Comic for Tuesday, August 18th, 2020
Yikes, have a buffer and still managed to be late. Ended up moving before internet was working, because apparently packages don’t arrive when they say they will anymore (modem had to be shipped to the new house; the plan was to move the computers the day it was to arrive, but it ended up getting delayed two days as UPS said they were impacted by the world being busy imploding and higher than usual shipping and what not).
Anyway… mostly moved now, and have internet, so business will be back to usual soon. Still not fully moved and some kinks in the general process to work out, but I just set up my drawing tablet again and it’s working, so I think we’ll be fine for next week, but I’m behind on a lot of things as I thought I’d be mostly done moving and setting up by Sunday night and here we are mid way through the week and there’s still problems. Been a lot of hurdles in this particular move from unexpected thunderstorms to utility companies playing power roulette each day to see if they want to give us electricity, to the general hassle of moving (up to and including uhaul deciding to give away our reserved truck because apparently someone with a similar name showed up? Yeah, not sure I understand the particularly fiasco… I think they just fucked up and came up with a dumb excuse).
…well, I’d talk more about the comic but have to go and am already super late in posting this, so I’ll do that another time. Working on next pages so they’ll be up on patreon as soon as I get a chance to draw them and what not.
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The Consul is a politician in every sense of the word. Anyone else notice how she took a general reluctant agreement to not worry too much about Kepler for the time being, since they have bigger problems right now, and turned it into “We will leverage the opportunities provided by Khepler and his MIUM without reservation”? And then she quickly turned to other subjects before anyone could disagree or question the degree of trust they were giving.
Yes, but I delete most of the posts I write, rather than actually posting them, so I probably deleted any comment to that effect.
Page (and the buffer page on patreon) will be up tomorrow around midday. I just finished it up, but it’s too late to properly proof read, so I’ll post it tomorrow after sleeping when I can read words.
Since I drew the two-half-pages (as I tend to post them these days) together, it ended up taking a little longer to get done, and I’ve been busy with moving taking much longer than expected, but we’ll be caught up on the buffer tomorrow as well, and from there I expect we’ll start gaining a good bit of ground as I’m almost with this giant hassle the moving turned out to be.
I note that there are curtains in the background, implying there’s a window. I also note that there is technology to let you remote-listen to a room by bouncing a laser on the windowglass and noticing how the soundwaves make it vibrate.
I note further that Mium would likely calculate in advance the most likely conference rooms for the Consul to have a Mium-free conversation in, setting up equipment.
Finally, I note that the Consul might assume Mium would listen in SOMEHOW, setting up this meeting to make sure Mium knows that her country is vaguely friendly…
Of course, silence spells might be standard operating procedure? But I wouldn’t bet against Mium knowing how to bounce tachyons or something off a sound-blocking spell to determine what exactly it’s blocking…
Curtains don’t always mean windows. In particular, I’ve been in a few conference rooms which had no exterior walls and yet they still had curtains – specifically so that they could conceal whether or not they’d removed the projector screen from the room or not.
I’m not sure how it was considered more cost effective to have heavy curtains for every conference room and only a few projector screens, but somebody apparently had made that decision. In any event, that was rectified within a few months after my employer moved into the building, but they still had these curtains nobody really knew what to do with.
It’s probably also worth noting that curtains have sound dampening properties, which tend to go up with curtain weight. The material and design of the curtains can also be factors. If the curtains dampen sound sufficiently, it can become really difficult to get that trick to work. While it’s true you can amplify sound more if you’re bouncing the laser from a longer distance, at some point the window is vibrating more from noise outside the window than it is from noise inside the window.
Take it a bit further, and the window may even vibrate more from the effects of the laser. Admittedly, to get to that point, you’ve probably sacrificed a lot of space in the room for layer upon layer of curtains. It’s possible if the conference room isn’t large enough, you may now be holding your meeting in the hallway.
That said, those curtains are clearly not that thick, and they don’t look particularly voluminous. The room does on the other hand resemble the interior conference rooms with the nigh useless curtains. Though, the resemblance is less in the curtains and more in the beige walls.
No historian here, but I’ll bet curtains were common when buildings were made of thick stone and paneling didn’t exist. Kills the echo, decorates the walls, maybe even makes it warmer?
And to me family mages suggests really old buildings.
I seem to recall being told that the definition of R1 insulation was based on a foot thick rock wall. You need a lot less than a foot thick curtain to get R1 worth of insulation. I don’t know the exact numbers. It probably varies based on various factors. But, yeah, curtains do insulate better than rock.
But the thing here is, they have beige walls. It’s not adobe or stucco or anything, either. That’s honest, modern beige. It’s quite calming, but it’s also a lot more sophisticated than rock walls.
Also, you and I have different ideas of family mages. Probably because most of the mages in my family blew up their houses (entirely by accident, according to the claims). Therefore, family mages to me suggest fairly new buildings. (I swear, I’m not related to Peter.)
The wavy curtains help dampen audio reflection. You also see them on the walls in movie theaters which without them are large cinderblock echoing caverns. The shape of the room actually helps keep the audio level somewhat consistent too. Curtains are about 50% less expensive than wall panels on a per square foot basis.
A few items on curtains in government offices. If you had maps or diagrams that you might not want the ordinary people to see, they would often be placed behind curtains. When people came in to clean up or serve food, the curtains would be closed and then reopened when only cleared people were in the room. When nothing was on the wall, the curtain would often be closed, both for aesthetic purposes and to prevent other people from knowing if those kinds of discussions were taking place.
With regard to curtains on the walls of stone buildings, they were called tapestries. The people who were in charge of castles tended to move around a lot. After all, castles were military fortifications. Tapestries and carpets could could be taken from castle to castle along with furniture to make living there friendlier.
First off: Excellent comic, Pastutopia! The art and story presentation are constantly improving.
Second: I suspect the diverse backgrounds were to assist the artist in keeping all the characters in the same configuration throughout the scene. And not for any other purpose. If there is another purpose for them, there are bigger security concerns with this particular room than a window covered by a curtain.
To add my voice to the already confusing subject…
I agree with @Just_IDD and Glider on the sound dampening properties of volumes of hung fabric. But I personally think Mr Effiate would simply see (the non-confirmed, proposed) windows to be a safety feature of the building, not a Hazzard. Remember when he had Peter literally jump out of one, or all the times people go though those things like a second door? Infact, I cannot remember a single thing we see MYM putting any of his chassis in a structure with only one entrance.
Also, I highly suggest the decor was a good bit by PU to make “less vague backgrounds”, as I think was his goal at one point. Definitely looks like a real, believable building and meeting room
From Mium’s perspective, *every* building has more than one entrance… Sure, the building on the linked page already had more than one entrance, but…
I agree on the decor, both the reasoning and the success. Conference rooms in The Consul’s Office (that is, the building, not the particular room in the building) are actually quite reminiscent of the conference rooms I mentioned above, apart from the fact that their curtains are not beige. I personally feel it was probably a better choice to have not beige curtains in a beige room.
In modern construction, with 16 inch center studs and two sheets of .5 inch drywall? Most interior rooms are about 70% emergency exit.
If you can walk through 3/4 inch sheathing (usually plywood or particle board) and a little vinyl siding? Most exterior walls are largely emergency exit as well.
I just have to say… the things we get distracted talking about here…
Amen.
Other commentators: Deep and insightful comments on the comic and world.
Me: I wonder why the Consul wears earrings and no one else seems to.
Always enjoy the comic! I think Tyler and the Consul both are doing an impressive job understanding Peter. Peter is a force of nature you adapt to, not something you can harness and control.
Hmm! Nice catch! There’s also a lack of rings, necklaces, other piercings, and hair adornments. Has there ever been nail polish on anyone?
I wouldn’t wonder too hard. We want Past to focus on giving us fantastic plot and dialog. Having him go back and redo every page sounds like a creativity-crushing task.
Nail polish?? Which characters have we seen with nails?
Remember when Past would lament the difficulty of hands? Don’t see that problem in this post, do you?
And his solution for it is completely consistent with his stated background in IT.
I’m so proud to know him, I’m putting it on my resume!
Yeah, every hand on this page is *flawless*. It’s downright amazing.
Perhaps because she seems to be one of the very few non-magic-users in the cast?
They’re autocasters, and she’s the only one in the room who’s not either a natural mage, an innate mage, or both.
She doesn’t really like to call attention to them. Shes not one of those people that feel like their autocasters give them the ability to play with the big boys. She understands they at best give her a few moments of respite, so she should only use them if she really needs to.
For what it’s worth, I always plan to be offline for about a week whenever I move. This has worked out fairly well for me, as it’s meant that I’ve almost always gotten online ahead of schedule.
I understand there’s a lot of difficulties in getting to the point of having software automatically deploy updates from the buffer, but I think it’s probably better to go through those hurdles.
While I don’t agree with the attitude of the person on Patreon who’s been pushing for you to get more updates out, I do agree it’s probably better for your profitability. But based on the comments made by all of the various artists I’ve followed over the years, that doesn’t really happen for most artists until they have some automation in the process.
The less time you need to bother with the hosting software to get the next update out, the more time you have for other things. Having stuff happen automagically like the chapter designation and the archive linkage means you don’t need to spend time going back and fixing that stuff because you forgot it. If it breaks, you get one thing to fix and it fixes it everywhere.
That said, I also know a bunch of amazing artists who clearly are still getting by without automating the deploy process all the way. Randy Milholland was still doing manual links for Something Positive the last time I did an archive dive, as an example.
If you do decide to go there and want help with it, I’m probably not the regular who’d be best at helping you with it. I mostly do perl stuff, which isn’t a hugely popular language for web frameworks these days, and I haven’t done any web work to speak of in most of a decade. That said, I’d still be willing to give it the old college try. You have my email address. At least, I’d assume you do, since i type it in to every one of these comment forms. (It’s an issue with what web browser I use to read this comic. Sometimes automation isn’t worth the other hassle you need to get it.)
It’s of course up to you and always has been. I’ve said my bit about it for now, so I’ll shut up about it for probably about as long as it’s been since whenever I’ve suggested something like this before.
Perl. Warm. Fuzzy. Perl.
I would love it if one of our more… creative commenters were to write up what such a lecture would sound like!
I’ll give Glider more of a chance. He’s a lot better at getting into Tyler’s headspace than I am for some reason. Although, thinking about it a bit more, the lecturer would probably also do well to be able to get into Ashvalt’s headspace, and I’m not sure we have had enough opportunity to see what that would be like. Also, maybe one of the Bronys from the Patreon site would be better at making references to Friendship is Magic.
This is where I confess I’m likely better equipped to deliver a lecture on the power of superior firepower than the power of friendship.
Peace through superior friendship? Maybe, but if we’re friends you won’t be bothered by my training marksmanship.
Can be both of course.
Mium inducing Ila to go leave a smoking hole where a giant robot thing and a warmage were threatening her friend would be one example.
Never underestimate the power of friendship… to cause a truly scary force of destruction to drop out of the sky at mach 3….
We could all use a friend like that!
Peter would consider NEEDING a friend like that evidence of poor prior planning though 🙂
Only if you don’t *have* this friend you *need*.
Needing a friend you have and can afford to need demonstrates that you planned well when acquiring said friend.
I don’t think Arkady was that calculating – he had only just met Ila, but he fed her and played with her because he was genuinely a good guy.
That Ila was, well ,Ila (and willing to ask her brother to seriously inconvenience himself to help) was just an extremely fortunate coincidence…
sounds tough
The Consul is absolutely correct.
Watching Weber give Ashvalt a lecture on the Power of Friendship would be entertaining.
Replace the last panel with a shot of everyone in the room suddenly hugging. Oh, wait, it’s not April 1st. Nevermind.
I know its more traditional to have ponies give a rainbow-coloured bitchslap hard enough to leave a crater, but we don’t have any of those; we DO have a dragon that can make large craters with its breath weapon, will that do? 😀
Does My Little Pony exist in this universe?
Ila doesn’t want a cute pastel pony though, she wants her own Dragon….
Does My Little Dragon exist in this universe?