Comic for Thursday, September 20th, 2018
Well, first of all, sorry for missing Monday – this one was mostly done by Monday, but it just wasn’t quite there, and I realized there was no way I would have a Thursday comic if I published it, so I decided to have an on time Thursday comic rather than a late Monday comic and a no Thursday comic. Plus, for various reasons it was the first time I’d actually drawn in like a week, so I was rusty and slow… I am working on the buffer now, and expect we should have Monday’s comic on Patreon around Friday, so we are about half-an-update ahead now.
I have heard about the term “comic book time” where “in world” days take weeks or months to resolve due to update schedules, but I think I may have taken that too the logic conclusion to render this conversation…
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@PastUtopia the trick to meditating or relaxing with a highly distractible mind is to distract it with something to focus on.
I have two suggestions for you. 1) on every breath out…think of the word ONE drawn out across the full exhale. On the inbreath, try to think of nothing imagine a blank surface
2) when you are first learning to do this your mind will get distracted. What you need to do is dispassionately examine the thing that is distracting you, look at it from all different sides, consider it, and then carefully set it aside as not important right now. Then go back to Imagining the blank surface
It’s Friday, and Arkady has less than half a second, and they’re still standing around talking and trying to figure out what to do.
You’ve really set a new standard for “cliffhanger” here!
Bwahahaha. #EvilLifeGoals.
Friday cliffhangers are the oldest traditions in the book for webcomics! Even better if you make a cliffhanger than put the comic on hiatus… Now that’s proper webcomic 101’ing.
….and that are usually the webcamics that I remember some time later, wondering “What ever happened to… -Insert Cliffhanger here-”
5 days trying to remember the name of said webcomic, 10 minutes google search…
Oh, still on “Hiatus”…. after 3 years… to bad
I think the F10 chassis should be allowed to fall over. Or at least to continue to fall in such a way that it has a chance to shoot the tank. Preferably was something that also then ricochets and goes through the war mage. That would deal with both problems and then give them time to figure out what’s that down the chassis.
2 other thoughts:
First: Kardus Ila-remote seems Hardware based, so Mium would propably suffer the same effects, when booting to her chassis. BUT: There is another software controlled device around: The Arpon tank.
Second: Lets say he fails. Unlikely, unwanted, but still possible. Arcady dies. Ila is mad, Naomi is devastated, Mium failed a lot of his directives…
He still has control over skyhamer, does he? One might think Kardus has something coming for him if he finds a way the teach Mium how to be mad
I think you’re onto something here. I could see Mium rebooting F10, but just using her to jump to the tank before she shuts down again.
The problem with that being that it would seem unlikely that the tank’s computer was compatible, … unless it just happened to have also been made by Avon. Which has its headquarters in Arpon, coincidentally enough. How convenient.. That wouldn’t be enough to stop a half second death from Kardus, but it’s the tank that’s the threat.
Another possibility; it could be that Mium would be able to fix the issue. But Mium booting the F10, fixing the glitch, shutting down, and then having Ila boot the F10, and blast the tank to bits all in .5 seconds seems less likely, especially when I consider that my new laptop which boots lightning fast still takes about ten seconds to actually boot, despite any advertised claims of “instant on.”
A third possibility: Mium boots the F10 chassis, nulls the spell the tank is casting and the whatever shut Ila down, shuts down, Ila boots the F10 chassis, and blows the tank and Kardus to heck. This requires fewer steps before dealing with the count down.
A fourth possibility: Mium uses a debug AI to boot F10, with code that will also null spells cast by Kardus or the tank, allowing Arkady to kick ass. This plan seems to have the problem that Arkady doesn’t appear to be in any shape to kick ass right now.
I’m fascinated to find out what strategy they actually go with. I’m glad I don’t have to wait until Monday to find out.
> “I’m fascinated to find out what strategy they actually go with. I’m glad I don’t have to wait until Monday to find out.”
I think this is what they call native advertising? 😀 I’m going to have to appoint you the director of marketing at this rate for that level of deviousness…
I am a bit… no , aLOT woried that mium can “reclassify” someone from “human” (i.e.”Do.not.kill”) to,somethong else, more killable so easily. Hope he has got some more stable ethics in place that prevent him from re-evaluating the whole “Kill-everyone-so-they-dont-bother-you-in-th-futur”-plan.
And yes… I totally see him booting on Eff 10. Given, that this Chassis is a bit more advanced than the Eff8 this could be interesting
It’s the classic loophole used to justify killing people. And yet, most racists don’t go around killing the people they dehumanize. Even historically, while they did kill more of them than they do these days, they didn’t declare all out war on them. I suspect Mium isn’t about to go on a mass murdering spree as a result of this. Also, considering that there literally is a war happening here, it’s probably less likely to require the sort of cascade killing that Atter is so fond of.
That said, yes, it is sub-optimal.
I perceive ‘Kardus’ to be a subclass of ‘human’, inheriting the human class, and extending it. Classed as a human, it would be fragile, and he might damage it. Classed as a Kardus human, Mium can use considerably more force without risking violating his directives.
Loophole? Yes. But not the egregious one that it might first appear. Rather than reclassifying a target to make it acceptable to terminate, Mium is merely updating his simulation to more accurately reflect the real world.
He is reclassifying him into an organization that is a threat to him and other humans. He’s not saying he’s not a human anymore he’s now saying he’s part of an organization of humans that he has less compunction about not killing.
This war mage has taken the action which caused the reclassification. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision by Mium.
It seems pretty clear to me that Kardus is being reclassified from being a human. It would be silly to change that particular classification if a Kardus happens to be a subset of human.
This is the sort of mistake I used to make a lot. You want to believe the best of people.
But in this case, Mium is not actually doing this reclassification to kill Kardus. He’s just doing it to allow him to lower Kardus’ survival priority enough that he doesn’t need to protect Kardus from anything. The two are very different.
Admittedly, when SkyHammer fires and Mium protects Arkady from the blast but not Kardus, it might not be quite as different as I think.
Taking that thought to the logical conclusion… Mium seems pretty confident about the less than half a second time considering he doesn’t have data after Ila was shut down. Is it the tank that will kill Arkady in less than half a second? Kardus? Or the SkyHammer shot that Mium already fired, basically when Kardus announced Dr. Martin had given him something to deal with Ila?
I think “a kardus” is a category of red eyed fellows who aren’t so easy to kill, and thus don’t require as much priority placed on not killing them.
Going to be honest here, with full apologies to Ila, but I have to disagree with the “this isn’t funny!” This page cracked me up for some reason, from showing Mium’s just blatant disregard for the safeguards on humans and how ineffectual trying to make rules against someone like him doing whatever he wants is, to Ila’s analysis of Naomi being incapable of being mean to cute things (and how remarkably self reflective that is).
Agreed! “Status update: About to shoot Mr. Arkady or something” totally cracked me up!
Panel 3: okay, I’m just going to ignore how you could possibly know any of this, because my head already hurts. Panel 9: – But if i rebooted you onto it, you’d just get shot down again.
Fixed the first one. Not sure about the second one; might be a slight difference of meaning from what you’re thinking (he’s saying that he needs to fix what the remote did to the F-10 before Ila could run the F-10 hardware, not that the remote could be used again, though that’s potentially true too).
I realized my screw up. I said “shot down” instead of “shut down”. sorry.
Nice.
Who sees Query / Mium booting onto the Eff Ten Chassis within the next few milliseconds?
Amen, brother.
That’s something I’m not betting against. We have to see what a very low survival priority looks like in action after all.
Probably bad news, especially as from what we have have heard, this war mage does not have Rovak’s immortality (I Code).
…oh! “But if I rebooted YOU onto it, YOU would just shut down again.”
Mium DOES seem to be hinting rather strongly that he be invited to boot there, yes 🙂