Grrl Power #1021 – The family tree contains several mobius branches
I guess Sydney was excited to learn that she had a great-times-5 grandparent who was a native Maltan. She’s been keeping that one in her back pocket for years in case she needed to trump someone else’s genealogy tale. No offense to any Maltans out there, but I’m not sure it’s quite the slam dunk she seems to think it is.
Okay, I don’t know how the doppelganger pre-zygote thing gets haploid DNA from the second mother. The delivery system probably includes some sort of chemical chromosome scraper that integrates the DNA into the baby to be. It’s an important feature for their race so the birthing mother won’t give birth to something that doesn’t look to share at least half her heritable traits. That way the doppel baby can grow up with a relatively normal childhood and not be immediately persecuted by superstitious peasants.
Of course, when the tween doppelganger begins to start taking on characteristics of the family pet, things can start to spiral quickly
I decided to make this page available to everyone over at Patreon so you can see all the stupid thank you cards Dabbler is looking at in panel 6.
In a universe that includes more than just humans and binary sex reproduction, the possibilities in the Hallmark space would become exponentially complicated. Even so, most of those cards I drew are so stupid. There’s one for cordyceps zombies. “Thank you for inhaling my spores.” Who is the zombie buying the card for? The long braindead meatsack it’s currently piloting? Or the “Thank you for incubating me in your torso.” card for the Xenomorph?
I don’t know. Maybe if there were enough alien races that used a tertiary sapient maturation method, they would have some sort of collective Dia de los Muertos type holiday where they honor their incubation medium’s sacrifice? Given that both examples above are either mindless or… hive mindless I guess… Well, not ‘mindless’ in the case of the Xenomorphs, but you know what I mean. I don’t think they have any organized holiday schedule in the first place, but there are probably plenty of examples from sci-fi and fantasy that mortally parisitize a host in order to live. Generally they’re evil, but I can imagine some that actually feel bad about their lifecycle.
Still. The idea that a Hallmark type industry would spring up so those sorts of lifeforms could buy their dead hosts meaningless scraps of sentiment both makes me chuckle and also now that I think about it, would definitely exist.
But hey, there are other cards there too. Like if your father was a (god turned into a) waterfall. A narrow demographic, but if you’ve got the shelf space, then why not?
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update: It’s done!
Seriously. It’s done! 210K words of weapon building, dinosaur fighting, harem satisfying, lumberjacking, moderate diplomacing, bad guy chopping action. Also some humor.
January’s vote incentive is going to hang in there just a few more days. Between getting TE:2 out and recovering from Covid, I’m a little behind this month. Admittedly, I usually am, but at least this time I can point to things and go “See!?”
Nude versions available over at Patreon. Along with a bonus comic page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. 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.
Was her sippycup actually a klein bottle?
Underrated comment. As a succubus / engineer, Dabbler has a lifelong interest in all kinds of curved surfaces, including non-Euclidian ones.
Guessing her da kine extends to at least six dimensions and could accommodate You Sothoth
All curved surfaces are non euclidean.
pretty sure it has to be bigger on the inside than the outside to qualify; are you saying curved surfaces have no inside or outside? i know Moebius strips are both inside and outside
no, its an actual real world math term. HP Lovecraft was a thesaurus junky and mis-used a lot of terms and concepts.
https://www.britannica.com/science/non-Euclidean-geometry
measuring the distances on a curved surface requires non Euclidean geometry
for Lovecraft, I think it’s more a thing of non-euclidean without curves being the weird thing, rather than the usual non-euclidean geometries that, fitting, cover the planet. All in all non-euclidean is more common in the universe as a whole than euclidean, even if there is no (known) flat plane non-euclidean geometry
eh, it really was his just using them like buzzwords, Derelith and others expanded on it, but remember this was a guy who was afraid of air conditioning and wrote a horror story about it. Science and math were not his thing…hell he claimed he didn’t have the constitution for math.
I agree, HPL used “non-euclidean” the way that people currently use “the Matrix” today. It’s just a catch phrase used to indicate that weird thing that mere mortals can’t understand. I wonder if anyone has ever counted the number of times he used the word “squamous”? HPL did have an interest in the sciences, even going so far as to write a astronomy column in his local newspaper. what he didn’t have a constitution for was the rigors of school.
1) Yes, the actual definition is pretty mundane and I was using the colloquial one in spite of way more college math than I’d ever care to repeat
2) I’m kinda proud that people here are aware of the distinction, and I should know better than to underestimate the level of nerdery in this forum
Non-Euclidean Space, in the Lovecraftian sense, is more akin to an Esher staircase. It is a space where going down a straight line does not neccessarely have you moving in a straight line, where going through a door might not neccessarely get you into the room on the other side of that door but into a completely different room altogether or into an open field or into a tiny cubbyhole that is too small to even have a door. There are some nice videogames that play around with non-euclidean space, such as the Devil Came Through Here trilogy, Antichamber, Superliminal, etc…
https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Non-Euclidean_Game_Tutorial
https://www.keengamer.com/articles/features/opinion-pieces/why-non-euclidean-games-are-the-trend-of-the-future/
that is still a mis-use and what is describe applies to bent/multi space physics instead.
people just like the way it sounds because of the Greek name in it making it sound so fancy and exotic. Its the same as using Japanese words or Japanese anime using Spanish words in weird ways to sound exotic.
I believe you’re correct, yes.
So is there a better term you would reccomend using to describe what lovecraftians think “non-euclidean” is? The whole idea of macrodimensional surfaces and spaces?
Inverted Expansionism spaces.
Hammerspace,
Pocket Dimension
and
dimensional transcendence/transcendentalism
are all more accurate terms
For external structures with overlapping multidimensional or even cross reality properties perhaps, multi space intersecting geometry.
Yeah, even measuring a “Triangle” on a globe is Non-Euclidian. On a globe, you can have a triangle with THREE RIGHT ANGLES. The sides are “Straight” along the surface of the globe, just curved in “Real” space.
post doesn’t look like it posted,
https://www.britannica.com/science/non-Euclidean-geometry
Non-Euclidean is a real world math term, and needed for measuring distances on a curved surface.
HP Lovecraft was a thesaurus junky, he mis-used and popularized a number of terms rather incorrectly.
I’ve poured over this image and I’m not seeing a sippycup…
That can be re-arranged.
https://www.kleinbottle.com/drinking_mug_klein_bottle.htm
Dabbler’s geneology keeps reminding me of that song ‘I Am My Own Grandpa’.
“Oh, TELL US about it, Mr. I am my Own Granpa!” – Professor Farnsworth to Fry
it reminds me of the old german succubus legends. The doppleganger was just one and done, the succubus was the mother/father of that trio. Sneak into a dudes dreams, inspire and fuck him, go to the girl he saw you as, repeat.
The Doppelganger is German, and were just omens of death *a ghostly image of yourself*,
the Succubus/Incubus despite the names deriving from latin are an English invention, and likely based on old faerie/fertility gods stories turned demons to appeal to the wider Christian audience in the 1300s (oldest record of the term succubus),
but yes, the succubus lays with man, collects is semen, then turns into an incubus and demon-ups the semen before impregnating a woman; thus taken biologically the offspring would have three parents.
in truth it is taking the typical stories of shapeshifting supernatural beings having sex with humans and adding elements to it, a lot over time, even the Succubus and Incubus were one entity part wasn’t universal, and really you could apply these terms to everything from a paralysis demon that is part of a wet dream up to gods like fricken Zeus turning into the likeness of someone’s husband to lay with them.
For anyone else who’s tired of always seeing humans get the short end of the stick compared to aliens, check out Alan Dean Foster’s Trilogy of the Damned. Where humans are second best at everything and best at fast twitch muscle response and violence.
Or try the subreddit r/HFY
there are a lot of great “Humans are space orcs” style fics out there. I tend to like the “deathworlder” ones where earth’s cycle of prey/predator ends up being pretty rare amongst life bearing planets and advanced mostly pacifist aliens are horrified that one actually developed enough to produce a space faring empire instead of snuffing itself out like the other “deathworlds”.
I should read those at some point, they keep on coming up when I search for a great scifi book I swear is called “City of the Damned” where a couple of human researchers travel with a local guide to the poles of a planet with at least 3 sapient species segregated by their temperature tolerances with only the overlap providing trade opportunities, to discover the source of what they use for currency which are high tech remnants of an ancient civilization. I haven’t been able to find this book since I read it though
Honestly I am, and well known in the comments by this point, to be of the opposite problem, seeing too many stories and shows and movies where humans are the chosen one race, the great saviors of the cosmos, mainly because they remind me too much of explorer adventure stories of the white savior trope where the European or white American, settler, and such go someplace and suddenly are better at everything, know the culture better, favored by local gods, or just plain have to save everyone from their own arrogance and ignorance. Yeah I get why these stories are made, audience appeal and what not, but changing out the ethnicities for aliens still had that underlined feel to it.
Dude, humans have Supers in the Grrl-verse, and those are unique/powerful enough by galactic community standards (at the least) to trigger an IMMEDIATE attempt at kidnapping for slave-trading. It’s not a problem here overall, especially since we all know that supers will keep proliferating, for many reasons occasionally discussed in-comic.
Yay, Goro!
Please say hello to my brother from my other other mother.
Well, I am glad I’m not the ONLY ONE here who thought of the song “I’M MY OWN GRANDPA”.
Thank You, Dr.Demento.
Now, many many years ago
When I was twenty three
I was married to a widow
Who was pretty as could be
This widow had a grown-up daughter
Had hair of red
My father fell in love with her
And soon the two were wed
This made my dad my son-in-law
And changed my very life
My daughter was my mother
‘Cause she was my father’s wife
To complicate the matters
Even though it brought me joy
I soon became the father
Of a bouncing baby boy
My little baby then became
A brother-in-law to dad
And so became my uncle
Though it made me very sad
For if he was my uncle
That also made him the brother
Of the widow’s grown-up daughter
Who, of course, was my step-mother
I’m my own grandpa
I’m my own grandpa
It sounds funny I know
But it really is so
I’m my own grandpa
My father’s wife then had a son
That kept them on the run
And he became my grandchild
For he was my daughter’s son
My wife is now my mother’s mother
And it makes me blue
Because, she is my wife
She’s my grandmother too
I’m my own grandpa
I’m my own grandpa
It sounds funny I know
But it really is so
I’m my own grandpa
Now, if my wife is my grandmother
Then, I am her grandchild
And every time I think of it
It nearly drives me wild
For now I have become
The strangest case you ever saw
As husband of my grandmother
I am my own grandpa
Am I the only one who thought of “All You Zombies”?
I should have added “Thank You, Dr.Demento.”
“Bart, your mortal enemy is on the Radio!”
That sounds like a genealogists worst nightmare. O.o
I misread that as gynecologist at first…
Same nightmare :D
Hmm. I thinking the aliens outside 4-Play are a D&D Thri-kreen, a Star Wars Besalisk, Goro from Mortal Kombat and I’m guessing a Thark from Burroughs Barsoom? Always dig your easter eggs, David!
Oh! And Salakk, a Green Lantern from DC Comics.
It’s not a thri-keen unless they’ve had a redesign in the last few years.
My guess
From left
Martian from Verne Novel
Kenobi friend from star wars
Goro from Mortal Kombat
Alien from game Unreal
And flying dude in upper right is a Green Lantern.
I always wondered if there was a Wolverine Vs Xenomorph.
(without adamantine)
And he got unlucky enough to get capture. Then just rinse repeatedly getting facehugged.
also some nasty Xenos coming from that. All growly and drinking and smoking cigars.
oh yeah and the uber healing and bigger claws.
now that Marvel is writing Aliens books it could happen…however a cross-over into the main Marvel is not planned especially as Marvel has their own expy of them *The Brood*, which answer that question of parasitic bug aliens with super powers they got from the hosts.
you can find fanfiction of Xenomorphs with Marvel heroes…and not fanfiction as when DC got their hands on them they actually did cross-overs like Superman vs Aliens.
Yeah :) read all of those.
weird. but good stuff.
I like she had her big nerd glasses on in the second last image in her teen years.
On a side note, as a kid, I thought the ‘Maltese Falcon’ referred to some kind of precious material in the context of ‘golden falcon’ or ‘ebony falcon’. I spent months trying to figure out what ‘maltese’ was, there being no such thing as the internet back then, and the local library not having a lot of reference books on movies. To this day, even though it I know it refers to a country, in part of my brain, ‘maltese’ refers to something like a super-rare wood, mineral or something manufactured like heather gems. Of course, I also didn’t know that ‘Don Quixote’ was pronounced ‘Donkey Hotey’ until high school. The world is really quite fascinating when you’re a child who doesn’t have instant access to the sum total of human knowledge on a device in your pocket.
*raises hand* one one-twenty-eighth Potawatomi indian, on my dad’s side! Have the scoop incisors to prove it!
(Several Native tribes have concave-backed incisors. It’s not 100%, but is generally a pretty clear indicator of Native heritage)
So 1 part dad, 1 part dopple, 1 part sucbi, 1 part sucbi host from mom. so either her mom had four arms or the bio 1st dad did. That is one hell of a Mendel cube. (got to go in three dimensions for that genetic make up)
The greeting card industry has been responsible for making up entire holidays. Does anyone seriously think they wouldn’t stoop to producing cards for long-dead meatsacks then guilting aliens into buying them?
Nice nerd-snipe*.
There are serious biochemistry problems (chromosomes, base pairs,
codons, amino acids) with this whole reproductive strategy, but
that’s no fun, so let’s wave our hands and say a wizard made it so
that Dopplegangers and Succubi can actually do what Dabbler says
they do.
Dopplegangers are hermaphrodites, and produce both egg and sperm.
When a doppleganger creates an egg, it contains one strand of DNA,
the Doppleganger DNA. Sperm from a male fertilizes the egg. The
zygote starts dividing, over and over, using the mass of the egg
to create a large amount of individual cells. These cells then
turn into sperm, each containg Doppleganger DNA and the father’s
DNA. One of the sperm fertilizes the mother’s egg and
reproduction continues according to the mother’s biology,
producing an individual with one each of Doppleganger DNA, the
father’s DNA, and the mother’s DNA. Only the Doppleganger DNA
gets passed down from a doppleganger to a dopleganger’s offspring.
Succubi are female, creating an egg with just the two strands of
Succubus DNA. The sperm from a male fertilizes this egg,
resulting in two Succubi DNA and one father’s DNA, and the
succubus carries the fertilized egg till birth.
In Dabbler’s case, a doppleganger received sperm and produced a
fertilized egg. The egg then became a bunch of sperm, each with a
strand of Doppleganger DNA and the male’s DNA. The sperm
inseminated Dabbler’s mother, fertilizing her egg, which contained
two strands of Succubus DNA. As a result Dabbler is tetraploidal,
with one Doppleganger DNA, one father’s DNA, and two Succubus DNA.
During meiosis (formation of egg and sperm), the Doppleganger
removes non-Doppleganger DNA, and the Succubus removes non-
Succubus DNA, from the egg. Both Dopplegangers and Succubi can
produce offspring with other species, so I’m going to assume
Dabbler can as well. The questions I have are: What DNA is in the
egg that Dabbler produces? What type of offspring results?
Option 1: The egg contains both Doppleganger (1x) and Succubi DNA
(2x). Fertilized by a male (1x), the child is tetraploidal,
differing from Dabbler only in the father’s DNA. Dabbler is the
progenitor of her own species. A Doppubi, or Suplegi. Oh, I know:
Succubanger.
Option 2: The Doppleganger kicks the other DNA out of the egg.
Fertilized by a male, it has two DNA, but then turns into sperm.
Unless Dabbler has some junk we don’t know about, this would be a
dead end. No offspring.
Option 3: The Doppleganger kicks the other DNA out of the egg.
Fertilized by a male, it has two DNA, but then turns into sperm.
Dabbler does have some junk we don’t know about, and can
inseminate a female. Things would progress like a regular
Doppleganger. (Which would violate the rule that succubi always
produce succubi, but Dabbler isn’t a normal succubus.)
Option 4: The Succubus DNA kick the other DNA out of the egg.
Fertilized by a male, it has three DNA, resulting in a regular
Succubus.
Option 5: The Doppleganger and Succubus DNA are so fertile, they
won’t let go of the male DNA, and Dabbler reproduces through
parthenogenesis. We get a clone of Dabbler.
Option 6 (advanced studies): Option 1 occurs, and Dabbler is
inseminated by a Doppleganger. His sperm contains one
Doppleganger DNA and one father’s DNA and combines with Dabbler’s
egg, which contains two Succubus DNA and one Doppleganger DNA,
resulting in one father’s DNA, two Succubus DNA, and two
Doppleganger DNA. A pentaploidal organism. If it is viable. The
two Doppleganger DNA might not play well together.
*Nerd-snipe
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/356:_Nerd_Sniping
that is an evil evil thing. I like it! give me a sign. do you have one that works on paralegals?
This makes sense, but requires we ignore the whole “TNA” thing, since that’s not relevant to polyploidy
Ugh… that’s not how nucleic acid helices work… just ugh… Each helix doesn’t add extra code… There’s so much wrong with this… I get that it’s fiction, and it’s “demonic” etc… but… just ugh…
Let me put it this way… this page is to genetics what this is to lasers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbTV4M0MUoI
And yes, triple helix “dna” is really a thing… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-stranded_DNA
Whiptail lizards of the Aspidoscelis genus in North America.
Ok? I’m not sure the relevance they have here…
Yeah, I messed up. There are several Apidoscelis species that are all-female triploids, but triploid means three of each chromosome, not a triple helix.
I feel you. Scientific agony!
Never heard of that show before, but now I hate it based on the scientific abomination of that one clip alone.
Hi no one else seems to be asking so who the hell had sex with a waterfall?
Not exactly a waterfall, more of a ‘golden shower’
And that would be Zeus being the rapey bastard he was
I was more disturbed by “Thank You for Having Sex with your Nephew”.
Sure but at least I can imagine how that works, unlike the “waterfall”
Andromeda’s Magog implant their eggs in sentients as incubator and early nourishment. We meet Reverend Behemiel Far Traveller, a monk of this species who does indeed feel a lot of remorse for his kind’s nature, and his own role in it. He keeps a photo of his “mother” and mourns for her.
The magog were basically space wasps implanting eggs in a living host to eat them. Like ewok versions of xenomorphs.
All this tells me is that Dabbler doesn’t know ANY of her parents.
As per her explanation, the doppelganger changes into a male of the same species that impregnated it. So if Dabbler even knew her Succubi mother, then her mother would be able to tell her what species the doppelganger was when they mated, or at least describe the species… Heck, she could probably put on a glamour roughly equivalent to a female look alike.
But it’s easy to see how Dabbler, despite possibly not knowing her parents, might have worked out she was a succubus with doppelganger mother/father… maaaan, she would have had both doppelganger AND succubi powers hit her in puberty… OUCH.
by the look of that 8th panel, it seems the only thing she’s certain about her father is that he is the contributor of her 4 arms geanology. But if she didn’t know the succubus or doppelganger parents, then there’s no saying one of them couldn’t have had four arms from their own mixed heritage.
Maybe something happened to her mothers
Maybe the four arms are just because of a random mutation?
Wait, Sydney is part Maltese? That would explain a few things (including why she gets along with Frix so well :P )
truly that post could give one the …yips
Okay, doing a little reading on the Maltese (the dog, not the people nor the falcon) and came across this: “Their drop ears with (sometimes) long hair, and eyes surrounded by darker skin pigmentation (called a “halo”), gives Maltese their expressive look.”
Sydney is totally a Maltese!!!!
Wait, so does this mean that I should have been bragging all this time about how I’m half-Maltese?
Colour your hair blue and grow it out for best results to saying that.
Is the other half falcon?
It’s happened again. Panel 3 could easily become its own popular comic.
Our DaveB cloning program has not yielded successful results yet. But work is ongoing, in the hopes of getting “Grrl Power After Dark” and other spin-off comics.
Sydney wins again.
*nods definitively*
Something I think is stupid in scifi/fantasy.
Hiveminds aren’t done right.
We have a hivemind. It’s our computers. They’re all individual machines with their own quirks and personal knowledge and issues, but also are part of the internet. Not all of itself is in itself, as it is part of a hivemind, but it can function on its own with less functions. I want someone other than me to start writing like this.
So, what you’re saying is, whether or not something constitutes a hivemind is determined by the speed of communication between individual “hive-nodes”?
Because by that definition, one could argue that humanity is a *very* sluggish hivemind.
I was all set to praise Grrl Power for coming up with the ONLY explanation I can swallow for the “many aliens are humanoid and can breed with humans” trope (that being that they ARE humans who have been abducted over the past few centuries and joined galactic society). And then you throw THIS nonsense at us.
Independently-evolved species shouldn’t have compatible DNA. Most shouldn’t have DNA at all – that’s OUR planet’s solution for containing genetic information.
I guess I can ALMOST accept it if Succubi and Dopplegangers are Clarketech-level artificial species with magically superintelligent reproductive systems that can intuitively understand and process the end result of any genetic structure. But then shouldn’t they be able to construct any kind of baby they want, with no need for collecting the genetic material of other species.
I wouldn’t care if it weren’t for the fact that it’s TRYING to give a rational explanation when it should have just left it as magic.
I can see where the ‘collector’ species can claim a bit of a handwave, even with the Clarke-III biomages added to their backstory. Just because they could go completely custom from the base pairs up, doesn’t mean it would be an efficient use of the time and brainpower compared to borrowing the code that someone else’s ancestors already spent millions of years developing.
Speculation: Dabbler is probably infertile. She is essentially a hybrid between two different single-sex species, both of which have a sort of “genetic override” to ensure their species survives even though they are obligated to have children with members of other species, which would normally dilute their genes to the point of nonexistence over time. Beyond the fact that hybrids are usually sterile, I doubt the two competing gene overrides would play nice with the genome of whoever she’s trying to have a kid with.
Doing a long overdue catch up here so apologies for being late to the party. Surprised that nobody mentioned the Puppeteers from Larry Niven’s Known Space books.
Huh why are succubi exclusively female in this universe. Being they are derived from a sex toy industry for there to be no males there would have to be no sexual desire among the creators or buyers of the flesh golems for male anatomy sex toys…That would seem unlikely as that would need the creators and consumers to only include heterosexual males and lesbians. From a wizard convention of multiple worlds…where some races may include non-binary sex races…huh I can only conclude incubi must have existed…and died out? Or are secretly still up in the spy game. But it seems weird for a sex industry not to have created a dildo model.
How come Sydney used the correct demonym for someone from Malta but your commentary didn’t?
Dave, you clever, clever man!
I know I’m rather late but this guy put an easter egg in the math, here! As taught when I went to school, in order to add the fractions to check the math you need to match denominators and multiply the numerators by the same.
1/2+1/3+1/6 becomes 3/6+2/6+1/6
Not only do we get the countdown gag but the Mark of the Beast since succubus are infernal!
Bravo, Mr. Barrack, bravo!
Zaphod and Ford, who apparently share five of the same mothers?