Author: Novil

I’ve removed the latest page A Sky Full of Stars 084 because people didn’t understand its context and nothing happens in it that’s important for the rest of the story.

I’ve updated the website:

• The list of characters is now up-to-date.
• The glossary now contains info about all locations and terms that have been used in the comic so far, plus some additional ones.
• All comic pages now feature the transcript of the page’s dialog.

I’ve also added several links to interesting YouTube channels to the Links page:

• Bright Sun Films presents abandoned places and defunct companies. In his second channel Bright Sun Travels, he reviews luxury hotels and cruises in a very entertaining manner.
• Defunctland produces documentaries about amusement parks. Highlights like the history of Disney’s FastPass and Disney’s animatronics are even very entertaining if you don’t care about amusement parks at all.
• Sabine Hossenfelder discusses science news and occasionally also posts longer videos explaining results from quantum physics, astrophysics and related fields. Some of my favorite videos are her videos about nuclear fusion startups and the current state of cold fusion.
• Wirtual is a professional Trackmania player and produces documentaries about the racing game, e.g. he exposed the game’s most notorious cheater (a second time).
• Writer Brandon McNulty is probably the best writing channel on YouTube with numerous tips how to improve your writing skills. Jed Herne gives advice specifically for fantasy stories.

Here’s the rest of my list of recommended YouTube channels:

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The rather frequent complaints in comment sections that various aspects of the comic are “unrealistic” are getting annoying. A large number of the objects in the comic are based on reference pictures. As a recent example, here’s a modern construction site with missing handrails on the narrow ends of the platforms:

It also makes no sense to constantly compare the world of Lavarel to Earth or other fantasy settings. It’s different in almost every aspect. Of course, it’s not an easy task to make such a unique world completely consistent, but I’m trying my best. If you think about potential issues long enough, you’ll see that there are logical explanations for at least 90% of them. But including long-winded explanations in the comic would be boring and destroy the pacing.

You may have encountered “Service Unavailable” messages when trying to access the website today. There currently seems to be a denial of service attack going on, specifically against the old forum that’s still used for internal communication by me and Elli.

The server log file shows a lot of requests with the user agent ClaudeBot. I currently assume that a misconfigured bot is the culprit of the attack. I moved the forum to a different folder and hope that this will already solve the problem. So far, it looks promising.

Now that you’ve seen at least a little of the story and setting, I’d love to hear what you think could happen in the comic.

Let your imagination run wild and write a comment below this post.