Freefall

Eh, Sam leans towards good. I mean, when Florence tried to sell him on trying to save the robots from lobotomy, she didn't have to sell it that hard (in fact, Sam had to warn her that she was selling it too hard). And there may be just a little blue in his morality as well.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

The Chief wants to weaponise Sam◊.

Well, it's not like he isn't familiar with Sam's effectiveness...

All your safe space are belong to Trump

If anything, I think the current situation shows it even better. Sam wasn't even put on Kornada's case for 24 hours and he managed to suss out exactly what he was trying to do and put things in motion to arrest him. It's quite possible that, even if GitD went out, Sam's efforts would have resulted in Kornada being arrested and denied all the wealth that he tried to steal (sure, it wouldn't have saved the robots, but I think the chief understands Sam's limits).

Also, interesting to note that the chief is indirectly agreeing with the point made multiple times before - society needs people like Sam to grow.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

Sam's punishment for his crimes◊ appears to be using his skills for good.

"Chaperone"?◊ What, exactly, is Sam implying here?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It's a chance for him to mooch free food and lodging, what else?

Most of the robots want to kill Sam, it seems.

Everybody say it with me: "Awwwwwww"◊

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

2679 and 2680◊. With a diet like that, I can't help but think that Raibert will not have the highest life expectancy. Moreover, his rationality becomes deeply suspect.

Meanwhile, more feels for Florence and Winston. I really think that she's going to be too happy to worry about getting mad at Sam.

edited 15th Jul '15 10:50:12 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

In this setting it looks like the first legal marriage of a human to a non-human.

"Show us the Galaxy Warp."

Wouldn't that be a jump start to AI rights! Can Florence even legally marry as the property of EU?

edited 15th Jul '15 1:04:54 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I think that's been raised somewhat. Definitely remember mentioning that her kids would be property of EU. (Well in case of wolf kids, she probably isn't even compatible with humans chromosome-wise.)

Bowman could probably cook something up. EU would never let him, which is almost certainly for the best, but he probably could.

^^ She's definitely not chromosomally compatible (so to speak) with humans.

[edit] Also, as to children, through her owner Scott she's arranged to buy her first child of the two cryogenically frozen samples.

edited 15th Jul '15 8:28:43 PM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

... Eh, I'd eat that pizza. At least one slice, at any rate.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

That was fast◊

The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!

Can anyone point me to the webpage that allowed viewing the archives as a single scrollable page (dynamically loading them as you scroll)?

http://tangent128.name/depot/toys/freefall/freefall-flytable.html

How do you make those? Because I would love to make one for other webcomics. Schlock Mercenary, especially, would work great except for the footnotes.

Tangent open-sourced the code for the speed-reader

Here was his CTC post about trying to use this codebase for other comics

Yeah that's a thing. Even if you could generally skip the footnotes, they are rare, SM has date-based filenames which you could compute but it would be more annoying than straightup numbers. There are also Sunday's extra size strips; you again could likely compute most of them as special rule, except for cases when it's not the usual three rows. Plus extra exceptions for non-Sunday extra large comics.

That's a problem with Schlock too.

I mean, look at that recent one, Sunday (ding), with 2 rows (ding) and of different height (ding).

And on a further random stroll, individual mid-week comics wobble by up to +/- 10 pixels by themselves.

By this point, with Schlock it would probably be easier to automatically fetch dimensions and pages for all the comics and database them down one by one rather than try to come up with generalised rules. Which kinda breaks the concept of an automated speed reader.

edited 19th Jul '15 10:13:16 AM by Adannor

Well, for the height thing, just allot all the comics three panels of height. Sure, most are going to end up with more space than they need, but it's better than one-seventh being rendered unreadable (or doing it manually).

For the rest, I have no idea. You could probably write something like "if image has -a at the end, fetch images -b and -c," but I'm not a programmer, so I don't really know. It would probably be more trouble than its worth.

> You could probably write something like "if image has -a at the end, fetch images -b and -c," but I'm not a programmer, so I don't really know.

Not how I think it'd work, you do not get a "what's the filename for date X, does it have an -a?", you check for file schlock20130721.jpg (which where it would be in auto date write without exception for Sundays) and get nothing. With exception, you just write it "if 20130721 is Sunday, fetch comics schlock20130721-a.jpg, schlock20130721-b.jpg and schlock20130721-c.jpg"

Or like "on every 7th comic, pick up -a, -b and -c" depending on how exactly this sort of thing rolls.

But as far as I figure, a whole lot of it relies on preemptively allotting the page space for comics, without loading the actual comics or contacting the comic server at all until it is time to actually SEE the images in the area you are looking at.
And that's hard with the comic like Schlock.

edited 19th Jul '15 10:33:19 AM by Adannor

I'd make something more comprehensive, like this :

• Fetch schlock<date>.jpg
• If it doesn't exist, fetch schlock<date>-a.jpg (if this doesn't exist, there's no image for this day : move on to the next date)
• If it exists, then also fetch schlock<date>-b.jpg, schlock<date>-c.jpg, etc... until you find one that doesn't exist.

You could also make something with regexes : fetch everything that begins with schlock<date> (if any), sort them and display them in order.

For the height problem, I suppose it might be possible to dynamically check the heights and position the images as needed. I haven't read the code in detail.

edited 19th Jul '15 11:45:50 AM by Aetol

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Not sure if this goes in the Freefall or Schlock thread.

TW: Data Structures lingo

So. The "clever" part of the speedreader is an efficient way to answer the question: "for a given y position, what comic intersects it?"

So basically, a collision detection algorithm.

For Freefall, you have very long stretches (usually over a hundred strips) where all comics have the same height. So it proves simplest to only note where comic differs from the one before it. See the actual data file the speedreader uses. (Mark kindly took up updating the data file for me, so it updates as soon as the comic does.)

For Schlock, it would probably be most robust to just have the data file list every comic. It would make for a very hefty data file, but depending on compression, actual size would probably be comparable to several images. So relatively, not that heavy. (In theory the data file could be split up, like a B-tree, but I'm not convinced it's actually worthwhile.)

The "hard part" is scraping the full list in the first place, and finding somebody to remember to keep it updated. Most of this could be automated; JSON is easy for scripts to work with these days.

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?