Comic for Thursday, March 22nd, 2018
…I bet you were just checked to see what excuse I put up for the comic be late, but BAM THERE IT IS. A COMIC! 😉
…that said, it does sound like the common consensus is that I should take some time off so we can get back to have regularly scheduled buffered updates instead of an endless litany of excuses, so, that’s what we are going to do. I am going to take the next week off updates. 🙁 Maaybe we will update on Thursday depending on buffer progress, but I would set expectations at next story comic being April 2nd… and I think everyone is happy that doesn’t fall one day earlier.
I will still make comics, but I will add them to the buffer, this way we are not in a situation that is directly what we call pen-to-publish where you and me are seeing the finished comic at roughly the same time. I will put up some form of filler (linked in comments once I make it, won’t be a comic update).
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And so, the next installment… will be three panels.
Miko answer the door.
Mr. Director walks inside. (we see a small bit of dialog…)
Mr. Director walks out muttering about the end of the world and burned books of avalon, intent on finding a hole to crawl into and pull the opening in on top of him.
Hey – just wanted to put a post up to remind people that I’m taking the week off to remake the buffer, and generally communicate that I’m not dead that I’m not taking the entire week off to play video games and sleep and other useless things.
Will update something tomorrow. ‘Something’ is a broad definition though, so don’t get your hopes up 🙂
Well if you still lack the something, and I haven’t gon looking for it, the wall is suspiciously missing a 404 which should be below the Director’s speech bubbles in the. 8th panel. I can understand leaving it off earlier when Mium is talking because even though you made his speech bubbles translucent slightly numbers written on the wall behind text would be extra scribbly and should be avoided there.
I should probably fix that, but if anything has to go missing… well, at least that way it’s funny 😉
Well, to be honest I did not have time to do what I sort of wanted to do, but I did want to put up ‘something’, so…
(Click for full size; it’s on patreon but public)
In other news, we are to buffer count 1! I have not totally slacked off.
That picture makes me think of Gym Leader Sabrina in the Pokemon anime.
Can you update the TWC vote incentive while you’re at it? I think this one’s about a year old.
That’s a good idea. If anyone has an idea, let me know. Will put up a new one tomorrow, anyone that has a suggestion has till tomorrow morning or so.
This is something that may help you but would be cool to see anyways.
How about a comparative height of all the main characters later you could do one for the less main characters. Do it like they’re all in a lineup for a witness holding little cards with their name on it. It could even be from the witnesses point of view through the glass so you wouldn’t even have to go into much details other than just general shapes and coloring.
That’s a good idea. I will probably do that. But that is more of a sketchbook entry idea, I might do it as one of those instead of vote incentive.
Well, part 1 I guess. Not too much progress yet, but there’s something.
Decided as this is a WIP that will probably be reuploaded its not really a vote incentive sort of thing. Will still think on one of those, it’s on the radar.
A good vote incentive for next month would be Naomi pulling an April Fool’s day prank on Peter (Easter-themed prank for the hat trick).
Likely Ila would be observing and confused about this and Mium would give an explanation that’s completely unhelpful for Ila.
I like the April theme. Practical joke on Peter though? I’m not sure how that works. How do you punk someone who has not a plan, but an entire cascading tree of contingencies?
The more I think about it, the more I want to see it!
How do you prank Peter?
By being the person who’s privy to all his plans due to him wanting someone else as helping to make sure he’s not ignoring the viewpoint of a normal conscience in favor of the bigger picture and being a good friend with his nearly omniscient AI and then deciding that him being the victim of a prank would be good for him.
So Naomi convinces Mium to prank Peter… Nothing could possibly go wrong there!
😉
I considered some sort of April Fool’s update, but I think in general the internet does not have a burning lack of April Fool’s content that needs to be filled. I think there is something lost when pranks are intentionally scheduled.
Of course, there’s always room for a clever bonus comic on any theme, but that’d require me to think of something clever.
Jeez, Mium, I think that’s one of the most complicated ways possible of saying “Taki goes by a different name now”. (Is the lights next to the door turning red at the end there supposed to be Miko signifying “Rather not talk to him”? (Reading some comments I suppose it could be just Mium not passing everything along, meh.)) Jeez these people are hard enough to keep up with when only one person is talking in “read between the lines”. With these two it feels more like “read between the lines between the lines (and maybe borrow a cryptoanalyst while you’re at it)”.
Also cool to finally get a glimpse of what Arron’s “hiding in plain sight” trick is supposed to be like.
Mium is being historically unhelpful. He also seems to have at least a minor compulsion to answer questions asked directly of/to him, combined with the need to speak at statements that are at least not lies. So absolute complex roundabout answers are to be expected.
A lot of name changes at work here. So Mium still answers to “Query”, but Miko has very clearly moved on. From what, we might find out in a few months.
I think on of Mium’s key priorities must be answering questions. Query was clearly built for that and it moved over.
Arron thinks that Naomi liked to him about not knowing where Taki is. It wasn’t a lie, as Naomi doesn’t know the name Taki, but I can see why he’d be suspicious. I am reasonably certain Mium can’t technically lie, but he can be creatively truthful, which is all you usually need.
Looks like Miko literally cut off all associations with her old name. A clean break on a new world?
What I find interesting is that we have a much clearer look at what ellipsis is like.
As well we have Mium’s comment and Arron’s behavior. Just making an illusion in front of someone would be incredible obvious, it seems like it just effects perception. In this case, it seems like it made Arron look like Peter(maybe?) as Peter is someone that belongs in that hallway by Mium’s point of view.
So perhaps what it does is someone make someone’s perception fuzzy enough that they automatically fill in the blank. It seems like it does work on Mium in the sense that he sees the “illusion” but not in that it actually fools him. This would make sense as while a human’s brain can be tricked into replacing its own memories, Mium likely would not be susceptible to something like that as his memories are more securely stored.
I agree, this is almost certainly a perceptual effect rather than a purely physical one. IE: it makes people not notice the person rather than just making the light bend around them and such that they can’t be seen. The reason why the “light bending” explanation for invisibility is more used in fiction, however, is because it is FAR simpler, less open to simple counters, more objectively reliable, and doesn’t (essentially) open up that can of worms that the implications of “global AoE MIND CONTROL” very quickly does.
So some of the questions this brings up: Naomi penetrated the effect by noticing that there were a lot of psyons coming from somewhere, so why didn’t the effect that made Tom functionally invisible also do the same to the Psyons he was putting off? Is it some effect of magic itself, such as that the Psyons have to be pereeptable (not hidden) because they have to affect the world and that somehow implies interaction with the contious mind (with all the philosophical implications)? Perhaps it was a weakness of Tom himself that he may not have been good enough to hide his psyons (unlikely if he can survive hanging around Nathan)? Perhaps hiding the psyons themselves is seen as a waste of energy since there are easier ways to see through the effect and if people manage the easier methods than getting past the more difficult “sensing of psyons” test is seen as inefficient?
What about cameras that only show a picture of the “what” is there and don’t bother with the interpretation? Would a “perceptual filter” be caught on camera and recordings that would be viewed at a later date to continue affecting people watching those tapes from miles and weeks distant from the original event? The camera itself wouldn’t know who “should” be there and for the effect to work it would have to deal with people who know better about any certain individuals and would further need to ensure that everyone’s stories matched when they tried talking about it. Furthermore for a lot of actions, such as the stealing of the bridgepoint data, ANYONE being in that room would have been suspicious so there would be NO acceptable person for the mind to recognize being there. Also the same would be true of Naomi noticing Tom, anyone or anything following her would likely have set off her mental alarms so she couldn’t have been only seeing a random person or an “ok” person in Tom’s place. Or maybe that was what tipped her off to look for the psyons in the first place (though I’m pretty sure it was explained as “instinct”, whatever that amounts to)? And if cameras, because of their lack of “perception” would be immune to a magical perceptual filter, how would that affect MIUM? Perhaps the bluryness in panel 2 is partially the effects of multiple camera viewpoints subtly disagreeing? So many unanswered questions.
And then lets not forget that a perceptual filter, since perception technically happens inside the perceiver’s mind, technically and realistically counts as “mind control”. It doesn’t take a great leap from “cause someone to not notice something” to “cause them to notice something else” to “cause them to ‘see’ something else” to much scarier things. . . Things in the vein of cause people to hallucinate till they go crazy, or give the average person a believable frame of reference so that they would commit an assassination. That last one, honestly, wouldn’t even be all that hard: “I know I am supposed to be the President’s security guard, but I saw a man with a knife leap in his direction and I saw the President off to my side, so I took the clear shot. Suddenly the President was in front of me and the knifeman was no-where to be seen,” (with the full on “see something else” version) or “I’m sorry officer, I laid down and thought I was asleep dreaming, then I wake up here with this weapon. I may not have liked the mayor but I never would have tried to kill him in reality” (this can be done with nothing more than causing a person to not notice anything but certain things, remaining at the original level of causing people to not notice and going no further).
And the questions don’t stop there. Imagine what someone could do to help themselves rise politically with skills like that, perhaps what someone like Kyle Kepler very well might have done? This would work even with JUST with the “not notice” version of the power and not any extended version of it. Perhaps the would-be assassin had good reason for his murder attempt? Would you trust someone with that sort of power to be the trustworthy “good guy” and not, at best, some sort of antihero? I’ll stop with that line of questioning before it devolves into a full on “bad people, bad powers” debate.
So yeah, this gets complicated fast.
> Naomi penetrated the effect by noticing that there were a lot of psyons coming from somewhere, so why didn’t the effect that made Tom functionally invisible also do the same to the Psyons he was putting off?
This is not quite what Naomi did – she instead just blasted out a wave of psionic particles (or mana, roughly the same thing) and found a spot where it was interferred with. She didn’t detect Tom’s use of mana, but people with a key interfere with with mana manipulation.
Essentially, she brute forced the problem.
How she knew there was something to know, well, that’s maybe a different story, but she’s harder to fool than she seems.
The details of Ellipses are still vague, but we will almost certainly see more about it in the future 🙂
Good to know about Naomi. I must have missed that point.
I look forward to finding out more about elipses. I doubt you took the “mind control” version of invisibility lightly and I look forward to seeing where those implications lead.
Panel 8: 404 is missing.
It should be above the no soliciting sign.
That DOES seem oddly appropriate though 🙂
I just love the caution signs on Miko’s “No Soliciting” notice. 🙂
Am I correct in supposing that Panel 10 is Mium’s way of gently telling Arron that if he tries to talk to Miko, he’s in for a thorough reaming?
My guess is that Miko can already hear the conversation, which is why Mium says the answer is self-evident. From Mium and Miko’s point of view, Arron is already talking to Miko. Miko is not a fan of face to face interactions. But as Miko’s replies are probably just strings of profanity, it is unlikely that Mium would pass them along, thus the one-sided “from your perspective” comment.
I believe that Miko could reply if she wanted to, but Taki cannot, could not.
“Got the implant working”
Probably fixed more than just being able to get out of bed.
So, Mium here, is just being WAY literal.
If he is standing outside of Miko’s door, and it seems that he is, and if Miko is half the computer tech that most real life techies are, which has also been shown to be true; than we and the director can pretty easily conclude that Taki/Miko has surveillance outside her door so she can see who is coming. He could just stand there with the elipses down and she could hear every word he said, the only reason MIUM had to show up was to say “cut it out” about breaking into the room.
That does bring up the question of it Taki/Miko, being from central and having some experience with the elipses, could see through it by herself. Perhaps she informed MIUM who was there and all the “I know who should be here” stuff that MIUM said was his confirmation process and not the original “intruder identification” process? Afterall, this would explain how MIUM knew that it was the Director specifically rather than one of the others who can use that spell (such as tom, etc.).
I get the impression that Mium will be hearing Miko complain silently (telepathically) throughout her conversation with Aaron… and that thought amuses me greatly.
…first? Sorry, I could not help myself. I usually don’t make it to a page first.
Always enjoy Mium’s combination of observational dialogue and peculiar humor. You really do get the sense that he views humans and human interactions as something of an outside observer.
Also, it is not surprising but it is interesting that implying Naomi lied bothers him. Perhaps as he (technically speaking) does not seem to like, he views it as something bad.
I would have been first except I decided not to comment on the page because what I was typing sounded like a rant.
I assumed that someone had to seen the page before me, but I was just surprised to find it with no comments. I think the rants and discussions in the comments are half the fun, personally.