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Fred has posted the comic to his Patreon. He'll post it to the main site and elsewhere probably tomorrow.

I can see why Ashe got mad. Dr Gero is kind of an ass.

Also, Junko tracking her phone... This should be interesting. I wonder if Dr Gero will shout out something to her first, or if she'll head into the Foxhole to finish tracking down Ping.

His approach is extremely clinical and almost sterile and I think that Ashe snapping her phone in half was about the most restrained response that she could have given him

Invisigoth wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 08, 2019 12:47 pm

His approach is extremely clinical and almost sterile and I think that Ashe snapping her phone in half was about the most restrained response that she could have given him

I was kind of wondering if she was going to snap him in half. "Oops" indeed.

The good doctor needs a good kicking. I hope this ends well for Junko.

Yeah Junko is extremely distraught.

Any bets Junko runs into Piro and Kimiko first?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8mUMSi5M8g

Liminaut wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 1:10 am

Any bets Junko runs into Piro and Kimiko first?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8mUMSi5M8g

That's not gonna happen, Junko and Piro have never met, and I know that Kimiko doesn't know her

Hmmm... my my my.
The next comic may be interesting, or an interesting scene change.

"Cough cough rotten personality"
>violently breaks things
Irony much? Also what's up with the random casualties in the background?

Okashinamaru wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 12:23 pm

Also what's up with the random casualties in the background?

Those are the Ninja who were escorting Miho to the Foxhole [1529]. Ashe stepped around them on her way out to meet Dr Gero [1532]. Presumably some have already regained consciousness and crawled away, so these are the few that are left.

Damn, this guy pisses me off. He sees people as things to be reverse engineered. The "twinges to the heart" aspects of her personality are born of a young girl's painful home environment and he only sees it as a thing to be emulated for profit. Fucking narcissist.

He doesn't even realize that his project can't work. Junko's pain is part and parcel of her entire emotional makeup: it cannot be removed and copied like a component of some damn machine. Emulating her "twinges to the heart" without emulating everything else will produce a model so unrealistic that the users will surely pick up on it and so defeats the entire purpose of his project. Realizing this would be the only way to get him, as well as Sony in general and others like him, to back off. Even if every foxgirl and ninja in Megatokyo delivered a beatdown and scared him off today, he would try again later, or others like him would keep coming. Only by convincing him that what he wants just won't work will make him move on to something else.

If and when he does realize this, he will do what narcissists do: blame the victim. I'm afraid that Junko is in for some deep hurt.

I don't think it's coincidence that the person triggered by this approach is differently able.

It is an interesting approach. Clinical, but logical in its own way. But yes, it doesn't take much familiarity with psychology to realize that flaws are a part of a person's appeal (and to anyone who attempts to take said appeal out of the flaw and insert it somewhere else: good luck!), and that only taking the "good" parts of various personalities and putting them together would not only make her boring and unrealistic (though part of the customer base might be into that... for a while), but also horribly dissonant and self-contradicting. I vaguely wonder how actual dating sims handle this without making the characters unapproachable for a portion of their users, since the users are no doubt at least as varied in their preferences, but I'm not really interested enough in the genre to find out directly. I suppose that's why there are always multiple paths available.

Is Ashe's aggression a result of the guy's approach to female personalities, of his dismissal of Junko's personality in specific, or merely from her opinion of his general behavior that has been gradually sinking throughout the conversation?

Whoa, was that Gorilla Glass?

Yl33 D4 N00b wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 3:44 pm

Whoa, was that Gorilla Glass?

Yep, she bore down with her thumbs and snapped that sucker

paarfi wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 12:34 pm

Okashinamaru wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 12:23 pm

Also what's up with the random casualties in the background?

Those are the Ninja who were escorting Miho to the Foxhole [1529]. Ashe stepped around them on her way out to meet Dr Gero [1532]. Presumably some have already regained consciousness and crawled away, so these are the few that are left.

And I love the fact that everyone is just ignoring them!

I wonder if the doctor is being completely honest here. In the last panels, his expression seems to show that he is affected by seeing Junko arrive.

I wonder if he is as detached as he pretends to be. There may be another reason why his creation has so much of Junko in her.

Invisigoth wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 11:25 am

Liminaut wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 1:10 am

Any bets Junko runs into Piro and Kimiko first?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8mUMSi5M8g

That's not gonna happen, Junko and Piro have never met, and I know that Kimiko doesn't know her

That doesn't preclude the possibility, merely the unrealistic fact that they might recognize each other.

eomdal wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 12:36 pm

Damn, this guy pisses me off. He sees people as things to be reverse engineered. The "twinges to the heart" aspects of her personality are born of a young girl's painful home environment and he only sees it as a thing to be emulated for profit.

Thus begs the question: Are we nothing more than a source for engineers? And if someone successfully reverse engineers a human, what becomes of us? Does anyone have a right to do that?

paarfi wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 08, 2019 12:02 pm

Also, Junko tracking her phone...

Ha, I speculated on whether that was what was happening when I saw the last frame in one of the Twitch sessions sometime this past week. (Fred said "very good" shortly after but I wasn't 100% sure that was actually directed at me... )

eomdal wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 12:36 pm

He doesn't even realize that his project can't work. Junko's pain is part and parcel of her entire emotional makeup: it cannot be removed and copied like a component of some damn machine.

That would be the nice safe non-threatening outcome. The more alarming possibility is, what if it can. A hundred years ago the idea of a machine that could correct not just spelling but grammar errors in a document you're still typing would have seemed completely impossible. (How the hell would you "teach" a typewriter to spell?)

Of course, analyzing human behavior to a level of detail and level of understanding that specific behaviors sure to "trigger" a desired response in a user could reliably be simulated by a machine such as Ping might seem similarly impossible to us at present. For good or ill though the key words in that sentence are "at present". To quote one of my favorite Harry Potter (sort of ) sayings:

Of course it was actually Eliezer Yudkowsky who wrote: People had no sense of history, they learned about chemistry and biology and astronomy and thought that these matters had always been the proper meat of science, that they had never been mysterious. The stars had once been mysteries. Lord Kelvin had once called the nature of life and biology - the response of muscles to human will and the generation of trees from seeds - a mystery "infinitely beyond" the reach of science. (Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond. Lord Kelvin certainly had felt a huge emotional charge from not knowing something.) Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.

(The Kelvin quote in question can be found here. towards the end of the first block of Quotes.)

Ping very early on in the story already demonstrated an ability to "pass for human" to everyone except those who were explicitly told otherwise (e.g. Piro and Largo by Tsubasa, Miho by Ping herself). Kimiko saw no reason to question her initial assumption that Piro had a nearly naked teenage girl in his apartment, and only bought his story of a robot girl abandoned by her former master after much closer direct interaction with Ping. Erika figured it out by accidentally eavesdropping on the initial conversation between Ping and Miho. An entire classroom full of teenage boys and girls saw no reason to take her as anything other than yet another normal teenage girl; Junko herself didn't figure it out in the course of multiple further interactions at school, until she was explicitly told by Ping herself after the telephone pole bit.

Of course romantic involvement might be considerably more difficult. Or... it might not be, at least not "considerably". Piro and Tsubasa already joked about her ability to steal one's soul even when she was still in low-power standby mode. Ninamori and her crew recruited Junko to help give Ping a "much-needed" talking to (and pedagogical hair-yanking) not because they actually gave a shit about the new girl in class, but because she had already attracted at least the attention of every boy in the classroom.

But even if those were just responses to her "superficial" features, even if romantic involvement at any "realistic" level might pose significantly greater difficulties... I would hesitate to assume that the Old Man is incapable of delivering the Final Product (for which Ping was a mere "prototype"). It would be great if he was just delusional about his own capabilities, yes; but if he's not, then I'm worried that merely "convincing" him he's wasting his time might not be enough.

EDIT:

Rapierman wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 9:05 pm

Does anyone have a right to do that?

And that excellent question is precisely the other side of why I am finding the Old Man more disturbing with every word coming out of his mouth. (And great kudos again to the Artist for having fooled so many into thinking he was disturbing merely for being yet another garden variety ten-a-penny "pervert". )

Historically those who accomplish what a reasonable person might question whether they had a right to try in the first place... tend not to ask such permission ahead of time. I am more convinced than ever this is not a "lone genius" who created a sapient artificial new life form "above and beyond" Sony Product Development's request for a "date bot", but something potentially far more dangerous: a genius who is quite content to crank out far more ambitious SPD requests, and sufficiently capable of doing so "on time and under budget". Any resulting headaches are for other branches of Sony to handle. Hence his "not my circus, not my monkeys" attitude to an escaped prototype wandering around love hotels getting up to heaven knows what shenanigans. (When I made that argument back in 1546, I made much of his talking almost exclusively about the Sony project, as opposed to Ping as an individual, for more than half the strip. Did anyone else notice that he stopped talking about Ping halfway through 1547?)

Clearly, the doctor is an overachiever. Fanboys & girls are not that hard to please, given their obsession with 2D characters. Passed the Turing test, no prob.

Calaron wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 09, 2019 2:29 pm

Is Ashe's aggression a result of the guy's approach to female personalities, of his dismissal of Junko's personality in specific, or merely from her opinion of his general behavior that has been gradually sinking throughout the conversation?

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but my feeling is that the obvious next step is to apply his plan to physical flaws as well. Take the cuteness of the girl who needs that little bit of extra support and remove the uncertainty about just how big a commitment it will be to carry on a relationship with someone who has extra needs.

For example you could have a deaf EDS who can type really fast and lipread perfectly and so you never have to learn to communicate non-verbally. I could see a Deaf woman getting offended by that kind of development.

Sort of a tangent here maybe but
....

He says "some marketing people say..." "I disagree."

Does this not sound like he is not actually an engineer?

I mean, see how he actually has time to go out to meet his sources?

Ok so he may have some engineering background but he's totally grade above the daily work of those building the product. Or even those designing its parts. He must be close enough to "some marketing people" to actually _care_ what they say, and willing to prove them wrong... Some higher level director? Not spending days at the office but chasing after the source and thinking in bigger picture terms.

It's Junko's dad from Nintendo who thinks that this is a doomed attempt remember? Ping is supposed to be something to replace the need for a story department to work with someone like Miho (and potentially ruining their lives if the story and the life don't match).

Wonder if this is what drives this development?

But would the Big Evil Corporation care that much about a few people who have issues because of the story being pushed on them?

Probably only if there was something else to be gained from that... Or much more to lose if the old ways are continued.... (for the Corporation that is)

cidjen wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 10, 2019 3:40 pm

Does this not sound like he is not actually an engineer?

I know this hard for those of us who actually are engineers (raises hand) and know how product development works in the real world. But MT is a comic world: Sony has an enforcement division; Sega has black ops; the TPCD schedules zombie invasions and regularly rebuilds half the city; magical girls, foxgirls, and ninja are real, and so are kaiju. The genius scientist/engineer who develops super-science ray-guns or loveable PS2 accessory androids who are more real than he intended, either on his own or with a team of flunkies, actually makes MORE sense in this kind of world. Think Reed Richards, not Henry Ford. This one of the big reasons why I keep calling him Dr Gero..