Remote viewing page three of three, in which James gets what he came for.

The readout in panel two indicates speed or acceleration, thrust, and depth. The indicators were rather cleanly obliterated by effects processing. Fortunately the enormous HollywoodOS trip indicator on West’s center display is legible, or at least legible enough.

There’s personal precedent for that bit of rather obviously plot-motivated information design – I used to zoom in on file transfers so I could get their status from anywhere in the room while cleaning, reading, etc. In this case it’s more likely a lock screen graphic – whatever the UX purpose it’s rather obviously here for plot. James now knows where the Daedalus is going. Mission accomplished!

For years (yes, years) this was a thing Grij was to have discovered during certain events of the previous chapter. That version of the outline persisted until I quit drinking – since then things have changed. Considerably.

This is the first day ATC has been a thing that gets done instead of a thing that needs doing since October 12th.

The server the comic is presently hosted on has been irrational, ill-tempered and non-functional whenever I’ve tried to actually use it more often than not for the past six months. It turned out that the solution to this problem was to just ignore it, and ATC, for a few weeks. I looked into alternatives, and even went so far as creating an account for one of those alternatives, with an eye towards improving conditions. This didn’t happen and I can’t really talk about the how and the why of it rationally at the moment so I’m not going to. Fortunately for the status quo moving the comic doesn’t seem to be a requirement right now. I haven’t received any shutoff notices from Project Wonderful in a couple of weeks and the comic seems to have developed a habit of being here whenever I load it, so I think it can safely stay put for the time being. ATC will move eventually, probably to a VPS. It won’t be doing this until it can pay its own way, which means that “monetization” thing I’ve been so good at ignoring is going to have to happen at some point.

For that to happen ATC needs to be a thing that can comfortably exist in my head for measurable periods of time. That hasn’t been the case for awhile – for most of this year, actually. I’ll talk about that when I’m able.

The page after this one has been done since September 4th. The two pages after that one need to be shaded, and have been ready for shading for roughly two weeks. At this point the chapter is rendered through page 4.17 and interior (Daedalus) line art has been drawn, cleaned up, and assembled through page 4.13. Huge parts of pages 4.12 and 4.13 still need to be created, and there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll still need to be created when page 4.09 is posted. The goal for the year has been revised from “finish chapter four” to getting all pages up to 4.19 produced and posted. Story-wise that’s the halfway point and very achievable, despite the impending release of Fallout 4 and/or Just Cause 3, one or both of which I intend to spend December with in lieu of other forms of activity.