Schlock Mercenary

He finished it yesterday

Dinosaurs.

The End?

Seems a bit ominous given that I was expecting a final comic tomorrow...

I'm just waiting for the filler swimsuit pinups after this. But yes, I think Howard has stated that there is a comic for tomorrow, although I'm wondering if it might be a more definite ending graphic.

This isn't narrator going the end now, this is "I'm gonna say it!".

Offical End is tomorrow. And Saturday is the undiscovered country.

Here be Dragons. Or at least an angry floofy and chonky T-Rex.

No prizes for guessing what's making the T-Rex angry.

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2020-07-24

And that's the end. Is the site going to update tomorrow, or is he taking a break before he does whatever he's doing next?

I think this ending is a little weak. Far from terrible, but we don't know much about the state of the galaxy besides "the precursors are coming back, Schlock is a god and Petey isn't (or at least not as big as he used to be), and apparently everything is fine now." Some more detail would have been nice, but then maybe he's planning more stories in the same universe that will flesh out that stuff.

He was pretty explicit in saying that yes, he has more stories set in that universe.

Although he has also stated that, due to his current health issues, he is taking a break on an unspecified amount of time, which was not originally planned.

I have faith in Howard to continue to story in a fun way, although there is also a sad legacy of authors with an amazing long-running work trying to go back to the well and falling short. Trying to recapture that spark, that lightning in a bottle, is difficult, although I think that Howard's method of grinding the work out day by day is a good one, same reason why people like Stephen King and R. L. Stine manage to be some prolific, not necessarily waiting for inspiration, but rather working as consistently as possible and building up for the dry times. Or, for that matter, fellow Mormon and author Brandon Sanderson who apparently wrote 12 novels before one was accepted.

There's going to be a strip tomorrow, just not one by Howard

Sanderson doesn't count because he found a magic cloning machine and thus has an army helping him.

Oh, so he's finally doing guest strips for real? Interesting.

And here it is:

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2020-07-25

Cute.

I thought he'd do more guest strips, but apparently it's just the one. He did do a newpost a couple days ago, which I didn't notice but I think is worth reading.

Yeah, I've read that, and to be honest it makes me worry about him quite a bit as to his mental health.

I think it will be quite a while before any new stuff comes out.

Honestly, him just hoping a long break will help him with his "lung thing."

I can imagine that, in a time of COVID 19 on top of it, is probably doing a lot to drag him down on his own.

Habits

Edited by 3of4 on Jul 26th 2020 at 6:08:28 PM

Does anyone have the hard copy books? Because I'm considering buying them all (all at once, since shipping through his site will be cheaper that way), but I figured I should check to make sure there's nothing wrong with them first. Or if he's about to release omnibus versions or something.

I have all of the current ones, and I'm paid up for the Kickstarter for Big Dumb Objects. The product quality is good.

The very first strip, remastered. Is this what's in the print copies?

As per the description text, it's part of the Prologue, not replacing the first strip. But yes, it is there in the book.

Oh, and good. They fixed the bug where logged-in Patreon supporters couldn't see that Prologue image. :-D

I don't quite get the point of even keeping around the Pa'anuri in the infosphere. You're already gonna have to kill them all, what's the point of keeping around digital copies? Yeah, let the ones already in there live and do their thing, but don't go creating new digital copies just to try to claim moral high ground of committing genocide. I never liked how this whole thing seems to just treat digital/physical as an easy swap.

Well, if Petey wants them to surrender rather than fighting this war to the last bloody square inch of empty space, "I'll upload a digital copy of you to paradise" is a lot more enticing than "Stop fighting back so I can kill you without losing any more of my troops."

Also, Petey is pragmatic but is an inherently moral person. And many of the big players in the council Thurl called at least like to think of themselves as good people (especially since Sorlie got herself put in the leadership role). These aren't people who would actually like to carry out genocide if there's a viable alternative.

Infosphere space doesn't seem to be a very limited resource, not in the same way that galactic-weapons-grade energy is, so as long as there's no real chance of escape (which, well, how would there be?) there's not much cost to this solution.

As an added bonus, teraports don't have negative effects on the uploaded dark matter entities, so they don't have to worry about annoying baryonic beings re-inventing them again.

I guess it's because to me, uploading a digital copy isn't the same thing as actually keeping that person alive. We have already covered similar ground with the Gavins and Tagon after he blew himself up. They're already committing genocide. They're simply uploading digital copies of them after the fact to salve their consciences.

Then again, everyone in-universe apparently sees nothing wrong with reviving people based on memory backups and bodies cloned from scraps of DNA, so they may not think of it as genocide, but "wipe out the entire species then replace them with digital copies" is pretty much what that is. I guess at the heart of the matter, it's really really hard to prove that digital transference and stream-of-consciousness matters, because the only one to who it would really matter is the one who "dies", and obviously they're not in any position to talk.

Edited by danime91 on Aug 17th 2020 at 7:01:33 AM