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PMush Perfect posted:I don't even read ErfWorld any more, but the blog update showed up in my "recommended" feed, so I gave it a look. I feel really bad because the well-being of Rob's wife is hanging in the balance here, dependant on him somehow figuring out how to be less of a cock-up. If it weren't for that, this whole debacle would be the most fascinating and hilarious well-digging in the history of webcomics. It bears remembering that his wife has metastatic cancer. While they've won the experimental treatment roulette and have something working for now, the reality is that very few people come back from that, even with all the new therapies coming out. Which is to say, the most likely trajectory for the next few years is for Rob and his wife to be going through the roller coaster ride of her dying slowly of a horrible disease. I mean, I hope for their sake that she pulls through and is cured, and wish them well. But Rob is not, nor will he be, in a good state to write the comic or make rational business decisions, and I think we need to temper our expectations for the foreseeable future.
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Dec 12, 2018 18:24
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Lead out in cuffs posted:
This comes across like Rob's dose of reality alt account.
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Dec 12, 2018 18:33
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Lead out in cuffs posted:It bears remembering that his wife has metastatic cancer. While they've won the experimental treatment roulette and have something working for now, the reality is that very few people come back from that, even with all the new therapies coming out.  at this whole situation, his wife having a death sentence for certain rather than just hanging in the balance.If anything, I'd expect him to cut more corners so he'd have more time to spend with her, not expand Erf's scope even more unrealistic ways.
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Dec 12, 2018 18:54
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I thought the metastatic cancer diagnosis turned out to be completely wrong?
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Dec 12, 2018 19:28
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i don’t want to talk or think about robs wife’s cancer, it’s sad as hell and I hope she makes a full recovery no matter how unlikely that is. also his comic’s problems have nothing to do with that and mostly have to do with the fact that he’s a decent world builder and a terrible storyteller
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Dec 12, 2018 19:38
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Rand Brittain posted:I thought the metastatic cancer diagnosis turned out to be completely wrong? As near as I can tell, it was more the diagnosis of the type of cancer that was wrong, such that Linda was getting the wrong kind of chemotherapy. She does talk about "tumors" plural, so it's still metastatic. I've done a bit of reading on what Rob says she has (neuroendocrine carcinoma), and the treatment which sounds like the one she's getting (Avelumab) only works at all in about 30% of patients, and is curative in an even smaller fraction. From what Linda's posted, she's only getting a partial response at best -- the tumors might be shrinking, and at least they don't seem to be spreading further. But this is an experimental treatment and it doesn't seem like there's good long-term follow-up data. In a lot of cases with therapies like that, the cancer eventually develops resistance after months or years. I mean, keep holding onto hope for them -- cancer prognosis is never 100% certain -- but be prepared for the worst. bigpolar posted:This comes across like Rob's dose of reality alt account. I work in cancer research 
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Dec 12, 2018 20:22
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Android Blues posted:Developing a procedural 3D city generation engine for your 2D webcomic's art is definitely a...bold...idea... Balder's going to be like the Flickr and Slack guy: his webcomic will flame out but the AI he develops to sketch cities will be bought by Facebook for millions and used to generate photo-realistic ads showing your friends being held hostage in some foreign country and you need to send money to the kidnappers.
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Dec 13, 2018 01:29
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Explain?
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Dec 13, 2018 02:59
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There's this guy who tries to develop an MMO game but its ambition is way beyond the ability of the little studio he's got. But during development they build a photo-sharing system and even though the game goes nowhere the photo-share system is Flickr and Yahoo buys it for a bunch of money. Then he tries to build some other game that also goes nowhere but during development they make the in-game chat system and even though the game goes nowhere the chat system is Slack and is doing well selling IRC to businesses. It's like the ultimate Silicon Valley fantasy to "pivot" from some bad business plan into something that suddenly makes you rich. Like, if the Etherium-mining thing had somehow worked out everyone would be talking about how this guy's such a genius -- leverages an aimless webcomic into a billion dollar cryptocoin-mining ring!
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Dec 13, 2018 03:27
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Okay, fair. If he'd come up with the scheme a year and a half ago, he'd probably be a quadzillionaire right now. ...and then lose it all in the crash anyways. 
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Dec 13, 2018 03:45
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It looks like he's getting through the backer stories by finding a way to combine this one with the new prologue. In the meantime, this one is hella bleak.
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Jan 9, 2019 15:57
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The "backer's story" part is much better-written than the "prologue" part because at least in the backer's story we don't get more cruft about signs and strings.
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Jan 9, 2019 16:04
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These guys are certainly interesting, at any rate. I wonder where they heard about "children"? Erfworlders seems to instinctively understand Stupidworld words once they hear them, but they have to hear them first.
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Feb 10, 2019 15:57
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Rand Brittain posted:These guys are certainly interesting, at any rate.
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Feb 10, 2019 18:51
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PMush Perfect posted:Oh my God, please tell me Balder got so caught up in the minutia of the nothing bullshit that he forgot a major part of his own worldbuilding. No, it seems pretty clearly intentional, since Paige finds the concept so unpleasant for some reason that she won't even discuss it. It's possible that Parson's ideas are starting to get around.
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Feb 10, 2019 19:43
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The last update talks about how "Language had all sorts of little-used words that Signamancers puzzled over", so it seems like Signamancers knew about words that don't have an Erfworld context before Parson entered the picture. Maybe the end of that sentence was "But they don't exist."
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Feb 10, 2019 20:36
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There's a lot of commonly used words that refer to family. Sons, brothers, daughters. I read that part to mean that she couldn't have a heir for reasons and thus didn't want to talk about it, being an old lady and all.
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Feb 10, 2019 23:19
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And today we learn that, yes, it is in fact possible to just write a contract with terms like "don't be evil" instead of Charlie's fifty-page bullshit. (Although, as a lawyer, Charlie's bullshit might be preferable.)
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Mar 31, 2019 14:14
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So the prologue-athon continues.... For all the other missteps since Book 2, this has honestly pushed me to my lowest levels of checking the comic. I'm at roughly once or twice per month from once every couple of days and only pop in long enough to see if it still reads 'Prologue'. The only webcomic I've read that has turned me off harder was Weregeek when they retconned the entire initial premise into a sham.
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Apr 4, 2019 02:17
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I'm actually kind of interested to see what would happen if Parson just forced Charlie to sign a contract promising not to be a dick.
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Apr 4, 2019 04:16
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm actually kind of interested to see what would happen if Parson just forced Charlie to sign a contract promising not to be a dick. Well whatever was the condition upon breaking it would trigger instantly.
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Apr 4, 2019 04:57
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm actually kind of interested to see what would happen if Parson just forced Charlie to sign a contract promising not to be a dick. He isn't a literal penis so the contract would never be broken. Gotta put some more effort in pulling a fast one on Charlie when it comes to contracts.
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Apr 4, 2019 08:20
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Is Charlie subject to the law of boop? Edit: 3 AM thought, what would y'all call the point where Erfworld stopped being a critique/deconstruction of an isekai manga and turned into an actual isekai manga? girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 09:03
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Book 2.
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Apr 4, 2019 10:35
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PMush Perfect posted:Is Charlie subject to the law of boop? Right when Charlie revealed he could end your turn anytime he wanted but somehow didn't apply this intelligently toward solving his problems and conclude the series.
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Apr 5, 2019 13:09
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Erfworld was never a critique or deconstruction of an isekai at all. If anything it's a take on hyper-strategic stories like, I dunno, Death Note or something, where everybody is trying to make extremely rational decision on how to deploy their broken powers, but failing because the rational decision is not the one they actually want to make.
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Apr 5, 2019 14:12
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I lost interest the first time Erfworld became a webnovel instead of a comic, and now I've lost interest again where it's all prologue, all the time. Has anything interesting happened with all the introductions?
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Apr 5, 2019 17:19
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I think the painful truth is that Erfworld has always been an isekai with an overly competent strategic main character. It just was funny and had the good sense to focus on Parson rather than sprawling out into the current mess.
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Apr 5, 2019 17:23
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nimby posted:I lost interest the first time Erfworld became a webnovel instead of a comic, and now I've lost interest again where it's all prologue, all the time. Has anything interesting happened with all the introductions? One of the backer stories turned out to be part of the main story, which seems to be about one of the mythical 99 original sides, "Archezoa," which is the only one that still exists and maintains itself as a secret island kingdom surrounded by hostile sea life. Fumo, a warlord who popped randomly in the middle of nowhere without the skills needed to survive in his environment, appears by his Signamancy to be "properly" a unit of Archezoa even though he isn't. This has horrifying implications about how many units are born to die every turn.
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Apr 5, 2019 17:35
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nimby posted:I lost interest the first time Erfworld became a webnovel instead of a comic, and now I've lost interest again where it's all prologue, all the time. Has anything interesting happened with all the introductions? It's still doing prologue webnovels, so no. It's currently about the discovery of Atlantis by a chain-smoker and if you're at a loss for how this is plot-relevant, then so am I.
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Apr 5, 2019 17:38
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Joe Slowboat posted:I think the painful truth is that Erfworld has always been an isekai with an overly competent strategic main character. It just was funny and had the good sense to focus on Parson rather than sprawling out into the current mess. I mean, it's obviously an isekai; it just isn't a parody or deconstruction of the concept because pretty much everything going on here is completely normal for isekai.
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Apr 5, 2019 17:38
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Rand Brittain posted:I mean, it's obviously an isekai; it just isn't a parody or deconstruction of the concept because pretty much everything going on here is completely normal for isekai. Yes, that's what I meant - it's just an isekai. It plays the whole thing extremely straight.
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Apr 5, 2019 18:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:Yes, that's what I meant - it's just an isekai. It plays the whole thing extremely straight.
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Apr 5, 2019 18:22
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PMush Perfect posted:Is Charlie subject to the law of boop? I'd say book 1 was critique, book 2 was straight isekai, and then everything else isn't even isekai anymore because it mostly stops using the perspective of a stand-in from our world and just narrates everything from the point of view of everyone already in that world instead. Which just makes it regular fantasy, but sometimes people talk about hexes and movement points and stuff.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:04
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PMush Perfect posted:Except for the whole part where Parson realizes at the end of Book 1 that living in a world that was basically tailor-made for his skillset (an isekai staple if there ever was one) is actually horrifying. That's not abnormal for isekai either.
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Apr 5, 2019 21:05
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Well I am back after like five months. I see the subreddit has nothing but "prologue pages" so I assume my guess of not seeing Parson for ages hasn't been proven wrong yet. At this point I am assuming that Rob is just bored of the characters and wants to do different stuff, but it's erfworld is his golden goose. Kind of like Jeph Jacques with Questionable Content really, but I don't fault Jeph for that because the main characters have been relegated to side characters instead of disappearing completely.
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Apr 5, 2019 21:30
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nimby posted:I lost interest the first time Erfworld became a webnovel instead of a comic, and now I've lost interest again where it's all prologue, all the time. Has anything interesting happened with all the introductions? He only got through a couple of them before the supposedly short introductions started getting bogged down in a need to show every event from every character's perspective, explain the backstory and reasoning behind every action anyone takes, explain the full rules behind every new thing that gets introduced, and so on. The current one has been going on for months, due to things like spending an entire page explaining the rules and mechanics of a particular flavor of feral scouting unit.
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Apr 6, 2019 05:05
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To borrow some parlance from Erfworld, this comic is growing stale.
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Apr 6, 2019 07:20
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What do you mean "growing"?
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Apr 6, 2019 16:41
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Hah, I don't really watch anime, so I wasn't aware there was a whole genre of shows revolving around getting dropped into a videogame world. It still feels like a relatively novel idea to me. 
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Apr 6, 2019 19:16
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