OOTS #1071 - The Discussion Thread

[Peelee]

I was going to say tattoos, but from the glimpse of the Frost Giant not in battle, I'm gonna go with Grey Wolf on this .

[Keltest]

I was going to say tattoos, but from the glimpse of the Frost Giant not in battle, I'm gonna go with Grey Wolf on this .

Most of the giant clerics lack visible tattoos/paints (with the exception of the one seemingly in charge) so they could be tattoos indicating status or role in society. I'm a little skeptical that they could get any sort of plant based dye or paint in the climate theyre in, though admittedly, they could be traveling through the mountains in wintertime.

[danielxcutter]

Most of the giant clerics lack visible tattoos/paints (with the exception of the one seemingly in charge) so they could be tattoos indicating status or role in society. I'm a little skeptical that they could get any sort of plant based dye or paint in the climate theyre in, though admittedly, they could be traveling through the mountains in wintertime.

There are probably *some* plants, which may also be the reason the paint is reserved for the warriors. Also, not all paints are plant-based. Many blues are extracted from rocks.

[rockdeworld]

Would a good answer to Elan's question be "1 in 4 people"?

[Shining Wrath]

The giantess is not thinking very rationally, although she believes that she is. She's not going to get very far attacking the ship with Roy whaling on her. Also, Elan can cast Minor Confusion again. This will not end well for the Furkini Menace, I'm afraid. It is interesting, though, that her instructions are "Destroy the ship", not "kill them all". Delay is good enough.

"I could have sworn I saw" counts as foreshadowing if ever a shadow has been cast before a cast of characters. Dragon? Roc? Return of Julio, just in the nick of time?

Andi's ability to rationalize that her decisions are good ones is remarkable.

[Shining Wrath]

And apparently Andi isn't even a very good engineer, given that she just said she fixes things via trial and error...

No she doesn't. It rather proves that her job may be engineer, but she's not an engineer, she's a dilettante.

I'm inclined to say it suggests the true job Julio selected her for is not "engineer," but "antagonist on an episode where I leave the ship in Bandana's hands at some point."

To quote the great Stan Kelly-Bootle in The Devil's DP Dictionary

• I heurist
• You trial and err
• He/she flounders

If you are fixing something on a spacecraft in orbit you don't just randomly command the hardware or upload new data and see if it works. That's a good way to lose a spacecraft. Making reasoned choices about the probably source of the error using a fishbone analysis of the possible causes of the observed error signature and eliminating them one by one before issuing any commands is the way to go. I think repairing a flying ship in flight is fairly similar to fixing a flying spacecraft.

Back in the day the best problems were the ones that went away when you put in print statements to help diagnose them, because those usually meant you were overwriting your own code somewhere.

[danielxcutter]

The giantess is not thinking very rationally, although she believes that she is. She's not going to get very far attacking the ship with Roy whaling on her. Also, Elan can cast Minor Confusion again. This will not end well for the Furkini Menace, I'm afraid. It is interesting, though, that her instructions are "Destroy the ship", not "kill them all". Delay is good enough.

"I could have sworn I saw" counts as foreshadowing if ever a shadow has been cast before a cast of characters. Dragon? Roc? Return of Julio, just in the nick of time?

Andi's ability to rationalize that her decisions are good ones is remarkable.

Not going to lie, if this forum had a like button I'd click the one for this post juuust for the words "Furkini Menace". Pretty sure that's the first time since the birth of the universe that someone's said those words.

[factotum]

Back in the day the best problems were the ones that went away when you put in print statements to help diagnose them, because those usually meant you were overwriting your own code somewhere.

Or the compiler you were using had a bug which only manifested with a particular arrangement of code...I recall once trying to work out why some code I'd written ran really slow, and hit on the idea of getting the C compiler to output the intermediate assembler is was generating. When it spat out about 2k of assembly code from 5 lines of C I knew I'd hit a bug somewhere, and just refactoring the code to use a not equal operation rather than an equal one made it work fine.

[Jasdoif]

Or the compiler you were using had a bug which only manifested with a particular arrangement of code...I recall once trying to work out why some code I'd written ran really slow, and hit on the idea of getting the C compiler to output the intermediate assembler is was generating. When it spat out about 2k of assembly code from 5 lines of C I knew I'd hit a bug somewhere, and just refactoring the code to use a not equal operation rather than an equal one made it work fine.

My "favorite" is a project where the behind-the-scenes multithreading code inconsistently broke when compiled in debug mode, so there were issues while debugging that never occurred in the production code (which complicated figuring out what the production code was smoking).

[ella ventic]

I read "I could've sworn I saw..." as a reference back to #1067, when Andi made the choice on which way to go around the mountain. Her reason for the path she chose was that she thought she saw plains in the distance.

Which is not to say it can't also be foreshadowing! What would make her see that and then have it turn out to be wrong? I mean, it could just be her own ego, making her sure that she has a solution that doesn't actually exist, but it could also be illusion, or...?

[Yendor]

"I could have sworn I saw" counts as foreshadowing if ever a shadow has been cast before a cast of characters. Dragon? Roc? Return of Julio, just in the nick of time?

Andi's ability to rationalize that her decisions are good ones is remarkable.

I'm pretty sure it just means whatever she thought she saw isn't really there.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Yeah it's just further proof that her thought processes are basically delusions and wishful thinking.

[Sermil]

My "favorite" is a project where the behind-the-scenes multithreading code inconsistently broke when compiled in debug mode, so there were issues while debugging that never occurred in the production code (which complicated figuring out what the production code was smoking).

My 'favorite' was a piece of multithreading code that broke only on single-core machines. Of course, all the developers had multicore machines so they could compile faster...

[Cazero]

Playful natural lighting can make wonderful optical illusions. Mighty glaciers thousands of feet tall could look like flat frozen plains until you're closer.
Wishful thinking only make it worse.

[Quibblicious]

You know, I like quoting from the Order of the Stick.

But it's going to be hard to find a way to work "Compel discerning peanut butter droplet ladders" into a conversation.

I managed to work variable speed corn muffins into conversation; don't sell yourself short.

Q

[Clistenes]

The part that's confusing is that Andi told Mateo to go head back to the fork, not the ridge....but they went over the ridge after the fork. Are they going to try going over the ridge again (despite being unable to gain more altitude than they had the first time), or does Mateo have a navigational frame of reference to allow bypassing the ridge?

I think they will just either get stranded due to being unable to gain enough altitude, or they will crash while trying...

[KorvinStarmast]

Weren't Saturns made by Toyota?

GM, in Spring Hill, TN.

Or is Andi so out of her element and incompetent that she doesn't even understand that what she's asking for is literally impossible?

That's an Andi thing. Just don't argue with her, because she's right ... uh, because.

... the words "Furkini Menace". Pretty sure that's the first time since the birth of the universe that someone's said those words.

Hmm, perhaps it is the name of an edgy all female punk band from the Yukon. It is a great neologism, and ought to be the subject of a t shirt or something.

[8BitNinja]

Not going to lie, if this forum had a like button I'd click the one for this post juuust for the words "Furkini Menace". Pretty sure that's the first time since the birth of the universe that someone's said those words.

Probably because Furkini is a crazy idea. By crazy I mean crazy counterproductive.

You are wearing clothes with fur on it, probably for keeping warm. But you are cutting out the majority of the torso area, thereby keeping the wearer from warmth, but on a hot day, it still feels warm. Therefore making it useless.

[Shining Wrath]

Probably because Furkini is a crazy idea. By crazy I mean crazy counterproductive.

You are wearing clothes with fur on it, probably for keeping warm. But you are cutting out the majority of the torso area, thereby keeping the wearer from warmth, but on a hot day, it still feels warm. Therefore making it useless.

Or, stylish and edgy for a Frost Giantess teetering on the edge of rebellion against the patriarchy! Not that I'd expect a Paladin to understand that.

[pendell]

Meanwhile, I don't think Andi has many more tries she can do in any event; they just cleared that last mountain and they have less magic gas now than they did then. I suspect they won't be able to go back.

Which means the Mechane is stuck in a valley or crater and isn't going anywhere until they can effect repairs, if then, since even if the ship is fully repaired they still need more magic gas.

Here's hoping they have the OOTS equivalent of Road Service. But I suspect this means the party is going to have to journey on without the airship for now.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Kish]

I doubt the Order will be continuing without the Mechane. Both because this would not, by any stretch, be "arriving in the nick of time" and because...while I won't be at all surprised if Andi exits the story (and probably the world of the living) any strip now, I don't think Bandana's role in the story is finished, or will be as anticlimactic as "guess our leaving you to deal with a busted airship is how your stint as captain ends after all" when it is.

[Quibblicious]

It's an ice thought, though.

That was cold hearted.

Q

[Monday]

That was cold hearted.

Q

Just couldn't let that one slide, could you?

If you're not careful we'll find ourselves in a frozen pundra again...

[TheNecrocomicon]

Just couldn't let that one slide, could you?

If you're not careful we'll find ourselves in a frozen pundra again...

I get the feeling that things are going to snowball very quickly ...

[danielxcutter]

I get the feeling that things are going to snowball very quickly ...

Ooooh, that gave me the chills....

[Sermil]

Ooooh, that gave me the chills....

The blizzard of puns might derail the thread!

[Knaight]

Well, if this is how Andi tackles engineering issues, she's also a rotten engineer. "Trial and error" is NOT how you fix a machine, in my experience. That approach implies that you just replace every part at random until you get around to the one that's actually broken. Maybe I'm wrong here, but don't actual engineers know enough about their machines to have a pretty good idea what's wrong before they start working on them?

Symptoms have an annoying tendency to have several possible causes, and that makes fixing machines frequently involve multiple checks.

As I edited above: she is suggesting finding an exit from the mountain range by randomly trying every valley they come across, so I think I am in quite solid ground when I say that her definition of trial and error is closer to what I'm using than to yours.

GW

This assumes one definition of trial and error, and that's a really dubious assumption. Every indication we've seen so far indicates that she's good as a ship engineer, starting with how she managed to jury rig the engines to work after the ship took severe damage in a thunderstorm quite possibly caused by a god. That doesn't mean that she can apply anywhere near that level of finesse when applying broad engineering principles to something she knows basically nothing about, and she knows basically nothing about navigation.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

This assumes one definition of trial and error, and that's a really dubious assumption.

No, it assumes that Rich has one definition in mind when he has her use the words, regardless of how many others there are. And the implication is that her "blindly try things until one works" navigation (rather than at the very least consult a navigation chart) matches her engineering approach.

Every indication we've seen so far indicates that she's good as a ship engineer, starting with how she managed to jury rig the engines to work after the ship took severe damage in a thunderstorm quite possibly caused by a god

The jury rigging had to be carefully undone, or risked exploding the ship. That is not an indication of great engineering. It is also not an indication of bad engineering - we simply don't know how dangerous the engine was before she jury-rigged it. Therefore, we don't know that she is as good as you claim: the evidence is mixed at best.

GW

[JumboWheat01]

The blizzard of puns might derail the thread!

I'm actually amazed we've managed to stay this level of on track for a comic thread. Kinda cool, really.

[Keltest]

The jury rigging had to be carefully undone, or risked exploding the ship. That is not an indication of great engineering. It is also not an indication of bad engineering - we simply don't know how dangerous the engine was before she jury-rigged it. Therefore, we don't know that she is as good as you claim: the evidence is mixed at best.

GW

The gnomes were obviously lying in order to inflate the price that they got from the Order. Diplomancy joke or not, you cant just talk somebody into speeding up a process that physically needs to be done at a certain pace.