Grrl Power # 1154 – Stroll in the penta-park
Max shouted the quiet part. But then, she’s the field leader of the U.S.’s Super team, so for all anyone getting lunch there knows, wormholes are a daily occurence. I’m not sure if the glare at the end there is a “I am one of the most dangerous things in our arsenal, so back off!” or an “I outrank you so don’t you dare eavesdrop on the things I am shouting!”
While working on this page I learned that the center of the Pentagon is a 5-acre park, complete with a hotdog stand, which may or may not be closed, but in the Grrl-verse, it’s open. Probably sells more than just hotdogs though. Sausage on a stick, maybe a kielbasa on a bun with some whole grain mustard, and if you want to stick to selling only roughly hotdog shaped foods, then why not churros, skinny burritos, push-pops, and pretzel sticks as well?
The April vote incentive is up! As promised, it’s a Sydney pinup. Not airplane bathroom selfies, but hopefully her cuteness will satisfy.
Variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon, as well as the semi-usual bonus incentive related comic.
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Last I knew there was a Taco Bell at the quad of the Pentagon…
Not exactly, from what I have read. Theres a mcdonalds and taco bell and some other fast food place on the side of that building but the main center building’s restaurant had hamburgers, hot dogs and noodles and was referred to as ‘cafe ground zero.’
All of those are gone now and there’s just an au bon pain there now because this world is no longer a magical place that can become a spy thriller at any moment.
Sure it can, the world is whatever we choose to make it. :D
I have my own unofficial training regime where anytime I do some activity (e.g. parasailing, scuba, axe throwing, learning a language) that could be used in a Bond movie, I mentally add it to my spy resume. You know, in case I need it later.
“Sure it can, the world is whatever we choose to make it. :D”
I wish I lived in your happy go lucky world of pentagon hot dog ground zero blast zone cafes with secret bunkers and bond villains, but i am condemned to live in a world of… ugh… Au Bon Pains and… I dunno… what’s another boring place to eat… the new Pizza Huts that don’t have the red roof and just have ugly boring square buildings.
Sigh. Even my tendency to send out ninja pirate hit squads at those who displease me with puns is actually FROWNED upon in my world, if you could believe it. Even though I’m clearly doing God’s work.
All resutraunts are boring now. They try to pretend to be what they aren’t. Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Burger King, etc…they are shells of their former selves.
McDonalds saddest among them, its like a demon possessed the body of a clown, and was the most boring demon to ever exist, burning all their clown gear, dressing up in a business suit and trying to sell the banana cream pies at a higher price than they should be…and half the time instead of handing out balloon animals gives the kids a single piece of cardboard and tells them to use their imagination. Yeah, it still goes around tring to do the job of a clown with none of the heart like a sad parody of a clown.
You must be from the U.S., right? McDonald’s is way better in other countries, you know!
McDonalds is supposed to be a place where you can just buy a meal because you only have $2 in your pocket and want to get a burger and soda. But nowadays it’ll wind up costing you $8 or so, and it’s going to be in a drab art deco style building. Same as how Pizza Hut used to be a place you could spot from the highway because of the red roof and you could go in and get a pan pizza in a cast iron pan served at the table (which is the only time that eating pizza with a knife and fork is at all acceptable, I say as a New Yorker, all other times doing such is the death penalty) and then go to play video games on a literal tabletop arcade game, and perhaps skee ball if you were lucky enough to have one of those in the restaurant. Nowadays Pizza Huts are rectangular boxes that you can’t spot from anywhere. There’s nothing distinctive about them anymore, including the pizza.
I feel old now. Damn kids won’t get off my lawn with their hula hoops and transistor radios and rock and/or roll music.
Coming on the tail of the hot dog stand loss, your reminder about the loss of the Pizza Hut roofs and arcades weighs heavy on the heart. As does their food.
You have a wise soul, brichins.
It occurs to me that if there’s a vending machine that sells doritos nearby, you can stand in the quad of the pentagon eating triangles and hexagons (crunchwraps).
I did wonder if they sold pentagonal pizza (personal size).
Three to four months ? Oh boy. That’s one hell of a limitation. It also begs the question of her shield energy usage, because remember, she got nuked, repeatedly, when stranded on the alien world and her orbs didn’t show a sign of stopping. So her shield must be really efficient, or she’s been constantly digging into her power reserves since then and the batteries are finally throwing the towel and activating emergency power saving mode.
Although, at this point, following the spaceship analogy for her orbs, it would probably make sense to see if the last orb is a power core, or a way to acquire energy through sunlight, thermal energy, ect.
The shields /might/ be regenerative in some way? Absorbing some of the energy they stop rather than just repelling it. (Idea from the Jenkinsverse).
It’s much older than the Jenkinsverse, look up “Black Globe” in science fiction. The game Traveller had it in the early 80s, and I have no idea when the first book was printed that had that particular tech device was. (I’ve read it, but I forget when the book was written, but it’s an old one.)
The version in Traveller had a serious problem, it couldn’t dump the absorbed energies when the system was on, it would just get reabsorbed. Suck up to much juice, boom in a bubble! They later made versions that had a flicker rate to dump excess power, shoot at opponents, see where the heck they were, etc.
A lot of scifi creations that get popularized in current times, are actually much older than the new “popular” version.
Even Lightsabers are really old, though they had other names, the description of a weapon comprised of an energy blade that cuts things is really old. (I think it was the 30’s, but it could have been in the 20’s.) (Yes, scifi existed way back then, even if it mostly was just a small niche back then.)
King Nuada had a sword of light in the “Lebor Gabala” from the thirteenth century. I am sure there are old examples of the light saber.
My faves from the olden days are the “hum-knife” -A single wire hoop or monomolecular blade-thickness metal shape that vibrates to cleave through any material like an electric carving knife on crack. and the “Force-knife” (A force-field popping out in the shape of a blade. a blade width measured in subatomic particles instead of the width of a single molecule)
John Ringo borrowed the idea in the 2000s and made an anti-personnel mine out of the force blade, calling it the “bouncing barbie” -always cutting men off at the knees when he thinks he’s getting somewhere”
There was also a Molecular Knife in one Piers Anthony ‘Cluster’ book from the 70’s that I wanted so bad, but was extremely dangerous to use. Basically you would set the cut depth and then use it to cut anything and it worked by firing a particle beam out to destroy a one molecule thick line of the material
The Spinward Fringe series had an “antiquated” reverse-ablative shield made of an exotic alloy that thickened and grew when hit with energy beams. It had been abandoned long before as the increasing weight could overwhelm propulsion needs and required periodic refitting, and kinetic weapon advancements (railguns) made it obsolete. Then everyone had moved on to better energy weapons/shields and abandoned kinetics when exponentially more efficient and powerful engines made even those projectiles too slow for space battles.
The antagonists (as always) were therefore able to take their ragtag beat up ship and surprise smash through some situations that should’ve been impossible, forcing several major entities to retool multiple craft just to deal with a single renegade.
Go older. Doctor who. 1963. An Unearthly Child. Good watch from something so far back in time… or is it forwards?
To be fair, she used Gigajoules of energy to melt the sand, in like ten minutes. And then even more energy to convert Oxygen to Nitrogen. Which would have used a lot more energy a lot quicker than her shields.
Honestly am more confused on the criteria Dabbler is using to estimate given zero familiarity with the technology, and admitting eight here it not being clear what it is using to recharge or by what mechanism.
So going with a guessing based on how much use Sidney has now vs then. But for all we know something could accelerate the recharge.
Who knows, maybe when she got nuked the shields were able to… like, absorb and redirect/reinforce themselves with some of that energy, ambient (from the radiation? idk) or on impact.
As someone who spent 20 years’ in the (Ch)Air Force… I can absolutely guarantee that the message of the *GLOWER* was the second choice.
I sympathize with Max….if I had her job…I would have a flat forehead from pounding it against a wall from dealing with Sydne– …No, wait…. an old M1 Abrams Tank in a Target area would have a Max’s-Head-shaped dent in it from the same pounding.
What makes you think the orb system was -designed-?
Given that is Nth technology, the skill tree and the user interface. Discard that and nothing really comes to mind.
This…strikes me as very ,very dumb, even by ADHD idiot standards. Not only is “open a wormhole” blatantly power-intensive, she seems to forget important stuff like “what happens if it cuts out halfway and my atmosphere ball doesn’t work?” Idiot is gonna get herself killed out in the middle of literal nowhere because she’s not fucking thinking…And no, that’s not ADHD, that’s holding the idiot ball!
Also, would an aetherium causeway allow pressure equalization? If yes…
> And no, that’s not ADHD, that’s holding the idiot ball!
Aha! THAT’S what the last one is!
Can she maybe give it to someone else? Please?
As someone with ADHD… it is very much in line with ADHD. You are thinking ahead. We don’t do that. In fact sometimes we think the answer and then go blank because we can’t describe the steps in the middle to get to it. Sydney has done this multiple times in the past.
What this tells me is she has worn away her meds and NOBODY knows how to deal with someone going batshit crazy on tangents. Dabbler is smart enough and dumb enough to not deal with it because both wanting to see where the rabbit goes and the results of testing the orbs. Maxima is very much aware of how much R2D2 levels of results without thinking is going on. And the area she is in nobody bats an eye at the giant golden military woman screaming about NO WORMHOLES. How much did you miss? The time when R2 decided to troll 3PO? Repair the lightspeed engines? Falling on the Wookie? Or did you just wonder what Frix is doing with the message that Dabbler very much has sent of “Sydney in the aircraft bathroom” because of course she would.
I should take my meds…
I’m also an *unmedicated* ADHD, and I’m not THAT tangental. Being On The Phone gives a bit of focus, especially when leaving a bloody message. Hell, the discomfort of being on the phone makes you want to get off the phone as fast as you physically can short of leaving a message sounding like you’re reading off a telegram. This isn’t “in line with ADHD,” this is a parody exaggeration of ADHD, on the same line as “SQUIRREL!”
Running a military superteam.
Positives: Unbelievable ability to respond to quick-changing battlefield conditions, near-limitless toolkit for larger threats given time to plan…
Negatives: Equally limitless capacity for SHENANIGANS.
Can confrin the hotdog stand, although the one I was there, I gotta say, it _sucked_.
The galley is much better. Although, not as good as the one at NNMC Bethesda (fucke the Army, it is not “new Walter reed, and never will be,i will die on this hill).
Trade secret: while hospital food in general has a well-deserved reputation for sucking, the food served in the galley at Naval Hospitals is seriously good stuff.
Naval Hospitals poach the best mess deckmen\women that pass through their hands….
The best food I ever got while working for the military was at Camp Cedar II. That was the start of convoy makeup/security for Iraq, so EVERYTHING went through Cedar.
Oddly enough, we got the best and the freshest of what went through that place. The guys in Baghdad had to make do with what we didn’t want. That was some good eating. Truckers would drive half the night just to get there for breakfast instead of stopping somewhere else.
Apropos of nothing – a jackal used to watch me almost every morning as I went to get my breakfast and came back with it from the DFAC in a take out box. She lived in the reeds that grew up out of the water dumped from the washing machines in the base laundromat. She was never aggressive, and I always gave her space.
oooohhh.. jalapeno and cheese breakfast kolaches and other types! …Now I really miss Kolache Factory
re: the park and selling. probably even some touristy stuff. I remember a tiny microscope/telescope that looked like a pen complete with clip to shirt pocket that museums would sell in d.c. in the 80s.
Assuming the Penta-dogs kiosk is… also pentagonal?
Poor Sydney… her ultra-cool magic orbs now appear to have rules and limitations on their use… the blush has faded from the bloom, I guess. Now they’re just tools, and she needs to start worrying about ‘efficiency’…
Also noticing Harem’s aheago tat sleeve… really? It’s washable, right? Or maybe one of those fake tat meshes…
The naval/Mabel pun made me laugh out loud.
maybe the unknown orb is a recharge orb and as later levels not only does it generate energy from nothing but can convert matter to energy and energy to matter. or maybe its some manner of healing orb
Know that think about it we have a defense orb, a attack orb, a live support orb, a sensor orb, a propulsion orb, a utility orb, so the unknown one would be the energy/reactor orb makes sense
ahegao tatoos.
never noticed.
Funny thing there I’m normally reading on my cellphone but that ahegao tattoo was the first thing I noticed when I started reading this page despite it being quiet small
Almost looks like a ‘Sidney’ Ahegao tattoo…
And I had never noticed it before either
You think she made those permanent, or is it a false sleeve to wind up Maxima with?
Bit off topic, but anyone else gotten the Golden Horse in Tears of the Kingdom, given it a purple mane, and named it Maxima?
The “so I says to Naval I says…” got a genuine chuckle out of me. Because repetition is one of the key points of humor or something like that. Whatever.
Anyway, I remember when I first started reading Grrlpower and I nearly busted a rib laughing so hard. It’s nice that the comic still has it’s roots firmly in the humor side of things. I’ve read to many comics that started out as light-hearted fun and then took a hard left-turn into drama and wangst.
… am I the only one who thinks a few gigajoules is not that much energy, given what the orbs can do?
The hoover dam puts out 355MW max, so recharging the orbs is like not even a minute of full blast hoover dam output; that is over 21 gigajoules. If we were talking terrajoules or petajoules, I would be more impressed.
It actually is Petajoules, as many have calculated. They’re just using the wrong word.
The “alien dice” thing threw me off for a second lol. Did you know there’s a webcomic called Alien Dice? I used to read it back in the day, i should go follow up on it…
Referencing another comic or just role play addict?