Grrl Power #1105 – Runaway conflation
These guys really are a liability. He’s stretched too thin, but when upper management says they want two guards on every door, the correct response should be “Well now, do you want one guard per door, each of them having an IQ of 97, or do you want two guards per door with IQ’s in the mid-to-low 80s?” The problem is that they already had him guarding the motor pool and the elevator doors on every floor plus one of them is out taking care of one of managements cats etc etc, so he wasn’t focused enough to consider how stretching himself further would affect him.
Harem loses physical strength with each dupe, but if she exists as only a mono-entity, she’s actually quite strong, like not quite Spider-Man strong. Strong enough to roll a car over relatively easily, not strong enough to lift an average car over her head though. Her pattern is that she slowly builds strength over time whether she works out or not, and when she exceeds about 125% of normal strength for a human female of her current age, she can create a new dupe. The extra strength bleeds off into the new dupe. With her current five dupes, she could actually do it as soon as she hit 120% strength, with the extra 20% x 5 going into the new dupe and leaving her with six 100% strength dupes, but she likes having a little extra overhead. Each new dupe she makes slows down the rate at which she accrues new strength though, so you don’t have to worry about any sort of geometric Harem-splosion.
Goon Squad has the huge advantage of being able to duplicate any clothing or equipment he’s holding (though it reverts to that butter-mint stuff after about an hour if he leaves it lying around, and then eventually crumbles into nothing) But as we’re learning, his mental acuity suffers with each split. It’s hard to quantify, but it’s like an IQ point for every 8-10 dupes? He doesn’t seem to have an actual upper limit, but at a certain point he’d start just standing around staring at the wall and not have the wherewithal to continue making copies. If you need someone to capsize a medium sized boat, he’s your man. If you need someone to quickly reshelve all the books in a library alphabetically by author, he is not your man.
“Let’s see, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, Joe… ♪ a real American hero ♫ … Heh, those guys had a lower body count than the Salvation Army. . . . What was I doing?”
The November Vote Incentive is up!
I went a little simpler with the art this time, which is to say I didn’t add like 9 passes of lighting and detail work. I wasn’t trying to chintz out on the time input or anything, I’d been browsing around ArtStation since I like torturing myself with all the amazing art there, and found a few people who do nice clean styles that are more Arcane (the League of Legends Netflix show) than Love, Death and Robots, and by LD&R I mean the ones that are like “Look at how realistic our skin textures are!” and not the ones that are more Pixar-y or just like 2D cell art or whatever.
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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Crashing through the sky
Comes the fearful cry
MAXIMA (MAXIMA!)
MAXIMA (MAXIMA!)
Nowhere to run
Nowhere to hide
Villains crying far and wide
Lemme guess, Sabaton?
The long version intro for G.I. Joe.
Specifically the opening song for GI Joe the Animated movie. A cartoon opening so utterly patriotic that you are not allowed to watch it without a bazooka in one hand, an M16 in the other, while eating a medium rare steak with fireworks going off overhead. Also a bald eagle must either be perched upon your shoulder, on your arm, or circlong overhead. If circling overhead, the bald eagle must also be carrying the american flag in its talons. Otherwise it must be situated on a wall behind you. When I watched it, I spontaneously gave birth to 13 marines, each of whom sported a full beard and grew into adulthood within 50 seconds, one second for each state in the U S of A. Segeant Slaughter delivered them by yelling at me to walk it off afterwards or be labelled a dirty commie red.
*long suffering sigh*
…Gen X military brat can confirm…
Yknow what, I think everyone must experience this song so that the original post can be appreciated in its entirety!
Everyone, get your bald eagles, flags, bazookas, M16s and steaks ready. Ladies in the audience, put down some sheets for when your water breaks.
https://youtu.be/4Ah2I166f_U
Wow!
I had never seen that before.
I’m neither American nor female, but I think even my waters broke.
I swear, GI Joe’s dress code is even more lax than ARCHON’s. :)
its all that freedom. it means no uniforms (except for the cool ones from the prior groups.) I have been reminded that analyzing GIJoe in a logical manner with result in my logical self being taken out for some drinks by some marines and forced to attempt to drink them under the table. (this never ends well)
I do wonder what been happening with the series the last time I saw any gi joe content in regulatory was a modern take called like renegades or something
last I saw the cartoon was being posted to youtube full episodes by Hasbro or someone with authority to do so. oh and for like 20 bucks you can buy some recreations of classic figures. (price may be wrong)
Sabaton is always a good guess though.
i actually heard the Underdog theme. it fits that too.
I now want to petition Sabaton to write the GI Joe anthem we deserve.
…
And not in the nice way.
The first line made me think of the reading rainbow song…
Sounds like the old Cobra part of the theme from GiJoe animation
So that’s why they argue with themselves: they forget they are the same person!!
Counterpoint: I would totally argue with a dupe of myself, fully cognizant of being the same person.
I think my cat is smarter than the Goon Squad guards on display here. and I mean the intelligence that she allows us to see. her real intelligence is of course much greater. all hail our furry overlords! so, I would expect that at least some of the comentariat would recognize the dupes of themselves. whether we get along with ourselves is… a question I suspect is better left unanswered.
Makes me wonder when this comic is going to get it’s Flerkin.
Every comic needs a harmless looking pet that’s ready to eat the entire universe.
*adorable cabbit noises*
Now I am wandering if any of those stories, shows, or movies where someone (usually a kid) brings home a “mysterious creature” were *and including both the comedy and horror titles*, a shapeshifting predatory creature pretending to be a regular animal. I know some where the kid is just stupid and doesn’t realize the fang faced creature with glowing eyes is a predator, but none off the top of my head where its imitating/mimicking a regular animal as a cover via shapeshifting.
Lilo & Stitch probably counts as innocent kid, although Stitch does change appearance to look more normal. Sadly the only other one that comes to mind is Ron Weasley and Scabbers.
ah yeah, the kid brings home something weird and either has to hide it from *most people* either completely or disguising it. Was such a trope by then, there were so many kid shows and movies in the 1980s doing this (why Amphibia has that line where X sees Ann hiding the planter family on Earth that its so 1980s), even into the 1990s, like the original Digimon when they got to Earth trying to pass off the Digimon as stuffed animals (this is why newer shows either make it so they can hide in the digivice or just go invisible).
But most of the 1980s are kid and family films, its hard to imagine someone *except Gremlins as there was no effort to hide it, the people just didn’t follow the rules*, hasn’t done a kid brings home something and has to hide it but its really a monster…well..The Hatching kind of did this in act 1…but I am not counting that as that was a surreal fever dream of a movie and didn’t so the disguise part.
I am making a note for myself, short story idea, dumb kid brings home a pet rock, keeping it in a tank or cage, because kid saw the rock eating bugs and leaf litter. Parents don’t believe kid and chalk it up to overactive imagination, not paying attention as bugs thrown into tank DO vanish.
*kid found a tiny baby Imitator in the woods*
mimic as a fish tank treasure chest…keeps eating the little plastic scuba diver, leaves fish be, ’cause it thinks it’s the dungeon boss
That is a cute idea, and you have to make like little hotdog and sushi men to make sure it eats properly.
Leela and Nibbler.
Nah, Nibbler doesn’t change appearance, he just eats everything and poops out dark matter balls
His people ARE well known for their prodigious pooping.
Yes, warship Cabbits count.
hmm,
Rhulan in tiny harmless looking familiar form, just an adorable squirrel-fox, nothing to see here…totally not capable of blasting an armada of alien ships out of orbit, nope…
Corroboration: I argue with myself even *without* being…fragmented.
my rule is when its a three way argument, I get help. then we looked up what help costs… and now there are 4 of us.
I don’t think they forget they are the same person, but it sounds like they don’t all get the same shared memories and experiences, which can lead to different random thoughts popping up. And without a linked mind such as Harem has they need to use old fashioned words to communicate between themselves.
maybe they get some dissociative personality disorder, like they know they are the same person with same experiences but stay separate long enough and that starts to drift until they defragment.
I realize that Goon Squad is probably litteraly an inverse ninja style of enemy. If his IQ goes down the more copies he makes, then you could assume that the more goons taken out the remainder will become stronger and smarter. Interested to see that play out!
This was, mostly, a joke, interesting to see how many took it seriously…
How many powers does Harem have? First she can split into 5 and Teleport, now she has Stacked Super Strength when she one person that spreads evenly to each copy? At this rate you’re going to have to have Harem Encyclopedia to keep up!
This was addressed really early on, in 2014 – she’s about on a par with Anvil when she’s all one, but she feels like she’s wearing blinders if she only has one sensorium (which is a word I gratuitously lifted from Adam Warren’s Empowered!). Every “popped” Harem doubles the strength and toughness of the remaining Harems by way of… redistributed phlebotinum, which makes her able to go from “normal fit 19yo girl” to “I WILL BREAK YOU”.
While Empowered is a fine place to expand your vocabulary, he didn’t invent sensorium himself. It’s actually pretty common in old-timey scifi in the pulp era and a decade or two thereafter. EE “Doc” Smith uses it often enough to notice.
Now, “supranym” is probably a neologism coined by Warren, and one I try to use regularly.
out of curiosity, what’s the antonym for supranym?
The antonym of supranym is just given name. or Penname.
Villainym maybe? Ghost Writer’s supranym is also his pen name.
Huh. TIL. Warren makes up so many neologisms it’s hard to tell which are his and which aren’t in his prose. Except for the Caged Demonwolf, he has some deep vocabulary pulls but little to none of it is neologisms, heh.
EE Doc Smith — there’s a blast from the past…
“sensorium” is plain English, of the Latinate intellectualism variety. Used in classical psychology, not sure how far back it goes. Quick google says late 17th century.
More than that, it’s just a standard Latin construction, from “sentio, sentire” plus the ordinary suffix “-orium”, which just means ‘place where [ ] happens’ (in this case, ‘place where sensing happens’). Lots of medieval philosophers would talk about the sensorium of an organism. Later, Newton would famously describe absolute space as “God’s sensorium” (I assume the fame of that description is how Google gave you 17th century).
I believe it was explained as her TECHNICALLY only having one power: the ability to teleport her bodymass out to create duplicates. Those duplicates can just appear at significant distances and at different orientations, and when the bodymass is stacked in fewer bodies those bodies end up stronger. “Teleporting” is just despawning a body and immediately respawning it somewhere else.
I’m not sure how the details of each copy keeping her own gear works. Presumably fresh copies are naked, but what are the limits on what she can store in this same hammerspace? If she despawns a body carrying heavy weights, does that weigh down the others? Could she despawn a copy carrying a cloned mass of her flesh and use that to artificially boost her other bodies?
she also technically teleports the local area at her discretion allowing here to carry her clothing and gear for her normal clones
she can also increase the amount of extra mass she can port by dematerializing one of her clones
that element of her power was explained in part in the restraunt parking lot fight way back when
At her current power level, with everybody else put away naked, a single clone can move one rather light person, but maxima is way too brick to be moved.
But yes, everything of Heram does feed back to one badly understood and explained power that she’s spent most of her life working to understand and master. (Subjective time, as she has more time the more clones she has.)
The interesting thing is because it’s still one mind running on the hardware of multiple brains she’s not any smarter or dumber when she stockpiles. Bet you that new clones are a bit awkward at first though.
I figure each brain is mostly used for local processing to cover everything that body has to do. I suspect all of them in one place, concentrating on one thing would be able to do slightly better at problem solving then just one of them with the rest put away, because I have faith the slightly different point of views she’s enforced in herself are a skill that HAS to pay off eventually.
I also notice that the author has said she COULD make another now, at 120%, if somebody drugged all but one body and started to try to get information out of the last one maybe. She probably takes a bit of comfort in knowing she has an emergency out.
For all we know she’s one of the players at Halo’s board game night, and it’s already happened…
“ I’m not sure how the details of each copy keeping her own gear works.“
According to Harem during the restaurant fight to the inventory sergeant guy, and earlier to Sydney, Harem has a weight limit of about 50lbs, and that weight limit includes her own clothes and hear as well. When teleporting with something heavy she had to remove her boots and she said she can teleport more naked.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-207-ill-take-six-of-these-twelve-of-these/
(Panels 7 and 8)
Where does 50lb come from? It isn’t said in your link, and earlier Harem claims Peggy’s Barrett, which is
26lb, is right up to her weight limit.
It was said in the comments section several times, and by DaveB in a blurb (although I’m not sure where – it’s harder for me to find blurbs than it is to find stuff in the comic), that she could port with her 50 lbs (including her own clothes), although that was based on one body. With five bodies it’s less (approximately 30 lbs, including her own clothes). Peggy’s Barret weighs about 12-14kg (or 26-30lbs) according to what DaveB said Peggy uses – “Peggy uses a Barret XM-500, which is a bullpup version of the M82A1. It’s also shorter than the M82A1.” – DaveB
Havent been able to find the exact quote yet by DaveB saying this, but I remember reading it. I have so far only found quotes by other readers who are quoting DaveB who have said 50 lbs is her max that she can port with her.
more support for the idea that the management of this enterprise is incompetent. these guys apparently can throw away a super yacht and still have significant capital. Otherwise the ‘paper trail’ the yacht has would have led right here before they raided ArcHQ (operation Greater Fool). I’d like to slip a note to the prosecutor/judge- make the top level managers write by hand, legibly, in its entirety, in at least two languages, the Evil Overlord list 10 times a year every year they are incarcerated. (life without parole please). also, if the records exist of the youth and ‘inexperience’ of the contributors that should be drilled into the managers heads. I hereby nickname this group … The Council of Hubris (TCoH). May it be stamped on the leaderships foreheads.
You’re assuming they didn’t just murder the random rich NPC who was the yacht’s previous owner and keep operating it using their now vacant identity
I am certain killing the owner and taking possession of the yacht under the now vacant identity is quite a bit harder than it at first appears. I’ll bet you are far from the first to think of it.
Sooo … you want to make them more competent in case they ever get out?
given some recent examples I doubt that they will make the required connection. Instead they will double, triple, etc etc add nauseating down on their flawed ideas. they will hire consultants to confirm their biases. somehow upon reflection they will see they have done nothing wrong.
So the Sentinel Comics RPG has a villain archetype called Legion, whose schtick is making duplicates of themselves as expendable minions. Their status die (which is a measure of how generally competent they are) starts out at a d12 and drops by a die size based on how many minions they have active, eventually reaching the minimum d4 (which is incredibly bad by super-being standards) when they have 9+ dupes around.
Goon Squad’s got what, dozens of copies at the moment? Yeah, that checks out.
The Overlord archetype has the same varying status die thing but inverted, starting at a d4 when there are no minions to boss around and maxing at d12 with 9+ lackeys. They’re pretty much power-mad office managers, utterly useless without someone else to do the actual work for them.
Isn’t “power-mad office manager” an oxymoron?
No. Though it may be redundant.
_Super_ redundant.
Now that was an interesting webic, wonder if it’s still going?
The poor guy who could shoot laser beams like Cyclops, unfortunately, this guy’s beams started from behind his eyes (which, as one would imagine, destroyed his eyes making him blind)
Yes it is, and updates regularly. However, and personal opinion here, it has been on this time travel storyline lately longer than it needed to be, but feels like it may be getting close to the end of that storyline.
I admit that I liked it better before the other two authors/artists left it solely in Mr. Sausage’s hands, and it transitioned from a daily joke strip to long-running storylines. Which is really weird for me, because normally I prefer long stories over daily joke strips.
yeah its an each their own like, with Erma, I like seeing the extended family, but many years of seeing cute and joke comics go dark and then die shortly after is leaving me uneasy about the current story arc of what was before mostly one shots of *spooky and silly* comic strip stuff.
that stuff just feels like it one day you were reading Peanuts and suddenly Charlie Brown was abducted by kidnappers and you spent the next year and a half of him locked in a dark room being treated horribly with all the other characters trying to find him…
I think the term I am looking for is tone whiplash, but I also have the sinking feeling thanks to reading so many online comics that ended up just dying off or being abandoned because the author wanted to do something more serious, longer arcs, darker storylines, but rather than create a new comic for that subjected their existing work to it and they just lost interest, or their bean counter basically died as a result etc…
Ladies and gentlemen. the warehouse club can of whoopa** has been opened. we would ask that truly egregious use of force be minimized. also, cop cars are expensive. save as many as you can.
It’s a pity Goonsquad’s weakness was outright stated here, I figured it out on the first panel of this page and felt all proud of myself.
On an unrelated note, I wonder what the limits on his gear duplication are. Can he replicate the effects of artifacts the original was holding? He carries grenades, so presumably chemical compounds are replicated: making him a power source when you hand him a (properly shielded) piece of plutonium or alien-sourced phlebotonim and have a few copies take it into the reactor.
… Imagine if HE was the one who found the orbs…
I had another question on his powers.
So his mind fragments, if one body dies do the rest get the fragments back or is he suffering data loss with each ‘death’?
Earlier page does suggest that he gets the fragments back.
Either that or his equipment has cameras and video display, but I doubt that.
…if Ted recovers & integrates the knowledge & experience of his dupes…
Ted Prime might legitimately be the most dangerous sob on the face of the planet. Like…Batman levels of dangerous. Like, might actually be able to beat Math in a stand-up fight and out-think alleged super-intelligence. Deus levels of dangerous.
Which is why his handlers make sure he always has lots of duplicates out. Stupid people are easy to control.
We know that the Dupes get increasingly stupid as he makes more. We haven’t confirmed that for Ted himself, who seemed pretty unaffected the one time we saw him.
That sounds like the Naruto Shadow clone training bit. The only downside to training like that for Naruto is exhaustion
I think he also got sensory overload when he used the clones (or rather, when he dispersed too many at one time) for training rather than just fighting.
Eh, continuity of consciousness is an illusion anyway. You actually do wake up as a (slightly) different person each morning. Ted just takes this into the physical realm.
I’ll just leave this here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F84WapAH7M
Procure half a critical mass of uranium. Materialize, say, four goons facing each other, the copies masses in contact. The ultimate in gun-type atomic bombs.
Explosions happen because some form of matter reconfigures into a form that occupies more space — such as a small amount of radioactive metal turning into a large amount of superheated gas.
So, the uranium goes supercritical and explodes. A shockwave of superheated gas expands at the speed of sound — and kills the goons. Unlike when they drop the object, death results in it getting Buu’ified (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YbZ4gALvW4) instantly.
So, all of that rapidly expanding superheated gas suddenly condenses into small butter-mints — and the resulting vacuum causes an implosion.
So it would be damaging, sure, but only within a very localised area.
(The real question is whether the radiation would also turn into candy…)
Other people figured it out, or at least guessed, on the first page he appeared. Some people would never figure it out without it being spelled out. Which, if any, should the author cater to?
This raises the question of why Goon Squad is doing lackey work, instead of lounging on a beach somewhere, having grown rich from a highly successful counterfeiting business.
Did you miss the part where the gear he copies turns to candy after a few hours of being left unattended?
He could still take a bank note and deposit it a few hundred times before the copies vanish.
It’s possible he tried something similar, and is forced to work with this group as a result of getting caught pulling that.
So? Buy gift cards with cash. The store has no way of knowing whose cash payment evaporated in the register, they’ll probably think they’ve got a clerk stealing from the till.
He probably thinks that’s too much like a day job. And the expendable goon gig probably pays really well.
Play slot machines with your fake cash, it’s literally profit.
Casinos would catch onto cash disappearing from machines and isolate the common player from security footage, within days at most. Also it takes a long, long time for a given machine to pay out.
All this means is that he’s leaving no evidence at best, and a calling card at worst.
Forget counterfeiting. He could make a fortune doing legitimate manufacturing. He can make a hundred copies of himself and staff a one-man factory.
Speaking of using powers to make money legitimately…..
Remember the guy who could refill any container from the Council? One wonders why he didnt buy gas station. He could keep refilling the underground storage tanks and have made a fortune. :)
Assuming the oil companies didn’t come after him. Success comes with its own risks and costs, and if you’re not prepared to handle them, you can end up worse than you were before.
Why would he announce it?
How else would people know he was selling the oil?
Do you ask the gas stations where they get their gasoline from?
No, but if you heard of this new, ‘independent’, gas station then the gas companies will hear about it as well and go investigate
This is exactly why it won’t work. Gas stations tend to have licenses to operate and contracts with different distributors and refineries, going to be noticed really quick (maybe a few months) that a gas station (especially if they keep prices low) is on no-ones routes.
That’s the point
I know, I was agreeing with you and expanding on what you said.
Not use to people agreeing with me :(
Nobody else is used to agreeing with you either. It may be a hard adjustment for everyone, if you keep being rational and reasonable.
Torabi cmon, that was mean.
It was intended to be complimentary! But I can see that it doesn’t necessarily read in the tone I intended it. Probably could have used a smiley or two.
if he ran an independent station maybe. but the distribution network knows exactly how much gas goes when and where. they know it by mass so the summer/winter problem doesn’t happen. I had family that worked in the computer room of an oil company.
Or work for an oil company. So much less expensive than drilling.
Oh wait he cant do the type of volume that an oil company would need.
He’d have to find someone who drinks gasoline (or at least establish that such a person exists). His drunken wish specifically enables him to refill drinks.
His wish was to refill any liquid. Not just drinks.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-453-i-am-the-refiller/
(Panel 5)
Which _would_ be hellabroken, but as he said himself, he can’t handle anything even remotely like industrial volume. But I imagine he certainly can manage a tank of gas, which means he’s probably saving a nice chunk of his income on that, in addition to never needing to buy more than one drink at a time.
I’m still annoyed with you. But I refuse to “stay mad.”
The discussion on that page already covers the 10 most expensive liquids in the world, but I’m realizing that he really ought to be making periodic stops to local hospitals or research labs. No need to donate his own blood, just refill a couple tanks of O- or rare antivenins and save hundreds of lives a year.
Horseshoe crab blood, it’s used in testing vaccines to make sure they aren’t contaminated. It’s one of the most expensive liquids out there. They can harvest from the crabs but they get only small amounts because the crabs are slow breeders. So draining them dry is out of the question. Nor is raising them in farms they don’t make it captivity. Sadly they are die-ing out so the blood they have will go from $15,000 to the sky. here’s some info on it: https://bigthink.com/health/horseshoe-crab-blue-blood/
Oh also:
Vintage wines.
Expensive Medicines in liquid form
Venom from poisonous creatures used to make antidotes for venom. I remember reading that scorpion venom costs around $39 million per gallon.
Or just the antidotes themselves.
Liquid gold?
Or open a store that recycles and sells printer ink. It costs more than gas. $2700 a gallon for even just black ink. Almost no overhead.
Im not annoyed with you. I still like ya.
I’m definitely assuing if he can fill a tank of gas, which is 12-14 gallons, he could make 12-14 gallons of scorpion venom. At 39 million dollars a gallon, he could make $468-546 million by selling it to a pharmaceutical company in one day. :)
Plus probably can get more in the future if he does a regular series of sales to the company.
If he really wants to make a fast sale, he can offer a gallon for a bargain price of $20 million per gallon, which is almost half what it’s worth.
One assumes that after duplicating the phone each dupe logs it into a unique instance of the messaging app used to send that pic
Also, the three character numeral suffix would seem to indicate that 1000 dupes might be a hard limit (assuming the original version is 000)
Or that the limit is more than 99 but maybe less than 1000, but at any rate more than 2 digits base ten.
It is hard to judge here as on one hand… Evil Inc is paying a single man rather than a bunch of men as they get an endless swarm of disposable henchmen who do not fear death and can be literally thrown away as cannon fodder as you may just need to equip one man instead of one hundred.
Down side? Like every big business they try cutting costs to the point it hurts themselves… Why have five really good soldiers who can think for themselves and pay for ninety five other soldiers when you can have a hundred idiots who can shoot really well and are not smart enough to question or ethically challenged tactics and methods?
Not sure if a hundred is the right amount, but the idea stands.
same idea as the army of robots, clones, insectoid drones, weird monster things, etc…
low cost, low training, disposable, but at the end its human wave tactics, and they can’t reason well enough to realize a plan is going to fail or question what is right before them. Its the whole (we got past the evil space tyrants army of bug men because we wore the same pheromone they and the officers of the evil empire use to tell friend from foe…maybe the evil empire shouldn’t have let us gun down thousands of them and take their bodies back for study.
Cost isn’t the only factor. There are other issues with hiring regular people as goons – you have to separately ensure their loyalty, and they aren’t disposable: There’s a limited supply of people who won’t be missed, and if your goons keep dying, morale as well as availability of willing replacements will decrease.
I think we can all agree on one point: shooting really well isn’t part of their skillset, either.
“Lower body count than the Salvation Army” is sadly not zero. The SA’s homeless shelters treat LGBT people like shit.
That’s the point
Wait, you think no one died in G.I. Joe? o_O
The cartoon, not the comics, famous for its bloodlessness.
Makes “The A Team” look like a bloodbath. You know, the series where you could fire a minigun into a crowded shopping mall and hit absolutely nobody.
A Gold Digger Christmas Special Comic had the main characters traveling through obvious parodies of other entertaining franchises, one of which has them fighting Nobra Tattlers and them discussing whether they’re ‘can’t hit a skycraper’ cartoon versions of the deadly accurate comic book versions (turns out to be the latter).
the cartoon is hilarious with the 1980s anti-realism style censorship. You see helicopters get blown up and then a second later a parachute is falling down from above the explosion as if everyone on a helicopter (not expecting to be shot down) somehow managed to no just jump but invisibly eject up *from a helicopter* and get to safety.
Same reason He-man and She-ra never used their swords AS swords against a living opponent, the Ninja Turtles never cut something alive with their weapons,
-and yet thanks to being robots the Transformers got away with a lot for *implied* gore and violence.,,,or directly blasting someone apart and mutilating their corpse into something else…decapitations, etc…because not human.
The original Ninja Turtles comic had serious amounts of gore. They were Ninjas, they use sharp weapons to kill people.
yes the comic, the cartoon however was aimed at very small children and outside the first season having an arc the rest of the series was (mostly) episodic and to sell toys. The comic changed for a while, but did go back its old ways after a while. Sort of like the situation with the Mask before and after the Jim Carrey movie.
The kid-safe short-lived version of Bucky O’hare was like that. Unlike the graphic novel where toad stormtroopers died in glorious explosions getting shot in the cartoon always showed the ship disintegrate while the toad pilot got safely sealed into a bubble for later recovery. About the only serious deal was the cyborg toad stormtrooper since he’s obviously someone that was crippled and near death pre-start of show and rebuilt into a cyborg.
Well to be fair, you can actually eject from some helicopters. Only a few specific Russian ones, though.
*giggling* just imagining a helicopter specifically designed to be ejected from. Looks kind of like a cross between a lawn mower and Snoopy’s house in my head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTnnXhcmSgY
That’s amazing, thanks for sharing. Time to dust off my box of drone parts.
what if you connected the drone parts to a kite? (like one of those long dragon kites)
Thinking anything too ribbon-like would result in a “no capes” event. :( But a dragon kite with a rigid frame core and embellishments too short to tangle could actually work.
Golobulus died in the cartoon movie. Killed by Lt. Falcon. And I think Sgt Slaughter killed Nemesis Enforcer after punching him repeatedly for Duke, for Falcon, for himself, and for the US of freaking A, but you dont actually see him die.
Originally Duke died too, killed by Serpentor as he saved his half-brother, Lt. Falcon, but they edited it to say he lived because test audiences hated that he died.
Oh and Cobra Commander became a snake, but he must have gotten better because he was in Transformers decades later as an old man called “Old Snake.”
From what I heard the decision to rewrite the scene of Duke’s death to him slipping into a coma *and make that shooting star symbolism later in the movie make no sense as a result* was also impart due to the backlash Transformers got from the deaths in their movie, namely Optimus Prime.
Speaking of cross-overs with other cartoons, want a really weird one. Look up the Hanna Barbera Godzilla cartoon cross-over with Gi Joe *they aren’t in it, just mentioned, but Cobra is…and its also noted as the only episode of this series where Godzilla actually goes up against human built weaponry.
Godzilla (a kaiju) vs human built weaponry sounds like the plot to Pacific Rim.
The point being it’s the only time in the cartoon Godzilla fights things like tanks and helicopters and planes and such.
OMFG! X’D
I was reading this line for the check in window at a grocery warehouse, and started laughing so hard everybody just _stopped_.
…I had to explain/share, and I think we have more fans now. ^_^’
Ah yes, the various aspects of the internal interminable dialog laid bare. It’s worse that getting caught having a conversation with the dog, the cat and the parrot. Some very interesting takes on the developement of what some call rock and roll. p.s. I’m not crazy, you’re the one that’s crazy.
Given the nature of his powers it is probably better to say that Goonsquad has the reverse problem of Harem’s powers in that he isn’t actually getting dumber but his state of awareness is getting fragmented the more he duplicates himself so he feels “off”. Like a million copies of himself would stand around in a catatonic state the same way any “normal” functioning mind would if it suddenly found itself looking through two million sets of eyes.Thinking of it in botony terms Goonsquad is a singular plant growing in many directions while Harem on the other hand seems to create a completely seperate duplicate, kind of like when you do one of those cuttings from a plant that still technically the same plant but can grow in a seperate pot
Mentally it puts me into mind of someone dreaming.
You are less likely to question weirdness in a dream and even forget that every character in your dream is YOU. That monster, person you are talking to, stuffy aristocrat asking you to impersonate the princess, whatever weirdness, in the end this is all being created by your brain.
Its like dissociative personality disorder, of the type where you all know you are the same person, aware of it, even have the same memories, but your outlooks and reasoning and such are what is varied so you feel like different people.
Imagine duplicating and you have the hangry you talking with a version with a slightly higher libido, or a version that is vegan and another that is a vampire etc… outlooks vary, but in the end its these sleep walking you-s.
and the sleep part seems to be the cognizance issue, sure there are 100 of you walking around but they are like the background characters in a dream by that point, practically NPCs.
Eh, not really. A character in a dream created by my sleeping mind is no more me than a character in a story written by me. If my mother shows up in a dream, that’s not me, that’s my mind modeling my mother.
yes, but your mind is still the one puppeteering what the character says and does. Its the subconscious doing it granted, but its still you behind the wheel. Even more so than a character in a story. When writing you are consciously aware your characters aren’t real and make up what they do and say, when you dream you subconscious has tricked you/yourself into thinking these characters are real and separate beings from you. In other words when dreaming you can talk to a person and can’t consciously control what they are going to say or do despite being created by your mind.
while not a perfect one to one, it is a starting point. Its like if you dissociative personality disorder, but these variations of you are all aware they are the same person with the same memories, but can'[t agree on who is the original, prime, or if that matters. But the dream aspect is if you split too much it could end up getting thinned out to the point that your doubles are more like the NPCs in the background your dream makes.
It’s still modeling. The dream person isn’t me, not supposed to be me, it’s supposed to be someone else, and my mind is merely executing a model of that person. The only difference to a character in my story is that I’m doing it subconsciously.
To be fair, maybe that’s what’s happening – OG Ted is subconsciously running all his clones, which is why they’re so dumb occasionally.
Yeah I can see this being Ted is making mock-ups like the NPCs in a dream, thus limiting their responses and reasoning.
Thinking over what I typed I may be projecting as I am not “normal” and have my whole life had dreams where clearly one or more characters in the dream are “smarter” than the others, more insightful, and apparently more aware it was a dream than “I” was. A whole psychological history there of talking to a few specific characters, and eventually merging with them, and now taking on their form when a dream turns lucid/I need to exert control over the dream…so in retrospect I may not be “normal” in terms of how dreams usually work for people. I may have been assuming others have that one or more special characters as well.
one of my favourites: I dreamy I was a hypothetical hypoteneuse, where the other 2 sides were undefinable (so spent the entire dream just stretching off into the distance, at an angle)
If Archon had these G.I.Joe helicopters:
https://www.yojoe.com/images/resize/w/MAX/imagestore/1919/78028.jpg
Along with…
https://www.yojoe.com/images/resize/w/MAX/imagestore/1826/37864.jpg
While those Goons have…
https://www.yojoe.com/images/resize/w/MAX/imagestore/1828/37860.jpg
Eh, the G.I.Joe vehicles are just cartoony versions of 1960s Chinook and Cobra choppers. Archon are *way* better equipped…
With waaaaaaay more weapons than those things would be able to hold or transport, but they sure looked cool, and they made great non-lethal explosions.
IF Goon Squad can duplicate anything he’s holding at the time for a limited amount of time he could be quite the resource besides just as literal goons. Need plutonium for a power source or multiples of a magic artifact to do something? Ted’s the guy! Need to buy something expensive from someone you don’t care hates you after? Hand him a bar of gold or bag of diamonds and let him go to town.
True. That duplication cheat could be highly profitable on certain items or materials that you don’t need to last very long.
Anyone else hear Grif and Simmons from Red va Blue as the two goons or it it just me?
I instead hear the two astronauts from the song “I Love the World (Boom de Yada)”
https://youtu.be/at_f98qOGY0
I was thinking RvB initially too but now that we’re discussing it, I’m hearing Statler and Waldorf.
Being able to copy anything is busted.
Goon Squad is able to take any one use magical, science or alien weapon, copy and use it without sacrificing the original.
Given his drop in IQ maybe would be better to have a little group of elites instead of an army of idiots.
And that explains the stupid “hut! hut! hut!” the more of Ted the dumber they all are. I see this happening then; “Ted can you handle 10,000 of you?” “Sure boss won’t take but a minute! gab’merlup” (falls down drooling) “Oh gawd…. each and every one of them just crapped themselves!”
Yeah not very productive power set. I doubt if giving him a super gun would be a good idea because of the drain on his IQ and the fact that when the goon is killed all of the gear also turns into butter mint stuff (which, if i remember right, is mostly powered sugar and bone meal).
Goon Squad might be very handy in small groups but these “geniuses” are overly dependent on his ability and it’s going to be the ruin of their plans. Like I’ve said before, the supervillain smart stupidity rears it’s funny, fugly head.
Ring of the Nine Monkeys anyone?
Googlewhacked
When even GOOGLE don’t know it, your obliged to explain.
Sleep deprived brain misremembering the Ring of Nine DRAGONS from the show Xaolin Showdown. A mystical relic that let you split into nine copies of yourself, but each copy splitting your strength, skills, and brainpower between each copy made.
yeah, but didn’t that thing also due to the old personality split thing as well? where each copy was hyper focused on one specific emotion.
Also you may have been mixing up Xaolin Showdown with Sun Wukong’s hairs (in which he makes clones of himself by plucking his hairs out that then turn into doubles of himself).
Although there was also an episode of the Alladin cartoon where genie got split the same way with the emotion specific versions.
And that fairly recent (some time in the last ten years?) retelling of the Monkey Legend had one of his clones remaining and acting independently when the original was no longer able (watch the movie if you haven’t already, had Jackie Chan and Jet Li in it)
The Forbidden Kingdom. It’s a fantastic movie.
Does Maxima snap her fingers at super speed/with super strength producing an extremely loud whipcrack sound that the pilot can hear even thru their phones, or was the pilot just staring at her unblinkingly waiting for the “twirl” gesture?
If they are well trained enough, both the pilot and the co-pilot were keeping an eye on the boss at all times. You have to warm up a chopper’s engine otherwise you risk a stall or power fall-off. Not to mention the risk of damaging the engine if the lubrication system isn’t warmed up to flow for high power output. It’s like a semi truck engine, you need to warm them up or they could stall and you risk both damage or a brake failure if the air brake system isn’t pressured up enough.
For those reading in the future, that Geotagging of images is why Russian troops/artillery had SO MANY problems with suddenly being shelled when they invaded Ukraine. Some of the troops would take and post selfies with Geotagging turned on. (There was also the problem of locations being identified by the backgrounds – mountains, buildings, etc.)
Well, at that point the Russian troops were being told this was “gonna take a week”, which is why their parade uniforms were packed in their carry-alls. They were not really taking it seriously, why would they? They were told it was a “drill”, they were going into places they’d be “welcomed as heroes”, and I’m betting half of them were shocked when someone shot back at them.
Ukrainians learned from 4chan about photo breakdown and geotagging to extrapolate data.
Ask the Syrian terror camps that Russia evaporated after they posted propaganda for recruiting.
Took 4 Chan a few hours to narrow down Time and place , angle of flight overhead which flight and from speed altitude where in flight it was at time of photo. Then shadows of objects, powerlines, and shape of buildings in distance.
A Lil geometry and algebra and posted coordinates after double checking Google Earth for similar buildings and layout.
20 minutes after post russian artillery sent thanks and said they’d take it from there.
The fragmented mind when split is an interesting angle. Many years ago for one of my characters (Rhulan) who can do multiple thought form projections *basically doubling but each one has a focused power set, and slightly different morals, ethics, and mindset*, the reasoning being they are like her when dreaming.
So the thought behind this was analyzing how in a dream, no matter who you are talking to, no matter how these other characters act or say, they are ALL still YOU. So when projecting doubles without splitting the focus of the conscious she gives these fragments of her mind physical form.
Which if it lasts too long can cause some Dissociative personality disorder (when defragmented the different projections would become transformations, with the same mindsets and power focus…but retain the different personalities *or slight shifts here and there in personality* despite being one body again and keeping the same memories. Rhulan even has a habit of saying, “this body” or “this me” om this regard.
-the main difference when split their is less focus, and when split they have full conciousness.
(not that this hasn’t caused problems with children sired or born to different forms when fragmented considering THAT form their parent and the others the alters.)
Imagine a duplicator that when their main body was captured or for a long mission split, and lacking a feed back due to circumstances existed as their own person for so long that they ended up having their own family, life, children, etc…and then when the original body is freed they remerge and those memories along with any other doubles memories all get jumbled back together. How this would affect the people who knew that one double, even with their dream like state and personality quirks as a result THAT was the person they knew, fell in love with, or was their parent.
I’ve perhaps taken this too far with cosmic beings and multiple incarnations with a split soul remerging after multiple separate life times; but the basic concept is still there of the mind splitting across different parts of the brain.
-note not individual emotions like so many cartoons but slightly different combinations of emotions and outlooks, different balances.
A thought occurs to me, while I doubt Chimryiad has power cannablism *gaining the powers of those you eat (Majin Buu, Kirby, etc…*
Does she have neural reconstruction cannibalism *I have no idea what this power may be called in other media, just my term for it*, the power when eating someone’s brain that you acquire their knowledge and memories. Think the game Prototype or a few alien invasion movies where the aliens devour people and then can live as the person because they gained their knowledge…like the space women from Gamera vs Guiron who were going to eat a kid’s brain to gain his Earth knowledge.
That hasn’t really been a thing since they figured out that memory is stored encoded in global patterns of sub-cellular features of nerve cells, like synapses. Back when they thought it was stored as RNA, (Maybe it is, in planarian worms…) it kind of made sense.
Given the biological reality, though, learning somebody’s memories from eating their brain makes about as much sense as learning the contents of a book by eating it. Once you chew, it’s all just meat.
Well, unless you’re talking something like shuggoths, which don’t necessarily digest your brain, but instead keep it alive so they can use it. Like happened to those guys in the movie “From Beyond”.
Yeah, Prototype is basically a viral shoggoth in human form. Also the aliens are likely just copying the neural patterns and not actually digesting them. I have a mimic character myself who she and the people who know what happened to her are going through some existential dread questioning if she was turned like a vampire or if the mimic that ate her body didn’t just replace her brain tissue with mimic tissue but was just copying her brain for the new born mimic to have an advantage. This power especially as seen with non human and often. Slime like shapeshifters can be seen biologically as less I digest you brain and then copy it, and more I copy your brain and then digest it.
For some reason that reminded me of Death’s Head II at Marvel, the high-end robot Death’s Head got sucked into would go around shoving a large retractable blade into the head of targets to ‘download’ their memories including computer systems. So like how does shoving something like 4 inches wide and a foot or more long into a computer do anything but destroy it in a shower of exploding components instead of download everything off the system? Or out of a human brain for that matter?
IQ aside, I think it’s hilarious that they still call each other Ted.
Given that ALL their names are Ted.
I don’t know why that’s hilarious to me when that is their name, but it’s hilarious nevertheless.
We Are Legion, We Are Ted
Bob was a better legion. I wish I knew what scared Starfleet so much.
Bob had to take out a couple militant rivals and IIRC was monitoring a few of his derivations as potential threats. His creators were lucky to get a benevolent nerd.
I have no idea what you two are talking about now and I feel I’m losing nerd cred by not knowing.
I think you’d enjoy The Bobiverse, semi-hard science with a measure of dry humor (but not punny!). Good reading, or there’s also a great audiobook version.
since I ‘read’ the audiobook I can confirm that the audiobooks have solid performances.
I will definitely check it out. Thanks.
Ted: Hey, Ted, you want to go the cafeteria for lunch?
Ted: Actually, I want to be called Theodore.
Ted: … Like the Chipmunk?
Ted: Like the _President_.
Ted: What? No, his name’s…uh…Barry?
Ted: Was there a Chipmunk President?
*bickering ensues*
This whole fictional argument makes me think a little about the Monty Python guard scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
https://youtu.be/miVeFWqKtI8?t=115
PS – This has been their TED Talk.
*sigh* Third read thru before I realized that Max was signaling to Peggy to ‘spin it up’ and not unlocking her phone by balancing it on her finger and spinning it fast enough to be a blur
My question: Is there a point where Goon Squad would be too fragmented to come back? Just 20,000 goons without the brains to recombine?
I suppose somebody could start shooting goons until he’s up past that threshold.
So shouldn’t that just be “Goon Squad’s Phone”? And they’d all have identical sim cards. That could be a problem.
My version of Suspension Of Disbelief quibble is that a copy of a smartphone works at all.
Lithium battery? Eh.
CPU ? That’s a stretch .
Are the chips made with 100 nanometer traces now?
you’ve never heard of clone phones?
You think it’s easier to copy a human brain than to copy a chip?
nope, but there are clone phones, so it’s possible to copy those
I’m having a bit of a laugh that no one’s mentioned the return of the Maxima bingo word Sydney had to trick Maxima into saying.
I’m hoping if we’re very quiet, one of these Teds will say it to Max while being interrogated after the imminent fight, and when she repeats it in disbelief the nearby Archon teammates will burst into cheers. To Max’s utter bewilderment, causing her and Ted to look at each other and shrug in commiseration about their respective weird teammates.
“you don’t have to worry about any sort of geometric Harem-splosion.”
Well damn, I was hoping there be enough Harems that I could get one for X-Mas.
FOR ALL THAT IS HOLY, PLEASE please let the Ted’s survive this and join the good side, I love them so much!!!
Unfortunately Cellphones are not cloned in this manner. Each device needs a different serial number, but has the same SIM id. If the phone were really cloned, with the same serial number the network would not be able to tell them apart. The clone attack is someone taking out your SIM, copying its unique ID and then putting it back. That’s why some devices went to Electronic SIM and don’t have a physical sim. It was a much larger problem in Europe.
So you could duplicate a nanogran of antimatter he was holding x2, x4, x8, x16, x32, x64, x128, x256, x512, x1024, x2048 etc… boom. How many generations before he could blow up the earth?
I just realized Ted probably doesn’t even need to make n clones of himself to create n duplicates of stuff, assuming he can de-pop instances at will like Harem. Just pop 1 clone in the same room, hand the new macguffin copy to the original, and de-pop. Then do it again holding 2 macguffins, rinse and repeat for exponential macguffin growth without the loss of any intelligence.
Okay, I think it’s time we actually see Harem down to one person, one location, and powering up Anvil with some Math-trained kicks.
The problem with Harem being one person is she really HATES being just one person. She’s so used to having multiple bodies that being one person feels like walking around with blinders on and being deaf in one ear.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-dabblers-science-corner-2/
(panel 6)
It’s not like she has to be one person for long, just long enough to power up Anvil
Or maybe see if Anvil can be powered up prior to entering conflict
I’m just repeating what was in Dabbler’s Science Corner about Harem’s power.
Also Anvil does power up prior to entering conflict. Like she did prior to entering conflict against the super mannekiller at the Mars Factory. :)
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-517-here-comes-the-wha-boom/
(panels 2 and 3)
Also in the blurb below the comic.
DaveB: “Anvil executing her Super/Ultra/S-Rank/Q move. Get someone strong to use her as a punching bag till she’s brimming with energy, then dump it all into on hit. Extra flair points for incorporating that into a sweet wrestling move. Guaranteed to hit harder than a sidewinder.”
So what would happen if each goon did mental excercises? Lots of crosswords, mnemotic training, that sort of thing? Would the reconstituted original become a genius?
You just invented the premise for Dr Mcninja’s “Army of One” story arc.
*Link to the relevant page in the middle, but honestly if you haven’t read it then starting at the beginning of the arc wouldn’t clarify much.
It looks like a link, but I can’t click on it.
Dang, sorry. Here it is: http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/17p19/
I loved that comic series. I wanted the phyiscal books but never got them
Hah! Her ‘Bingo Target’ became plot-relevant!
I’m hoping it turns out Ted has a connection to an Archon leak, is somehow in the betting pool on Make Max Say bingo, and subconsciously let this slip out.
If splitting causes himy
To become essentially dummer… Say he gets absolved because the lawyers and pr team plead his case that he was too gooned out to be responsible for being duped into a world domination plot … If he joins the arcswat as a probationary member and gets reduced to one person and gets a study plan that comprehensively stimulates all kinds of brain activity. Then splits into a few copies and does the same kinda study plan until his results reach single goon squad level and so on. Could you theoretically make him grow much smarter?
No! Stop wanting every villain to be redeemed and joined Archon!!
Unless the plan is to eventually have more ‘reformed’ villains than heroes, and then the villains take over and destroy the world as ‘heroes’
Ted, now every villain.
Worked for Suicide Squad :)
Well the second movie at least. And the animated movies.
makes me think of the joke.
*Okay X-men, all of you actually on the team and leaders. First odd question I know but for this moral building exercise I want all of you who have not committed or attempted to commit mass murder to raiser your hands
…wow…I was expecting…way more hands than that.
I don’t think “knowingly let myself pass the threshold of responsible decision making” is a valid defense (barring him being forced into it against his will like Concretia was). That’s pretty much the same thing as drunk driving, still his fault.
How would goon squad’s mobile provider payment plan work? Since the phone gets cloned maybe remove the number next to the „goon”? Or say that is his „birthyear-part” of his nick :)
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Have a nice day =)
Goon Squad would still be pretty fast at re-shelving a library with just 8 dupes. That’s still 7-8x faster than someone with only a single point of IQ or whatever-outdated intelligence metric people use.
Yet another reason to ignore Fred and NOT split up.