Grrl Power #613 – In flight edutainment
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve drawn Sydney. I mean previous to the previous page, but I draw two pages side by side, so this page and the last were the same page as far as I’m concerned. I almost forgot how to draw her bangs. :/
This is kind of an odd page because it isn’t terribly illuminating. I just wrote it because I realized the team never went over Sciona’s race, or rather her species, which might seem species-ist, but in this case, it’s informative of her abilities. So instead of playing it like I just forgot to cover this before, or just kept putting it off because I couldn’t think of a name for her race (which I’ve been informed is not nearly as unique a race name as I thought it was – apparently my google-fu sucks) I thought it’d be funny to play off of Sydney’s ADHD again. Being told in a briefing about Sciona seems like something she’s at least try to pay attention to, but it was delivered as a written brief, there’s a very good chance her eyes would glaze over while scanning it.
Given the sensitive nature of anything to do with Twilight Council races, they probably wouldn’t just email blast everyone with clearance on the team, no matter how secure they thought their system was. So it was definitely a meatspace brief, but Sydney has had rather a lot on her mind lately. She was probably still mad about the whole werewolves (and indeed, wolves) have no relationship with the moon whatsoever.
There are more people in her bubble bus than I pictured, I haven’t quite decided who yet, but there’s definitely at least one Harem sitting in the middle. She’s not a heavy hitter or especially armored, but she’s mobile and really handy for ferrying small items around, and no technology or power yet known can block her ability to sense what each of her are doing, (including Sydney’s shield, which I actually considered the first time it happened) meaning the team has perfectly reliable communication over any distance. Unless someone klonks her on the head or something.
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I am sad to hear that Stephan Hawking has rolled on into the great beyond yesterday. He will be missed. And who will Sheldon have to argue with now on the ‘Big Bang Theory’?
https://tvline.com/2018/03/14/stephen-hawking-dies-physicist-dead-76-big-bang-theory-cast-tribute/
well it wasn’t expected that he would live hast his 20s with that condition he had. With that in mind, 76 is quite good. Sheldon will have to argue with Hawking’s ghost, I think. When they are at it, they can get a ghost for Einstein, Plank and Oppenheimer too.
If we’re suggesting a list of spirits with whom Sheldon Cooper can argue, may I nominate:
1)__Isaac Newton, who had his share of anti-social “quirks”:
[]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Personal_relations
2)__& who can forget what hijinks Erwin Schrödinger was up to, when he wasn’t pondering the life-or-death of hypothetical cats?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schrödinger#Personal_life]
Or he could bandy with Jack Daniels?
On a side note, I am friends with various of Isac Newton’s relatives. One of whom is now on the other side. I could have a word with him, and see if he will set up the relevant appointments.
Arthur Conan Doyle was quite into spiritualism and mediums. He could probably give me advice on how to go about that.
Oh … wait … hang on … I see a flaw in my cunning plan.
Smelly Shelly doesn’t argue with people, he browbeats and berates them until they give up and let him win just to shut him up
Yea, very sad. I too thought of his appearances on BBT. Amongst his profound work, such as with wormholes.
And we would do well to be mindful about his warnings about aliens.
*looks meaningfully at Dabbler*
But at we can be confident that they would not be coming for our water.
Never had to deal with Ice Pirates have you…8-P
I had someone steal my red dragon this winter, does that count?
Seriously. It guards my front door. It got nicked. That night the house caught on fire, whilst I was asleep and I almost died. Only saved by Miss Kitty Fantastico sounding an alarm meow.
The following day it was returned, with a pair of healing crystals around it!
Quite pawey, given the smoke inhalation, from when I was asleep, and minor burns I suffered fighting the fire.
Obviously the dragon accidentally set your house on fire and ran away to avoid blame. He came to his senses and returned bearing gifts as an apology.
I had contemplated that very thing myself.
I shall have to keep a wary eye on the dragon. Never a bad idea mind.
Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never, EVER cut a deal with a dragon.
Street Proverb
Look, I’m a mage who starts EVERY contact with a Johnson summoning myself almost into a coma to give my teammates an edge. I’ll compact with a dragon if our face gets to set all terms with my Spirit of Man whispering in her ear.
can and HAVE*
Given the context, for a second I thought the “Archon” thing in the bottom text was referring to, y’know, archons.
Ahh, you thought that they might be the emissaries between humanity and Halo?
Mind you Archon’s name makes a lot more sense, now that we know there really are angels and demons out there and that Archon are acting as emissaries to them!
Hah, I love this secret code we have. Where we can talk about stuff that readers using phones cannot access.
We should have a secret paw shake too!
(First time poster)
If you’re talking about your blocked out text, my phone can see it
Yea I just tap on it and it highlights. On phone now
Thought I admit I don’t know how to do that myself and would like to know how.
At the bottom of the comment box when posting is a list of tags you can use. That one is [ spoiler ] and [ / spoiler] (without the spaces if I did it right).
Spot on.
One thing to be wary of though is that the spoiler will automatically end at the first paragraph break it comes to. So if you want to do several separate hidden lines of text, as I did above, you must enclose each of them in the spoiler tags, as Mike demonstrated.
Heh, yea. One person said they could not access such, on their phone. Which kinda made me sad having some folks in the community who could not see things I concealed with spoiler.
Still it does give the opportunity for a bit of fun. But glad that it is not a universal problem.
I thought Sydney’s flight/bubble combo wasn’t any faster than the jet because of the limited oxygen supply, and thus frequent stops? I know that she has the oxygen orb now, but she still only has two hands doesn’t she? So she’d either have to let go of the flight orb, which would make them all fall, or let go of the bubble orb, which would drop everyone but her. So… am I missing something? Just a thought. Love this web comic! :D
I just discovered this topic had been thoroughly discussed on page one of the comments! (Didn’t realize there were multiple pages!
It took me weeks to realise that myself, when I first got into the comic, so you are in good company.
Let me add my encouragement to that of [Yorp]:
Please don’t feel as though you should be obligated to worry about this — every one of us has had to go thru this same “learning curve” — it’s fine, trust me.
Race does mean species.; Which is how racist humans have used it for 400 years. Blame the White Christian Maritime Empires, formation of Capitalism, Black/colored Slavery and early form of Scientific Racism where the idea of 5 or 7 races were figured out with Indo-Europeans or Aryans were placed at the top and other groups below them in stature, intelligence and skills. The old nomenclature has muddles so many things including the real Science of biology and genetics which show we are all of the same race. Just with many variations due to local adaptions. We are the Human Race.
Use of “races” would be correct as they are not human.
Race does not always mean species. One well-accepted definition of “species” relates to whether or not individuals can interbreed. Horses and zebras are different species (can’t interbreed); horses and donkeys are fairly closely related species (can sometimes interbreed, but the offspring are almost always sterile).
All the human “races” can interbreed, resulting in usually-fertile offspring, and therefore all humans are part of a single species. In this case it is way-more-accurate to equate the word “race” with the word “breed”, as in “breeds of dogs”. All dogs are one species (can interbreed and have fertile offspring), but that species has many breeds/races, see?
Yup.
Strictly speaking it should be called the human-neanderthal race, given that homo sapiens interbred with neanderthals. Except for the pure homo sapiens in Africa.
In truth though the different ethnicities of humans have more in common with each other than breeds of dogs do. Dog (breed) not only affects things like coloration, skeletal structure, fur density, but also longevity, temperament, and intelligence.
Humans despite their constant insistence and hatred have only minor phenotypical variances. The most extreme differences only existing in small isolated populations adapting to things like altitude and local diseases.
I know its been awhile…but Imma just gonna leave this here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebroid
Just wait until someone finds the parents of the duckbilled platypus!
Surprisingly one is a velociraptor.
Turns out angels and demons aren’t really enemies, they just like screwing with the heads of random goat herders.
Ghengis Khan’s troops preferred to play polo, with the severed heads.
And joining them are the Psionic Cephalamorphs.
(Goes searching through the archives.) Aha! Okay, there it is. Sorry if someone noted this already, but I think it’s canon that (1) there are actual angels (not just various species mistaken for them), and (2) they get along with demons well enough that you can have an archangel’s daughter taking classes at Demon High (at least, Khal Barrack said that the bottom panel of this page is canon, so I assume his commentary on it is as well):
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1698
Also: DaveB’s mention of “Ava’s Demon” is why I went and found it, and if you hain’t read it, I’d recommend it quite highly. It’s great.
Has the archive glitches been fixed yet on Ava’s Demon?
I have to give up trying to keep up, or rather lost patience as “new page” meant a cluster of like a half dozen or more pages were added at once and had to back scroll one by one to find where it left off.
As near as I can tell, if you refresh the page and hit “latest”, it will take you to the first of the newest set of pages. So, if you mean “will latest jump me to the *actual end* of the existing comic”, then no, still busted. I don’t really mind the setup, but yeah, it took me awhile to figure out that I was waiting for a new page in a place where new pages were never going to show up. Hm. Though, as I think about it, latest *will* take you to the most-recent set of pages, and I think it didn’t used to. So maybe it *is* fixed.
Personally I prefer to not rely on comics features like that (other than ‘next’ and ‘previous’),* as I always bookmark the second-to-last page that I have read. I avoid the last one, as many comics have a URL which points you at the most recent comic, rather than a specific comic page. Which will not show the same page when you next come back, if there have been more recent updates.
Whilst you can work around that, a couple of ways (manually altering the URL to point to the specific page, or navigating to that version of the page), it is easier just to go back one page and save that link instead. Plus it helps to have a refresher as to the most recent activity, to get back into the flow of a story (‘on last weeks show we saw …’).
Even doing so on comics, like this one, which provide an excellent feature to return to the last read comic (check out the ‘tag’ ‘goto tag’ etc buttons at the top of the page). Simply because most do not have such (or they do not work in a consistent manner). So I much prefer to use my own technique, providing me a standard way across all the webcomics I follow.
Although I would expect a ‘latest’ button to go to the very most recent, so that would frustrate the heck out of me too. If my latest bookmarks are not available (if google chrome has not synced correctly, for example), I would rely on being able to easily go to the end of the story, and quickly navigate backwards, until I find a page I recognise.
* Comics which only have a list of links to pages, in an archive, and no other easy way of sequentially going through a story are unlikely to find me coming back, and may not even see me finishing the initial read through. Unless the story is compelling.
I don’t know whether it’s true, but I recall reading somewhere that there was as much, possibly more, genetic diversity within the relatively small population of chimpanzees still living in the wild (<300,000, with 4 recognized subspecies) as there is in Homo Sapiens (all ~7 billion of us).
There's a theory that ~80K years back we went through a genetic bottleneck, with all humans alive today descended from less than 10,000 unique individuals. With some modern populations having gone through much smaller bottlenecks relatively recently.
I have a personal theory that humans had a time when they were in very much the same conditions that bonobo chimps (our closest living relatives) are today. In Africa, cut off by a major river. Which would explain the various aquatic adaptations that homo sapiens developed, which give us our major distinctiveness from other great apes.
All of which would help humans to survive at the water’s edge, or crossing tributaries, gathering resources from the river and avoiding the dangers of the water (notably including hippos, crocodiles and the various land based predators which congregate around water).
Some highlights as to why our adaptations would give us an evolutionary edge in such circumstances:
• That very aspect, of having a mixture of water based and land based predators, would punish any species which solely relied on fixed instincts to evade harm. Diving into water, to escape land predators, could expose the individual to a watery death. And vice versa. Whereas successful intelligent strategies, to avoid such predicaments, would drive intellectual development.
• Bipedalism allows wading through deeper water than apes who need to support their weight with their arms.
• A bipedal mother would have her arms free to hold a baby or toddler, when crossing such waters.
• Downward facing nostrils allow diving into water without drowning.
• Subcutaneous fat helps prevent hypothermia if cold and wet (as an African I can assure you that Africa can get very cold at times, such as at night, in winter). Plus allows for extended foraging and fishing in water.
• Streamlined hair (rather than fur that goes in directions which can create drag) helps sustained swimming. Not a lot, but various small advantages add up to improved survival chances.
• A diet rich in fresh fish and river vegetation would give a health advantage, especially given the premise demands a major water source, which never dries up.
• Fish provides vital nutrition to allow big brains to develop.
• These various factors reinforce each other synergistically. Should a population be dependant on a watery food source, to evolve larger brains, the process could be interrupted, at an intermediate stage by a drought. Which Africa is prone to. Wiping out those parts of the population which were dependant on that food to maintain their evolutionary advantage. But the water stability offsets that.
Whilst temporary shortages (such as depleted fish stocks) could be countered by the intelligent strategies these proto-humans were developing. And migrating to areas where the shortages were not a problem would be easier with bipedalism, tool use, weapons creation and fire.
While wading in deep water the water provides a large degree of buoyancy, making the use of arms to support your body weight unnecessary. Bipedalism doesn’t change this.
When you dive into water, your downward facing nostrils are facing upwards, and yet the water doesn’t just rush into your lungs through the nose. It doesn’t even rush into the nose and nasal passages. The nose doesn’t work like that.
Check out this mother monkey (not a close human relative but it was conveniently easy to find and illustrates my point). The clip shows that she is limited to travelling in water no deeper than that, using that technique (where she can easily grab the baby if it is in difficulty).
Later you see the baby climbing on top of its mum. Which provides a solution for deeper water. But with risks, as they are then dependent solely on the baby’s grip for it to stay in place. Which for younger or poorly individuals may be harder or even not possible. Leading to more situations where a baby could die in hazardous conditions.
It also means that a species young needs to be more self-reliant from a much younger age (ideally from birth). Like we see quadrupedal herd animals having to get up and walk from the day they are born, in order to keep up with the herd
Humans however were able to trade off the necessity to do that, for the advantages that can be obtained from slower development, whilst making the most out of those big brains to learn more stuff, before having to walk, run or support its own weight with gripping hands.
But this means the mum needs to be able to hold the baby (in days before they evolved enough to make devices to carry them anyhow). For great apes, who cannot walk upright for very long, this limits the width of rivers that they can safely traverse. And poses a serious drowning risk, for the baby, if they hit a sink hole, strong current, or other hazard (even in a short crossing).
The mother’s buoyancy never comes into the equation by the way. That is only pertinent when so fully submerged that a babe in arms would be drowning. If a great ape has entered water that deep the baby is likely to die, unless it can balance itself on its mum’s head. Which, in any event, would increase the risk of the mother drowning, given that they are nowhere near as good in the water as humans are.
Humans can swim though (if they learn to of course, but that is more likely if growing up in a riverine area), so they have more options in that situation.
And, talking about which, human babies have reflexes which allow them to hold their breath and survive underwater. Which would help a species evolving in a riverine environment.
I do not know if other great apes share this trait mind, but that would not affect human evolution, other than if competing against them in a similar environment.
You are doing it wrong bud. You really should not turn your nose upside down, on your face, before diving head-first into water. The rest of humanity have their nostrils protected by the arch of their nose, when doing that. None of the other great apes have that feature.
Jumping into water, feet first is a different matter, but that is not diving, that is jumping.
You are the one who brought up diving. And then you lecture me about it? Did Guesticus hack your account, or are you just stupid? That was a rhetorical question, you don’t need to answer.
Hey don’t blame me because you cannot distinguish between ‘down relative to the rest of the body’ and ‘down relative to the planet’. Humans have some degree of streamlining (more than apes, less than seals) from the tops of their heads, down to their feet. Importantly, this includes the nose. Thus allowing them to dive into water.
Their nearest relatives cannot do that. Which means if having to escape a land-based predator humans have the edge. Not only can they get into water, but they retain the momentum to help propel them far from the bank in a minimal amount of time. Thus completing their escape. Whereas a chimp would still be floundering near to the shore remaining exposed to an attack.
As stated before this assumes having acquired the relevant skills. But for the scenario presented all the proto-humans are living in a riverine environment, they will have picked up those skills and be passing them onto their offspring.
“pruny” fingertips are not waterlogged. That is an adaptation to allow fingers to grip things in the water. I’d put more money on our ancestors spending a significant amount of time on the ocean shore rather than by lakes and rivers. Predatory animals don’t like to go into the ocean, which makes it a good refuge as well as a place to find food.
Thanks, I had forgotten about the fingertips. That is a good support for my contention. And there is no reason why it cannot be compatible with yours. A population trapped by major rivers could be in an area bounded on one side by the ocean. Given the dietary advantage of both coastal and river food sources, they would have even more of an advantage from every aquatic adaptation they developed.
This would also account for rapidly accelerated human evolution, which there has been some indication of in recent discoveries. Once they advanced far enough to resemble modern humans they would have little difficulty escaping the riverine confines, by raft building, and could rapidly expand out into the regions beyond. Where they would probably rapidly replace their more archaic relatives.