Grrl Power #706 – The girl who cried woof
“What species are you?” is probably a conversation you should have before you fool around with someone.
This whole page happened because I thought the name “Woof” was basically the funniest sounding name for a race of aliens. Sure, there are sillier words, and it’d be funny if we met a race of proud warrior aliens, but their name for themselves in our language sounds like “Drippy dicks” or “Fart nose.” We’d probably just insist on calling them something else.
But “Woof” is such a stupid and simple name for a race of aliens, made so much worse that it sounds like wolf, and they kind of look like wolves… a little. We’d probably try and call them that anyway, only to find out that it’s a horrible slur in their language.
Whole alien languages could be like that, too. It’s an amazing coincidence that Klingon sounds tough, with lots of hard consonants. Imagine if it sounded like French, or a typical sentence sounded like “Flooppy ploopy blippity bloop, hazaaaaa.” They would lose some of their menacing edge. No one carries gravitas speaking like that.
Fun fact. Women’s breasts do fun things when they laugh, but it’s usually much less polite to point that out.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
What was that thing where they were dealing with an alien species named something like “Blue Orange Orange Teal Silver?” They couldn’t speak, as such, but communicated by changing colors. Creepy-looking floating spheroid critters with low-strength telekinesis instead of hands…. This is a movie from the 1970s, it got released directly to video… anybody know what that was?
Sounds like “BOOTS”
I used to have a SF paperback where an alien robot came to Earth
and communicated by emitting colored lights.
The title or the name of the book and/or the name of the robot was RGB.
The robot was radioactive so that complicated the communication process.
The spaceship was just the drive mechanism with the robot being
the power source, guidance system and payload.
Have ye no seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind?!?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZj7gUIO-2k
“Play the five tones”.
Both, Multiple times.
No, I only saw the first two.
VOR, Violet Orange Red. https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/james-blish/vor.htm
As I recall, an interesting story overlaid with some people’s highly annoying relationship problems. I wonder if James Blish was going through a divorce at the time?
Then there’s the Hoovooloo, a superintelligent shade of the color blue.
(thus: Blue Man Group)
Pretty sure the book with the Hoovooloo was the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (by Douglas Adams), although the race was also mentioned in Starship Titanic (also by Douglas Adams) and it might have been mentioned in an episode of Dr. Who (not by Douglas Adams but Neil Cross, who wrote that episode, was a fan of Douglas Adams – or just a plagiarist :) ).
Starship Titanic is set in the H2G2 universe. If you remember, the Starship Titanic was the first to use the then little understood Infinite Improbability Drive and is commonly thought to have undergone a Total Existence Failure.
What are the odds of that?
Don’t try to make sense of Douglas Adams’ work – at least not in the way of constructing a canon “this is what the H2G2 universe is like”. He didn’t seem to care for that himself, and the different versions of H2G2 that he created (radio, books, computer game, movie, tv…) are contradictory. Just roll with it.
I’m pretty sure H2G2 specifically pooh-poohs away any contradictions with that fussy alternate universes nonsense that showed up in the later books once he started running outta actually funny gags. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. The rest of that series was mediocre.
Douglas Adams was a producer for Dr. Who. Don’t assume plagiarism, when “Hey, can I nick that?” will suffice.
There is some weird connection between the Hoovooloo in Douglas Adams’ work and the Blue Man Group, but their SEO is really good and after the third page of Google showing me tons and tons of links for every show and merch order site in existence for them I got pissed off and stopped looking for the connection.
Adams wrote several Doctor Who serials during the late Tom Baker years, it’s almost painfully obvious when you’re a fan of both even without the intro to the episodes. Also he served as script editor on Season 17 (again Baker). The stories he wrote though were Shada (untelevised originally due to a strike), The Pirate Planet, and co-authored The City of Death under the psuedonym David Agnew.
Now I’m wondering if that “water” is really a Hoovooloo…it’s a threesome!
When she gets home, Dabbler’s Porn sense is going to go off like crazy isn’t it
Woof is an excellent name for a species! I’m a woof; I have been for decades.
Are you a woof that lives among the trees?
Or perhaps a sheep in woof’s clothing?
Dances with Woofs?
Uh oh, maybe the woof at the door?!
The woof woofer, to frix your leaky woof :P
More like a fiddler on the woof.
Yes, indeed, a Timber Woof.
My uncle was called that by a bunch of sailors after he barfed up his breakfast the morning after he got Shanghaied. They thought it was an insult, but he took it as his name. My mother named me for him.
No, Yorp, not a Woolbeast.
I love this.
I wonder if that came out as Dirtling?
I would doubt it was a translation error, and more a none-translated noun thing. Like how is species (Woof) isn’t translated but just so happens to sound like both Wolf and the sound a dog makes.
So “human” the sound its self could mean something different. After all its non uncommon to find other languages which have the same combination or close to it of sounds but with completely different meanings, especially if the languages were distant enough to have no influence on each other.
so it could be like meeting an alien called *Goo’fups*, or *Slipee Deek*
“Wait, didn’t his species call their world something like “that which holds our roots in safety?”
It’s been a trieties of many a sci-fi book that most species alien or otherwise use the name for what they live on as the name of their planet UNTIL they become a space-faring race. On our world accross the races we had had Earth, Terra, Teluria, Soadt, Gia, aarde, dünya…. Need I go on. A people who mainly live in the ocean would use water words, a cold planet might use freezie words.
But – since trying to go space, most scientists use the galactic address of Terra 3, Sol, outer spiral Laniakea cluster, The Milky Way.
Some scientists translate human as “Emotional person” which fits Sydney to a tea.
And that assume the translations are getting translated ^.^
I always thought that it was an odd programming choice on the part of James White’s translation devices that they would translate the word “Earth” as “earth” (and therefore every other species homeworld name the same way) when it didn’t have problem distinguishing between other synonyms in speech. .
Doesn’t seem odd to me, seeing how ‘Earth’ is the name of the planet, unless you mean it was Bjorked and was programmed to translate all planetary names as ‘earth’, which simply means the programmer was an idiot!
All or nearly all. Because pretty much every race used a word referring to the ground underneath their feet to refer to the home planet as a whole they were all translated into the same word, “earth” in English. It’s the kind of thing where the author is being dumb by trying to be clever.
Okay, thanks
We really need to come up with a better name for our planet then dirt both Earth and Terra mean dirt, would you want to be know as the People of Dirt? Gaia is okay but some of the religious folks may get a bit twitch with that.
First contact day
Alien: Greetings People of Dirt..
Humans: Who the fuck are you talking about?
Not really,
Earth means fertile soil.
Humans owe their entire civilizations being able to exist to agriculture. Farming the land, developing calendars to track the growing seasons and optimal times for planting and knowing when to expect to be able to harvest.
Thus humans name their land after the ground under them, the fertile soil upon which they prosper and depend, the Earth.
Well “woof” means “grain of material”.* So the two names are not that different!
* Or, by another source:
1.The set of yarns placed crosswise in a loom, interlaced with the warp, carried by the shuttle; weft.
2. A fabric; the texture of a fabric.
This is true. If we named the planet based on the most common planetary element visible from space we would call it “water” or “ocean” (or Aqua if you want to get fancy). though obviously by volume the amount of water is miniscule compared to entire volume of Earth which is mostly made of rock.
On a completely unrelated note. I agree with Sydney. Frix is a totally hot. I mean Woof!
And unless the inhabitants came from space, they would have no idea what element was most commonly viewed from space…
How many millennia did it take before the inhabitants of this planet got it’s first view of it from space? o_O
I’ll have to agree.
So many of Earth’s own languages have context sensitivity to their implicit and explicit meanings that it would stand to reason the translator would need to be able to compensate for such subtleties.
Apart from the classic question ‘when does the translator stop translating’, there’s also the matter of people’s names.
For example: say there’s someone named Daniel Ao. Depending on the level of context sensitivity, the translator could translate their greeting at least three different ways (exluding syntax issues); “Hello, I am Daniel Ao”, “Greetings, I am God-is-my-judge green”, or “Surprise, I am law-of-God blue.”
With the last example breaking down the wordparts to their literal translations.
and don’t forget, Americans call the streetlight color “green” while Japanese term it “blue.”
(it’s actually near the middle, so … semantics!)
Eh, it’s more that the Japanese have a slightly different culturally-associated color range perception – which is to say, different cultures treat the potential lines between colors differently, and this is an example of a difference between English and Japanese in specific.
To the Japanese, “ao” or “aoi”* COVERS most shades of what English speakers call “green” AND all the colors they would call “blue” OR “teal”, and occasionally can also mean “pale” depending on context (usually referring to people, e.g. a person looking pale).
I say “most” because they do in fact have a separate word for some colors that an English speaker would unequivocally call “green”, a term which ONLY refers to shades of green, which is “midori”…but according to the person I was learning Japanese from**, that’s like…Very Specific Greens. VERDANT greens. Like, the riches, purest, greenest greens to ever green. As a term, it’s associated with wealth and luck and has very different connotations from just “ao(i)”. Kinda like how “pink” is TECHNICALLY (usually) a lightened shade of red hue, but we would definitely find different connotations in the color, culturally? Like that.
*(re: ao vs aoi – which version you use depends on whether you’re using it as a noun or an adjective-like Descriptive Verb, sometimes called “i adjectives” in language courses because English speakers have trouble with the concept of a language with Descriptive Verbs instead of “adjectives”)
**(she had a Master’s in Asian Language Studies AND spent several of her college years literally studying in Japan before teaching for a few years in Japan, so yeah I would trust her knowledge on this)
OH AND
Fun fact: English has an unusually high number of words bothering to distinguish between colors – for instance, “pink” as I noted, is distinct from “red” (whereas many languages don’t distinguish between them), “black” is distinct from “blue” (some languages, such as Russian, do not), and of course, “blue” is distinct from both “green” AND, technically, “teal” (which is the ambiguous blended color range between the two which is not quite “blue” and not quite “green”, but kinda both).
This isn’t to say that other languages don’t sometimes have words for color concepts that we don’t have; I believe it’s Hungarian, for instance, that has TWO different words for “red”, and I don’t mean in the “crimson, scarlet, red” way, where there’s just synonyms that mean pretty much the same thing, I mean, like, there’s an actual difference in meaning between them (I think one is for living things and one isn’t? something like that).
But it’s just as common for a language and its accompanying culture to just…not distinguish between certain colors that other languages/cultures do.
It seems weird to a lot of English speakers (because we’re able to distinguish them more easily, usually, given we HAVE words for those concepts), but when you look at the combinations that do commonly pop up lumped together like that – such as green/blue, blue/black, or pink/red – there’s always a certain logic to it. Such as green and blue having MANY intermediate teal shades, pink literally happening to usually be a light red, blue and black being an understandable “color range” for the sky, etc.
In the case of traffic lights, I about did a double take when hearing them called “aoi” at first but when I actually looked at one again I realized, yeah, it’s NOT a “midori” shade of green, it’s indeed at least vaguely bluish/blue-greenish. So of course, it’s “aoi”. ;)
@Guesticus I meant if we decided to rename the planet which will likely happen eventually through natural evolution of the language if nothing else. I mean the word “Earth” is only about 1000-years old (I think) so who knows what Earth is being called thousands or hundreds of thousands of years in the future. The language(s) will be almost certainly unrecognizable to us by then. That being said the idea will probably remain same for a very long time considering how many languages (I’d say most of them) use the dirt and soil around us to give the planet name.
I guess it could be different if we met alien species that had no idea about our name for the planet. For them it might look like a water world. They might name it something and stick to that name even after they figure out it’s inhabitated by sentient species. Assuming they are even capable of generating human-like speech.
Eh. Wasn’t disputing anything anyway. Just commenting.
Understood :D
If they are anything like humans they’ll call the planet whatever they want regardless of what humans call it…just like every other country does to each other.
Which is why ‘Australia’ translates into “That brown pile of shit filled with criminals wanting to kill you across the ditch!” :P
In Jean Johnson’s scifi books, the birthworld of the Gatsugi race (they communicate emotions as changing colors on their skin) is called Beautiful-Blue (blue is the colormood for “happy’ emotions), and the Salik (frog-octopus bad guys who spend their first 5 years of life underwater) named their planet Sallha, aka “Fountain”. …The Salik also eat sentient species alive, kicking and screaming, and they colonized a world whose name translates to “Come And Get It! (aka dinnertime)” for a semi-sentient race they quickly decimated for their dinner plates.
Saying that – the address I just gave would be completely different words in an alien language. It’s like how the Japanese don’t call their country Japan. They call it Nihon. And they call America – “米国 Beikoku” but sometimes say it “Amero” or “enigo”.
“eingo” (I’m guessing “enigo” was a typo,) is the language English, not the country. Just like how “Nihon” is Japan, but “Nihongo” is Japanese.
ah – no… Unfortunately. Enigo is a nihongo (japanese) person trying to immitate “those types of americans” when they go “English! Do you speak English”.
They make fun of it by calling american’s Enigo, as in baka enigo. Although I have heard engiro as well.
Hang on, has it really only been a week in comic world time since Sydney joined the team?!
um no
Time is weird,
the first comic was set when she was a Corporal (E-4) https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/60
but it was also set after ARCs version of Basic Training. then moved to her first day of basically being outed as a superhero….
So, actually, the answer to the question is ‘yes’… Flash forward of the first few pages notwithstanding.
Not exactly DeadManWalking, there were a couple of time jumps so it has been about two weeks or so :) Dave fell behind real time early on and never caught up, poor guy
That time doesn’t count as she has not, currently, reached that point in time
Yeah, I was wondering about that too.
Maybe Sydney is differentiating between ‘being with’,
‘working with’ and ‘hanging out in the public with’?
No… Still doesn’t make sense.
Actually, I was waiting for Frix to ask what Supermodels were and
Sydney’s explanation that they were paid to be pretty.
Snrk…HAHAHA! Is the planet he is from also called Fenic? Like WH40K with Fenris being the home of the Space Wolves but with a twist to sound like the name for the species of fox with the personality of a dog?
can on next time space woof explain what human does mean in his language ?
It’s the rubbery skin that forms on the surface of homemade pudding.
It indicates that the pudding is not from a can, so it’s a good thing.
If anything, given the context it is likely an onomatopoeia;
like maybe its the sound of a fart, a hummer, blowing a raspberry, or a made up sound word associated with a famous Woof comedian to express surprise like a “Uh..waaa?”
Ah ha! I just remembered. That name, Frix, had been bugging me since he was first introduced and I finally remembered where I’d seen another character named Frix. It was in Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Lieber, and in that book the Frix was a woman, or a female air spirit anyway, bound to serve some useless noblewoman until she’d saved her life three times.
I can remember that literally decades after I read the damn book, but can I remember the quadratic formula? Of course not. My memory is only effective for totally useless things.
On the contrary. The quadratic formula is easy to find. The name of a spirit in a book about a fictional city? Not so easy.
Thanks! That’s a much better way of thinking of it. I shouldn’t be so down on the way my memory works.
Of course you shouldn’t – just forget all about it.
I too remember the wrong things.
There should be a word for that.
“Human.”
That’s why it’s such an amusing word.
Only now is it clear how freakishly large her head is
Okay this Whos Who looks even better than the first one I got.
https://www.deviantart.com/viirin/art/Sydney-Scoville-Jr-783719308?ga_submit_new=10%3A1549038788
The problem I have here is that the previous page was an in joke that you had to really know human culture to be able to tell. This page is a joke that would only make sense if you have never heard of humans before…
Space Woof? Leman Russ might have some things to say about that!
May have twigged on to what causes comments not to appear to go through: it appears to be linked to the cast-bar, your comment won’t appear until that changes (was watching that just now when a post didn’t go through, and it didn’t change even after several refreshes, then when it did change the comment appeared)
Ooh, interesting. Something to keep our eyes on. Would be interested to see if that matches anyone else’s observations.
Sadly I don’t get much time spare to pop in, so doubt I will be able to do any testing on that myself, for some time to come.
I’m pretty sure that what we are all seeing is due to whatever caching system DaveB’s web hosting service has set up. I base this on an odd thing that happened tome yesterday when I first commented on this currentpage.
When I started typing my comment, there were already 3 comments that previous fans had made. When I entered my comment, not only did my comment fail to show right away, but the page was back to only having one comment. After a couple of attempts to refresh using the go to 1st page then latest page trick, my comment finally appeared as the 5th or 6th comment.
This sort of trip back in time can easily happen if my page requests were hitting a cache with stale information. I’m not sure how long DaveB’s web hosting service keeps data in cache before doing a refresh, but it has to be several seconds at least in order to exhibit the behaviour I’ve seen.
Tom Scott has a good YouTube video in which he explains how caching can cause retweet counts on Twitter and view counts on YouTube to go up and down. While his examples are specific for those sites, the same general concept occurs with sites all over the web. If you don’t want to watch the whole video, the meat of what is happening starts around 6:30 into the video.
Why Computers Can’t Count Sometimes
And they don’t know how to put things in alphabetic order, if going by Windows poor performance in that task. I had been looking forward to upgrading to Windows 10, because it irritated me that the feature on the desktop, allowing you to sort the icons into alphabetic order, didn’t. Basically you would get a couple of stretches that ran alphabetically, but ignoring one another. This ignoring the fact that the early versions specifically kept the core Windows icons separate at the beginning (which I was fine with). And also odd icons that were put in a totally random position in the order.
Particularly irritating as it is the entry point to the system. The first thing you see on using windows is the icons and their associated names. And they refuse to order themselves in proper alphabetic order!
And worst of all? Windows 10 is just as bad! Come on Microsoft, there may be some computer explanation for why it sorts in a crap order, but try and get your act together so that it prioritises sorting the way humans expect it to, not the vagaries of character set listings.
As far as I know the reason for that is automatic translation. You can set it up that whatever you show as your icon name gets automatically translated but the sort is kind of stupid and only uses the “real” name of the icon for sorting. That is also the way they got the special Windows symbols to stick to the front. They have different displayed labels in most languages but the “real” name starts with a special character so they are always at the front. At least that is how it worked back in the day.
And that is what is wrong with it. The interface is meant to make things easier for users, not programmers. We are looking for the name of the program that WE can read, not the hidden one that the program uses!
I think somebody implemented the system for translation and didn’t change the back end of how sorting on the desktop works. Quality control tested it in English and found nothing wrong with it. The others, if there was any testing at all, checked that translating worked and where done or told that it’s intended behavior. Stuff like that happens.
Not sure about this, but I wonder if this sorting issue has anything to do with Microsoft trying to provide backward compatibility to the old MS-DOS FAT file system. That file system only supported filenames with 8 characters before the dot, and 3 characters after. In early versions of Windows that were still using that file system Microsoft came up with a scheme where there was a real name in the 8.3 format, and a display name to show to the human users. A file that appeared to have a name like Yorp and friends on vacation in Italy.mpeg would get a real name of yorpan~1.mpe. The problem would then occur in there was another file named something like Yorp and DaveB at ComiCon.mpeg, which would get a real name of yorpan~2.mpe. Sorting on the display name renders one result, while sorting on the real name gets you a different result.
Like I said, I’m not sure if this could be part of the issue. I just know that Microsoft has had to do some pretty weird things in order to preserve backward compatibility with its older operating systems.
Personally prefer ‘Tom Scott the Cartoonist’, was sad when it was some other ‘Tom Scott’ :(
I never knew there was a Tom Scott the Cartoonist. I’ve been watching Tom Scott the Video Blogger’s YouTube channel for many years now. I highly recommend subscribing to his channel if you are into things that are interesting, educational and often amusing.
Having just written the long reply above, my experience matched your observation, so I can add that to the data set.
Prior to that post, my comments had not been initially appearing. Which I have been getting used to, and don’t bother waiting around, or trying to trick them into showing. But I had made a note of the banner pictures.
After finishing the long post however it appeared instantly. And the banner pictures had all changed.
Possibly a co-incidence mind, for instance if #6 is correct. But the more observations we make the better we will be able to confirm or refute the respective proposals.
Sometimes the post goes up straight away, sometimes have to refresh (if bother to wait), that was the only time paid attention to the Cast-Bar while refreshing the page
As you said, this will require more observationing and from multiple sources (changing page, as per #6‘s example, doesn’t count mind)
Okay, that post above went through straight away nicely (as it should), the post about ‘Tom Scott the cartoonist’ didn’t, and even with multiple refreshes, the Cast-Bar did not change (and neither did the post go through)
Had a series of posts appearing straight away. Then one which was delayed, so I took note of the images. The next post was a short one, which appeared immediately. Looking at the banner it had changed. And the previous post had appeared too.
So your observation is holding up so far, in terms of the banner changing seeming to free up any delayed post. Based on the limited observations made so far.
The banner itself is made up of individual pictures that WordPress rotates using a PHP script. The pictures are themselves subject to getting stuck in the cache servers, and thus will be as fresh or as stale as the rest of the page. So the behaviour you are seeing is consistent with the theory that the issue is due to how frequently the cache updates itself.
Each of the characters in the banner have their own picture rotating PHP script, and their own pool of images to draw upon. Dabbler for example has a pool of 36 images, with a naming convention that runs from port-dabbler-001.jpg through to port-dabbler-036.jpg. Halo has a much larger pool of images and Anvil has a relatively sparse pool.
Yeah, understand all that, was just pointing out a possible correlation between posts not going through and the Cast-bar not updating (and sometimes it is the whole bar, sometimes it’s individual images)
Should probably also ask if there is a need for protection between species. incase of pregnancy or std’s.
Bit late for that…
pretty sure the captain would keep a clean ship, considering she wrote the crews sexual resumes herself. and as for pregnancy thing, pretty sure its been only 2 weeks or so since she punched herself in the ovaries for them being ornery.
Regarding the latter, that would put Sydney at a fairly fertile point of her cycle. However if you refer to the scene in question, and check out the small details, you will spot that she is on the pill.
Not that offspring is at all likely between species from totally unrelated eco-systems on different planets.
But, there again, this is a super setting, not a sci-fi one, so unusual influencing factors (such as the eco systems being related due to some extraordinary reason) will often overturn such mundane rationals.
In one Superman, Superman’s cousin and an earthwoman had two babies.
I guess wearing glasses means the DNA can’t tell the difference between alien and human DNA.
…and in Star Trek, all humanoids are related. They are able to interbreed despite the huge evolutionary distances. There’s a TNG episode that goes into the details, but basically, it’s the magic of “the story needs this”. As you should know, that’s the most powerful magic of all.
It’s called “we can’t justify the cost of CGI aliens for every episode so most of them are humanoids with rubber masks.” They justified it with a story about a seeding of humanoid races across the galaxy by a common ancestor.
That said, ST:TAS aliens were far less anthropomorphic than the ones on the live-action series.
Isn’t his cousin a girl? o_O
<.< A couple being two girls hasn't stopped earth women, why would it stop alien women?
Also a person can have more than one cousin!
Science still requires a male and a female to combine their DNA to produce a child (unless using cloning, in which case you only need one ‘parent’)
Have only ever heard of Kal-el having one cousin (well, two if you consider Powergirl and Supergirl to be the same person, just from different Universes…)
Power girl, is Atlalntian, her powers are based on magic, while Supergirl’s are based on the earths sun.
When the Hael did they change that? Power Girl is a Zor-El, just like Supergirl, she comes from one of the other dimensions (not Earth-3, that’s Super Woman, the evil Wonder Woman), and at one stage her weakness was to natural un-processed material (yes, that means a tree branch could kill her)
Huns, the cannons for things have changed so many times it’s ridiculous. Not to mention different characters with the same names; not including passed down mantles. ie Mrs Marvel, Captain Marvel, the other Captain Marvel who is now shazam, before he changed his name, which did I mention, supergirl in the tv series is kara danvers and the current captain marvel is carol danvers – are they possibly related!!! Does this mean Ms Marvel is actually Power Girl! I think Nott!
Shazam (ie the Big Red Cheese) was originally not even a DC character (can’t remember off hand the name of the publisher, butt DC eventually bought them out because Big Red Cheese was actually outselling Superman), Captain Marvel (originally a Kree male by the name of Mar-Vell) is a character owned by the Marvel comic group (or, whoever now owns Marvel)
Some things have changed, changing the species (or is race? keep getting confused about the logistics about that, are we the human species? or human race?) of Powergirl has, to limit knowledge, never happened (ie, she is, and always has been, a Kryptonian)
Supergirl is named “Kara Zor-El” in the TV series; her adoptive sister is Alex Danvers so it’s possible she goes by “Kara Danvers” but there isn’t, AFAIK, any connection between Alex Danvers and the Carol Danvers of Captain Marvel fame. In any case, Kara Zor-El/Supergirl and Kara Zor-El/Power Girl are the same person in different universes.
The whole Captain Marvel/Shazam vs Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers crapola is a PRIME example of how fucked up the entire comic universe has become.
While admittedly this isn’t really hard SF, I’d hope we won’t see cross species pregnancies. I mean, seriously, humans and apes aren’t cross fertile and we’ve only been separate species for a few tens of millions of years at the most.
Sydney should have more in common, genetically speaking, with broccoli than she should have with a Woof.
Now STI’s might be an issue in theory, but you’d hope people with the sort of advanced medical tech we’ve seen on the ship would have solved all diseases. Though, in Empowered by Adam Warren some of his supers acquired their powers via alien STI’s, so there’s precedent.
True enough.
Although your preference for a hard science option is predicated on the assumption that planets’ ecosystems have evolved independently of one another. Whereas, in this setting, we know that aliens have been present on this planet, in sufficient quantities to require a council to organise their relations, for at least 3,000 years. And possibly a LOT longer than that without formal representation.
Further we know that succubi (with the aid of magic and technology) are fertile with every other race and are widespread throughout the galaxy. This in itself does not mean that any genetics would affect the other species involved, as the offspring become succubi. However it does show that the technomagic is widespread and thereby there is a good chance that other species may make use of it.
Not to mention that our legends are overflowing with supernatural beings breeding with humans. It is present in a huge range of cultures. Then throw in Ariana’s briefing that many of the legends we know are actually true! Albeit that she indicated supers may be the source, that is only because the presence of the supernaturals is still classified.
So the various randy gods we know of through folk tales may have actually been aliens.
Or gods. Sydney might be able to go one up on Deus if she can get an “oh my god” with one of them.
True, but Succubi are a special case, and the other instances may have served a specific purpose which justified the effort of overcoming the chromosome barrier. In general, sapient species would probably find it more convenient not to make that effort. On the Ringworld, Rishathra was used as a way of controlling population growth, and a form of risk-free recreation. Eliminating those “benefits” simply because it could be done, would not have been particularly rational. And in Aliens, the marines were quite happy – though not morally justified – in exploiting the chromosome barrier for their enjoyment.
Psychopaths are not actually supernatural, in the Real World.
Just sayin’
Elves map to arboreal Great Britain, as a small tribe.
How do we know hyu-mons and apes are not cross fertile? Has anyone tried?
As it happens, yes!
Chimps are the closest relative humans have, and a group of Russian scientists unsuccessfully tried to breed a humanzee back in the 1920’s. Via artificial insemination you sickos. Didn’t work.
And these days we know it couldn’t. One huge difference between humans and the other great apes is that we have one fewer chromosome, way back in our evolutionary history what would have been chromosome in apes 2 and 4 merged and became a single kinda oversized chromosome in humans. And while chromosome count isn’t an absolute barrier to cross breeding, it’s a huge barrier.
More important, while we’re closely related, we’re only 95% similar genetically, and that’s just too much for normal breeding. Maybe you could manage it with artificially mediated chromosome merging, but it just plain isn’t going to happen naturally.
Chimps and bonobos can crossbreed, they’re much more closely related than humans and chimps are.
Yes, abject failures.
How can you call the POTUS ‘an abject failure’? o_O
Space Woof > Star Fox
But not a Star Wolf
http://twessner.idirect.com/man-wolf/images/stargod001.jpg
He’s the engineer. As any interstellar textiles expert could tell you, that makes him the warp woof.
What surprises me is that it’s a sound which comes at all close to a human word. Given difference in mouth shapes…. Then again, it may be the translator doing it’s best with what it has available. (I presume not everyone is actually speaking English.) Plus there may be all sorts of subtleties of intonation that Sydney isn’t picking up on and either the translator us correcting or Frix is politely ignoring her getting wrong.
Apologies for typos, though these days that may go without saying. Darned auto-incorrect…
Ahh, perhaps you were trying to describe him as the Scottie Woof?
Are we forgetting that any humorous coincidences between the languages
are coming from the translator AI?
Is Frix hearing the translation AND the raw feed?
Next Sydney should chase Frix around the ship with electric clippers…!
While both still being naked.
… Why? He is already nicely well-groomed
Please no. Space is so cold, I’ve seen what you people do with those clippers… http://wrcb.images.worldnow.com/images/14138153_G.jpg
OMG if anyone ever did that to my dog yea those clippers scissors so on will be going into their arse and eyes.
It is hilarious how large head some dog breeds have compared to the rest of their body. Reminds me of our Afghan who had a huge head that looked proportionate until you got his fur wet and realized how huge it was compared to the rest of his body.
That is just wrong. I pity that poor dog.
Is anyone else following Safe Havens? Starting with 2/1/19’s comic, linked, they just figured out that Martians speak ‘canine’. I get tickled when webcomics display convergent evolution… or something like it.
Yes, for years.
Okay -1 to Sydney’s nerd cred with me. Everyone knows that when it comes to interstellar races we refer to ourselves as Terrans not Humans. Any sci fi nerd should know that immediately. :)
Any real SF nerd would know that ‘Terran’ refers to all races (and species) from the Planet designated ‘Terra’, or are you going to call a cat ‘human’ because they are also from Terra? o_O
You could also call us all Tellurian. I mean all species originating from Earth. Also Solarian if you prefer to refer to Sol-system.
“I’m a homo sapiens, from Terra, or Sol-3 if you prefer. Solarian, that is. Or one game identified us as Humaniti. We aren’t united enough to have just a single name. I could call myself an American, but that just refers to a geo-political subset of humanity… I’m a Grrl.” If she put enough Grr in Grrl, she’d probably get a very funny response.
I am so glad that Sydney is finally getting some. She is going to be a different woman when she returns to the team.
It sounds like ‘Space Wolf’ with a lisp. xD ‘I’m a Space Woof! Wath tho funny???”
It took me a while to remember it, but here is some funny alien language in use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b72ZCsztdyk
And now show he the short list of actors that can do that scene without laughing.
The amount that happened between the last page and this one then Frix must be a blink dog, err – blink Woof.
Pity this doesn’t have character sheets.
Read. The. Yellow. Box!!
Funny thing: there is a place not far from where I live, called ‘Woof’ and selling… hot dogs xD
https://www.facebook.com/woofhotdog/
Honestly one of my favorite pages so far “I’m a woof” had me laughing so hard!
Maybe I misread last page’s situation. It just felt and read really awkward and gravely, but this page it appears the interpersonal lubricant has been applied, and they’re sliding into the inevitable. Things is all good.
I honestly imagine this as like, not chaste exactly, but like… cuddly sensual washing and massaging each other and just generally making nice feelings, more than fuckin’? I dunno why that’s what my mind wants to fill in but it is. Either way they seem to be enjoying themselves so yay.
This page makes me a bit sad cuz it reminds me that we will probably never see any nsfw art of sydney, and I find her stupidly attractive.
He’s a Mog! Half Man, half Dog. He’s his own best friend. <3
I mean. I think Klingon sounding sharp and tough is less a coincidence and more a result of the fact that it evolved as a language in the same environment that the rest of Klingon culture comes from. It seems only natural that a race of honorable warriors would have an aggressive language.