‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 714

Please note: NAV is updating only on Tuesdays until the end of June.

25 Comments

I don’t understand therefore it cannot possibly be a good thing 😛
(I just hope she does talk to Danni before anything drastic happens.)

I think it’s more she’s worried her sensors are failing to pick up what they should be picking up. Malfunctioning sensors aren’t a good reason to relax.

It’s like when you see a spider in the corner of your room, leave it alone for a while and go back to look at your computer, then after a while, look back to where the spider was and don’t see a spider.

Or as I joked in cases like that – it’s not the ninjas you see that are scary – it’s the ninjas you don’t.

You’d think she doesn’t have an ultra-powerful AI at her beck and call to go ask him questions and spy on people. Maybe that’d get her caught? Be a bit fishy if the anti-hacking AI is constantly streaming data to the middle of the Indian ocean.

Is she more afraid of losing friends or being attacked?

Thanks for the links. I like seeing her place, kinda curious about the rest of it. Like, does it have more rooms or is there just a fold down bunk on the wall with a toilet/sink by it and that room is basically it… all the amenities of a prison. …wait, she can float right? No need for a bunk at least. 🙂

I think the consensus is that she has a nuclear submarine maybe cold fusion powered. Fully automated design for a larger crew so she can stay down for even longer than the design spec was. D can hijack and route food to someplace they can do pickups. Essentially Unlimited power, is either tapping trans-oceanic cables or has something on the surface as a relay to a satellite. My guess is is cables because satellite would have a huge latency cost.

Woah, the navigation buttons (to go back/forwards page by page) seem to be gone. I’m pretty sure they were there last time I checked the site just a few days ago. Did you remove them intentionally for some reason or did some HTML break somewhere?

A plugin updated and broke parts of the site. I’m still working on fixing things.

Thanks for the quick fix! Getting 404 errors from your favorite webcome is mildly annoying, but for you it must be a horrifying headache. Good luck! (btw, chrome says this sight is “not secure” at the moment, not sure if that info helps you or not.)

Its still broken for me

Oh, plugin update. That explains why the site was down when I first looked for an update.

Is she floating? I can tell she went from standing to what looks very much like sitting knees-to-chest but not sure what she could be sitting on. O would have expected the floor given no chair in the first panel.

It’s hard to curl up in a ball when you float.

Her rig is probably magnetic(thus she could hack Earth’s magnetic field, which everyone knows is a thing that she totally did!!!) and thus exerts force. I assume that it has its own expert system stabilising it, so it would keep her vertical even if she shifts around or curls into a ball by applying more force in one direction and less in another as needed.

In the first “IRL” story arc you can see her wearing what appear to be magnetic boots that allow levitation. It might also be a feature of being a cyborg.

She can’t see the obvious answer cause of the PTSD, which is pretty sad.

It’s a bit more sad than that: it is mostly not due to PTSD, rather due to her limited experience with people and/or autistic traits. For her – like for me in my earlier years (and still when I’m not level-headed enough) – there is more or less an equality between “I don’t understand” and “something is wrong”.

When something or someone behaves unexpectedly, either your understanding of the situation or your understanding of the behavior is wrong – and this, to her as to me, feels dangerous! Whether it is the situation or a behavior (of a person, of nature, of a technical system, you name it) that I don’t understand the implication is the same: I don’t know how to react, because I no longer know what to expect. A moment ago I did but I was proven wrong. A very likely explanation – at least when dealing with technology – is that something already went wrong, the situation is an exception (a fault mode, a bug, et.c.) that I did not know about before (thus I did not have a corresponding try-catch to deal with it). With people it is somewhat similar, there is some sort of exceptional case going on, one that I have not seen before.

And when people are involved it is REALLY hard to figure out where my lack of understanding lies, because I can’t easily test it. If it is a social situation of some sort I also have about one second to figure it all out before a reaction is needed… leading me to take a guess. Leading to something going wrong, if it had not already. Leading to social anxiety.

In Keikos current case, she is not aware of any reason that Jake would have for not telling people that he found her. She is currently running her brain on overdrive to find possible explanations:
– has he told them, and my monitoring system failed to pick it up?
– was he somehow stopped from telling them? Did D fry Jake?
– has he just not gotten around to it yet? Not likely, last I heard finding me was real high on the prority list
– has he somehow refrained from telling? Then what for?
* does he want to kill me himself? I did kill Mom, he hates me for that… (this is likely thought to get stuck on for hours if not days)
* does he have some ulterior motive? Like, using his knowledge of my identity as a trump card?
* does he not want me killed? Then what does he need me for?
– working on the game? No, they don’t care about the game
– other programming help? No, they’re Tenka, they have all the programmers in the world, including Jake… but is it Jake that needs help? On what? (close to the truth here)

Note how I assume she does not consider that Jake would want her to not be killed for emotional reasons. For one, she surely believes Jake hates her for killing her (more or less their) Mom. He probably made that very clear to her at some point. On top of that she may well regard emotions as not root reasons, because there is often underlying reasons behind emotions. Emotions where underlying reasons cannot be found are often stronger and more important, but they’re not really explainable or understandable, so they don’t get to play a role in her view of the world… yet.

I try to include emotion as a base reason without further explanation in my understanding of people. It is scary, it is hard, it is unpredictable in a way nothing else I know of even comes close to. It creates extreme behavior from quite normal situations, it creates indifference towards extreme situations, it is altogether unruly. My understanding of myself did eventually improve when taking emotions into account. But for understanding my friends or people in general the increase in complexity makes it so hard; that I don’t feel I have more success then with the approach of only looking for more tangible reasons. Yet.

There is hope, yet. Apologies for the very long reply if it was not interesting to you, hopefully it is interesting to someone more than myself. I wish I could be explaining these things to Keiko.

I like your description there. Emotions really do complicate things, especially since they can also taint world views leading to misinterpritation of events or situations sometimes. I try to run through a lagical analysis in my own head with things, but when dealing with social situations and the huge amount of unknown variables, including emotions, the complexity level rises.

Thank you for sharing that. It is very interesting and people need to read stuff like that regularly. To be back on topic, I feel you’re explanation is quite apt.

Well you have two options practice what you preach and “be nice” or nuke his city he won’t be able to tell if he’s dead. The choice is yours.

don’t forget run and hide

Hmm, Floating. That is not a feature of being under water generally. Could she be in some kind of space station?

The Hapkido allows her to fly, and it’s been shown she does so even while “jacked in” to Life, so it’s more likely that’s what’s letting her float.

I can’t see anything 🙁

yeeesss, things are finally starting to get JUICY!

One thing I don’t understand though, is the extend of D’s capability. I was under the impression he had near full control of the game and is kind of mentally linked with Kleya where he can hear whatever she’s thinking. We know D was in the private server, could he not have overheard what Bandit and Danny was talking about? Could he not hear what Kleya is saying right now? Or has he heard everything but is still too young and naive as an AI to know to inform her to calm here down? Or does he have restrictions where he has no access to voice channels or and can only hear Kleya when she wants to be heard? Gah, so many questions.

There are things D can do, and things D can do without being noticed.

The second is a subset of the first. D can exert full control over pretty much any networked computer system. But when the system is designed to prevent unauthorized access, D can do much less without being noticed. I have some experience with cheating at computer games. You can do almost anything, but what you can do without an anti-cheat system of some sort detecting your client output as invalid is much more limited. That’s why K didn’t want to cheat, she knew Jake would notice (and he did).

Tapping a private channel is apparently one of the things that will be noticed. Which is why Jake trusts them so much, though he probably still shouldn’t. Just because D can’t do it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. K was apparently not big on subtlety when creating (or awakening) D.

I can see it now! Thank you!

Oh, they’re back! The buttons!

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 714