Grrl Power #1094 – Exodon’t
I’ve lived in Texas for 40 years and to this day if someone says “Texas” my first thought is of desert and cactus. Granted, I’m old enough that when I was a kid, there were still cowboy shows on TV. They were mostly syndicated reruns, but you if you were flipping through the 4-6 available channels at the right time, you could watch the Lone Ranger in glorious black and white. I’m not sure where most westerns actually took place, but Texas was often mentioned. Man, I’m glad we’re past the cowboy obsession. I never was or will be a fan of westerns.
And sure, if you drive far enough west through Texas, there’s plenty of desert and cactus, but growing up in a suburb just north of Houston, it was evergreens all the way to the horizon. People joke about whatever place they live only having two seasons. In Houston, it was “Summer” and “two weeks of winter,” but it was an extra kick in the teeth that the leaves didn’t even turn.
Oh wait, I take that back. In addition to evergreens, there were gumball trees. Or technically they’re called Sweetgums, and each and every one of them dropped hundreds of trillions of these caltrop things all over the place. Walking through your yard barefoot was a hazardous prospect to say the least. But at least their leaves turned.
I’m sure a lot of places are just fixed in people’s mind thanks to media representation. If you say “LA” to me, I generally think of people roller skating near the beach, homeless people, and earthquakes. Oh, and also that concrete spillway where the T-1000 chased John Connor, and also the paved over LA River where the shuttle crash landed in The Core, which is one of my favorite dumb disaster movies.
I tried to do “air particles streaking past” to indicate motion in a few panels there, but looking at it now, it does kind of appear as though Sydney flew them through a swarm of locust at about 300 miles per hour, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll dial it in eventually.
The October Vote Incentive is actually up!
Why did it take so long? I couldn’t tell you. Well, I hand drew the lace on Lorlara’s body stocking, so that took about an hour by itself. Anyway, it’s likely the next one will be single character, and hopefully it won’t be so late. Usually with fewer characters I can do more outfit variants but we’ll see.
So I have enough “Blue Babes” to do a theme. Eventually I’ll be able to fill in the whole rainbow of my own characters. I did a rainbow lineup previously for those who hadn’t seen it. I’d love to revisit that one of these days.
Enjoy variant 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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One would think from Sydney’s face that she needs to go potty, but she’s shaking the flyball.
Her orbs have needed recharge times before…
If the orbs actually are an incredibly advanced space ship, how does it refuel?
I’m tempted to think that the orbs are tourists. They want to go around, have adventures, see shit, experience life…
I mean, iirc she HAS spoken to (maybe even conversed with) the balls before…
When would you say she spoke to them rather than at them?
Cosmic Background radiation, zero-point energy generators, something like that? Basically infinite, but slow when you eventually need to recharge.
Maybe the other way around. She was just around some very active supers while a lot of supers are active in another area attacking other supers.
What if all other super are powered by the orbs which somehow register them as “crew”?
It might just be the orbs need to spend some points. There might be a limit as to how long she can put off upgrades
Bathroom break? Or low on power/ fuel.
Might turn out it powered by spicy food. That would explain so much.
They always seem to be standing far too comfortably inside Sydney’s hampster ball :(
Kenya can, and has, convert the kinetic energy of her impact on the ground into stored strength.
Xuriel likely either can use magic or summon some kind of device that allows her to fly, or at least land safely.
Only Sydney is at risk here, really. It is somewhat surprising that Maxima did not require Sydney to carry a parachute when she uses the blue orb. Then again from a comics illustrator’s point of view (as opposed to reality) this is understandable.
In fact most of Archon either can fly or has ways to land safely. Or they are effectively invulnerable, aggravatingly so or ordinary.
There’s never been a specific reason to suspect the reliability of the orbs, and Sydney now has automatic feather-falling, so she doesn’t even need to hold the flyball to land safely.
Nobody knows how the amaze-balls work either, so historic performance are no guarantees for the future.
:)
And the feather fall special is a function of the same orb that we now speculate may be failing in some way. It is possible, even likely, that if the blue orb stops working so those the special…
From the context and the artwork it seems clear that Sydney at least fears something is wrong with that particular orb at least, and her big tearful eyes strongly suggest that she fears the same problem may also affect the other orbs. Which, if there is indeed a failure, would make her no longer a powerhouse of Archon.
Now there is a specific reason to suspect the reliability of the orbs, and if it’s not resolved, there may be some reason for Sydney to carry a parachute in the future. But Max had no knowledge of this in the past, and thus had no reason to require Sydney to carry a parachute.
I shouldn’t have to explain how time, independent minds, or knowledge works, but far too many commenters seem to expect the characters to be able to predict the future and make decisions based on information they have no way of knowing at the time.
I am an engineer (granted architectural, not aeronautics), so I may be used to looking at this a little different. One of the things I learned that with every design you have to think of the failure states and how the design copes with that.
This includes calculating not only how the construction copes with the base (or static) load, but also with dynamic loads (like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. And in areas where this is a theoretical possibility floods). We also have to show how much of the structure of the design can be taken away before it becomes structurally unsound. And then design yet more into the building that prevents that critical structural element from being destroyed.
That water heater may be protected in every conceivable way against explosions but we still have to design a building around one in such a way that if one explodes it will not take the entire building with it.
As an engineer, when confronted with a device that I have not the first, middle or last clue how it works but that allows the user to fly arbitrarily high and at several times the speed of sound, I would most definitely consider: “what happens if the device fails”, since I have no way to estimate the likelyhood of such a failure.
So, if Sydney were working for me I would have told her ‘if you fly above 12000 you have to have a rebreather with you. If you fly above 20000 you have to have an oxygen mask with you ready for immediate use. Above 60000 you have to wear that oxygen mask at all time. A parachute is mandatory.’
I would have to look up the speed where protective gear would no longer help in case of a sudden failure of the shield orb, but I would tell her to wear some kind of protective gear that can at least mitigate the damage that would be caused by instant exposure of air going at whatever mach speed she was flying when the bubble disappears.
Engineers assume that Murphy’s law applies. Always.
Guess what? Maxima is not an engineer.
She’s a soldier. We’re damn well familiar with Murphy’s law and the Bad Idea Fairy. The later affects all privates without supervision and bored soldiers in general.
Case in point, we carried a case of oil and 20 gallons fuel dispersed through out the company as well as vehicle tools enough for field repairs in my company whenever we conveyed more than 100 miles.
This on top of even denser emergency rations above the basic mres we carried, even when we traveled with a mess section.
Because Murphy’s law said that they’d breakdown or get lost before we could get fed. Or our command forgot to include rations (3 times w 2 diff captains all because of the s3 and s4 majors pushed off the requests over political shit)
New officer got a long lecture on this from our new officers and old ncos. Heading to a winter reforge with just summer gear and one truck of mres (got lost 4 times on a straight north highway and broke down 3 more times too.)
Murphy’s law is why we packed 30 to 60 lbs more in rations ammo and sundries over the “basic soldier’s kit).
We even learned to make Pre-po caches with long term supplies when early movement orders started.
We also learned which forms were needed to pay civies in case of emergency feeds and housing.
A pizza hut and bk hosted us and ran out of food one time. 4 companies of soldiers coming through at same time can do that. Bk did our breakfast too, next morning.
As for plan on failure aka highrise jenga, many don’t realize that the WTC buildings were designed to pancake vs fall to a side like a felled tree. Gravity assisted demolition aka failure of static and dynamic support is required of any tall building especially those in dense urban areas and earthquake zones.
No one remembers after the first WTC bombing (van full explosives in parking garage) that congress asked what would happen if the buildings fell over. They were told, they’d never fall over, they were designed to collapse in place in those cases. Questions rapidly changed after that.
Assuming that the featherfall still works if the orb is depleted.
The blue orb is not glowing like the others. It would seem to indicate something is not fully functional.
Sydney took a passive that gives her automatic slow fall, even when not holding the orb.
Question is: if the orb were to power down, would the slowfall still work?
Sydney took a passive on the fly ball that gave her slow fall, even when she lets go of the orb.
This is the first indication anyone has had that the orbs have a cooldown, and since Sydney got Feather Fall that negates the reasoning for a parachute.
However, being able to land safely doesn’t help if you’re a few miles over the middle of the Atlantic when your plane runs out of gas.
Sydney picked up the “passive” for the flight orb, which turned out to be featherfall. Page 946.
If I recall correctly, while the shield ball will by default not take a chunk of the ground with them, she has demonstrated having it holding a bunch of sand on the bottom. The bottom isn’t being shown here, so I’m suspecting they’re also transporting sand, dirt, or wood, to give them a more comfortable place to stand.
That wasnt sand from the ground, if you’re talking about the press demonstration. That was sand that shot up at her after her cutting beam went out of control (‘explodey sand’). And after she put up her shield in a frantic flailing and hilarious jumble, sand was left in the shield bubble with her.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-168-a-harsh-lesson-in-orb-management/
(panels 3 and 7)
Battery getting low? It’s true she hasn’t remembered to put them on the charger them this whole while…
Ooooh!! Fly Ball has limitations!!!!
So, any bets on whether they need to recharge, or if it’s some other safety limit involving commanded speed, frontal surface area, and the resulting shockwave damaging the ground?
Maybe things will be better once Sydney stops to level up? Or maybe a good night’s sleep will recharge the orbs.
Is she indicating that she can’t find the Supersonic button on the flight orb?
Also, I think we are short a hand. One is holding flight, one is holding shields, one is holding the oxygen generator; oh, wait a second. What is she doing to keep the air breathable for the three of them?
Since she now has the passive of feather fall she can periodically release the flight orb to refresh the air while keeping the shield up while slowly dropping and presumably keep forward momentum. That was technically a possibility before she gained the passive given how much output the atmosphere orb appears to have.
The plan was to put a rebreather in a circular couch or pad so they didn’t have to lie down on a curved surface. Since they aren’t hanging at the bottom of a sphere, I presume they’ve got something going on that order, and I really doubt the O2 recycler was scrapped from the design.
She doesn’t need to constantly be holding the air ball. She typically switches the flight orb out briefly to refresh the air. This is made all the easier by having feather fall now, so she doesn’t start plummeting to the ground for the duration.
She didn’t “plummet” she literally went ballistic when she let go of the flight orb. That was one of her problems during the kaiju battle, the bad guys knew she was preparing to fire when she stopped maneuvering and started ballistic flight after letting go of the flight orb and grabbing the pew pew orb.
I think the problem is the orbs want to upgrade and can’t while they’re in use. So they are making Sydney feel distress.
I do wonder if the new feather fall only reduces downward momentum or if it prevents her from going ballistic as well. Probably only downward, but I can also understand it simply preventing dangerous levels of uncontrolled momentum (even if it was intentional.) There have been a couple instances that indicated it only effected downward.
I do think Sydney’s face look kinda disturbing in the final panel.
She’s going to cry, because no experience point.
For those wondering: they’re currently flying over St. Louis, Senegal. It’s on the North end of Senegal’s coastline.
Thought they were in Missouri…
Pity it’s not the capital where the U.S. embassy is. That would likely be a safer place to land and get bearings.
I have to admit that my image of Texas is a sort of mash-up of Friday Night Lights, Five Easy Pieces and Dallas…
Actualy depending on where you are, as you travel west from Far East Texas, you have the Forests of East Texas, then Texas pairie land, where they raised cattle then the other biomes, heck the coastal regions of Texas are kind of a reverse Florida that gets hotter and dryer down near Florida. The Houston area has wetlands, both natural and some man made because Rice cultivation was a thing, along with Sugar Cain, Cotton, and wheat.
I’ve driven from/to Dallas on I30, I35, and I75. I’ve ridden in a car with someone on I45 to Houston and on I35 to Austin. I’ve *seen* a lot of the Texas biomes, and I’ve talked to enough people from west Texas to know there’s a lot of desert west of where I’ve been. Yet my image of Texas is still basically all prairie land covered in oil fields as depicted on the intro to the soap opera Dallas.
I *know* I didn’t see that many oil fields, I *know* I saw a diverse assortment of biomes, but apparently soap operas one watches for a few days every year while one is visiting ones grandparents during ones formative years is more influential on the imagination than a decade of immersion.
Hmm, transform desert into arable land. That is what I think of for much of southern California. That really got going in the last hundred years, diverting the flow of rivers like the Colorado into the area around Los Angeles; now a lot of that irrigated land is in worse shape than it was before we started trying turn scrub land into farmland. Due to the massive water works projects, there are 17 million people or so in an area that would otherwise only be able to support 1 million. That is my thoughts on L.A.
Evidently everybody saw the movie Dune and never bothered to read the books. To transform desert mass into arable land takes an order of magnitude of potable water mass. And there already is a shortage of drinkable water. You can’t just apply NanoClay and turn the desert into arable land. If you search for such projects you find example sizes of just couple hundred hectares, because of the resources these “demos” consume.
Also, if you converted all of it you’d have a huge ecological disaster on your hands. Not only would you be removing the native environment for the Saharan species, you’d be connecting the Asian and European ecosystems to the African ones, *and* changing the climate of much of Asia (which would get more rain/water as it gets picked up and moved), *and* removing a vital part of the South American ecosystems. (Which actually rely on North African dust as fertilizer.)
And a lot of sand is blown straight across the Atlantic Ocean to South America, and to the Amazon forest in particular. Acting there as a massive dose of fertilser.
Of course with the rate at which the Amazon is beign destroyed and a current president who seems to consider it his duty to turn the entire forest into a mall and parking lot, the need for that constant stream of sand may soon be a thing of the past (and if anything South America may start supplying sand to either Africa or the Pacific (or just raise the Andes mountains by another couple of feet each year ..) ))
Nonetheless, according to National Geographic about 20 years back, Africa has eight different ecological patterns that it cycles through on geological time. Really great graphics. Iirc, about three of them had the desert there in the north.
There are no “Saharan species”. There are animals that live there, but they’ve just moved in, they didn’t evolve for the area. Reason is, evolution takes a while, tens of thousands of years for real speciation unless you want to get nitpicky about the number of hairs on a mouses muzzle or something, and the Sahara has only been there a relatively short while. To put it another way, that desert is human caused, and the Great Pyramid predates it by quite a lot.
Um… not an expert but I’m pretty sure the Sahara Desert, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t caused by man. The end of the Sahara Desert being green was about 8000 to 4500 years ago. It’s gone from arid to green in cycles over the past 4.6 million years of its existence.
I’ve read that there are some theories by archaologist David Wright, who says that overgrazing by nomadic humans helped to do this in small patches throughout the Sahara, but even without humans, the Sahara was going to turn back into a desert anyway. David Wright’s theories have not shown anything provable so far. And even he says that right now, his theories only have evidence only for correlation, not causation.
“Which came first? It’s hard to say with evidence we have now. “The question is: How do we test this hypothesis?” she says. “How do we isolate the climatically driven changes from the role of humans? It’s a bit of a chicken and an egg problem.” Wright, too, cautions that right now we have evidence only for correlation, not causation.”
“It’s important to note that the green Sahara always would’ve turned back into a desert even without humans doing anything—that’s just how Earth’s orbit works, says geologist Jessica Tierney, an associate professor of geoscience at the University of Arizona. Moreover, according to Tierney, we don’t necessarily need humans to explain the abruptness of the transition from green to desert.
Instead, the culprits might be regular old vegetation feedbacks and changes in the amount of dust. “At first you have this slow change in the Earth’s orbit,” Tierney explains. “As that’s happening, the West African monsoon is going to get a little bit weaker. Slowly you’ll degrade the landscape, switching from desert to vegetation. And then at some point you pass the tipping point where change accelerates.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-really-turned-sahara-desert-green-oasis-wasteland-180962668/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CBy%20overgrazing%20the%20grasses%2C%20they,explained%20by%20the%20orbital%20changes.
expert but=expert about
There are also studies that indicate making the Sahara arable will reduce or destroy the Amazon rain forest by eliminating its main source of nutrients.
Not to mention that with LA sucking up all the water in the state, practically, and the wonderfully idiotic state government demolishing dams and draining reservoirs, the entire state has an artificially created water shortage that the government is calling a “Drought”, even though the rainfall has been within historical averages for at least the last 10 years.
My roof has a half dozen leaks, so I know when it rains. If I have to empty the buckets, it’s raining. So I know for a fact there’s no “Drought” at least not in the bay area.
My garden grows because of water. So I know when it doesn’t rain. If personal experience matters only my sixty years sez it’s a droughty drought drought. And of course, *I* am more important than you, special snowflake me! Rainfall is part of the story, but who is drinking that water up is the other. We have more users than we have water.
The entirety of any water supply in the western half of the United States is artificial. You can dam or not (give a) dam. It’s still unsustainable. The arguments over who gets to drink that non-existent water have been around longer than either of us have been alive.
“The arguments over who gets to drink that non-existent water have been around longer than either of us have been alive.”Or even I. 71 years next month.
So far, it is a 22 year drought.
I suspect someone who is from a society that finished their home terraforming millennia before she came to be may not necessarily remember all of the ramifications of terraforming, assuming they even covered those details in her classes. It’s also probably important to remember that she’s from a world where magic is used actively and she’s part of a created race whose conceptual beginnings started with necromancy.
Uve Boll marathon? Jesus that’s a fate worse than death.
P.S. Don’t forget that every cactus is a Saguaro, with the big tubular torso and the arm-like branches on the sides.
I think it’s that the streaks go the wrong way — there’s a dot to the left, and a streak to the right, but the dots should be moving rightwards relative to our frame. (I mean, I guess I just assume they’re not flying backwards.)
Fun fact, if you use a first-shutter flash on a camera, that’s exactly the effect you get. Second-shutter is usually what you want, because it matches how your eyes and brains see things better. :-)
“Air particles”?
For a moment I thought they were drawn as if we were watching them through a video camera and those were lines of interference.
Vapour trails might be a better way to indicate the motion of flying in such a scenario.
Even if Sydney’s shield wouldn’t generate vapour in flight itself it could be interacting with low level clouds, or just ambient moisture, and causing them to form as they pass the widest part of it during flight.
Same here, thought SmugD was spying on them (again), to make sure they didn’t forget something and return and catch him letting Sandy go with a handshake
In Canada we joke we have 2 seasons. Winter and Construction. And in really bad years it’s only Construction.
If you liked “The Core” (which I did) I think you would really like “Moonfall”
You’re from Montreal aren’t you?
Idk, we make that exact joke in Alberta.
I lived in Newfoundland for a while and they have the same joke there, except back then it was Fishing instead of Construction because of the Great Banks before it was depleted. The old joke was you just needed a weighted basket and some rope to lower it from to get enough cod to feed a family for a year. Now there’re so few left the Canadian government has stopped all fishing on the Banks, destroying Newfoundland’s economy. Thing was Newfoundland’s economy was going to be destroyed anyway, but with the moratorium on fishing there was a possibility that limited fishing could resume eventually, where as it was the fish were going to be gone completely in a decade.
At first I thought ‘What if she’d accidentally grabbed a different orb, and was still using Fly/Shield?’ Then remembered the color stuff. Perhaps it’s not a recharge, and more ‘Orb is attempting to save specific locations for Warp’? Being able to instantly port between anywhere and Deus’ capitol would be useful, and save Maxima a flight every once in a while.
My first guess was Fracture Station Traffic Control–either having come up with a way to block her bookmark (and the ball is telling her by greying out that jump option or something), or they’ve gotten together the right equipment to follow her backtrace and jump to *her* and the ball is warning her about incoming.
If it’s not just that she hasn’t got her experience point to spend (thus the teary face) then it could be anyone warping in.
Texas has just about every type of topography you want, Hills, desert, pine forests, marshlands, coast land, tropical. scrub/grass land ,suburban. just pick what you want.
So true. I live in the Hill Country, sometimes commute to the west Texas desert/oil fields for work, have lived in Houston, even driven up the east side to Oklahoma to bury my grandfather. Yep, its even got swamps over near Louisiana.
It’s so hard to want to leave the Hill Country once you’re here. I do miss North Texas storms though. I still think West Texas is only good for travel, and even then, that’s limited. Would love to go back to the Davis Mountains and McDonald’s Observatory again some time, but Odessa area? Ugggggghhhhhhhhh.
There’s the trope about how big Texas is but even looking at a map you still don’t get a real feel for how big it is. I live in North Texas and driving across Oklahoma, Kansas is still closer than the gulf coast. Along with the different biomes there is also a deep difference between the urban and rural areas. On the one hand there is the urban sprawl of the Dallas-Ft.Worth, Houston and Austin areas and on the other there are counties near me that have a population of fewer than 400 people in the entire county.
You can drop Texas, into Alaska, and almost lose it. I have been to Alaska, it is over 1000 miles from the southern most part to the northern most part. ( Not precise distances.)
No real mountains. You have to go down in a canyon and pretend.
Something wrong with the orbs? Ok, that’s bad for all kinds of reasons
…maybe they’re low on power after glassing that large stretch of desert?
I say it’s a 50/50 split between Fly ball has a form of capacitor that is running dry after back to back flight there, flying while making obediek, flying while fighting fires, and flying back, or Sydney has noticed a new function of the fly orb and misinterpreted it
Ok, 75/25 split towards out of juice.
Or she may be overdue for an upgrade given all the stuff she’s been doing.
This was my initial take, but she hasn’t shown any concern before and seems to be getting more attuned to the orbs and using certain things intuitively. I’m now 90/10 on some kind of alert vs a new skill point.
First guess for the alert is “you seem to be taking the slow path back to a frequent waypoint, did you mean to use the causeway?”
If they have a Power-in-Reserve component, I’d like to put it out there that the central wheel of the Upgrade Chart is her power capacity. And if that is correct, does each additional point put there result in a squaring of available power? Because, maxed out, that would result in a truly stupendous amount of energy at her disposal.
Interesting tidbit from a physics question about the subject of high speed and plasma.
It may be that Mach 10 may already have enough compressive heating of air that it starts interfering with radio waves…
Maybe that mobile phone connectivity is not great for more reasons than getting out of range of ground stations far faster than the designers ever considered possible :)
At least at a ‘mere’ Mach 10 Sydney is not streaking through the air like an asteroid going the wrong direction …
An asteroid, plummets at above 40,ooo MPH, before striking the atmosphere!
Correct. We can see blue sky and clouds above them instead of the black of space in panel 1, which means they’re not very high. Not even high enough for the typical supersonic plane. I think that’s a mistake, you’d want way lower air pressure if you’d want to go that fast.
I was wondering why she didn’t go into low earth orbit for that distance and that speed.
In story reason? Because Sydney likely knows very little of orbital mechanics (imagine getting her to sit still for that class).
Out of story reason? Because flying this low looks nicer on a comic page. Mind, the 100km images of Falcon 9 launches look impressive on a computer screen but do not make the greates backdrop for conversation. (Dave did that one image like this when Sydney tried to escape the Alari homeworld and the invading Mechathulu’s. It looked great for that one picture to provide a sense of scale, but would not have worked for an entire page worth of panels)
While there are theories and practices to ‘terraform’ the deserts, the truth is, 1) no one wants to mess with things on that large a scale due to unforeseen consequences and 2) the foreseen consequences could be devastating. The fact is that the trade winds actually carry sand and other particulate from the Sahara all the way to north America which helps the fertilize the ground. So the drive currently is more ‘how do we use what’s there’ more than ‘how do we revert what’s there’.
There were studies on damming The Straight of Gibraltar and draining the Mediterranean.
I thing they decided against it.
Did you mean South America? Much of the nutrients in the Amazon come from the Sahara.
Pssht, speak for yourself, messing with things on a large scale is already what we have been doing since the industrial revolution, it is the cause of this whole global warming problem. I, for one, welcome massive geo-engineering projects like the Green Wall. Ill-advised projects like these are the only way to get humans motivated to stop boiling their future offspring. Sure, it will cause massive ecological catastrophies, but we’re very far beyond the point where one more massice ecological catastrophe is going to even move the extinction needle, so we might as well risk it.
If global warming is the problem, then there’s already a cheap, safe, and certain solution that doesnt’ require a bunch of political graft or money transfers.
1) Build a moonbase.
2) Manufacture orbital parasols.
Problem solved, with certainty, in less than 20 years, and we get all kinds of technological benefits as offshoots.
That was sarcasm, right?
Or perhaps you just have different ideas about “cheap” and “safe”.
And “certainty” and “political grift”, given how efficiently aerospace and military programs are usually approved and operated.
This is the third or fourth time someone has said this. As if somehow the countries that own the land are required to benefit countries on the other side of the world who *don’t* own the land that’s being blown away. Are those countries paying for this benefit, the big majority of which gets lost in the transport?
If you are greening this desert you are already destroying an ecosystem, the desert one. The greening of the desert does create a carbon dioxide sink. The carbon dioxide sink that people are implicitly supposing exists in the Amazon? It’s being massively chopped and burnt the fuck down by those countries that own that land. So the idea that “for the good of the world certain countries that would (if they even could) improve their land must suffer” is bankrupt unless you’re also going to go in and kill Brazilians until they -also- comply.
But of course applying the money to green the desert, that seems pie-in-the-sky.
I’m reminded of a science fiction story in which humans living on the moon plan to leave Earth by negating the forces that keep the moon in orbit. The question is raised as to whether they have any obligation to the Earth, which would suffer catastrophic ecological changes without the moon.
Anvil should ask “What do you mean by something’s wrong?!?”
Sydney should tell them that her fly orb isn’t ready or charged up….
Caltrop things:
I was thinking conker shells, or something similar… like… https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_sNpMFs3ox1I/TJIV5LthMHI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/gmpfOv-EIVY/s1600/P9160216.JPG for an example.
Not THAT. Those are amazing
It’s probably not an upgrade to the flight orb, she’d be happy about that and not consider it to be something “wrong”. It’s something else, maybe something she hasn’t experienced before.
So, the question is, is Sydney shaking the orb, or is the orb shaking like a phone would for a notification?
Is she getting another level up?
I’m thinking that’s the case she did use both the PPO and flight during the Darude battle. either it’s a level up or it’s giving her a warning of overuse and needs a “rest”.
So suppose they’re out over the ocean and the fly ball runs out of power. Do they sink or does the shield bubble float?
Oh it floats, remember when Sydney and Max found out about the “air orb”? She bobbed up and splashed out a fair amount of water from the pool and soaked Vari and her book. Then proceeded to prank Harem by blasting her from under the water with the air orb blowing her bikini top off. Nice prank by any viewpoint but Harem.
Harem is well-positioned to consider many points of view though.
The shield bubble floats. We learned that during the pool episode where she had to be chained down.
My wife grew up in Houston and said YES when I showed her the gumballs.
Although nobody would leave the house in bare feet due to all the fire ants.
Funny fact, a lot of westerns if no5 most were shot in Spain. It was cheaper for most Italian producers to go there than fly over to the states. Kind of like how a lot of 90’s/2000 scifi tv shows were shot in vancouver.
It’s also why they are called “spaghetti western”.
At least, as far as i know.
Most westerns weren’t spaghetti westerns, though; we just don’t really remember the old Hollywood westerns as well because they were so disposable.
Unitedstatian ‘westerns’ were filmed in Culver City. This city has long since been paved over.
Italy, not Spain.
They used the deserts in Spain for western like biomes, indeed.
Cyriel knows the featherfall cantrip and Sydney has passive slowfall unlocked recently. None of them are in danger.
Waning orb power makes the most sense. The PPO could easily expend the most power and she just spent who knows how long with it on full wide beam.
Guessing this is more of that intuitive sense she gets from the filling of the centre ring. Dabbler should have a featherfall type spell if they’re caught out, but best not to be in the middle of the ocean if you need to use it. If we presume the orb shut-off at night is also a recharge and she’s been sleeping with them activated by tapping them to her hands that could also be a factor.
Whatever the case I’m guessing they probably don’t want to be entering a random African nation randomly. Particularly if Sydney’s power cuts out and it’s only Kenya and Dabbler to rely on in a pickle.
Gumballs…. Ohhh, when you said it, I was thinking like the resin that drops from eucalyptus, like literal gum. I got those growing up in central California too. I used to use them with my He-man figures as morning star flails. That and the little plastic swords used in cocktails for cherrys and lime wedges.
I’ll note that way back at the beginning of the comic, when speculating on the functions of the two unknown orbs “power sources for the others” was one of the offered options. We still have one unknown orb; this might be the moment we see it work as a power source for the others. “Power source” would fit the spaceship theme of the orbs as a whole.
Point of fact: that concrete spillway IS the LA river. It’s dry like, 90% of the year.
But yeah, I live in Central California. Most folks only see SF and LA, so they have no idea that the state is LOTS of farmland. Salad Bowl of the nation. You want tomatoes? We’ve got them.
There is a very dramatic and beautiful spillway down the Tehachapi Pass in which the California Aqueduct water is slowed down from being pumped up and over the pass from the Central Valley into the LA basin and I was supposing that’s what Dave B was talking about. I had never seen the movie so I went and looked on YouTube.
Yuppers Robin Bobcat is correct. The actual Los Angeles River is used in the film, that is where the action takes place and that -is- what it looks like.
I must say, the vote incentive is quite impressive
In which it turns out that the orbs run on a non-renewable fuel source, which given their inscrutable origins no one knows how to resupply, and they’re now running on empty. Sydney is forced to retire from superheroics… the end.
Well, the first part seems likely, anyway.
“You have no free credits remaining, please deposit 10e5000 petajoules to continue.”
You haven’t seen Uwe Boll until you’ve seen the Rampage series, Tunnel Rats and Blubberella
I lived in Texas for about a decade,m and if someone mentions Texas my first thought is pf oil rigs. I worked on them.
One of my favorite insults to this day is telling someone they are “As Street Smart as a Texas Armadillo” Those are the ones with tire tracks through them. In a decade I saw one living armadillo.
The problem with that one is that most folks don’t know just how mal-adapted armadillos are to highways…
Truth. They wander onto the pavement to eat the insects that collect on the still warm pavement but their eyesight isn’t great and their startle response is to jump straight up into the air.
And up here in Washington State we see squashed porcupines and skunks. These aren’t stupid, or course. It’s that they evolved defenses against predators which used to work against anything up to cougars and bears. But now they have two-ton steel predators that run at 60 mph…
do we need a rendition of dead skunk? or does that song stink?
Loudon Wainwright III thanks you for remembering his song, Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road.