Comic for Thursday, June 2nd.
There is something about a box of text on the web that causes a need to fill it with complaining about things. I believe this explains much of the phenomena behind Facebook.
Needless to say, I will likely fill this box with complaining, you’ve been warned.
Complaining:
Those that regularly make it through this little complains section may remember that a few weeks ago I bought a car. Two days ago someone wrecked it in a parking lot. I haven’t heard if it’s totaled or not (…currently the insurance company has lost it, but that’s a separate issue that frankly I’m still a little too vexed about the first one to be upset about yet) but what is for sure is that my shiny new car is now much less shiny and much less new. It lasted less then a month.
A short story short, someone in a souped up purple pickup apparently hit it going a good clip in a parking lot (they managed to take out three cars across five parking spaces); they were apparently deemed mentally ill by the police that arrived on the scene and were having a seizure or something. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I have my suspicions, but I’m probably in a bit of a jump-to-conclusions mood which is why the guy whose car got smushed doesn’t get to decide these things.
All in all it’s not that bad; I wasn’t in it at the time, which is a pretty big pro when it comes to having your car smushed. It’s just money (if it’s totaled – no way they will cover the full price of a new one I reckon) and hassle, but it’s not been a great month for either of those things around here.
Comic:
Flying isn’t entirely unique to Ila, but is more challenging then it may seem on the surface. We’ve seen both Kally and Naomi have little trouble jumping to a several story rooftop and landing fine. The tricky part about flying isn’t accelerating yourself in an upward direction, it’s continual course correction. A human (even a mage) isn’t going to survive a single acceleration event that could propel them long distance, which means you need to frequently calculate the magic and cast it again. This is sort of challenging when hurtling through the air as you have to hit a moving target (yourself) as a moving target (yourself) with the correct environmental variables (like your current speed and angle) with more and more Eidos based factors building up from the previous spells. Most mages can only make it several accelerations deep before before it gets too complicated to maintain in the timeframe required to not go splat.
The only other person we’ve seen definitely flying is the man in red armor from Kor’s World.
One of the easiest ways to bypass the problem is assisting with technology; an auto-caster can help, but also something actual physics based flying assistance gives you a lot more room; it’s far easier to calculate your environmental settings while being effected by traditional physics.
Related Comics:
- The first time we saw Ila flying (which, to be fair, was mostly floating and entirely different magic – weight shift plus a tiny acceleration shift, but hey, sort of related!)
- What Ila is doing flying through the rain.
- The last time we saw Ila’s inner monologue obsession with being needed/useful.
- Technically this should be more related then the first one, cause at least she’s using the same one of her six spells here (acceleration shift). Notable she only uses on at a time on herself, which is probably wise.
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I really love Ila flying the rain. It is super well drawn ^^
Thanks 😉 I know we’ve got a long way to go on art, but I like to think we’ve come a long way as well.
I do like Ila’s inner dialog here. It makes her seem a bit more… human. It is human to desire a purpose – to desire being needed or useful or at least have a goal to reach for. Though, she does ascribe it the purpose of disuading them from shutting her down, which is a matter of self-preservation. For a robot, self-preservation would be part of their core programming.
Asimov’s Three Laws? ^^
Self-preservation is probably one of those things that’s the core programming of most things that can think 😀
personally, i dont think she’s acctually a programmed ai or anything like that. her personality, character, and the “black box” thinking makes me think that she is an upload. a human mind that has been digitized and dropped into a computer.
http://pastutopia.com/?comic=comic-for-monday-may-18th
here peter talks about copying the funcinality of the brain and useing it for an ai, but it lacks the creativity or “something” for the eidos key. what i think m.i.r. did was copy the entire brain, personality and all, then drop it intoa computer.
unless she grew a clone brain and installed it into the f-10
Even if she is an upload, that does not preclude the possibility of a programmed “framework” of restrictions or laws.
Remember Robocop? Remember Alex Murphy’s three primary directives? : “Serve the public trust, Protect the innocent, and Uphold the law” Later, he had to fight a hidden fourth directive which prevented him from serving justice to an executive of the company that made him. His brain is human, but his programming restricted him.
Alternatively: Perhaps Mir was able to imprint an electronic version of hypnotic suggestions to Ila’s equivalent of a subconscious?
if its the original one yes.
otoh his human brain did fight through it tho.
but so far nothing we’ve seen has really caused any major issues. if she had to say fight mir then any safegaurds would come into play, just like robocop’s did. thats not so say there is not something. just we havnt seen it -yet-. and really as an illegal quasi-military experement, what safeguards would be there? probaly not much more than “don’t mess with avon” and “do not do anything against mir’s wishes”
after the first battle with mium everything else seems to be just trying to justify not going back to mir as a failure. get a few “wins” such as rescueing a high value target, she can go back and say “look i AM useful”.
and mir doesnt seem to be a hypnotic type. more of whatever i make is perfect. even if its not quite perfect.
“If all goes well…”. Oh, how ironic. There are two problems inbound for the poor troops–and one of them is an over-achiever. ^^
Being useful for whom? Peter’s not about to shut her off because at the very least Naomi would pitch seven kinds of a fit if he did.
Multiple acceleration events? Like Project Orion? 🙂
Bummer about the car, but I’m glad you weren’t involved.
Quote: “Being useful for whom? Peter’s not about to shut her off…”
Avon. In her mind, she has merely formed a temporary agreement with Peter until she can prove her worth to Mir. She needs shelter and opportunities to demonstrate what she is capable of, so Mir wouldn’t even consider dismantling her.
I agree, and it makes sense from her point of view. Mir “obsesses” about Mium and he works for Peter, so it’s not a big hurdle for her to view that as a minor detail in being considered valuable.
I’m also not sure that she sees Peter as “not Avon” really, but that’s more speculation/theory. She clearly knows who he is. It’s all but stated he has some connection to Avon. He has Mium, who was somehow an Avon AI and claims not to be rogue (a dubious claim though).
Re-reading the part where she agrees to work with Peter, they say “return to the Avon lab”, not “return to Avon”. While he speaks of Peter as a “third party” that could easily be referring to another Avon not-Mir sponsor.
To at least an extent I think it’s safe to say that her grasp on social dynamics isn’t highly nuanced. There is probably “me” and “others” and maybe on an good day “us” and “them”.
As for Peter’s status with Avon… well, does indeed complicate things a little. I think she at least views Mium as more of a rival then an enemy from the start.
Project Orion probably is a good starting point. Now imagine trying to fly in an atmosphere by strategically launching and quickly detonating nukes.
And yeah that guy has AT LEAST one in comic not going well.
I think that was one of the reason it was scrapped, wasn’t it? Concerns regarding fallout from launch? Probably that and the utter insanity involved.
Magic propulsion is much easier. Cheating sure is convenient.
that and the fact that no resonably sane person wanted to be on the thing with nukes blowing up in close proximity. and for the record it was devised to be a deep space drive. either interplanitary(ie between planets like say earth and jupiter) or interstellar. one of those “it seemed like a good idea at the time” ideas.
tho it works better with magic.
Haha, I guess this would be closer to Project Pluto with it’s nuclear SLAMs (Supersonic Low Altitude Missiles) where I reckon the launching the flying would have been as destructive as the impact. Project Orion was downright sensible compared to that one 😉
well one thing to remember is that these are unclassified ideas. they are hair raising enough. but one wonders what might still be hiding in the still classified areas.
and then theres the wtf ones, there was that old movie about progect rainbow which was to make a destroyer sized romulan cloaking device. may or may not be real.
the german of ww2 had a bunch of em from the ratte, a 2 thousand ton land battleship, to a rocket powered helocopter. yes rockets on the rotor blades turn them and it flys up and rams a bomber.
the japs probly got the mad science award tho. they get one of the german’s radar arrays and turn it into a laser. yes. “LAAAAAAZER” made 1 prototype and decided that up to 5 min was a bit long to cook its target, and went on to something else. (might not have been a walking tank)
Well, considering she’s spent most of her time around Mir I would reckon she’s fairly justified about being paranoid…
We’ve seen Mir note that she doesn’t want to risk losing experiments that could still be useful in dealing with Rovak; the keeping useful things around seems to be a bit of a thing with her.
Of course, she seemed fairly ambivalent to Ila’s continued survival beyond being incredible annoyed at someone else having her things, so again, Ila’s paranoia on that front my be valid…