanations.
I was wondering when we would see this version again. Neat.
Last time we saw him he was leaving in company of someone very likely a Pathfinder. Apparently he was taking copious notes.
In Peter and Vium’s conversation we find out that Vium now has Pathfinder capabilities. This is somewhat like Mium gaining capabilities when he was taken to the Palace Between.
Here’s my thing about Mium’s personality being fake. He doesn’t have to put on a performance for Peter. Peter doesn’t have to apologize to Mium both for the “no one would agree with your plan” comment, or when he was grumpy and Mium was telling him to take a break.
A more interestingexample. Mium doesn’t have to snarkily nickname Miss Portunia or highlight the words dangerous when the cybersecurity team is researching him. Neither of those are likely to be known to either Miko or Naomi. The only way it could be worth the cost is if the personality is active at all times and is the default. So you get a becoming the mask situation.
Mium is a self optimizing AI. Running a default personality 24/7 without just integrating it until it’s basically a part of him is incredibly inefficient for no real gain. Simple decisions should not take a significant chunk of computing power to make. Especially when the outcome is unlikely to have a meaningful effect. These quick decisions could be considered reactions, habits, biases, etc… Basically a personality. Could he adjust it in the future? Sure. However, that doesn’t make his personality any more real.
Nice!
…So, can Peter think his feet back on before returning to reality, or will he need to get cloned feet grafted onto himself afterwards? Or robo-prosthetics I guess?
Part of Peters whole deal is running away from danger (into traps he set up), so he’s going to need working legs…
Wow.
Excellent comic and worth the wait. Your talent continues to grow with the new comic format. Not being bound by rigid panel frames allows much more free and expressive art.
One very minor annoyance is the “If I told you to destroy yourself” panel where Peter’s head blocks the text of his thoughts. I have an obsessive compulsion for completing things much like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory. But that is MY problem and I can’t/don’t/won’t fault your artistic license.
The reason it is like that is that Peter’s thoughts are growing increasingly hard to determine as reality solidifies. At first, Peter’s thoughts are indistinguishable from what he says on purpose (last page). Then Peter’s thoughts become faded, and then background text, and then disappear entirely.
It’s why the comic starts to have boxes around the images again, as they move back closer to stable reality.
None of this addresses the problem, necessarily, but I figured I’d explain why the text becomes more obscured.
It’s related to why Kally’s thoughts started to be visible last page. The more the dimension was breaking down, the more the line between thought and speech was breaking down, with the effects of how well a character can see or conceal their thoughts varying based on the character (for example, Naomi could see some of Tyler’s thoughts before the dimension started to break down, while even fully outside of reality Vium’s thoughts aren’t revealed).
I thought about just fading them more and more, but people were complaining about faint text the last few times I did that, and I thought this way it would be more apparent that it was increasing reality that slowly occluding Peter’s thoughts (by using the bounding box to start containing them and pushing them to the background layer).
Personally I really like it as a visual. Ultimately what is obscured is low priority information and conveys all that we need to know without being able to read every word.
I do hope you are doing well, it is always welcome to see a new page from you.
Thank you for the explanation. My old (ancient?) mind did not pick up on the subtlety intended with the faded thought text.
Extraordinary comic even with my misunderstanding/confusion!!! You have truly ascended to a higher plane of artistic expression. Thank you.
To put my praise in perspective, the first comic in the archive, Wednesday, October 8, 2014, has 4 panes and text within the frames. This comic has 9 “panes” and over twice as much speech/thought text extending beyond the graphic content.