‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 397

Bad topics for everyone, apparently.

35 Comments

“But I thought they got rid of anything that, you know, “that hacker” did in the Game?”

If they did, evidently they didn’t do a very good job. How much of the code in the Game itself is actually Kleya’s? We know at least the whole Demoli path itself was her doing.

Not to mention, if they got rid of her code, how come you can’t say her name?

Whether in real life or in fiction, attempts to expunge everything touched by a certain person because of how much people hate that person almost always turn out to be all about rhetoric and appearance, rather than substance. And when they don’t, bad things happen.

For example, should Republicans win sufficient majorities to repeal Obamacare, they undoubtedly will do so immediately, and then immediately pass a virtually identical law that just has someone else’s name on it. If they don’t, millions of people will loose their insurance, the entire health care sector will be thrown into finacial chaos, and insurance companies will start doing things like dropping people’s coverage for the horrible crime of getting sick. They’d have a revolt on their hands and they know it, whatever they say.

Another example would be the US’s attempt at de-Baathification in Iraq. They threw out everyone connected with the old regime, and then discovered they no longer had a functioning government or civil society.

Not to get political, but I’d like to point out that my family was one of the ones that lost our health insurance thanks to Obamacare. The so-called “approved” insurance now available have been abysmal and too-expensive to say the least. I have no love for that law.

I’m really sorry to hear that you’ve been having trouble, Aneeka. Since I don’t know anything about your personal situation I obviously can’t comment on it, but I hope you find a solution.

My point was that while Republicans might fiddle around the edges and take Obama’s name off of it, the core elements of the law (such as the exchanges) are major reforms that were really long overdue and that the Republicans themselves were in favor of before Obama got involved. No matter how much they may hate the President, they aren’t going to burn down the building just to spite him. (Well, there are some who would, but that’s a different issue.)

It’s okay. I understood your original point. I just felt you were also insinuating that the only people who would be against Obamacare would be because they were against the President. I simply wanted to point out that I’m against it because of how negatively it affected my life, not because of whose name was on it.

There is no solution available right now. We have to wait for another reform to reform the first reform. Such is politics, I guess.

Not at all. What I meant to insinuate is that I think that the national political movement that insists that Obamacare is an evil plot to destroy the Republic that must be repealed at any cost is largely motivated and energized by personal and political dislike of the President. But no large political movement is ever because everyone involved has the same opinion or the same motivations. For example, not everyone who supported independence during the American Revolution cared at all about British taxation of the colonies. People always have all sorts of reasons for what they support or oppose.

And I’d point out that there’s a big difference between saying that Obamacare has problems that need to be fixed and saying that it’s a socialist plot that must be destroyed. Not even the law’s most ardent supporters would argue that it’s perfect.

You should have the words “Speak of the Devil and (s)he shall appear” burned into your skin for such a question.

Seriously, “whose that shall not be named” is a thing. Doesn’t matter if you think they’re deader than if you personally shoved a nuclear warhead in their face and set it off, and they’re in more pieces than the world they live in. There are some fates you just don’t tempt. Ever. (Unless you’re really stupid, and/or really confident. Or just really, really clueless. Especially since the devil you know, and don’t want to speak of directly, happens to be in the room already. And you know it, and may be trying to make subtle jokes as to her identity.)

I don’t think the Demoli path is her doing. It is her favorite but I think she wasn’t part of the original development.

It’s her game, I think all of it was her’s originally then modified later. I’m betting they didn’t get everything.

I don’t think that page means she programmed the game. Just that she is the best in the game so in that sense, it is “her game”.

The Game seems to be really huge, with tons of content. It’s not really a one-person project. Kleya being on the development team sounds pretty likely to me…

I don’t think Danni meant Tenka. If she did, Bandit and Dude wouldn’t have mentioned people trying to kill Iemis. After all, if Tenka wanted him gone, they’d just ban/delete the character, and done. So when Danni says “they”, she means people in general, specifically other players.

Wow, Dude has a really amazing ability to say exactly the wrong thing at any given moment. It makes me wonder how he’s managed to survive this long without anyone strangling him.

Let me guess, Jane is our “fan created” miracle zone player Annie!

Can’t be. At the very least, it has been established that Jane has kids.

I like the old theory that she’s Mina’s mother…

So there is a light (dim) that Kat could defeat her fathers avatar and people will begin to like and care about her. But maybe Jane’s first to defeat him and steals that chance from Kat.

she has to defeat him without killing him, hmm maybe reflect his free curse on him and somehow undo all the other trees

I think her dad actually made it so only Kleya could defeat him. Don’t follow the rules~

It is not completely clear to me whether Kleya harbours negative feelings towards her dad (even though he is clearly not the best of fathers), especially as at one point she said “All I wanted was my dad back.“. Although it could be argued that she was speaking in the past tense and that there is evidence that her feelings have changed.

I wonder how Jane would react if she learns that Danni is someone “about to die”.

Good question. And Danni is technically an adult, I think, but close to still being a child. I think Jane would have issues with that.

More proof that poor Jane is an Outsider playing at Evil for the sake of feeding her children.

🙁

Am I the only who thinks Jane is Mina and Mae’s mom? I mean, she’s an outsider and the dolls in her special look like Mina and Mae. At the very least their hair matches.

That is a totally brilliant idea! It hadn’t occurred to me at all. I’ll have to go back through the archives to see if the details support it.

This was talked about in the comments before. Let me see if I can find a link…

Mentioned here: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-223/
Discussed a bit more here: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-239/

…I think I’m not looking far enough back. Maybe it was immediately after the game preliminaries?

I think it’s an extremely plausible theory, but there’s a big question I’d want an answer to before I fully believe it: Who wrote Jane’s Dreadful Dolls?

The following are facts:
-Even copying and pasting chunks of code together takes a certain amount of know-how to debug the resulting mess until it does what you want.
-Kat was surprised when she saw that the dolls could tell Jane was a friend. In fact, Kleya wasn’t able to predict any part of the special before it happened, which means that it’s not just leveraging existing systems within the game, and is, in fact, a very complicated special.
-Jane’s Dreadful Dolls still work, despite its apparent unmaintainability, and that TENka still pushes out patches for the game.
-Mrs. Lily is dependent on Kleya to constantly patch Mae’s avatar, despite the fact that LiFE is ostensibly never updated anymore.

And I make the following assumption:
-A programmer being skilled enough to maintain the Dreadful Dolls against TENka’s patches does not imply that she is skilled enough to fix Sandra’s city.

To me, consistency demands one of the following.
1. Jane is Mrs Lily, but the Dreadful Dolls was programmed by someone else – probably a much better programmer – and only looks sloppy because it’s deliberately obfuscated in a way that would look like sloppiness rather than draw TENka’s attention. I consider this unlikely overall; The laws of drama would demand that the programmer be a character we already knew, and I can think of no one who fits the bill. Still, since I had to invoke meta to refute this, it’s more likely than the next two.
2. Jane is Mrs. Lily, but AvatarScript in LiFE is extremely different and more complicated than SpecialScript in the Game. Given that SpecialScript has been specifically established as being made deliberately difficult by TENka, while no such claim has been made of AvatarScript, I think this much more improbable.
3. Jane is Mrs. Lily, and Mae is being left the state she’s in (possibly with her avatar being deliberately crashed occasionally) to try to attract well-meaning programmers to help. Given that we have no evidence to believe that Mrs. Lily is that horrible of a mother and human being, I consider beyond the pale of possibility.
4. Jane is not Mrs. Lily, and is a programmer capable of maintaining the Dreadful Dolls in her own right. This is the most likely scenario I can conceive of, despite the resemblance the dolls bear to the Lily family.

I’m not entirely sure that Jane is a good programmer. A lot of really bad programmers can take a bunch of existing javascript code and make an impressive website. But looking at the code, it will be cobbled together with parts that aren’t used, parts that only work because the stars are lined up correctly, and all sorts of other issues.

So, Jane might have some basic programming knowledge and just luckily found a few specials that she could cobble together (maybe her kids were big players before The Ending and they had some?). Since Kleya had a hard time understanding it, it could be because a lot of the code doesn’t function the way it was originally meant to and a lot of the code is useless.

Jane also seems to be quite adept with her scythe so she might not even need the dolls to win. They could just be a distraction.

If there’s enough scraps of code lying around that a really bad programmer could make something like the Dreadful Dolls, why are Specials so rare? Furthermore, if it’s easier to paste a bunch of scraps together and throw new art on it, why was Kat surprised to see that Jane’s special was made of bad code? Wouldn’t that be the more common way (among beginners) of writing specials than coding the whole thing from scratch?

There’s also the issue of maintenance. The Game is continuing to be updated. If the Dreadful Dolls contained parts that only work because the stars are lined up correctly, it would not continue to work patch after patch after patch without someone fixing it.

Well, I’d suggest that Jane might be a purely self taught programmer. She might be talented while still not having the faintest idea how to deal with the large scale systems you need to run a city.

I think that the hacker hunts would give any programer very good reason to conceal their identity and skills. I get the impression those feelings haven’t entirely faded away yet. If Mrs. Lily were Jane, that could also give her very good reason to conceal the fact even from family and friends. A reason named Mina. Mina’s a sweetheart, but I don’t think she could keep a secret if her life depended on it.

However, I think I see a fatal problem with the idea of Jane being Mrs. Lily. You need a kiddo to be in the Game, and it’s been strongly implied the Lily’s don’t have access to one. That doesn’t seem like something you could hide.

What if the special was programmed by Mr. Lilly? It’s been mentioned he knows what he’s doing. He and Kleya work together to keep May’s avatar working, maybe he’s good enough to make the special?

I suspect Jane is Mrs. Lilly, but either someone else does her programming (possibly Mr. Lilly, perhaps with deliberate obfuscation), or she deliberately acts like she doesn’t know what she’s doing where the kids can see her, as part of her secret id. She plays scary/nasty characters, and probably doesn’t want her kids to know about that.

This weeks issue is filled with issues.

I love the look on Kat’s face in the last panel it’s almost as if she’s telling Jane “Don’t even think about it.”

So it looks like Kat and Jane are about to explode. They will either say something or take action.

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 397