Comic for Wednesday, January 15th, 2020
Jan16
Well, just when you all were probably suspecting I’d miss the week again… š
Comic!
I guess this doesn’t really count as the return of Tyler as he’d already returned a bit earlier.
I’d intended to give a rundown of how a comic gets this late, but the comic is already pretty late, and I’m sort of running out of time before I have to head out, so I think I’ll just say, “sorry!” and post and run š
Hopefully next week will be on time, currently see an open slot of time on the weekend (but might be a mirage though…….)
Loading ...
Also, PastUtopia, buddy. This is not half a page. I’m happy for it, but looking at this page I don’t think I need an explanation of why it is late. You managed to shove 9 panels with 19 drawn characters on them and copious dialog, and shove that all into “half” a page.
And as someone that follows you other work, I happen to know that this isn’t even all you did this week… honestly I’m amazed we get anything. I’m lucky if I have the motivation to pick up groceries after work, let alone make anything of value. Your life sounds exhausting.
I want to rant that it barely counts as a quarter page, and demand more content!
However you are correct, Ferrus. Any other webcomic would label this a double page.
Also… Weber. Woohoo!
Technically speaking, Dresden Codak would call this a half page with poor shading, and wonder where all the mezzodes were. It’s probably a mezzode plot to lull unsuspecting decent citizens into their clutches.
Dresden Codak averaged around 13 updates per year for the past 5 years.. Some of those have been splash pages.
Over that same time period, The Far Side of Utopia has had 482 updates. 13 of those were to old pages that had been previously published (3 of the 13 were to the first page). Quite a few of those were every bit as complex, but without the depression-fueled obsessive detailing of the artwork.
I understand you haven’t maintained a steady pace in that time. Neither has Aaron. He’s managed 8 updates in the last 16 months. (Note that I’m starting that clock roughly the day after his update before those 8. That may be a little unfair, but you were doing three a week back then, so going back halfway to the update before that would be more favorable to your count.)
There are grocery delivery services in many cities, FYI. I’m sad to say I use them more often than not.
I don’t do a web comic or anything, though. I just struggle with life right now.
I’m struggling with this. What makes you sad to say it?
Someone will deliver groceries to my door?? If I leave the door unlocked will they load them into my fridge?
I’m not seeing a reason to be sad. Would I have to put pants on for this, or can I lounge around in sweats?
Growing up in a place and a time where we occasionally had to shoot, clean, and cook our food, the idea that someone would just deliver it? Not a source of sadness.
Even today I live so far out that no one delivers pizza. Though I suppose I can have beer delivered. Maybe I can pay extra for the beer van to bring me a pizza?
I used to be the person who did the shopping for the family. I didn’t know how to prepare food properly, but at least I could figure out what was good produce and what wasn’t.
Now, most of the time, the decision is not, “Do I have the time to do this, or should I just have someone else do it for me?” It’s “Can I maintain my mental focus long enough to purchase all of the items on my list? Will I hurt my back if I carry the groceries home myself?”
I don’t feel I’m old enough for these concerns to be really justified. I’m only 48. Intellectually, I understand that health problems are not “due to old age”, like people talk about. Health problems are due to specific experiences and/or lack thereof. It’s just that age provides time for those experiences to happen, and lack of experiences take a fairly long time to be felt. There’s also a couple of additional age effects that make it more difficult to get ones exercise in safely, and cause additional experiences due to things building up over time. But those aren’t my issue yet. Life choices could have made them my issue by this point, but I did not make those life choices.
To be fair, I’m not going to say I’ve always made good life choices. I’ve made a few that were particularly poor. But I’ve always had relatives who were willing to sacrifice themselves to demonstrate the inadvisability of the worst life choices, and thanks to their efforts, I understood in time how inadvisable those choices were ahead of time, and thus didn’t make them. Also, I hated being drunk the one time I attained that state deliberately to see what it was being like, so there really were no plus sides for me with that path at all.
You are certainly not unique in using a grocery delivery service. At the Whole Foods store up the road from me, most of the people in the aisles are the in-house shoppers filling orders to be delivered. It is a huge piece of Amazon’s grocery biz plan. For folks who have too many things demanding of their time, it is a lifesaver.
This should be interesting. The I think Acalia’s power is probably fairly secret (otherwise Peter and Miko would have known about it for sure a lot earlier), and Tyler seems to have rolled out of bed directly onto the warpath.
Also releasing Tyler in a room full of the conservative/rebellious Families ought to be popcorn worth. The fact that he is voting at all should cause quite a stir. Presumably the Families are aware he was made a mage-commander (conferring him some degree of Family status) but where that puts him the scale is uncertain to me.
The mage-commander from the front lines had that status to be comfortable rebuking Regin, but at the same time, he didn’t come here. That said, depending on the technicalities of the situation, Tyler would probably be the head of the Weber Family… an interesting question of what happens when a non-Family member is elevated.
Also a funny thought. If Tyler is not technically a Family head, that means that Peter is technically a Family heir, as Tyler named Peter his heir (to everything) before he got wounded.
I think Taylor might have made less of a splash than you might have anticipated. Primarily because of the direction he is taking.
I’d say it probably depends on who does the elevating.
If a family head without any other special position elevated a non-Family member without going through any special process, that probably would mean that person was part of that Family, and just a normal member.
But if the head of state does it, that’s probably starting a new family. It’s unclear whether the Accord would grant the Consul that power, because they’re mostly keeping their family rituals intact, and that was one of them. So maybe it takes whomever is the top dog in the families to do that.
Elizabeth seemed to think that Camilla was “their princess or something”. My guess is that guess was based on Camilla being identified to her as their royalty, noting that Camilla was not in charge, and also young. It’s therefore my guess that Camilla is for all intents and purposes the current queen of Malsa, except by the Accord, she doesn’t have that role for any public or governmental purpose. And as Camilla was very intent on not being the ruler, she decided to act as the ruler’s bodyguard, to do her utmost to make sure that she didn’t have to rule.
It’s therefore reasonable to assume that if the Consul doesn’t have the ability to promote a commoner or foreigner to family status, Camilla made sure it didn’t matter.
This is, of course, just my thoughts, and there’s probably some gaping holes in them.
No one seems to have questioned the Consul on her ability to create a new Malsan family line. That being the case I think it is a safe bet that _someone_ has done it before.
I would suspect that it stems from much the same situation as regular battle field promotions. Someone capable and present at the right moment gets the rank necessary to do the job.
My understanding is that the attempted assassination of Tyler Weber was because everyone agreed that this promotion DOES create a new family, and a number (possibly small number) of existing royalty preferred to commit murder over allowing the Consul to dilute their power by means of increasing their number.
I agree that such a promotion from within an existing family wouldn’t create a new family, but add a bit more status to the existing family.
I figured the nobody questioning it meant that the Consul followed the proper process, but that doesn’t really give any hints as to what the process is. It could be anything from the Consul just whiming to call someone a mage-commander, to some full-on Family ritual. The only things that are really clear are that the Consul followed the process and the person being promoted doesn’t need to be involved sufficiently for Tyler to realize that it was being promoted to being a Family. It’s not clear whether they’d need to be involved sufficient for a normal person to have that realization, mind you. It’s entirely possible it required some very specific mental blind spots that only Tyler has ever possessed for him to not realize that.
It’s my understanding that the attempted assassination of Tyler Weber was strictly to do with the defense of that particular IDS facility. They understood that one mage was going to assault the place, and they were going to kill whomever it was to send a message.
Offing the new Family while it’s still just one person is, of course, the way to go if you want to keep the number of Families down. That very well could have been the reason, except … dang it, rereading the pages to find the link suggests you were right and I was wrong. Ok, so, yeah. Clearly official because the rogue families decided to opt out of the power dilution. I’d link, but it’s basically every page from 12.07 to 12.13.
I’m not thinking whether or not an existing family adopting someone would add more status or remove status. I’ve heard of enough situations that I feel like either could happen, depending on the circumstances – even in a situation where normally it was always one or always the other, because the particulars of who adopts whom is always relevant.
Acalia is the teleporter, isn’t she? Also super attractive, but I don’t think that’s the power they’re speaking about.
Yes, teleported last seen bleeding out in shock from Naomi ripping her arm off.
So power is secret enough that Miko was upset that Peter guessed it correctly. She’d hoped he was just trying to avoid admitting to a mistake.
Just a few thoughts more about the Acalia’s power being secret thing. Based on chapter 12, page 8, Acalia’s power isn’t too secret. If she were to demonstrate teleporting around, at least some of the family heads in Malsa who aren’t in exile, and aren’t in league with those who are would know who she was, even if all of her features were obscured. Of course, if it was more secret than that, the name drop wouldn’t have really worked.
But you’re right, it wasn’t completely common knowledge. Also, as an exiled family member without a political reason for visiting Malsa (for example, I’d expect this Family meeting would count as a free pass for the exiled family heads, otherwise Saraine wouldn’t be here. Probably some of the others as well, but I’m not certain which others were clearly exiled.), the fact that Tyler has seen her at all is probably a bit of a deal.
To be fair, Tyler’s a foreigner, and being from foreign parts, seeing someone who’s not allowed in local parts is probably not a huge deal. But it’s my impression that Tyler basically came straight from where he was to Malsa on hearing that there was an opportunity in Malsa for him to escape to. I’m also of the impression that the Consul hasn’t actually been in her position for very long, maybe a few years, so there’s not a lot of time that Acalia’s been showing off her ability to foreigners.
Free time mirages seem more insidious than water mirages, but maybe that’s just due to being hydrated enough to think straight.
It’s my guess you don’t live in a desert or other area where you might possibly be dependent on the water mirages.
I’ve never been dependent on water mirages for hydration, but one time in scouts, I was lost with a couple of scouts. We didn’t have complete agreement that we were lost, and we didn’t have proper signal materials. We thought we were almost back to camp. Camp was just over this hill, by the lake. And OMG we saw that lake so many fricking times before we finally got back to camp (we had the right direction, but it was over about 10 hills rather than 1.)
I’d say they’re about the same amount of insidious.
I think most of us have had that experience in scouts. For me it was in a cave, and our nominal leader was convinced that he could find an alternative way out of the cave. Eventually two of us worked out that we could probably get back out of the cave by retracing our steps, but likely not if we went much further in. It was just getting to be too many steps to recall.
Fortunately for our illustrious leader, he opted not to be left alone in the cave. To this day no one has found a second entrance/exit to that particular system.
No mirages involved, sorry.
Panel 4: “The IDS is seeking to restore you*R* power”.
Correct as written. The IDS is not trying to restore “your” power. It is not yours, if you have to restore it. It might arguably be trying to restore you “to” power. But I think it is correct as written.
You know the IDS isn’t concerned about how much power you get, but how indebted to the IDS you feel for getting said power, either restored or new?
I updated to using “your”; I think you’re right in that the best way to say it would be “you to power”, and that was probably what I was originally going for, but when typing that it lacks the sibilance the consul tends to speak with (she really likes statements with mirror or repeated structures), and I tend to over emphasize character speaking patterns of what’d be the most correct thing to say.
I think the problem with grammar often stems form the fact that I read the dialog in the voice I envision for the character which often papers over a lot of the small details as I just correct for that in mind in the process of translating it to how I think they speak, but that sort of thing doesn’t always convey well in writing.
Also that I’m terrible at grammar š
Appreciate the help and thoughts Old Dan & pls. š
I think that is what I like about the writing. You are very good at writing dialog because characters sound like characters. Half the time you could tell who was speaking without speech bubbles and if you consider how many characters there are in the comic, that’s a pretty impressive feat.
I think the characters and how fascinatingly deep their personalities tend to be is a lot of what I like about the comic. Characters like Miko, Tyler, Peter… even characters like the Consul and Arkady both have layers and complexity to their characters, despite the very limited word count of any given character due to the nature of it being a comic.
Good timing, Tyler!
And surprise on surprise for the families.
And yay for comic! Thank you, PastU!
This definitely feels like Tyler at speed.