Episode 25: There Are No Shortcuts
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Hi! I just posted a new Pepper&Carrot episode on peppercarrot website:
https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/article440/episode-25-there-are-no-shortcuts
Have a good read!
56 comments
Every five episodes of Pepper&Carrot, I release a muted episode without texts: It's a tough artistic constrain. As if it wasn't constraining enough, it was necessary for me at this point in the story to rebuild the house of Pepper (destroyed in the previous episode), remotivate Pepper to finish her studies and finally showcase the power of the old witches Thym, Cayenne and Cumin (who never really made any demo of their power before this episode). That wasn't easy to pack all of this together, but it feels good to finally release this "firework episode".
Sorry to all the readers of Pepper&Carrot because this episode took me a very long time to produce. It took me time because I wanted to do research on my own painting technique and style. So, I did Freelance works here and there during this period to fund my life and the time streched exponentially. But it was necessary for me to take this time and to study my art again...For me too, "there are no shortcuts"!
I hope you'll like this episode! Thanks again to all my patrons and to all the contributors around the project who helped me to release this episode.
Congratz (again)! Nice episode, nice visual effects for magic, and funny ending with a great life lesson ^_^
Yay! New long-awaited episode is released! I hope, folks from Ukraine will enjoy this as well ;)
Awesome to see the new episode in its full glory! Thanks!
That's the first time I've seen the Lorenz attractor in a comic.
Lots of motion and emotion in this episode! Nicely done. It was worth the wait.
Beautiful!! Congrats on finishing this episode at last. :)
Very beautiful to do an animation
This one will be quite easy to translate xD
how many special effects i can see why it took so long
There are shortcuts, but only a very few find them and most of them don't recognize it when they do.
BTW, not much to translate :D Very nice and clean drawing David, I am enjoying the beautiful house repair. In reverse, the Pepper's hair on page 8 does not fit for me. Is there any reason it is so sharp?
Another amazing comic by my favourite web-artist!
Amazing FX...
Good job David, again.
It's great. Thank you for taking the time and for posting updates along the way.
Hmm seems like the butterfly is different compare to the live stream you did before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIk8adM3aw0&list=PL1f3KX119RCWByunN41ofv988gpXx4WPO&index=9
I love it! This is definitely one of the best Episodes!
So many interpretations of Chaos in so short comic strip! You Sir are the best!
Well... No pain, no gain, Paper.
Beautiful!
You clearly did not take any shortcut to create this one, each cell looks amazing!
Bravo !! Quel beau retour !
I really liked so much this episode. I'll be waiting for more, and I hope one day, you can make all the episodes animated! :D
Their magic is destruction centred, so I think they ripped a hole in space time and tore a copy from an earlier (or future) version of the house. The butterfly was a butterfly effect cancelling spell for the disruption they did to the time stream.
I'm happy there's a new episode out! It's great to see Pepper again.
Very relatable. Good luck, Pepper. You can do it!
That's one possibility, but the version I'm thinking of has the house reduced to it's individual particles and then re-assembled. Chaosah is well within their power to do that.
Chaos is not about destruction. Chaos is about unpredictability and Chaosah is closely linked to the forces of order, disorder, and chaos. It's perfectly within their realm to cause particles to become disordered and then reverse the flow of time in that space for the particles to become re-ordered.
Rather than think of Chaosah as agents of destruction think of them as agents of controlling physics. And then add a desire for disorder and destruction on top of that and you can see why the other magical schools don't usually hang out with them.
That's one possibility, but the version I'm thinking of has the house reduced to it's individual particles and then re-assembled. Chaosah is well within their power to do that.
Chaos is not about destruction. Chaos is about unpredictability and Chaosah is closely linked to the forces of order, disorder, and chaos. It's perfectly within their realm to cause particles to become disordered and then reverse the flow of time in that space for the particles to become re-ordered.
Rather than think of Chaosah as agents of destruction think of them as agents of controlling physics. And then add a desire for disorder and destruction on top of that and you can see why the other magical schools don't usually hang out with them.
Sorry for the duplicate here. :)
Serves you right being buried in books, besides it's your fault so that's your punishment for ruining the house and also reward for the interest in magic they've showed you.
It is very rare that I see someone tell a great story such as this without words. I love it!
It is very rare that I see someone tell a great story such as this without words. I love it!
Woops, did not mean for that double up. Capcha glitches out on me saying it failed but it didn't. Hmmm
I love the twist ending on this! With the title "There Are No Shortcuts", after they entirely *obliterated* the house's remains with magic, I thought they were going to make Pepper rebuild. Probably by hand, with no magic, as punishment for having gone against orders and recklessly made that tree. No shortcuts in learning to harness the awesome forces of Chaosah magic though ... I didn't see that coming! Great job on this, David!
Awesome as always! Great job David!
I've had trouble trying to quantify things into a magical domain, especially with Hippiah. It's difficult not to want to classify things with a somatic component or an aura effect into Hippiah's domain. One of the things I enjoy about the magic system is the presence of constraints and trying to wrap my head around it.
wow so many FX! I really like the "silent" chapters this one is specially gorgeous, such an awesome research there too, nice work David!
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
That was amazing, and totally worth the wait. Thank you!
This episode was, as usual, great. Now it's rare to see a comic strip that beautiful. Most comics are made as simple as possible to fit into Sunday columns. And the beginning comment in the html source is cool as well, though I had to feed it to cat to see properly.
This comic is amazingly beautiful and it just get better and better through each episode. You are sooooo talented! Thank you for bringing us readers so much joy’
Guest starring, the quantum weather butterfly. Amazing as always!
No quantum in the butterfly effect. (A pure quantum version would actually make it simpler.) All the fun in the butterfly effect is in the nonlinearity of the non-quantum equations. And the Lorenz attractor is a very nice further nod in the direction of getting order from such disordered processes.
Great work. Reminds me of version control. Got. Reversing commits after messing up.
*Git. Would you publish your pencil sketches? They can be rough. Cheers.
Glad to see another episode. The story tells the moral itself. There are no shortcuts in life if you wish to achieve something. Hard work (if one is willing) and dedication is the main key. Sadly, in today's world, we all want INSTANT RESULTS, and will not or unwilling, to earn what they wish to get.
By the way, I have finished writing a short story set in an Africa like continent featuring a character inspired Conan the Barbarian. However, I just cannot come up with any more stories. It's like I am in a rut, and any ideas I thought up I think is good, I realize is dumb. I just don't know what to do. I hope to have my short story published in a fantasy/science fiction magazine (I am also working on an Atlantis young adult book and a fantasy tale inspired by manga)
As for the African Conan character, I tried putting him in different time periods. One set in 90,000 B.C.E., one he is born in a Middle Easter region, and even tried to put him in a John Carter of Mars scenario, but NOTHING SEEMS TO WORK. I was thinking of dumping the character after, and IF, I send my tale for publication, and just concentrate on my two fantasy books. What do you think?
Hope to see another chapter of your comics. It is very inspiring. Before I go, I read the English translated copy of the French fable and philosophical graphic novel Pyrenee online. It was beautiful. Have you ever read it? If so, what did you think of it? I hope that the creators will make the sequel soon.
Have a good day.
Mark Munroe
Trinidad, West Indies.
Even without saying a word, I can still absorb everything. I actually didn't realized that there are no speech bubbles, until I read David's comment. Keep on experimenting with cool stuff like these.
Just discovered your works and read all your comics at once.
You're doing an awesome job, I'm grateful for the good time I spent.
Your efforts will certainly be rewarded if you try hard enough, keep going and good luck ~
Loving this series, this is a really awesome episode. Glad to see a new one after the long wait :D
Ni!
For those wondering about the physics of the magic in this episode, no need to invoke manipulating time or anything beyond classical chaotic dynamics.
In a chaotic system, the vicinity of any state is reachable from every other state and contains an unstable periodic orbit. The other condition is that small perturbations have big effects. So it suffices to cunningly intervene with small perturbations that will bias the sytem towards the desired periodic orbit, effectively stabilizing it.
Translating into magic, Cayenne broke the house into bits, which Thym could shake into a chaotic system, so Cumin could introduce the right sort of tiny perturbations in order to stabilize it around the original form of the house.
There is an area of physics research called "chaos control" which explores this and similar techniques:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_chaos
It has applications in manipulating the role of turbulence in biochemical systems. Related ideas also have applications more widely known, for example, in space travel, instead of propelling an interplanetary satellite straight to its destination, you use small perturbations to jump in between the orbits of planets and use their gravitational force to carry the satellite most of the way.
I am quite curious about how much previous knowledge David had of this. Also because it was the subject of my undergrad monograph ;-)
Hi Solstag!
That's really cool information and it gives for sure another depth in the reading of the episode. Thank you!
Here I'm really curious in general about all chaotic systems; that's why the magic 'Chaosah' of Pepper&Carrot or the title of my first DVD training 'Chaos&Evolution'. I read books, follow videos about this topic; but the one for the wide audience because I'm not skilled as a scientific to understand the scientific papers.
I'm glad I could encode this second reading in background, with the obvious elements like the Lorenz attractor :)
Bahahahaha they gave her hat a chinstrap
...or not, maybe that's just her hair.
That was a good one! I haven't read your comics in a while and it just made my day!!!!!!!!!!
It is due to your comment I found out there is some text in this episode ;) Also, folks from Baku (Azerbaijan) read your translations as well! Thanks!
Uff!! How much can a picture speak without speech!!! This is so wonderful!!! like like like like super like...!!!
这一集的分镜实在是太劲爆了!!!
Hi David. Thanks for all your comics. I'm going to make a small suggestion, but please don't take this comment as a negative thing, I'm just trying to provide a bit of constructive feedback :)
When I saw the Lorenz attractor I thought it was just the infinity symbol. If it is indeed supposed to be the attractor, I would do a humble suggestion about the shape (if you plan to show it again in the future): each "arm" that comes from the top to the center should split in the middle and go to both sides, instead of each arm just going to the opposite side. See for example this "Lorenz Attractor in 3D" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ouVrPCvvVg. Admittedly, not many videos show the shape properly, and it would be a shame if this great idea of chaos magic was not conveyed as well as it could be.
Please excuse me if you already knew this and your design was intentional.
I take the opportunity to say thanks again for all your tutorials about Krita and painting in general, and your beautiful speedpainting videos and your efforts on libre tools and culture.
Thanks for your nice words and constructive criticism. Yes, it's a Lorenz attractor, and I'll try to paint it more accurately next time :)
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