Oh, reeeeeally?

Sylvain · Post by **Sylvain** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 3:16 am

New plot twist! New plot twist! Unless she switched gender, this newcomer - who is apparently deeply involved in all of this - is NOT Miss Fusselton.

His overly detached demeanor and heavily computerised brain makes one wonder if he is organic at all! Miss Fusselton's android assistant, perhaps? Something like Assissi, whom he ressembles a little?

Looks like Alice has figured Pierce out, or was it just a shot in the dark?

Alfador · Post by **Alfador** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 5:06 am

I think both of the twins figured him out.

Notice how there only appears to be one of them now.

Sylvain · Post by **Sylvain** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 5:47 am

Alfador wrote:Notice how there only appears to be one of them [twins] now.

Well, the last scene is already a bit crowded, and we don't see Rhonda either. Alice appears to be the most forward of the two, and she probably takes more after her mother. So far, it seems that Laine, for all her impressive physique, has inherited a character closer to her father's.

Allan_ecker · Post by **Allan_ecker** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 6:55 am

I'm not sure whether or not to score it as a writing error that I've foreshadowed only one supervillian and she isn't the first one we actually *see* on screen. You will notice that I made it as clear as I could that this character is male so that nobody'd think he was Sissy Fussleton.

I have, however, made up my mind that I'm only making note of my errors here because I plan to make later comics which are much more seamlessly designed; both within the Umlaut House mythos and in my other universes. I've only done one comic in the After Humanity universe (Unit Zero), and that's going to be a pretty major one later on. I want to make comics in *there* that will begin to walk alongside the print comics I read in terms of artistic complexity and story depth.

It may take a couple of decades before I start treading on Neil Gaiman's ankles, however...

Kesh · Post by **Kesh** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 8:33 am

That was perhaps the best accidental outing I've ever seen. Poor guy.

Nyamaza · Post by **Nyamaza** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 11:19 am

Thermonuclear fox/skunk rage bomb going on in 5... 4.. 3...

That guy had better hope that Pierce doesn't find out he's the cause of all this. Mind-mind attacks can get ugly.

Andrick · Post by **Andrick** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 12:33 pm

Nyamaza wrote:... That guy had better hope that Pierce doesn't find out he's the cause of all this. Mind-mind attacks can get ugly.

Pierce would get his head handed to him, sad to say. Pierce is out of his environment and he's now out of the closet. He wasn't able to keep control under even the most cursory of questioning by Alice which does not speak well of the boy's mental fortitude. The male fox/panda is a frustrated-passive as opposed to a rage-bomb type of personality. Pierce is the damsel in distress. To bad there's no knight in shining armor around... unless you're counting the one wearing plastic-plate armor with the coat-of-arms emblazoned upon his chest "37."

Micro_Fur · Post by **Micro_Fur** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 1:28 pm

HACKER! *SNERK* I'm not sure if I should sympathize or empathize for/with Peirce, as my situation has gotten just as hairy, without the whole mind link thing; God I would just die if that happend to me right now. *Is hit with an over-ripe tomato from an unknown trajectory.* What the. . .*Is pelted with a volley of tomatoes, runs and takes shelter in a nearby closet.*

Micro_fur - Fozzie

Cinni · Post by **Cinni** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 10:12 pm

Poor Pierce! Though I suspect that his fellow equal-opportunioty leericist will provide him some comfort at earliest opportunity. Alice seems the sort to do such a thing, to spare someone uneccessary unhappiness.

The Eye-Fi hacker, now he might get interesting. He gives me the impression of someone who either does not plan ahead well, or who is brain-meltingly overconfident.

Or who just has a thing against the Eye-Fi technology.

The cybernetic implant wireless security community will need clean shorts after hearing of this one, and can be expected to make some truly amazing efforts to render their favoured toys and tools safe once more, though a lasting blow will have been dealt to the reputation of the technology.

Cin

Allan_ecker · Post by **Allan_ecker** » Tue Nov 22, 2005 10:47 pm

Cinni wrote:The Eye-Fi hacker, now he might get interesting. He gives me the impression of someone who either does not plan ahead well, or who is brain-meltingly overconfident.

This word, it has four too many letters in it, yes?

Andrick · Post by **Andrick** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 2:49 am

Ovenfiden? Ovofident? Vernfidet? Overfide?.. Oh, Overfide! Yeah, you're right, four too many letters.

Micro_Fur · Post by **Micro_Fur** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 1:11 pm

<>!*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<>~#4
&[].>./
|{,, SYSTEM HALTED

Micro_fur - Feeling nostalgic

Allan_ecker · Post by **Allan_ecker** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 2:05 pm

Congratulations, Andrick, you blew up another wood martin.

Zaylas The Bard · Post by **Zaylas The Bard** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 3:22 pm

*reads the three latest posts, and watches what appears to be another tech joke fly right over my head*

Andrick · Post by **Andrick** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 4:02 pm

Pine martin, Allan, piiiine martin. Y'know, one a' these guys only not so officious with the dark suit and spook stylin'. To my knowledge, if it was indeed I that broke him, this'll be my first martin of any variety, even if most of the viverrids I've known are broken (which invariably they are) it was not by my doing.

One thing that I keep running into is this word "gestalt" and I wonder what it really means. Dictionaries and reference sources keep defining that word in a way that doesn't tell me anything comprehensible.

a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.

I'd like a little help on an actual meaning to the person on the street.

Micro_Fur · Post by **Micro_Fur** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 6:45 pm

Gestalt -> Mass Defect - The difference in binding energy of subatomic particles defined by the derivative E=mc^2 as compared to the sum of the individual particles; dm>0 -> stable, dm<0 -> fission reaction, dm=0 -> fusion, dm=(infinite) -> Event Horizon(theoretical)

High energy physics course was a breeze, didn't even have to be high/drunk to understand, calculus and ML make more sense drunk from my experience.

Nope, not broken, look here.

Besides, SYSTEM HALTED is the O/s's way of saying 'take it slow' (Ten points to who figures where I chop and swapped that one from.)

Micro_fur - Bewildered but not confused.

Kesh · Post by **Kesh** » Wed Nov 23, 2005 7:25 pm

Basically, a gestalt is when two (or more) unique "things" are unified into a new, single "thing" that is functional itself. It becomes an object where the sum is greater than its individual parts.

In this case, the hacking has turned all the students into a gestalt mind, retaining their independent minds but, as a whole, linked together and capable of much more than if they were working as individuals.

Resistance is futile...

Cassol203 · Post by **Cassol203** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 6:06 am

What rights would the gestalt mind have? Would it have to choose a sex for official documents? The only thing obvious to me is that ASCII makes the squiggles go radial, then cylindrical, and now they're all whorly between everyone.

I saw a version of that poem that had a ! instead of a / at the end of the second to last line, and SYSTEM HALTED got translated as HANG.

Nyamaza · Post by **Nyamaza** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:07 am

wow, I thought the guy looked familiar, but I didn't actually connect him to Ascii. Eye change, clothing change... and to be honest, I wouldn't really expect an android to change that much over a quarter century, unless Ascii was unhappy with how his eyes looked...

Allan_ecker · Post by **Allan_ecker** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 4:04 pm

This is more of a character design change than a change he himself made. It's like the way Rhonda and Pierce changed between their appearences in Umlaut House and Umlaut House 2.

So I won't be commenting on it in strip unless I come up with a good reason, but I was in general trying to make him look more or less the same. His hair is mostly the same, although it has been pulled back, his ears are only a bit more pointed, if considerably larger, and his fur pattern is unchanged. The change in his eyes is actually a general change to character designs in UH2. Eyebrows are represented as single width lines, sometimes appearing as white to show up against black fur. ASCII hasn't developed dark arcs of fur over his eyes; I've just started drawing eyebrows on characters.