'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Hacker Hunts are mentioned. Hacker girl is cruel.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 154

Hacker Hunts: they weren't pretty.

We've reached over 50% on my Kickstarter. Yay!! And if you wanted to see how I draw, check out this post about Kleya's short story for the printed book.

As for the voting incentive, Dr. Grace gets one last word in 😀

34 Comments

Hmm…

Is the President “him”? I think he is. If he is, then the Bandit’s goals diverge significantly from the woman’s (the man could be supporting either side).

The blobs in panel 1 were hunting the other blobs that have more defined limbs. Clearly this indicated they were hacking.

Don’t be mean. I thought it was a good way to indicate what had happened, without launching into a full-scale flashback.

It was a joke. I love how his limbs are stretched out; it makes him look cornered and scared. It does indicate the situation pretty well, considering I’d be scared too since I can program in two languages. (quick, bury the java! And not the coffee kind)

lol

Hear, hear. A call for more sensibility (even though I know Grace doesn’t believe a word he’s uttering). I again point out that they don’t even know she’s made her own specials though.

Also, 2 years is more then enough time for more brilliant hackers to emerge.

It’s kinda weird. If the hacker hunts really did kill off all the best programmers, then how did they become so reliant on an automated system? If I blamed computers for the fall of the world, I would think that I would rely on them even less afterwards. I certainly wouldn’t be wanting to play a virtual game run by “legalized” hackers/programmers. You can’t have a virtual world without programming/hacking and yet everyone in the world has become addicted to it even more then they used to be before the Ending?

I would think that if the Ending was really as bad as this, humanity would revert to a pre-computers style of life. Mid-twentieth century perhaps?

But computers are so *useful*. And a game that keeps the populace distracted is also too useful to let go.

It sounds to me like a good segment of the population does live like that, the story just isn’t focusing on them. Some characters have mentioned that in the “States” the playing of the game is discouraged in favor of working in the fields. It sounded like most of the people who live in the virtual world do so because the catastrophe destroyed any physical means of contributing to the rest of civilization.

@Aneeka: You should really get a Gravatar, it’ll make it easier to identify you in the comments.

Aside from that, really loving the comic! Came here from EGS.

I see you did that. 🙂

Yep, I did! Though I rather liked being an inverse blob… 😉

Well, this explains why people aren’t all great at programming in a world where virtual media is the primary means of socialization… they killed all the people who were good at it! No wonder Tenka has a near monopoly.

XD i totally was expecting something like what the Hacker Hunts seem to be. Any world where Hackers are a major problem and witch hunts are organized for them, innocent programmers are going to be killed in the crossfire.

“if you can program, you can hack” for the record, totally not true if you mean the hollywood sense of the word. That requires knowledge of firewalls and security systems. On the other hand, hack in programmer jargon simply means adding extra code into a program for functionality not originally planned by the devs to be in (and not necessarily malicious). Anyone with some knowledge of code can do that.

Only hollywood uses the hollywood sense of the word.

… you mean like our world?
Buffer overruns don’t take much knowledge of firewalls or security systems, and that’s been a windows exploit for ages.

hacker hunts something akin to witch hunts i take it

Huh, witch hunting in cyberspace. “I don’t care that you’ve never done any evil, what you do is wrong and I fear you for it. NOW DIE!!”

One can always hope that people won’t revert to such idiocy, but then all you have to do is look in an American high school and you see the core of such attitudes are still alive and well.

Or middle school.

Seriously, I hated it.

Ever been conditioned by your bullies so you start screaming and raging when you hear the words ‘happy birthday’? To the degree I told my own father to f*** off?

…Well to be fair, that was mostly because he said the solution to bullies at school was to be bullied the same way at home.

Yeah, he earned that ‘F*** OFF!’ from you, and I have called my mother a b*** to her face before. She’s mellowed out since then, so now she can laugh at it instead of backhanding me, but I take a perverse sort of pride in being a ‘Son of a B***’ and will respond to that.

In high school they have those prejudices refined, although I will admit that they do exist in middle schools as well.

Just like witch hunts. Some things never change. How do you determine if someone is insane online? Did they give that one a psychology test before hand or are they basing it off of that one’s behaviour in their matches? Insanity could be no more than a persona presented to the world, a mask for the entertainment of oneself or others.

Pretty sure when they say insane player they mean BloodyMary, she murdered her entire team after all. She was supposed to be a hero and a leader but instead she killed everyone on her team before disappearing. If you do that anyone will label you as insane.

She destroyed their game characters and they never came back (as far as anyone knows). This doesn’t mean that she physically killed them. But that’s not important. Has this person that Kleya will be fighting given any indication of such behaviour? We don’t even know who it is; the tournament tree never gave any indication.

She has the same special as Bloody Mary, which is apparently pretty iconic. Given that someone that skilled is unlikely to give her speical out, it’s a pretty solid indication that it’s her.

If she acts insane ingame, they are going label her insane ingame. It’s not like they have to deal with her outside the game, so they might as well just assume she is crazy (ingame).

So did Grace let Bloody Mary back into the trials just to pit her against Kleya? That seems risky. She’s gotten this far, so she’s definitely back in the Game. But she was banned earlier, right? And people know she got back in? That’s not going to do good things to TENka’s respectability.

The way things have gone and his lie at the end tells me that Grace is putting this particular justification together at the last second. He didn’t actually care if Bloody Mary and Kat fight when the Trials started, but now that they are and he needs a way to get Dmitri and whats-her-name off of his back, so he came up with this.

Infamy and/or insanity can also be entertaining to watch, which may be why Bloody Mary is back in the game (I’m looking forward to seeing her myself). On a random note, I keep thinking of the Lady Gaga song when I see Bloody Mary.

I’m curious, did they conduct the hacker hunts in reality or in life? If they had hacker hunts in game, would killing an avatar simply block a player from the game or do they die with the avatar? Theres so much to this world its crazy! :0

Real life. There is a neural linkup machine thingy, but the game can also be played mouse+keyboard, like Kleya and Bandit (We see shots of their hands on a keyboard at times). They may also have a virtual reality headset, but as Kleya says, you can just take that off at any time.

Obviously it’s in the real world. I don’t think the game has a force feedback system or neural overload yet.

I’m still seeing the possibility this guy and the Bandit are out to find and protect Kleya. Well who Kleya used to be anyway. XD

This is the first mention we’ve seen of (presumably) hacker!Kleya’s “cruelty”.

Suddenly I realise that despite 154 pages (and counting), we still don’t actually know what Kleya’s original personality is like.

If they can secure her she could be a powerful tool. So protecting her could mean a lot of different things.

Quasar: Well, we know she’s got wrinkly, pale fingers and doesn’t eat enough! : )

Also her nails are kinda greyish…

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 154