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Directember: I-Ikari-san?!

🕑 Added 2024-12-18 22:51:43 +0000 UTC

Comments

awgiedawgie

And in #4669, Yay told Aurelia what they are.

awgiedawgie

Bubbles didn't explicitly mention the multiple bodies, but the way she described them hinted that she knew quite a bit about them. "If the spectrum of artificial intelligence is a coral reef ecosystem, that being is an Architeuthis lurking in the deep water beyond."

legobil

Yeah I had noticed that too..! 😬 here’s to hoping it can be resolved with little to no effort while the holiday lasts!

Marc Ducharme

Sir you live in Canada now. Apology Drones, not Patriot Drones. The Apology Drones will arrive for your correction shortly. Sorry.

Robert Heinig

Extremely slow now, and the "last" button no longer works... But Cloudfar... ahem, flare is evil anyway. Patreon using it ever-more-intrusively will likely be enough for me to stop my account & thus all my artist support sometime soon...

Holly Nelson

IIRC, Yay said Bubbles had some idea of what they are (3393) but we don’t know what Bubbles thought, or why/how she would know anything about them. Plenty of wiggle room there, I still think.

awgiedawgie

The rest of QC has only seen one body at a time, but when we first met them, they remarked that Bubbles knows what they are (#3393). And they told Roko that they have multiple bodies (#4041).

Sean Kinlin

I thought Roko knew of Yay's multiple embodiment.

Freid

Remember that Twitter thing Jeph did with Elon Musk with Twitter. It was brilliant and hilarious. Can honestly not even quite remember what it was (still laughing like an idiot about it as I’m writing this though), no, wait it was like an impersonation or something that blew up so much? Where Elon then said that was FORBIDDEN to pretend to be him. xD I had folks who don’t read QC show me Jeph tweets and I felt oddly proud like “oh my GOD Jeph Jacques?! I KNOW him! Er.. I mean, I know OF him. We go way back” 😁

Doc Gumby

Same here.

Holly Nelson

Speaking of Yay - it strikes me (I know, I’m a bit slow) that no one in-comic, aside from perhaps the Director, actually has any knowledge of Yays multiple nature. All they know is what Yay has told them. We spectators have seen them, and Azathoth and Mr. Smooches have enjoyed (and hopefully still enjoy) their company, but the QC friend net has only ever seen one at a time. Even then we and the dogs could still be fooled by a sufficiently robust satellite data link and a handful of identical chassis. Is it possible that Yay's guilty secret is that they aren’t the unique person they profess to be? I’ll grant them special powers, viz. the rescue of Bubbles, but not necessarily multiple embodiment.

Dan Weiss

Even better than the marker trick is to have serial numbers on the cards and use a sorter. A sorter was a physical device that could sort the cards back into order. The marker trick could work in some situations, but the more cards, the less distinction there was between cards in putting them back in order. But none of that fixes the problem with the weight and size of the decks. So we got the floppy disk. And then it got smaller, and then we got thumb drives, SD cards and so on. If you thought monitors were chunky back in the day, take a look at the first production Hard Drive here: https://nurtureit.in/remembering-the-ibm-305-ramac-the-giant-birth-of-hard-disk-drives/ the guy in the picture gives you a sense of scale.

Elyse M. Grasso

If you had a large deck of cards, the trick was to use a magic marker to draw a diagonal line across tops of the card deck. Then if cards got out of order you could at least tell which part of the deck a card belonged in.

Dan Weiss

I am happy with food simulations if they taste good. Plant based, bug based, synthetic. I do not have a fetish for killing animals.

Aaron Burt

I like that the plural form of they/them actually works for Yay.

John Wedoff

It does look https://questionablecontent.net/ is down. Cloudflare is saying that the host is returning a 522...

Bel

That was the case for me earlier, which is why I waited so long to mention it - now I am getting 'website down' and cloudflare is offering wayback machine.

Daryl Sawyer

I don't know why it's happening, but I just reload, and it usually works on the second try.

drij

I'm still using a 30" Apple Cinema monitor with its 2" thick display. Just in case I need a shield to defend myself from an intruder.

Bel

I've been trying to read backlog comics since the start of directember and for more than half of that I have been seeing cloudflare errors coming up on every page load. At this point I can't even get the page to load after multiple attempts. I am glad that Jeph is getiing time off, and I am content for my own purposes to wait until the new year to read more - I just wanted to mention it because not being able to load comic pages might be an income issue.

Jeph Jacques

We’re still trying to fix the problem, which is basically that my server is dying

Abhayakara

D’oh!

Am Queue

H-19 terminals were blue/white, rahter than green. ANd had 26 lines, the last of which could be individually controlled. If you turned it on bright, it would light up the keyboard enough so you could do stuff with the lights off and thus avoid bothering your housemates with lights on in whatever room the ttys were in.

Steve McSheffrey

Thank you.

enchantedsleeper

Jeph did do a commentary on strip #1!

enchantedsleeper

Heh, I guess Neutral Evil was his WoW persona xD

enchantedsleeper

It counts

enchantedsleeper

Yeah, I think Angus was actually Mar's first, because he did kiss her back, even though he later rejected her.

enchantedsleeper

Plenty of people have already mentioned it to him (here and also on BlueSky, I believe). The issues are still ongoing probably because Jeph is on holiday and so he's not going to tackle that until he gets back

enchantedsleeper

Some of the early lore is also wild in the sense of "wow, I didn't remember that this character actually did X"

enchantedsleeper

I ship it

enchantedsleeper

(nb Yay uses they/them)

Boots McGoot

so sick of the agony beams. i said what i said, King Bill's had work done

Carrie

Only Spaceballs if Musk gets Gwynne Shotwell out of SpaceX. I would like to see her get investors to get him gone.

Carrie

It already does come in nugget. Just not in America, Canada, Europe and most places not west of Hawaii. In the Pacific region it can be found.

Stephen Wells

Thing is, we already have a great mechanism for turning bugs into delicious edible protein, and it is called "a chicken". Hard to compete against that.

Carrie

Artificial lab grown meat is already for sale in some countries. Chicken included. In America the FDA is holding it back.

Dean Reilly

Yeah, the rest of us will be stuck trying to make quota in Musk's lithium mines on Mars!

will davison

Hanners face here… this was not my favorite time in design of the comic. There were short adjustment periods when you added lips or added teeth, but some combination of factors right at this time was uncanny. Also, I can’t look at Marigold in panel 2 without thinking about the similar comic where she forgets Hannelore is watching and rips a huge fart.

Creeperkry

Only if that means I get to pelt him with tiny balls of ice.

Matthias Urlichs

Might be easier to just use bug meat and then postprocess the heck out of it until it's sufficiently beef-y.

Abhayakara

Man, that went to a dark place. Personally I'm pretty happy with how you generally don't do that. I mean, Yay is fun and all, but the fact that she turns out to be a marshmallow is kind of what's great about the direction your writing tends to go. Anyways, when you're working in the LLM troughs, the point is, keep up that optimism, so that when the LLMs finally do turn sentient (hah!) they wind up having your attitude and saving us all.

Charles Hirst

The English Electric DEUCE [Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine - IIRC - based on Turing's ACE] had flip-flop circuits based on 2D21 Thyratron tubes - and the main storage was mercury delay lines. I printed my first book of poetry on its peripheral terminal [a Friden Flexowriter] using paper tape and sprocketed fanfold paper. The time did not sync on my State-of-the-Arc {Sorry Noah!} PC, so I appear to have posted this (before edit) 11 hours ago - time machines rule!

Veronica Jane

I bet it would work really well as some kind of pasta sauce base. Delicious chicken and tomato mix on your cards.

Veronica Jane

Yeah but bugs are so efficient you don't need to vat grow them. The whole point of synthesising beef in a lab is to make if efficiently without all the wasteful food input (and land) that actual cows need.

Minzoku Bokumetsu

I think that's Soylent

Minzoku Bokumetsu

it'll be bug protein: max efficiency (I believe it's closer to 2:1 food to "meat")

kwixote

What? I question your loyalty to the new Regime of Oligarchs that is to replace our tired, old worn-out democray.

Tim Peterson

In 10 years you may be saying 'Remember when this was all Science Fiction/'

Melissa Wilson

It is such a worthwhile endeavor to start @ strip #1 & binge until you’re back to waiting on live installments. It’s a rich history Jeph has crafted.

Melissa Wilson

And Hannelore is boundlessly curious, even when she’s petrified about germs or something

Captain Button

I think this is because beef is the least efficient grain->meat conversion. 10:1 versus 7:1 pork and 3:1 for poultry.

JCfromNC

Everybody talks about vat-grown beef, but I think vat-grown *chicken* is much more likely to get here first. I wonder if anyone is even working on that one?

Slight Hiccup

I'm not that old but I do have massive nostalgia for the sound of ZX Spectrum loading screens.

Captain Button

Polycue with Sven

Claudia D.

😞

Ursus Ridens

I checked. It's one of Jeph's great gags.

Ursus Ridens

We begin to question your loyalty to El Presidentissimo,

Ursus Ridens

Idiocracy? More like Spaceballs.

BookBeard

I know right? I hope it comes in nugget form.

Matthew Reiter

What are you doing thinking about comics?! Get back to work in the LLM content troughs! These LLMs don't content themselves!

Diptych

Same reason I sometimes browse on my phone while playing a game on my PC, I guess.

Diptych

Dale is sending his guildmates to fight her one at a time, to test her prowess.

Miyaa

Someday, I hope May & Momo get their significant other. Which maybe each other for all we know.

ValdVin

Wyse terminals or 286/386 DOS compatibles? I've had my hands in both.

Miyaa

Does work now. Cloudfire sometimes gets weird.

Taigan

https://www.deviantart.com/taigan/art/QC-Alignment-Chart-339587694

That Blair Guy

Technically, I believe it was for impersonating said owner. Though that was also a rather mocking impersonation, so you're not wrong. 😉

Michael Wells

That got sad fast

Veronica Jane

The lab grown faux chicken slurry sounds pretty good actually.

YoPaulie!

Seems to work for everyone else...

Darren Franzen

I find all of that very terrifyingly plausible All hail the grand emperor

Ben R

As an old guy whose gaming quit in the nineties when my kids got into it and started to kill me, sometimes episodes just fly past me like the (now defunct) SST.

Drazi

Jeez, Jeph, I'm depressed enough. Isn't your break supposed to be... relaxing?

Jon Wilson

I think the kiss being referred to here is when she kissed Angus, but I'm not sure.

Dan Weiss

Someone once walked up to me with an 8" floppy and thought it was a gag. Nope, real thing. Even worse, the idea was based in part on the plastic "records" that used to come in magazines called "flexidisks". The whole floppy disk thing was invented at IBM so Systems Engineers (aka repair people) did not have to carry around boxes of punch cards. Punch cards were heavy (2000 came in a box, 80 characters per card, so roughly 160K) and god help you if you dropped them and they got out of order.

Captain Button

That is not the future we will have: "Videos, photos and direct observations show 74 cases of California ground squirrels hunting, eating and fighting over voles, which are tiny rodents, between June 10 and July 30, the study said." We need Momo more than ever: https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1485

Dan Tomalesky

LLM Content Troughs... I laughed and cried at the same time :')

melloncollic

As opposed to PvE (Player vs. Environment) for when you just go kill npc monsters or something. PvP is just generally used for player characters fighting player characters.

Doc Gumby

I believe it's Player Versus Player. As opposed to ganging up I guess?

Doc Gumby

Marigold and Hanners is really a very unlikely pairing when you think about it. But Hanners does have a strong will.

Saibh

Dale does a good ikari impression.

Steve McSheffrey

I'm so not a gamer. What is this PVP they're trying to do to her? My mind goes to dirty places.

Miyaa

Could someone tell Jeph that I’m getting a Error 552 code message when I connect to this page or a lot of the archive?

MarRose

I started reading (seriously, not just now and then) at about 3500 or so. It's nice to see the origins of these people.

Timothy Roller

I am so glad your art style has evolved over time

BookBeard

Hey, she told him to bring it. https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1680

Sean Kinlin

Jeph certainly wouldn't get kicked off a social media site for mocking its owner...

legobil

Also, Elon Musk receiving “Community Notes” on his own platform when he posts propaganda without full context.

legobil

Funniest thing in a while how he went bragging about how SpaceX was gonna bring home Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore when Boeing failed, and now they are stuck for two more months because SpaceX isn’t ready.

BookBeard

Or at least a woman of a Kuiper Belt object. https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2164

ValdVin

I'm fascinated by Hannelore asking Marigold about (what I take to be) her first kiss, on the space station with Dr. Francis York. Our Mare-Bear is a woman of the world by this point! Bonus points for Hanners' "He. Is. Flirting. With. You."

illibuster

Marigold's expression in the third panel is *chef's kiss*

Magic Chopstick Games

Everybody! Heed the words of a Wyse man!

ValdVin

Hey, PCs before Windows emulated mainframes and minicomputers. Whippersnapper!

Wednesday

Verisimilitude or compatibility

BobC

I thought Dale's glasses were VR/AR. If so, why the HECK is he staring at a monitor?

ValdVin

Su***de Boxes? I've already got my quarter on a string ready!

Opus the Poet

The start of a love story for the ages.

Diptych

Gosh, I feel like such a baby - I started out on 5¼-inch floppies.

jonesnori

I've also used paper tape. That was less common than punch cards even then.

Jack Atherton

Bless you and your commentary 🙏🏻😭

Ye Olde Phart

I watched "V for Vendetta" a couple years ago and thought "dang, that's scarily close to reality by now!". Then I saw "Idiocracy" a few years ago and was like "this isn't even funny anymore, it won't take 500 years till then, feels more like we're almost there!". Today I read your harbinger post, and... and... I... I just can't. When do we get the Su***de Boxes from Futurama? Hurry up, mankind.

William J. R. Fickas

Punch cards for me too, and Teletypes. For the youngins, that’s the mechanical terminal that a text console window is emulating

Kevin Hicks

And THEN they took AWAY our green monitors and made us start connecting with PC's!!! With WINDOWS, if you can believe it!!!

ValdVin

I have a QSL card from an older radio guy at one of the better tech universities which has their radio callsign punched out on a punch card. Not saying how long ago that was.

That Blair Guy

Call it a hunch, but I sometimes get the idea Jeph doesn’t care for Elon Musk. Nah, couldn’t be.

Bill Hately

Thankfully I missed the punch cards ... barely

Errol Lobo

My 60 year old boss told me about how when he started his research career, everyone used punch cards on the mainframe. And that was over ten years ago...

Taigan

Back around the time this comic came out, I created a Questionable Content Alignment Chart. I used this image of Dale and listed him as Neutral Evil. Seems very out of character for him now.

Magic Chopstick Games

Hey, don’t knock working in the LLM Content Troughs! …seriously though, don’t, it’ll *tank* your credit rating

Dan Weiss

You want old? I started on punched cards. I was young and they were old, but still. I remember when monitors were one color, GREEN. And then in the 80's some went to "AMBER".