Comic for Wednesday, May 18th, 2022
May18
A little later than I expected, and it’s rather late my time as I post this, so, I’ll keep this part brief…comic! It exists.
Polls
2024 Santa Hat Poll - Who will claim the Christmas Crown this year?
- Naomi Atarah (11%, 38 Votes)
- Fluffy (11%, 38 Votes)
- Kally Summers (11%, 38 Votes)
- Ila F-10 (9%, 31 Votes)
- The Consul (7%, 26 Votes)
- Miko (6%, 21 Votes)
- Avi Atarah (6%, 20 Votes)
- Kor's World Soldier (5%, 16 Votes)
- Mari Kepler (3%, 11 Votes)
- Dr. MIR (3%, 10 Votes)
- Rovak Stas (3%, 9 Votes)
- Camilla Canthi (2%, 8 Votes)
- Magnolia Dai (2%, 8 Votes)
- Nathan Summers (2%, 7 Votes)
- Lisa (2%, 6 Votes)
- Arron Kepler (2%, 6 Votes)
- Dr. Martin (2%, 6 Votes)
- Tyler Weber (2%, 6 Votes)
- Saria (1%, 5 Votes)
- Vium (1%, 5 Votes)
- Amy Selah (1%, 5 Votes)
- Kyle Kepler (1%, 4 Votes)
- Maia Ethi (1%, 4 Votes)
- Arkady Arduni (1%, 3 Votes)
- Elizabeth (1%, 3 Votes)
- Ryn Koko (1%, 3 Votes)
- Ashvalt Ardunni (1%, 2 Votes)
- Control (1%, 2 Votes)
- Tamara (1%, 2 Votes)
- Artem Arduni (0%, 1 Votes)
- Alex Fairway (0%, 1 Votes)
- Ashley Thomas (0%, 1 Votes)
- Lucy Harper (0%, 1 Votes)
- Biana Beyer (0%, 1 Votes)
- Gate (0%, 1 Votes)
- Jayce Myer (0%, 0 Votes)
- Ikirium Avon (0%, 0 Votes)
- David (0%, 0 Votes)
- Nick Otte (0%, 0 Votes)
- Joid (0%, 0 Votes)
- Yoav Cao (0%, 0 Votes)
- Varilem (0%, 0 Votes)
- Gelon Level (0%, 0 Votes)
- Marc Idunni (0%, 0 Votes)
- Blake Shoreman (0%, 0 Votes)
- Regin Enkari (0%, 0 Votes)
- Nelson Otte (0%, 0 Votes)
- Toshe (0%, 0 Votes)
- Frank Marsh (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 115
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Assuming this ‘Ark’ actually does refer to a transport vessel of some kind I’mma gonna take a wild guess here that any sentients on it (AI/ Demon/ Human all options) are from one of those ‘infestations’ the Kor’s World soldier was talking to his command about. They lost the fight, they ran, they got away to here.
Maybe they even passed through Central (Bridgepoint?) and kept going. This would explain why Kor’s World attacked Central and nobody yet understands why – they managed to track the Ark to Cental and then lost it. Thinking the Ark was somewhere on Central they ripped the place apart and eventually left after deciding it wasn’t there.
Possible way to confirm this theory: How does the first appearance of Ark technology showing up here line up with the invasion of Central on the timeline?
Sounds like an awesome question for a Q&A!
I don’t know that anyone in game would have that information. Interdimensional travel wasn’t a widely know thing prior to the incursion. That’s firmly in the realm of “magic” I think. And so nothing about Palindra would have been known at the time of the incursion. It isn’t even clear that Palindra was contacted soon after the incursion. It is alluded to that Central had been seeking out other locations to migrate to, and so the involvement of Palindra and Central _may_ be quite recent compared to the incursion timeline?
All of which to say is that unless Peter has researched this, it seems unlikely for an answer to emerge from the characters. This would have to be Archiver grade information.
And this is late Sunday night, for all we know the Q&A is about to drop in a few hours. But if not, then perhaps timeline questions regarding Ark discovery, incursion, Palindra Central relations might be available at some point?
I actually looked this up on the Internet, and the one I liked said that people can’t agree on a set of rules, so you might as well pick one and be consistent to the extent possible. It should also be realized that usage varies between technical fields and between locations. There is a computer protocol called SCSI, which American engineers pronounced as “scuzzy”. Some Japanese engineers at a meeting were very annoyed at the meeting about the Americans saying that their SCSI devices were “scuzzy” and that they were actually very nice devices. (The Japanese spelled out SCSI.) The internet actually divided these things into acronyms, abbreviations, truncations, and initialisms, with a variety of representations. So try your best and then relax. You don’t want to be like the people in Gulliver’s Travels who had a war over whether you should eat hard-boiled eggs with the little end up or the big end up. Although that book was the origin of the concept for big-endian and little-endian computer architectures.
My first encounter with scsi drives was around 2002. We pronounced them “scuzzy”. I did at first wonder why we were using filthy drives.
Big endian is clearly better. Except for eggs, where the opposite is true.
Anyway, I’m glad you got our information from the interwebs. Not all sources are as reliable!
There are techniques in evaluating the quality of information on the internet/interweb, just as there were techniques for evaluating the quality of data before the electronic age. Many of them have actually been discussed by Peter in The Far Side of Utopia. For example, most people will lie to you when you ask for information. However, the nature of the lies indicate which information they view as the most important. It is often obvious when they are lying. For example, they will often give answers to questions you haven’t asked as a means of deceiving you into believing false facts about the subject which you actually asked about. This is apparently the reason that one intelligence agency is sometimes referred to as the “never say anything” agency. In general, they seem to prefer telling the truth or nothing. Lies will reveal too much, and as Benjamin Franklin once said “When in doubt, tell the truth. It will amaze your friends and confound your enemies.” As I heard one person say, friendlies will tend to believe their advice about computer security and enemies will assume it is a lie. Therefore, they can give good advice and it will help their friends more than their enemies. This is not to say that they don’t know how to lie or deceive. However, they can use this to be deceptive about when they are being deceptive.
I have also seen this in doctoral research where people try to conceal the weaknesses in their research. I have had had some very amusing exchanges of information in this area.
Is https://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-thursday-april-12th-2018/ the strip mentioning the competitor trying to market goods by pretending they came from the I.D.S as stated in the third panel.
No ‘ in competitors in panel 3. You also don’t need both the dash and immediate ellipsis in Kally’s speech.
“Those are the things Kor’s world hates most, isn’t it?” should use the plural “aren’t they?”
Fixed. I left the “-…” as I sound that differently than I would just a “…” even if it’s probably not grammatically correct. It’s a just a stylistic thing that she’s stopping mid sentence abruptly, then pausing, then continuing (as opposing to just “-” before continuing which usually means they change their word mid sentence, or just “…” which is just a pause to consider what they were saying – in this case, Kally is changing what she was saying, and pausing for a second, so I used both).
Isn’t it/aren’t they is an relic of what Kally originally said there, but I tweaked what she said, and didn’t update the plurality of the statement (…the source of a solid 30% of the typos I make… 70% being that I cannot grammar good).
Seconded.
This should have been a reply to MrAnderson. (Yes, theoretically I know how to work around the bug, so I’ll figure out in time how to a actually succeed at that.)
If the comment box is at the bottom of the page and you’re replying to a comment that isn’t the last comment at its level or lower on the page, you need to click the reply button again.
If you’ve figured out you’ve messed up as quickly as you did, you probably still have the option to edit your comment, which means you could click edit, select all in the main comment box, click the ‘delete’ button, confirm the delete, and click the ‘reply’ link you wanted to reply to and get it posted as a reply to the comment you wanted, probably before anyone’s the wiser.
I tried to delete or edit and I couldn’t. Probably because the comment was awaiting moderation (which I have no complaint about, I am grateful that PastUtopia keeps this comment space spam free) or because I used my mobile phone.
Anyway, I will figure this stuff out and I hope you all can bear with some faulty comments from me until then.
So thank you for the pointers!
Moderation, definitely. I run into that occasionally, especially if I navigate away and come back.
I make mad numbers of typos. I review at least once before posting, and at least once after posting (within the edit window), and thus it looks like I’m merely illiterate rather than completely incoherent.
That boost from a 5 minute edit window to a 2 hour edit window probably makes it look like I got 20 IQ points smarter.
I feel… I feel like we are actually touching on the reason Peter ‘left’ the IDS. Something that actually needed to be dealt with, and that IDS with its red tape, superiority complex, and departmental warfare, just couldn’t get around to processing actually existed. Something… cataclysmic to the landscape.
Touching, yes. But the conspiracy on Palindra wouldn’t necessitate going rouge, I think. Involvement of high level Central actors in the conspiracy might.
Is it Sophie who is the ancient demon summoning sorceress? Who also seems to be tight with organizations where Central didn’t have a lot of contacts? And I think she has some sort of ties to Rovak, the very old warmage who either imagines Dr Martin, or has ephemeral visits from him?
There’s more to this story, but we’re seeing “Miko & Aaron dialoging about empty worlds” level reveals here.
I really think Peter kept his original color, rather than going rouge. It’s not as if *he* was auditioning (or pretending) to be either a Family kid or a genetically modified one.
Maybe Sophie should go rouge?
Oh he is rogue. Just like a rogue detective isn’t following his bosses orders or the law. Its a bit fuzzy here since no one on the IDS side is really doing that. However, Peter did it before it was cool. Also, central thinks he’s so awesome that he could steal the strategic equivalent of nuclear weapon and ICMB blueprints while destroying the IDS’s copy.
Heck, this post even mentions that the data is in a format that isn’t just digital!
Find my post on this page @ May 20, 2022, 2:02 am to discover why I can’t tell rogue from rouge. The worst part is I knew I was wrong, but couldn’t be bothered to Google it. 🙁
Panel 5
…like that you’ve USED their tech to give A/AN S.M.A.I.
Don’t know for certain about the A/AN distinction. I tend to like “an” for abbreviations that start with a vowel sound, and many letters do even when the letter itself is a consonant.
As long as it’s ‘ess-emm-aay-eye’ she’s saying that’s my preference, but I feel like this isn’t obvious when it might be said ‘sm-eye’. Abbreviations are a pain for this case. Even when it sounds better to me I’m never positive.
I agree.
When reading aloud, acronyms are suppose to be reconstituted. However, if the acronym has become common parlance, it reads aloud in its common parlance. Therefore, A/AN is used for what would be said when reading aloud.
The question becomes: What are these people actually saying? Has our favorite comic artist reduced what is actually being said to an acronym (for “space purposes”)? Or are they saying something like “SMAY-aye”? Or is the “a” suppose to be an “an”?
They actually say the acronym. When it’s not said as an acronym, I’ll write it like a word (an example being PACT, that’s an acronym, but one that was likely intentionally made into a word and since it forms a word, they just say the word). If I put the periods in (Like I.D.S) the are saying the letters.
It’s my impression that it’s nigh universal for people to read the letters when your initialism is punctuated like that… unless you’re a member of S.H.E.I.L.D., in which case you write out the periods but still pronounce it as shield. I think I’ve read some other Marvel comics which appear to have been perpetrated by someone of a similar mindset regarding other acronyms. That said, those Marvel perpetrators have a significant amount of influence, so the situation is less consistent than it was 30 years ago.
There’s less agreement on acronyms written such as SMAI, which I pronounce smaye, but other people may pronounce S.M.A.I. because they know that’s the official way to spell and pronounce it, and still others pronounce it as S.M.A.I. because they don’t know how to sound out ‘smai’, and yet more who pronounce it as ‘smee’ and ‘smaee’ and ‘smahih’, and I’m sure I don’t have an exhaustive list yet.
I can’t help it. I’ve shoved just barely enough German into my head that SMAI keeps reading as “sm-EYE”.
Given the pause at the end there I’m not sure Peter knew that Kor’s World hates demons and dragons. Thoughts anyone?
I interpreted the pause to indicate concern that Kally was having a first person conversation with a member of the race/ species/ geopolitical faction that their works has been fighting for a generation. I’m pretty sure that was something that Peter had not known.
Thought the same thing here. The usually glib Peter was at a loss for words when he learned that the Kor’s World soldiers talked with Kally.
I suspect that Peter at least had the idea that Kally was close enough with the Kor’s World soldier to exchange words.
The news that they *did* have some words to say that Kally understood may have been something. I suspect Peter expected the soldier to not engage in dialogue with someone anchoring a construct. The encounter likely would have run through completion without the soldier saying anything that Kally could even hear, all communication going through the soldier’s Eidos interface instead.
But the soldier clearly sided with Atter in the fight, which surprised Kally enough to ask the soldier about it. And the soldier replied.
I suspect the soldier’s actions were a tactical decision to side with the construct whose anchor wasn’t present, so that it could possibly follow the other construct back to its anchor and deal with said anchor. It’s possible it was instead going after the biggest threat, which Kally clearly demonstrated herself to be by taking out both opponents.
There’s also the difference between having come to a decision on a particular point and sharing that decision with others. Or the possibility that Peter decided to lie here.
I mean, to be clear, we don’t have clear evidence that Kor’s World was going after Malsans or Palindrans apart from going after the Bridgepoint data, which was something the IDS had collected. Sure, Malsans do have at least one summoner of red constructs, but she uses them fairly sparingly. It also seems likely that Eliana’s constructs have far less independence than Dragon, and I feel like that independence is a significant part of what the Kor’s World types are opposed to.
For all we know, this all could have been a Kor’s World plot: they knew that the IDS was collecting data they didn’t want them to have, and that the rogue Families had a teleporter. They leaked the security details about the bridgepoint data to the right parties, Acalia was thus tasked with gathering the data and sabotaging it, as the Kor’s World team expected, and then all they had to do was clean it off of the expected much less secure servers on Palindra.
For all we know, the Kor’s World people could have even taken a much more direct role. They’re human under their suits, more or less. Maybe they actually have spies in place on Palindra working under cover who gave specific instruction to Acalia on the kind of sabotage to do, or provided the software she used to do it. Maybe they have people in place in the various companies so they would know exactly where that data was hosted and what kinds of backup plans they had. Maybe they only sent soldiers after the data to hide their spies’ involvement. (Would it be that crazy if the data had already been purged from the server before the soldier arrived, so all that was really needed was a sufficient presence so that people wouldn’t be looking too closely at who was on the server around the time the information apparently disappeared? I mean, the soldier did seem to succeed despite being highly distracted by Naomi.)
It’s also possible that the above is all true and still Peter and Kally don’t really generate a significant amount of threat from Kor’s World, because Kor’s World’s rules of engagement on Palindra are sufficiently selective that they’ll back off rather than risk hurting their colonists, and the native wildlife is at greater risk from the Kor’s World colonists than they generally would be from the Kor’s World soldiers, with or without the I.D.S. poking their noses into stuff.
So you think that Kor’s world has colonists on Palindra, civilians living the “primitive” Palindra lifestyle without being recognised as foreigners? Interesting thought. It’s similar to what Central plans with the difference that those colonists will be open about being from another world.
Kor’s World refugees / colonists is a theory that I think just recently cropped up. I’m not sure I’ve bought into it. Maybe. But maybe a ship that made a bad dimensional jump, possibly while damaged in a fight? And crash landed without being discovered / recovered by Kor’s World?
I’m not sure. I like the idea that one of the nations may be actual Kor’s World descendents, but I’m leaning towards it being hardware without people.
For a whole nation to be descendants of Kor’s world, this crash landing must have happened a long time ago. That wouldn’t explain the crashed ship with the rather new Ark technology.
While I can imagine a surviving crew of a starship crash taking cover and blending in until they are rescued, I doubt that most of them would want to stay. It would be a good reason for Kor’s world to come to Palindra in the first place: To look for survivors and track what happened to the technology that fell from the sky into the natives’ lap.
My personal take, and I think I break with the consensus that has been described so far, is that IF there was a contingency on Palindra that is derived from Kor’s World (refugees, crash, or whatever) they are sufficiently far removed that they are doing reverse engineering on some old cache rather than trying to preserve or recover technology. Those descendents may not recall, or only recall through legend and story, what their origins are.
Ark Technology just sounds OLD to me. But I see references to (a? More than one? ) missing dropship that make it sound less old.
Maybe it’s none of this. Maybe teleportation and this castle between Worlds is new even to Kor’s World. If they had it, Central never saw them use it, and teleportation was taken to be impossible by several well versed Centrans. There was debate that this is tied to the Whirlpool virus. Maybe it isn’t a cache at all, but several groups on Palindra can snatch materials in transit between dimensions. Maybe even FROM Kor’s World.
Well, that there is a lot of speculation with not much to back it up.
Just because somebody’s from an advanced civilization doesn’t mean they understand how to build the technology of that civilization. It also doesn’t mean their new neighbors necessarily understand the technology.
I’m guessing that the Ark Technology is as much of a secret as it is because reverse engineering that stuff openly generates a lot of hostile interest from some Kor’s World immigrants^W^W^WOrish Warmages. The Orish don’t necessarily have a great grasp of all that tech, but they *do* want the native wildlife to continue having a worse grasp of it.
Panel 3: That’s how YOU made Mium.
Fixed, thanks 🙂
I wonder whether (Kally is right that) it actually was Peter’s idea to give M.Y.M. an Eidos drive card. Since Mium has one at the Avon lab
( https://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-thursday-november-3rd/ )
and Peter came to Avon to investigate their “Ark technology” a.k.a. Kor’s world technology, maybe Doctor Martin or another Avon scientist had already combined their A.I. with this piece of Ark tech when Peter showed up.
I suspect its more that Doctor Martin uploaded himself into the Ark Tech. Potentially as fallout with Peter over it.
That would explain why only some people can see and hear him. It would mean that all those people have some similar sort of interface/implant.
My guess is, Dr. Martin gave MYM an Eidos card, but didn’t give one to F5 or F8. He only had the one, and had not really figured out what exactly it did.
Peter had two of them. He wasn’t supposed to have any, but the I.D.S. wanted to know what they did and he was on the list of researchers and this was before he actually had upset anyone involved with IDS S.C. or IDS C.A. too much. In any event, these didn’t come from those organizations, so any growing friction there didn’t matter. It’s possible it even helped lubricate the deal.
That Peter absconded with two of these unknown cards wasn’t escalated. Most of the people who pay enough attention to politics to be concerned about Peter having them don’t know enough about what they really do to be properly concerned. The people who have an inkling what they do don’t know that Peter had two of them, and most of them don’t even know that Peter’s a persona non grata these days.
The idea of using one of these cards like that hadn’t particularly occurred to Peter. It might have, except that he was a bit too aware of how dangerous it was to take such a big risk.
However, somehow, seeing Dr. Martin’s data, stuff suddenly clicked for Peter. He ran some discreet tests and figured out at least some of what was going on with his cards, *and* how the implants that he and his cousin had were related. He also figured out how to help his cousin.
He made a short-notice trip back home using an illegal gate. It was probably owned by the IDS, but they used it for stuff that they wouldn’t admit to (Sky Hammer parts transfers, among other stuff), and so it was configured to not log.
It didn’t take him long to bring Miko up to speed. She embraced his project to a degree that gave him some concern, but it was mitigated by the idea he could shut off his own implant at least for the foreseeable future. That was enticing enough he agreed to bring her into it completely and not look back.
When he returned, he found both Dr. Martin and Dr. Mir MIA. He didn’t exactly have an alibi, since he’d travelled both directions using a gate that didn’t log. He understood that he’d be a suspect. But he also knew that he needed at least a little more AVon resources to achieve his goals, so he took the F8 prototype that they had already been about to scrap.
This recount doesn’t include exactly when or how he brought MYM onto the team, but it was sometime around this point. It’s possible that Miko was instrumental to that effort. It’s also likely connecting MYM’s Eidos card with one they put in F8 was a key piece of that. It’s been explicitly stated that Query was a key piece of it, though whether that was originally done due to MYM or F8 wanting that human analysis boost, or if it was simply done as something to reign the rest of the system in if they went “rogue” isn’t particularly clear. Sure, *now* Mium highly values the Query component addition, but how much of that is from MYM/F8, and how much of it is Query controlling the outcome is something that at most Past knows, but maybe not even that.
I should have probably stopped typing some time ago. At least, I’ll stop typing now
Somehow I doubt that Peter would have used some piece of Kor’s world tech that he doesn’t really understand on Miko. Also, I suspect that Miko’s problem wasn’t about her ability to use magic because in that case she could have just lived a normal life as a non-magic user. So I don’t think that Peter fixed Miko’s and his implant with Eidos drive cards.
I agree with the theory that Peter combined M.Y.M. with the obsolete F8 prototype and an Eidos drive card. I wonder if Ila also has one or if her Eidos key has another source. I think there were hints that M.I.R. might have given Ila her own Eidos key but in that case she should have been more upset with her loss of Ila.
This seems slightly tangential, but I’ve suspected for some time that Peter and Miko have some significant differences between their implants.
Miko has referenced several times that she should have been a powerful mage. I think her implant was meant to enhance this. Peter on the other hand has been referenced by both Miko and Kally as having effectively zero magical potential and able to cast only through heavy reliance on an autocaster.
In this comic, I think an early reference to the A.A. system, it looks like we might be seeing the serial number of Miko’s implant. It’s literally #3.
https://pastutopia.com/comic/comic-for-thursday-december-15th/
I think Peter’s reputed to have effectively zero magic potential because he came from technical stock and refuses to have his implant turned on. Also, I think people are much less averse to using technology they don’t fully understand to assist a loved one after someone else performed surgery on said loved one to implant some of that alien technology into her, and now she has trouble functioning as a human being. It’s my understanding this is the primary sore point between Peter and his father and Arron. He still speaks to them because they didn’t do it – they were just the ones who signed Miko (and him) up for it.
Yes, it’s poorly understood. But it’s the only tech that has a chance of working.
It is now 11:17PM on Midway Island in the Pacific. Congratulations!!! You posted the comic on Tuesday as promised. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Hope your real life is getting better.
Agreed!
Except…. you hope his life is getting better??
The guy is retired, spends all day drawing cartoons and playing D&D. He just moved into a new home a year or so ago. I haven’t seen pictures if it, but it’s probably like a 3700 Sq ft mansion. I think he’s still unmarried because he keeps cycling through his super model girlfriends too fast to settle on one.
HOW much BETTER do you want this guy to live??
Past, I remain forever envious. You go dude!
I often joke that I’m retired. According to housing loan people, I might as well be. They take dim attitude toward “I make stuff for the internet for a living”.
…I’m glad to hear the fan fiction of my life is going splendidly though. Their life sounds a bit complicated though.
Grasshopper …. you severely underestimate the Archivist’s lifestyle. He is not retired as he mentions joking about that. He does own a few 3700 sq ft mansions. He refers to them as “guest houses.” One of his real homes sits underground beneath the 3700 sq ft mansions and covers a few square kilometers. That gives him room to park his spaceships and house his SMAI armed forces. The size or location of one of his houses does not really mater since he goes from one to another using transdimensional gates.
This makes a lot more sense. We have adequate evidence from the timing of posts and his concept of “time” that clearly dimensional travel is involved somehow.
Nice insights.
That’s probably why he stopped complaining about his wrist and hand hurting. High level advanced medical care, he probably just had a new arm grown.