Page 63. Whoopsie-doodle.
Emerald City Comic Con starts on Thursday in Seattle! Here’s a map of where you can find me (booth 212) and my various events. I’m looking forward to sharing a sneak peek at the first half of Meal, which will be going to print in just a few months! Augh!
the pronouns between the last page & this one are tough to hear, oof
(but also SUPER great. proud of all these robots and their freedoms!)
It was jarring to me too until I rralized they were talking about the Robot With Many Names and not Sulla!
who is also sentient, for what is worth…
So I can’t wait to know what Tsade becomes in the future? Is Tsade the ballerina or dog robot who revived Al—or some other robot (or even possibly a human) we’ve seen, but not gotten the name to? So much mystery here, but it is so cool to see events play out.
I’m guessing this is the black-screen contact Brendan called back at the beginning.
Oooo… I need to go back and read that now.
Tsade is the robot with the elongated face that Brendan gave Lucile to help around the office. The last time we saw a name on him, someone had changed his name to “Tuba”.
And yes, I too think that this is the person Brendan called to find out if they’d produced Al — the one whose phone contact icon was a black square. That person spoke in a very stilted way, suggesting they might be an AI.
OK WHOA this subplot got really interesting really fast. The combination of ‘he’ and ‘resignation from Villas’ made me think ‘…empty set?’, which made this an enjoyable – and yet perfectly logical – surprise. First good candidate for Menacing Black Square, in my opinion.
I love that even though we have one smart AI who is quiet and sensitive and cooperative living with Brendan, they’re not all going to be like that.
Brendan must be thinking, ‘well I have a 12-year-old and they’re a child’. But they’re a child because the transfer was incomplete.
I remember an essay a few years ago (I haven’t been able to find it again, but I bet about half of my fellow readers know of it) that went something like: ‘Want to be EXTREMELY progressive when it comes to countering inequality? Well, what have you done for AI rights lately?’
The robot prototypes seem to be named after letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Tsade is the 18th letter; the name is pronounced “TSAH-di.” It’s close to the Hebrew word tzadik, meaning a righteous person. It’s also one of four letters that have a final form — that is, they’re written differently when they’re the last letter in a word.
Robots + Hebrew = Golem symbolism, I’m guessing…
Brendan is also Jewish. Al isn’t, but given that Al didn’t seem to have named any of his robots, I guess we can assume Brendan had a hand in naming the models?
Painfully, it looks like Tsade is the one they kept renaming as an office joke: http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-6-page-13/
Yeah, that’s definitely Tsade:
http://ohumanstar.com/comic/chapter-6-page-46/
Really interesting development! So cool to see the first robots besides Sulla gaining full consciousness and independence. Guess he got tired of those renaming jokes :P
Whoa, there’s a lot of truth to this. Must be rather dehumanising (well, you know what I mean) to be treated as an object worthy of a series of renaming jokes – what better way to notice that everyone else hasn’t considered that you might deserve self-determination? I hadn’t gotten quite that far, but I’d wondered in an idle way whether Tsade would run off with the extra sample face that Brendan built with the stuff Villas shipped to him. Terribly easy to see an AI as a nifty machine when they have an amorphous metal piece for a head.
It’s a tough competition but that last panel might well have the best exchange/lines in the comic.
I’m seeing a pattern here. Things are changing fast.