Grrl Power #1107 – Tube… of DOOM
This is a weird page, and drawing isometric stuff is harder than I thought it would be.
The picture is supposed to be a simplified model of the base, like a LIDAR scan, not a photograph. Chimyriad is hanging her commandeered phone out a window and passing it back and forth a few times and… I guess the phone has a “construct isometric model” app or something. Or hell, maybe she found a drawer with early plans roughed out and snapped a shot.
I have a book series recommendation. I’ve developed a bad habit lately of starting a new series, and 15% of the way though the first book it’s not for me. That’s fine by itself, but I’m currently 3 for 3 with coming back a year later and giving it another shot and deciding it’s my favorite series in a long time. Part of it is simple timing, and part of it comes from trying to read the book, then when I return to the series, its because I’m looking for a new audiobook to fill my ears while I draw. It’s not that I’m a lazy reader, but the need for content I can multitask to helps me get past the “establishing phase” of books which is usually my least favorite part.
Anyway, the series is probably something you heavier readers have heard of, called “Expeditionary Force,” the first book of which is titled “Columbus Day.” In some ways, the first book is structured a bit like the movie “From Dusk till Dawn.” If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a fairly straightforward “bank robbers on the run filled with Tarantino-esque dialog,” and then out of nowhere and without any foreshadowing, the third act is like “You know what? Fuck it. Vampires!” I wish more media had the balls to pull a crazy move like that, but the money people are always going to be worried about burning their existing audience. Expeditionary Force doesn’t have anything to do with Vampires, there’s just a fairly dramatic change of circumstances about 2/3 of the way through the first book. It starts off as the very opposite of a HFY story, which is usually not my speed, but… eh, I don’t want to spoil anything, I’ll just say the series become sort of a master class in lateral thinking. I just finished book 13, and by then… it’s… kind of a HFY story? Not really but… arg! It’s good. I recommend it, and I especially recommend the audiobooks, because the narrator does a fantastic job with the main characters. The only caveat I’ll give is the that the whole story is incredibly high stakes, like it starts at “if we screw up, humanity will go extinct,” and it only gets worse from there. 13 books of that (actually 15, I’m still working through it) is a little stressful, there were times I felt like having a palate cleanser with a Robert Asprin book or something, but I was still compelled to forge ahead with the next book.
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.
They’re from Texas. That explains *everything.*
Where’s the tigers?
I dont think this is the headquarters, given the New York incident. Confident this is one of those well funded by rich jerks trying to monetize super powers so there may be multiple such sites around the country. The fact they even had the confidence or were able to get close enough to a federal base like Archon screams of insider, even especially knowing that the list existed and where on site it was
I don’t know. Your logic seems sound, but throw in supers and all bets are off. Specifically, the info about Archon could have been obtained by mind readers.
Not a volcano but…..
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/grimadventures/images/5/5e/Bunny_Island.png/revision/latest?cb=20100130144122
Reposted to others can see the picture.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/grimadventures/images/5/5e/Bunny_Island.png
The lair is under ground where the old Texas Stadium was.
Nah he said it’s North Central Texas not Central North Texas. It’s probably the old Desertron complex. (Abandoned superconducting supercollider project.) Just outside of Waxahachie by Scarborough Renaissance Faire/Screams Halloween park. Or the Tesla Tower complex just south of there; in Milford. Where that tech company is using Nikola Tesla’s method to transmit electricity long distance using Zenneck surface waves.
oh forgot about the old supercollider site.
such a huge waste of money that was.
It would have provided 15,000 jobs and made America the world leader in high-energy physics, thereby causing a brain drain from Europe to America. It would have inspired a generation of STEM students and led to advancements in basic physics that undoubtedly would have turned into highly lucrative products over the course of 2-3 decades, because that’s what happens when you do basic research.
All this for $11 billion. This could have been funded with $26 billion left over if the military been willing to build 1 fewer littoral combat ships.
I think about this any time I hear people complain about NASA spending (and SLS’s budget justifies a lot of complaining). NASA has helped create and commercialize some of the best inventions of the last century, producing a massive impact on civilization for far less than the military regularly blows on failed pet projects.
I meant a waste of money not finishing it.
Shutting it down may have been the start of Texas’s assault on science and education.
Continued funding of failing government projects are often textbook examples of sunk cost fallacy.
If the money people at Hollywood were worried about burning their current audience, what happened with Disney? From the MCU phase 4 to Starwars 7+, oh… my… GOD… that burn is atomic.
Like the next day after I got talked into doing the ghost pepper challenge… Not my best idea… You know it’s bad when both the cat and dog wanted to go outside ASAP!
Speaking of the Three Musketeers, there is going to be a new two-part movie next year
Is it wrong that this feels like a callback to the page with a geokinetic with a pools worth of gold? https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-368-billions-of-bullions/
Maybe he contracted out to make this.
Unlikely – this group isn’t the type to leave the geokinetic free to pursue his Cave O’ Gold fantasies. They most likely used a captive geokinetic – WHICH WE KNOW THEY HAD – aka, Concretia probably ‘helped’ build this place.
Hm… the character mentioning Sydney by name isn’t appearing to the side of the page, so I’m not sure who that is, other than an ARC-SWAT member.
Umm, it’s Seneca, she’s just had a makeover and changed her haircolour and her eye-shape (what? that’s something totally possible in the Grrlvere, just ask Kronachome)
They are on in the who’s who, says their name is Seneca
That who’s who wasn’t there when I posted that. I don’t know if it was an issue with the site, my computer, or if the author just hadn’t put it up yet.
Yeah, the Who’s Who only shows up when you are reading the comments (and she was listed last page anyway)
The Who Is Who (as opposed to “The Who” “Guess Who”) doesn’t show up if you’re viewing the comic landing page (i.e. grrlpowercomic.com), it only shows up on the direct link (e.g. grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1107-tube-of-doom )
ACTUALLY! While, sure, most Texas Volcanoes are around Big Bend (far-west Texas), Austin is practically RIGHT ON TOP OF ONE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_Knob_(Austin,_Texas)
Interesting so it is a dead volcano, good thing to building your city on active ones tends to be bad for the property value. Seriously Saint Helen’s did a number on the surrounding area when it went, it would be a mess if Rainer pops it’s cork.
Potential house buyer: I thought you said this was water-front property!
Realtor: No, I said it was river-front property.
Potential house buyer: You didn’t say it was a river of lava!
And if the series is *really* stressful you take two Asprin.
The Expeditionary Force series is AWESOME!! (I SO did that in Skippy’s voice!) RC Bray does a great job narrating.
Another brilliant sci-fi series is The Bobiverse series, by Dennis E Taylor, also very good on Audiobook. Ray Porter is one of my favourite narrators.
They’re attacking the Umbrella hive from the first Resident Evil movie?
I’m sure Deus at some point will build a base on a tropical island, shaped like a skull, submersible inside a volcano, with lasers. He has to, to keep his Evil Mastermind creds
With his ego, he’d want something super visible. Like a giant statue with his lair in the head.
Giant statue?
I think you mean giant ROBOT!!!
Feel like I am in an extended BLEACH interlude, my small opinion and surely not expressed by most. My being 77 has something to do with that tho.
Hah. North Central Texas IS, however, known for a relatively shallow water table. So, ah, that facility is probably kinda moist on the outside.
Don’t break a wall.
It’s gonna be kinda moist on the inside after Maxi starts opening up some Masked Mooks
“There are no basements in north Texas, despite the tornadoes. folks would rather face the wrath of the skies than what lies beneath the clay.”
https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/116087846504/texas-gothic
Graboids, and molemen
Bah, Grabs are just big softies. You just have to give them a few scratches right behind where their jaw opens. As for the molemen. Eh, don’t dig up their house and you won’t find out how grumpy they are.
What you need to do, is to find the perfect depth for your bunker – Deep
enough to be protected from the Hawkmen, but not so deep as to anger The
Mole People….
Spoiler
(YOU DO NOT WANT TO ANGER THE MOLE PEOPLE!!!)
It is, like so many things in life, all about finding the right balance….
Well, expletive! Are Seneca’s goggles the new HUD? I remember the glasses were trashed by the end of the restaurant fight.
Anyone consider that they might have just bought an abandoned nuke silo, and ‘upgraded’ it?
there were 13 Atlas ICBM F-series silos built in Texas—12 of them near Dyess Air Force Base (in Abilene, Albany, Anson, Bradshaw, Clyde, Corinth, Denton Valley, Lawn, Nolan, Oplin, Shep and Winters) and one north of Vernon along the Texas-Oklahoma border. Other F-series silos were based at Schilling AFB, Kansas; Lincoln AFB, Nebraska; Altus AFB, Oklahoma; Walker AFB, New Mexico; and Plattsburg AFB, New York.
It’s called “photogrammetry”. Take hundreds to thousands of photos, put them through software, and get a 3D model out of them. The “hundreds to thousands of photos” can be the idividual frames of a video. So just record a video of everything & get a 3D model from it.
I’m kinda impressed that they managed that size complex without being raided by the DEA due to the excesive power consumption
What does the ARC on her suit stand for? :)
I absolutely love the Portal word balloons.
Great article. Thank you so much for sharing with us.
So, does Seneca have top level sniper school qualifications with Chekhov’s Jinxing Gun, like Sydney does?
I don’t know what they would name a brand spanking new volcano, in Texas. But, I’m sure they wouldn’t be happy till their volcano was the biggest.
Hey, how do you pronounce Chimyriad? Specifically the first three letters