Grrl Power – Dabbler’s Science Corner #8
There’s no “System” on Earth, so delving a dungeon is really only good for loot, which, admittedly is nearly unique on Earth and probably hugely valuable, especially if you have access to a reasonably competent alchemist. A chemist could learn to do a lot with plants and slime cores and whatever else you could pull from a dungeon, but at some point you’d be leaving potential on the cutting room floor if they ignore the magic infused into those objects.
No one would gain XP/Essence/Mana/whatever by killing magically generated/enriched monsters or beating traps or labyrinths. Well, I should say almost no one would benefit from that, but some already magical or magically attuned beings could benefit from it. Vampires, who pull almost all of their energy and power from life force via blood could gain a little bit from a dungeon delve, as they vampirism is a magical parasite slash symbiote (depending on who you ask.) A mage could benefit from it, as practicing magic in an area with higher mana would improve their spellcasting and possibly allow them to accelerate the growth of their personal mana pools.
But Joey Shotgun won’t get anything from delving besides the experience. The experience of having done it, not experience points. Also possibly some loot, but while an immature dungeon will probably provide some interesting botanical specimens, Legendary Daggers are a long way off.
You know? I think I wrote that tachyon joke. I mean obviously I wrote it, that’s how all the words appear in the comic. I mean I think I actually… invented that joke. Or whatever verb you’d ascribe to that act. There’s a chance it’s cryptomnesia, of course. My memory is poor enough that I could have easily stumbled across that joke three years ago while looking up science jokes for another page, and I don’t remember. Or… I do remember, just, not well enough to know I remember it. Which… is the definition of cryptomnesia.
Next page returns to Peggy’s tale. Things have calmed down a little, there’s still lots to do, and unfortunately I am currently living in Houston with my Mom, while the wife is up in Dallas taking care of the house and cats. It’s likely I’ll be down here until… I don’t know. We settle everything, probate of the will wraps up, and we decide what my mom’s living situation will be. Probably it will involve selling her house and ours and moving to a new location, possibly around Buffalo, which would put us an hour or two from my sister in Toronto, but my parent’s house is big and full of nice stuff, some of which has emotional attachments, and I don’t want to empty out their house then get a house that’s big enough for the “mother in law apartment” then have to fill that house, so there will probably be storage involved and viewing houses on the other side of the country, then moving across the country. It’s… a lot.
Anyway, that’s all… none of you guys’s problem. Like I said, I don’t like using the comic as an agony aunt, I mean, generally my life doesn’t have much drama going on in it, but damn, the last… month? Yeah. Geeze. The last month has felt like 5 months. Not so much because it’s been emotionally draining, moreso because my normal routine is “draw comic, watch some TV, go to Pathfinder game every other weekend, maaaaaybe go to the gym, repeat” but for the last month it’s been like one big important meeting every two or three days, then lots of “not part of my routine” chores every day. Really, that probably tells me I need more variety in my day-to-day life, cause I do have a tendency to find a routine and then suddenly I look up and it’s been 4 years.
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Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.
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0.00011% = 0.0000011 = 1.1 * 10^-6. There are only two significant figures, which define its precision, not accuracy. Clearly, we need Max to take one of my physics courses so she can recognize the difference in the terms. She was an officer in the Air Force, so she should have already had that training. Maybe it has been long enough since she took the applicable courses that she does not remember the details.
Officers aren’t know for intellegence.
Dave,
As a long time fan (10+ years! Dear God where does the time go…), and a fellow Dallasite and Texan, I would STRONGLY recommend against moving up north. Not because I’m prejudiced, but because of cost of living and regulation issues. Everyone I know that has lived in Texas for any amount of time then moved elsewhere has told me “Don’t do it!” The legal and regulatory changes have always resulted in horrendous fee, license, and fine issues (one friend found out that he was being ticketed for being uninsured on a car he didn’t own, in a state he no longer lived, which caused insurance issues in New York to the tune of about $2500).
…which is not to say I understand anything about your challenges and family dynamics, which may be a trump card that overrides any necessary warnings.
I wish you the best, and have a ton of love and respect for your work and devotion.
Cheers brother, all the best.
That middle panel has a lot of irony in it.
What group receives garners least sympathy from media? (Sidenote: webcomics ARE media.) Compare how the “fragile egoed white middle class men” are typically treated, (openly derided in ways that would be literally illegal to do to any other group and treated as deserving of mockery and death) in comparison to saaaay, fentanyl Floyd?
What group is being wrongly privileged in the real world? What group is being provably oppressed? What group will you be attacked for using the correct word to describe their oppression? Gosh golly, it’s all so confusing.
You are talking like a firm believer that racism is a statement of fact rather than a position. Questions aren’t legally damning, but the implication stands. Using the archaic “golly” isn’t a very subtle dog whistle. Don’t feed the trolls, they say, but I feel that I can’t read past this without redress.
Rich, good shit mate. keep ya chin up
It’s possible Dabbler inserted “white middle class men” specifically to create drama in the comments.
I don’t think that Dabbler can break the fourth wall like that,25352, we’ve only seen Halo try that, and Max acknowledge her knowledge of the trope.
Or she’s just being completely accurate.
Which is far more likely the case.
“Dabbler” didn’t insert that, and it’s highly likely that a superintelligent alien would have a far more nuanced, less cartoonishly bigoted take on the matter.
It was Dave who chose to insert that puerile racist sexist classist straw-man broad-brush smear.
The point would have been better made if targeted (no pun intended) against say the subset of hunters (of unspecified demographic) who think they’d prevail in combat based just on their trips to the woods to hunt “herbivores”. But gratuitously dragging in “middle class”, and “white”, and “men” into the mix when all those are beside the point (and hardly exclusive categories for that kind of mindset, I can think of numerous prominent exceptions), clearly smacks of some kind of personal issue that Dave is trying to lash out about. And it’s especially weird given that Dave himself appears squarely in the middle of all those classifications.
Or is it simply that there’s a base human instinct which makes it cathartic to denigrate large swaths of people, and today these are about the only groups it’s still acceptable (nay, encouraged) to crap on, and so we’d expect the same folks to be just as enthusiastic making swipes about… other groups if they had been around in the 1950’s with that era’s different list of approved scapegoats?
What Patreon tier do we have to buy into to motivate Dave not to be an ugly bitter douchebag about classes of people that likely 90% of his audience has membership in (in at least one category)?
Bigotry is bigotry. I encourage everyone to aim higher.
Ah, perhaps that’s where the confusion stems from. He’s not disparaging all white people, all men, or even all white men. He’s disparaging a particular demographic defined by their attitudes and behavior, and noting that a majority of them also happen to be white men who make a big deal about being white men.
It’s like the difference between saying “all dogs are mammals”, which is true, and “all mammals are dogs”, which is false.
Sorry, I just have to check. In the context of the rest of your post, when you say:
> What group is being wrongly privileged in the real world? What group is being provably oppressed? What group will you be attacked for using the correct word to describe their oppression? Gosh golly, it’s all so confusing.
It sounds like you’re saying that black people are being wrongly privileged and white people are being provably oppressed. Is that what you meant? If so, I’d be fascinated to hear your thinking — in what specific ways do you believe this privilege / oppression manifests?
Not OP, but I can give you some info.
Its well established in the US that black people and hispanics regularly get jobs/school slots/government positions because of their skin color. Joe Biden explicitly chose a supreme court justice and his VP based on sex and skin color.
That same supreme court justice has stated that the 14th amendment should only protect black people, and nobody else.
Conviction records show that men are drastically more likely to be convicted for crimes than women, and sentenced longer, even with similar evidence and crimes.
Harvard recently lost a lawsuit where they argued, not that they weren’t discriminating by race, but that it was their *right* to discriminate against white and asian people. You will find no such companies arguing that they should be allowed to discriminate in favor of white people.
I can’t prove it, but I know multiple people who have been offered bounties if they can recruit women or black people to their company. Yes that’s illegal. No the companies don’t care. I know one woman who lost her promotion to a black woman who demanded more black representation in management. I know one man who was refused a job explicitly because he is white.
No, it’s well-established that a bunch of people belief that to be true, but that is not in any way evidence that it is true. What is well supported is that white men are disproportionately wealthy, occupy a disproportionate number of positions of power, and that neither is a result of exceptional performance or capability. It’s been shown that the same résumé will be perform differently based on the perceived ethnicity of the name attached to it, and that white men are preferred in hiring and promotion.
You’re complaining about a finger on the scale, when there’s an entire hand pushing on the other side. Which is why people disparage white men — they’re likely to occupy a position that they don’t actually have the qualifications for, and to have been selected preferentially on the basis of their sex and race. Anybody else has to work harder to achieve the same level of success.
The difference is that bias towards white men occurs implicitly, unspoken, and thus appears invisible unless you actually examine the statistics. The explicit mechanisms for trying to correct that bias are more visible, more discussed. They may not be ideal, but those benefiting from the existing bias never seem to offer any actual solutions, just tell people to stop complaining and accept their place in the natural order.
“It’s been shown that the same résumé will be perform differently based on the perceived ethnicity of the name attached to it”
That’s confounded by “ethnic” names being class markers (high-class blacks are less likely to give their kids ethnic names.)
Other than that, the evidence for bias helping whites is rather lacking and mostly relies on comparing raw outcomes, but that doesn’t actually allow the conclusion it’s discrimination. If you do things like control for SAT, you’ll find that the (naively) apparent bias reverts. (If you look at asians in the US, the effect is even stronger, at least in the academic realm, the perform even better and get discriminated against even harder.)
“They may not be ideal”
They’re not just not ideal, they’re worse than the purported original problem (and even more worse if you overestimated the original problem). Racism – explicit, official, unashamed racism – in the other direction is not a fix for (subconscious) racism. Your “solution” is rejected because it’s not a solution, but a worse problem. We’re not telling you to stop complaining, we’re telling you to stop discriminating. Once you do that, we can take a look at what discrimination remains and how to actually fix what we find.
With gender, it’s even worse – you’ll find that women do better in many situations and that’s simply ignored, whereas everytime men do better, it’s called injustice.
*citation needed
There’s the grift right there: “Stop trying to solve the problem your way, and maybe we’ll consider solving the problem another way.” And it never happens. Maybe offer an alternative solution you prefer first, and accept that until you do, people are going to feel justified fighting fire with fire.
Removing the weight on the scales may be preferable, but I don’t see what’s wrong with saying “There’s a 5 pound weight on one side, I’m going to add 5 pounds to the other side to balance it out.” Other than people denying that there’s any extra weight on the other side. And obviously people disagree about what’s fair. Everybody thinks the whole world is against them, because they’re only looking at part of the evidence.
> And it never happens. Maybe offer an alternative solution you prefer first
The solution (at least the concept, implementation is non-trivial) is straightforward and has been known for quite a long time: Promote a society that doesn’t discriminate by race. That’s why it’s never going to happen until you stop discriminating by race. The first step to implementing our solution is removing your “solution”.
> I don’t see what’s wrong with saying “There’s a 5 pound weight on one side, I’m going to add 5 pounds to the other side to balance it out.”
Two things:
(1) Saying there’s a 5 pound weight on one scale. There may be a weight on the scale, but you don’t actually know how heavy it is nor how many other weights there are on either side.
(2) The assumption there’s a single scale. Even if (big if) you’re right in (1), the scale you’re looking at is a societal average, but you’re dealing with individuals. The problem with discrimination is that people are discriminated against.
If white guy A gets the job at company X over black guy B because of their race, that’s unjust. But it’s not practical to identify A and B to fix that directly. The solution, going forward, is to make X non-racist. If instead you make society-wide affirmative action to “balance the scales”, company Y will hire black guy C over white guy D. Which means twice as many people got unfairly discriminated against/advantaged because of their race.
“Let’s discriminate more against other people in the hope discrimination will end up equally distributed over different groups” doesn’t make anything better.
The evidence of the truth of it is, in part, that there are literally black and Hispanic only organizations and grants and not just in a local community kind of way. They tend not to get into positions very high in the organizations, but (in my admittedly limited experience) there is at least a difference in attitude between cultures which may contribute. Black and Hispanic persons seem to trend toward being more…abrasive in their personalities, so to me it sort of makes sense that a long established white man making a promotional choice isn’t going to promote someone who is likely to clash with him. Outside of pretty strictly redneck sorts a white person in the office is far more likely to hand out a ‘great joke, sir. May I have the honor of refilling your coffee?’ Incidentally, regardless of how well they do their jobs, the more crass and abrasive white folks also tend not to get promoted (again in my rather limited experience). IMO a difference in manners and mentalities seems to be the largest barrier for people to move up in positions of power in a company.
If you’re willing to keep your head down and suck people off, then stab them in the back, and sell out everyone around you when the opportunity arises, you too can climb! (stopped talking to a lot of people over the years because they’ve been that shitty, but it’s worked for them, so…?)
So, essentially, white men are more sociopathic and therefore it’s good that they get promoted higher.
I was going to say… That’s the primary trait white men do score higher in than everyone else. So they built a society that rewards it.
The Cliff’s Notes version is that there’s a certain kinda white boy who is big mad about any attempt at leveling the playing field and/or restorative justice. They are the walking embodiment of the saying, “for those who have enjoyed a level of privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
And of course, they’ll then insist they they aren’t privileged, thereby living up to part of the very definition of privilege, in not having to acknowledge it.
The sad fact is, these guys have so thoroughly internalized the hierarchical bs of conservatism, that they genuinely can’t even see it anymore. The idea of a genuinely horizontal society terrifies them, because they can only think in terms of bosses and bossed, rulers and ruled…and if they aren’t rulers, then that must mean they are being ruled. In other words, the only way for a straight white male to be free, is for literally everyone else to be subjugated. Which is both incorrect, and also horrifying in it’s implications for their perception of the world, because it means they cannot even imagine themselves as having anything in common with other people. It means that they have come to regard anyone who isn’t a straight white male, as less-than, literally subhuman. That’s why they don’t ever see anything wrong with anything being done to anyone else. To them, the rest of us “deserve” to be oppressed, repressed, controlled, policed, whatever. At best, in the view of this kind of white man, the rest of us are “slaves by nature,” who need to be guided, controlled, and otherwise managed by a straight white man. But more likely, we are just vermin to be exterminated when necessary or convenient.
Peter Thiel’s “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” comes to mind. They equate freedom with power, so for one person to be free, another cannot. Under their model, only a single person can be free. An opposing model is that freedom requires nobody to have power over anybody else.
Yeah I honestly stopped reading today’s comic halfway through that blurb. Gotta love how everyone is fine with mocking white men and exclusively white men, while also calling them “fragile egos” when their feelings are hurt by that, and *then* having the gall to tell men that they need to open up and be more vulnerable.
More vulnerable? So the mockery hurts more? That’s just sadistic.
Eh, I’d be inclined to give Dabbler the benefit of doubt, here. First off, the Grrl-verse isn’t really into the “reaction” phase of the recent vilification of white men (I forget what year it takes place in, but Obama is still president, for example), and she’s relatively-new to Earth, so her perception largely matching that of the media – whether right or wrong – isn’t that surprising. And she isn’t wrong about certain demographics having a lack of coverage of their struggles, considering a lot of that is stuff the media would rather not cover much on account of it going against The Narrative (consider Chicago). Additionally, I don’t think she’s saying middle-class white men all have fragile ego’s (a lot of the supers she’s working with were middle-class white men before they got rich working for Archon, as is Maxima’s boyfriend), but rather that this would describe many of the ones who would be getting killed in the dungeon and causing problems when their grieving families are broadcast to the world by the salivating media.
“It’s everyone else’s fault that (some) straight white men act like sociopaths,” is totally not an abdication of responsibility or agency. Really. I promise.
Stop making excuses. Isn’t that what all those straight white manly mans keep telling literally everyone else on earth?
You’re responsible for your own actions, your own choices, and nobody making you do, or not do, anything. Right?
“Have a little p E r S 0 n A l R 3 s P 0 n S i b 1 L i T y . . .”
If you don’t know enough examples of how deep the roots of systemic injustice against racial minorities reaches in the US please watch some episodes of last week tonight. They do a lot of fact checking so feel free to prove their claims wrong. There was one episode about how housing zoning historically increased the differences between opportunities for racial minorities and for white people. If you give better opportunities for several generations of one group you cannot expect that to be undone just by stopping to continue such treatment.
I think, even though I am a white male, that the level of bitching and moaning I see in this discussion about white people being oppressed, will be ok as soon as white people have suffered as much oppression as they have dished out historically. So until the level of privilege and/or suffering between any two groups has not been balanced out, the group that got away with being a dick historically, looses the right to complain until they have suffered just as much. I don’ t see any other way to be fair. If you do know a way to make up for all the wealth generated through slavery and better education and job opportunities throughout the previous generations, please share it! Instead of nitpicking around every attempt of others to repair the injustice. For me the same princie applies to gender i equalities as well.
Apologies if my English sounds unnatural, it is my third language. I hope I was able to get the point across.
The irony of “having to stop reading” because of the mockery of “fragile egos.”
The USA has free speech, so I don’t get what you mean by “literally illegal.”
If you go around saying stuff like “fentanyl floyd”, it’s all but certain you are a racist. People who are having an opioid overdose are catatonic, not hyperventilating and visibly agitated.
George Floyd DID die from a fentanyl overdose according to the autopsy report.
Pointing out proven facts does not make one a racist.
Calling him “fentanyl floyd” was going a bit too far i agree. Just George Floyd or “the guy that kickstarted blm” will also do.
He was also videoed being choked to death.
You got the facts wrong. The autopsy report did not say he died of an overdose: https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-george-floyd-autopsy-new-892530421961
To quote the news article, the autopsy said he died of “cardiopulmonary arrest” from “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.”
Oh, goodie. Another lecture on the White Man’s Burden.
Oh good, Bharda being Bharda again.
I can’t recall you ever posting anything that wasn’t exactly what I expected of you and your cohort.
“Everyone is an individual, except the ones who don’t agree with or otherwise support my biases, they are all uniformly identical, interchangeable, and I already know everything about them, so I can ignore and dismiss them all out of hand!”
Ever seen The Blob, Icky?
It’s hard to be sure, but it sort of looks like Dabbler is drawing Jeremy Berimy, and that would be a pretty good science joke all by itself. The tachyon one is pretty good, too.
Go on, Dave- tell us how you REALLY feel about hunting.
As a counterpoint, climbing Mt. Everest has something like a (roughly) 5% deathrate, and that hasn’t stopped subburban housewives, instagram influencers, vegans with something to prove, and middle-aged idiots going through a midlife crisis from trying to climb it. Nor have any government (AFAIK) specifically outlawed it.
Yes modern society is far far FAR safer than at any point in recorded history, but that hasn’t entirely some people from playing a certain amount of Russian-roulette with their hobbies. If anything, I would argue it might encourage it. If that’s good or bad… well, where do you stand on the whole “idiots hiring sherpas to drag them up Mt. Everest” argument?
He’s not bashing hunting, he’s bashing the idiots who thinks it “makes them a real man” to kill something. Not the people who do it to subsist off it.
Who’d die like idiots in a Dungeon.
Your reaction says a lot more about you than him.
Hunting for sustenance is fine. Hunting for sport is… I guess fine, so long as it’s done within limits of conservation and all that.
Setting up an automatic deer feeder outside of a deer blind that gets deer to learn where it’s safe to get consistent food, then hiding in the blind and shooting it in the head while its munching on the food you provided isn’t sport. It’s just killing something after basically gaining its trust.
If that’s hunting, then so is setting out a mousetrap with some cheese on it. I was making fun of dudes who think they’re some great hunter or survivalist after doing something like that.
While we still have first-worlders doing stuff like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wjmIFlnNo , it’s true that we no longer embark on fortune-seeking adventures with an over 20% mortality rate (see, the early Dutch east India company). Not sure your average modern Indonesian would either, though.
“100% of people who die have a dangerous chemical in their body called dihydrogen monoxide. But don’t worry for the coroners, it’s just water down the drain to them.”
A very high percentage of murderers have eaten bread within 24 hours before their deed.
“If Dabbler had to select her favorites on Earth’s periodic table, she’d probably be a fan of Helium, Nitrogen, Tantalum, and Iodine.”
I think that’s the most unamerican thing I’ve heard Dabbler state to date.
Keeping young and overconfident/desperate people from risking their life in a grab for wealth and power, that in the end mostly benefits a few that already have wealth and power.
What do you think the revolutionaries consisted off, the miners in the klondike, the entrepreneurs in Silicon valley, the workers in the weapon factories, the prisoners in the overfull prisons, etc.
Will she require people to drive cars that get a yearly safety review, will she require people to be able to make turns with their cars, will she require companies to implement worker protections, will she limit the amount of wars the country fights, etc.
Accidents(unintentional injuries) are the third cause of death in the USA, the first is heart disease and seven i diabetes melites.
There’re good reasons besides this to keep the public from delving though: military secrets, limited resources(they might have to share some of the spoils) and
It’s funny to see the demographics that boast the most about how tough and capable they are complain about being picked on. Fragile egos indeed.
Gotta love the society telling men to be more vulnerable, while also mocking them for being men. “Let our insults hurt more!”
Such wonderful people.
The point is more the idiots most likely to TRY doing the Dungeon would be NRA morons who think they’re “tough” and would die like bitches.
Basically all of are, oh, right, Middle Class White Males.
The people getting made fun of are basically Andrew Tate/Meal Team Six idiots.
Grow a pair.
Unfortunately that tachyon joke will become so popular that there will even be a science notebook with “What’ll It Be? A Tachyon Walks Into A Bar” on the cover published in 2019.
I was under the impression that dead delvers were an important part of dungeon ecology, contributing critical biomass to the dungeon.
Anyway, Western society lets people do things like BASE diving, mountain climbing building and flying experimental aircraft. Ordinary life has been pretty softened, but taking risks is still permitted for people who want to.
She’s talking more about lots and lots of casual visitors, as opposed to serious hobbyists/professionals. I think the ‘hold my bear, I can go kill an orc!’ crowd would end up dying a lot more than before.
We don’t have the martial mindset of a medieval crowd because we live in a better world than they did. That’s all there is to it.
Perception of danger is unrelated to actual danger. There are lots of examples of tourists teasing wildlife and then being completely surprised when they get attacked.
I am not talking about people playing with a blue ringed octopus out of ignorance. That animal at least looks cute and harmless. (And if it bites people don’t complain. They are just dead.) I mean animals, like Elks, Hippos, Rhinos, those are well known to get aggressive and cause considerable harm
If you’re holding a bear (assuming it’s not the stuffed animal) then you can probably kill an orc.
replace % dead from american national, in park visitors, with % dead from african smartphone cobalt mine, in local peon laberours.
or % dead from welfare denial, in injured/ptsd service vets.
human society is very able to rationalise much higher deathrates than referenced here in their cultures. just give people a facile justification. like “if they didnt want to starve they should have just not been lazy”. and thats before you get to political/religious excuses.
the entire “humans care about life” is a very middle class western thing. and even that demographic has people itching to inflict ideological cleansings.
It’s funny because of the math
I typed “A tachyon” and Google filled out, “walks into a bar.” It’s Redit entry is 9 years old, so if you were the original author, it was at least 9 years ago.
Or maybe predictive algorithms have broken causality.
I don’t know what media Dabbler is consuming, but in the Chicago area at least the deaths of black people at the hands of police, white people or each other or the economic issues they facedominate the news.