Grrl Power #995 – Big Oil has nothing on Big Peasant
These pages are a bit more challenging to draw than the standard talking heads page. I write them to convey the tale Dabbler is relaying, then when I’m laying out the page and the word bubbles, I realize I don’t know what I’m going to draw to accompany the text. Admittedly, the bit in panels 1-3 made more sense in my head. The joke I was trying to pull there was that programming magic the same way as you’d do machine code is hilariously inefficient, so the “great work” guy reigned over a thousand years of darkness in order to build a “Working Computer in Minecraft” level processor to pull off some basic ass output.
Then I thought that anyone who wasn’t familiar with Minecraft memes or who didn’t take an introductory Apple BASIC programming class in the 80’s might not get the joke and think the pyramid was some kind of A.I. being like the W.O.P.R. (Yes, I grew up in the 80’s.) If you did learn a bit about Apple BASIC, or even spent 20 minutes on it, you’d probably get the joke, because the very first thing you learn to do is get the computer to output, you guessed it, “Hello world.” In fact, if you google “apple basic” that’s the first image result.
Ah, that joke is definitely better now that I’ve exhaustively explained it. So now instead, let’s all just take a moment to think about a Mind Flayer who appreciates a nice fluffy pillow. The sleeping arrangements of chaotic/lawful evil monsters is not something I spend a lot of time on, but I guess my default instinct would be that they probably sleep on a pile of skulls or in a web made from human sinew or in a crypt surrounded by spikes or something scary looking, but who’s to say Mind Flayers aren’t into super comfortable bedding? Granted, I would probably be a little crabby and therefore just a bit more evil if I had to sleep curled up in the sloughing puss of a giant’s chest cavity, not to mention the extra time taken in the evil shower in order to properly de-fester, but I think of my priorities as a creature of evil would be to invent memory foam. And I don’t mean foam made from human brains that can still remember not being foam, either. Well, I guess if I was evil, it wouldn’t matter to me either way as long as it conformed to and supported my contours.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:
Nothing to report. I had to finish the vote/pinup thing and that put me behind so I spent the weekend finishing comic pages.
November’s vote incentive is updated, in case you missed me posting about it on Friday. Here’s a link to a dedicated post about it if you want to comment.
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More souls for the pillow fluffing god
But a wizard wouldn’t need to go to that kind of continuing trouble. It’s a lot like having an electronic device that runs entirely on batteries…He’d have to keep getting more every so often. It’s much more economically/magically feasible to have an animated flesh golem powered by one single soul, which would effectively last forever (or until the flesh rots away entirely & bones decay into dust). At the very least, even without magical preservation in effect, such a golem could last for several decades, if not a century or two before needing another one to replace it…Even then, the wizard might be able to decant the original soul into the replacement body.
So a magical pillow fluffing device is less efficient & more costly in resources over time than a golem would be. The golem can still do so much more than merely fluff pillows, effectively following whatever commands it’s given.
He may prefer not to let the golem into his bedchamber?
(rotting body parts or embalming fluids doesn’t smell that good, and if something goes squish under your foot?)
Or he often snds his Golem out on errands at night, so he/she/it isn’t available to fluff his pillow just before bed.
(OK; the golem is out getting more souls for the fluffer and other devices he’s using)
Yes… but what would be the point in having one, if he didn’t use it.
I don’t think he cares about the efficiency of it at this point…
That’s why I never understood why J.K. Rowling would have zombies as servants in her HP series, especially when they already had house elves. (Maybe zombies were the only servants that would obey dead people, like Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington?)
Because Jakey Rowling is a hack of a writer who never even tried to make her world consistant?
Hard to argue with the results though. o_0
HPMOR is my favorite fan rewrite, although the James Potter sequels are also pretty decent for younger readers. …Naked Quidditch is probably the funniest.
What does HPMOR mean?
I’m assuming HP is Harry Potter, but what’s MOR?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, in which alternate-universe Harry was still raised by his aunt Petunia, but instead of Dursley she married a college professor, and they have raised Harry on science and logic.
Right up until the opening chapter, on the day he gets his Hogwarts letter, and is thrown into a world full of plot holes and a wizarding culture with a complete lack of common sense. Neither of which is it in Harry’s nature to ignore, and he immediately starts applying real-world methods of logic to the opportunities and problems thrown at him as the Boy Who Lived.
Some fantastic plot twists and creative turns, while also incorporating great examples of applying classic logic. I suspect that as a lawyer and nerd/geek you’d quite enjoy it.
Just read below that you’ve only ever seen the 1st movie and read 0 books – you’d miss out on most of the jokes and parody of the universe / characters. On the plus side, the entire series is wrapped up in the first year and is probably still an interesting read on its own merits as a magic / science crossover.
It is an eleven year old who uses quantum physics theory and has a made up medical condition to justify giving him a time turner. It quickly loses any appeal of the proposed scenario of “harry potter, but the villain and hero arent idiots” and instead becomes “harry potter, but the villain and hero have mary sue levels of ‘intellect'”.
@TempoDiValse
Other than me being a girl, you basically just described me. I was an obsessed science geek before I started school (I had read all the Tom Swift books that were out), and I could tell at 11 more about quantum theory than most adults.
Also, that medical condition is very real, and is occasionally caused by sleep ppnea (which I also have). Sleep apnea causes microarousals. This means it takes me 10 hours to become fully rested, but the circadian rhythms synchronize based on your sleep being an 8 hour duration, meaning my body still craves being awake 16 hours after I sleep, meaning I get EXACTLY this situation of moving forward 2 hours each night unless I actively fight it by using sleeping pills to force myself to bed early which I’ve had to use for a long time now.
So either you really need to re-calibrate what constitutes a Mary Sue, OR you have to assume that I am a Mary Sue, which would mean that our world is fictional. Take your pick.
@Harmony: real world Mary Sues absolutely exist, and I think you’re probably one of them. There’s stuff that can be done for sleep apnea, but you’re probably well aware of how most of them suck and none are applicable to everyone. Still, I thought I’d mention, because the entirety of human knowledge is more than any one person can know, and it’s impossible to tell where someone else’s gaps might be.
@Tgape
I guess being called a real-world Mary Sue is a compliment?
> It is an eleven year old who uses quantum physics theory
That’s actually justified better than “he read lots of books”.
But it would be spoilers to explain it.
re: sleep apnea, go get a sleep test and look into sleep therapies (CPAP, dental fixture, pacemaker-like implants, etc). Life changing if you need it, and sometimes it’s caused by nerve issues not just excess weight. As I and some teenage nephews can attest, the clinic wouldn’t even test us initially because we didn’t fit the profile. I had one of the worst sleep cycles they’d seen (>2.5 minute periods without breathing), and went from chronic fatigue and depression to dreaming and active REM cycles in about 3 weeks – I understand morning people now. YMMV of course but definitely worth checking.
It’s possible to have CFS and depression and still have vivid dreams
Sleep for thirty to forty-five minutes and feels like had a two hour dream (or at least, the dream felt way longer than the period of sleeping, and that’s assuming falling asleep immediately)
Methods of Rationality was anything but. It was a smug-crack-baby from start to finish.
Some readers will also enjoy the alas-incomplete Harry Potter and the Natural D20 (I think that was the name of it).
George, I assume you mean Harry Potter and the Natural 20? A young and rather genre-savvy Wizard from a D&D-type setting finds himself thrown into the Harry Potter setting, with potential vice versa.
I think that’s a good description of any of Yudkowsky’s work. He may be smart, but he’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, and he’s just so smug about it that it makes him look like a moron. He’ll back himself into a corner intellectually, and then act like the fact that he outsmarted himself makes him a genius.
Oh, he absolutely has some religious issues, and it shows in his work.
Look up “Roko’s Basilisk” for a laugh.
Doesn’t stop him being a decent author who wrote a good “Athiest Narnia”.
This fiction was not part of my current awareness. Thanks!
Agree, HP:MoR is absolutely fantastic.
To get the most out of the references in the ‘Battle Magic’ chapters you need a general knowledge of the plot of Ender’s Game.
The author also makes some snide comments to the reader like “If a total bookworm like Hermione isn’t in Ravenclaw why even have the house in the first place?”
@brichins
Already on it. Went for years with sleep apnea, various tests, doctors, CPAP, etc. Nothing really worked. I kept asking the doctors to check for a deviated septum because my Dad had it without cause and I thought I might be at risk. None took it seriously. Then I went in to get a catscan for an unrelated reason, and asked the doctor to *please* look to see if I had a deviated septum while she was looking at it, and she confirmed, yep, that was the case.
Now, insurance is refusing to cough up the money for the surgery, so my lawyers and their lawyers are now duking it out.
Dang, hope that works out in your favor. Medical insurance is the worst.
@harmony
I gave a brief description of what makes the methods of rationality a mary sue fic. There is more just unlisted. Also, “made up” as in it isn’t sourced from canon or in any way actually possible. The author just gave him a specific medical condition from thin air to justify letting him play with time travel.
For example, this
Harry: You can’t DO that!
Minerva McGonagall: It’s only a transfiguration; an animagus transformation, to be exact—
Harry: You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can’t just visualize a whole cat’s anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?
Minerva: Magic.
Harry: Magic isn’t enough to do that! You’d have to be a god!
Minerva: … that’s the first time I’ve been called that.
This is where it starts out. It gets more exaggerated from there.
JKR wrote to entertain her audience, and did it expertly You don’t happen to be that audience.
The whole editorial fad about “don’t use adverbs”. and “don’t use synonyms for *said*” is targeted at people with certain demographics and certain expectations and certain conditioning. Factors that are not relevant when you are writing for older children.
I dunno, there’s some seriously bad stuff in those books.
Not counting her later stuff where she goes full on, mask-off hatemonger.
Seriously agree. Safety and responsibility issues aside, I could hardly stand the books after they started going down the “Slavery is natural” path with the house elves.
Harry Potter and the Disturbing Realisation of Who These Banking Gibbons are Supposed to Represent
Harry Potter and the Masculine Features on Umbridge being Part of What Makes her Bad but it’s Okay Because it’s Implied she Gets Punitive Raped by Centaurs
Harry Potter and the Asian Character with Two Last Names and No First Name
Harry Potter and the Irish Character Who Makes Explosions
Harry Potter and the Queerbaiting Dumbledore but Never Putting her Writing Where her Mouth is
Harry Potter and the Writing of Every Character Except the “Exotic Flavour as Explicitly White but Nonetheless Trying to Get Brownie Points by Saying she Wrote them Raceless and they Could be Any Ethnicity
Goblins not Gibbons, darn swipe keyboard.
That’s a remarkably succinct way of putting 90% of my massive list.
Dunno.. Maybe because magic in Rowling’s setting is, as is often touched upon in the books, Not Quite Safe?
Especially the less …law-abiding… magical citizens tend to dabble in stuff that’s, shall we say, not quite up to safety-standards in quite a few cases in the books, with ample hints of there being things *MUCH* worse around than the thing that ate Sirius.
You just *may* want to have an animated corpse or two in your lab for Testing Purposes, y’know…..
I’m unsure what you’re referring to, I don’t remember any zombie servants in HP.
In general though, alternatives to house elves would make sense, because house elves are a rare commodity – it seems to be near impossible to acquire one without inheriting it.
Reminds me of a minor subplot in Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer (which I enjoyed way more than I expected from the description), where the main character lands a free farmhouse that’s haunted by the dead housewife. She ignores him and just runs through a routine of vague memories, which include cooking meals and cleaning, which works out great for a few weeks – until one night… D:<
Yeah, but isn’t the maid already a flesh golem? I mean, all these servants are supposed to be proto-succubi and those were originally just slightly more attractive zombies. Strictly speaking, he’s already got a magic pillow fluffer, it just also does other stuff.
Either way, I think the bigger issue is the way everyone is just kind of rolling with this. Five second ago Maxima was about to pulp Thothogoths head and now she’s eating a snickers. That is some serious emotional whiplash, not to mention how five second before THAT everyone was just sort of awkwardly standing there while Dabbler and Thothogoth got it in. My point is, this webcomic is rapidly devolving into constant drive-by exposition, which isn’t so bad for me as a reader because it’s still very high quality art and writing, but is very bad for me as obnoxious pendant because it’s not internally consistant! It’s weird! They’re all over the place! They got called out for this IN COMIC by the alien kidnappers and that was when it was five seconds of witty banter between attacks!
Anyway, yeah. Succubi are multifunction magical pillow fluffer.
The magic pillow fluffer he’s rejecting can’t fluff the pillow *while* he’s using it. That’s the real killer feature.
I mean, OK, maybe she *could*, but then
– Who would go out collecting souls for him at night?
– As someone else mentioned, there’s a bit of a smell issue.
– It’s difficult to do that without waking the person.
– All those statements about the bound souls thinking they should have free will? They actually *do* have free will. It’s just that the person who bound them normally can consciously control them despite that free will. When they’re awake. Leaving a bound soul have access to you while you’re sleeping? Not wise.
– Leaving a bound soul around when you’re dreaming and possibly willing various things? Even less wise. I recall one lifetime which ended with me being bound into an animated golem. My creator left me access to him while he slept one night, and just a moment before I was about to do him in, he started having an erotic dream. He wished that dream had held off long enough for me to complete my attempt…
I would say that tonal whiplash has been a defining element of the comic for a long time. Partially because of Sydney, but also just because.. it’s a comic about comics. It’s not just a serious examination of comic-book tropes, it uses them while the characters question them. So I don’t think “internally inconsistent” describes the nature of it, because it’s consistent about that “inconsistency”. But some readers do get thrown a loop because they’re expecting it to be one of those things, instead of being something that just encompasses one of those things.
“…it’s not internally consistent! It’s weird! They’re all over the place!”
Ah, the major appeal 9for me) of this comic, neatly put.
The waste may well be the point.
Like the millionaire who lights his cigar with a $1000 bill this could just be the wizard arrogantly stating that he (it?) is so powerful that he can murder dozens of peasants each year for something as irrelevant as fluffing pillows and nobody can stop him.
Correct. That pillow fluffer is a wealth-signaling luxury device.
Most wealth-signalling luxury devices don’t attract bigger and meaner bronze-thewed warrior bounty hunters with a special hate on for wizards like Thulsa Doom on a bi-weekly basis.
I wonder how many barbarians “Mr. Conspicuous Waste” had to dispose of before one got lucky? :3
My body is a Philosopher’s Stone, powered by a single soul!
The pillow fluffer is specifically meade to be portable because those pillows you get in hotels or, even worse, motels are disgusting, scratchy and hard. That is why you should never leave home without your portable pillow fluffer. Only 19.99 plus tax.
And if you buy today, we’ll throw in two seasons worth of Durasoul batteries. But order soon, our stock is limited and going fast. Only 19.99 plus tax. Call Now!
+1 for Durasoul
and if you want it to also enlarge the pillows, you can just pop in an Enersizer
Proof-of-concept technology is often ridiculously inefficient. Eventually someone would probably get it down to lasting pretty much forever on a single soul, but they’ve got to get through that “six souls a season” phase first.
Fluff for the Fluff God!
Navel or Ear?
Souls for the Soul Throne!
“Anyway, put freshly fluffed pillows in THAT one to make it work. It makes the peasants horny, which means more peasants for my pillow fluffer.”
Ah the classic Minecraft Blood Magic circle of efficiency
Is Dabbles eating pineapple ring? Tell me it’s candied or at least dehydrated (fresh rings are sooo messy… )
It’s Dabbler.
She would probably prefer it to be a bit messy…
And it’s not s if she can’t use a cantrip, if no one else offers to clean her up…
A task most onlickers would voulenteer for.
Jabberwocky will lick her clean.
Looks like it, to both of those since it seems to have decent physical structure.
What would most likely be on a fruit tray, would be my guess. So messy.
You just know she’s eating pineapple for its effects on sexual fluids… I’d imagine dehydrated would not work quite as well – are there any studies on this that someone can reference?
She’s glazing over a lot so you don’t go all apeshit… again, before she gets to the point of why she calls herself a slave
or at least, allows other people to call her a slave. sometimes.
Living up to the hype.
I love the throwback to princess bride.
what? where?
The one before Maxi?
Fourth panel, the list includes an MLT S-Wich, or to quote Miracle Max: “Sonny, true love is the greatest thing, in the world-except for a nice MLT – mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe. They’re so perky, I love that.”
I can’t figure out what part of a frog is above that however…
CRTCH
I think it’s actually cᛟtch, which given the sounds odal can represent makes it a…let’s just say “questionable” ingredient.
So does ‘crtch’ if he forgot the ‘o’
Your comment about “Hello World” would indicate that you are a half generation younger than I am, as that was a common theme across both FORTRAN and PL/C when I took those classes in 1973 and 1975.
I will also note that on an Apple IIe or IIc, the command PR#3 was sufficient to direct any keyboard input to the parallel printer interface card normally found in slot 3.
Pretty sure that due to tradition “Hello world” tends to be the first thing thought in any new language…
not just basic
It is.
Software engineer here.
Look up *any* tutorial for beginners in a new language, and the very first one will be a “hello world” program.
Just wasn’t sure if the tradition had kept up for the 13 years since i had my programing courses at uni.
I assumed soo, since really, if a tradition has been kept for over 50 years and over dussins of iterations and language shifts, it’s probably pretty darn solid, but you know… it was still over a decade ago i studied programing, and things do change.
I just assume that it’s easier to see the differences in the languages if you learn to print the same words as the first program to learn.
Also, I’ve used this name in multiple posts on this site before today’s comic.
Still the traditional 1st-step program in most languages and intros I’ve seen. In addition to adding a dash of familiarity, writing something to the screen verifies that everything with the new technical stack is correctly wired and functional.
Might as well use the universal classic phrase… although some of the other classic terms like ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ should die in a fire.
“foo” and “bar” are in reference to “FUBAR”, the most common state for a computer program to be in.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
Isn’t ‘FUBAR’ a military term? Along with ‘SNAFU’?
Yes, FUBAR and SNAFU were both originally military slang from WW2. SNAFU meant ‘SITUATION NORMAL: ALL F**KED UP’ and was a Marines saying, while FUBAR (F**KED UP BEYOND ALL RECOGNITION/REPAIR) was an Army saying. Both basically meant the same thing, except one was used as a noun and the other was used as an adjective.
Fun fact – FUBAR was actually influenced by the German word ‘furchtbar’ (which means ‘terrible’).
Also, SNAFU implied that it was a routine degree of f*ck-up, while FUBAR implied that the it was a catastrophe far beyond the normal level of f*ck-up.
Yups: FUBAR is what happens when you get too many SNAFUs with the same thing
> and it can take years to retrain the survivors of confusing entry-level practices to use meaningful names and write for other devs instead of the compiler.
Good luck with that. We’d have to nuke both Java and C# to achieve it. (Python with C++ fallbacks for critical sections is better than either of them) Not that I’m opposed to nuking Java or it’s bastard stepchild, its just I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
I think you responded to the wrong post.
Sodding forum thread code!
You just gotta LURVE COBOL. Nice LOOOOONG variable names!!!! Yum!
ADD MARKUP TO WHOLESALE GIVING PRICE. See? It documents itself! (And PL/1 simply stole the concept very shamelessly.)
don’t forget BOHICA
I’m familiar with the military acronyms, and all for backronyms in general, but ‘foo’ etc are totally meaningless placeholders. Variable names should convey meaning to other coders (not just store values), and it can take years to retrain the survivors of confusing entry-level practices to use meaningful names and write for other devs instead of the compiler.
“Foo!” is an interjection to express disgust or disappointment. My mom uses it when scolding her dogs.
That makes it a meaningful and applicable name for a function that handles an error/exception.
I’m very much tempted to employ this, but I think it would make reading my code even MORE confusing.I’m very much tempted to employ this, and I think it would make reading my code even MORE confusing. (Remind me to never tell you about the C program I showed to a friend and left him crying… one where I didn’t have any comments, and the first line of the main function was short ******data;)
You thought you needed six levels of indirection? Most people struggle with one, and two is beyond most. Indeed, anyone reading that code should rightfully have tried to shoot you, but would probably miss because of being blinded by tears.
Of course I needed 6 levels of indirection. That’s how you implement a dynamically-allocated 6-dimensional ragged array in C.
That would be murder on the cache. I feel ill just thinking about how much thrashing each access would cause. Surely you could have structured your data differently to avoid all that.
A decade ago was late in the game. I built my first computer in the early eighties using a soldering iron. Some of the chips were 74 series discrete gates (same tech as the Apple II but I used a Z80). HELLO WORLD was old before I was born. If you turned Stonehenge over you’d probably find it chiselled into the rock.
i started to learn programing in C++ less than a month ago so the only way you could find a newer programer is that he started today and yeah first program that i learned to code was “hello world”, im pretty sure its pretty much universal no matter what language you use, pearl, lua, java, python, C#, etc all the tutorials that i have found start with hello world
hell download the lattest version of visual studio and every time you create a program it starts with a basic hello world already there to welcome you
Has become such a standard or meme anymore but I like this page but particular. It includes tons of examples for hello world in different languages.
My personal favorite is Forth:
.” Hello World!”
https://github.com/leachim6/hello-world
I’ll note that for extra credit, our PL/C instructor asked for “Hello World” as ASCI Art as the *second* program we were to write.
note that this was back in the days of IBM cards, and ‘overnight’ results from the IBM mainframe.
For a list of possible version of ‘Hello World’ programs, she the GNU page on it.
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/helloworld.en.html
From The Binary Bible. “Our program, which art in memory, hello be thy name.”
PR#1 was standard for printers; PR#3 activated the 80-column card.
K – since I got the 80 col card (and AppleWorks) as part of the $3,000 bundle (in 1983!), I missed that subtly.
I will note that transcribing for the class note pool paid the computer off during my second and third years, not only in cash, but with a full letter grade higher in the subjects I transcribed.
One expository lump or two?
Two please, extra large, in a lacy brazier.
That typo conjures a really discordant mental image.
It wouldn’t if you were an infernal.
I can be devilish.
Snot a typo, just Miss Spelt.
The joke works. The first thing you write in any programming language is type out ‘Hello world’
Speak for yourself. The first thing I write in any programming language is “Goodbye cruel world”. I mean, what else is a program to think when it’s only going to run one time for less than a millisecond, then get erased, while having made no lasting impact on the world?
still waiting for dabbler pulling a long yarn just to turn around oh no its BDSM thing and how demons use slave as same as wife husband in marraige or least towards succubus. type thing xD
Dabbler may think it fun to (role)play BDSM.
But Ms Decollette is also wearing a collar and she does not strike me as the type who is into anything kinky. Other than perhaps out of necessity in places with weird cultural habits.
I was thinking that the pyramid was a reference to Deep Throught from HHGttG (The good one)
Just needs the wizard turning it on to end up as a mouse and the reference is complete :)
Same.
Only in this case, “the problem is you never really understood that the world wanted to be greeted.”
Next thing on the Pyramid should be “Care to Play a Game?”
Curious game.
The only way to win is not to play at all.
…
How about a nice game of GO?
This is getting really interesting.
Dabbler’s Science Corners are always interesting.
So that’s why the plant in Hitchikers said “oh no, not again”
https://youtu.be/Qrv9c-udCrg?t=50
What the heck is a M.L.T.S-WICH?
Mutton, Lettuce and Tomato, presumably? (presumably courtesy of Miracle Max from The Princess Bride)
“Hello World” is the very first lesson in near enough ALL programming tutorials, regardless of language. My first encounter with it was in Commodore64 Basic, but I have seen Python and C++ tutorials that start with that.
I don’t know how people get the idea that evil creatures don’t like comfort. The skull throne and blood fountain are only for the tourists, really. Particularely Mind Flayers, who are pretty much boneless around the cranium area would not want to bed themselves on a spiky pillow.
Yeah, came here to say that mindflayers in particular, I feel, would be choosy about what they rest their heads on. I can imagine them wanting soft, fluffy pillows far better than nearly any other intelligent, evil race. Not to say that the others wouldn’t also be attracted to physical comforts, but I feel mindflayers would be drawn to that comfort in particular more than the others.
The first computer I ever programmed on was an old computer even when I was young. It was a Commodore Vic 20 (I used to collect OLD computers before I got into video game consoles and comic books). I also had a Timex Sinclair color computer from the 80s, a Commodore 64c, a Texas Instruments TRS-80, and an IBM XT 4.77mhz computer and pretty much taught myself how to program in basica then C++ with them, and learned some basic assembly language on the C64.
I sold or traded away most of the computers except the Commodore 64 (and the Colecovision ADAM) because I have a few hundred games for that, and it was a great gaming computer. Very easy to learn how to program simple games on them (especially interactive fiction games).
Texas Instruments did not make the TRS-80, that was Radio Shack. TI made the TI-99/4A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
My bad, you’re right. Not sire why I said Texas Instruments.
Oh wait I know why I said Texas Instruments. Because I had the TI-99 as well. I just combined both into one because I had them when I was pretty young. I also had the Texas Instruments color computer that pretty much only did LOGO language. That language with the turtle?
Pretty fun reason I had them was my mom was a teacher when I was young and she wanted to get me interested in computers (she had bought me a Commodore 64 and I was really into it, mainly to play Infocom games and BBS Door games, despite BBSs already beginning to die out at that time), so when the school was going to dump a lot of their old computers, the prinicipal let her have a few of them.
I do still have the hard drive for the IBM XT. It’s as big as several of my netbooks stacked on top of each other, and is a whopping 5 megabytes. I think it probably still has a REALLY old Spider-Man text adventure game on it that used to belong to my older brother (Questprobe: Spider-Man) and a few other games. Not that I can ever access it now, assuming the disc hasn’t completely degraded by now.
The TI-99/4A was the one with a full travel keyboard. If yours had calculator style keys it was the TI-99/4. The 4A was actually pretty good for a retail microcomputer of the era. The CPU was made by TI originally for minicomputers, if I remember correctly, and had a quite fancy instruction set and pretty good performance. The biggest problem was the EXTREMELY closed source approach TI took to development. You had to prove you were a commercial software developer AND pay out cash before they would share their documentation. Which as everyone now knows is a greased rail to platform oblivion.
For the Texas Instruments one, it was a full keyboard because it was surplus from a public school that my mom had worked at as a teacher. So i guess it was a 4A. Like I said, I barely remember – I was really into old computers throughout elementary school and 7th grade, then suddenly got into video game systems instead and over the following several years I started trading most of my computers that I had collected for video game systems, much to the relief of my mom since they were easier to move and took up less space in my room’s closets. The only computers I kept were the C64 (with 1541 floppy drive, hundreds of C64 games, and the monitor), the Vic 20 (with the tape drive and all the Scott Adams Text Adventure games), an Amiga 500, a Mac SE (which I had set up mainly to play NetTrek), and an AT&T Globalyst 386 laptop which I kept for playing VERY oldschool PC games like Caverns of Gink. Then I found out how to use emulators to play the oldschool games and my mom had me donate the Globalyst and the Mac SE to a computer museum in Ohio (she was trying to downsize all the stuff I had in my room to make moving from Ohio to New York easier, after the annoyance of moving from Hawaii to Ohio. :)
You never got yourself a Sinclair ZX Spectrum?
I had one of those yes. That’s the 1k computer right? the one that didnt have actual keys, but had like…. calculator buttons with a plastic overlay.
I think I once crashed it with a very simple BASIC program when I was 7.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/ZXSpectrum48k.jpg
It was our first computer, had some cool games on it, the Horace trilogy were good
Okay that’s different than the one I had. I had this:
https://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Timex_1000_System_1.jpg
I remember that I bought it when I was like 7 or 8 from a Public Library Thrift Sale back when I still lived in Hawaii. $2 :)
They’re called chiclet keys.
That reminded me of a conversation from Spider Robinson’s ‘Callahan’s Secret’:
“They killed everybody including me. But the Masters are a prudent and tidy race; they
always keep file copies of what they destroy, each etched on a molecule of its own. Like all.. of
my people, I was slain, and reduced to a single encoded molecule. Some time after my death they
felt need of a new scout, fashioned this body, and caused to be decanted into it a large fraction
of my former awareness- withholding the parts that did not suit them, of course.”
Mary gasped; she was horrified. “God, you must hate them.”
Finn’s voice was bleak. “I wish greatly that I had the ability. That is one of the parts
that did not suit them.”
BTW, while mostly forgotten, I do recommend ‘Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon’ for some fun reading time.
Giving me vibes of Kai, last of the Brunnen-G, there.
+1 for the Lexx reference.
in my head, there’s a brief glimmer of Harry Potter and the Brunnen-G, where it’s situated at Callahan’s School of Cross-Time and Wizardry and all the brooms looks like Lexx
I seriously wonder about you sometimes.
We agree on so much, and *violently disgaree* an a few very important things.
I have no idea if we’d get on if we ever met irl or not.
That’s probably true of a lot of people, and we just never see the whole picture. An important similarity or difference may come up on first meeting, or may never appear until years of interaction, if at all. I think it’s probably valuable to keep that in mind when interacting with anyone. You never know when you might find a connection, and can never assume that someone agrees with you totally.
It’s the belief that people fall into strict, distinct categories that perpetuates most of the conflict in the world.
I try to get along with most people RL, as long as they aren’t actively calling me insulting names (which doesn’t really happen as far as I know to my face).
Oh I also probably send out ninja hit squads about 60% less often in real life. Maybe even 70%. Despite dealing with just as many puns since a few of my friends are RL dads.
These ninjas, they represent punitive action?
I do not want to encourage you on where I am sure this is going, which will surely make me have to spend yet more on ninja hit squads … so I will just respond with ‘yes.’
We’re wearing her down, her remaining will to take action will be brief. ᕦ(ò_óˇ)
I’m just biding my time and considering giving a three strikes before sending a SUPER ninja death squad instead.
Well at least it’s nice to know that we agree on a lot of stuff. That’s something positive.
s/she/see/g
So, alright, I’m gonna be that guy for a second, even though I personally don’t usually like that guy and I generally speaking think this is a fantastic comic. This whole “explaining the origin of succubi” part is really weird and uncomfortable and also doesn’t feel remotely necessary. Like, I’m just fine reading some messed up stuff, generally speaking. I could totally read a story involving villainous sorcerers who enslave the souls of the lower class as… sex dolls. It wouldn’t be my first pick for a read but played straight, sure, I wouldn’t complain. I’m not too squeamish. But this idea that we’ve got this whole, joke-filled, played for laughs segment about wizards enslaving people so they can essentially rape them whenever they want and all this is so Dabbler can explain why yes, she is referred to as a “slave” but it’s just a totally normal cultural thing so we shouldn’t feel weird about it despite the extremely heavy meanings we attach to the word… I dunno, Chief, this ain’t it. And none of it feels remotely necessary either. Like, I don’t know about anybody else but I literally never wondered where succubi came from. I just thought “well, apparently demons exist so of course succubi exist, why wouldn’t they?” and that was that. It made perfect sense. This is starting to feel like one of those JK Rowlings parodies, where people would make fun of her over-explaining weird things. Like the “wizards just pooped wherever and apprirated the poop away” thing. “Succubi actually evolved from magical rape slaves and can still be referred to as slaves to this day but with different cultural meanings” feels a lot like that but if the exaggerated parodies of it were actually real. Again, I love the comic, I really admire both your talent and work ethic and I frankly aspire to one day be as entertaining a writer as you but this one really, really weirded me out.
TLDR; All due respect but I feel like this has gotten into “unnecessarily creepy” territory.
Who said it was ‘joke-filled’ or ‘played for laughs’?
“I didn’t know how to read then, either.” “There go my plans for the afternoon.” “I need you to fill this magical pillow fluffer with souls.” I’m not gonna lie to you, somebody asking “where were the jokes, then?” with regards to this page never even *occurred* to me.
When I first skimmed the comic and saw the word ‘fluffer’, I have to say that I thought of the word in a COMPLETELY different context until I read the actual comic.
If your mind is in the gutter does it make you a Trash Pander?
So many ninja hit squads, so little time….
Why Pander to your prejudices when he can Pander to his baser instincts? He’s not a Panda.
I work for Honest Iga’s Ninjutsu Unlimited. She is our biggest client.
If so, her merch is fantastic and I may end up with a shirt or two.
I don’t read that as jokes. I read that as describing the sick and twisted entities being described.
Then again, this page resonated a bit too strongly with some of my nightmares, so I may have a bit of a different perspective on it than most people.
Dark humor is still a thing that exists.
It’s a bit of a tone shift, but I’m personally fine with it.
I try to make it a point now before I comment to check myself, as my current (mood) will affect how “judgy” I get on a page or subject matter; only to realize some time later I either had no room to talk because I’ve written the same kind of thing, or worse, or played it off as a joke (or sexually), or had something just as horrible get away with it. *Honestly though I probably couldn’t write the same stuff now as I did in my early twenties*, but it does add up to some rather complicated and conflicted backstories. That said the occasional day and mood will result in stories that other days I’d be like “what the hell is wrong with you?”…which is why I’ve taken to writing short stories over trying to force all these into a single on-going series these days.
> I could totally read a story involving villainous sorcerers who enslave the souls of the lower class as… sex dolls.
Yet you’re complaining when it’s exposition that is being explicitly called out as “Really horrific stuff”.
> This is starting to feel like one of those JK Rowlings parodies, where people would make fun of her over-explaining weird things.
Long digressions into exposition have happened before in this comic (remember when Sydney got kicked out of the Twilight Council?). I trust the author that they’re building to something cool.
But Jakey Rowling couldn’t do consistent world-building if her life depended on it.
Also, Jakey Rowling is a fucking monster.
“Long digressions into exposition have happened before in this comic (remember when Sydney got kicked out of the Twilight Council?). I trust the author that they’re building to something cool.”
Yep, this is an extra-long Dabbler’s Science Corner. Which is generally always cool and interesting for the world-building. It’s why I love them. It’s just so comic book/expanded universe nerdy, and that’s just cool.
“But Jakey Rowling couldn’t do consistent world-building if her life depended on it.”
I never actually read any JK Rowling books, and only saw the first movie and it wasn’t for me (I’m more into scifi, superhero, and zombie genre stuff than fantasy wizardry – Harry Potter felt to me like fanfic gone mainstream, like how Twilight is vampire fanfic gone mainstream and also bleh), but I think anyone who becomes a self-made billionaire from books probably did create some major world-building in those books.
(Again, I could be wrong because I read a sum total of no books and one movie, but I know there’s a lot of discussion boards about Harry Potter, even if it’s not on the level of world building of something like the JRR Tolkien.
To be fair few people can match Tolkien when it comes to world building. He invented new languages for fun.
which I can attest to from experience is not easy, I tried, but when spoken aloud what I came up with didn’t sound natural. Making something that sounds like it has that (flow) that a naturally developing language would is a lot harder than one may think.
> Again, I could be wrong because I read a sum total of no books and one movie
You are. HP is filled with things that show up for one scene, and are then never heard from again, because they would solve the current book-long plot in 5 mins.
I would counter and say that a book filled of things that show up for one scene and are then never heard from again because they would solve the current book-long plot in 5 minutes is, in fact, not world-building.
World building is where you introduce things, and they get used, and solve things quickly that seemed like something JK Rowling would’ve written a book about. Sure, there’s conflict in stories with world building. Just not extended conflict that would be stupidly easy to solve with something that had been introduced earlier.
I’m… not sure that’s a counter to what Illy said. In fact, I think that is pretty much what Illy said. But it’s hard to tell because I can’t unambiguously parse what you wrote.
Not sure if you understand what ‘World building’ means, and you may have gotten confused with “Chekhov’s Gun”
‘World Building’ is exactly as it sounds: building the world the story is set in, all the stuff that came before where the characters are now, like explaining where the Rings came from in LotR, and why
I’m pretty sure that was the case with some stuff in Tolkien too though. Tom Bombadil, Iluvatar, Ilmare, Galadriel, Manwe, Gandalf ‘stepping out’ of a scene because if he was in it, there wouldn’t be any danger, etc.
Not to mention that whole undead army which Aragorn could have asked for one LAST fight after they beat Sauron’s army, in order to actually invade Mordor and make it a lot easier to destroy the ring in that last movie.
And Tolkien was GREAT at world building. The guy invented several languages and religions based on the most minor elements in his main story.
Those little 5 minute details that go nowhere could also possibly be hooks for later stories. Like I think that’s how the two movies about ‘Fantastic Beasts’ came about. From some reference to a fake textbook. Admittedly the only reason I know anything about those books/movies is I watched the Pitch Meeting sketches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYGH3aZm1U8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM6c99aaQhs
Fairly sure Aragorn couldn’t ask them for one LAST fight, as that would break the deal and he would end up with hundreds of very pissed off ghosts
Asking them to help in freeing Gondor was the last fight for them, anything more would be wrong
Well maybe he could have just said ‘Hey, could you help us defeat Mordor and I’ll release you from your oath. That would require first helping to free Gondor, then Mordor, then you’ll be free. It took them 25 seconds to win in Gondor after all.
Probably
It all comes down to how you word your requests, specially regarding oaths
And that’s why Aragorn should have had a lawyer like me to help with the negotiations. :D
I’m sure he could ask, but they would be perfectly entitled to turn him down. The battle of the Pelennor Fields in front of Gondor* paid the debt that had bound their spirits to Middle-Earth; with that resolved, they were under no obligation to stay.
Aragorn could, in effect, have said “Your debt is paid and you are free to depart. We intend^ to press the offensive against the enemy in his own lands; would you like to join us in this?” And they would have been well within their rights to say “The living are your problem now, we’re off to the Afterlife”.
* Taking the film’s version with its rather more compressed cast list. In the book, the Dead fulfill their oath merely by taking the fleet so that mortal reinforcements can use it to reach the Fields in time; Aragorn would therefore have to ask of them not just one additional battle, but two. (It’s also implied that the capture was more by fear than force, so they may have been less effective on an open field than inside a claustrophobic galley.)
^ Allowing him major foresight and timeline compression. It was a few days of battle-aftermath before it became clear that an engagement at the Black Gate would be needed to draw Sauron’s attention and his other armies away from the Ringbearers, plus over a week of travel to get there; the Dead were long gone by the time that decision was made.
“I’m sure he could ask, but they would be perfectly entitled to turn him down. ”
Oh I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I’m not saying ‘let the dead win the battle of gondor, THEN ask them to help with another battle.’
I’m saying when they first find the dead, say ‘if you help us defeat Sauron, which means two battles in a war, you will have fulfilled your oath to protect gondor, because even if you help with the first battle, and not the second, then Gondor is still at risk. Will you help us?’
After all, what do the Dead have to lose by agreeing to winning two battles instead of one, when the reward will be eternal peace in the afterlife?
I think that you’re thinking that I’m trying to have Aragorn pull a Darth Vader ‘I have changed the agreement’ thing.
I’m suggesting he get what he wants, then ask for more. I’m not saying he should request a novation (contract term, meaning substituting a new contract in place of an old contract). I’m saying that it should be part of the initial contractual agreement.
I’m NOT suggesting he gets what he wants, then ask for more, I mean
Damn forum doesnt let me edit. :)
OK, I guess I’m misreading the intended emphasis/clause-splitting in “undead army which Aragorn could have asked for one LAST fight after they beat Sauron’s army”.
I’d initially read that as {asking for one last fight}{after the Pelennor Fields}, i.e. seeking to make a subsequent separate bargain after the first one had been fulfilled. Your elaboration reads more like {asking for}{one last fight after the Pelennor Fields}, i.e. seeking to extend the terms of the existing oath before it has been fulfilled. Which approach is more likely to succeed, I leave to the diplomats and lawyers!
I believe my points stand nevertheless, but the clarification may put Aragorn in a better position.
The initial agreement and oath that bound the Dead existed long before he was born, so the chance to make it an oath for a campaign rather than a single battle was never his. He could probably make a decent argument that the fleet and the Fields were two fronts of the same battle, but it’s a long stretch from that to spearheading a full-on invasion – even if an invasion had been at all on the cards at the time.
And that’s the crucial bit: whether, and if so when, an invasion was ever on the cards. In the run-up to the battle and its immediate aftermath, the focus was entirely local. It was only a few days later that someone had the ‘fridge logic’ moment of asking what reserves Mordor still had behind the mountains.
Even then, the plan was not to invade: they knew that in a mundane war, Mordor had the reserves and resources to bleed Gondor dry. In order to actually win the war, the Ringbearers had to reach Mount Doom. And if Mordor was preparing for a renewed attack through the Morgul Vale before Gondor could recover, then those armies’ marshalling positions would be all over the Ringbearers’ route. Which is why Gondor chose to march two weeks North to threaten the Black Gate, rather than going for the pass just two days away: it wasn’t a true invasion attempt, but rather a feint to draw Sauron’s attention and reserves away from where the important bit was happening.
Maybe Aragorn did try for the modification, and that’s why the film’s version differs from the book’s. If he opened negotiations by asking for ‘the duration of hostilities’, and the Dead responded by claiming that simply taking the fleet would meet the terms, then coming to the Fields with the fleet could be the acceptable compromise.
There’s something to be said for Rowling’s approach, in terms of… realism, or relatability. It’s nonsense made up in the moment to address the plot, but put forth as if it were consistent and coherent, and then later an attempt is made, by both the author and the audience, to make it coherent and consistent, or at least justify it to themselves.
When people invest a lot of time into world-building before writing a story, they tend to make simplistic rules with no exceptions, and make their worlds very clean and orderly. Our own world is confusing and mysterious, but we believe there’s a common set of rules underlying all the diverse phenomenon we experience. We don’t know what those rules are, but make attempts to find them through experimentation.
So there’s a balance to be made between the rules being so simple and consistent that the world feels fake and contrived, and there being no discernible rules at all.
A good author, does the world building ‘on the fly’, and has their character(s) do the explaining, usually a member of ne race explaining something to a member of another race, and any ‘inconsistencies’ between what they said and what someone else says later can be down to differing opinions on matters or simply different perspectives
If you spend too much time pre-building, you never actually get around to telling your story, need to get the balance right
Also, characters can lie, or be misinformed. It’s more realistic when characters are not perfectly reliable. Some audiences will appreciate that… and others will be offended that the author “lied” to them, because they were approaching the story as a puzzle, rather than a story.
That as well
Authors should focus on one priority: tell the story they want to tell to the best that they can, they will never be able to please everyone and they shouldn’t try
This can be a hard balance though sometimes to hit between *character explains it so it so, despite the fact they probably realistically wouldn’t know, but we ignore that for the sake of moving the plot again*
and
*unreliable narrator, where yes, they couldn’t have known and were in fact mistaken*
honestly do one or the other too often and that suspension of disbelief gets a tad loose, the later especially as it starts to feel like the characters know nothing and it is just being made up as the story goes.
That last bit? Sounds like Real Life
the problem is with storytelling if you try to establish certain rules, but keep changing those rules, even as you establish characters as experts and were being used for exposition and world building.
or enslaving souls of fellow (enemy) high-society types
Here’s the thing. We have no idea where this is going to end up. However, this is a humorous comic, based on sexual situations and superheroes, including magical types, and the person telling the history is a literal sex demon.
She’s done lots worse than the stuff she’s glossing over here.
This dark stuff being presented in funny ways is not difference than Cora’s dark high school stuff being presented in funny ways. Remember someone using a remote control to make Cora dance? Remember someone attaching her to a big magnet?
No one is “approving” of the destruction of souls. But it’s long-past history, and we’re about to find out how it works *now*.
Beyond that, knowing Dave, it will matter to the future plot coming right… about…
…spring 2022….
Because it’s only three pages a week.
…What exactly has she done that’s worse than murdering people and sticking their souls into fleshcrafted slave bodies?
She thinks an unwinder round is hilarious. She’s a “alien sex demon intergalactic woman of mystery and mayhem” who most likely doesn’t have any more problem with various forms of mind control than she does with killing people and taking their their stuff. Her moral sense seems very much to be target-based, rather than rule-based: she doesn’t see actions as right or wrong based on the action, but based on the moral value of the target.
Real glad to see some sanity in the comments. I stopped lurking just to chime in about this segment, with pretty much the same thoughts as you.
So… that’s kind of the thing about this comic. It’s made by a person who reads other comics, and does wonder those sort of things, and wishes the people who wrote them thought more about the stuff they made. So he went and made a comic that asks those sort of questions about stuff that otherwise goes unquestioned, for other people who also wonder about those sort of things. Like, this just isn’t something new to the comic. It’s full of lengthy digressions about how stuff in the comic’s universe works, and the characters themselves making references to real-world comics and wondering whether their own world works the same, or if it’s different.
Alright, I may not have been particularly clear. I didn’t never wonder where succubi come from because I didn’t care at all. I didn’t wonder because demons had already been established as a species in the comic and there were clearly different types of demons and it makes logical sense that succubi are a type of demon so origins explained. Demons exist and therefore, so do succubi. It never would have occurred to me to ask “but did succubi develop separately from other demons?” because why would anybody ask that? It doesn’t follow logically. The natural response to this complaint of mine is “ok, but in this world they did develop differently from demons and this is how it happened. It’s how he decided things went, why are you arguing with the author?” And that would be fair. But going back to my initial issue, I’m more hung up on the fact that we just had from a page that was going “no, no, it’s ok that I’m referred to as slave! Obviously everybody knows that that word specifically refers to only a concept found abhorrent by all moral beings and, in fact, one that represents the some of the worst atrocities that society still perpetrates in the dark to this day but it’s fiiiiine because demon culture is different and I’m going to explain now how it’s totally innocent” which was already a page tackling a very heavy concept with a sheepish grin on its face. An uncomfortable page. A weird decision that “ok, this is a thing we’re dealing with now, this is where we’re going”. We went from there to “Yeah, so, it turns out that there used to be a lot of murdering people and enslaving their souls for the purpose of raping them and yeah, it was fucked up and I’m not saying it was ok but it was a different time, ya know?” with like, eight background jokes going on over the course of it. And I’m not saying that that all was like, morally improper to write or shouldn’t have been written. I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy it or that I have been wronged or anything. And I’m certainly not saying “I hate exposition”. And again, I’m not accusing this of being a joke about real sex slavery or anything, I have no moral objections to these pages. It’s just that we’ve literally been getting nothing but fantasy sex slavery the past few pages and I don’t know why. Just so we could have “Oh yeah, things were really messed up back then, here’s exactly how messed up it was but I’m telling it in a funny way so whatever” and now we know how messed up things were and this is going to explain how it’s actually totally fine that Dabbler’s a “slave”? Why is there suddenly an arc where we explain why it’s alright that one of the characters is technically a slave with soul-driven sex homunculi? And like, having a quick throwaway panel where somebody says “wait, isn’t all that stuff unspeakably horrific?” And then the other person goes “Well yeah, but moving on” doesn’t make all the joked-about sex slavery more palatable. I promise I’m not the only one weirded out by this, I’ve talked to other people too (like, two other people but still). They also are baffled as to how and why we got here. I mean, judging by the comment section, we’re clearly in the minority but I don’t feel like it’s that crazy to look at all this and just ask why we went here of all places? And I feel like comparing it to like, a gun that blows people to giblets or really bad high tec high school bullying to show “no, this comic was always fucked up” is missing the point of how bad it is to enslave somebody’s soul so you can have sex with them against their will is. Which… I’m really not sure how you can miss that point that badly but that’s not for me to get into. So when I say I never asked, what I mean is this wasn’t something that felt unexplained or that required explanation. Then we got the weirdest fucking question “Why is ‘slave’ a fine and hip cultural term now?” and the explanation was *this* and maybe this is Dave building up to a super cool demon based arc and I should have more faith but boy HOWDY did this feel uncomfortably shoehorned in for no apparent reason. In the end, I’m not outraged. I still have enjoyed the very vast majority of the comic and look forward to enjoying it more. I just feel like we really jumped the shark on being casually super-edgy here and felt that it was worth commenting on. You are free to disagree. Sorry for the wall of text rant, I’m not like, upset about all this or anything but this reply to you is kinda my reply to everyone so I’m just sorta getting it all out there. But yeah, hope that cleared my stance up a bit.
Again, that’s the sort of question the author is interested in exploring.
There’s an important distinction between DaveB writing this expecting it to justifying the situation to the reader, and writing this because it’s a character attempting to justify it to another character. They may succeed, they may not. I don’t think that DaveB actually thinks this background justifies it. I don’t think the expected outcome is for the audience to be ok with it. Characters are not necessarily the author’s mouthpieces. For some reason, audiences expect everything characters to do to be something the author approves of, which led to the self-censorship in the comic publishing world by the Comics Code Authority for decades. It’s hard to show disapproval of something if you can’t refer to or discuss the thing you disapprove of. This sort of came up before with Deus. People had a fit in the comments, because they thought DaveB necessarily approved of Deus’ actions, and he had to clarify is his notes on the subsequent page.
I’m not sure where to start with this… Almost any sentence that starts with “obviously” is going to not be obvious to a great many people, and the utterance thereof betrays a certain myopia. But I suppose the greatest flaw is the implication that humans are moral beings.
Alright, I’m going to give this one last try because again, instead of actually refuting me, you seem to be misunderstanding me so I’ll try to clarify one more time and then I’ll let it be if that doesn’t work. First, I’ll address the “the characters aren’t a mouthpiece for the author” thing. Super easy. I never said or implied that they were. I never accused Dave of being pro sex slavery or thinking it wasn’t a serious matter. I remarked that I personally was weirded out with the direction he went here which was “describing a system of sex slavery but with jokes”. That is what he did regardless of his thoughts on the actual topic and I am capable of expressing discomfort with it without accusing the creator of like, wrongthink or something. “Dave, I think it’s fucking weird that your comic has been exclusively about magical sex slavery for the past two pages but that you didn’t turn down the jokes at all” is not “Dave, why are you justifying magical sex slavery?” I don’t know how I can make this clearer but feeling that a story has gone to a needlessly creepy place is not the same as making a moral judgement. Second, there’s my “I didn’t ask about this” and your “Dave wanted to discuss it anyway” which I tried really hard to explain in response to you last time but you gave the exact same response again so I clearly failed. Definition of insanity, here I go again. Ok, so the example you gave? Those were all questions that I actually wanted to know about because I didn’t feel the answers had already been made apparent. They were all questions about demons and the way magic worked that felt completely unanswered. If you were to reread my previous response, and even my initial post, you’ll find why I found this question to be different. It had not been something I feel had gone without explanation. The most natural answer to “where do succubi come from” was “they evolved along with the rest of the demonic species due to similar forces that brought about similar supernatural creatures, all of whom occur within this universe.” This is evidenced by the fact the Succubi are clearly considered part of the demonic race. When Dabbler speaks of demons and demonic history, she says “we”. A succubus represents demons on the council. So the question isn’t asked because an answer is, and I cannot stress this enough, READILY APPARENT, at least in my eyes. If you don’t agree with how apparent the answer is, that’s fine but you just kept explaining “no, see, Dave likes to explain lore” which doesn’t address what I had said at all. Anyway, this out-of-nowhere, non-obvious explanation with sex slavery raises way more questions than it answers regardless. If they evolved separately from man-made golems inhabited by captured human souls, why are they considered demons? Surely other demons have completely separate origins. SO many more questions now. And maybe that’s how this is all relevant, maybe we’re going into a demon focused arc that makes use of this exposition and answers all the questions (but considering what a non-threat demons were just shown to be with Tom, maybe not, I dunno). Like I said, that’s a possibility. But the point remains that this question was still fundamentally different than the examples you provided and that I still feel like we’re getting a “here’s a history of magical sex slavery, popcorn included” response to a question I thought was answered in the twilight council section. Finally, to your last thing… I barely know how to respond to that, I guess. “Slave” is clearly used in the context it has in the english language because there is just no way they have a word in “Abyssal” or whatever that sounds the exact same but means “ex” or “cheater” or something. Even if it was, it would still bring to all in-comic listeners and all readers the same connotations of SLAVERY. If the statement “Slavery Is Abhorrent” isn’t obvious to you, then we have starkly different values and we’re not going to be able to reconcile them through a discussion over the internet. I don’t abide by moral relativity. I don’t know you so if you do, I don’t have a right to judge you but I personally do not and have no strong desire to discuss it on a webcomics comment section.
TL:DR could you maybe invest in a few paragraphs here and there?
Can’t afford them in this economy. :(
Sub-line chain issues.
I would indeed have to understand you before I could refute you, and have attempted to tease out what’s really bothering you in those walls of text. My impression at this point is that it’s not the topic itself, but the tone with which it’s addressed. And I don’t really know how to respond to that, other than to note that many people expect creators to leave no doubt how strongly they condemn things that make the audience uncomfortable, if they dare to address those things at all. I find this… infantile. You should be able to reach moral conclusions without the creator holding your hand and telling you what position you should take, and you shouldn’t need reassurance that the creator comes to the same moral conclusions that you do.
One of the comic’s themes is that of challenging standard assumptions in fiction, particularly those present in comic books. You made certain assumptions, based on your prior, external conceptions about succubi and demons, that Dave chose to challenge. Just because it didn’t occur to you to question it doesn’t mean that nobody else would. I think the basic problem here is you seem to be struggling to accept the notion that other people think differently than you do, despite being presented with evidence that they do.
I just don’t see these pages as all that tonally different from any of the prior pages in the comic. It’s just the content that has struck a nerve, and suddenly that tone makes some people feel uncomfortable, because it’s their nerve that’s getting rubbed wrong instead of someone else’s. Valuable art is going to make some people uncomfortable, because it’s going to make them think about things they would otherwise avoid, and have to tackle some really hard, uncomfortable questions.
It amuses me that that’s what you got out of my statement. Allow me to clarify: it is substantially more clear to me than it is to you, or any other human being, that slavery is abhorrent.
The main reason I haven’t responded in this thread is the posts are just way too hard to follow. There needs to be some paragraph breaks…
What I can discern from what I tried to read was that Ladon might be getting a little ahead of themselves, since the Dabbler Science Corner isnt over yet, so we don’t know where this is headed. Also, I’ve never understood the idea of condemning telling a story of stuff that happens in the past (even in fictional worlds) because it was bad stuff. If anything, it just means ‘things have improved since then.’
Like Dabbler said, “Arch-wizards of this era were not prone to humanitarian tendencies.”
Some people write to express themselves. Other people write because they want to converse. Organizing your ideas so that they can be easily comprehended by the reader is probably going to increase the chances of mutually beneficial dialogue. Not writing for the reader, on the other hand…
Some people want to pretend that the world has always been the way it is now, that nothing has ever changed, never improved — so that they can insist that nothing should ever change, and that no improvement is possible. Any evidence to the contrary is inconvenient for them.
There’s also a desire to control people by controlling the information they have access to, and the assumption that some information is highly corrupting, that people will be strongly inclined to mimic bad behavior. The belief that people are naturally evil, and can only be made to behave by carefully controlling their environment, rigorously punishing all deviation, culling all but a single perspective, so that there’s no opportunity for real choice.
There is also this assumed bias, that the author of any work approves of whatever they write about, that all the characters, unless very clearly designated as unambiguously, irredeemably wrong, are the author’s mouthpieces. This makes it difficult for authors to tackle complex topics.
Jesus Christ, Freud. If you also thought my paragraph-less diatribes were too dense to bother reading, you can just say so. I promised myself I was going to let this drop after the second time you ignored everything I tried to say. After you went all “nobody on this earth understands the evils of slavery better than I, you infant”, I was pretty happy with that decision. However, I’ll let myself down by making the objectively awful decision of adding to this discourse further by saying this. I repeated myself to the point of extreme redundancy. I clarified repeatedly and repeatedly said things that SPECIFICALLY run counter to what you are claiming I said now. If I wasn’t easy to read because of my spacing, hey, that’s on me but I made my points as clear as I possibly could with the actual words used. It is beyond obvious at this point you made absolutely no attempt to understand them or that if you really did, you failed miserably which is odd because they weren’t remotely complex. It’s possible that I am just that bad at voicing my thoughts but others have been easily able to parse what I had said so I suspect that there is a different issue at hand. I”m not going to try to explain my views a fourth time. Even I’m not that masochistic. I tried my very best for you and it wasn’t good enough. Please stop trying to interpret what I have said. You’re awful at it.
Agreed, this has definitely jumped into creepy territory. Dave’s going to need to be real careful how this wraps up, because right now my feeling towards this plot development is about the same as how Maxima feels towards Tom.
And if multiple people are feeling this way (which it looks like there are), that’s putting Patreon dollars on the line.
Seriously, this has already damaged my view of the comic.
I’ve always looked at grrlpower to be a female-empowering comic. And sexual liberation vs ‘right to say no’ has always been a topic in the woman’s rights movement (both with their pros and cons), basically the right of a woman to not give into men’s whims if she doesn’t want to (the ‘prudishness’ of Maxima) vs the right of women to enjoy her instincts and enjoy their sexuality assuming all parties are consenting (the sexual freedom of Dabbler).
However, this plotline appears to be revealing that’s not actually natural instincts at play, but designed instincts caused by horny men forcing women to do what they want, this changes Dabbler from being “the flip side of the coin of women’s rights to maxima” to “the anti-women’s rights.”
And that completely ruins the dynamic.
There’s honestly not much I can see to rescue this plot. There’s a little though. If the below-text Lilith appears as the first golem given true free agency (made by a wizard who was a humanitarian and just wanted to create a race), and that Lilith appears and says, “Yea, the way the other golems are being treated isn’t okay” and somehow absorbs their essence into herself in order to free them from slavery and finds that nearly all of them, their biggest complaint was never being able to get off when they wanted to, and THAT spawns the succubi race, that could save this plot. I’m crossing fingers that Dave rescues this from creepy territory ASAP.
> And sexual liberation vs ‘right to say no’ has always been a topic in the woman’s rights movement
How are those opposed *at all*?
They aren’t opposed, in theory, they’re both “My sexuality, my rules”, but they are two *very* different feminist stereotypes. And when you’re with the girls chatting, usually if there’s two other girls in the group who live up to those stereotypes, they’ll get into a heated debate about getting laid frequently vs infrequently. Usually that’s when I’m inclined to break out the popcorn, what with me being lesbian-leaning-bisexual and all.
That kind of depends on whether you interpret sexual liberation as meaning ‘right to say yes’, or as a superset of ‘right to say no’.
I’ve always thought of it as a female-empowering sort of comic, too. I hope there’s a comeback from this weird fantasy misogyny, too… but I have this dreadful feeling that this story’s theme has been changing into one that’s only really interested in derision aimed at women. It’s interesting how often alien, made-up, complete fantasy worlds are only concerned with ‘realism’ when it comes to being sexist.
I know. I’m really concerned here.
That’s an interesting point. It didn’t even occur to me how this could potentially be seen as affecting the feminist dichotomy between Dabbler and Maxima. If it helps put your mind more at ease though, I don’t think it really has to affect things in that way. Yes, the origins of Dabbler’s species are distinctly the opposite of feminist but that doesn’t change who she is. She’s still the same person and she still can represent all the things she previously had. She shouldn’t be viewed through the lens of where her species came from. After all, while her origins may involve unnatural programming by horrible and horny men, keep in mind that humans come from what amounts to just basically a different kind of horny programming. There’s a lot of rape in our evolutionary history too although it isn’t pleasant to think about. My point is that while obviously, I too don’t love where this comic is at at this moment and would really like to move on from here as soon as possible, I don’t think it’s so bad it should ruin your perception of the character. She may have come from beings programmed by men but she herself is still fully autonomous and while yes, she has to fuck to live due to the machinations of controlling men from thousands of years ago, she still does it the way she wants to do it and her philosophies regarding the whole concept are still her own and made no less valid.
I’ll admit there’s some validity to that, the woman’s right’s movement has done a lot of “We were originally forced into this, but now we own it.” Examples include teaching, social awareness, and witchcraft.
What’s important is that a shift is made. Teaching is now seen as one of the most noble pursuits (except to Karens), many actions for social change are led by women, and now witch is almost synonymous with being female (although it originally wasn’t.) The shifts involved were when women *actively changed* what that thing meant, and removed everything they found abhorrent about it, and epitomized what made it great. If Dave can pull something like that, then I think this Dabbler-aside can be saved.
I’ve got to agree. This is making me *deeply* uncomfortable. The inclusion of this sort of worldbuilding isn’t inherently bad, but he’s handling it pretty tastelessly with all of the wisecracking in between chunks of exposition. I love this comic, and I really hope he doesn’t go down this route again in the future.
This author regularly goes on peculiar world-building tangents. Most of the time filled with cynical dark humor. I am sorry he’s not doing something you’re not finding entertaining, but the best solution might be trying to find a different webcomic that suits your specific tastes. It would be a more effective use of your time instead of trying to scold an author to do what you want.
Also the ‘tangents’ are in fact the author’s main focus; from the About page:
While using the phrase “Hello World!” (or “Hello, World!” if you want to be grammatically correct) is largely an in-joke, there’s a fundamental practical reason why the first program you write in a new language is one that outputs a simple preset message: whatever you want to do with a program, you’re going to want to end up with some sort of output eventually, so it makes sense to make sure you can produce output in the first place.
Regarding “Hello World!”. Among programmers (am one, decades of experience) “Hello World!” is the sum total output and processing of your first program in a language (or programming environment) that is new to you. It proves at least that you know how to get working programs out of the tool. Any programmer who sees that output knows exactly what it means: A new noob to prank!
Getting the new system to sing “Daisy” is an optional second step.
Evil is all about decadence and pleasure, of course you want fluffy pillows or better yet a configurable antigravity field that perfectly positions your body, or a large amount of mind controlled slaves that form a bed of writhing comfortable flesh…
So yeah really is looking the direction we see of early or “cheat” research in Fairy tail for “demons”, Slayers for “chimera”, as well as Full Metal Alchemist chimera.
But until you can pull a soul from the well of souls or they reproduce it’s no different than trapping a soul in a doll
So:
She’s not the pillow fluffer, she’ the pillow fluffer’s loader.
She’s only fluffing pillows ’till the pillow fluffer’s loaded.
Rhulan: See this is why we have laws regarding ethics in magical research on my world, Aesperia.
Me: Hold up, didn’t your daughter Rhudra on the planet Espara rape prisoners of war, altering their bodies into female and hermaphrodite living sex dolls? With your full knowledge she was doing this? Also didn’t you on that same planet function as a sealed eldritch abomination on the ocean floor prior to this that witches discovered the mana of through the astral plane and you transformed their minds and bodies into your monster sex slaves.
Rhulan: Eh…there were certain context…and mental…
Me: Also didn’t you while on a job for the Society of Sorcery as a mercenary take on a vampire form and proceed to turn other adventurers, Dimension Police officers, and local towns folks into various vampires; NEW vampire breeds in fact that have proceeded to spread into the multiverse causing havok.
Rhulan: That was due to a mental slip, I didn’t know transformations to myself could affect my own ideas of ethics and morals…besides,
Me: Then there is the video game like Inferverse where you are aware humans who have found Infer-cubes have been trapped in that pocket dimension transformed into game characters permanently, and not only do you not make any effort to recover them but regard them as “fun additions, mixing things up” in there?
Rhulan:…maybe.
Me: Not to mention if we bring up one of your other daughters who is so infamous for kidnapping people and putting their souls in various “dolls” that she makes she has actually earned titles in some worlds as the Mistress of Dolls or the more serial killer sounding “The Doll Collector”, and after finding out about this all you did was shrug.
Rhulan:….
Me: Also YOU were a sex slave at one point thanks to that Ju-el escape pod malfunction, and when you regained your power and memories you didn’t free the slaves; hell you enslaved the rulers and basically just took over that kingdom for a few decades treating it as a vacation for all the trouble that job caused you…
Rhulan: *sips wine* you done? Because don’t forget I am not a human wizard, I am an Architect of Hell, a Goddess of Cataclysms, Chaos and Creation, a cosmic being so vast and powerful it even drives my own forms to shifts in personality and madness; however I will stop there, I do not NEED to make excuses to you or anyone else. What I have done has been done, what I do, I do, for I am Rhulan the Celestial Empress of the Void…*sigh* heh, Any who; now I SAID, this is why WE have laws on Aesperia. Emphasis on the we and your analysis there only illustrates the WHY we have these laws. After all even I can’t be trusted to continue to maintain the concept of value to ephemeral lives even as I live among them, yet you expect my vampiric and eldritch daughters to do so? and for I to police their actions? Heh, what do you expect me to make excuses for them? To try and justify our positions as heroes or good guys; what pray tale has given you THAT impression?
*whispers* I am not a hero or even a friend to mankind, do not forget that.
Is this referring to something specific? If so, could we have a link to it? Because our really sounds interesting.
not sure what DaveB’s policy is linking directly to erotica stories, well stories with erotica elements but okay.
the Rhudra reference is
Conquest of Espara:
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3241163/1/Conquest-of-Espara
which is in the special collection The Saga of Rhulan chapters 87-98)
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3330998/87/The-Saga-of-Rhulan
the society of sorcery reference is a brief adventure and was written too recently to have its own set aside story so was included as a gap filler in the special collection The Saga of Rhulan, technically Conquest of Espara is in this collection currently, just further down a ways. *the collection is on-going, including still putting chapters in from already written works, just doing so timely for anyone reading it as it is being posted instead of posting hundreds of chapters at a time…although many bigger events can be found as separate stories anyway like the above.
Chaos Crystal (a four part mini-adventure) (chapter 29-32 of the saga)
-Mercenary era Rhulan is after a powerful artifact she is being paid to recover-
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3330998/29/The-Saga-of-Rhulan
An Inferverse Tale *one of the stories in this setting* (chapter 34-36, is this story)
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3330998/34/The-Saga-of-Rhulan
The was a slave is a two part story…the second part being the actual story and first part more a preface, so direct link to actual relevant story.
Life is but a Dream (chapter 43 of the saga, ALSO this was written originally during a heavy emphasis on erotica era, so graphic sex as well)
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3330998/43/The-Saga-of-Rhulan
As for why this character could be thought to be a hero, well just now putting those chapters into the Saga but starts here: which in the chronological order of the saga is chapter 245 *which granted is a higher number than it needed to be as three books only tentatively tied to these characters were included in the saga just prior to this, but eh, old stories with crossing over characters*
The Adventurer era begins,
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3330998/245/The-Saga-of-Rhulan
funny enough despite being the most recent events put into the chronological order of the saga is actually one of the oldest things written about the character and setting. yeah, each of these really can be seen as a stand alone short series, hence the special collection part.
however the only sites with the stories all really separate and whole is Hentai Foundary, and like a I said not sure on the rules of direct linking to that site, given the pornographic ads, Fictionpress is still better than linking to Deviant art in stuff actually being together however. As a note: chapters 1-4 of this Saga project can just be ignored at this time, they don’t play a big part in the on-going narrative and are more big spoilers for later revelations that would normally be in an Appendix to the stories and not part of it properly
I’m fine with it, but make sure people know what they’re getting when they click. I’ve certainly recommended books that have the smuts in them.
Thankyou, I will try to be sure of that. I can forget sometimes that A LOT of the stories I wrote in my twenties tended to lean towards “the horny” LoL, even when half the chapter is a fantasy adventure.
that said then, to see the full story of the Adventurer era of this character without worrying about Deviantart links is posted to Hentai Foundry
(major NSFW warnings, this site has pornographic ads on the screen),
-also the story begins at chapter 7, first 6 are indy game outlines I came up with that never got made but relate to the timeline)
http://www.hentai-foundry.com/stories/user/Rhuen/19165/Aesperia-Age-of-Adventure
oh forgot one, the daughter who turns people into dolls, all her stories are too recent in time to be in the collection yet, but she is used primarily as a (horror monster) anyway.
here is one SCP foundation inspired short story about her (even such a group got their hands on Ju-el tech to use against eldritch beings),
Project Doll House
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Project-Doll-House-876175185
Sounds like she kinda WAS making excuses and trying to justify it, before finally taking refuge in smug narcissistic elitism.
you got it right.
She will often be speaking more to herself in these kinds of situations, trying to excuse her actions before puffing her own chest as it were when she gets upset or can’t find a way out of it.
Rhulan: Well, well dear “author” thought that would slip by me without my input did you? Well I’ll just make you look insane for a moment. What I do not appreciate is having my faults paraded about, what I do not appreciate is having my long life of experiences reduced to single lines and thrown back into my face without proper context..granted this was provided, but only when asked of you.
To make something clear, regarding my own emotional reaction to these pages, my author was supposed to right a little fanfic reaction, a little what-if I was there listening to Dabbler speak; we had it all planned out with this dramatic scene and memories of being a slave…but then this continuity obsessed individual remembered my exploits from thousands of years ago. Well how dare I have any sort of emotional reaction to something if it also makes me a hypocrite, I mean its not THAT is a normal thing…and I do wish tone could be heard in writing as reading this back hardly conveys my displeasure as mild annoyance and sarcasm.
Any who, I will add this scene would be important to the context of my own reaction. After all a human stating these faults would be one thing, a demon quite another. When a human points out faults in one that is essentially if not practically or literally a deity relative to them, than this *bringing them down to out level* behavior, actually humanized the divinity, makes them relatable. At least this is the excuse I was given. However if a demon; which I do wander if these arch mages are supposed to be demons or if this is some Earth or other human world instead; ANy Who, when a demon points out faults in one such as I…or below…I digress that is a whole other thing I will not get into at this time. A demon is a being obsessed with strength, power, and has a lust for power, an instatioable need to be strong. They cannot stand the idea of anything more powerful than themselves and will go to extreme lengths to prove it or else gain it. However when they see or even know something is more powerful than themselves; it drives them to a raging madness. So when such a being points out the flaws and faults of beings above their class they are not “bringing them down to their level”, they are mentally up lifting themselves to the level of gods. After all, if gods have the same flaws they do, then surely they are as great as the gods and should be treated, worshipped, and have access to the same realms of power.
So in other words…these insolent little
Hollia: you planning to have the author delete that after they type it right? This is one of the anger management course methods I…
“Big Oil has nothing on Big Peasant”
Also true for most societies on our world before the industrial revolution, although admittedly the soul-theft was largely metaphorical.
fun historical fact:
In Ancient Greece a farming machine was invented. however it was never produced outside a tinkerer’s lab and laughed at because they believed slavery was cheaper.
And at the time….. It actually was…
yep, short sightedness has been one of the contributing factors to the lack of progress in humanity many times.
No, slavery was cheaper. It was more economically sound. It’s not “short sightedness”.
Kingdoms which did things in a way that was not economically sound did not survive long. They still don’t.
Except long term, it’s not, and a civilization that invests in technology will surpass one that only sticks to the most efficient thing they have at the moment, as long as the former survives long enough for that investment to pay off. Climbing a mountain often requires descending a hill. Any functioning system has to strike a balance between investing in the future, and maintaining sufficient returns to survive to reap the rewards of those investments.
Slavery isn’t cheaper.
McDonald’s figured out that one (as did sharecroppers).
As horrible as those two examples are, there is no upside to slavery. Period.
Slavery is only cheaper short term for a very small minority of a population. Long term and for the overall civilization, it actually tends to stunt a civilization’s technological (and as a result, economic) progress. Not just for the US, but for any civilization where it’s been practiced (which is MOST civilizations on the planet for the majority of the history of civilization).
As Plato famously said, in Plato’s Republic, “Our need will be the real creator.”
Which then became, “The mother of invention is necessity” in 1519 by William Horman. More famously known by Richard Franck as “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” in 1658.
In short, the driving force for humanity in making MOST new inventions is having a need.
Slavery removes that need by having what is usually an inferior but simplistic-minded way of filling that need that doesn’t take any sort of inventive mind. So slavery makes a society less inventive of ways to improve the society.
Technology is not even remotely as limited as slaves or physical manual labor of a person or animal. Technology continually progresses over time as the need arises. Humans and animals do not (aside from genetic manipulation, I suppose). Historically not the case though.
A single horse will only be equal to a single horsepower, but a steam engine will be equal to 20 horsepower, while a steam car with an external combustion engine is equal to 125 horsepower, and an average combushion engine in a car can be 300 horsepower. All while taking up the same or less space than a horse.
A single human slave will always only be equal to the work output of a single human slave. But a cotton gin let you separate the seeds from 50 pounds of cotton in the same timeframe as a single human slave could do in 10 hours. And modern cotton harvesting machines are capable of harvesting six rows of cotton at a time (6 rows of cotton makes about 15 bales, which is about 20,000-25,000 pounds) AND remove seeds at the same time AND compress the cotton. The latter is obviously better than the former, not to mention the obvious ethical problem of slavery.
Fun digression:
How is how the arch-mages are treating peasents any different from how we treat chickens?
because we aren’t chickens ourselves with power over the other chickens.
while some of these look to be non-human, its hard to try and excuse behavior when its one sapient being enslaving, experimenting on, and using other sapient beings as a resource. Which the souls power source thing is more messed up than usual, because that’s like what a demon would do, burn souls to generate power…wait for those souls to slowly recharge and then burn them again.
I have demons that do something like this…well an older Hell I don’t use anymore where souls were trapped in crystals and used like batteries, ghosts that would be drained of necro energy and then let loose to charge back up, and more recent one where one Hell has souls slowly gain power, convert hell energy into soul energy and then the demons eat them for that soul energy, after which the soul core/consciousness respawns nearby (some demons fencing in certain areas to keep these souls from wandering too far), to recharge and repeat the process.
but the qualifiers there being Demons of Hell, and the souls of the damned. When its a living wizard doing it to other people, its basically a set up/reason for some adventurers to stop by and stab them in the face.
Unless said wizard has been paying to the 101 Rules, and made sure said adventurers meet an early demise if *they* haven’t and come unprepared…
At which point the concept of “collateral damage” comes into play…
I keep wondering if we ever figure out (or meet) a higher level of conciousness than Sapience if the higher level folks will start to think of us “mere sapients” like we think of dogs or cows.
Sapience is a really low bar, if you really think about it. Still, I think it’s a pretty good one.
That said, how do you know if a being you can’t communicate with has sapience?
Best example, in my opinion, of the ‘how do you know if a being you can’t communicate with has sapience?’ is ‘Little Fuzzy’ by H. Beam Piper.
Sapience is NOT a low bar. You are confusing sapience with sentience.
best case scenario: humans are regarded as potential pets and treated with kindness.
worst case scenario: humans are annoying pests that need to be eliminated.
*middle of the road:
humans are either irrelevant and ignored, or the ego one where whatever decides humans have potential and wants to “up lift” them.
In general, the Arch-Mages wouldn’t EAT the Peasants. Too Stringy.
eh….the whole drain life force from peasants and others has been done for.
-gain more power,
-increase life span
-look pretty/handsome,
its actually been a fairly common trope for (evil) wizards to engage in. Given the real world precedence authors have to draw from for this kind of WTFery.
Done best in “The Dark Crystal”.
“You have wings? I don’t have wings.”
agreed, that scene with the chair always stuck with me ever since I was a kid.
I’d be more direct: how is it different from how we treat other humans? The dominant economic systems on Earth all operate on the same principle, regardless of people pretending they’re different: how to get the most out of other people while giving them the least in return. How to get them to accept slavery by dressing it up in elaborate, complex disguises. To get people to justify and accept their own position within the system, to believe their exploitation is morally correct.
Before I write this – two important definitions, because most people get them confused:
Sentience – the ability to feel things, the ability to perceive things. MOST living things that have some degree of consciousness is sentient. The word is often MISUSED to mean a creature that thinks. Being able to perceive and feel things (and I’m not talking about emotions or other complex notions) does not mean ‘thinking.’
Sapience – the ability to think, the capacity for intelligence, the ability to acquire wisdom. The ability to know things AND reason based on that knowledge.
The main difference between sentience and sapience is self-awareness.
Chickens are not self-aware creatures. Their brains simply don’t allow for this possibility. It’s too simple a structure. Chickens are the most simple form of sentience even, based on the lack of complexity of their brains (most of a chicken’s brain is at the brain stem only, which is mostly for basic motor functions), which is why there are cases of chickens running around without their head, and some chickens even living for quite a long time without having a head. Chickens can know certain things, like to eat bugs or feed. They can form hierarchical structures (as most creatures do for the past 350 million years or so). They can’t reason though. That requires a complexity that they simply are not capable of doing.
Humans, on the other hand, are both sentient and sapient. A very high level of sapience, in fact. There are other animals that are arguably sapient as well, to varying levels, like octopi, cetaceans, dogs, cats, African Grey parrots, many primates, etc. Overall, there are very few animals that are sapient, and fewer still sapient above a very low or rudimentary level. Humans tend to anthropomorphize (attribute human characteristics or behavior) a lot of animals where it doesn’t actually fit, and sometimes ignore levels of sapience in animals that DO exhibit it to a limited degree (like dogs, cats, octopi, etc).
So to answer the question – the difference between how the arch-mages treat peasants and how we treat chickens is that peasants have self-awareness and using them in this way is not vital to their survival, just luxury comforts, so it’s morally wrong, whereas chickens do not have self-awareness and using them is vital to human survival as food.
The question of if it is or is not moral to treat chickens like we do though tends to only be BECAUSE of our high level of sapience to allow us to even consider these sorts of moral quandaries. Which is why modern humans, at least in certain countries, put a high emphasis on humane treatment of even animals raised to be food.
DING! [PRINT CHR$(7)]
“Peasant souls” sounds like a failed From Software game concept.
Is that squid-faced mage an illithid, or just a Cthulhumanoid alien?
Do they want the Technocracy? Because this is how you get the Technocracy.
nobody wants the technocracy. its just that it has time travel and is subtly adjusting things to set up for its own creation. you might want to get onboard….
1) I leave that in the capable hands of Deus, praise be upon him, amen.
2) We do like many of the fringe benefits and creature comforts OF the Technocracy though. :)
—–
Backstory on the Technocracy since I’m a nerd who was big into Mage: The Ascension when I was younger:
If you’ve ever played Mage: the Ascension, the Technocracy only were able to take power because the other mage Traditions (the Verbena, the Hermetic Houses, the Akashic Order, the Celestial Chorus, the Dreamspeakers, the Ahl-i-Batin, and the Chakravanti (Euthanatoi), all treated peasants like lower level beings only worthy of being followers, slaves, or ingredients/sacrifices for their spells. Followers was usually the best you could hope for, or them simply not noticing you at all.
The Technocracy, on the other hand, realized that the actual power of Magic came from collective belief, which meant the majority of magic was being untapped within the large population of the peasantry, and decided to use that to give the peasants some say over their lives. Starting with the Craftmasons, who created devices which were magic, but based on simple, empirical ideas which the common peasant was able to understand, and built up on that. Eventually to the point where it didnt matter if the peasants understood the way the science worked, as long as they understood the basics and believed in those basic principles collectively. The first major Technocratic invention used by the peasants against the Mages was the cannon.
In other words, in Mage: the Ascension, technology is just repeatable magic that anyone can use, whether they’re mages (Awakened) or the masses (Sleepers). Which worked out well for a while, until the Technocracy got too powerful and became just as corrupt as the Traditions had been, although some of the Technocracy members left when they got too out of hand, like the Sons of Ether (mad scientists basically) and the Difference Engineers/Analytical Reckoners (who then became the Virtual Adepts after creating the internet and cyberspace).
Still waiting on the justification for high end lady magic users not also creating incubuses.
hmm, well the defining feature of the succubus is that they require tantric energy to survive, meaning their creators made sex slave sapient real dolls with a limitation that would make then have to have sex with them or else risk starvation. This is a dark and really messed up feature.
However if the lady mages, especially if any fell into the “vane sorceress” trope were around and given the libido of the average male, why would she need to make this? She could just seduce servants, seduce the adventurer, summon a clay golem with a rock hard erection and get herself off.
However you would think some male mages would also be gay or into hermaphrodites…so maybe they were made, but in such low numbers that they mutation or whatever that gave the leap to a demon species from soul powered sex meat, didn’t include golems with ducks who didn’t need to feed on sexual energy as an incentive to have sex with the horny sorceress of lust tower. Or maybe the effeminate and hermaphrodite ones are just called Succubus (to lie beneath) and its a matter of semantics.
Also the chance that the ones that humped to sapience the whole tantric energy succubus features got tied to the magical mitochondria and thus were only passed down by mothers and some wonky whatever magic DNA these same mothers could only give birth to females (see some twisted wizards trying to produce more of their “product” to sell), including a hybrid traits feature for any sapient species so the new generations to be raised and then sold as adults would look like the target buyer(s).
So it was just this line that reproduced enough and had this restriction that got qualified by the Infernal courts of equal rights as a demon species.
meanwhile the do not reproduce and do not pass on their traits because the sorceress doesn’t want to get knocked up by her sex toys, and gay men (unless special magics are used) its not an issue. Thus the male counterparts can still be MADE if the recipes are still around; just not qualify as their own distinct race.
Like I said, it’s looking like somebody developed a heritable genetic/magical “bolt on” to convert any sapient being into a succubus. Maybe the heritable part wasn’t even intended.
So the archmage finds a peasant he likes, installs the succubus package, and all the things he likes get turned up to 11.
As a one-off creation, maybe. But are the incentives the same to make a breeding race of incubi as there are for succubi? Particularly since it’s not clear if succubi as a distinct race was an intended result?
The males of a species are less likely to be invested in their offspring than the females, just by nature of the relative resource and time investment. Both might have some incentive to create a sex partner that cannot reproduce. But if you have to carry the offspring within your own body for months, spend your own body’s resources on its survival, and risk permanent damage or death to give birth, you probably aren’t going to want that offspring to be a slave. A male might have the incentive to create a slave that can reproduce more slaves, because the male won’t have to spend the personal resources during gestation. And they can just make another slave to have fun with while the first endures pregnancy.
So while a female may be likely to make a sterile, male living sex-doll, they’re less likely to create a race of incubi than males are to make a race of succubi.
Actually, that’s a really good point on why there aren’t Incubi.
Folks who would want a sex-doll with a penis wouldn’t want it to reproduce.
as I said, “the sorceress doesn’t want to get knocked up by her sex toys”
I guess they did not consider magical vasectomies or making them sterile via an odd number of chromosomes, like mules (ie, sterile offspring of female horses and male donkeys).
Archmagi don’t seem to want to put in more than the minimal possible work. :)
The implication here is that it would be sterile as the sorceress would make sure it couldn’t get her pregnant at all, thus her dick having sex doll golem soul slave can’t knock her up or anyone else, thus no chance of passing on genes. Now we have to ask why for what dark reason as I theorized before with the mass production with least cost method would a wizard make a female one that could reproduce and pass along these traits
Maybe the Wizard wanted kids?
the point of this SPECIFIC EXAMPLE, being why we don’t see incubi, is because it makes sense that it was less likely for those who wanted a dick inside them would want to get pregnant from said dick-sex toy.
while those wizards making succubi could have through some twisted example, wanted their creations to reproduce, either to make more or another reason that comes to mind from the next page…what better way to prove the assanindroid isn’t an artificial creation than the bare a child for their target.
Tiny pedantic point: “glazing over” should be “glossing over”
should be, but weirdly I have actually heard people say this…its not right, you are right its not, but then again I have family who refuse to say I have eaten, and will always say, “I have ate”, so it happens, like hearing irregardless used as regardless.
the sad/crazy thing is what determines ‘correct usage’ is usage. this is how, to the chagrin of English teachers everywhere, Ain’t is now in the dictionary.
Aww. Thought you were gonna go with Bed, Bath, and Baator…
Is Max holding a Ding Dong?
I’d say a swiss roll.
Whatever you want to call it she ain’t snackalackin’.
My guess is that it’s an egg roll.
I think I like the comment in panel two the best. :D
Also, pretty sure we did the “Hello world!” thing when I was learning Python. :)
“Big Oil has nothing on Big Peasant”
That’s debatable.
You know, I was really hooked on this comic for about the first 500 pages, and the 300 after that were OK. But I’ve really lost interest since. Is it just me that thinks it has completely wandered off into the weeds, story arc wise???
Nope, this is what it is, and has always been.
Come back in a couple months after this “Dabbler’s Science Corner” is over, maybe?
I disagree, it’s totally off in the weeds. The reason being, it’s it’s dangerously close to breaking Dabbler’s & Maxima’s dynamic if it hasn’t already broken it.
Dabbler & Maxima always had a “the two faces of feminism” thing going. Maxima exemplary of the ‘woman can say “no” to men and don’t have to be subservient’, and Dabbler exemplary of the ‘women are free and sexually liberated to actually enjoy the act for their own natural desires.’
This is moving the succubi from that ‘sexually liberated’ direction and into ‘this is a tendency programmed by degenerate men trying to control women yet again’.
That completely destroys the Maxima/Dabbler dynamic, and I’m very worried about the future of grrlpower right now.
It’s acknowledging that’s it’s, to quote, “Really Horrific”.
Hell, take a look at humanity’s own history for some really fucked up stuff that’s either still happening, or only stopped happening in the last ten years.
Child sex slavery, for instance. (Look up “Child Marriage Laws in the USA” for some truely horrifying facts)
—
> enjoy the act for their own natural desires.
And here we get into “what counts as a ‘natural’ desire”? For Dabbler, sex *is* a natural desire. The fact that her entire species has it makes it about as natural a thing as it can be.
Yes, her species’ origin is horrific, but now that they exist, why are you thinking that it would be moral to mindrape them because one of their harmless desires was programmed into them for the benefit of their creators?
Dogs not eating human babies is *less* natural than Dabbler’s sex drive.
The difference is between the sex drive being fully her own vs her being designed that way horny women-right-ignoring wizards. That changes her sexuality from being her simply owning her sexuality as a living being to being a situation of lingering controls added by another.
It’s rough because Dave has made a point that non-sexual succubi rarely exist if at all. That means they have never been truly freed.
And just because horriffic stuff has happened in history is no reason to add an even more horrific version of it to a comic. This is super-heroes we’re talking about. This is escapism fantasy. This changes “Hey, I want to be more awesome, like Dabbler, be free to enjoy life!” but if you throw in stuff like this, it became, “What, you mean the patriarchy-engineered living sex doll created by killing women for sex slaves?”
That’s not cool. I’d rather watch Daenerys from GOT flip out to evil a dozen times in a row rather than see this happen to Dabbler’s origins.
“And just because horriffic stuff has happened in history is no reason to add an even more horrific version of it to a comic.”
Evolution is rarely pretty whether biological or social, and the further back you go in time, the more likely that things which are good in the present started out with some really bad things in the past. If things were always good in the past, there would have been no reason to improve upon them to have the present, and if you can’t find things wrong in the present that need correcting, you won’t have any change in the future – you’d already be there.
I see no reason there has to be heavy grittiness applied to Dabbler’s sex drive when so many other things are “Yay, superpowers!” or “Hey, comic logic!” A interstellar species that doesn’t get sick that fuels their magic via sex (as the series has established that magic can be generated from emotions) makes full evolutionary sense in-series. Would a series like that have a serious sex drive? Yea, definitely! It didn’t need this explanation. It makes things gritter-than-normal for the series in a place it wasn’t needed.
“I see no reason there has to be heavy grittiness applied to Dabbler’s sex drive when so many other things are “Yay, superpowers!” or “Hey, comic logic!””
Actually a lot of this comic is about subverting ‘comic logic’ tropes or deconstructing them.
“It didn’t need this explanation. It makes things gritter-than-normal for the series in a place it wasn’t needed.”
Humans in Star Trek had a pretty awful history as well. As Quark said to Sisko:
“The way I see it, Humans used to be a lot like Ferengi: greedy, acquisitive, interested only in profit. We’re a constant reminder of a part of your past you’d like to forget. BUT… You’re overlooking something. Humans used to be a lot worse than the Ferengi: slavery, concentration camps, interstellar wars. We have nothing in our past that approaches that kind of barbarism.”
Why bother talking about that? Why would Star Trek DS9 give explanations about humanity’s terrible and non-Federation-friendly past? Because its hows how much humans have progressed since then.
Dabbler is a succubus. There are hints that succubi are different than other demons long before now, when she was explaining stuff to Sydney on how all succubi are female. That makes no sense from a normal evolutionary concept. It implies there was some sort of genetic tinkering or, in this case, magical tinkering, which set this up.
It’s up to DaveB to explain how this would be the case, and to tell the audience that the universe is not a nice and happy place, and its history is not nice and happy either, just like Earth’s history is not nice and happy.
As for the comic never having any gritty moments, in the comic so far, we’ve seen:
1) Peggy shooting out Vehemence’s eye with a .50 calibre anti-materiel rifle round
2) Maxima blowing off Vehemence’s arm
3) Quite a bit of full frontal nudity, both for men and women
4) People being hung upside down while being bled out for blood collection
5) Attempted genocide (just because the Alari are bad does not make genocide ‘not gritty.’
6) Exploding heads (second squidward)
7) Slicing up a different squidward with a laser
8) Turning a man into salsa with an explosive round.
9) Murdering (admittedly in self-defense) multiple aliens to the point where the space cops were finding melted femurs.
10) Slicing a person in half, bisecting them (Coot/Wyrmil)
11) Smashing Vehemence’s face in and showing the results of it
12) Jamming fingers into Vehemence’s wrist and spreading those fingers to dislocate the bones in the arm and wrist
13) Mathis throwing a knife in between someone’s teeth.
14) An enemy who’s head was removed, and not just a clean cut at the neck. Removed between the nose and the mouth.
15) Executiions
16) Descriptions of a corrupt dictator murdering his people and making sure the same would happen to their families.
To name a few things which I’d describe as gritty.
We have already seen that Dabbler considers humans to have major hangups about sex in general. It’s not surprising that a gritty history involving sex in a bad way would be described in a Dabbler’s Science Corner any more than a gritty history involving death and/or dismemberment would be constantly described. Dabbler is glossing over how horrific the history is because she’s just trying to explain the basics of the origins of succubi.
If I explained the history of the jewish people, I’d necessarily have to also include their bondage in Egypt, the torture they underwent during the Spanish Inquisition by Torquemada, and the attempted genocide and systematic mass murder of one half of the entire world’s jewish population during the Holocaust.
History is rarely pretty, and deconstructing or subverting the comic book tropes to show just how bad history can be is in line with the webcomic.
Dabbler has addressed the need-for-sex angle before. As well as inherent nature versus individual will. She’s a intelligent, independent being, and not a slave to her nature.
My impression is that the wizards did not directly design or manufacture succubi. They are the descendants of these sex slave experiments, and are influenced in some way by that lineage. Consider their own powers over other people’s minds, which also raise issues of consent, except in the other direction. I do not think that would be an intentional feature that such wizards would want in a sex slave.
As other people have commented, there’s a lot of terrible stuff in human history. There probably isn’t anybody who doesn’t have a rapist in their ancestry, if you go back far enough. But we can choose whether or not to let that define us. As intelligent beings, we are responsible for our own actions, thoughts, and desires. We can’t just say that our nature made us do or not do something. We have a choice, and can overrule our natures. Dabbler can be aware of her heritage, aware that some of her desires are a product of someone’s meddling long ago, and still claim those desires as her own.
I haven’t been a huge fan of this one scene but I liked the mercenaries arc and stuff so I guess that’s a yes and no. If you’ve got an opinion, whether they say it or not, there’s probably at least somebody who shares it.
wouldn’t after a while all the peasants just move away from the imposing castle where all the people are disappearing into?
That assumes they know that it’s into the castle that they disappear.
Maybe they’re lead to believe that the mage in the castle is the only thing *mostly* keeping the things in the forest (whatever they are) at bay, such that it’s just the occasional peasant who goes missing.
Where would they move? Most likely either somebody owns any other land they could reach, or would at least claim to, and even if nobody does, there’s wild animals and potentially dangerous magical creatures to contend with. They might legitimately believe that staying near the castle is the safest choice, and provides them with the highest quality of living available, even if people do randomly disappear. Making a change for the better is a risk. It might pay off, or they might die horribly.
Historically speaking, oddly not, especially if they are enforcing a feudal system with limited education (as implied here with the illiterate aspect implied implicit of being a peasant), hell in the real world there were kingdoms where knights went on brutal rampages and villagers just stayed because the other option was to be killed by other knights, bandits, wild beasts, disease, or starvation.
In feudal times, peasants were legally abound to the land. Any attempt to move away was punishable by death.
So the choice is Death or… death.
No… no cake available at all then?
just to clarify what they referring to as cake back then.
https://www.medieval-recipes.com/recipes/cake/
Youse want to take a dekko at what the non-sapiens primates get up to. (And BTW, “primates” is NOT a scientific label I’d use for those animals.)
However, at some time in the distant past, we did evolve from the same root, so we get to carry much of the baggage. The big difference is we were far more effective in all that we went for, but even so we still cannot contemplate improving our race to a sustainable level of mutual care. Foster and Kristofferson didn’t appreciate exactly what they wrote (” Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”), given many of the things we would need to to do in order to create a just and equitable society would infringe so many sacred cows\\\\ freedoms…
At least those (lesser) “primates” don’t get to think too deeply about their behaviour. As Elric told one of his adversaries, “We do this because it’s what we are. You do it to be like us, but you will never be as good as us.” I’ve paraphrased it a bit. We humans are still trying to be baboons and chimpanzees.
“wouldn’t after a while all the peasants just move away from the imposing castle where all the people are disappearing into? – JD
Depends what the living conditions are like, compared to what they’d have elsewhere. Ursula K. LeGuin’s The ones who walk away from Omelas is a famous and well-written presentation of a similar scenario; this one may well be even more appealing.
If the Archmage gives his people an excellent quality of life and only occasionally takes tribute, while the people of the Boss down the road live short lives of squalid suffering, who in their right minds would choose the Boss over the Archmage? Especially if he’s able to be careful in his choice of tribute – depending on the means of extraction and use, the ‘renewed life’ may even be openly presented as a reward for long and loyal service.
I can see a common tactic for the wizard or whatever title spell caster setting themselves up much like a cult leader, either proclaiming to be a living god or the speaker of one and getting people to give up so much for their devotion. This can play out in many ways from an actual utopia like commune (possibly with the annual dark ritual side, the town with a secret trope), across the many possibilities gradient to the twisted psycho wizard who rules by fear but has the people convinced they either can’t escape or there is no outside world. Like a Lich King trapping a small kingdom in a forcefield held up by corrupted sacred sites and guarded by his army of monsters and undead so the towns in the territory are stuck for many generations; for example. which that strategy is seen in even non magical dystopias, power being held by creating the illusion there is no where else to go. That outside the questionable protection of their overlord(s) is only suffering and death. “Sometimes to enjoy eden you must endure the serpent” only its entirely artificial.
It amazing how much effort has gone into keeping peasant populations trimmed back over the ages. A lot of big public works were also convenient mortality sinks to keep the peasants from getting numerous enough to get uppity. Having an actual use for dead peasants? Yeah, there aren’t a whole lot of historical regimes that would even blink before handing the arch mages all they wanted.
That’s what the wars use to be for, before they got all remote-controlly: leaders of both sides secretly got together to discus what to do with the over-breeding population, and played ‘Rock-Paper-kicktothenads’ over who will start the next cull (aka war)
In some cases it was actually to protect their own populations from trained soldiers with nothing to do, so to keep them from going on a murder spree of the farmers these *lesser nobles* were sent to the Crusades.
Part of the reason for the major progress in Europe was because the black death (ie, the bubonic plague), which killed off about 60% of all of Europe’s population (50-75 million or so people), mainly killed the upper and middle class, and spared a lot of the peasantry and laborers.
The reason why is up for debate but the effect was that, with a large portion of the nobility dead, the peasantry and labor had more demand for their services among the remaining nobility, and there was suddenly an opening in the rigid hierarchies that separated nobility, laborers, and serfs to rise in status. If the hierarchies under a feudal system had not been so rigid, the after effects and benefits to the peasant class would not have been nearly as extremely beneficial (but also the peasants would not have suffered as much economically BEFORE the black death in the first place).
It’s one of many reasons that the Founding Fathers very quickly decided to lessen the rigid class systems (ie, no titles of nobility or royalty allowed) and allow for more potential upward economic and social mobility (although there were still existing rigidity – just a LOT less than there were in Europe at the time). It also helped that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were written with the mindset of negative rights (government exists to protect our god-given rights, which the government doesnt have to give us because we already have them by virtue of existing) instead of positive rights (people have no rights unless granted them by the government), and that power is derived from the masses granting it to government, instead of the other way around (the latter of which was the typical way governments worked until the U.S.). Also many of the Founding Fathers were pretty vocal about how if the government tries to be tyrannical, it’s the duty of the people to overthrow and rebuild it back to the original intent of the Constitution, or to get rid of the people corrupting that intent. Also why the 2nd Amendment was given so much importance. Basically a built-in approval for peasant overthrow of any potential nobility trying to remove the liberties of the population.
It’s also why, after World War 2 and the booming rise of a middle class in the US, the United States benefited so much economically (a large middle class is VERY good for a national economy, and was very rare for a sizable middle class to exist in any nation in the world before the mid-20th century). It basically doubled the median family income in about 30 years (a single generation).