Not a plaything

He got bullied into building those showers after all. And looks like Stefen is opening up a little bit, Filip’s inherent special power is being easy to talk to~

Yet another week has passed, not much has changed although I’m getting closer and closer to revealing a nice surprise I’m working on! For now, only the Patreon camp dwellers know what’s going on and cheer me on as I draw instead of looking for a job ლ(╹◡╹ლ) Nah, that’s not actually true, most of my time is still devoted to preparations, even though I’d rather be drawing Robert in Madoka’s costume or more of the First Steps episodes, to finally finish that silly side-story. That’s also why I’ve been slightly more quiet in the comments, sorry about that (づ￣ ³￣)づ

My friend told me this week that it feels like I’ve never been following my dreams and only did whatever seemed reasonable for my whole life. When your dream is to write books and draw comics and illustrations you kind of have no choice. There is no job like that. And I’m not actually all that good. At least not good enough to instantly become popular and pay my bills with stories and drawings alone. So yeah, I guess my life was (and still is) full of “this is the most reasonable thing to do” choices but maybe one day I’ll be able to turn the tables around. This time I saved up money in order to move to Japan for good. Maybe next time will be to write a book and actually try to do what I want to do. Right now I’m still a chicken ๏◡๏

Sorry for the random thoughts. I hope you like the new page, we’ll get back to Ada next week! And the awesome secret thing I’m working on… maybe in two weeks? I post updates often on the Patreon, though. And thanks for the votes! Kasper doesn’t look too happy about your attention but I assure you, he secretly loves it.

 

78 comments on “Not a plaything”

  1. Olivia Reply

    I don’t think anyone here would agree that you’re “not actually all that good.” I’m really enjoying Replay and hope you’re able to keep it up! PS I do a lot of freelancing on Upwork. For native English speakers who want some decent writing gigs (think web content, editing, etc.), it’s a good place to go. I think there’s also a pretty strong market for logo designs, which I’m sure you’d be great at. 🙂

    • NotImportant Reply

      Not a native! And I really need to find a stable, programming, office job here, to get the visa. But one can dream, eh? Maybe in a few years I’ll be able to live of Replay. I’m glad you enjoy it, thank you for the encouragement! <3

      • bitflipper Camp dweller Reply

        English might not be your mother tongue, but you are certainly fluent and skilled in the language, NI. And that’s the opinion of a native speaker who has copy-edited a handful of books. Don’t be so quick to dismiss your own skills; you’re intelligent, talented, and rather impressive, looking from where I stand.

        A lovely page, as always; I love your ability to portray lighting so wonderfully!

        • NotImportant Reply

          I know I’m judge myself too harshly, that’s sadly how my brain functions. At least I’m sane (?) enough to realize that I shouldn’t trust that judgement too much. I didn’t intend to whine, sorry if it sounded like that!

          Thank you for your kind words and I’m glad you like the page!

          • thebombzen

            “I’m not all that good.” Bruh, these pages are gorgeous, whatchu talking about. When I found this comic I took one glance at the art and instantly decided to archive binge it.

          • NotImportant

            Hahah that’s awesome 😀 “Goodness” in that sentence is sadly measured in food-buying-coins. Replay doesn’t earn as much as some other comics (yet?) = I’m not good enough to live from drawing it.

        • Olivia Reply

          Yup, I had no idea you weren’t a native speaker! Your English is awesome. And yes, Upwork doesn’t often replace a day job. It’s a good resource if you’re looking to pick up some cash after-hours or in between gigs.

      • Dragon Master Reply

        Something I’ve found is that non natives will actually make less mistakes than natives, unless their still in the early learning stages of the new tongue. This because their more careful about what their going over to make sure they understand it. Whereas natives can easily miss it because we aren’t focusing that hard.

        Neat trick to try: Send a message to a friend in their mother tongue (or whatever language they use/think in most). The message must be written so only the first and last letter of each word is in the proper place. The rest of the letters are jumbled about. They should still be able to read it normally, and in fact probably won’t even notice the jumbling. This is because most people only look at the first and last letter for each word, and the brain fills in the rest. Their are some people who this doesn’t work on though.
        *Note this only works with languages that use the Roman Alphabet, (so no glyph based languages, ruling out most if not all of Asia) but most Western languages will work. This works best if your target isn’t expecting it, also spell check will also ruin it.

        • NotImportant Reply

          That’s very true. It was noticeable at my work. We had a system for answering client tickets and sometimes developers used it as well and we had people from many different countries working in the company and not all of them spoke English well. So any fresh comment had to be accepted by someone higher up. It quickly turned out that me and some other non-natives can be whitelisted but many native Americans in the office struggled with grammar and made a lot of typos (where’s your spell checker, man?). Clients made them too, obviously 😉

          I didn’t notice that trend with Polish, though. It’s quite popular for people to invent their own words but messing up grammar is very rare (or I’m unable to notice haha). Maybe because Polish is so rigid… German language has a similar grammar, I think.

        • JW Reply

          and in fact probably won’t even notice the jumbling.

          I sluioersy dubot they w’dolunt nicote. But i’ts uaulsly prfcleety rledbaea, yeah.
          Tghouh I think t’eehrs also a dceeffinre beeetwn radlmnoy jbilmnug the leertts and sinortg tehm aaabcehilllpty.

          • NotImportant

            I grew more and more annoyed with you as I read the sentence, before I even realized the words were jumbled. I guess my brain was upset for the extra work haha~ But ‘aaabcehilllpty’… ugh!

          • Dragon Master

            Yeah no, that trick won’t work, we’ve been warned :p And I’ve never tried or heard of it being done alphabetically, sounds like an extra pain.

          • JW

            Yeah, long words especially are a problem.
            The difference between random jumbling and sorting, is, I think, that random generally leaves more of the word-shape intact.

            Hmmm.. I wonder if I can train a neural network to translate word-jumbled text to it’s correct version. Like the ultimate spelling correction.

          • NotImportant

            I don’t think anyone has one like that yet so it’s either too hard or not profitable. The problem is that most current research is about words, not about letters. So possibly you’d need to build it from scratch. I doubt it would be able to generalize with a generated input, though. It most likely wouldn’t be able to fix a word with sorted letters if it didn’t know at least a very similar one. Not to mention that it wouldn’t be a good spell checker, typos are not limited to shuffling, you’d need to include other typical errors….

            I’ll get back to drawing now x)

          • JW

            Well, I don’t mind if it’s not profitable, as long as it’s interesting/fun.
            I’ve read some papers that work on the character-level (there’s a pretty well-known LSTM-model for generating Shakespeare letter-by-letter for instance). Translating is a bit trickier than learning/generating, but it’s been done.
            I figure if I throw in a wikipedia dump, it should be able to learn most common words, and be able to get an idea of what they mean (so it can disambiguate scrambled words that are anagrams given a context). Maybe throw in some word-vectors for good measure 😛

          • NotImportant

            I wonder if there are many words that are anagrams of each other… That neural network would mostly be a dictionary.

          • JW

            I’ve had a look at a wiki-dump from a few months back. There’s just under 2 million words (1,985,573) that occur at least 5 times (rule-of-thumb threshold to filter out most of the crap non-words). And if I character-sort them (so anagrams all get lumped together), there’s 929,800 that don’t have anagrams.
            So a lot of words are anagrams of other words.

            If I factor in word usage as well, then 86% of word occurrence are a word that has an anagram.
            With a cutoff at minimal 50 occurrences of a word, that goes down to 74%, and at 250 goes down to 65%, and 56% at 1000. But that makes sense, because longer words are more likely to have an anagram (more choices), but are also rarer and we’re culling them from the pool by upping the threshold.

            Hmm, maybe I should look at that later by filtering on word-length.

          • JW

            But that makes sense, [..]

            but apparently isn’t true..
            1-5 letters: 96% @ t=50, 91% @ t=250
            6-10 letters: 44% @ t=50, 28% @ t=250
            11-15 letters: 4.2% @ t=50, 2% @ t=250
            So short words are likeliest to have an anagram. (I could make up an explanation again — like they occur more often, so if there’s an anagram it’s more likely to show up — but meh. Who knows.)

            I’m also a bit suspicious of what occurs as words in that wiki-dump. Maybe I should try another dataset.

          • NotImportant

            More short words having anagrams that are used in a language make more sense to me. We prefer using short words, so we try to squeeze as many words as possible out of a given set of letters and many anagrams end up used in the language.

          • antrik

            Most of the rare “words” are probably misspellings; and many of these are likely swapped letters — which is why it *looks* like they were anagrams of other words…

            Not sure what exactly you are trying to find out here, though 🙂

        • Klorix Camp dweller Reply

          I once received such an e-mail and only noticed halway through. I might not have noticed at all if the e-mail had not been explaining this. I was baffled.

    • Hearushowl Reply

      I think your work is awesome and beautiful! I love getting to look at even just a fraction of your comic at the start of my week. Also just gotta give you some appreciation for the “Lung Cancer” shirt while he’s smoking

      • NotImportant Reply

        Haha thanks! Glad you enjoy 🙂 It’s a good feeling to know I can brighten someone’s day a little.

  2. NiWo21k Reply

    Your friend isnt totally wrong. I know where you are coming from, and yes becoming a famous writer/artist isnt easy, but i think you are on a good way.
    I think your idea finding some work is good, but never loose the other part out of your sight, meaning still aim high and then there will be some day the opportunity 😉

    I mean you are making a big name of yourself even if its at the moment more in the web comic scene – beeing still #1 in the Tob Webcomic List with nearly double of what the #2 has, and on this site (best 100 web comics plots) http://sguru.org/top-100-webcomics/ you are even #5. So its going up in my eyes 😉

    • NotImportant Reply

      That sguru site looks like a cheap parse of TWC list, someone just grabbed the content from one month and pasted it there, it’s not really a list. Just a SEO trick 😉 But TWC votes are very real and I’m still super suspicious about them, unable to accept the fact that so many people enjoy the comic xD I’m terrible, I know hahaha

      I really hope I’ll be able to continue drawing Replay after finding a job. Working in Japan might be tough (time-wise). I’m also in the middle of writing a book but I was unable to find the time for it in the last two weeks… I guess that’s what’s making me grumpy. I wish I knew more about marketing, maybe then I could ‘sell’ Replay better, ditch the idea about the office job and just focus on producing content. But eh, maybe one day! I won’t know until I try, right? 🙂

      • NiWo21k Reply

        Never stop trying – and i believe it will happen – i know another artist who struggled for some time and this year it finaly happend that he got part of his wish 😉

        Even if its just a copy somone took a little bit time 😉
        And to be grumpy is something that is allowed. And even if its more tough i think you find your way through, i belive in you 😉

        But making Replay more know is something thats a little bit more time consuming. The right Marketing may be a solution, but the problem here could be that if you do to much it may backfire and if you do to little it may not work.

        I know this is a long shot but maybe really think about working on a book for the first chapter and try a crowdfunding campaign to collect the money for it. You dont need to make it extra big, but it might help to bring Replay to a broader audience. I can really recommend you may check out the campaign to Scurry Book 1 (i also did a small video about it) whats possible. Like i said just my two cents.

        Or maybe work out how you put up your ads (i am still amazed that i havent seen one ad for Replay anywhere o.o even if people tell me they exist).

        • NotImportant Reply

          The secret project that I’ve been posting on Patreon is for that. When everything is done I hope Replay will be more attention grabbing, I’ll use the new drawings for ads as well 🙂 I’d post more ads but it’s costly and I don’t have a job hahah, I think Replay is advertising on Questionable Content right now (my boyfriend is managing the ads so I might be wrong).

          Well, other than this I just want to make pages and see how it goes haha, I’m impatient right now only because I don’t want to spend 10+ hours daily in the office when I could be drawing/writing. Other than this I’m happy with the community that built around Replay, I love you guys and when I see other artists complain about trolls and bad audience I feel like a blessed person <3

          Book is too much work for now, especially while I'm in Japan. How would I even go about it, I have no idea... I'll think about it when my life situation is more stable. I want that first book to be extra awesome, with additional content and such! I don't want to work on it and risk a one-year-long hiatus like Ava's Demon...

          • NiWo21k

            The secret project is definitive something that grabs attention – and i hope i can help with my project also a little bit 😉

            And i hope, if its really the case, the adds come out of the whole they are hiding, because it would be a shame if they would be lost in the darkest cornes of the net.

            To be impacient ist bad, it means you want something to happen (i can relate in some way) yeah and i habe to admit the community here is great – ok i am a little biased here XD

            And i understand your thoughts about a book. But if you ever need some pointers or some help just send me a message, i may can help you to a specific point or at least can give you some advice (not art related) – but i think there are a lot of people who would gladly help you with that.

          • NotImportant

            Thanks! I’ll keep it in mind, I’ll definitely ask for help/advice when I start thinking about making a book.

            Making comics takes a lot of time. Having expectations would ruin me in a matter of months 😀 It’s better to just enjoy drawing and chatting with you guys. I bet more on my writing, maybe I could bully someone to publish that book I’m writing right now, that’d be awesome. But it’s still a long way haha, especially when it’s hard to find the time for it.

          • JW

            I think Replay is advertising on Questionable Content right now (my boyfriend is managing the ads so I might be wrong).

            It is!
            Huh, I didn’t know I had ad-blocker still enabled for them. I try to turn it off for most webcomics. … Course then it’s still blocked by No-Script. Oh well.

          • NotImportant

            Replay doesn’t have any ads (and it will probably stay that way) so you can disable it here. Just in case it would destroy the layout from the sheer bewilderment caused by not being able to find any ads or something.

          • JW

            I think my adblocker mostly uses whitelists/blacklists of sites to decide what to block, so it doesn’t destroy layout assuming something is an ad when it’s not from another site

            No-Script breaks a bit of functionality here, but nothing major. (I don’t have the banner, or the twitter box, and the reply-box for the comments is always at the bottom of the page). It’s kind of nice, sometimes I allow everything globally when I need to view a very difficult site, and then when I get here I’m instantly alerted I left it on. 😛

          • NotImportant

            You’ll regret it when I change the slider to something super cool and you’ll be the last one to notice! >: D

          • JW

            I’m sure someone will mention it in the comments when that happens.
            And I see about 30% more of the comic without scrolling down when the page first loads 😛
            Course that only matters on Monday, but still.

          • NotImportant

            I need to add text on the slider to never mention the new art in the comments 😛

          • JW

            I have full confidence in my fellow commenters inability to contain themselves 😉
            And you’d probably mention it on twitter yourself, which I check occasionally.

          • NotImportant

            Fine, I give up! It’s not like I’m determined to force you to watch that slider every time you visit. I hereby allow the use of No-Script on Replay’s homepage! ♩♫♪

          • JW

            I’m not sure these particular ads would have drawn me in, to be honest.
            Do you have multiple types of ads? You(r boyfriend) could do some A/B testing to see what works best.

          • NotImportant

            Yeah, we have multiple ads and tested them. I’m working on making new ones, those are pretty old.

  3. Klorix Camp dweller Reply

    Whoa whoa whoa! Stuck inside a protective spell?! I was wondering how they transported it… But they also expanded it!?
    This is crazy!

    Totally understand Stefen. He certainly had a lot of bad experience with magic…

    I did not notice last page, but these gloves look a lot like Ada’s https://replaycomic.com/comic/useless-disciples/
    So, did she just cut off the fingertips?

    • NiWo21k Reply

      “So, did she just cut off the fingertips?”

      Could be, but there are fingerless work gloves on the market so it could be that she just had chosen this version because so she likes having more feeling in her fingertips.

      • Klorix Camp dweller Reply

        It’s also required for the protection spell if I remember correctly.

    • NotImportant Reply

      Aaa this is not how I wanted this phrase to be interpreted xD Remember the map on the end of the previous chapter? There was a huge distance to their destination… They couldn’t have possibly expanded the circle this much. But they are inside one now as well (bigger than just a single tent, but still, not 10km radius) and can’t leave it if they want to stay in one piece, hence the ‘stuck’ comment.

      • JW Reply

        They should try to make a protective circle with roughly a 40000 km radius. So basically the same size they have now, but inverted. 😛 Then all the demons get squished into a small area and presumably die or something. Or get launched into outer space.

      • JW Reply

        Wait a minute, does this mean a while back, when Ada was trying to teach them the spell, they were doing that inside the larger protective circle?
        I wouldn’t expect they could be nested.

        • NotImportant Reply

          Yes, whole new camp is circled with a barier. It’ll be explained in a moment, I just didn’t feel like starting the chapter with a huge info dump about how cleverly (or not) they organized themselves in the new place.

          What would you expect them to do when nested? Not work? Inverse work…? That’s be funny lol I went with the simplest “why not”. And it’s rather handy, you can nest several of them and hope that even if the outer one breaks (for any reason) you can be safe for a while longer.

      • Klorix Camp dweller Reply

        That’s what I meant 😉
        The moved it and made it bigger than the initial tent, i.e. the campe. If they were able to make it several km big, whole cities coulbe be rebuilt…

        • Klorix Camp dweller Reply

          Magic of misunderstanding, that’s kind of my special power 😉

          Also, I should not type when I’m tired…

          • NotImportant

            Nooo I freaked out a bit, sorry xD Glad everything is clear, phew!

          • Klorix Camp dweller

            So sorry, NI!

            Did not want to make you worry! Unfortunately I have next to no control about my superpowers… 🙁

          • NotImportant

            No problem! There’s absolutely no need to apologize 😀 And don’t worry, one day you shall master them, I believe in you..!

      • NotImportant Reply

        That’s absolutely hilarious, I love it. I’m sure Adam does that all the time to kill the boredom, being (possibly) the last human alive and all.

  5. Dragon Master Reply

    Something I meant to mention when it first came out but forgot: I love Kasper as Kyoko! It totally suits him! Especially the way he;s got his face covered he looks like he could pass for a tall brawny woman(I’ve know a few ladies like that. my first gf was just under 6 feet tall and pretty broad across the shoulder too.) Plus his pecs are big enough that in that outfit they can be easily mistaken for boobs. Or at least that’s what I thought. Don’t want to insult him he just might get me. xD

    • NotImportant Reply

      I think he’d cry if he read this XD hahahaha glad you like the drawing!

      • Klorix Camp dweller Reply

        I think he might actually be crying…
        (Not really, but the pose fits. 😉 )

  6. Tim Reply

    I wouldn’t consider insisting a capable person contributing to the group in a survival situation to be bullying. What do I know? Maybe Im a bully, Id do the same thing.

    • NotImportant Reply

      Oh, it was in a playful tone, I don’t think Filip feels particularly forced.
      Nothing stops him from running away from the construction site ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • JW Reply

        Nothing but the crushing guilt of not contributing to the group.

        And possibly demons. If we consider the whole camp as construction site.
        Though, I guess, guilt is an internal demon. And you can never run from it! Not even with magic. Except maybe lots of booze. Magical booze.

        • NotImportant Reply

          By the way… What’s the best thing to make booze from if you’re stuck in a forest…?

          • JW

            Depends on the season. Fruit would be good. Or honey. Anything with sugar, or starch. (For starchy ingredients it would be expedient to add some amylase, by chewing it. But that not likely popular in the western world.)

          • NotImportant

            Blueberry/honey wine sounds pretty awesome ლ(╹◡╹ლ)

          • JW

            Personally, I’d prefer blueberries as they are. I’m not a fan of wines. (Or beer, for that matter. I had a shot of whiskey once that was okay though.)

            I think around here, I’d be most likely to find black-berries, or later in the season elderberries.

            Something else you could ferment is the sap from certain trees (e.g. maple, which you can also make maple syrup from), which would be something for early spring, I think.

          • NotImportant

            I’m not a fan either and I don’t think I drank a single beer in my life, but! They have nice, very sweet and fruity alcohols here in Japan (not wines, the process is different for most of them, I think). Umeshu is great (from sour plum), I like yuzu (type of citrus) and white peach ones too (´∀｀)♡

            My boyfriend tried himself at making wine once or twice, just to see what kind of silly wine he could make. I remember him reading recipes about carrot wine for example haha. We made one from ginger + raspberries which was very nice~

        • Klorix Camp dweller Reply

          “Nothing but the crushing guilt” and Nina. In my experience (not that it’s much), the powers of a girlfriend should not be underestimated 😉

          Also, showers are a very sensible utility to build. It might not be life-threatening to not have one, but even if you don’t need a shower every day, especially after physical exercise (like hiking through the woods, and probably carrying all that building material), taking a shower feels so goooood.

          I wonder what kind of water supply they have. Lake or river? If it’s a lake, I hope they don’t have too many mosquitos… *shudder*

          • JW

            Yeah, but isn’t a girlfriend’s superpower just guild again? :p

          • Klorix Camp dweller

            Often enough, it is. Pride is a good motivator too (“Are you even a real man?”). There’s also self preservation (the stick) and promises of rewards (the carrot).

            Cliché? Nah, you think? 😉

          • NotImportant

            Girlfriends have many manipulation tools at their disposal haha~

          • JW

            Also, showers are a very sensible utility to build.

            Only if you have water to spare. What’s really important is a good toilet.
            Getting their sanitation in order helped the British win a lot of wars, because not having half your soldiers sick and dying from disease is a great advantage.

            I wonder what kind of water supply they have. Lake or river?

            Looking at the map from the end of the last chapter, there’s a river going through the city, but they’re keeping well away from it. And I only see a few ponds, not lakes.
            Maybe they have a well? Or maybe Ada calls down the rains every now and again to replenish their supplies.

            If it’s a lake, I hope they don’t have too many mosquitos…

            Eh, they have a barrier spell to protect them from harm; should work against mosquitoes, right?

          • Klorix Camp dweller

            Yes, of course, if there’s water to spare.
            I certainly hope they have some sort of err.. waste disposal. It’s been four days after all. But as they do still have some military around, I think that should have been taken care of. The soldiers, I hope, know how important this is and will have organized this early on.

            Regardless of size, my point is whether they have access to flowing water. I think that’s usually more healthy than standing water from ponds. Also, depending on the size, the reserve might not last for ever.
            As to the rain spell, it does require a silver plate or coin. If they have that, this can be useful, although the campsite would become very muddy and that’s not that great…

            Wow, if that barrier helps against mosquitos, I should try drawing it around my bed – my girlfriend would finally allow me to open the window in warm nights.

          • NotImportant

            I haven’t thought of it but that would be nice! I need to see if it works for the jumping spiders. They come inside no matter the closed windows, sigh…

            I don’t plan to draw them building toilets since there are more interesting topic to cover but I imagine that Kasper and his friends from the military know how to take care of it. Showers are the simple kind – build a frame, put a barrel on top, paint it black if you want the water to be warm, resupply the water when you run out.

          • JW

            The jumping spiders aren’t dangerous though, are they? Mosquitoes can spread all sorts of disease, and if nothing else they’re out for blood.
            In fact, if you have enough jumping spiders crawling all over you, they’ll attack any mosquito that comes near you 😛

          • NotImportant

            I don’t like random critters suddenly jumping on me, though =_= And mosquitoes don’t seem to be as determined to find their way into the house. There’s like 1 mosquito and 40 spiders visiting in a month, ugh.

          • Klorix Camp dweller

            I don’t mind the spiders (we’ve got the normal net-building types). As long as they leave me alone, I leave them alone. However, it would be fantastic if they were able to catch some more flies…

          • NotImportant

            I was always upset at my cats for failing to catch flies. They were way more eager to hunt bugs when they were smaller, eh!

  7. SotiCoto Reply

    He doesn’t even have his own glasses any more. Useless.
    He is pratting about building showers while Renate is still being dead…
    And there is some other guy. Lots of other guys, probably. No idea how many. Doesn’t matter.

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