‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 604

Someone is happy! Someone is not so happy.

43 Comments

Overwritten within seconds? What is this, surveillance not only like, but also in 1984? 😀 But it’s good to know the reason why Kim didn’t jump at Dude’s “girlfriend” whisper, because I sitll consider that a slip-up on his part if he’s paranoid enough not to warn his team about the portal.

@Aneeka: Would you like to shed some light here or is that spoiler-territory? Why is “giving your team-mates an early warning like you’re supposed to do” more dangerous than calling Kat Bandit’s “girlfriend”, implying that she is her and that they know?

Also I think you nailed all the expressions. 🙂 I agree with Dude, I also can’t wait to see this! ^^

I suspect there’s an element of “did something highly improbable that would lead to the Dude’s whispers being extra suspicious” that caused the differing levels of paranoia.

There’s a lot more thought that would go into “how do I make this highly improbable event look like luck,” and something like a whisper would be an unnecessary risk in an already unstable plan, vs. just an ordinary risk. (Dude may be paranoid, but he’s not Mad-Eye Moody – he’s more vigilant when doing something risky. At least, my character interpretation.)

The thing is, if I were in a situation where I ran away and found a portal truly by accident and a large monster jumped at me I’d definitely send cries of help to my team. They’d need to know a Deselione was incoming so they could prepare accordingly.

He was sending cries of help. They’re called “screaming.”

Regardless of how good the Dude is, Dude’s *persona* isn’t competent enough to whisper to his team.

Not Aneeka, but calling Kat Bandit’s girlfriend isn’t a red flag in the same way that knowing secret information is. If questioned about it, all Dude or Bandit has to say is that they have an ongoing private joke about it, being an ironic reference to how much ire Kat shows to Bandit. It isn’t concrete evidence and it’d be difficult to disprove, even if the comment might raise suspicions somewhat.

It’s not secret information if you stumble upon a portal and warn your friends about it afterwards. Of course they can make excuses regarding the gf thing, but I find an excuse for “no warning” to be harder to make, because Dude is a pro gamer like everyone in the group besides Danni.

I suspect in a post apocalyptic setting, uttering the phrase “We can’t add health records because the server’s full of whispers” might be an issue.

As for the “Girlfriend” comment… technically that can be saved as Bandit’s character; that was kind of his deal in the Game Trials.

Especially with the “Be Nice” battle, which Kim *did* see.

lol unless they’ve taken a distinct step backwards in terms of storage space saving text messages would be no problem…

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibms-world-record-330tb-uncompressed-data-on-a-palm-sized-tape-cartridge/

These are on tapes which take a long time to go through, which is why they are used for archiving and not other things, but 330 TB would probably be enough to store everyone’s whispers till the end of the world lol

When I see something in a story that “gets the science wrong,” rather than calling it out, I like to imagine that that science is true in the fiction, and extrapolate to see if it implies other things.

In this story, whispers cannot be recorded because they’re too big. The Game probably doesn’t have more than a few thousand players, so that means that whispers would have to be quite large individually. Maybe they’re a much richer medium than just text (possibly richer than sound), and cannot be compressed in realtime – much like how video recordings have to be stored in gigantic raw format. This would make it possible to eavesdrop, but not record in bulk.

Of course, maybe they could record a downsampled version of that, in which case… [more technobabble, and deeper and deeper the rabbit hole goes].

Maybe in the ending they lost the means/knowledge of how to produce disk or it’s ridiculously expensive. So they have just enough dedicated to The Game to store the information of the players (could be an explanation for the limited player slots) but not enough to store whispers.

Or…. whispers are the same as conversation. And almost ALL of the Outsiders (and many of the Cits) are talking nearly non-stop. Don’t care how big your memory is, it would fill up with junk fast. “Less then 60 sec” of chat log memory seems plenty.

No spy agency has the TIME to listen in on everyone. Expecially not now. Mail is usually more meaningful and could be worth reading.

OK so I did some testing. I went to https://randomwordgenerator.com/sentence.php to get some random sentences and then put then through google translate. I timed it and waited to see how far it would get in 1 minute, and copied that onto a .txt. The file size was 853 bytes. Extrapolating from that, we could fit one person talking for an entire year straight on 0.44 gigabytes, or 0.00044 terrabytes. (Conversations would likely be more space, as it has to name each person that says something. Another thing I didn’t take into account was time stamps, which depending on how long the messages would probably increase the space needed by like 20% or so but I’m not sure so I didn’t include that in the calculations)That means that ONE of the drives that I mentioned above could fit 700000 people’s conversations for an entire year. Additionally, a neural net or even just a keyword search could easily sift through most useless conversations, drastically reducing how many WHISPERS — something only in the Game, which is people need to be popular to stay in so there are likely not that many people in it– and it would probably not be too difficult to make it only record a few peoples whispers.

The only reason they can’t spy on whispers is because they don’t want to. As for what Tim C said about whispers being more than just text, that may be true… but even right now we have bots capable of hearing humans and comprehending what they are saying with high accuracy. I highly doubt they can’t do that in an age where AI like D can exist, even if he is an advanced one.

(For reference, the lines that I used for the text doc were She wrote him a long letter, but he didn’t read it.
I currently have 4 windows open up… and I don’t know why.
My Mum tries to be cool by saying that she likes all the same things that I do.
Malls are great places to shop; I can find everything I need under one roof.
There was no ice cream in the freezer, nor did they have money to go to the store.
We have never been to Asia, nor have we visited Africa.
He said he was not there yesterday; however, many people saw him there.
Is it free?
The lake is a long way from here.
If you like tuna and tomato sauce- try combining the two. It’s really not as bad as it sounds.
If Purple People Eaters are real… where do they find purple people to eat?
A song can make or ruin a person’s day if they let it get to them.
She advised him to come back at once.
She always speaks to him in a loud voice.

Feel free to test this on some text to speech and put it into a txt, it will almost certainly be very close to what I got.

I agree that it’s not text, but audio, but low-quality audio is still not expensive to store, and since only a handful of cities are alive the whisper traffic can’t be enormous either. “Overwritten within seconds” sounds like they can store no more than 100 whispers in total, which is a generous estimate, because there can’t be many players playing the Game at the same time if they get playtime assigned to them. Low-quality mp3 costs about 1MB per minute, so the total storage is like, say, 5 MB? 3 seconds per whisper on average?

Looking at the beautiful Game graphics I see a slight discrepancy. 😀
Buuuuut I agree that it’s Science Fiction and that that means that things are different, period.

I suspect we are dealing with a combination of two things:
1. The factories making storage media have problems. (destroyed, damaged, out of resources, etc) So people are instinctively limiting any data storage in an attempt to preserve hard drive life.
2. They lack the programming man hours needed to take care of little things. So whispers were initially and accidentally set to auto over-write and nobody has the time to go back and fix it.

Even if they are initially conveyed through audio (Though why low quality if it is about to be deleted?), it wouldn’t be hard to make a speech to text bot… considering they already exist and all…

Maybe the fact that whispers get overwritten is more of a security feature specific to the game. To make it harder for other players to spy on you and get the goods on your team.

Ehhh, Bandit says “We don’t have enough space” so I’m assuming its because of space…

Here’s the way I see it. it’s not that whispers take up a lot of storage individually. but it’s the amount of whispers that are going on, since it sounds like the system isn’t designed to single out one persons whispers and any whispers sent have to be stored between them being sent and received. So thus even if the whispers are small,and the space to store them isn’t it’s still the fact that the system has to handle everyone’s and I do mean everyone’s whispers.And since there are plenty of other people whispering random things to random people. The system would have to mark the space as open as soon as it doesn’t need to keep that whisper on disk so it can write down the batch of whispers in the flood of them that keep coming. I could also see the game having the whispers not set up in a super efficient manor as likely when the game was first launched (pre-end) there was little, if any, need to save individual peoples whispers and disk space was probably really cheap. after the end it did become much more important, but what programmers remained where busy doing other things.

I did some calculations, my main comment is up above, you can read that for more in depth but basically one of those archiving tapes that can store 330 TB could store 700000 peoples conversations for a year. (As in 700 thousand people talking non stop for a year). Also as I understand it, whispering is only a part of the game. The game is something that requires you to have popularity to stay in. If you need say 1000 followers to stay in the game, that means that one tape can store the equivalent of 700 million LiFe people. 10 tapes could store 7 billion. Assuming The End was actually catastrophic, the population alive, much less with access to LiFe, should be well below that. (Estimates say we will have around 9 billion people in 2050, and the technology doesn’t seem to be *too* far ahead of what we have, save the strange way people everywhere can be both trapped and have food delivered and have access to the internet.) And remember, the further in time we go, the less storage will cost. At the time of the End, you could probably buy 256 or 512 gb flash drives from your local Office Depot. Archival tapes will get more advanced too. Considering all of the other tech that survives, I would be VERY surprised if there was no space to store a few text files.

But…. why would anyone have bothered? BEFORE the end – whisper logs were junk. Why bother to archive billions of players worth of in game chat logs? No matter how cheap archive media is… it is still not free. Nor would it be completely ‘free’ to set it up. AFTER the end – whisper logs are still junk (except to Kim). But now it’s expensive in terms of man hours. Prohibitively expensive in fact.

Assume that whispers WERE saved before the end in secure archives. Is the physical hardware it was using still intact? And why aren’t they using it for LIFE updates instead of archives of dead player’s chat logs?

Eh, depending on the rules of the game they could be saving whispers to ban people who break them (like how games currently save chat logs as proof for bans) but if the game is basically a free for all with no rules then yea they probably wouldn’t save whispers.

True, it can be saved because of the flirting in the Be Nice battle. There are ways to save it, but I’m just thinking that paranoid Kim suspects everything from anything, and she hasn’t stopped suspecting Kat of being her yet.
“That girl better be a saint or she’s dead on her next wrong move” (somewhere near the end of the Reality Arc).

This is a great reveal. Tenka doesn’t have the capacity to spare on their servers, or the manpower to do manual logs without giving up some other important thing, like that person harvesting food.

I just got to read your reply to me from the other day and I thought your point about the “girlfriend” whisper was a big problem with what I was saying. But this update explains it. Now that Kim has seen the portal thing happening and is thinking that the Dude is the dubious she might want to know all his whispers, so he can’t get away with saying that Kat is Jake’s girlfriend anymore, not if she does station someone to read them.

As for not whispering about the portal, maybe Dude thought they might start logging his whispers once the portal showed up. Or maybe he’s spinning that for Jake and he is a quintuple agent, or just more loyal to one of the other three sides than he is to Jake (probably not though).

I like the quintuple-agent theory. 😀
Maybe at some point his house of cards collapses and he’ll have to admit that at some point he lost track of whom he was actually spying for.

If I were Kim, I would definitely keep a closer eye on Dude from now on.

Well – now we know why the University expansion is busted. They are seriously short on RAM.

Its not RAM they are short on, but storage space. Two different mediums. Even with solid state theses days, they are still different as RAM looses all information when it looses power while solid state storage retains its data without power.

We do not know if they have solid state storage, or if they are still using magnetic and optical mediums for their hard drives and other data storage still.

Another issue no-one has brought up yet is that digital storage DECAYS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation Sure, you might have the space to store all the whispers in high def NOW, but…

1. There isn’t enough storage that isn’t prone to data decay (or overusing the storage for trivial whispers makes it decay faster)

2. There isn’t enough storage that isn’t lost when power fluctuates or goes out.

3. There isn’t enough bandwidth to sent the data to storage.

4. The Apocalypse constantly messes with data storage (magnetic fluctuations, high energy solar radiation…), so most existing storage is either broken and/or ridiculously redundant to combat constant data degradation (in other words, a whisper might be a small file with small bandwidth, but backing it up in 30 different places simultaneously is a problem).

5. There simply isn’t enough data storage. Sure, you could write a program that compresses audio to digital text but… wait, a program that understands human speech sounds a little smarter than what these people are comfortable with.

6. (My favorite:) Speaking of programs, what if “The Virus” is hogging all the data storage, and all that Tenka is allowed to work with is a miniscule fraction of their theoretical capacity?

@Aneeka: Would you like to shed some light here or is that spoiler-territory? Why is “giving your team-mates an early warning like you’re supposed to do” more dangerous than calling Kat Bandit’s “girlfriend”, implying that she is her and that they know?

It’s not spoilerific, but I prefer the story to stand on its own two feet.

However, in this case, I think the confusion stems from the fact that there are two types of warnings. A) Warning he’d found a portal and B) warning he’d found a super secret portal. Jake would have wanted the latter warning but Brandon, knowing everyone involved with the portal would now be focused on him, didn’t know how to convey that info in a non-suspicious manner.

I can’t help but feel like this is Tenka lying to Bandit lol there is no way they can’t store peoples whispers… even if they can’t store everyone’s (Though I’ve argued in other comments that they could), it would probably be easy to make the game store specific peoples messages.

I wonder who is going to be most surprised out of Brandon, Jake and Kat when it finally starts to show that both Jake and Kat are actually looking to come on good terms with each other again.

Aneeka I think you got Bandits expression down perfectly in the last panel.

I have forgotten… what is Dude’s “deal with Dr. Grace”?

You haven’t forgotten. You don’t know yet.

First we’ve heard of it.

Thanks. Am glad to hear I’ve got at least a couple brain cells still working. ;D

I love the Dude’s reaction. “Dude, you’re gonna fail so hard! It’ll be awesome!”

Agreed! I LOLed!

Glad, am I slow.
Quadruple agent.
What factions do we have here:
– The presidency.
– Dr Grace (i assume this is linked to the presidency to gain authority, not to help the administrations agenda)
– Jake&Dude – these are actively conspiring as a dual entity.
– Kat & D- blamed for blowing up the world that one time. Perhaps Kat did help with it…
– various gaming teams
– Kat’s circle of friends – small, and none of them looks prone to do earth shattering things… tho they’ll probably stay loyal to Kat so long as she doesn’t do anything crazy like blow up the world… oh, oops.
– Jane and friends – it’s unlikely she’s alone, and given how the Dude reacts, its unlikely she and the Dude are in contact outside the game, but the Dude’s mask is quite thick. Probably working with Kim.
– Dude’s city – dying? Or looking weak on purpose?
– Robot army – hypothetical (but fun)

I”d say the Dude is doing his quad agent game with Jake&Dude, Dr Grace, his local city, and…. um. Not sure. Not his game team – he’s working with them but not revealing inside scoop to them. Well, not openly. I don’t see him having direct contact with the presidency. for that matter, his contact with Grace is iffy.
Somewhere, there’s an org chart that explains where Dude is quad-agenting, but so far all we have is pieces of the picture. Fairly whole cloth of current events, but it only catches bits of people’s connections and affiliations.

You missed the mentiin of an anti-Tenka rebellion/resistance a few pages back. BUT it is possible Jane is part of that so . . .

My speculation: The president, Dr. Grace [not really a different entity, but different loyalties within the same organization], the rebellion, Jake are the four entities. He’s feigning working for both the Prez [primarily] and the rebellion for Dr. Grace, and with Dr. Grace for Jake.

That said, that wouldn’t be four stacked entities, just four overall. Perhaps, in order, then: his city [most visible], the Rebellion, Dr. Grace, Jake [least visible].

I don’t know that we know all the plots on a deep enough level yet to know all of the factions, yet – after all, we just formally found out about the rebellion (before we were just generally aware of “outsider” contentions).

I think Bandit’s expression is right on the mark, Aneeka! Good job!!

So its going to have all the online internet horror and suspense as the timeless classics Unfriended and Friend Request?

Only you, not totally sh**.

maybe they don’t have the space because pre end the game was relatively minor and had limted resources dedeciated to it. then post end it got popular very fast and they had to adapt quickly to the increase demand and the now limited resources.

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 604