‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 487

Colors by Audrey. Everything else is by me.

It's possible Kat has no idea what normal people can do.

58 Comments

“It’s possible Kat has no idea what normal people can do.”
That one cracked me up. 😀

Is the deselione a desert lion, i.e. a deserto leone?

@Bandit: Don’t just watch, DO SOMETHING!!!! I thought you wanted to help her stay under-cover, man!

Dude, Alex! Bandit plays chess against ME! Not helping is doing something, for sometimes you have to fold to not reveal your cards. If say “certain parties” saw Bandit helping “an old friend” cover tracks or stay hidden, not only would it be revealed who it is, but also what side his loyalties lie..

Lol, Dude, you of all people should know that chess and poker are pretty much opposites strategy-wise. 😀 In chess there is no meaning to folding other than admitting defeat, and wasting moves (i.e. not doing anything) is bad in most cases as well. But I can see what you’re trying to say, though I respectfully disagree:

Bandit should help Kat simply because they’re on the same team. Nothing weird about that at all. He doesn’t need to cover her tracks, he just has to land a few “nice” blows to even the odds. But if she comes out of this victorious, unscratched and with a 100% Erbana rating (note that the Deselione mustn’t die within her range either for that to happen) with no more help than your distracting Bellatrice’s gang, she will be in trouble.

i don’t think wild animals count do they? then again no wait she spared the creatures in the tutorial thingy.

also what if that ‘attack’ was actually a buff? and now it just hit the lion?

If it was a buff, then she would have known.

I’m a little fuzzy on what happened, but mostly because of sparklies going “klang”

on the last page she called out some grass or whatever from her endless bag and used it to deflect the attack similar to when she stopped the sword with the grass on an earlier page.

Oooooh. Thanks, I was a little confused.

I think she somehow created an invisible shield out of plants?

It’s the same shield grass thing from page 473

She used blades of grass as a shield again, and the polygons of light bounced off her grass. Videogame physics!

The images are still blurry on the iPad, though oddly enough, the text is readable on my android phone. Could you check the settings on your final save operation to make sure you aren’t saving as interlaced? If Audrey is the last one to save, she might need to check her settings. It’s not a critical issue for me, because I can check the comic later in the day on a laptop, but some of your readers may not have that option, and I would hate to see you lose readers over something simple like this.

I’m good on iPad using Safari to view, just as more information…

Do you mean progressive JPEG? JPEG doesn’t support interlacing. I don’t think interlacing would be an issue anyway… A while back I had some trouble with images looking horrible on my iPhone, but then I discovered that ISP was downsampling images to reduce bandwidth. ‘Twas super annoying.

For what it’s worth, the images look fine on my iPads.

I’ve had “progressive jpegs” give the same kind of trouble about a decade ago with a particular viewer. I think there the trouble had been the (dirt cheap) viewer didn’t correctly support all types of progressive jpeg, and it only handled the first iteration correctly. Removing the progressive nature of the jpegs had solved the problem back then. I think the trouble here is similar – it certinaly looks the same. The iPad software fails to move past the first iteration. Whether the fault is with the iPad or the software saving the jpeg is immaterial. In a software production environment, the bug could even lie with the iPad, but the solution would be to change the jpeg (none of the parties present work for Apple, so we can’t change how Apple reads the images).

Aneeka: You might ping your colorist on this problem. I bet if you load one of your images in the Windows Paint program and do a ‘save as’, it’ll load ok for all your readers. You may lose the progressive nature of the jpeg, but your readers will appreciate text they can read. Imagemagick allows for bulk conversion of images (if you can handle scripting), Thumbs Plus by Cerious Software (I think the software still exists) handles bulk conversion with a pretty UI – no need to script. I dunno if gimp can handle bulk conversion or not.

Readers: till we can convince Aneeka to change how she saves her images or convince Apple to “fix” Safari (I doubt this is an Apple bug) try Firefox.

//Torrenal
– Experienced software developer, amateure statistician, forecaster, and sometimes works with graphics.

From one dev to another; Safari is made by Apple. It’s part of the iOS operating system. They certainly have the ability to change the code which renders progressive JPEGs.

But from my experience building both websites and software, Safari is the new Internet Explorer. It’s not standards compliant and its performance is abysmal.

WebKit is the Safari backend, and due to its poor performance, all former WebKit browsers have migrated to better platforms. Ironically, Safari only wins on a benchmark developed by the WebKit team.

Yes, sorry, I meant progressive JPG. I haven’t upgraded my iPad’s OS for a while, so possibly newer versions have better handling of these images. (I’ve had bad experiences with updating the OS, so I tend to wait until I’m forced to.) Due to the way Apple likes to control its ecosystem, even Firefox on the iPad is really using Safari webkit code underneath, so using a different browser tends not to fix the problem. (I’ve tried several.)

It looks fine on my iPad. Though I am checking this some time after your comment, maybe it was fixed already.

That would be nice. I only get to a computer every few days. I’m on android using the dolphin browser.

Well that cardista has two immobilized teammates who are sitting ducks in the grass.

I looked at the issue with Aneeka a couple weeks ago. For troubleshooting info – is the image also blurry if you go through the archive? I discovered that on Amazon’s Silk browser, ALL of the comics are low res, regardless of how Aneeka had saved it. I suspect the problem is with WordPress implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which delivers low resolution pictures in order to improve loading speed. Google failed to find me a workaround to force a higher resolution picture through. If anyone knows anything about how to fix that, I’m sure Aneeka would love to know.

AMP has to be added manually and will not be shown automatically to mobile browsers. More info is available here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/

I’m inclined to believe this is indeed a backend issue as mentioned by another user. Silk is based off Chromium’s Blink engine, which is itself a fork of Safari’s WebKit.

I suggest that the problem occurs because of some bad code in the WebKit/Blink engine. It appears to render the “srcset” image incorrectly because the widths assigned by srcset are not in any particular order.* This is just a guess, though.

*(look at the HTML if you don’t know what I’m talking about)

Maybe I’m the exception. I’m on Android 5.0.1 Using the Dolphin Browser. The archive also looks blurry to me I hadn’t thought to confirm that. its deffinately a browser related issue since it does work with the default browser. That is so normally ugly I had it disabled.

I’ll put in a bug report with the browser

Wait why are Vize’s feet not on the ground?

Nice catch, I didn’t notice that. I guess that his attack has a significant recoil in this low-gravity-environment.

Since Kat just deflected that kind of force she should be pounded into the ground next, unless – you know – magic.

That could be the reason why she’s floating, you know bouncing like a ball.

Well, Kat just used him as a springboard a couple pages ago, entirely possible he left his feet because of it in the low gravity

Because Kat grabbed him and jumped to try and protect him from the desilion. Remember the everyone get into trees comment she whispered to her teammates? Vise then attacked Kat at close range. I’m not sure Vise understood that Kat wasn’t attacking him.

Hmm, cardboy is clearly “not” thinking. Trying to continue a Team fight when there is something on the field that can eat everyone 🙂

OK, first, I hate the bandit. Don’t know if it’s just me, but this self righteous, arrogant, narcissistic guy should hide 50 feet under the earth not talking or even breathing unless he gets the secret signale. Hint: The secret signal is the sun going supernova.

That said, avoiding the hit was skill, hitting the deselione was dumb luck. I know some players who have this kind of luck rather often, it’s a good thing they are on my side.

Bandit is a guy I love to hate. 🙂

I don’t think Kat had dumb luck. In case of any other player I’d agree, but not in case of Kat. Ok, the Dude would be another exception, because he seems to be able to harness dumb luck on purpose.

the Dude’s first card was ‘luck’

Sorry, but I really like him. Or at least Jake. Especially in the reality sections where he ends up saying “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.” (Page 342) You know he really does love her and is trying to do anything he can to hide her from the higher ups.
Yeah, he’s a know-it-all, but that kinda goes with being the second best player on the planet. Kat would be the same way if she ever talked to people. (For example, see her conversations with Danni.)
And I don’t think that luck had anything to do with her hitting the deselione and Bandit knows it and is trying to figure out a way to spin it AS dumb luck.

Yeah, there’s dumb luck in the Dude way, and then there’s dumb luck in the Kat way.

Dude: Runs away only to come back somehow aggro’ing a creature not native to the island.

Kat: Somehow being able to both block an attack at the last minute, with reflexes, while *also* somehow hitting without looking at the only third party enemy in a three-way fight.

If it was anyone else she hit, it could’ve been chalked up to that. But now Jake has to try and weasel with “Attacking the deselione could’ve killed it, and if our girl was going for a perfect Erbana run now, she totally wouldn’t have risked that. She would’ve *intentionally* missed.”

He’s just sarcastically noting that she made his job all that much more harder.

Oh, wow, you’re right, she can’t kill the deselione, either. Man, if she gets out of this with her 100% intact and with nobody else helping her, they’ll be on her heels again.

I am kinda hoping that Saisuke turns out to be stronger than Bandit, if only because he had more time to practice post-ending than the highly politically involved Tenka-double-agent Jake.

better hope I was wrong and that wasn’t a buff spell she just deflected to the deselione

Lol, I haven’t thought of that, but that would’ve been hilarious.

But I doubt it, because Kat and/or D definitely would’ve known.

I was just thinking the same thing Craig. He knows she rescued him. What if he was trying to increase her abilities? The Deselione doesn’t look too awful upset.

Usurp, at best, is a control spell. I doubt it would be in anyone’s best interest at this point to have Kat under his control.

I believe the “Usurp” was D’s question whether or not he should do that.

Yep, she’s known to take control of players afterall.

But Kat would’ve known if it was a buff, right? Why she’s trying to avoid hacking to actually DO things, she seems to have no qualms about having an easily handy read-out of all the information available on her enemies, and I’d think that would include knowing what powers they’re using, you know?

Craig, I don’t think you’re wrong at all. For the last three comics I’ve suspected Vize was acting kind – he was moved out of harms way by Kat and Aneeka has indicated “Vize still to the rescue!”. As for why Kat/D might not realize it was a positive buff: she has been accustomed to thinking everything against her is an attack. Note that Aneeka’s comment for today’s comic can be read in two ways – one of which is that she has no idea how limited in capability normal people are, the second of which is that she has no idea the capacity of kindness that normal people are capable of. Also, the deselione’s cuteness factor went way up 😛

I love the art on the card attack, both panels.

Deselione! Must be french :O

XD I dunno if you really meant it or not, but brings fond memories of a fun Psych episode~

Way to use enemies powers to kill your other enemies, Kat!

Just so you know.. I like Bandit. He’s got depth as a character. Isn’t saving her all the time (he can’t but wants too… very typical male thing to happen). He actually cares about people and that motivates him more than anything else I can tell. So I see him as a very nice guy who’s simply doing the best he can with a world that isn’t in his control. I like him. I would like to see him blow some stuff up though 😉 Could be fun and irritating to Kat and that’s always fun!… lol

I don’t like the Bandit persona, but I think he’s not meant to be liked (well, he has fans, but he is meant to be unlikable to some people). I do like Jake, who is the player behind the Bandit persona. To me, a lot of the point of this story is how the underlying personalities people have often aren’t reflected in the public personas they show to the world.

“And she manages. Again. *eyeroll* And of course things go just right.”

– Jake, Panel 2

Yeah, Kleya! Show them how awesome you are!

Oh, geez… Bandit’s really looking skeptical in that panel.

Whoops, it was actually a buff. Now the deselione is going to kill everyone even faster! So much for that.

Instead of “normal” the term “technically possible” might be more accurate

Hooray for Kleya! You, a player who’s never supposed to been in the games before, are an excellent erbanist and have succeeded in avoid every sigle attack!
Wait.

Ooooh, I can’t wait til Friday!

Of course she has already established that she has some skills after doing so well in the initial contest to enter the game. Her fans like her because she is an unknown with fresh new skills. So I don’t think the fact that she is excelling is a problem for anyone except Tenka, at least until someone besides Tenka claims she is the original hacker.

Well, she’s definitely going to be generating interest in Erbana.

Deslion?

It seems nice, even more dandy.

Yep, it’s a dandelion…

I’m not sorry

NICE

okay there are three outcomes to this:
1) it was actually a buff, and it becomes clear Kat is an awesome lone player but sucks at teamwork;
2) it was an attack strong enough to kill the monster and Kat actually wasn’t trying to redirect it there, which should make the accidental nature of it obvious and f*** up her rating;
3) it was an attack that would only weaken the monster or a debuff, and Kat is g-dmodding without realizing it

I’m betting it’s not even her ‘improved interface’ semi-cheats, it’s just THAT level of skill…

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 487