Questionable Malcontent - 2016 Didn't Suck Edition

So dump a copy of her mind onto an isolated disk and wipe it if something bad happens. Why would you experiment on the only copy of the data, which is essentially a unique life, that you have? It's amazing that every strip brings even more contradictions and gaps in reasoning that we as readers are supposed to just run with uncritically.
also
Grade A dialog

I still can't even post to this website without connecting through a VPN. Is Codemonkey worse than Josh?

Ill give him that, he is thorough about blocking his own plot solutions.

Burqa edit where?

I had a slightly modified alteration in the last thread.

...

I think the high point of her career was being stalked by that insane fat fuck Ricardo Lopez.

That's more or less what we discussed in the last thread – that CW could have planted anything what so ever there. Do we know if he reads these threads?

You know, never mind how shit the writing is with regards to the locked "memories", this whole scenario just makes Faye look even *more* selfish and self-centered than ever before.

I mean, it's only now that she's been fired (for a perfectly good and justifiable reason, I might add!) that all of a sudden she suddenly gives a fuck about the legality of any of it.

And since she's so keen to tell all her stupid friends about it, I don't see why *anyone* in this town would want to employ her.

She is the typical bitch employee who acts like an asshole their entire career and, when they inevitably get laid off, rushes to Facebook to shit-talk the company.

Absolute fucking poison!

I think that is, in part, CW's work. "Nothing to see here Faye, just adult consenting robots engaging in consensual fistfights."

And then she finds out about this.

I'm not entirely sure I can believe Faye never once thought something might be up with that operation.
Even when the cops got wind of it she still seemed to be in full-denial mode.

In fact, by the looks of it the *only* incident which made Faye question anything involving her job was when Menstro didn't immediately rush to her defense when she was acting the cunt.

The whole situation could have been handled so much better.
Like, Faye could have asked where all the parts were coming from.
Or even have a tense discussion with CW after asking if she can have her wages transferred directly into her account rather than getting cash in hand all the time.
Subtle things which hint that the operation is only semi-legal and have Faye come to a gradual realization.

Instead we get.
"Menstro didn't agree with me… CONSPIRACY! :O "

Ardent's stupid power even works on flashlights? That's not even a "machine"! And if you increase the voltage all you do is burn the battery out faster. Or overheat the filament.

Quantum computing offers a way of breaking the currently most popular encryption, but it's not a magic way of making everything faster. It gives you a way of executing special algorithms that can't be executed on regular computers at a reasonable pace. There is research into cryptography that's basically resistant to quantum computing, and most symmetric encryption is made weaker but only to an extent that can be compensated for.

Asymmetric encryption is encryption where you encrypt and decrypt with different keys, which is extremely useful. If I want to securely send a message to you I only need to know your public key, which is public knowledge. I can use it to encrypt my message, which then can't be decrypted by anyone besides people who know the private key (e.g. you), not even myself. It's like a lock anyone can close but only someone with the key can open.

With symmetric encryption you use the same key for encrypting and decrypting.

Quantum computing can ruin the standard methods of asymmetric cryptography.

The most it's known to be able to do to most symmetric encryption is reducing the number of keys you have to try for decryption to its square root, which is not as bad as it might sound. The difficulty of cracking good cryptography increases exponentially with the size of the key, so if you make the key twice as large you've compensated for that.

Symmetric encryption is inconvenient for many uses, but it's completely suitable for this.

But the breaking time of two million years is worryingly low. With the kind of computing advances you see in Questionable Content it's unlikely but possible for that to end up as something breakable.

Using present-day technology it's easy to encrypt something so securely that it wouldn't be possible to decrypt it using all the available energy in the solar system at maximum theoretically possible efficiency. I'm not exaggerating. Two million years is peanuts.

Not to mention that this is one of the rare situations where a one-time pad could be used. A one-time pad is a really simple, really old cryptography method where the key is just as long as the message. It's absolutely impossible to break without knowledge about the key. The reason it's never used is that it's extremely inconvenient, because you have to securely transmit the key, which is just as hard as securely transmitting the message itself. It's appropriate when you have a secure channel to transmit the key before the message is composed, and the person encrypting the message can't use a computer. It's also appropriate when there's weird singularity stuff going on and the key doesn't need to be transmitted in the first place.

Which makes me wonder - why did she encrypt it and store the key? Why not delete it and store a backup?

I guess you are implying Dis-Info 101, False Information that is guarded will be assumed to be genuine, and that Menstro actually has no dark and troubled wartime memories at all.

No, I'm implying Jeph didn't think it through. Moving the memories is safer than encrypting them and doesn't make it any easier or harder to fake them.

Also water is wet and Andy dick is a cunt. what's new?

He didn't think it through in a different way than >>745461 thought. Very important distinction.

So … They just continued to dig until, one day, they encountered a half-meter thick ceiling? Then they just stopped?

I would say that it works on devices where it can detect electrical circuits, but it seems it can enhance wind-up mechanical birds.

Perhaps the battery was also enhanced? Perhaps Handstab doesn't understand conservation of energy?

Perhaps Corpse Witch is to niggardly to use up extra storage space (remember that in order to be able to quickly delete it she probably needs to save it in her own body)? Perhaps Menstro just sucks at math?

Here I'll have to defend Jeph — a key is easy to destroy. If Menstro turns against her, she can easily destroy the key. Even if it is really long, simply destroying part of it will leave all the memories completely inaccessible. If she stored the memories on a hard drive, and Menstro turns against her, Menstro might be able to turn of her power before she has deleted all of the memories, leaving the rest intact.

Of course, one hickup with the plan is that Menstro can just turn off CW, remove her hard drive, mount it from a separate OS (I assume that the personalitites and egos of the robots need to be booted like operating systems), and locate the key. This would be simple. If it doesn't work, CW will have no memory of it (perhaps she'll think that she blacked out), and just to be safe you can delete everything stored the last few days. You could even make a backup, so that she loses her leverage. Perhaps you could put a copy in another body, and promise the new CW a chance to replace the old CW in exchange for Menstro's memories. Or you could give put her in a simulation, where you wind the clock forwards 10 years, and have her give the key back.

These are the sort of interesting ways you might be able to use the fact that your characters are robots. But no, Jeph just wants a shallow quirk to his cartoon, as well as class of oppressed people without having to use a real victim class that might make SJWs mad at him.

The quick deletion makes sense. But storing the encrypted version yourself instead of with your adversary might be smarter.

A 512-bit key would be overkill even for solar system-scale quantum computing. That's just 64 bytes. You could fit it in a tweet, like this:
W3wS0fjKOXvqeUjWcYZfV6zly+0M0r72eYcV9urg47i0JW5j5KRSaxWPJnGtOMtqaWIQdLjimcnVjSMUUhlTiA==

It would be hard to shut her down completely before she notices. She could also be storing the key in volatile memory, which clears when its power is shut off, and move the key out of it only when a shutdown is expected (modern-day RAM is volatile).

Speaking of this, Jeph actually explains that this makes a difference to Menstro. His explanation is so retarded that I'm not even sure if it was ment as one, but I think it was. See, because she still has the memories, she knows what happened. Since they're encrypted, she can't remember it, but she still, somehow, knows what happened. No, I don't know the difference.

If CW had removed the memories to an external harddrive, Menstro wouldn't have known what happened during the war.

Perhaps not. For example, if the central computer is stored in the brain, and the torso contains the battery, maybe a quick decapitation (her body is weak enough for a fat woman to dent it) could work. She wouldn't be able to gain enough information before her brain would shut down. Remember: Hannelore's dad probably could give them the blueprints to CW's body, with those they might be able to come up with a resonable plan.

I thought of this, but it seems like a very careless way to store something that important. Especially for 10 years.

She remembers it because she remembers remembering it, not because the encrypted copy is there. She forgot that period of time, but she wouldn't forget talking about it to a psychiatrist, for example. The memories of the memory don't harm her, just like having a traumatic experience explained to you doesn't give you PTSD.

If she can tell the difference between the encrypted memory and random noise there's something very wrong with the encryption.

What sort of junk machine would store information about itself remembering things?

This is a good explanation. If she actually talks about the memories to gain deeper insight about them, it makes sense she should store it. However, I don't know if she did go to a psychiatrist. I looked through the archives, and it seems she did not. She says she was an outcast among other robots, and was dirt poor. This is also the first time we've seen her talk about it with her friends.

The only memories she ought to have about it would be her thinking back on it (although as I said above, she probably wouldn't store this information in her long-term memory), and her PTSD. Both these memories ought to be mainly comprised of pain, so either CW blocked them of or Menstro should still feel the pain.

Sure, but you can't expect Handstab to know that.

why on earth would an egg beater not work when a manual pump does

It should remember its own thoughts, and it's hard to store thoughts without any information about the memories they're referring to. It wouldn't store the full original memory, but it would duplicate some of it.

Talking about it to anyone would store the memories in as much detail as the conversation itself has. It would be completely reasonable to keep a permanent record of all conversation. A text transcript would be extremely compact and also very useful. She would know at least as much about it as what she told CW.

I could expect someone without crypto knowledge to ask someone who knows that. He knows the xkcd guy, right? That guy's a faggot but he does know about these things. This is basic crypto knowledge.

I think it was an electric pump.

I doubt that. It probably has extremely detailed thoughts all the time. and saving all of them would be an extreme waste of space. Think about the thoughts you have constantly. Now consider how more detailed they would be if your brain was a billion (or however many) times faster, and capable of rendering every part with great detail.

It's not only a memory problem. If menstro had to make continous backups of all the information contianed in her RAM (her thoughts), it would slow her down a lot, since reading and writing memory is quite the bottleneck when it comes to computing.

That's true. I forgot that she probably talked about it when she searched for help.

Jeph doesn't strike me as someone who does even basic research.

Never mind the crypto shit, what bugs me is how the fuck she was in such a crappy position.

If Menstro is a friggin spec-ops super-soldier then why is she poor OR neglected?

IRL private contractors would be falling over each other to offer her cushy, lucrative security & bodyguarding jobs, and however bad her PTSD was psychiatric care would come as standard in that line of work.

They don't need to know what she worked on (like they'd even ask anyway), just looking at her tech specs they could see she's a goddamn million-dollar asset, better than any human. Why would she be in the gutter? Did I miss the page where it explains that she's mechanically broken somehow?

I forgot to say in that it doesn't need to store any part of the memory over again, it might just use a pointer or symbolic link or something like that.

So then you store the thoughts in a low resolution. The conscious part can't be that bloated. There's a lot of background stuff going on, but we have that too. The resulting chains of reasoning are not that large. It's the difference between storing a program's output and a full record of all the states the program went though to get there.

That's not enough to get rid of everything. For example, if someone is reading our conversation they can have a decent idea of what the comic is about even without a copy of the comic itself. It won't be nearly as detailed, but it will be enough.

Well to be fair the Airforce scrapped several planes that cost millions because it's no longer efficient or the budget is not enough or redirected to newer tech.

This is a good point, although I'm still not sure it wouldn't slow her down. I've worked with supercomputers that were poorly programmed or constructed or something, so that you needed to modify your code to minimize the amount of data saved and moved between nodes. Saving data can be a bother.

But that isn't too hard to solve. She could use the RAM to store the part of the data that have yet to be saved to the permanent memory, and then save it properly while she sleeps. If she has dreams, perhaps that's why. Perhaps that's why we dream as well? Does anyone know if Menstro or the other robots sleep?

Sure, but if every name, description and reference here would be replaced with a null pointer the entire thing would be completely incomprehensible.

Counter-sage because I forgot to remove sage from email-field.

This might be unclear. I meant that the dreams was a sideffect of her brain processing the memory and storing it.

If they do, do they have dreams?

Storing thoughts would slow her down only slightly, especially considering that much of the results of thoughts needs to be stored for normal operation. Storing a transcript might even be easier than storing only the important bits.

Storing a reference to a name instead of a name wouldn't be useful. You would be saving mere bytes at a huge cost to locality. And even then it wouldn't be a null pointer, it would just be a dangling pointer. The same name would still have the same address, so you could tell if two instances of names are the same name even if you don't know which name it is.

meanwhile, cryptography in Gunnerkrigg Court (an actually good comic)

This pleases my autism.

There are many unknowns here. How much information per second would she need to save? How quick is she without saving any information? How quickly can the permanent memory of a quantum computer be modified?
strikes me as a bold statement, considering how little we know about the technology.

Not true. When we humans use names, they work as pointers would in an AI. If I say
the names "Corpse Witch" and "Handstab" are simply references to refer to the concepts they represent. Since names are not unique, it might be wiser for an AI to use pointers, or at least some form of unique information sequences.

Whoops! I'm a bit shaky when it comes to the exact terminology regarding these things.

True. Remove "names" from my hypothetical.

Not a fair comparison, you oppressive shitlord! But yes, it seems good. Notice how the structure of the message actually has an emotional impact on the characters and the story. Jeph just throws in a bunch of technical concepts and calls it "hard sci-fi".

The permanent memory of a quantum computer is not special, and I think it's unlikely the main processor would be quantum, since the benefits are limited to very special algorithms. Expect "QPUs", special extra processors for quantum computing.

My point is that you need to save quite a bit of information anyway to make the thinking useful, and this extra saved information might not have much of an extra cost.

Talking about names being replaced confused me into thinking you were talking about pointers to pointers instead of just pointers, because the pointers themselves wouldn't change, just what they point to. I get what you meant now. It already seemed double.

A null pointer is a pointer containg the null value (0), a dangling pointer is a pointer with nothing attached to it.

Anything that works like a pointer could get the correlation treatment. Humans work like this all the time. You often learn the meaning of words from context, not by looking it up.

I had no idea this comic was still ongoing. The style has changed quite a bit from the football heads back when I first read it.

no kiddin

Would waifu everything from numbers 10 to 18. Don't like the 20s very much, though the 30s look better. I'm not artistically inclined enough to explain why it seems that way to me though.

The author also does pages like pic related

Would you a fire elemental, yes or YES?

never heard of it

such a relief to see competent framing after staring at Jeph's monstrocities

Funny you should mention that.

by the by what the fuck is this? what is this power? when was it explained? what did he do to the flashlight?
fuck
what the fuck is this horribly explained power?

Something about this guy is pleasing to the eye
I really like looking at the faces he draws on this one guy. He's really simple too, his nose is just a J, his mouth is barely 4 lines, his hair is a black flat top. I like looking at this, seeing this simple cartoony face in freeze frames feels like there's so much movement in the scene. Is anyone else seeing this? He also gives off a character vibe like Vincent from silent hill 3. I really really like this image.

I think shortly after her introduction she mentioned having sworn off violence altogether, hence why she's not doing merc work or anything of the sort. Can't be arsed to go look for it though.

Hey cool, a fire girl who isn't a complete bitch.

...

To be fair, Annie does have moments of bitcheyness, but usually when it happens she gets called the fuck out on it, or it fucks her over hard

She has gotten better ever since her meltdown when Ysengrin began to mentor her.

She gonna take the knot.
Which was Coyotes plan all along, for what would be more apt and ironic revenge against the Court and Surma for "stealing" Reynard?

the Court has made it quite clear they dont give a shit about Annie

As somebody who Dropped GC a long time ago, hows it going?

I dropped it because I disliked how every conflict felt like it was caused By a Misunderstanding A, and I really hate "Nature Vs Man" plots because nature fucking sucks, and whenever its portrayed as a Disneyland I wanna drop the writer into the amazons in a loincloth and no previsions.

some of the creatures in the forest are outright hostile, and the rest of them apart from the not-elves are braindead retarded

But would Coyote truly care about what they think? Considering how he is him going for the ironic twist despite it not really being "effective" is in character.

I don't really care if it happens or not, but MUH DRAMATIC IRONY means i wouldn't mind it actually doing so.

It's chugging on, they basically just pulled out the cursed arrow from Jeannes corpse, which seems to have enraged her even more, and the removal process let Annie see Kats "Mecha-Goddess" Aether Form.

Oh, and Annies dad is back with the ANGST that followed, which includes her being held back a grade, because it turns out everyone but Kat knew she was cheating of Kat.

Honestly, i think Tom just did the whole KAT IS LESBIAN thing to try to pander to I AM ALREADY NAKED, seriously that edit has been around for fucking ever and i know people find the comic from it. I know i did anyway.

The Nature Vs Technology is a bit more ambiguous, Coyote clearly has kept Annie from the "worst" parts of the forest and her Medium training introduction makes it clear it is quite brutal, and as seen with Kat, not all technology is bad either.

It's a great edit, it got me to get into the comic too. Also there was actual development leading up to and following that point, not pulling a sudden HAY IM SHEMALE over the course of three days and rolling along like nothing happened. So that's another point over QC.

Why not all of them? Are they all Herbivores? Does the magic sentient juice not extend to herbivores so that the carnivores don't have a screaming prey begging for mercy for those fur pants that Annie got?

Thats why I fucking hate nature plots. Im very much for conserving nature and the environment, but the second its not a screeching death pit full of suffering and starvation that it ACTUALLY is I go berserk.

shit dude, i dunno what they eat, only a few chapters so far have been actually set in the forest, most of the comic takes place in the court.

i found this bonus page, as you can see, they eat pretty much the same shit that we do

Au contraire. The Court cares massively about Antimony – they want her irrelevant, stuck in a position of powerlessness under their collective thumb and away from the bleeping forest. Their subordinates had to basically mutiny to keep the status quo going.

So, what did the Court do? Called in the only person with any sort of control over her they had any real influence in.

I expected porn. I didn't know people actually used the spoil tag for spoilers!

In my opinion? Because this is a future with cool things, but not far enough in the future for them to be really cool.

Menstro is an analogy to US veterans. Its easier to fab a new Menstro, than to deal with a robot with PTSD.

I doubt this. You wouldn't be able to efficiently store the information of a qubit (a decimal between 0 and 1) in a bit (0 or 1).

This may be true, but I sort of have a feeling that Jeph believes that putting "quantum" in front of something makes it magic, and he wants that magic to create consciousness. Also, he says that the qbits are stored in nanocrystals. Perhaps these can be continously grown inside the robot, just like a human brain grows by itself, which might mean there are reasons to have the entire brain consist of such structures. Perhaps it facilitates learning or perhaps it enables you to construct a cheap, small, brain that can grow to perform wonders as it continues to expand over the years.

Also, I would guess that the minimum storage size of a Qbit (a two-level quantum state) is smaller than the minimum storage size of a bit (a flip-flop). If Qbits are cheap and stable in room temperature in the QC universe, they might be the superior choice.

Not necessarily. Yes, for it to be useful it needs to have some result, but it doesn't need to be one saved to the hard-drive. For example, the result of the thought
might be an open door. Not everything in a stream of consciousness needs to be saved.

It's okay user, you can cuss here.

You don't permanently store a qubit. It's just used during computation, and collapses into regular information once you read it. The permanent memory wouldn't have special properties.

Jeph generously uses the word "quantum", but he doesn't actually say it's quantum computing. Quantum mechanics is important for regular computing too with the scale we're working at now. He might be talking about quantum computing but maybe he just put "quantum spin state" in there to make it sound impressive.

The thought "I should open that door" can be saved in a couple of bytes at most. Permanently storing that is really easy. If you use a write buffer there's practically no cost.

That makes sense.

He is, since he said they were stored in "foamed nanocrystal lattices". You wouldn't store a regular bit in an atomic lattice. Although I don't quite know what a "foamed nanocrystal" is.

Isn't that the the purpose of every part of Menstro's explanation?

Sure, but if the AI performs, say, 100 mundane tasks every minute (opening doors, moving objects, pushing keys, saying a sentence, turning your head, making a face, taking a step, turning wrenches), it adds up over time.
That's a lot of junk information to carry around, and we've yet to mention especially since there's no real upper limit to the age of AIs. There are also other things that might be even more important to save (your location, peoples expressions/apparel, weather/heat/humidity/light level), and that might take even more space.

This is permanent storage, so it couldn't be a qubit. A "foamed nanocrystal lattice" sounds like a grid of really small things, which is great to store regular information. You want it small. It's all bullshit of course, but I don't think it's quantum computing bullshit.

If a mundane task takes a hundred bytes to store (I would expect it to take much less), that's just 5 GB per year. That's very little now, and it would be even less significant post-singularity.

I don't know about this. Since, like all quantum numbers, spin is a conserved quantity, you'd just need to isolate the particle used as a Qbit. This can't be done with today's technology, but I wouldn't fault a "hard scifi" story like QC for saying it can be done.

In order to store qbits you'd probably use an atomic lattice, perhaps a crystaline structure (ex: nanocrystal in this case). If you store something in such a lattice, you will operate on a scaler where your building blocks most likely can't be approximated as existing in single states, rather than as a superposition. Thus, a "bit" would simply be a "qbit" which you would have taken extreme care to put almost entirely in state 0 or 1. Doing this would cost time, would require great care, and would make you lose information, all for no good reason.

If you want a proper, traditional bit you'd have to go to a bigger scale, I think. Perhaps it would be possible to do it by using the lattice position of an atom that is sufficiently big and has a "heavy" enough probability distribution, but I think Handstab said he uses spin states.

I forgot to say that "Foamed" was the word I didn't know. I'm not too familiar with nanocrystals either.

Actually, forget this. This would inevitably fail, because of the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

What's the point of permanently storing a qubit? Measuring it fixes its value. When would storing it for looking at it later be useful? It wouldn't be useful for storing regular information.

I didn't mean that it wasn't a qubit because that would be physically impossible, but because it would be useless.

Not necessarily. You could view the entire system as a probability distribution, and internally try to avoid what would be considered a "mesurement" within Quantum Mechanics.

For example, if you have a qbit |a> in the RAM, you could entangle it with a qbit |b> in the permanent memory, so that, using the conservation of spin, the state goes from
to
without having the wave function collapse. Something like that might work, I think, I might have made a mistake somewhere. You could then load the value from memory in the same way.

When would this be useful?

You poor thing.

What an absolute holocaust

Don't you worry.

It's about to get much worse.

10/10 Beautiful would choke on cherry cordial again.

Twitter bully! You're alive!

Long story fam, but yes. I'm alive, I'm back, and I'm ready to fuck shit up. Consider this your Christmas miracle.

Also, seeing Jeph's cronies and ass-kissers showering him with pictures of their dogs gives me uncomfortable flashbacks of that time someone tried to cheer up that kiddy fiddler Nick Nyberg with pictures of his niece, also on Twatter.

I thought jeph was pozzed already

Give him the gift that keeps on giving:
a knife rack

Actually, my entanglement example is pretty dumb, since saving the memory resets the RAM, and loading the Memory would reset the memory. It might still be possible, but you'd have to make it a bit more complex than I did here.

A bit is 0 or 1, a qbit is any number between 0 and 1. Thus, a qbit contains much more information than a bit. It's the difference between a boolean and a decimal. I have absolutely no idea how most things could/would work in a quantum computer, but if we put on our "hard scifi" glasses and allow for some speculation, storing information in qbits would be much more efficient than storing it in bits, since qbits contain much more information.

This really is Christmas!

We can only hope

Oh nuts

Well, if I'm remembering correctly, finite state machines generally use flip-flops to hold their memory. These flip-flops are made from transistors (an electronic switch), that flip on or off under specific voltage conditions (usually 0 and 5 Volts or 3.3 Volts, to represent 0 and 1). Technically speaking, when designing a circuit, you aren't exactly limited to using just these two voltage settings, you could have filters or something to detect a range of voltage values.

Granted, the complexity increases when you do this, but it's not like storing values between 0 and 1 are impossible without quantum computation or whatnot. Also worth looking into is something called Fuzzy Logic, which relies on using the values between 0 and 1 for logical decision making, and is rather important in the field of Computational Intelligence.

I think we all can agree that on a scale of 0 to 10, Q*bert lies between 0 and 1.

For the reference of anyone interested, 8archive lives(ish) again and I found treasure!
beta.8archive.moe/posts.html#!co/500756_#500756
beta.8archive.moe/posts.html#!co/470299_#470299

Bembo returns

Last year's Bembo strips

that's not really awful, I can appreciate that as a mundane joke if you change bembo's line.
FUNNY AND ORIGINAL

We're doing Trump edits of these, right? I remember we did one of your last pic. Here's a new one.

For fucks sake, he's actually doing it. I can understand doing more Blembo comics but this fucker is seriously using all the gags he already spoiled for everyone on twitter.
Doesn't he have anyone to tell him it's a bad idea to spoil your own weeks worth of content?

They're actually pretty funny. Way funnier than his normal content.

So you can say

his

normal content

is

questionable.

Please don't shoot me

This is the guy who loves having jokes explained to him.

Your setup was fine, but you flubbed the ending by apologizing. I'd have to say that your execution was questionable.

YYYEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Nice

...

It may not be awful, but it's been done a lot better.

So is Gunnerkrig Court actually good? I remember reading a lot of trashy webcomics in 2004-2008 or so, and saw it but never got into it.

Tbh I had such shit taste as a kid, but man it was nice being so easy to please.

An attempt was made.

(Classic) Penny Arcade and XKCD are good if curated. Condense thousands of strips into two hundred or so and they look good. PA suffers from dated references, but if you're in the 30-40 age range and gamed regularly from 1995-2005 it'll proabablly still work. Megatokyo can be good if you're not the type that insists on finishing everything he starts.

CAD was always shit, though. I never understood how it got popular. Even if I don't like it, I can "see" what other people like with most popular things. CAD was always empty.

On topic, add QC to the list of webcomics that I can't see why people like anymore, since circa 2013-2014. I understand reading out of habit, but so many people actually like this thing. It's so poorly done, and these people seem to be middle aged, not teenagers. And $10k/month on Patreon? Jesus.

re:CAD

People liked it because gamer reference humor, being 13, and webcomics in general being new. Imagine you are a 10 year old who doesn't relate to doonesbury or the other shit in the Sunday paper, you read some comics on Gamespy Arcade while playing Icewind Dale on your 56k modem, and you find Penny Arcade / Megatokyo. You find these comics that make jokes about the things you love, so you search out for more like them. You're too young/clueless to realize buckley is a scam artist, wikis like ED don't exist, some of the jokes are occasionally funny, and the storylines while shit are the wish fulfillment that 10-year old you loves.

you guys are talking about floating point arithmetic. computers store decimal numbers between 0 and 1 right now using decimal, but they have a limited number of significant digits (which is why in some situations you can divide a number by itself and get something like 0.999999999997).
Now if you want to store infinite precision, you got a problem, because that would take an infinite amount of space.
It's not what fuzzy logic is, but yes, modern "AI" is mostly about storing large matrices of floating point numbes between 0 and 1 and using that information to make inferences. Say you want a system that takes information about a given bird and tries to classify what species it is. It first converts a bunch of information it is told about the bird into a series of numbers (beak length, wingspan, etc. etc.) and then compares that to all the numbers it's been fed on other birds.
(these things only work on what they've previously been fed, which is why that Deep Dreams program can recognize any picture you feed it but recognizes it as either a dog, or part of a dog. It's seen millions more dog pictures than it has anything else, so it's very biased.)

So maybe I'm in for a sensible chuckle this week.

I tried

Floating point is just one possible hardware representation. It's not even a good solution when you exclusively work with numbers between 0 and 1, because it's designed to be useful for really large limited-precision numbers as well. You'd be wasting space on those.

No, they don't. They store them in binary. And note that we typically write integers as decimal numbers too. They do use a significant digit system for floating point (which you use for numbers with a fractional component or for large numbers), allocating some bits for the order of magnitude.

Only if you keep using floating point. Storing arbitrarily precise rational numbers is possible and not even that hard, just like storing arbitrarily large integers is possible. You just need to store two arbitrarily large integers and you're done. Storing irrational numbers gets trickier, but it's possible too.

Computational Intelligence is not quite the same as Artificial Intelligence.

Eh

I did almost the exact same edit when we first saw , although I kept the rest of the image (I might have changed some of the text).

You should've posted it

Even Bembo is into fatties

Bembo is going to complain about the patriarchy in tomorrow's comic isn't he?

Didn't save it.

Is this an edit to mock Jeph's SJW tendencies or …

Credit where it's due. This may be the only SJW comic to have the phrase "traditional western beauty standards" in it and not actually be a condemnation. He's not saying that it's a social construct or anything, he's just saying that it's not "otherworldly". Ironically, he's saying that those beauty standards AREN'T unrealistic.

Wonder how long it will be until the inevitable backlash from this wrongthink makes him stab his hand again.

I thought this was an edit too.

honestly handstab should drop shitgrove and just do bembo as his second comic.

He could probably just not update Alice Grove for two months before anyone noticed something was up. And after two months, who cares anymore?

Otherworldly beauty~

you are giving JJ far too much credit

She also has nonhuman ears, very high eyebrows, and wings. As much as I would like this to be the norm in The West, it still qualifies for the phrase "otherworldly".

Damn. I guarantee he didn't think of that. Does anyone have a burner account to broach that interpretation on the QC forums? I'd love to see that fire rise.

I don't have 17,000 posts and Global Moderator status so the likelyhood they take me seriously is low.

Shit, how did I not notice this?

It's a world where magic is real.

Polymorphing your pet dog into a babe for sexual purposes is probably common in Jeph's comedic fantasy world.

Yeah but these people have serious problems delineating fantasy from reality. Furthermore, they think everyone has this problem. It's the entire reason they harp on the "beauty standards" argument.

Is that the threshold where we start to use the phrase "not as bad as I remember" when talking about David Willis' porn comics?

Oh baby

Man, how spooky. It's the fucking Microsoft Paint airbrush monster.

definitely as bad as I remember

Every time

...

What if it touches a sexbot

fantastic

Maybe that's what the goth chick's deal is.

I hate Dave Willis for several reasons. But him making porn based on his characters is not one of them. I don't mind, that's his creation, he's actually making a lot of money from that. As an opportunist I think that's a pretty commendable tactic.

He's using that as an excuse. It's his version of "you only disagree with me because I'm a woman/black/tranny." Being a straight white male he has to search for an actual scapegoat. When this shit was happening, 99% of gamergate didn't even know who he was. He was obnoxiously interjecting into every Twitter conversation and at that point people Googled to see who the hell this faggot was. Obviously he's real sore about the porn so everyone used that as a cheap way to get on his nerves, just like he deserves.

LOL this captcha.

yeah, but they're unattractive.

even jeph has drawn characters I wouldn't mind seeing fuck, if he would put forth the effort required to make decent porn (something willis also has a problem with - aside from it being obvious he only looks at lesbian porn, so his heterosexual porn is rather awkward.)

Oh I see. Yeah he's act all high and mighty because he felt that theTransformers community and the Shortpacked fans are behind him. But he blundered to uncharted territory that is angry videogamers…

Eh, at least he put them behind a paygate. So only his rabid fanbase can read them.

I used to read his older comics like It's Walky when it's still about action oriented superhero story. His comic was just alright back then. He became so unbearable when he starts making Shortpacked. He became so preachy I left in disgust. That guy is the epitome of small guy big ego.

...

...

TMI Dave, what the fuck I don't need to hear about your bowel movement.

To be fair the name Dave and Willis are pretty common names for caucasian male. But yeah I feel sorry for this guy too.

tfw I thought was talking about .

I'm happy I was wrong.

WoW humor

Still funnier than his regular content. I think he's shackled way too long with the old cast, all he need is to make a new comic altogether. Let Hannelore hit that nuke button and half crazed Hannelore fucking comatose Marten as the world burn behind them.

He tried this. Multiple times. QC has been soft rebooted with the focus on Clint, Brun, Elliot, Renee, and whoever else but then Jeph lost interest in a week. Alice Grove was supposed to be a passion project but from the very start it felt like something he was being forced to do.

The last soft QC reboot was with the interns. One of them was dropped several months in and one of the others was meant to be Marten's quirky lolrandom girlfriend until Jeph was vetoed by his Patreon donors in favor of the tranny.

I mean, all Jeph has to do to turn QC into Bembo is bring back the Yelling Bird universe with Randy, Shame Orb, and Sweet Tits and then add Pintsize and maybe Steve to it. Jeph said he'd never bring Yelling Bird back but that's easy to work around. Just give Yelling Bird a mustache and say it is in fact Shouting Bird, who has nothing whatsoever to do with Yelling Bird.

What the fuck with that cuckery? Patreon was supposed to support the artist not to drive them like a fucking cattle.

But I'm surprised that he wanted to make Emily Marten SO. I actually like Emily. Unlike previous Marten hook ups she's the one with the least drama and she can make Marten actually being more assertive. She's also fleshed well as being a loner with no friend and this time Marten will be the one who bring her out from her lonesome. I'm just sick and tired seeing Marten as the butt of the joke and weakling of the group.

Here's the storyline immediately before the trappening. What happened was mass complaints on the forum, Reddit, and Twitter about how they all wanted Marten to hook up with the tranny and then Jeph dropped this like it never happened.

...

Presented without.

Oh fuck those cunts. When writer no longer have control of his own story than it's game over. Fucking fuck Jeph you fucking cuck I hope you actually read this Jeph you're a fucking disappointment now I'm glad you're divorced no one want to take care of a loser like you.

I had forgotten how mad I was that Emily never got a chance to fight for and win Marten's affection, but I didn't know it was driven by his forum. It figures that Tumblr would kill off the best Marten/_ chemistry that Jeph has ever written.

with enough reddit gold or karma or whatever, would it be possible to make him stab his hand again?

...

Bembo without Bembo

You left his shadow in.

I hoped no one would notice. I didn't until after I posted.

Wow, it's been so long some people don't actually know what happened.

That other reply is ind of mild. It wasn't just that there were mass complaints, it's that they attacked him up to and including via email, and that Jeph is such a self hating alcoholic he went on a drunken bender, took out a knife, and drove it right through his damn drawing hand.

After he got out of the hospital and got back to drawing there was a massive left field as Claire became a tranny(people forget that Claire was originally written as an ugly, condescending woman and didn't "come out" until around the incident, and conveniently became less ugly at the same time), and the black intern was written out(which was probably because Jeph got bored with her. She had character flaws and a personality beyond "random hipster").

What followed THAT was the most pained, awkward ass romance I've seen ANYWHERE. Jeph was so clearly forcing it that Martin actually grew a spine and was made to actually flirt with Claire. We got a bunch of cringeworthy shit like him randomly giving her massages and "ice cream kisses" that read less like a relationship and more like an alien guesstimating what a healthy relationship looks like. Even the "you're beautiful" page we love to mock is just the culmination of that. Old Martin was a spineless beta male but that's a line he'd never in a million years use.

The fact that the remaining QC audience didn't just keep reading, but actively bought into this shit, shows how desperate and attention starved they were. They're activley in denial and want any facsimile of a happy life they can afford, even if it's a clear fake from an alcoholic divorcee with no real friends and a dog that hates him.

Not just around, five strips after recovering from handstabbing.

That said, the attempted Emily pairing was well after the second handstabbing. It was a new wave of complaints, two years after the time frame you're talking about. Yeah, it's still connected, but a long time apart. The Claire X Marten 1.0 thing was dead in the water after they apologized to each other for no reason after the wedding.

Oh man that's sadder than what I expected. He really lost it huh.

I always thought none of that Claire courting bullshit made any sense.
Like, one of the last scenes before "You're beautiful" and Martin presumably getting fucked up the ass was him helping Claire scratch his head.
This was forced to look all romantic and sensual and shit.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't see anything erotic or sensual at all about someone digging and scraping their fucking fingernails across my scalp.

It would even have made more sense if Claire said, "Gee, my balls sure ache from wearing these girl's jeans that aren't made for my physique!" and Marten offers to help rub them.

The handstab and divorce were months apart. Even before that the quality drop in the comic was noticeable. I guess Jeph has "recovered" but he seems to be in a state of arrested apathy.

Personally, I think the sad state of Alice Grove is a reflection on Jeph's inability to progress. It was supposed to be a rebirth, a phoenix free of burden of QC his ex-wife, and whatever else was weighing him down. It ended up being that poorly assembled wood framework your high school friend calls his basement renovation project that's been going on since shortly after you graduated high school. He'll finish that soon after you take that European megatour he's been talking about since 1996.

Social grooming (aka monkey bonding) is a primate thing and something many find pleasurable, both sexes. The act itself isn't so unusual but the sudden and unprompted nature was. There was no buildup, just a sudden switch flipped in Marten's head for no reason. He acted totally out of character as he aggressively persued Claire after two years (real time) of showing no romantic interest. It was like season 7 of a once popular sitcom randomly pairing characters in an attempt to recover ratings.

Jesus, when John fucking Campbell is taking the piss out of you, you've got problems.

John Campbell the Evil Dead guy?

That's Bruce Campbell. John Campbell is a webcomic artist who ran a kickstarter, and then went insane and destroyed all the backer rewards after getting hassled by the backers expecting their rewards.

Oh That fucker. Look I understand depression and stuff but people pay their own hard earned money for his books and he really need to respect that. But still, salute to him for making fun of QC.

IN A GUEST STRIP.

Which kind of makes him a cunt.

Eh, I still think that he's a fucking cunt for his last stunt. So yeah I pull my salute back.

Do you have some links?

Great! I'm still not sure I quite understand why "TEH" is supposed to be funny, even to hipsters, and now there are two new text shirts I don't even understand the beginning of.

Wait, was that how it happened? As I understand it there were two stabbenings. The first was an accident, the second happend because he drew the fatty with glasses in a bikini. Have I misunderstood something?

Smif = Smith, the lesbian college capitol of the USA in Northampton.

No, you got it right.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band. They were cool fifteen years ago and they hate Israel for the wrong reason.

Comic 3380:
Comic 3381:

So he didn't stab himself because people wanted Martin to date the tranny, as seems to imply?

So I assume they're just for hipsters nowadays?

Apparently it has a QC wiki entry:
questionablecontent.wikia.com/wiki/Smif_College

No, that was two years later, 2014. Handstab 2.0 was in 2012. Handstab 1.0 was in 2006.

Also, the tranny reveal wasn't until after the second handstabbing, so no one knew yet.

Okay okay can someone bloody tell us all the actual timeline of both stabbenings and the real reasons? We can hate but we must do it right..

I'm not good on the first stabbening, but the second stabbening was the big one in 2012.
Jephy posts 2307. "Kearsley" bitches him out on his tumblr for not making Marigold fat enough. Jephy chugs a bottle of whiskey and tries to jack off his cutlery. Takes ~2 weeks off - picture of Claire, guest strips and bad puns go up in the meantime. Strip 2318 is the next non-guest strip and The Trappening is strip 2323, aka Jephy's end of week shitty plot twist that has absolutely no relation, no sir to the "insulting women" issues in tumblrbeast's rant.

I still can't get over how little he cares about dating a tranny. It's like >she said she's got red hair. Even if he thinks >she's a woman, doesn't he even contemplate the possibility of ever having children?

That's because Marty boy himself is a Cuntboy and trans-white (vitiligo).
That's the next handstab reveal, 2017.

They're enlightened young progressives. Children would just be for abortin' anyway.

What a bigot!

I wonder if we'll ever get to see some sort of abortion in QC. That would be really progressive, but jeph is probably too much of a coward to do so, lest he'd be yelled at and stab his hand again. Is there some robot equivalent to aborting children?

This is an interesting idea. Let say two robots are in love with each other and want "offspring" So they make a copy of their AI and merged them. Since this is a complex AI merging it will take time to create a new AI from the combination of the two AIs. Let say between 2 months to several years. If both or one of the parents decided to abort the merging process will it still considered an abortion?

Even in-universe Jeph's stand-in rapes dogs.

Has meme magic gone too far??
NO_

I actually like this one. It got puppy!

Porn when?

I know it's not eactly what you were decribing, and it's not technically AI related, but here's something similar.
Computational Intelligence is slightly different from AI, but has many real world applications and is used more than people realize. It's awesome shit.

mathworks.com/discovery/genetic-algorithm.html

Well it said that it pick its genetic choice randomly, but there's also study about how computer is actually not well versed for making random choice.

After a google search, this engineering.mit.edu/ask/can-computer-generate-truly-random-number can we really trust them to pick a true random choice?

Well, no, they're called Pseudo-Random Number Generators for a reason. rand() isn't that great, but it works for most applications. There's a variety of better algorithms out there, and you can make and test your own pretty easily in Matlab and whatnot.

The point of my post here was that genetic algorithms feature "parents" and "offspring". Although, abortion in this case would refer to the outright deletion of a child in the population group of possible solutions; thereby reducing the effectiveness of the process in the short- and long-term.

best random is urandom

What?

STAB
MYSELF
IN
FIST

(double check 'em)
I maintain to this day, and will until my last breath, that Claire was never supposed to be an actual tranny until that very strip.

I remember back on cuckchan gogin to worksafe gifs and lurking in the threads about Dodger Leigh. Never even heard of her prior to them, but just watching the previousl completly unknown drama unfold was interesting. Who she was dating, how fat she was, anaons pining after her. It was neat seeing all the drama and bullshit from a almost complete outsider pererspective. Never heard of any of these comics, matter of fact this is my first time on Holla Forums ever. Just thought id jkepp you posted.

Wait a minute!

Where's doc!? We forgot to take our daily dose!

Oh shit. We got someone going into withdrawals over here.

With the right hardware a computer can pick a truly random number, but that's not really relevant for this particular problem.

For a genetic algorithm pseudo-random numbers are fine, as long as they're properly generated. The point is that it's unpredictable enough not to be biased towards some choice or some repetition of choices or some other meaningful pattern, and that's easily accomplished.

Most of the interest in truly random number generation is for extremely paranoid cryptography, because you want to be sure your adversary can't guess what key you randomly generated. It's not at all relevant for genetic algorithms.

Linux (and most other modern Unix-likes) have a special file, /dev/urandom, that you can read from to get a stream of random data that's created by feeding hardware noise through a special algorithm. It's partially pseudo-random but considered good enough for cryptography.

Shit, get a liter of saline 1uick!

Quick*

I got you bro

Thanks

...

post his sick bantz

Thing is, I don't know where they are. Milo's still banned from Twitter and if he has a submarine account I don't know what it is. I'm guessing this has something to do with virtue signalling to Zoe Quinn since she's in the replies and also retweeting SJWs ironically saying to not give attention to him while making several posts in a row about him.

I think I've spotted the fuckboy who got dunked on.

Well, that's certainly getting dunked on. With cash.

As much of an annoying fag Milo is, he's certainly more influential than good old handstab

Did he ever do that scholarship thing he had going or is it 100% confirmed scam now?

He claimed yesterday he finally found an investor for it and thus that it's getting there or something

You mean his parent?

You guys ever wonder if we shouldn't just kidnap Shelby? I mean, on one hand, we'd be robbing a mentally unstable individual of his sex-toy companion animal, but on the other hand, I personally would rather be dead than have Jeph in control of my food and water supplies.

I'm pretty sure Jeph's "models" are himself in the bathroom mirror…except he reduced hers to B-cup.

A number of anons here think Bembo is a significant improvement over QC–and I don't disagree–but, really, have these really been been "a treat"? They just have better setups than QC, and Jeph allows Bembo to do whatever is necessary for the punchline. It's still Jeph.

Yes, we know. But since his basic content are utter shit stuff like Bembo is considered an improvement. It's pretty obvious we're not going to put his comics on the level of Calvin and Hobbes or Dilbert.

...

Its kinda strange that the lizard queen is the most naked one there.

Most lizardy as well. The rest look like fish-eel men.

Hunger is the best spice.

Why does he have such a bubble butt? I can understand having well-toned glutes, but that's a thicc girly ass and his leg position only enhances the femenine vibe.

Jeph isn't already losing his nerve over drawing a masculine character, is he?

The guy across the hall from me in college had the most feminine bubble butt. He was such a meathead, too. I pointed it out to everybody and no one could unsee it afterwards.

The guy just tickled wickled a doggie woggie in the previous strip. What do you think?

I will always regret that Clinton didn't absorb Clarence's fetus in the womb.

I wonder if Clinton ever dresses up like Clarence and sneaks into bed with Martin.

...

Jeph draws men walking like that. He's a retard

Wonder if this'll ever leak.

Wat

He reached $10 this month so there's a bonus strip. Here's the last and only one.

$10k

Good God , I miss editfag prime. I hope he comes back someday. That is, if he didn't perish last winter. I can't remember if he said he'd come back someday or if he was just gonna lurk forever.

He wasn't even confident about his health. He said he'd still check into Steven Universe General and post his episode review blogs but I don't go there so I don't know if he followed up.

If he manages to live through the ass-cancer or whatever the hell happened, he'll probably just become a plain old user. He said so in one of the SU threads, way back when.

I go to /sugen/ every once in awhile to check. Nothing so far, but I'm not really surprised. I don't think there's any way he could catch up at this point without cutting his wrists. He was right about one thing, though: that cartoon is some of the most evil, cuck-training shit I've ever seen. I only started watching it so I'd understand the reviews, and I got the hell out when he quit because I could feel my testosterone levels disappearing.

Fucking Jeph. That's a runner's leg. What's the point of having one spatula designed to make you run fast when your other leg is normal? Better question: why the fuck does Clinton have a fully-bionic hand but that bitch is making like one half of Oscar Pistorius?

He should have just done a conventional leg. Modern prosthetic limbs look pretty fucking cool, like something out of Deus Ex.

What is beyond cucked? Beyond pozzed?

Eunuch? Castrato? Neutered? Spayed?

Burched.

didn't he post this last year

Kek, nice

Now that's the Jeph I usually see. He looks like a fucking cattle in this one.

Yeah, it's not the new one. His Patreon hasn't hit $10k since they removed non-paying people from the claimed figure, which happened about a year ago.

I'd donate $20 if he'd start SUBTRACTING comics.

It's like a bully mating call.

What panel is it?

Why don't people just punch him? He can't possibly have any bodyguards. Yes, you'd be banned from the convention for life, but at least you'd never have to pay for a drink, ever again.

He neglected to say.

I guess the Canadian e-girlfriend is still around after all. That or Jeph's been dating someone else for a week and rushed to engagement before she figures him out.

Proposing to your reflection while wearing a red wig doesn't count as getting engaged, Jeph.

He never stops calling for me, but it's not him I keep coming back for.

God I missed you Twitterbully!

If it's a shitty panel, we get to make fun of him for being a shitty artist.

If it's a good panel, we get to use it as definitive proof that he is phoning it in, since he's capable of drawing better than he does.

There's no way to win with that statement.

This is why I don't rely on one single panel to hate him. I used to follow his comics for years before he cucked out to the SJW faggots. His evolution progress is like:

...

You cheeky cunt

You forgot the gradual degradation of his art over time.

Gradual and continuing, AKA the perpetual "It looked so much better two years ago!" effect.

I actually want to disagree. While he's still shit, he has technically improved over himself, as in everyone doesn't look like a goblin and they have jawlines that don't make them all look like crescent moon people.

He slowly improved up until the snakebite arc and the party at the lakehouse. After he stabed his hand, his art quality took a nosedive that had nothing to do with his tissue damage.

hey remember when Clinton was actually having an interesting character arc with IPP and then got thrown on the bus for that fat guy with the bandaid on his nose

Remember how a timeskip happened out of nowhere in the worst way possible and then the comic has been nothing but starting new plotlines that never resolve ever since?

Are you saying that Jeph emulating Tite Kubo now? Just keep adding new characters when writer block set in?

At least with Tite and Bleach he got Jump Comic and their editors that can say "Okay, that's enough, time to wrap up the story!" but not Jeph.

You guys just can't handle all of Jeph's ideas.

They did say, that is why Bleach is over.

Didn't painanon/editfag prime have a wife and kids?
Hope he didn't die

Yeah, but Tite is part of the shonen manga genre golden trinary. He's one of the three biggest money maker for Japan comic magazine today. The editors don't outright say "stop this now!", they simply on the sideline calming Tite from fucking shit up and giving hints for wrapping as many sub plots. But they kept him going for a long time because the money still pouring in. I believe Tite himself that decided to end the series.

Oh, right, this is still going on.

Remind me of this

That's a very ironic copyright.

This is fucking retarded on so many levels.

This is fucking hard sci-fi on so many levels.

So she's going to take out a loan that she can't afford in order to let a dozen or so robots share a single outlet in a 10 x 15 room where they can't get quality repairs. This is her way of overthrowing the woman who built her operation from the ground up and turned it into a place where disenfranchised AI can trust their bodies to her.

How is this a good idea?

She's planning to be PETA but with robots including the part where she puts them down en masse because she can't afford to take care of them

Because she's going to go in for a loan, and The Man is going to point out that she doesn't have any income, and then they will then go to war against the oppressive banking systems as well.

If this happened I hope Hannelore saw through all the bullshit and decided to nuke the world.

...

Fayes head keeps changing shape and her nose gets bigger.

It'll never happen, but it would be great if they recover the memories and "bring corpse witch to justice" just to find that those memories include Menstro stamping on a bunch of infants and gunning down non-combatants as they try to run away.

I just noticed, this story doesn't have the mundane character. They have everyone bring up the points that break things down, like "Well this isn't a problem because of this" and then another character comes in right after and says, "That may be, but you didn't think of this," which leads to, "oh darn, that"
This story needs a lot of things of course, but he needs at least one character that puts things in perspective at the very least. "What are you guys worrying about? We always pull through these things, this is par for the course, we have a problem, we solve it." A character to level with the reader that, "yeah this problem is a little dumb or cliche, this isn't that different from their previous struggles." It needs to be about everything they've done and then you can put it in perspective on a larger scale to say, "this is the same as our other problems, but we shouldn't treat this lightly, because this is how it's different than those other times." There's never that moment where the writer says, "Hey, you may not know why this is a big deal, so let me fill you in. It makes this character feel this way and it has changed this about them, and the consequences for not getting that important thing are this this and this, including prolonged feelings that the character was already experiencing." Then you think, "Well why do I care what happens to this character" and that's where it all crumbles because none of these characters are people you want to see fight and survive; IPP was the closest thing to that we got because her fucking home and workplace burned down, even as a last panel joke. You think, "Well shit that character has known loss and they didn't really deserve it, I want them to take back their life and get shit back together." These arcs would be great if they all deprived the characters in some way that was actually explained to the readers, but there's stagnation, something happens, then they get over the hill after a dramatic scene. I don't feel anything for menstro because she says she's a war bot, but she acts like a teenaged girl like the rest of them, and all of them do act as though their problems would even affect anything even among them, but it always just boils down to absolutely nothing happening. Slice of hand is fine as a genre, but even jojo made a point to have the characters interact in a mundane way when they weren't directly in the line of fire; in part 7 even Johnny and Illius's moments when they're just talking are the best because it tells you who they are as people, Gyro just wants to help people and make em laugh, Johnny wants to learn to use his legs again and he wants to win so he can prove to his dad that he's not worthless.
How the fuck am I supposed to root for a robot that can crush other robots into scrap piles when the thing she's fighting against is a smaller, less combat suited robot? I get that she's acting like a smug asshole, but if menstro was smart she'd say, "Fuck this, give me that key or I smash you to bits." If the key was going to be fucking lost anyway, it's better remove the person causing you pain in the first place. And you can't even say legality would come into play because she was already running an illegal underground robot fighting ring, the most menstro would be charged for is unethical dismantling of a robot, which could then be argued that it was ethical to prevent that robot from harming other robots or people. Problem fucking solved.
That's why you need a mundane character, as of right now there's no perspective, there's just, "Hey, feel bad for this character right now."

Can anyone remember a serious, value-related difference of opinion between the characters ( that didn't immediately get resolved)? I can't.

There was that one time with a broadsword.

The Dora vs. Sven thing took months to resolve but that's a technicality since it wasn't mentioned in that span and was immediately resolved upon when it was mentioned.

Okay wait, joke answers aside dora's drinking problem was at least a small arc.

I mean, I agree, man; but try to brake down the wall of text next time.

...

Jeph confirmed for not hating 2016 enough, he's letting it spill over into 2017.

It means that the copyright is up and we can buy the rights to his fictitious hipsters out from under him.

We will TAKE OUT A LOAN.

...

Worked for like one week then quit because MUH hands.

I know everyone here knows that, but it needs to be restated every time that poster is posted, cause that poster is spitting on the ones who actually did it.

Just like Jeph, in other words.

Is the twitter job a demand or a supply market? Because I'd like to try my hand at that position. I'm shit at drawing, shit at composition and can't make OC even if my life was at stake.
But I'd still like to do my part for the sake of the thread.

Well, there's job for being twitter PR agent for companies. Like Denny's for example.

But what I think he meant was taking on the role of twitterbully.

You can become Twitter Bully, but there's only one way.

You know a song is super catchy when you saw a pic and the song starts playing in your head immediately.

Video because I must share the suffering.

It's horse shit, the AIDs patients it going to take the money and run.

I want this job.

Imagine what would happen if they put some shitposter in charge of the company's social media…

...

You're only allowed to have one of those, m8. Pick one and move along.

More like Jeph can't into math and didn't know which days would fall in 2017. We'll probably be seeing a week of 2016 unless he goes back and corrects them.

I always wondered how such a B movie managed to get Queen. I guess Freddie needed money for AIDS treatment.

They got Queen onboard the same way David Cage got David Bowie involved in Omikron. The premise sounds fucking awesome and they wanted to be a part of it.

Not a difference of opinion. I made the comment because I noticed that every single "good" person has the exact same ideology, values, and idea of what is right, good, and just.

Underrated comment.

I'm fairly certain that's just fat.

...

Something about Menstro inspires headlocks.

Out of curiousity, I mashed the Back button on the site looking for strips in which they interacted. Here is the sum total of their friendship development:

3060 - Hannelore and Bubbles are introduced at a party. An awkward scene occurs.

3141 - Bubbles walks into the coffee shop and Hannelore sees her.
3143 - Hannelore is still trying to figure out how to respond to previous awkward scene.
3146 - Hannelore offers Bubbles some tea for AIs.
3147 - Bubbles drinks Hannelore's tea and hallucinates a unicorn.
3148 - Hannelore offers to get Bubbles more tea.
3150 - They all stand around and watch what's-her-name knock herself out with a mallet.
3151 - Bubbles asks Hannelore to make pegasus tea for next time.

3247 - Bubbles revisits the shop and Hannelore presents her with a reinforced chair to sit on.
3248 - Hannelore gives Bubbles tea again.
3252 - Faye storms out of the shop and Bubbles follows, thanking Hannelore for the tea.

3387 - They're such good friends that Hannelore will pull strings to do a thing to undo the thing that Bubbles asked to have done in the first place.

This is what it means to hard sci-fi.

Even if English isn't my mother tongue, I promise I won't let you down.
Scratch that, I'd rather promise that I will trigger Jeph enough to block me.

I don't want to be twitterbully, I just want to bully Jeph into an alcoholic relapse.

By the looks of Menstro on that couch, her legs seem to have shrunk.
And maybe I'm just being petty, but from all the shading I'm not entirely sure where the light source is.
By the looks of it, a bulb should be hanging right in the middle of them.

This sounds like an algorithm she personally created/modified, which is a really bad idea unless you're a cryptography expert and have an audience containing a lot of cryptography experts who spent considerable time trying to break it. I'm sure it was meant to make it sound like she's super duper good with cryptography, but it gives the impression of an amateur fucking around and possibly making things insecure. "Don't roll your own" is a very basic rule of cryptography.

Indeed. There are only a handful of algorithms worth using, and most of them were AES finalists.

Given how copy-pasty handstab is with his characters, I've just kinda come to see the supposed "light shading" as mere designs on their clothing. There is no light source, their world is just stuck in "full bright" mode during daylight hours.

Does anyone have that one image that shows how Jeph does his 'shading' with a photoshop plugin that just creates all the shading automatically in the brainless unthinking manner that only a computer can achieve?

Once you see that image it goes a long way towards helping you understand why QC looks the way it does. It's stupendously lazy.

...

...

That's the shit, right there.
Yeah, it allows you to do each comic in 45 minutes. Wouldn't want to sprain your hand putting in too much effort now, would we?

I think he may not use this method anymore since switching to Manga Studio, but that's happened in the last year or so. Jeph used this method from circa 2004 to 2015. What a long time to stagnate.

And he only switched to Manga Studio because it's made for comics and thus has even more auto-fill type tools available.

She looks like Marten in the last two panels.

Oops.

...

Maybe Handstabis just projecting his white-knighting trough Hanners.

"Oh this is a Strong Female Protagonist in need of sympathy. Look how even Hanners gives her unconditional hugs."

A real hard sci-fi story wouldnt even have Hanners trying to break the encryption (at least not without a good heap of the source data) because she would know it would need more energy than the planet can produce to pull it off.

I'm betting $10 that Menstro's story arc is resolved through the AI equivalent of a hypnotherapist to "reconstruct her memories using trace data" or something similar.

Bonus points if the process requires her to relive those memories as she gets them back.

that would require jeph to draw new locations

We all know Jeph reads these threads, so congrats, you just helped him get out of the corner he'd written himself into.

I really do hope he rips off my idea. Even the most hardcore fan will struggle to defend his "Hard SciFi" once he brings a robot spirit medium into the mix.

Even better would be if that autist Hanners solves the problem by beaming down a magnet to slap on Menstro's head and make her *really* forget.

No knowledge of the memories then she won't care about them; perfect.

Now that I think of it, that would be a good outcome and at least cause a bit of genuine drama…

Hanners calls in her dear ol' daddy to solve all their miniscule problems, and he does so by removing all memory of those memories existing.
Of course the hipsters will all cry and whine but he could respond along the lines of,
"It was the simplest solution to the problem - CW has leverage, so remove its value and the leverage is worthless."
"But muh feels for muh robo-frend! :( " they shall cry.
"Your 'friend' you say…? Why would you *want* your friend to suffer trauma? Why force them to live with something they deeply regret? Such is the benefit of a digital mind; they don't have to suffer grief and anguish like we do. They don't need therapy or coping mechanisms. If a part of their memory causes them problems - remove it! Stop trying to impose your weak, biological limitations on your 'friend'."

And in the meantime, Menstro is perfectly happy.

Honestly, I want him doing that to find out later its not even that.

Like, shes never been a warrior, thats just a lie Corpse Witch fabricated. I dont know why else you'd need a superstrong armored bot, though.

so you can have it fight other superstrong armored bots and then have other robots bet on the fights.

Oh god.
Menstro was built by CW for illegal fighting.
But Menstro just didnt…. DO IT. Or did it too well.
So CW took her off the scene and just has her doing menial work.

Alternatively, Menstro was a league career fighter of some sort… (maybe direct-controlled by humans) before needing to be removed from the scene.

Me too an oops.

Menstros face is making me very uncomfortable

Then it's working.

Is it possible that a non-standard algorithm would be difficult to break either because you can't easily identify which one it is (and thus how to best work to crack it), or because the algorithms standardized for the most common encryption types are less efficient on the modified encryption? I'm probably just talking out of my arse, but I'm curious.

Regarding the
comment, it stands to reason that all modern QC cryptography experts are AIs. If so, Corpse Witch, being interested in cryptography, could potentially have the software to simulate most of them in her head.

Why the hell would CW need encryption in her job anyways?

She needs encryption to make sure that the fight videos are only viewed by the right people.

That seems like something she would use asymmetric cryptography for. She used symmetric cryptography to help Menstro. Again, not an expert, but I would assume that the same
could not be used for both.

The chief problem and inevitable disappointment is that there is no way that this is concluded with Faye's overexcited emotional quest being wrong and punching Bossbot in the face ending up to be 100% completely justified and moral.

They'll probably get the police to lock Corpse Witch away forever and set up a community house to rescue all the poor disadvantaged refugee AIs, who all were blackmailed with hidden memories, every one of them, but Hannelore solves them all offscreen because Encryption is Magic, and then Faye will propose to Menstro and everyone stands around clapping and saying "Congratulations!" and QC readers will be emotionally moved to tears and applauding right along with them and Jeph will tweet about how he just had to give everybody a nice gift to counteract all the icky gross things happening to in America in (current year).

This is called security by obscurity, and although it can be helpful it's something you should, as a rule, never depend on. If knowing how your system works is enough to break it it's deeply flawed. Modifying an accepted algorithm (which is presumably widely considered to be very secure, with no known weaknesses) is just not worth it. You gain a little security by obscurity and you're likely to lose everything by accidentally introducing a weakness. Meanwhile, the original algorithm would have been unbreakable as far as everyone knows.

You're better off just increasing your key size.

In that case the other cryptography experts and the adversaries have similar resources (like those simulations) available, so it scales up. The reputation of cryptography algorithms is not based on airtight mathematical proofs of correctness, but on people throwing everything they have at it and not managing to break it.

How do you know?

Great. Now I'm going to have Hamilton nightmares.

Lived experiences, dehumanizing, invalidating emotions, memory imperialism, take your pick.

The problem with non-standard algorithms is that cryptanalysys is an advanced study and its techniques are very likely to weaken, if not totally break, your ostensibly clever cipher. There are very few people who are qualified to create secure ciphers, and you tend to see their names over and over again over the course of decades, e.g. Bruce Schneier, a security "celebrity" who wrote the Blowfish, Twofish, and Threefish ciphers.

I'd buy that in some other context but this is a world where robots have PTSD and can't control their rage and make butt jokes. It's not inspiring confidence.

Boss bot is probably distributing password protected 7-Zips on USENET or TOR.

It'll be even worse. Right before the showdown, Jeph will abandon this storyline for six months and then this discussion will happen:

I for one welcome Cube Witch.

If this was good drama, we would cut to a panel of Corpse Witch listening to their whole conversation via a bug that she planted in Menstro's chassis the first time she did repairs.

Let us meme it

Or maybe an Ex Machina situation where Faye wanting to be helpful and friendly to Bubbles backfires terribly.

You mean cut/paste a punch of shots of Corpse Witch into a page and insert the dialogue as radio chatter?

Obviously. Wouldn't want Jephy boy to strain his hand now would we?

Faye's actions are so obviously BAD DECISIONS that there cannot be a good ending without her assistance becoming a blight on Menstro.

Lived experiences, dehumanizing, invalidating emotions, memory imperialism, take your pick.

But see, it's not the objections that matter; it's that we have someone who treats the AIs as the machines they are.
Something that ties into this "poor, downtrodden AIs" story that we never really see.

They said that it's simply an encrypted filesystem. That's the sort of thing you'd use symmetric cryptography for.

It's a reasonable assumption for now, but does Jeph understand that?

You use public key cryptography rather than symmetric when you need to pass data across an untrusted medium, e.g. the internet, to an entity who may also be untrustworthy. If you're in control of both encrypting and decrypting, then you use symmetric encryption.

lol @ the idea that someone could be offended by this milquetoast comic. I don't see what he's talking about so I think it's just attention seeking. The big tipoff is that anyone complaining about drama is always the source of drama.

I don't think he's talking about his own comic. He's probably talking about someone who got bitched out by some tumblrtard or whatever, irrespective of how non-kosher their work is.

Good catch. God, I can't think this way. The idea of virtue signalling "sympathetic exasperation" is totally foreign to me. My reaction would be, "Well, sounds like you had a bad day," and then I'd go about my business. I mean, this is almost certainly a "Twitter friend" we're talking about, right? Not like his sister or whoever actually close to him.

god, I hate those fucking goony pun display names.

I thought he hated Bon Iver because he charges $35 for T-Shirts or something.

...

The fuck does "48 hours til shelby" mean?

...

My guess? Vid related, but in reverse.

This is pretty much just Jeph admitting he completely forgot Station existed, and when his fans pointed it out, he shat out this strip of Station flaccidly explaining why this melodrama can't be solved in a concise, logical fashion.
Also is it me or did Hanner's nose get bigger recently?

He's looking forward to fucking his dog and posting the footage onto /zoo/.

The noses and heads seem in a constant state of flux, lately.
Same with Menstro's body.

I can only assume he's been wracking his brain for a believable conclusion to this bullshit to the extent it's fucking up his style - he is *that* nervous.

Also… The hologram says the memory encryption, performed at Menstro's request, is the worst crime ever and warrants being shot from orbit.
I can't help but wonder if they omitted the part about illegal robot fighting from their story.

Oh fuck.

Guise, I… I think Jeph SHARES CUSTODY OF THE DOG!

Station's a male feminist.

...

I was going to greentext some of the salient points in that video and rip them apart, but so much of it just makes me angry…

Jeph. He is an arrogant cocksucker. *No-one* needs money to publish some of their comic ideas when they already run a well-fucking-established webcomic.
That is purely time management and prioritising what he wants to do the most and feels most confident about.
Money will *not* help with this beyond giving him something to jerk off on.
And he is such an immensely arrogant shit head, so far up his own arse that he's inside-out, to think that his *opinions* on music, coupled with a bit of entirely subjective nostalgia, are somehow so powerful and well-informed that they are worth *paying* to hear.
This is something that can be done for absolute free on *any* message board, forum or comments section.

The only thing that makes me more angry than his delusions is that there are, somehow, people out there monumentally stupid enough to give him money for this.

I'd say it was all some sort of expertly-acted scam to fleece morons of their parents' money, but I really don't think he's that intelligent.

There must be something seriously wrong with Jeph if he has his dog periodically taken away from him, presumably for its own psychological health.

Not only that, but even with $3000 it barely updates once a week.

Based on some of his Twitter comments, it sounds like he doesn't even deliver half the time. He's said stuff like "I'm thinking of getting back into writing the music columns." He's changed the Patreon hangout to "custom doodle" because one takes two hours and the other takes a few minutes between all the Patreons. I'd hope you at least get a new shat out 45 second doodle per month but knowing Jeph it's redeemable the first month only.

Not even. Jeph has had a bye week practically every month since dropping from "twice per week" to "once per week". It's basically a 3 strip per month thing, 4 if the month has 5 Saturdays. Every month has a holiday, conference, travel day, sick day, mental health day, whatever. Fucker is being paid $1000 per strip and they look like ass.

QC got robbed. Nary a mention in the worst categories. I can live with the Willis nomination, though. I will say this about both Jeph and Willis, however: I can't even be arsed to hate on Dresden Codak. I hear Homestuck is absolute shit these days but I could never bear to read more than 5 pages of it so I wouldn't know the difference.

Oh and compare Lackadaisy with Alice Grove, lol.

What's so fucking frustrating about Jeph (and other artists like Willis or Kate Leth or whatever) is that they feel FORCED to add a joke at ALL TIMES.
You see it in DoA regularly : David starts actually hoping to make a sad story. To make one of his characters go through something painful/difficult, to give them background, stuff like that. And weirdly, they do it ! They manage to bring up something somewhat creative that actually COULD make the entire thing much more interesting and deep… and personal.
And then they add the gag.
"Dad… you almost killed me and my girlfriend and you are my only family so I can't accept tha- NOT ! FUCK YOU DADDY ! HERE'S A DOUBLE FLIP-DA-BURD LOL"
The most excruciating one was when that same girl came back home after years of being away, and started remembering her life as a kid there… including when she found her own mother who'd killed herself.
Literally 4/5th of the entire page was him trigger warning his readers about suicide and how everything's gonna be alright and I understand if you don't want to read and it'll be okay and really don't worry and then he shows a soft, simple but touching recollection from the girl of that past, culminating to that death… and then a picture of a kitten.
Literally a picture of a fucking kitten
next to some more "it's okay don't worry it's alright".

The issue with "artists" like Jeph is that they are cowards at their own jobs. They are terrified of taking risks and making choices and telling anything that THEY might enjoy doing. And the result is a heartless, weak, idiotic product that doesn't please anyone but is vapid enough to allow other idiots to at least forget for twenty seconds everyday that they're still alive.

That's like comparing the olympics with the special olympics. Extremely funny but you just know it's not fair by any measure.

I'd say the total lack of a mention for QC is a good sign of how irrelevant it has become. It's the Garfield of webcomics. It even has lasagna!

And this is the core argument for these threads, really. It's not that Jeph is a vain faggot with delusions of adequacy and a fetish for red transsexuals. It's not that his "art" could be reproduced in 30 seconds by an amputee dog. It's not that he'd be fired from Bazooka Joe comics for his inability to copy down a hundred year old joke correctly.

It's how fucking much he gets paid for his useless shit that inevitably ties us all together as siblings of rage against him. All the edits, bullying, omits, anti-fanart…all of it is us screaming unto an unfair and uncaring universe that this fat, closeted, hipster fuck is making money hand over fist for doing a shit job and deserves some kind of Biblical plague upon him. He is everything that is wrong with the world.

You cheeky cunt.

That faggot is a hard left shitdick and his taste is questionable.

But he is right about Alice Grove:

Faye seems much too comfortable with the idea of murdering her ex-boss and anyone who happens to be standing nearby. What about their basic AI human rights? Robot lives matter.

Silly you, only the good minorities count.

Wow, the art gets even shittier. I realize Jeph's in France with his portable Cintiq with the 7 year old battery he thought would never die but I'd think he'd remember how to draw Hannelore regardless.

Also, can we get an answer on these memories? Does Menstro want them or not?
These fucking memories are simultaneously worth more than 9001 ounces of gold and 9001 Bitcoins combined and more toxic than then neutron bombs.

If Bubbles is fine with not recovering the memories, wouldn't that just be the situation as it was already? And the only thing complicating that is Faye going dipsy-doodle emotional outburst with the face punching and deciding that something *must* be done no matter how illogical or futile it is?

So… Did Hannelore go home to ask the hologram questions and decide to change her outfit and style her hair before reporting back with this potentially life-changing news?

Or did she just walk into another room, or something?

I assume it's the next day

It's the next stage in his bid to make literally everyone a fat dyke.
You can see her trending almost the same way Faye did years ago

I legit couldn't tell that was Hannelore before I remembered the context. Is it?

Holy shit I have never seen anyone go so off-model so quickly

I understand that artists gradually drift over time as they change their artistic style but this happened in just a few strips. The fuck is Jeph doing? Is he hitting the booze again? Will we be seeing Hand Stabbing Episode III sometime soon?

I understand all that. I would and do use symmetric encryption for files. The point is that Jeph possibly knows enough about cryptography to understand what public key cryptography is, but not enough to understand when it's appropriate. You can't assume that a cryptographically sensible choice was made, especially when other insensible ones have been mentioned already.

Jesus, this is the first time I've actually heard his voice and he sounds like he's liable to burst into tears at any moment.

wow, page 10 already

Pretty useless advice, Jeph. Twitter supports only SMS as the second factor. CDMA (Verizon, Sprint) is vulnerable to cloning and everything is vulnerable to randos claiming to have lost their phones to minimum wage store employees who still wouldn't give a shit even if you told them they were being lied to.

Also, Wikileaks didn't say they're releasing passwords and cell phone numbers. It looks like they're cross referencing public figures on Twitter with other publicly available information. Whatever possible information Wikileaks may have gleaned from Twitter they did months ago so changing your personal info in a panic now accomplishes nothing unless you also move.

Shelbs prepares the anus.

Pleasure to completion.

...

For your viewing pleasure

That is the face of a dog which no longer whines; she has long since realised there is no solace from this torment.

Bones, toys, biscuits… they are but lures. Bait balanced at the mouth of the pit of suffering which feeds on the mind, body and soul.

The words, "good dog" should not elicit such a sense of helplessness. When she hears them, Shelby knows she must do things…
Things that no dog should have to do.

I'm currently looking after a friend's brother's dog which was quite sadly abused horribly earlier in its life. She'd get beaten with a broomstick whenever she did even the slightest thing wrong, as a result you have to put her in the yard whenever you sweep the floors or she thinks she's going to get a beating. She's also scared of cats - the friend's brother's wife (now ex-wife thankfully, awful woman) had some cats and would beat the poor dog whenever she dared go within about 10ft of the cats. It's suspected that whoever owned her for the first two years of her life was burning her with cigarettes, because she will not look at you when you've got a smoke in your hand.

But I digress. All this abuse has really stuck in the poor dog's head. She's 7 years old and you can tell something is still kind of 'off' in her head and the way she acts a lot more timidly than a dog should. But even then - she still shows more enthusiasm and energy than Shelby ever seems to display in all the pictures we've seen of her. Which just raises the question: what the fuck has happened to that dog?

>what the fuck has happened to that dog?
What hasn't happened to it, is the real question.

For starters, it probably hasn't had a caring master who didn't molest or neglect it.

Well yes, but that goes without saying. I meant as in what bad things has it not experienced by this point in time.

Also,
Isn't that a bit redundant? What caring master would molest or neglect "man's best friend"? Did you remember to drink 8 glasses of liquid water that was wet today?

Molestation is unwanted attention, neglect is no attention at all.

New thread since I want to sleep in