Grrl Power #1077 – Coup de grâce appropriation
To answer some questions about Darude’s powers. He can control sand, and also transform into it, IF he has at least his own mass of sand to… hide in, sort of. A lot of superpowers (and magic spells) rely on semantics, so the question isn’t, “What is sand,” it’s “What does Darude consider to be sand?” Sand is really just particulate minerals, but Darude grew up in the desert, so he probably couldn’t use sand from a coral beach right off the bat. Sure, if he was the main character of his own comic, he’d almost definitely grow his powers over time and be able to use coral sand and maybe even be able to control concrete, or at least rip the sand out of it. In a manga, there’d be many multi-page sequences of him trying to work past his own definition of sand, like, when does a grain of sand become a pebble, or is there some intermediate designation that geologists use? Maybe when he’s a giant sandstorm, small to medium sized pebbles count as “sand” to him because of the difference in scale.
But what Sydney did was to melt the top 3 to 4 inches of particulate matter into a big molten trail of lava/glass, which then rapidly cooled and broke into slabs ranging from the size of the top of a shipping container down to, well, tiny, dangerous splinters that could reasonably be considered sand. Even so, she tied up about 97% of the sand for a few miles in any direction – remember the bits she skipped over was farmland, which will be soil rather than sand, (I think the major differentiator is that “soil” has far more organic matter in it) roads, and the odd building.
To address some other concerns people mentioned; yeah, she absolutely wrecked the ecosystem in that area. If anyone actually brought her attention to how many little desert mice and lizards she just smoked, she might legitimately have a breakdown. Basically, she saw a giant Mummy sized sandstorm and focused on solving that to the detriment of other considerations. The worst thing about her plan was that if Maxima hadn’t been able to keep him distracted and he had plowed onward, she could have done all this only to find him pulling sand from another part of the desert. It wasn’t really a strong plan in a lot of ways, but at the same time, it might have been the best one? Bottom line is, Darude is potentially a catastrophic level event, and sometimes to beat a catastrophe, you must become a catastrophe.
The August Vote Incentive is up!
I’m a big fan of John Byrne’s run on “The Sensational She Hulk” and the imminent show looks very Sensational influenced. Therefore, I was inspired to draw some buff (pun intended) She Hulk, and threw in Red She Hulk for fun. Also, a wild Sydney for scale. Enjoy them posing in various outfits and lack thereof 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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Ouch! But that’s a nice reverse on the authority. I wonder if Maxima will ever utter that grade herself after this
Plot protection
Maxima is a visiting super in another country. Vale is one of that country’s representatives.
This was the authority from the very start.
Oh I’m well aware, but it’s still quite the ouch moment to let her do the work then come in with the “Thank you for your assistance, we’ll take it from here”.
I could imagine that Max may not have been keeping authority in mind during the battle, she gets her victory on an old nemesis. Riding the high of the victory train and then this cold shower hits her.
All the worse because they must have been sitting back and waiting to jump in like this.
Well, Max is out of jurisdiction, so these people could be the local law-enforcement. Maybe even the Galytn equivalent of Archon. So, yeah, they will take it from there.
It’s a matter of legal jurisdiction, like it or not…And Max most certainly does not.
I’d place 10-to-1 odds that Deus will recruit the SoB into his own super-army, under dire threats of permanent imprisonment or worse. It’s something that pretty much *every* government does even if they try to keep it as secret & low-key as possible; Deus is the type who would publicly flaunt it at the right time for the highest shock-value as possible.
halo, cutting the bbeg off from his source :D
Words cannot express how stupid it was for her to take that mask off in the middle of this fight. Really, I’m speechless.
That is a movie trope. Same reason Sword fighting actors take of their helmets before a big duel. Most stupid thing to do in real life. But in a visual media they want to show their faces. (And sometimes have that even in their contract.)
That is one of the reasons I was so impressed with V for Vendetta. The actor did so much without ever showing his face and he stuck to it the whole movie. He completely crushed it.
Same with Urban in Dredd (everyone knows, the real star is The Chin of Law), as opposed to Stallone on Judge Dredd (where he barely kept his face covered for five minutes)
A real shame Dredd never got a sequell.
They were supposedly working on a series, but then Urban joined The Boys…
Hugo has had parts in almost every major film/series of our time. But as an Aussie I’ll always remember him for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert which was an amazing movie that he gave an amazing performance in. That probably blew his career to the Global stage and The Matrix solidified it.
Biggest armor failure I’ve seen was one of the fighters missing an important armor piece. The fight ended similar to pawn beats knight in Battle Chess.
If it’s just missing I could live with it. In long parts of history soldiers were expected to provide their own armor. So they used what they had. Many a breastplate was just a kitchen pan roughly hammered in shape.
So, a piece that is missing could be lost/stolen/whatever shortly before and the comabttant in question did not have enough time/resources to replace it.
I’m not talking about top notch armor of nobility and long time professional soldiers of course.
Yep, Smaug and that one patch over his heart that didn’t happen to be encrusted with jewels gold.
It may have been blown off during one of their trades, at least – he DEFINITELY would have been aiming to do so, since it would make it easier to incapacitate her.
Check the previous page again. Maxima doffed the mask when Plan Sydney kicked in.
No, she literally ripped it off herself last Thursday. I guess so her shocked face would be visible.
Please check the previous comic. She took it off herself.
Max took it off in the previous comic, panel 7.
At this point, he would probably have only as much sand to give her a nice polish
Wasn’t the concern about getting sand into her lungs. I guess it depends on if he had enough sand to get the pressure to do that + the small volume to fill her up left over.
Almost as stupid as it was for the guy to turn his head and hands into sand but leave his big bodybuilder chest exposed.
Actually, at that point, he is running out of sand, and the extremities (not including his head) are the last things he would give up, seeing how those are what he is attacking with…
Good point. I’d rather have Max crush my ribs than my brain.
About as stupid as it was for this guy to turn his face and hands into sand but leave his big bodybuilding torso exposed.
As someone else said, there’s a desire to show the faces to the audience. There are better ways to do it. For a knight character it is to wear open face helmet like in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vYFFx4whoE
Hope that piece of glass he crashed into is cooled off enough.
Toasty :3
That’s what I was thinking as well. It seems only moments after Sydney was melting that sand so logically, that glass he crashed on and they’re standing on should still be many hundreds of degrees.
to be fair Opal is still inside the portal and everyone else standing directly on it are implied or stated to have very high durability; how far that defense aura extends under Maxima or Vale’s boots is a pondering through.
I feel like if she had just focused on the sand he had collected, turning that to glass, she could have saved all of those snakes and mice
that would not have worked. first – sydney shoots beams of super-heated whatever. and that guy was flying and had an entire sand STORM. as in the whole volume of space was filled with sand he controlled. to turn that into glass, sydney would have to super-heat that whole volume to glassification temperature. shooting beams into that cloud would do nothing. and if she would try to shoot down from above she would hit the ground and anyone on it. collateral much.
the way you want it to be would be “create a miniature sun in the middle of the cloud for everything to heat up equally and turn to glass”
Not to mention the sand storm would then be whipping around superheated silica, sending it flying EVERYWHERE
Max was already doing that. As she mentioned, when he runs low on sand, he just pulls from what’s around. By melting the top layer of sand for a few miles around, they actually had to blast LESS sand than if they had to keep blasting Darude. As long as there is sand around and easily accessible, he’ll just keep going.
Maxima was already working on that sand, which was why he was about to need to go for more. Teamwork frequently means going after *different* aspects of the issue.
If Darude was causing this large of a violent sandstorm, like he was, there is a good possibility that any animal and plant-life in the area was already dead or dying. Sandstorms can be extremely deadly, especially if caught off guard. And seeing as this was not natural, and animals that would survive by burrowing and waiting for it to pass would get dug out, in short order. Kind of a no win situation for the innocent bystanders.
Oh sure, now you guys show up after all the hard stuff was done..
While we know very little about Vale’s capabilities, I doubt they’d have been a good match against Darude.
Well it is their country and Max is just a visitor.
Considering how quickly she glassified (quartzified?) that much desert area, I kind of wonder if some countries might contact Sydney about helping reverse desertification in some areas.
Vitrified.
Oooh! A new word!
(adds it to my collection)
Thanks! :-D
…Was that the regular one, or the platinum foil version?
3 syllables involving a Latin base….
That means it’s a foil rare word, but not a full-holographic art Platinum foil hidden rarity word.
Which, to be fair, full-holographic art Platinum foil hidden rarity words were diminished in value once everyone learned disestablismentariansim and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, but there’s lots of uncommon words still in that category to collect such as abnormalization and paleobiological and objectivization and labyrinthically.
I definitely agree that Sydney is a catastrophe at times.
Yeah, “must become a catastrophe” isn’t much of a challenge for her. The tricky part is making sure that she’s the *right* catastophe…
Months and months ago during a rushed board meeting…
Arianna: “You know what we should name her? Halo.”
General Faulk: “Oh, you mean like angels?”
Arianna: “Exactly. We already know she’s a bit of a loose canon. The name may give her something to aspire to, to try to be better, more divine.”
… a little bit later…
Sydney: “So… Halo… have to admit, that was pretty clever.”
Arianna: “Yea, as in angels… you know what angels are, right?”
Sydney: “Oh yea, I’ve seen Evangelion. 2nd impact and all that.”
Arianna: “… what?”
… a little bit later, in front of a tv as “End of Eva” credits roll …
Arianna & General Faulk: F#%k.
… now …
General Faulk looking at battle field report pictures: F#@k, second impact
That is so damned accurate it isn’t, well, it is funny.
How quickly that people tend to forget that the angels will do God’s Will, even if it means mass murder. Remember the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt because Pharoah refused to set the slaves free when Moses asked?
How about Sodom & Gomorrah? That’s another good example.
It really doesn’t take much difficulty to search up more examples.
That time God had the angels set up a bucket brigade to put out Man’s fires of passion. It really is a good thing that Noah’s passions were hoarding animals and having a large boat.
Person of mass destruction.
And today Sydney wins herself a cat ass trophy for her efforts.
Look up Xanth if you don’t get the reference.
I feel like the cat ass trophy worked so well in Xanth because it’s one of those things that works even without a reference – as so many things in Xanth do. Which I think is really good, because since aging out of the appropriate age for those books, they really seem … inappropriate. I don’t regret reading them, but I worry about the person who wrote them.
(don’t go looking for his book Pornucopia, then)
“Bio Of A Space Tyrant” was mostly decent
hmmmm decent writing? I there’s rape in several of the books and (shudder) institutionalized sex. trust a Navy to find a way to make sex boring…..
If that was all you paid attention to, then the fault is not with Anthony…
And did say mostly decent
In Pornucopia, he is outright trying to make it offensive to everybody. He mentions that in an interview or author’s note somewhere, lol. It’s pretty intentionally terribly bad.
I love Xanth, but yeah it really isn’t the kind of fiction you should use to shape minds.
Anthony was often controversial. I think his worst was Tarot – a long, rambling philosophical book that, in the end, winds up advocating Satan worship.
I really liked his Incarnations of Immortality.
Probably his most unoffensive work todate. Honestly, much of his works give me the feeling that he is patting his own back while trying to hide doing some really weird wishfullfillment wet-dream fantasy. Or not trying to hide it. For a man who claims to write strong female characters, many of his plots are resolved with a female (I paraphrase) going “AWW! The cock!”.
May I draw your attention to all of these less dedicated/talented smutty fanfiction authors…
As Recall.. Portal Lady is in prison still… so one assumes many questions are going to be asked how she escaped a pressurised prison without you know.. death.
Most probably she is on parole [Or however you right that. English is stupitly hard]
Or even Deus paid her out.
In #412, Deus advocates to Max that Opal be released into his custody, and in #570 we see her using her portals to give Deus access to the Black Reliquary.
Deus bargained for her release back when Sidney was getting her rebreather.
She was released into Deus’s care. Maxima was the one Deus asked about giving her a release to his care since she was needed for transporting goods and services to and from Galytn, since it was landlocked at that time. She did not ‘escape.’
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-412-how-long-can-trusty-recruit-scoville-hold-out/
(panel 1)
Deus also got Vekter released into his custody in Galytn as well. Or at least ‘sped up his processing.’
Remember, everyone involved in the restaurant fight, except for Vehemence, was technically under the influence of Vehemence’s violence aura. Especially Vekter and Opal, who Vehemence was able to convince it was their idea in the first place, when it wasn’t. Easy way to argue that they were not responsible for the fight.
I thought Deus made an exchange for her since her portals let him run a train to the coast without going through the intervening countries first?
Deus for her out right after, which in universe was half a year ago.
Ps we previously saw her out of prison when she portaled into the vault
“Sometimes to beat a catastrophe, you must become a catastrophe.”
… in the name of all that is good and merciful no one tell Sydney this or she might make it her motto. … or be completely mortified that she embodied it… or both…. I kinda want to learn which, but I really really really don’t want to learn which.
That is pretty much the motto of my own character Rhulan. Fighting a genocidal giant fire demon that is a hundred feet tall. Well better transform into an even bigger dragon, Scylla, or celestial being and have a Kaiju battle with it.
Or to quote Demolition Man…
John Spartan: “Send a maniac to catch a maniac.”
https://youtu.be/fdIKyK8uLM8?t=27
Vale’s cup size went way up. Way up.This mean her powers increased too? Or did she use the dagger on herself? Which implies they’ve been on a major killing spree.
Pretty sure she’s not really human, more of a shapeshifting mass of eldritch power.
Vale is an eldritch “something” that looks like whatever she wants to look like. And she was big in the first place.
I thought it was established her human form is some kind of shell. So presumably she changes it as she chooses?
No, Valyeur has always been that big
She’s just big enough that when you haven’t seen her for a while, she always looks bigger. Kind of like May in more recent QC updates.
Well, she is lifting up her boobs with her arms.
Im… kinda surprised Opal got out “so quickly”.
Though, to be fair, she was basicaly the car lady.
We saw Deus negotiate with Archon leadership for the release of Opal into his custody.
So did that portal kill him off, or safely get him to some containment where Mr Evil SuperIntelligence can convert to his whim?
No, they conveniently removed him from the area before Maxi could ‘interrogate’ him and find out he was working for SmugD from the start
Darude is still on the ground behind the portal in the last panel. You can see his outstretched left arm.
They didn’t even remove him. In the last panel you can see a bit of him in the bottom left corner.
The portal opening kind of looks like it’s swallowing him in the previous panel, but nope, just due to the border being drawn by a whirling point of light that hasn’t quite completed it’s circuit yet.
You can clearly see that his legs are gone in the second to last panel. He’s still there in the last panel because it hasn’t finished swinging around to scoop him up.
Yups: it starts by revealing them and ends by removing him in one motion
Is it me or is the list of characters to be corrected.
Darude is shown, but not on the list.
To Sidney … other way around.
Technically, he’s never been formally named, so, until then… he gets no entry (but yeah, Sydney should not be there… unless she’s supposed to be responsible for the BWEENNN)
Considering his power and where he was, Darude had reached a Godzilla Threshold: the point at which a catastrophe is so dire that calling in Godzilla, patron saint of collateral damage, couldn’t possibly make things worse than they already are.
… and not being sure Godzilla would be enough, they called in Sydney…
That actually made me laugh out loud for real, “Not sure if Godzilla will be enough of a catastrophe to end you’re Big Bad? Try Sydney Scoville Jr.”
“One’s a walking disaster area with a carefree atitude to colateral damage and atomic breath….and the other is a big green lizard!”
Together they fight crime!
.
.
.
Somehow
Not sure if even Godzilla could take on Sydney Scoville Jr. at this point, to be honest.
It depends whether we’re just using movies or comics. In the comics, Godzilla kills God (as in, the Abrahamic one). Then he eats a handful of angels on his way out of Heaven.
sand control is potentially soooo much more than just sand… Sand is mostly made out of silicon dioxide in the form of quartz. so basically he manipulates Silicon! and silicon is used to make much more than just glass! it is used to make computer chips. all of them! now imagine if that guy would have thought of that and trained his powers. well. no need to imagine – just look at Shatterbird from Worm (https://worm.fandom.com/wiki/Shatterbird) — silica kinetic.
citywide instantaneous simultaneous shattering of every glass surface (windows, mobile-phones, cars) and every silicon based computer chip, and then pinpoint manipulation of the resulting debris.
now that is a disaster! what that guy does is Gaara-light.. just meh.
Shatterbird’s intentionally over the top to be a world-renowned big bad. Darude, on the other hand, seems like they’re supposed to be relatively obscure outside of the African desert area. (I’m not certain which desert this is, except it’s not the Sahara. My African geography is poor, but I at least know that much.)
Kalahari
There’s also Dust from X-men.
Who literally is living sand, and iirc, just got more dangerous when someone attempting vitrifying her.
Course, we’re also taking about the X-men here, which also includes Mercury, who’s literally living liquid metal too.
Lot of those second/third-generation X-men are actually pretty damned scary.
That was really lame. This is cartoon level situational awareness from Darudes side.
Like having your shoelaces tied together while in a boxing fight lame.
That.. and seriously. He waited until he was so low on sand a single missed resupply of sand would knock him out? instead of continously stocking up?
This is seriously a case of MASSIVE idiot ball glued firmly to both hands.
Both of his oponents have superspeed… It Didn’t happen slowly for him.
When one person is trying to murder you (and possibly legally) you tend to focus on the super powered murder machine trying to kill you with laser beams and energy blasts… Rather than the other no name person who thought that glass ing the entire region was a good idea.
Because as stated by everyone… That would cause a whole lot of problems… Which might only be fixed by super powers and advanced alien tech.
Though seriously it is like complaining about a boxer focusing on his opponent not thinking that his friend would chuck hand grenades into a boxing match. The moment you notice the pins are gone is the moment they explode or your opponent takes advantage of your moment of disbelief.
This is akin to defeating aquaman by draining the ocean. Theoretically possible, but most people would not go that far to do it.
Pfft. We didn’t drain the ocean. We lured Aquaman into the Red Sea and just drained that. So much easier.
He had no idea what was going on, and he WAS using reserves… he was a couple miles tall!
But control of sand doesn’t let you see through sand, so he literally blinded himself with his own sandstorm!
If we’re going with precise definitions, sand is a type of soil. Types of soil are usually categorized by grain size, rather than amount of organic material (almost everything a plant needs comes from sunlight, CO2, and water, and you can fertilize for the rest), and while the exact size boundaries vary between systems, one quite common theme is that the smallest grain sizes are clay, then the next biggest grain sizes are silt, then the next biggest are sand, and from there it’s gravel and up. If you want an international standard, it’s defined in ISO 14688-1:2002. Finer soils tend to be better for agriculture because they retain water better.
Also soil is composed of 4 components, silt, sand, clay, and organic matter. The best agricultural soils have some of all 4 heavier in silt and organic matter.
Also, also, DaveB stated in this comics comment that Darude can control what he (Darude) considers to be sand.
Not an ISO or geological definition of what is sand, only what Darude recognises as sand.
Why? Possibly because that is how Darude believes his power works.
With training, (possibly from Deus and his crew) he might expand his capabilities.
Then I think our heroes can all be very glad he didn’t realize that glass is just sand in another form. Imagine the carnage!
(BTW, I like this explanation a lot: it’s not some utterly random bs about sand and glass being different somehow, just that he doesn’t realize they’re basically the same. Otherwise it would be about as logical as Frozen 2: Ice is Not Water, Honestly!)
“Finer soils tend to be better for agriculture because they retain water better.” Clay is an exception, it is terrible for agriculture.
I think clay is good for agriculture if it is mixed in properly. It has very similar nutrient retaining qualities as biomass (because of the high surface area to volume ratio if I remember correctly.) Just don’t ever let it compact, which means among other things that you need to keep the soil water level higher than you normally would (luckily clay retains water really well), which together with the “Don’t compact” rule means using heavy machinery is troublesome.
Also, ploughing is going to be very tough, so don’t plan on doing that.
It is especially handy for permaculture and similar low or no plowing and low or no heavy machinery techniques. Or, you know, gardening. Normal gardening and pot soil contains very little clay and that is one of the reasons why your plants drink so much.
Since you asked, sand has grain sizes up to 2mm beyond that we speak of gravel, of which pebbles are a subdivision (4-64 mm) (wentworth scale 1922)
When you reach that size it’s commonly called pea-gravel up to “dirty-twos”, my brother-in-law drives a dump truck and drives that into my head often…
Uh Dave, molten glass takes a long time to cool off. 3-4″ in that wide of an area would probably take days. The very air would be superheated and unbreathable for quite some time.
Which makes me think that even if Halo didn’t target the nearby farms…the blasting heat from the glass would have fried anything actually on the farms – not to mention the people minding them.
And that superheated air will ignite many things, and will rise fast, drawing in cold air from the surroundings, which will then heat up fast. Essentially causing a massive mushroom cloud full of whatever gets drawn in from the sides (probably more sand).
“Another way of telling if a Mighty Halo is in the area is to look for mushroom clouds!”
I wonder if Opal was the many who refused Archon’s offer of membership?!? And did Vale meant by that they’ll take it from there?
She meant that, as a representative of the local government, she will take take custody of the criminal and deal with further legal proceeds.
Opal was definitely one of the many who refused Archon’s offer of membership, because she already had an employer. Also said employer went to work on getting her release immediately before any of his other employees who were caught up in it. Which was at least Vekter but could’ve been more.
Gaylyn is a sovereign nation and where Darude attacked so they by national law has the right to detain and dole out punishment as they see fit. Which in Deus’s case will probably mean his version of “community service”.
Everyone’s been concerned about the damage that Sydney caused but Max wound up doing pretty much the same thing fighting him last time, plus judging by his scars she did come very close to killing Darude last time!
I’m now imagining Darude using his powers on a White Sand beach, and just before his first attack Halo points out that it’s not actually sand but Parrot Fish poop.
Power semantics. Heck we get things like fibrakinesis where a person can control anything with a fibrous structure, being totally different from clothekinesis from people who control cloth specifically, or papyrikinetic which controls paper vs necroflorakinetic who can control and dead plant matter.
Well, yeah, as DaveB mentioned, a lot of powers are self-semantic (as in, it’s what they believe it to mean)
Just look at Iceman, for years he thought he could only be a fluffy snowman who could throw snowballs and make slides… until Emma took his body for a ride and showed him what it could really do (and even then, he mostly just ungraded to a naked icicle that could get spikey)
Hmm… Sidney approaching the Godzilla threshold huh? Interesting.
“Bottom line is, Darude is potentially a catastrophic level event, and sometimes to beat a catastrophe, you must become a catastrophe.”
In TV Tropes-speak: The Godzilla Threshold.
Also, speaking of learning to work past limitations: Toph from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” learning to metalbend (established as capital-I impossible), by latching on to the impurities within metal and moving those.
That’s uh, going by Vair’s math-y result below the previous page, the energy of about 26 Hiroshima bombs. That’s quite a bit, Dave.
I think her orbs are what’s known as deep magic wells. Or as Krona put it “The Deep Code” N-level technomagic. Her orbs are probably have as much energy as a star, which they might end up being.
That is a world ending amount of heat to add to the planet, I think. The climate is now seriously fucked.
What are you talking about? Did you forget the nuclear tests with detonating hundreds of nuclear bombs, each usually dozens or more times as powerful as fat man and little boy?
The Tsar Bomba alone was about 1500x the energy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and represented about 10% of the energy released in all nuclear testing up to that date. And it was only detonated at 1/2 power to reduce the fallout and the size of the fireball. Also because at that point, neither the USSR nor the USA were quite sure whether a big enough bomb would ignite the entire atmosphere and flash burn the entire planet.
Fat Man was tiny compared to the current nukes. About a thousand times less effective than the Tsar Bomba.
Wellerstein says that 10-100 supernukes (like we have today) would destroy humanity by radiation alone, and the amount of carbon thrown up would be even more damaging to humanity through damaging the climate than the radiation.
https://scienceinfo.net/to-destroy-the-world-only-10-fusion-bombs-are-needed.html
Is it just me or does the portal angle change directions in between the last two panels?
I took it to mean that the portal was moving. Kind of like a revolving door where the bad guy is on one side and the… other bad guys(?) were on the other. The door (portal) is rotating to drop the Vale and co. off while scooping up Darude to deposit him somewhere to be detained.
It’s rising up from the right in panel seven to reveal Cthillia’s well-pedicured feet (you try telling her they aren’t) and moving down to the left in panel eight to finish moving Sandy to SmugD’s ER
To Dave:
I hope you are all right this morning. I heard there was up to 6 inches of rain and major flooding (which would be a good name for a water kinetic) in the Dallas area last night. If you need to take a few days off to clean up or build an ark I think we will all understand.
I live in the same area as Dave and unless he’s in a low spot he should be fine. However the bottom levels of freeway overpasses are definitely not passable for a while.
Judging from the pretty purple color, that sand has a looooooot of manganese in it.
Well it is a web comic, so close enough?
(I’m not sorry)
So the one thing I don’t understand about Darude’s power is why he can’t recapture any sand that Maxima knocks off. The same lack was in Naruto for the guy that wielded the sand with his demon.
That’s still only as much sand as he personally contains (and just like the Daphne’s, doubt he wants to find out what happens if Sydney glasses bits of it… basically, if he’s lucky, he loses a finger and not a vital organ)
Because when Max hits it with her power, she’s glassing that bit. She didn’t damage the environment anywhere close to as much as Sydney, but Max started it.
That’s a really cool portal trick
‘sometimes to beat a catastrophe, you must become a catastrophe’
A LOT of people do not think about such things, especially in the heat of a bad moment. They always want nuclear scale responses to any kind of problem or ‘enough is not being done’. If EVERY problem was solved that way, no one would be alive on Earth today.
‘ow, I stubbed my toe! Time to break the table I kicked!’ is the norm for many people. SOME have the will, fear of legal reprisal or self discipline to step back from such a precipice. Not all do and in today’s modern, wonderful world of US politics, FEW show such. After all, it is perfectly appropriate when law enforcement officials DARE to go to enforce the law, to blame THEM for doing so and attempt to kill them.
Uh… no?
Don’t get me wrong. Law enforcement in the US is a mess and half right now in so many ways and for so many reasons. Some of that is political. Some of that is financial. Some of that is racism on several sides, lack of training, fear, corruption and/or simple mismanagement. As I say, a mess.
‘The end justifies the means’ is actually a fairly reasonable argument in many cases, but when you burn down the building that the table you stubbed your toe on was in… A bit excessive?
I know, I know. I am bad, wrong and evil in asking for reasoned, proportional responses to problems but I DO like living. Is that so wrong of me?
“The end justifies the means” assumes that the means used do not preclude the end sought. So much of the time, the means used *do* preclude the end supposedly sought.
In the case of the police, I’m not sure that’s something they’re worried about. I feel like at least some of them actually are not concerned at all about the end they’re officially seeking. They just want to blame crimes on somebody they can get the blame to stick to so that they look like they’re competent. For some of them, actually stopping crimes sounds like something that would cost them their jobs. “You gotta have crime or you don’t need police.”
I don’t know how endemic this is. But if at any point, it becomes too endemic, the police become the biggest obstacle to fighting crime.
Many people, especially opponents of consequentialism, like to ignore that the “ends” in “the end justifies the means” includes all ends, which means you have to look at it holistically and don’t externalise costs by calling certain “ends” “collateral damage”.
Of course, some especially annoying proponents of consequentialism also love to ignore the “ends” that keep them from doing what they want. Fucking hypocrits.
If the police are paid by commission (e.g., they only get paid, or they get paid MORE if they actually stop a crime), then something’s already horribly wrong. Police should be paid a wage (with the usual paygrades for experience and so on), and if crimes happen anyway when the police could reasonably stop those crimes, it indicates laziness or incompetence, and the police should then be penalized as you would laziness or incompetence in any job with a wage. (Reprimands, demotions, sack-and-replace, etc.) There should not be benefits for the police to allow crime to go unaddressed.
I suppose there’s always the long-term problem where if the police are competent to the point where crime is significantly diminished or non-existent and people become of the opinion that the occupation as a whole should be phased out as no longer necessary, but I don’t think any society has ever legitimately reached that point. I doubt that many, if any, police actually see such a scenario as a threat to their livelihood.
What is the end that the police are serving? Somehow, I doubt that everyone is on the same page.
It doesn’t help that no one seems to have the same idea of what cops are supposed to do.
1) Catching criminals? Um, sure unless of course said criminal is rich, powerful or heavily armed, in which case, is it MIGHT happen or it MIGHT not.
2) Stopping crimes before they occur or in progress? Um, okay for some places. Others? As long as the cops get their cut of the haul, why should they CARE?
3) Inspiring fear and enforcing obedience through said fear? MANY people who should know better want that, because it SEEMS to work. At least, right up until the people being terrorized get off their asses and fight back.
And last but certainly not least, shoring up evil regimes through the use of fear or force. Yeah, that worked so well in Portland, didn’t it? The problem was that in the US, cops are not supposed to be allowed to just go out and KILL people unlike places like Russia despite the best efforts of many in positions of political power in the US. It has happened and will, because humans are human and mistakes get made but it is not LEGAL (YET!) in the US for a cop to go out and flat out premeditated murder someone, Judge Dredd style. I bet it will be eventually for cops or vigilantes to do just that, since so many want that for so many reasons.
So many different ends desired and some are even logical or desirable. Funny ‘that’ in the modern world where emotions are all that matter. Not lives. Who cares about lives when emotions can be manipulated to garner power, right?
Cops operate at the intersection of the rule of law and the rule of man. I would argue that the rule of law is an anomaly in human history — a good one, but an anomaly nonetheless. Humans operate on in-group/out-group distinctions, tribalism, and power; the idea that none of that matters, that everyone has to follow the same rules no matter who they are, is a unnatural concept.
A related problem is the mental classification of people into “law-abiding citizens”, who can do no wrong, and need protection from the “criminals”, who can do no right, and have no rights, and “law enforcement”, who get to do the classifying, and for whom any action can be justified in the pursuit of protecting citizens and harming criminals. This is a tribe-oriented approach, not a rule of law approach.
I’ve heard this summarized (by cops, arguing for its merits) as “wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs”. So far none of them have made an effort to explain why the sheep shouldn’t be offended by this classification, nor why rogue sheepdogs acting exactly like the wolves generally have protection from being dealt with in the same way.
Yes, we all know that in the modern world, feelings matter more than lives.
FYI: Wolves don’t CARE about how the sheep feel, only how they taste. And as for sheepdogs? Why should THEY care about the feelings of sheep? It is the the job.
As for rogue sheepdogs being protected when they act like wolves? They are only protected when they are the ‘right’ kind of people for the flavor of the month. It shouldn’t happen, but it has, does and WILL as long as there are there are those who demand the benefits that the sheepdogs provide while denying the sheepdogs any support whatsoever. Who demand that the sheepdogs do things they are not trained for, equipped for or even remotely prepared for and then blame the sheepdogs when things go wrong.
But it is all good. The feelings of the sheep MUST be protected. That is ALL that matters on the modern world.
My personal opinion? When a sheepdog stops being sheepdog and becomes a wolf, they should be denied all protections of being a sheepdog. But then? That might hurt the feelings of the sheepdog and we cannot have THAT, now can we?
Funny how so many WANT more wolves in society and think it would make less of a mess than we have now.
Because it’s a system based on identity, not behavior.
Yes, humans as a whole LOVE their ways of putting each other down.
Funny, in a sad kind of way. In the modern wonderful world of the US, MY feelings mean absolutely nothing, but YOUR feelings mean you can hurt or kill me any time you want as long as you can justify it to the ‘right’ kind of people.
Now that I think about it? Not very funny at all, because I have never been and never will be the ‘right’ kind of people, whoever they are this week. And you know what? I am glad!
The police, the people they’re policing, and the people they’re policing for all like living, and take what they think are the best actions available to them to continue doing so. If we don’t like what any of those groups are doing, then we should examine their information, incentives, and resources, and encourage different behavior through changing the conditions that produce it.
That would be logical, yes.
Unfortunately, logic went bye-bye in the US over the last decade or so. No one specific person is to blame for that, but MANY have taken advantage and will.
As a student of military history, I don’t see this ending well.
The portal is rotating from left to right taking Darude away and bringing the other 3 in.
Maxim 10: Sometimes the only way out is through. . . through the hull.
Maxim 20: If you’re not willing to shell your own position, you’re not willing to win.
Everything is air-droppable once.
” If anyone actually brought her attention to how many little desert mice and lizards she just smoked, she might legitimately have a breakdown.”
Immediately after being told that little tidbit, she gets a Level Up.
Sydney: “No. Noo. Nonononono.”
Darude probably sucked up just as many little critters with the sand. Even if he left them behind they would get covered in the fall out. Dead mousies either way.
Not sure the exact location of this place, but you might also consider adding Fennec Foxes to that list as well as the Snakes, lizards, and mice. In which case Sydney is a monster!
Well there goes the last hope that the other shoe will fall and that our heros will ever get a challenge. Seems like they intend to breese there way through everything like a bunch of Merry Sues.
If they keep glassing the battlefield like this the big bad isn’t going to be some kind of monster, it is going to be the climate change type of mass extinction event.
Wouldn’t that glass be really hot right now, like hotter than a sidewalk you can fry eggs on levels of hot. Anyone standing on it has to be heat resistant at least.
it looks only Opal has her feet in a portal, the other three standing there are stated or implied to have high durability.
“how many little desert mice and lizards she just smoked”
The wildlife probably wasn’t faring too well being lifted into Darude’s sand blender anyway.
In the other hand, the craft glass industry in the region is about to take off big.
Funny you should ask. As a geologist, I can tell you that we do have a particle size between sand and pebbles! Sand is considered to be any particle between 0.0625 mm and 2 mm in diameter. Smaller than that, and it’s either silt, or clay if it’s much smaller. Just above sand, from 2 to 4 mm in diameter, we define as a granule. Beyond granules, we have pebbles, cobbles, and boulders (the last of which start out at a surprisingly small 256 mm).
That IS surprisingly small; I usually define a “boulder” as any rock that’s too heavy for me to lift. Maybe starting at about 200 lbs? (Yeah, now that I’m in my 60’s I’m getting kind of puny.) Now I know I’m picking up and carrying off “boulders” when I go rock hunting. Cool!
I propose Bouldules for stones above cobbles but less than 100lbs.
but, what do you call one that only weighs one stone?
a Jagger
An absolute unit.