02/06/13 Dimitri is Debugged



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I had a dentist appointment. First time in a while (due to finances etc). And they looked pretty good. Whaddya know! Guess it’s okay to eat the tremendously unhealthy amount of sugar I normally do to keep up my buzz (kids, don’t listen to me).

Just listened to Connie Willis‘s “Inside Job.” Dang, that woman can write.

My water soluble oil paints arrived. Do I paint quinces, a portrait, or the cover for my next novel? Or do i write instead? Or just make more fudge? So many questions!

My girlfriend is going to trim hair and tomorrow we drive to Lee to get a sofa. Oh, the exciting lives we lead. ;-)

29 Comments

  1. Fnordius

    clacke, the redundancy actually makes it very clear that the king is listening in. Leaves no room for thinking the king might be referring to something else. There was a little bit in Scott McCloud’s _Understanding Comics_ that dealt with this, how to deal with things like this when telling a story in comic panels.

  2. Nomi

    I’m with clacke. Have the speech bubble overlap the two panels, getting transmission-jaggy in the last panel. It’s clear as is, but the repetition is a little jarring. Crowdsourced formatting! Every cartoonist’s dream! (not)

  3. Herandar

    I like the way TB assumes it’s a bowl and not a highly advanced bug deactivator that just happens to be bowl-shaped. Each ‘plink’ sound in the strip is actually generated by a tightly aimed hypersonic/electromagnetic pulse that renders any monitoring device into a dormant state.

  4. Muzhik

    @Herander, intercourse putting the monitoring devices “into a dormant state”. The “plink” is the sound the devices make as they are returned to their natural molecular components.

    @Frank, I agree re: the disrobing of Dimitri. (I’m thinking of the movie “Enemy of the State”.) My only concern would be this: what if the bugs were motile? I.e., what if they can move in order to make it harder to detect them? The places they’d go, the things they would hear!

  5. you know, I don’t think anyone has commented on how awesome it is that Dimitri just sighs when kidnapped as if saying “here we go again”

    @LordCircle: yes, but I was saving that for next week, when we might have more information on him/her

    @Muzhik: that… that does sound like the kind of thing Mihrgoots would do, doesn’t it?

  6. Corpore Metal

    By the way, have I mentioned before how much I *love* the King’s smile? I don’t really think he’s evil but he comes across as a very clever and scary guy you don’t want to cross.

    About the bugging technology–

    First we have to understand this is a science fiction comic where a lot of physics defying technology exists–for example dark greased light drives. As such, it’s hard to discount something using arguments based in science as we know it.

    The bugs could all be using tiny FTL transmitters that don’t even work by electromagnetic radiation. So maybe a faraday cage won’t work. We just have to take Chris’ word for it that dropping the bugs into this bowl deactivates them.

    Additionally, we don’t know if just removing Dimitri’s clothes will work. The Mihrrgoots might have developed internal bugs, based around nanotech or MEMS, that attach themselves to Dimitri’s auditory nerves or even use the hairs on his skin to sense vibrations in the air.

    I’m just saying could be very complicated and we’ll just have to accept the storyteller’s word that this has all been taken into account. When the hooded Illuminati guy says they’ve got them all, we have to assume he believes it. Also when King says they missed a few, we have to believe it.

    Maybe if Chris were writting the hardest of hard SF, then we could argue about it but, he isn’t.

  7. LoneWolf

    Sorry, but my sides hurt so much right now and I have tears rolling down my cheeks that are laughing as hard as I am right now. Those last two frames put me on the floor for nearly 5 minutes I was laughing so hard.

  8. Jonesy

    Nice. A very intersting turn of events. King was being pretty boring, actually.
    So….if they have the most advanced (Eeb-made) listening device, it’s not that weird that some of the are not found. After all, they do have the fastest spaceship in the universe.

  9. TB

    “Each ‘plink’ sound in the strip is actually generated by a tightly aimed hypersonic/electromagnetic pulse that renders any monitoring device into a dormant state.” – Herandar

    Actually, the bowl contains a Maxwell’s Demon who catches each bug, rapidly unscrews the back, and removes the batteries. The “plink” is the sound of a very tiny battery being tossed into a very tiny recycling bin.

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