Comic for Monday, November 25th, 2019
Ah, glad to see that autopublish is still clearly not working as Monday is well under way and the comic is not… I mean, it has to be my fault, but on the hand, that’s impossible because I’m a fully tech-literate IT person- what’s that you say? I managed to lock myself out of my own website and MayW had to reset my admin access so I could post this? Lies and slander. This is not even my actual admin account because I don’t want to reset the password on that one for reasons. EVERYTHING IS WORKING FINE, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
It turns out that I’ve made it pretty hard to break into my own website when I don’t have my own computer. I guess that’s a good thing. Probably should have planned for that better though. It is possible autopublish thinks it is working and is just confused to the time I think it should publish, so if we get two of these comics………. oops.
…there is a known grammatical issue in the comic… at least one… pointed out by the good folks on patreon, but as one might guess I do not currently have the technical ability to actually fix things with the comic page, because that would require access to my actual computer. I’ll fix those next week, until then, you guys will just have to think that PastUtopia is prone to grammatical errors… that’ll be a big shock to some of you, but we’ll work through it together… 😐
…well, this posting time should add a new erratic entry to my posting time for those that speculate what my timezone could to generate the bizarre schedule I post on… (that’s unfair though, am travelling).
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Oregon
Texas
Sto Helit
Page will be up late today or tomorrow. I decided to wait till I was back to update so I could fix stuff and the like, but am a little swamped with stuff to do at the moment. Sorry for the delay.
I’d tell you that Tgape and I went done yet anyway, buuuuut….. I think we lost him.
I’m going to miss him. He was one of the finest vegan kale suckers I’ve ever met.
So we are probably going to be another day. Just be transparent what the delay is, I decided to make an edit before I posted on Monday, which required me to get home before I edited it. When I edited, I needed to edit the art.
When I edited the art, I needed to edit a bit more.
But unfortunately I’ve been pretty busy since I got back. I will complain and rant about that in the future.
So, the comic will come, but I’m behind again for now. I should be able to catch back up Monday. I should have just posted it, but once I decided to change it I didn’t want to not change it because I’d already decided to change it, but you know what the say about boxes and pandoras and things that shouldn’t have been opened.
To be honest, probably comic on Thursday and Friday.
Apologies for delays.
Sort of like when pop open your computer (or car, I guess) to make a quick fix or change, and next you know parts are strewn across the room for next few months.
We (most of us) patiently await the comic. We know that it will be worth the wait. Of course we also look forward to the latest rant.
Happy Thanksgiving, Utopians!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving!
I really hate to nitpick such a fine comic but what are the apparently floating vertical bars that appear to extend through an doorway arch suppose to represent. They might represent a discrete emergency floating grab crutch but other than that I got nothing. I also know that hospital decor can be baffling but this seems a bit much.
I don’t think those bars in panel 4 are actually supposed to be physically present. I think they are just a poorly executed attempt at diagramming a scene change from panels 2-3 to 4.
I don’t think those are bars. I stood around for an hour and couldn’t order a drink.
Groooan…
^_^
Did you try posing any legal questions? There’s more than one kind of bar.
Wasn’t made from chocolate either.
Thank you for making that check. After the last time I tested for that, I’ve decided to not check to see if things are chocolate anymore, unless I have good reason to believe they are. I hope your sacrifice was not too great.
There’s a process, Tgape.
1 Sniff it. It can’t really end here, otherwise some really fine cheeses wouldn’t make the cut. But this definitely let’s us know when we might want a bit more caution.
2 Touch it. What’s it feel like? Certain sensations, mild electrical jolt, might cause us to terminate testing here.
3 Wait a bit. This one is very important. Think poison ivy.
4 Taste carefully. Literally just touch it to your tongue. Be prepared. Don’t actually put anything in your mouth. Think dieffenbachia.
5. Wait more. As previously this is very important. I’m still thinking about dieffenbachia.
6. Still feeling bold? Remember that there are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters. There are no old, bold mushroom hunters.
7. Eat a small bit. A very small bit. I’m thinking ghost peppers.
8. Wait. Just, wait. ALL mushrooms are edible. Some can be eaten more than once.
9. Okay, probably safe to eat. In very, very conservative amounts. Unless of course it is Amanita virosa, which would have passed all the above tests and successfully destroy your liver in this step. Sorry.
But on the bright side none of the deadly Amanita species taste at all like chocolate. Well, probably not. I’m not tasting those.
3. This reminds me of a nature tour guide who led me and some other people on a hike. He said something like,
“Now this plant is one to be very careful of. It’s called poison ivy, and just touching it, like this, can cause a pretty nasty rash for most people. There are some people out there who are immune, and could rub it on their face like this without having any problem. I am not immune, so you’ll be seeing what kind of problem this causes in a few minutes to maybe an hour.
“Over here, we have some poison oak. It has red, shiny leaves, like poison ivy, but instead of leaves of three, it has clusters of five leaves that are shaped like oak leaves. It’s the same poison as poison ivy, but it’s five times more potent. I’m not going to be touching this one.
“Now if you look over this fence over here, on the next fence we have poison sumac growing. It looks just like sumac. I’d say except for the red coloration, but there’s also red sumac that’s perfectly safe. This isn’t. It’s three times more potent than poison oak. I’m not going to get any closer than this, especially since I can start to feel the poison ivy itch. If the wind starts to blow the other way, we need to move quickly.”
The paragraphs were actually separated by about 100 feet each, but I don’t recall the trail well enough to describe it.
4,5. I think you have me confused with my older brother. I don’t eat houseplants.
6. I like how you ask if I’m still feeling bold. I was not the tour guide in my anecdote just now. In fact, I didn’t even risk the sniff test in your step one, or the touch test of step two.
I’m not concerned that my unwillingness to do these tests will keep me from enjoying some really fine cheeses. I’m vegan, which is enough to keep me from enjoying any cheeses, full stop.
7. I’ve been around ghost peppers. While I would tend to say I’m not particularly averse to spicy foods, and have been known to eat raw jalapeños, I’ve been able to tell that ghost peppers are too spicy for me without even touching them or getting appreciably close to them.
I understand the odd shapes on my screen are not in the same class of spiciness as ghost peppers, because I’ve sat with them displayed on my screen for significant periods of time without any tingling. This does not, however, make me want to risk anything overly much in identifying them.
8. Actually, not all mushrooms are edible. Goombas, for example, are pretty clearly mushrooms, but not edible. The giant mushrooms growing on Hyrule Ridge are also, as far as I could ascertain, entirely impossible to eat.
Just to note, the tour guide mentioned in my last comment had one eye swollen completely shut by the end of said tour. I’m not sure how it was he managed to still have a big grin on his face the whole time.
Still, I learned something on that outing, besides the fact that some people are quite insane: poison ivy and mosquito bites aren’t all that bad if you can completely refrain from scratching them. That said, I still wouldn’t rub poison ivy on my face like he did.
My take home here is “vegan”. We might have a problem. It isn’t so much that I’m a carnivore. I just revel in omnivority.
Speaking of which, I’m certain that those goombas can be eaten. That I don’t know how yet only means I need to try harder.
I see it now, still very tricky to pull off. Maybe they would work better if each was linked to their respective text box and the text boxes all extend out of the frame.
Not sure where I recognize it from, but I immediately recognized what it was, so I’m going to guess it is something commonly used in comics. I think usually they are outside of the panel in whitespace, but that wouldn’t really fit in the half-page format that PastUtopia does.
Actually based on the instructions given in the transition i would expect to see Weber in. Scrubs and a doctor’s coat in panel 5. It sounds almost like they got the clothes from the doctor and then tossed out the now naked doctor since he wouldn’t make the age rating of the comic.
I believe the three bars are meant to represent the three scenes described by the three grey boxes of text.
They are graphical indication for the reader to fill in the blanks.
You know, ellipsis. 🙂
See??? This is what happens when you start to drift into management! Before long you’ll be demanding that engineering synergize with fully semi autonomous consultants.
I’ve been trying to figure out what “fully semi-” anything would be for a few days now, and all I’ve gotten is a headache.
I don’t know about your employer, but my employer makes a practice of only engaging fully autonomous consultants. Any semi-autonomous entities must either be directly employed, directly contracted, or must be interacted with via fully autonomous consultants.
I don’t know where fully semi autonomous consultants fit in with that, because I have not yet been able to figure out what they are.
If you really meant fully autonomous consultants who are semis… it’s my understanding that we might be working on fully autonomous semis, but I’m not aware of us having any plans to hire them as consultants after. Admittedly, in this company, it’s generally a good idea to assume that someone, somewhere in the company, is working on anything one can think of. So, maybe yes. If somebody besides you can actually think of this thing. Or if you’re working for the same company.
I’m don’t think we work for the same company, Tgape. I’m work for an internet provider, I think you work for some sort of engineering / manufacturing / design firm.
If we do work for the same company, we should be eating lunch together. Or maybe we are? I’ll start telling jokes about SMAIs over lunch…..
My “fully semi” comment was a reference to a meme that’s been rolling about certain circles. I think it originated in this clip:
https://youtu.be/5xVQXCL2JGA
Spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with contractors.
I replied earlier, but I think a link to YouTube caused it to be filtered.
The “fully semi” is a tongue in cheek reference to a meme circulating. One of the big name media outlets had a “fake news” moment where they were demonstrating an AR firing on the “fully semi auto” setting.
Well, it certainly caused it to go in the moderation queue. Even posting links to this same site can do that. Posting links to Youtube are likely significantly worse, as Past might follow the link, and then get caught in Youtube’s link addiction routines for a bit.
At least it wasn’t a link to TV Tropes. If somebody tried to post one of those, we might never get another update.
I read you loud and clear. I’ll start tracking down their servers. You work on where their developers live. We can eliminate this threat.
Pardon me, I think that’s a trope. Just a moment while I go check…
Dang. We lost another good one.
Panel 3: it saves you from finding him being unreasonable.
Panel 3: Would be correct and proper English, if one changes “him” to “his” as Tyler possesses the quality of “being unreasonable”. Magnolia-ic in brevity: “It saves you his being unreasonable.”
However 1st panel: {Say[, “]I reviewed his injuries.[“]} Is normally how people write imperative quotes in English.
Panel 5: I suspect Peter has more than one interest. Thus the “s” should move from “continues” to “interest” making “interests continue”.
Good catch on panel 5. That would be much better.
PastUtopia better get back soon or this comments session is going to start turning in a English class as the grammar carve the sentences to pieces.
It occurred to me just now that it’s not only rare that grammar carves anything, and uncommon that a word like grammar is considered plural (the usual plural of grammar being grammars), BUT *also* that given the apparent (at least to me) semantic meaning of your sentence and the passage of time, it’s totally consistent with the inferred intent of your post to point that out!
That said, I find a lot of people take offense when I start taking apart their sentences and picking out what part of speech each bit is in and stuff. Also, that was a pretty boring sentence, a mere 27 words. I’m sure I can find a better sentence to pick apart *somewhere* around here.
Serial commas are, by definition, only for cases where there are at least three elements in the list. In the above sentence, Tgape had the audacity to place a comma before the first and in their above sentence. I don’t even have words for how completely wrong that is! Did they even *study* English at *ANY* point in time? Oh my GOD!
… sorry, I realize it’s clearly past my bedtime, so g’night all, and have a good weekend.
Does Tyler suspect that Peter has more than one interest? That’s probably more pertinent to what the correct grammar would be than the number of interests Peter *actually* has is.
Note that I don’t know the answer to that one. It feels to me like this could very well be a point that will be hard for Tyler to get. I feel like Tyler has one interest due to… stuff that hasn’t been explained to us in the comic yet. Because of this, he’s allied himself with Malsa, which gives him a second interest. But I feel like his character doesn’t see the two as the same – it’s still the first interest, it’s just what he needs to do to accomplish it. It’s possible there’s additional reason for him to continue seeing that as one interest.
From their interactions, I think that Tyler feels like Peter is a very confusing person, but hasn’t really gotten much of anywhere on figuring out *why* Peter is so confusing to him. He has learned enough about Peter to understand that he’s uncommonly effective. He may even see a bit of himself in Peter, which leads him to trust Peter more than he should. Like Tyler, Peter came to Malsa and applied to the Malsa naturalization program through Levenworth. Like Tyler, Peter has extraordinary gifts that most people don’t understand.
Peter is, of course, very different from what we’ve seen of Tyler. Peter has family connections he still cares about. He still has friends who are still with the IDS that he still cares about. I believe the comic has showed that to us a lot more than it’s been shown to Tyler.
There hasn’t been a lot of Tyler’s background shown in the comic, even compared to others. It’s my feeling that he may not have positive ties to anyone from the land of his birth. He may not have connected closely with anyone growing up, such that the MSB may be his “real family”. Sometimes people are like that because they understood enough of the people around them to realize they weren’t good people to be around despite sometimes seeming very friendly, but other times, it’s that they quickly determined those around them weren’t safe to get close to. Sometimes when this happens, they take longer to get to understand how complex people tend to be.
Actually, this is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote it, but I didn’t feel like writing it out. So thank you, Tgape.
How silly. Peter would never clone someone. Wetware is imprecise and messy compared to the glorious precision and perfection of coding an infiltrator-type SMAI.
Only a few people have any real way of guessing what Peter actually did though. It seems like people know about hardlight projectors/holograms, but also know they cannot be used to “fake” real events. Peter seems to be using them to do just that.
I suspect its a combination of his SMAI being able to calculate the scene render better than any normal computer, and him somehow using a version of ellipses to make it seem more real.
I still suspect Peter has some degree of mastery of Ellipses, and him flipping around like this would be a very Peter thing to do.
We can do most of that now.
You can go on Daz3D, download the modeling engine, download the face-copy utility, and add an existing face to a close-match model.
Then import that model into a 3D animation program, Blender, say, and show it taking a hit to the head, complete with (painted together) gore.
Since he controlled the timing of the shot, it was very doable, and we could do it now, except we don’t have holographic technology.
For the most part, people see what they expect to see. This is the whole basis of stage magic. Peter has been labeled a magician by his ex? girlfriend. (Once and Future?) Certainly the Central troops expected to see the head of state take a headshot so they wouldn’t really be all that suspicious that it happened just like they planned.
But I don’t think in comic holograms are good enough to fool people in most cases. When Arron sees the Consul get shot, he clearly realizes something. He says that in the office he might have overlooked the hologram, but he realizes that’s not the case seeing how realistic this one was.
That is why I think it’s so hard for people to put together what Peter is doing, because they know that holograms exist, but aren’t this good.
I’ve always loved Kally’s line about Peter being a magician in a world of mages, and I think it speaks to why Peter’s trick works. He’s trying to sell what people expect to see (as you say). This makes it a lot easier to sell, and no one asks too many questions… until too late when Peter can use Mium to plug the gaps in the illusion with whatever fake data he needs to sell it.
The Consul herself pointed out to Peter the flaw with how he operates – if you face him head on, his tricks don’t really work. He can make a perfectly convincing fake record, but if you know its fake it doesn’t work. But when he does small touches he can guide the audience to the conclusion he planned for.
I agree with your later paragraphs without further comment.
On the existence of holographics suitable for the job, we’ve seen one put to use by Peter before, in the rain, while on a train. So, at the very least, we, the audience, DO know that Peter has the use of holographic technology suitable for fooling people who are susceptible to being fooled. (People who think they they already know what’s going on, so aren’t looking for the telltales that they don’t. Telltales such as literally being able to see through the illusion.)
But, yes, the basic video-phone hologram doesn’t seem to try too hard. It’s probably not, in my opinion, a limitation of the hardware, but one on the available bandwidth, and they do their job just fine as they are so there’s little reason to invest in better.
I think Peter’s managed to tweak the holograms to be a little less see-through than people are used to them being as well. I expect that much like his fake records, he doesn’t particularly invest in making them look less fake to the people he’s not intending to fool with them (for example, if you looked at his hologram of the Consul from behind, I’d expect it to look at least as obvious as a normal hologram, or possibly even have the tweaks he made to make it look more opaque from the front be apparent)
Regarding the phones – I would expect that like businesses in our world, the phone companies have not invested in supplying the hardware needed to make use of more bandwidth. The technology exists to do better, but those phones would only do marginally better even given a much bigger data pipe. One could likely minimize compression glitches in the image and possibly improve the detail a little, but even if you hooked one up directly to Lab 5’s computers, neither Miko nor Mium could get it to do full color or even improve the detail enough to have it look just like a member of the Blue Man Group.
I’m not ruling out what Ila could or couldn’t do, because there’s no particular reason I’m aware of for her not being able to program a new magic into her autocaster list. It’s possible I shouldn’t rule out Miko, considering she has her own Eidos key, but it feels to me like her being able to whip that out is less likely.