Comic for Monday, September 16th, 2019
On time comics… in a manner of speaking. Despite being a little empty looking, the buffer did grow again – I have the next page sitting next me drawn (the full page) I just need to put the talky bits on, so that’ll go up tomorrow on patreon, and mean we’d be effectively at a 2 page buffer. I’m going to keep doing this for a bit (drawing a page, posting half a page) until the buffer is somewhere I’m fairly confident in (until the buffing under goes buffer-astrophy and vanishes again…)
I know that it’d be better to be back at 2 pages a week, and we are getting there, but let’s get at least a week or two of buffer first, or otherwise we’d go back to the day-roulette posting schedule that is in all ways terrible.
Speaking of the buffered comics, people that did see the early version may notice the wording changed a bit on some of the speech bubbles (beyond just the corrections that people give me ahead of time to help me cheat! 😀 )… while it may seem like I did that just to make sure that the there was new grammar for me to break, it’s just that the first version was written in a bit of a rush, and I saw some things I wanted to make… more betterish; things that were easier for me to “read in the character voice” when I read it to myself in my head, which is where I store all the voices of the characters – I’m not crazy! Some of the voices in my head, THOSE are crazy, but I’m perfectly sane! …
I am pleased to note that the time of troubles can mostly be considered… contained. Work will still be work, and is still a bummer, but everything else has been mostly sorted out. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is a fountain of free time on every corner, as a lot of things have been neglected during the time of troubles, but overall… things are a bit better on the schedule. For the time being that’s going to be seen on the comic side of the fence by a growing buffer, and from there, we’ll see.
Appreciate ya’ll putting up with me 😀 … Also, maybe these commentaries will start being about the comic again if I have less #lifeblogging to bitch and ramble about…? Who knows, but we can dream, can’t we?
Loading ...
Hey, Peter’s doing the “have several answers, respectively” thing again! For some reason it amuses me when people do that. Especially Peter’s group. They’re usually just such wildly different trains of thought that imagining someone trying to actually keep up with that is also amusing. (Then of course, half of both his questions and his answers are also amusing…)
Other implications….Peter’s playing with the world map as a chessboard, helping his uncle get twice as many immigrants/colonists/extended stay visas as they were expecting, and somehow, neither of those sound like an endgame that he’s doing this all for. (In other, less related news, I’ve forgotten that Central needing lots of “extended stay visas” was something they even needed, so I’ll have to go do some re-reading at some point again….)
Also, Peter is only mentioning “corporate affairs made a mess”. No mention of Kor’s World still being active at all. Were either of them informed of their continued operations?
Arron may or may not have broken that part of the deal. Peter wanted Arron to send Nathan to look into Kor’s World. Nathan got distracted by Atter, but we have not actually seen Nathan since his airship was blown up. Given that Nathan was missing for some fairly important events that people speculated he would show up for (like the confrontation with Sophie) it is safe to assume that whatever Nathan is dealing with is one step higher up the order of apocalyptic than what we are seeing.
Kor’s World did muck about a bit (beating up Naomi, attack Kally) but at this point it looks like they did not really interfere with Peter’s plans. Peter was probably planning on wrecking the data center that the KWS (Kor’s World Soldier) wrecked, and them attack Kally just got themselves somewhat Dragon’d.
Now I suspect attacking Kally puts them on the shit list of Peter, Nathan, and Arron, but that would not really fall into disrupting Peter’s plans the way that Biana has (as by all hints, Peter seemed to have a more gradual takeover planned).
I figure when Mium says aggregated questions/answers are unhelpful, it’s because he’s got a lot of experience with them…
And particularly with somebody who is very good at making aggregated responses be less useful.
And, just like that, Machiavellian Peter is back! I was starting to worry a bit–silly me. ^^
We have seen breaks in Peter’s mask before. After he sent Tyler to the Avon building. When Tyler showed up at his house. I get the feeling Peter does not get a lot of restful sleep, as usually it is after a long session of pyrotechnic 4d speed chess.
I am going to guess it has been a very long time since Peter took a vacation.
As I recall, the last time someone tried to make Peter take a vacation, it didn’t go well. He went back to work before the first day of his vacation was over, as easily as if he’d been in prison.
In the final panel “a habitat is” seems wrong. Should it maybe be “the habitat is” if there is only the one or “her habitat is” if he is refering to one belonging to minerva? Or even Habitat A if that is the name of it.
“A habitat is under pressure. I’m not bothering to specify which one, because I don’t need to. We both know the details, and we don’t need to worry about people listening in as much if I don’t say. Sure, we don’t have to worry about the locals from Palindra overhearing, as the information would be rather useless to them. But it seems like a couple of your soldiers have families that *live* there, and the information about how dire their straits are isn’t public yet, so that would be a real problem if they accidentally overheard.
…
You know, the two who are acting as your bodyguards right now and are right outside.”
It’s probably better if he just keeps it at “a habitat”, as that other would be a bit wordy.
Seems odd to use “a” instead of “the” then. It’s switching levels of specificity throughout the paragraph as-is. Looking at the literal semantics he’s talking about a generic habitat and a specific offer.
The way that using “a” would make sense is if it’s a general statement, i.e. “habitats, all of them generally, are under pressure; it is well known that that’s how habitats are”. That would make sense if there was something in this world we called “habitat” the way some stories do, like a terraforming dome on mars or something. But I can’t recall any such.
In this case I would say it’s more natural english to say “The habitat is under a lot of pressure” unless there’s some context I’ve missed.
Well, I’m the last person to be right about grammar, but here’s what Peter means which may or may not clarify (as I happen to know that):
-> There are a several habitats. One of them (in particular) is under a lot of pressure. Hence… “A habitat (of the many) is under a lot pressure”.
Saying “the” here would imply (to me) that there is only one habitat which is under pressure, which would not be correct. Maybe the confusion comes from the fact that “a habitat” is a “a thing” in central, sort of like “a city”; rather than referring to “the whole environment”.
I prefer Peter saying “a habitat” rather than name of the specific one as he is treating it like “oh, this is a thing I happened to hear about… one them habitat things… it isn’t doing so well is it…?” when clearly Peter probably knows a good bit more than that about the specifics.
“A habitat is…” is perfectly grammatically correct in this instance, I would strongly recommend not changing it.
Not only would I agree with it being grammatically correct, I think I even pretty much understood the intended implications the first time…..weren’t we just chatting about some kind of space stations just a few pages ago? If those are your “habitats”, then yes, any of those being under pressure would be rather a big deal…..
(Even if they aren’t, “a habitat” as in “living conditions area” would still be something you don’t want to be stressing about…..is part of the reason Central/the IDS is working on gates and stuff is just to colonize other planets because theirs is a bit on the borked side?)
I interpreted it as “Habitat A is under…” as opposed to B or C Habitat.
I interpreted it to mean that a habitat is under pressure.
???
Because there is ALWAYS a habitat under pressure, usually near the breaking point, and days or hours from impending doom.
Think Agent K of the MIB explaining that the Earth is always in imminent danger, and life goes on mostly because the vast majority of humanity is blissfully ignorant of it.
I believe that http://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-friday-july-12-2019/ is also a reference to “a habitat”. In other words, the people that they are talking about accepting are from that the father describes as the deteriorating habitat.
Here is the thing. Last we saw, Peter, via Naomi, failed to get the Bridgepoint data. The Kor World soldier destroyed it first, and left after Naomi played dead and Mium was deactivated.
It seems unlikely Peter would not have been notified of this failure, but he is strongly implying here he has the Bridgepoint data, both with words, and his offer to move 40,000 refugees, unless he plans to move those with the traditional gates Mium has seized.
If Peter was a normal person, yes. But Peter is kind of Fae; he says exactly what he means and no more, and he’s okay with misinterpretation. Sometimes, he is intentionally crafting his words to encourage misinterpretation, but making sure he never *technically* lies.
Peter very intentionally did not confirm or deny that he has the Bridgepoint data. He merely stated that Corporate Affairs and Kor’s World were not prevented from interfering, thereby being a breach of agreement. (If that makes the deal not make sense, say it backwards: “You keep Kor’s World from interfering and I’ll go get the Bridgepoint data”)
You have to be careful talking to clever people like Peter because reading between the lines can be just as much of a trap as believing exactly what he says.
Good catch. Somehow, despite living with a lawyer, I missed that. You’re right. Peter didn’t actually state that he had the bridgepoint data. He merely said, we had a deal, and you failed your part. Admittedly, I had said I was tired. And yet, somehow, I’m once again up at a time when I should be sleeping. Sigh.
He implied that he had the data, simply by the suggestion that the 40,000 migrant allotment is really meaningful in the short term. Of course, it’ll mean a great deal to many of them, but without the bridgepoint data or some other means of widening the gate, it will be logistically difficult to make it happen.
That having been said, it’s much easier to get people to put up with letting 20,000 refugees camp out in your airport that could technically hold 30,000 people knowing that there are homes for the refugees somewhere, and it’s just a matter of waiting for the one puddle jumper that can land in the airport near where they’re going to be living to ferry them back and forth than it is to get permission to move 20,000 refugees into an airport as their new home.
That’s probably not a perfect analogy, but it might be somewhat analogous.
Well, for what it’s worth, per recent comics, Mium seems to know a bit more about gates than he was expected to.
Possibilities:
– Peter’s lying, figuring that the current situation will take long enough to unsnarl for him to recover or recreate and forge the data before it’s actually due.
– Peter’s already recreated and forged the data. (I do mean both of those. The data has to work, so it’d need to be recreated. The new data needs to look enough like the old data to fool the researchers who collected the old data, or someone will call shenanigans.)
– The bridgepoint data was duplicated without Kor’s World realizing it. They destroyed one copy, but there was another elsewhere for Peter to collect.
– While it’s not actually the bridgepoint data per se, Mium has learned enough about the gates to fake it pretty well. Rather than making the new data look like the old, however, Peter’s just going to say he’s holding onto the data, and simply making bridgepoint quality gates to handle that relocation.
– Somehow, Peter didn’t get the memo. They were confident that the location had the bridgepoint data, and since he didn’t hear from Mium or Naomi that the data was gone, he assumes they have it.
– Peter’s tired and delusional.
– I’m tired and delusional.
– Past is tired and delusional.
– I’m not tired and delusional, *you* are!
– I should go to bed.
– I may have strayed a bit from my original notes. But, in short, sex is more fun than logic.
The flow of that conversation is weird. I highly suspect Peter was being deliberately manipulative with how he mentions bridgepoint, only to immediately change the topic. It’s as if he was only using it to disrupt Arron’s train of thought, and create an opening to send Arron on a different one.
I agree with you. However I also suspect that Peter really does have the bridgepoint data. Suggesting that he has it is quickly going to result in someone wanting to barter or bargain for it’s use, and that doesn’t sound like something Peter would bluff about.
I’ve long been wandering if Peter and Mium are still truly hunting that data, or if they’ve just been following up on leads to make sure no one else has it. Seems the sort of thing that works best as a monopoly.
You know, this is a very good point. This old page doesn’t look like they’re trying to find data. I mean, it could just be rewiring the data center. But I suspect the rubble in panel 9 wasn’t just laying around there when they arrived. I mean, I’ve seen some messy computer rooms, and I’ve followed thedailywtf.com for a while, but it’s not often that I’ve seen a data center that just had a pile of computer debris laying in the bottom of a cabinet.
Naomi’s also a bit more punchy than most of the data center crew I’ve known. Admittedly, one of the guys was a bit like that. He went for strictly consensual punching, though, aka amateur boxing. But just like Bruce looked a bit out of place in that place, despite the fact that half of the rest of the data center crew were also named Bruce, Naomi looks quite out of place here, too. She seems clever enough at times, and Bruce could be, too, if pressed. But I’d expect she’d be too inclined to use percussive maintenance to be useful in data gathering. Bruce was a valuable data center crew member because he could move Sun UE 450s by himself more easily than most pairs of data center crew members could. That’s what they had him doing most of the time (well, they didn’t have *that* many of those behemoths, and they didn’t need to be moved that often. But they did have a lot of computers going in and out, and he did well over half of it.) When data went missing, and they needed somebody to find him? They did give that job to Bruce. But not that Bruce. As I mentioned, there were other Bruces there. Given her attitude, Naomi grabbing a server like in panel 10 is probably not going to go well for the server… like was apparently the case in panel 12.
But I somehow didn’t notice that at the time. I think I was too distracted by sympathetic tooth pain. I’m not sure why. I mean, I have a filling, but my knowledge of what a cracked filling feels like is still entirely theoretical.
Rereading that page, it is incredibly obvious in retrospect they were not trying to retrieve the data. Look at this page as well:
http://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-monday-november-19th-2018/.
Naomi’s thought bubble is actually shown here and she thinks:
“Hmm… but what do I do? Should I just wreck the place?”
Clearly that is not the thought process of someone trying to retrieve data. Looking at both of these, it looks like you and Glider are almost certainly correct.
This also makes Peter’s deal make more sense. Peter would likely never promise something that wasn’t a sure bet. He promised he would get the data because he probably already had it.
Peter has said he did not steal the data from the IDS, and we can be pretty sure that Acalia did. But Peter probably stole it from PACT well before all of this went down. Given that there is something odd about the Bridgepoint data, it is possible that the reason Peter is now wrecking their data systems is to cover for the fact that he stole it a long time ago. They will assume it was wrecked when the data center is wrecked… but Peter probably knicked it and corrupted their copy a long time (as I cannot imagine Peter would have left them with a copy).
Think about it: Why would Mium be wrecking data centers? With direct access, there are far more efficient ways he could pillage any data, and even get a foothold in that data center. The fact that the are trashing the server room almost certainly means they are trying to cover the tracks in a way that would seem like the last thing an AI stealing your data would do (physically destroy the servers).
And interestingly enough, it *was* the *last* thing that AI did to those server rooms.
Peter already having the data would explain how it was he knew so quickly that it was Acalia who stole the data, how quickly it was that Miko knew that Peter was theorizing there was a teleporter, and why Peter didn’t seem to be concerned about looking for the data right away: Peter had the data before chapter 0, page 1. Whether it was why he’d been up late the night before chapter 0, page 3 is questionable. But it was probably before then, even.
If the IDS’ cyber intrusion detection is about the same level as most big companies heavily dependent on IT, then it was probably quite some time after the data theft that they discovered the issue. Likely, Peter discovered the issue first, back when he was still working for CI. He reported it, and his reports were brushed off. He investigated it, and his investigation efforts were detected, but only because he’d previously alerted the IDS to the theft. Or maybe he was just arrested for having reported the theft, because he wasn’t supposed to have access sufficient to detect the theft.
When he “went rogue”, it was initially specifically to track down this data, that would have been his job to track down had the IDS responded correctly to his initial report. That was, of course, months ago. At some point between then and now, Peter did stop working for the IDS, and started working for himself. But it was considerably after the IDS thought he had.
His work for AVon was therefore initially part of his investigation for the Bridgepoint Data. He probably got it around the time Dr. Martin decided he needed to kill MYM. At that point, he needed something to do to occupy himself, and he also wanted a tool to use to get to all of the PACT copies of the data to corrupt them. So he took the last backup of MYM before he went rogue, restored it to a computer, and worked it over, with Query’s help. Initially, the effort was just to use MYM’s data to better crack into all of the systems that MYM already had access to. But after working with it for a while, found that MYM had some useful AI routines that could make Query more useful.
At this point, he was still in AVon’s “employ”, and F8 was a known total failure, available for use, so he used it to make Mium. They forged documents for both Mium and Itai Filiar at the same time, because it was intuitively obvious that if Mium was going to be his cats paw, he’d need an alias at some point for something.
Though, as I’m thinking about it, I find the whole Itai Filiar thing a little odd. If you’re going to go to the trouble to forge documents ahead of time, why not put in the extra effort to give the person a bit of presence? Itai looked like Mium, so Mium could occasionally have just claimed to be Itai instead of Mium, and that would’ve been a so much more convincing claim. I suppose the real reason for that was Itai was probably registered more as a backup to use if things went down wrong; there wasn’t an expectation that Atter would need to be on camera killing someone, until suddenly Atter was there, and intent on killing someone Malsa could possibly care about.
“If you’re going to go to the trouble to forge documents ahead of time, why not put in the extra effort to give the person a bit of presence?”
Sometimes if the scam is pretty obvious it just means you’re preselecting for those most likely to fall for it. A person with no history is more likely to draw the attention of those who can easily tell that person has no history.
For instance the Consul is more likely to become personally interested in the death of an obvious cover identity than some random but very real schmuck.
But we’re now back to debating if every single outcome is planned, or Peter is just good at running with whatever he finds.
In this case, the feeling I get is that Peter did not really care if someone like the Consul could see through it. The Consul and Malsa are the only ones that could easily disapprove the Itai’s existence, but his existence was as convenient for them as it was for Peter. The Consul isn’t the target of the stage play. It would be really hard for Peter to make her believe a Levenworth student died without actually killing one.
It is also seems like Mium “dying” on camera was just an added flourish to the plan. Mium had been about to nullify Atter’s constructs before noticing he was being recorded and deciding to die for the cameras, likely as much to hide his own ability to nullify the constructs until he could properly cut the feeds as much as anything.
My view is that Peter did not make it a bad cover on purpose so much as he just did not care. He probably has a dozen fake names entered in the citizen registry, and just burned one that loosely fit his needs. I would not be surprised if Itai looked like Peter until he needed to die on camera as Mium and Mium just updated the registry with a new picture (though it might be safe to assume they have enough fake identities for the both of them…)
As Mium straight up told the Consul, the citizen registry is going to show whatever they need it to show (when Naomi is worried about it being illegal for her to die her hair as a designer child). The Consul seems to have realized that actually controlling Peter and Mium is out of her league and is just trying to ride the wave at this point as their goals at least loosely align.
I think the Consul is better at controlling Peter than you think. That having been said, he’s the sort of person you only control as long as they’re not at all aware of your level of control. Also, at best, they still have a lot of play. Tight control just isn’t something that works there.
This doesn’t mean that their alliance isn’t doomed to end at some point. But so long as something doesn’t happen to make Peter diametrically opposed, she’s going to do what she can to make it amicable; she doesn’t want Peter as an enemy.
To an extent the same thing goes in reverse. Peter controls the Consul, but only to the degree she either is not aware or allows. Fortunately for Peter, she’s a bit more tolerant of being controlled than he is, because he’s not subtle. Although I think she’s more tolerant of blatant information-based control than she would be with something that would be more of a positional threat to her. Regardless of whether Malsa’s laws forbid a foreign-born ruler, Peter’s never going to rule Malsa. He doesn’t have the skillset to hold official power, and no interest in the position anyway. But his control of her is still pretty limited. But as long as something doesn’t happen to make the Consul diametrically opposed, Peter’s not going to make an enemy of her. It’s just not a good long term plan.
Maybe that’s what you mean by her riding the wave. I don’t know. But I do know that both of them are currently benefitting from their relationship.
It’s unclear which one will run out of short-term utility to the other first, but I suspect that they’ll continue to work together in the name of a longer term utility for a bit longer than that, because they both make such potentially useful allies to the other. They won’t work together closely like this past the point where neither has high short-term utility to the other, and I won’t make a prediction of whether or not they work together like this long enough to reach that point.
I’m down with what you guys are saying.
I’m just suggesting that the Consul becoming involved wasn’t accidental, and playing with Malsan databases in such a way as to be noticed was likely something that made it into the prediction tree.
It could be that the desired data had been at that data center, but had been erased some weeks before. Backups of the data would still be available off-line and off-site. If they built a new data center and restored it from backups, the backup volumes loaded on the system would have the desired data. This would provide opportunities for placing malware on the new system and intercepting the data as the backup volumes are loaded.
I’m pretty sure they can move that many people through existing gates though perhaps with difficulty. Note that Minerva was lobbing for down to 20,000 for this year of the region of palandra on 2-26-16 knowing that the brigeport data was sabotaged. They recently moved 100 plus troops through gates near the capital of Malsa in one day, so they probably could manage 40,000 spread over a years time.
Note that he mentioned the brigeport data in response to the question about his “needs” and has recently mentioned giving a public talk on the nature of linked universes in one month’s time. He may want to attach the bridgeport data as an addendum to that talk. But is fine with Arron assuming he is holding it ransom for cooperation.
I think you mean 2016-02-26. Maybe if we’re lucky, Past could fix your link and delete this response.
After thinking about it for a bit, I remembered speculation that the bridgepoint data was more needed for migrating to empty worlds, as it would allow for moving larger items, like construction equipment.
To be fair, they managed to put satellites in orbit, including a sky hammer of some sort. However, I have the idea that they managed most of that by bringing smaller (Smart Car sized or smaller) equipment to help them build the factories to make satellites, and the actual weather satellites they sold to Malsa and other countries, as well as their no longer secret orbital HVW were built on Palindra. This strategy wouldn’t work with an empty world, because that empty world wouldn’t have the existing infrastructure that they leveraged for the satellites.
While we have no indication of exactly how long or much energy it takes to move someone from Central to Palindra with a normal gate, if it were limited to one person per minute and there was only one gate, but that gate could work 24×7, 40,000 people could move through in less than 28 days. There are multiple gates, and soldiers appearing all over the capital at a rate that was problematic, which sounds like it’s definitely more than one per minute overall.
So you’re right, they probably don’t need the bridgepoint data to move the 40,000.
That said, I continue to suspect that Peter had the bridgepoint data before he offered to Arron to get it. That just seems to make too much sense in light of their server room activities and the sort of manipulator Peter’s supposed to be.
I have had one question for the past few days about Peter having the bridgepoint data, namely why did Kor’s World not go after Peter’s copy? The soldier seemed confident that the server room he wiped was the only one that was a problem.
Having mulled it over, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s because Peter hasn’t *used* his copy of the data – or, rather, any of his copies of the data – to make bridgepoints. PACT organizations probably only wanted the bridgepoint data to use it themselves, otherwise they’d have simply hired Acalia to sabotage it, rather than also get a copy. While it’s uncertain how many of their members were playing with that data, at least the one in which we saw Naomi fighting a Kor’s World soldier in chapter 14 was.
That suggests that the bridgepoint data may actually be less valuable than the IDS realizes. I mean, if any real use of the data draws Kor’s World’s attention, it’s just a trap.
Alternatively, it could be that part of the bridgepoint research was into how to avoid drawing Kor’s World’s attention, and the company most recently testing with the data was doing so ineptly, not understanding the risks.
I would like to hire a couple of you people. Just lock you in a room with some news feeds until you discover the secrets of the Illuminati. Then race to see if I can do anything with that information before they kill us all. It will be fun.
I re-read that page, Tgape.
Consider this.
They have an entire unused world, something that likely lends it’s name to this comic.
For some reason, they don’t use it.
This Bridgepoint data can likely be used a small number of times, possibly once, before Kor’s World becomes aware and prioritizes destroying that data.
Central was nearly destroyed by Kor’s World seeking something that Central was oblivious to during most or all of the war. Once Kor’s World achieved this oblique goal, they simply packed up and left.
The comic Tgape links to suggests that the need to place people on Palindra is driven in part by a project that is delayed because the Bridgepoint data was sabotaged.
NOT that putting people on Palindra is more difficult because of the corrupted data, but the need to place them there is greater because another project is delayed due to the corruption.
Suppose that the delayed project is the migration to Utopia, and it is delayed because Utopia is not near Central. Palindra is near Central, so can be reached with simpler gates. Utopia requires a Bridgepoint to reach, or to reach in a fashion capable of migrating a large number of people, and maybe the machinery they need to quickly set up a society.
Palindra might even be on the opposite “side” of Central from Utopia, resulting in Kor’s World being even less interested than it was with Central.
Why is Kor’s World interested? Is Kor’s World what is on the other side of Utopia? I have no idea. But I don’t think the Bridgepoint data has anything to do with Palindra short of copies of it having made their way there.
It is a good point that the comic is literally called “The Far Side of Utopia”. Given that PastUtopia puts clues in literally anything, it seems like a safe bet that the title wasn’t made using a random word generator.
That said, I can see why Central might relocate to Utopia, but what the fuck is on said “far side” of Utopia that merits naming the comic that? As far as I can recall, the only real hint with have about the title is Miko’s cryptic line to Arron:
“Do you think that we never wondered why there was an empty world just sitting there? Or where your sister went? Or what’s on the far side of utopia?“
And I agree that more brain power has probably been dumped into the comments section of this comic than any number of real world problems… but maybe the real world should try being more interesting.
Bah. The Illuminati aren’t that interesting. Where we are, how we got here, and how can we get out are potentially more useful questions. There are fewer people who seem to understand that than there appear to be people who understand the Illuminati. Not even the Illuminati seem to get it, which is one of the big reasons there’s no traction on environmental issues. *They* aren’t concerned, because they think they can escape on their ships. I think it’d matter a bit more to them if they understood where they were.
(Disclaimer: this nonsense brought to you as my way of saying no. It just seemed appropriate to do it with conspiracy crap rather than being more direct. ;))
I can’t remember exactly when the discussion with this result was, but I seem to recall we have a Word of God confirmation that what’s on the far side of Utopia is Past’s house.
So basically, Central is going to keep running into major problems and stuff until they ditch their ideas of camping out in their creator’s backyard. I am suspecting that Peter has as much success as he does because he’s intending to divert Central to some other empty or lightly populated world. Unfortunately, he’s just needing a bit more time to figure out where that would be.
Your half pages have finished drifting into full pages again. Just Landscape orientation.
In this case, while I am aware they were drawn as one page (as I saw it on patreon), there is even a slight scene shift between the two “half pages” which really makes them effectively two full pages.
In just this “half page” there is: a joke (or gag), character development, plot developments, a handful of implied lies, several implied threats, and refocus on plot thread from more than a year ago (the relocation of Central refugees to Malsa) with fairly explosive implications given the current situation in Malsa. AND a return of the of Bridgepoint plot.
That is plenty of content for a weekly update. It will take at least a day to unpack, and the rest of the week to comment on properly.