Grrl Power #1054 – Operation dessert storm
If you plant the mini-bananas, would they grow mini-banana trees? Trick question! Bananas don’t have seeds! That’s weird to think about – all bananas are seedless. At least the modern commercially available banana is seedless. That and we’re one banana flu away from bananapocolypse. Apparently the O.G. banana looked more like okra and had dark seeds all up in them and looked really gross.
A bunch of you mentioned the name “Darude” in the comments, so I guess I’m not as original as I thought, hah hah. But really, what do you call a guy who can turn into a sandstorm? Easifat ramlia seems to be Arabic for sandstorm, at least according to google translate, but the guy probably has a less apto-supranymy name and goes by something more poetic, like Wrath of the Desert or something.
Most people don’t get to beta test their wishes, but Parfait has yet to actually successfully grant a wish. She’s only been able to use the ability since Tom “enslaved” her, and it’s been less than three days. Also, Tom, being reasonably opportunistic, probably isn’t going to let Parfait start handing out wishes for free.
I’ve decided that whatever tech the team has in their chokers >cough< I mean tactical throat mics also includes a way to hear that doesn’t include some sort of ear piece, with or without the coiled cord attachment that I always forget to draw. Just assume they have some sort of bone conduction earphone that’s concealed under hairlines or something. That or someone figured out how to make it work up through the bones in the neck despite all that spongy cartilage in the way.
The June vote incentive should be up with the Monday comic. Just need a little more time to do backgrounds and detail work.
The May Vote Incentive continues to be up! It’s Warsyl, from Tamer: Enhancer 2! I’d say “spoilers,” but the book has been available for 5 months now. Anyway, this pic doesn’t have a zillion outfit variations, partially because her armor took longer to draw than I thought it would, but mostly because she just has an armored form, and an unarmored form. The latter being available over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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looks like sydney failed her spot check
She’s almost as bad as some of my other favorite awareness-challenged characters
Nice punny title.
So simple wishes fail in simple ways, but more complex wishes fail in more complex ways?
Spelling: “silverware”, not “silverwear”.
English is not a natural language for her, just… pass it off as an accent or something
So, does ‘sliverwear’ mean scanty undies?
maybe the spoon was supposed to be a silver hammock instead.
SHINY undies.
There’s the bananas.. All you need is some strategically placed silver cups and you have silverwear….
And an outfit Dabbler would approve of…
Thanks…now that song is stuck in my head again…
It’s raining bananas, halleluiah.
…huh. If I had a nickel for every time I came across a parody of American music group The Weather Girls’ hit song “It’s Raining Men” where replacing the word ‘Amen’ in the lyrics with ‘Hosanna’ would properly maintain the rhyme scheme, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s really weird that it happened twice.
i was referring to Darude Sandstorm
I’m sure you were, but ‘Random Guy’ wasn’t.
Hehehe.
Sydles should prolly invest in some safety goggles to go over her glasses.
*grabs popcorn*
Anyway, looks like it’s about to be For Real Combat time!
RE: Sydney’s glasses- Or just succumb to the milieu and start wearing goggles with lenses that that make the ANSI Z87.1 certification team weep tears of joy, for they have found perfection.
Her glasses, are made from, an alien material, they may be indestructible!! whatever, that may be probable!!!!!
glasses being indestructible is a good thing. staying on her face in the event of 5g involuntary tractor beam incident… priceless.
Considering they’re fabricated using advanced alien technology they’re probably superior to Earth safety glasses, although they could use the side shields and probably a strap on the earpieces to help hold them in place.
The “side shields” ar probably built in, but use some sort of force field or electrostatic effect to keep out all sorts of debris & other dangerous particles, liquids, etc. Just because we can’t see that they are goggles doesn’t mean they aren’t already effectively goggles. Sydney just hasn’t been in a situation yet where she’s noticed that things don’t get in her eyes; she may just not think about how nothing has got in her eyes (yet), like most of us don’t every day until it happens. Given she’s about to be in a sandstorm, she may finally notice during the upcoming events. If her face gets thoroughly powdered, she may look a bit like a raccoon at the end of the day and put it all together to thank Cora.
Pretty sure she could rock a steampunk look, if Archon would let her wear a matching outfit.
That’s what she has a shield for.
I mean, you could have called him Efreet or something. But this works. We’ll find out what he calls himself later, maybe.
And miss out on the Darude – Sandstorm joke?!?
YES!!!
NO! we need more jokes and less grit.
We want good jokes
you don’t know that they are not good jokes. the spaghetti method works best.
Also, someone needs to introduce Parfait to Norwegian Eurovision.
…before that wolf, eats my grandma.
expand, explain, expound, elucidate.
Just remember…
…you specifically and explicitly asked for this.
https ://youtu.be/FJjo8s3fKUM
What the… you know what, I was fairly warned, that’s on me.
I love how calm everyone is with a massive wall of sentient sand looming over them.
And thinking that line made me remember the time Sydney filled her shield with sand during the tank demo.
It’s easy to stay calm when you have an impregnable forcefield.
As she learned against the kaiju, it isn’t as impregnable as she used to think.
What a cool visual design for that character. Love it.
Yeah, the bananas thing is… unfortunate. It’s worse than a monoculture, you’ve got just a couple of clonal lines being used *everywhere*, and like you said it would take just one “banana flu” to wipe it all out. (It has happened before! Bananas used to taste different! The Gros Michel line tasted more banana-y than the current Cavendish lines.) There are some research efforts into breeding new lines, but obviously people are bad at making investments into those kinds of forward-looking, risk-managing projects…
Cool, a villain with his theme song in a webcomic.
Maybe he goes by Scirocco? No, not the car, the desert wind in Libya.
How about Khamsin aka Desert Storm
Haboob.
There’s already a supervillain by the name of “Scirocco”: https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Scirocco
I wonder what exactly the wish was that made this… thing happen.
Go back a few pages, believe it was something like a banana split?
several banana splits, in the hope that 1 will be correct. clearly the wish mechanism has a a few bugs (several anthills worth)
Hmm… interesting move, Sydney. And, given recent complications, probably not a bad idea. Entering combat with the orbs circling the hands is probably better than having them float around the head where she can’t necessarily keep them in her vision at all times.
Waist might be better though. Easy accessibility from both hands if they keep circling, and you can’t lock them away without locking Sydney away either.
Zap zap zap zap zap zap zap, bananastorm! (do-do-de-do-do-doot) Ping pong ping pong ping pong ping, bananaspoon…
lol, after this, Thor can summon only bananas in place of lightning for approximately a week… with no clue why.
20 minutes later and I still have this earworm, so thanks for that. >_<
flat as a spoon?
Really hope Parfait works it out soon, looking forward to Big-Boobed Sydney :)
And the reason banana flavouring has a slightly different taste to an actual banana is that the flavouring was initially manufactured when the Gros Michel was the main cultivar, but after it went all but extinct and the Cavendish became the ubiquitous cultivar, they never got around to changing the formula.
Actually, it’s because they synthesized Isoamyl Acetate first and then decided to market it as artificial banana flavour in the U.S. and artificial pear flavour in the U.K., since it’s related to both of those.
That video actually states that banana flavouring tasted like bananas until the 1950s when Gros Michel was replaced by Cavendish!
but the flavoring might soon enough taste like “the banana” again
because more and more Cavendish exploitations are decimated the same way as the Gros Michel went out, but scientists already came up with a variant of the Gros Michel that is resistant to the infection, so everything is ready for when the Cavendish fails and we return to the Gros Michel
Anyone who believes the same flavour tastes like two different fruit clearly has never tasted either for real
Well, at least it wasn’t Scirocco.
OR
dust storm
black blizzard
devil
dust devil
duster
harmattan
khamsin
peesash
samiel
sand column
sandspout
shaitan
simoom
At least we know his first name is not Norman aka Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf.
Or “Haboob”…
Let’s face it, we all know it was a struggle for Dave not to name him that.
The Gentle Breeze of the Morning
Or Black Scorpion, Captain Mako, or Ghost Widow. Or worse, all four at once.
I always preferred Widow, hung out with her (canon, apparently) adopted son in an RP group. ^^
I though it was a frying pan full of pasta.
Sydney taunts with hentai orb- “Can we call you, Mariah? Or wait….since Max thrashed you once…Broken Winds?” In proper scribbles as her glasses translate what ever he’s gonna surely yell or diatribe. As bad guys are wont to do.
Dabbler “Sydney, that toy…it’s unusually dexterous, can you bring it to my next Tupperware party?”
Aside from the presumably non-diegetic descriptive sound effect, are we sure they’re tiny bananas and not tiny plantains? They’re kind of easy to confuse with each other, to the point where the US military did training films about “don’t eat the damn plantains raw, they’ll make you sick” during the 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Of course, if the microstorm there is actually making the noise “bananathunder” I guess they are bananas for sure, but the question then is how to peel them and whether it’s really worth the effort. Heck, I can’t even be bothered to shell pistachios, and those look like they’d be way worse to deal with for even less return.
Do tiny bananas grow in tiny bunches, and are those bunches sometimes home to even tinier tarantulas?
Yes. Is that dude a hot, barren sandstorm, or a post-meal confection?
So no one else seems to have noticed in the last panel, Sydney pulled off her halo of orbs with a flick of her hand? Does that mean her halo effect is now removable or is it purely done by the powers of comedic effect? New ability or just sheer insanity? YOU BE THE JUDGE!
She could always freely manipulate the orbs (as lomg as they stay close to her), the “halo” is just what they do when she isn’t thinking about them.
She’s been shown to manipulate their orbit before, such as putting them in the tube, her sparring with Math, and crushing the nuts of that guy in the steakhouse.
Her balls go where she wants them to go, just usually easier to have them floating around her head
Going full Bangles (“Walk like an Egyptian”) is new though…
I’m just going to name this guy Shitstorm. It’s in my head now and you can’t change it.
Maybe it’s actually just a squirrel in a diving suit
“That or someone figured out how to make it work up through the bones in the neck despite all that spongy cartilage in the way.”
That, or you know, ‘magic’. Not like they don’t have access to that as well.
It just came to my mind that even though Tom is supposed to be the master of the two succubuses, it looks more like Dabbler (and soon her sister as well I imagine) are dominating him. I mean, I know this comic is named Grrlpower, but shouldn’t a culture who takes pride in identifying themselves as slaves be allowed to actually live that? So far Tom has been getting Worfed, because he didn’t do anything impressive on-panel, so he comes across as quite the beta male and mere energy-provider, in my opinion.
The way the selection process for succubus “masters” is shown doesn’t look any better. I mean, even though I’d personally be happy to provide for a succubus and treat her well, I wouldn’t want to sign anything in blood or whatever. Scaring off men that are jerks is one thing, but scaring off all the good men aside from the extreme betas is kind of a waste. Well, ok, they probably have the whole universe to choose from, so they can certainly get away with it, but I do think that being this strict makes it unnecessarily hard for them. I don’t see why they shouldn’t have some kind of magical way of evaluating a man’s character instead of using all those contracts.
Pretty certain they’d stay away from anyone that subscribed to all the alpha beta stuff. It’s been pretty well established that while succubi are technically slaves, they are not in any ways bound to or interested in being submissive. except maybe in the bedroom, because it’d be funny.
as far as Mr. Ultimate-Destroyer-of-your-Sandcastle, Maybe he just goes by Chris?
No, Doug.
Some call him… Tim?
The heck did I just read…
internet comments.
Sydney probably has the perfect power for that but hasn’t leveled up enough to unlock it, or else the unknown orb has something for it but she still hasn’t figured it out. Maybe she can get another point out of this.
Every so often we get the ‘miniature bananas’ in the grocery store and they taste like drywall dust.
This isn’t a major problem because I don’t care much for bananas to begin with.
Their chokers must work on the generally accepted IJD principle, ‘It Just Does’ ;)
That’s because they are drywall dust
Simple fact of life: don’t consume anything that is produced or manufactured in the US and expect it to taste good (or is good for you)
Remember the pink-slime burgers?
Oooooh, yeah, I remember that. If I remember correctly, they used that pink slime to *increase* the food quality so that the burger would, on average, barely qualify as food instead of dog food. Wasn’t that slime made from bones or something?
Btw: Someone told me that his American friend who came over to Germany and tried baking frozen Pizza was astonished at how good our cheap stuff tastes compared to the USA. Same for McDonalds. Of course you can choose to disbelieve that, but I wouldn’t put it past fast food producers to produce whatever makes the most money in each respective culture.
Bit of trivia, banana trees are not trees at all. They don’t have any wood in them. They’re basically just giant herbs and the bananas are its berries.
That’s my superpower, I’m a fount of useless trivia.
Bananas are only seedless because we made them that way. In nature, bananas have seeds and are pretty awful. Mankind bent reality of bananas like an ancient banana god to our mighty agricultural wills to have the delicious fruit we have today. :)
Btw DaveB, you misspelled silverware in the second panel.
I would have called him “Khamsin”, but mostly because I’m familiar with military history.
In regards to hearing things without an ear piece, an implant in the jaw could transmit sound very well while being unobtrusive and hard to overhear. So maybe each team member has a small speaker on their jaw bone and the choker just acts as a relay. Not sure where the mic would be though. Maybe that’s in the choker?
I remember a sci-fi story where the protagonist had a newly developed advanced computer implanted into his skull that ran off of neural energy and had an ear implant to speak to him. He’s later shocked to find out that one of the alien women he was interacting with was evolved from a feline predator and could actually hear his computer AI talking to him. She later stole it for herself (the AI was happy about it because she provided way more power for it than him) resorting in a chain of events of him independently without realizing it initially developing FTL communication (which was the reason he was where he was in the first place, to get the secret from an arrogant alien scientist).
That idea falls through when you consider Maxima would have to have one.
For Max, the solution would be to use her skin as a conduit. Other supers with various levels of invulnerability would also require that solution (Achilles comes to mind).
However, I think other comments have the real solution: ARC has access to magic and other advanced tech via the Council. While such transfers are probably highly regulated, communication devices probably are both simple enough and essential that they constitute an exception.
Probably the only person left on the planet who has refused to listen to that shit-song, and always felt the need to throat-punch anyone who posted the meme
You seem to have an awfully strong opinion on something you have just admitted to not having the requisite experience to form an opinion about it.
Feel the same way about many shitty memes
https://pics.onsizzle.com/darude-youre-ugly-sandstorm-13874339.png
“You sure you don’t want my help on this, Max?”
“Scoville, the last time I fought Darude I essentially had to nuke his ass.”
“Obviously you didn’t do it from orbit.”
“SYDNEY!”
“Right, right. I’m guessing collateral damage is a big nono then.”
“Exactly. Hopefully I can draw him far enough away that I can safely cut loose.”
“You think he’s that dumb?”
“What?”
“Well, you beat him once, so he’s probably going to looking out for that. I don’t think Deus has a mass hydrokinetic or a weather manipulator handy, so the usual tactic against fighting sand elementals is out.”
“How would you know how to fight this asshole?”
“Flint Marko, Imhotep, Crocodile, Gaara, Scorpio… Psammokinesis sounds rare, but it’s not.”
I would think the shield, com ball, PPO enema combo would keep him busy and only risk a satellite or two. (which Sydney can provide a cut rate launch vehicle for its replacement)
Presumptuous of you to assume Deus does not have both a mass hydrokinetic and a weather manipulatir :).
Yes, and he just appeared on the horizon…
Let’s just say the chokers were made in cooperation with a tailor ninja and a technomancer.
Well, the commercial banana we know is actually a clone of a SINGLE plant. So yes, it is seriously and stupidly vulnerable to a pest or disease that would annihilate it.
https://www.newsweek.com/worlds-bananas-are-clones-and-they-are-imminent-danger-publish-monday-5am-1321787
We never learn. The Irish potato famine was caused by this too.
— Douglas Adams
Yeah, we can probably kiss bananas goodbye sometime in the near future.
Cavendish bananas have little resistance to Panama TR4 disease, a variant of the fungus that wiped out Gros Michel and we have no contenders for a replacement cultivar.
Even if we did have a replacement we are so stupid that we would monoculture again and of course the fungus would change again to take advantage of acres and acres of new food.
Life always changes to find a new way.
We do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.
Hey Dave,
Panasonic neck speakers, SoundSlayer in a higher tech, svelte design does reception. These are wearable speaker sets so everybody around you hears what you hear, security could be an issue, but then, we can see the speech bubbles, so maybe it is open comms at the endpoints and encrypted between.
Combine with a laryngophone like an Iasus and the chokers are definately doable. Give it a few years and what you have drawn will probably exist.
Dammit, I can never spell definitely right, D’oh