Grrl Power #1246 – Lack of gold is the new orange
I apologize for the horribly unrealistic part of this page, in which we see a teenage succubus texting in complete sentences with no emojis in sight.
I don’t know why I took time out to dunk on Oak Island, but I wanted Dabbler setting Lapha up in front of a TV, and my wife has recently gotten hooked on treasure hunting TV shows, so why not? If Lapha’s spot on the shelf there is her prison (or even if it’s just temporary until the super jail has a spot ready for her) and prison is indeed supposed to be punitive, then Dabbler would take away that remote and force Lapah to watch the show.
I imagine there’s a layer of hell where you spend eternity being an editor for shows like that. There’s probably ten million hours of footage, and your job as an editor is to make hay out of literally nothing happening. There was one bit where some of the crew was scuba diving off of the shore looking for, I don’t know, evidence of the island being used as a trading stopover or something, and one of the divers signaled that they’re done looking for the day and to head to the surface (keeping in mind they’re in like 35 feet of water) and… they do that. They just swim to the surface, and nothing goes wrong. But the editor has to turn that into a 5 minute segment where the guys on the boat are checking their watches and going “They’re late coming up.” and the narrator has to V.O. “The boat team radios to the divers, but something is wrong. There’s no reply.” without sounding like he’s rolling his eyes super hard, and the music score has been doing “Thriller Movie” dun dun dun duns for like 30 minutes straight, and then the finally (like 9 seconds after the diver guy was like, “Let’s swim up.”) they get to the surface, and then if I was the editor, I would pick up the editing console and smash it into my temple until the top half of my head looked like an open faced manwich.
That scene I described was somewhere in season seven I think, so you can tell how desperate they were at that point to make “Not finding anything” seem interesting.
Also, yes, Sydney’s glasses auto adjust to her updated prescription.
The new vote incentive is up! This is a bit of a weird one as it’s a character that hasn’t appeared in the comic.
It’s my Ifrit Pathfinder 1e monk, Fray! Ifrits don’t really make great monks in Pathfinder, as player characters they get a +2 to Dex and Cha, but -2 to Wis. For monks, Dex is good, Cha is largely irrelevant, but Wis is important as it can add to your AC and also has something to do with Ki points I think. But I didn’t care. I wanted a character with dark blue/gray skin and glowing orange hair, so that’s what I picked. (I don’t think Ifrit even really have dark skin, so maybe she’s 1/4 Drow? Don’t care. I think she looks cool.) Will she show up in the comic? I mean… maybe? Probably in a Dabbler flashback, but who knows?
As usual, Patreon has her in delicto flagrante.
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Couldn’t she escape though the internet… That is a Roku controller..
The whole room’s probably air-gapped and magically warded. Also, that device she’s in is specifically for capturing Aetholiths, so she probably can’t escape it until she’s released.
I have a Roku, trust me, the controller is very basic. The battery would go dead before she could transfer her “data” through it’s infrared emitter. Analog morse code is a very slow and crappy way of sending that much data.
Interesting, mine works on like some sort of low grade WiFi, like it will work even if you are not in the room with the box. You can point it away and it still registers the button clicks.
IR bounces around off walls, but if you closed a door it would stop working.
While you’re correct that IR bounces off stuff — it’s light, after all — and I personally have done some neat tricks bouncing the light off several animals’ coats/collars, a dinky little LED is not gonna have the power to make it to the TV from other rooms. It’s not a laser, it’s just light. That’s like expecting your phone’s flashlight, which is certainly brighter than any remote’s IR blaster, to be visible from another room in broad daylight, just by bouncing it off the walls.
Besides, while I don’t have Roku, people I know do, and at least their remotes’ LEDs are blue. That’s on the opposite end of the light spectrum from IR. So there’s two possibilities:
– Either they put two LEDs just so you can see the blaster fire with your own eyes (unlikely and dangerous, and asking for a lawsuit)
– or, more likely, it’s there for show, and they’re just using basic wireless tech like low-powered Bluetooth (which would also explain the bad battery life if it’s not BTLE) or simple RF (cheap as heck). And yes, closed doors can hinder both.
Philosophy does not trump science. Unless you’ve actually tried to do this (and with more than one type of remote), you are just guessing that the LED doesn’t have enough power. Also, IR is not visible to the naked eye, so that red or blue LED you see lighting up when you press a button is just a visible light indicator, put there because people, not realizing that your phone camera can see infrared LEDs operating, kept complaining that their remote wasn’t working.
Some of the IR LEDs for remotes will emit a tiny amount of visible light. But some walls papers and paints are highly reflective to IR as well. If you prowl around on amazon and find a cheap kids night vision toy you could be surprised how strange the everyday stuff looks when lit up by IR light.
There are different models of Roku remotes, some are wifi and some are IR based.
Your talking about the one’s with voice operated search, it still takes a bit for it to process what you say into them.
I have that, almost never use it, I have a slight studder, and if it flares when I try… I get bored watching the swirling thing on the screen…
they probably have an airgapped media server. There are apps for the Roku that hook into your “personal” movie collection.
Earth’s internet isn’t likely to have any Aetholith-compatible hardware to sustain her, so even if she could escape her prison that way, she’d just be committing suicide. Besides, there’s no reason to suspect she even could travel that way – the reason Garamm wouldn’t give Tenri Gal-Net access wasn’t because of the risk of her escaping, but rather because she could use it to tell the authorities “Help, I’m being held hostage! Here’s the address and room number, and here’s the info on my captor.” Or tell her friends, I’m pretty certain the team that was put together to capture Parfait could beat Garamm (and also capture Lapha).
One, would you like to enter the internet?
Two, Aetholiths are probably in the tens, or even hundred of terabytes in size, with personality, skills and one (or more) life of memories. She would need days to upload herself, if she could even do that.
So, the possession eyes did mess up her prescription? Or perhaps just a temporary setback?
Those glasses aren’t prescription.
They’re the Smart Glasses from outer space she’s not really supposed to have.
So they can change the prescription based on the needs of the wearer. When she first put them on, they were still on her old settings, then they adjusted to accommodate her new eye characteristics. This way, Cora and crew did not have to analyze the old glasses to set up the new one. I’m pretty none of them are optometrists.
Alien tech no doubt solved the need to see an eye doctor long ago, if you think about it, there could be implants like the lens they put in my eyes because of cataracts could be just like Syd’s glasses. I’d be just fine with a pinch and a pestering week of eye irritation for never needing glasses ever again!
I wish I had glasses like that, even if only for the adjustable prescription. Hate having to adjust to the fit of new glasses each time the prescription changes.
There is a concept of using a gel lens sandwiched between ring electro-magnets to electronically create the needed lensing for all but the worst of corrective glasses. You’d dial it in the same way an optimist needs to the whole multi-lens array we currently use. And would in theory be cheap enough replace actual corrective glasses. Hooked to various sensor it could also adjust to differ Near/Far settings.
Sadly no major work has been done on the concept in 7 years.
I would think the tech used in some cell phone camera lenses would come close to mirroring that line of research. I remember seeing an article where they were using water to act as a zoom lens for a cell phone. Was pretty nifty
Or couple it with the tech from Microsoft Hololens or Apple Vision Pro or Ray Ban Meta.
ok that sounds awesome. Sad that it hasnt been worked on.
My prescription’s been pretty much stable for the past twenty years, so I hadn’t gotten new glasses in almost that long. Turns out, not such a good idea: I needed new glasses not because my prescription changed, but because micro-scratching over the years left my glasses permanently fogged.
that’s why I tend to need to change glasses, although when I come in for new ones occasionally I find that there’s some minor change in prescription as well
They are currently working on contacts that do this saw it a couple years ago, oh and the have a zoom feature.
Yes of course, I am aware, but one would presume that they already had her prescription from before, meaning no need to readjust, right? So my question is if the possession did change her eye sight, or not?
Says who?
I maintain that people are completely misinterpreting the restrictions Cora mentioned.
Let’s see: She has nth technology (the orbs). Who exactly would care about her having glasses which are barely higher level than Earth technology?
Should it not say: “is a masterclass in* logical phalacies?”
My thought for that show has been, “They replaced Mythbusters with that?
Mythbusters ended, because the hosts couldn’t act like they didn’t want to replace the crash test dummy (forget what name they gave him) with each other
They really couldn’t stand working together, that’s why when they restarted the show, they had different hosts
Buster was the Dummy’s name.
Jammie or Adam was the dummy’s name. Buster was the crash test doll.
Touche lol
According to them, they didn’t hate each other. They weren’t friends, but they respected each others’ work.
And the show ended because the ratings were declining. They actually knew a season in advance.
Didn’t say they hated each other, just that they still couldn’t stand working together
Jamie was a control freak, Adam was a devil-may-care type of guy. “Am I missing an eyebrow?” says it all. Their personalities never were in sync. Part of it too was I noticed Jamie has tremors, his hands shook all the time, so he may have had to retire anyway. I for one would not want to use machinist’s tools like that.
My wife’s entire body is like that, but Parkinson’s is common in her family, she’s has bad days where I have to feed her, she flings her food otherwise… We try to joke with her about though, my son does this gag that Jeff Foxworthy did on stage, where an old woman is seeing her doctor about her shakes. He asks her “do you drink a lot of coffee?” she replies “No, no, I spill most of it” always gets a laugh out of her.
Not really both agreed they could work with each other
But they simply ran out of MYTHS to test. it just started to become more and more out there and both got tired of it
They updated Buster during the show.
there was at least one show devoted to just making/fixing/rebuilding Buster. and Busters last crash was Glorious.
One of the few times when a network didn’t run something that was successful completely into the ground.
The one big thing about those Treasure Missing shows is that they CANNOT EVER find the treasure. Because that would end the series!
Imagine they found the treasure in the middle of episode 2, and have a 12 or more episode season. What the eff are they going to fill it with?
And they definitely can’t make a series where womeone finds a treasure every few episodes. There’s not that many real buried treasures to find, and definitely not with sane people looking for them using logic.
wasn’t that the premise of Storage Wars?
Nah, that’s just the bullshit people started posting online about the show
No, no, no: If they ever find the treasure, they just transition to filming a “Lifestyles of the wealthy” show, instead.
Or, more likely, transition to the legal battles with Columbia or some other South American country over ownership of the find!
Same reason why I think all those bigfoot / loch ness / [insert monster] hunter shows are nonsense. If someone really found an actual sasquatch it would be actual news, not revealed via some awkward low quality show.
Dude, the ay some people look these days, how do we know some of them aren’t among us already?
Besides, the Woke people would be up in arms about some of the names. Bigfoot would be considered insulting due to being based on a physical feature, and the Abominable Snowman would be considered offensive, due it referring only to men
> the Woke people
Oh dear, you’re one of *those*…
“The Woke People”… aren’t they the ones running around complaining about how other peoples crap stinks while claiming theirs is like roses? A load of Karens and Karls just wanting others to pay attention to them…
Generally when a right wing person uses the term woke it just means “something or somebody I disagree with”
The same as “critical race theory”
It’s like DEI. When a right-winger uses it, they just mean n****r.
When they say woke, they mean “the jews.”
Ah yes, as opposed to the unconscious, who don’t have much to say about anything. On the whole, unconscious people are boring.
I recall a game called “Sam And Max hit the road” where the Bigfeet (they were quick to correct anyone who called them “Bigfoots”) were having a convention in “Town, USA” and the hotel had put up a sign up that said “Welcome Podiatrically Gifted.”
Ah, Sam and Max. Freelance Police. Whatever became of those two?
Poker Night with Brock Samson.
I love that video game. Plus GLaDoS is the dealer.
Dealing cards, or dealing cocaine?
“Woke People?”
Really? You need to start a fight _that_ badly?
well, pineapple on pizza isn’t getting rise anymore. they have to do something to entertain themselves.
Pineapple on Pizza is absolute fucking heresy. The sentence is Exterminatus by orbital bombardment.
I will die on this tiny, tiny hill.
The Emperor Protects.
You will not die alone on that hill. As someone who lived in Brooklyn for years, where we knew of good pizza, asking for pizza with pineapple would have two large men named Vinny and Guido come out from the back of the pizza place, drag you into a back alley, and punch your head until you learned your lesson.
As is Right and Just.
typical east coast elitist. thinks they know everything. I’m sure you willingly eat things with coconut in it.
It’s not an East Coast thing.
I’m a Californian. I was born in the South Pacific, and spent my formative years knocking around the Pacific Rim (Navy family).
I love pineapple!
Pineapple does not belong on pizza, in the same way that mayonnaise does not belong on a baked potato, and ketchup does not belong on spaghetti.
Yes, I see you, Entire Nation of Japan, and you are all fucking monsters.
I ask you, “would you put banana on a pizza?” Because they do that in Sweden, the filthy beasts. Filthy, filthy, sexy, beasts.
Also, coconut is a perfectly good ingredient in lots of dishes. Coconut Shrimp, Coconut Candy, and a Bahama Mama all make excellent use of coconut!
I digging into this I learned something chilling. Hawaiian Pizza was developed in Canada. the people who, according to habitual line crosser, have two modes- apologetic and walking genocide. the fact that I was raised within a few hours of one of the major border crossings explains much. I also learned that there are people who put broccoli on pizza. In Chicago no less.
Coconut is not food.
I like mine with pineapple, green peppers, and anchovies.
A well-done Sasquatch search can be entertaining even if you know in advance they won’t find anything. The problem is that most of these shows focus on the possibility of success, not the hunt itself.
And yet when they are told that one was spotted in the area they are, and the location, they do not even bother going there, but talk about how amazing it is that there may be one in the area. I have seen only one episode, while bored, just to see what the heck it is.
They see footage of of a humanoid shape carrying something long and straight with plant material all over the being, they assume it’s a bigfoot carrying a spear, instead of a hunter wearing camo.
If the find would be verifiable, sure. The show might still contain actual footage of the monster, just in so bad quality news people were not convinced. Theoretically, I mean.
The problem with getting actual footage of Sasquatch, et al, is the same as what’s wrong with all the flying saucer pics.
They’re blurry as hell. Up close, standing still, they’re so blurry you can practically see through them.
“Bad quality image” while filming a TV show with high end movie cameras.
If they are truly “hunting” Sasquatch, they should bring a high speed camera quad opter with them, then you don’t have the camera man chasing him on foot.
But in reality, even phones tend to take decent 4K video nowadays, so, the fact that there aren’t a ton of videos of hikers seeing him implies that he’s either gone into hiding, or was never real.
ahah she’s a weeb
one of us, one of us
It would have been hilarious if the possession eyes actually corrected her vision
Actually, panel 4 DOES look more like too strong a prescription rather than too weak…
So, has Max figured out Syd’s glasses are more than simple glass yet?
And does anyone care, seeing as they’re openly thinking about Peggy getting that leg?
Not yet, Sydney has been surprisingly tight-lipped about them, and with good reason, they are the only reason she passed the gun range requirements! I’m sure Max suspects something, but isn’t one to pry over something that simple. Like how Sydney is able to read alien text, or know what someone is saying in another language, and now saying that just now after putting them on.
Dabbler knows, and who knows if she’s told Max
I’m guessing that Dabbler has specifically not told Max.
If she were to be caught facilitating illegal technology transfers to Earth, she’d be in trouble with people she really doesn’t want to piss off. She knows that Sydney is just going to use the glasses. If Archon command learned of Sydney’s glasses, they’d likely be taken and studied, with Sydney getting a normal pair of Earth glasses for the duration. Said duration would probably be forever, because regardless of the techs’ intentions, I’d guess their analysis of the glasses would turn out to be destructive.
Also, risking Archon command making off with Sydney’s glasses would dishonor the gift her friend made.
As such, the only way Dabbler’s told Max about them is if Dabbler’s certain that Max would be as circumspect about it all as she is. I strongly doubt she could be convinced of that.
Lets not forget Cora used her own “Massfab” setup to make them, plus Sydney is in contact with Frix, so even if she lost them, it wouldn’t be too hard for a quick trip for Sydney to “go get a new pair” on the down low.
… considering “anywhere in galaxy” is quick trip for Sydney, yeah.
Only if she’s got coordinates
I like to think she already knows, and just doesn’t actually care, but plays dumb to humour Sydney. After all, Max is very perceptive, and Syd isn’t exactly subtle. But it’s not like she can fire a gun without her glasses anyway, and surprise Google Translate could turn out to be useful, so why not just pretend to not know so the information could never leak in the first place?
I’m likely extremely wrong, but it’s a fun idea.
That makes a surprising amount of sense.
Also avoids higher-ups like “will not finish that sentence man” ever hearing about them.
Every job in a bureaucracy ever; Boss:”I’m glad you did it. Good job but don’t tell me how you did it. That way, I don’t have to spank you and I have plausible deniability if it come out.”
Max may know but is simply not a priority for her because most of the team has something going on in the “down-low” that are greater potential concern. She’s a boss and she has only so much mental capacity to keep track of her team’s shenanigans.
Remember the alien chick Achilles with totally-not-like-Wookie life-debt? Or that Dabbler suddenly got sick around the same time there was a everyone’s-horny-and-strangely-OK-with-it incident? Yeah, stuff like that is going to be a much higher priority for her than Sydney suddenly doing better on the gun-range or maybe somehow suddenly understood a language she didn’t before.
If Sydney’s glasses are cheating, then so are the orbs. Her power is essentially “alien tech user”.
Now, admittedly, the point of the various tests isn’t really about her eyesight or combat abilities in the field. It’s about discipline. She wouldn’t be expected to qualify without glasses, and these are just better glasses. If Earth had that level of tech, at a point where it was accessible to the average person, then nobody would be expected to qualify with regular glasses. They would be the standard.
Actually, aside from tracking the number of rounds, those glasses in the shooting range aren’t doing anything a good laser sight couldn’t.
They might even be training her to be a good shot, by building up her muscle memory of how to hold the gun in relationship to the point she’s targeting.
Now, if they let her pull off that precision targeting of ricochets that Robocop does, THAT would probably get people suspicious…
Exactly. The hard part of good shooting isn’t figuring out where the bullet will go. That’s what the sights are for. It’s squeezing the trigger without letting the muscle movement pull your hand off target.
And, you know, lots and lots of practice.
The difference is that the orbs are, essentially a known quantity(minus the fact that they hide many abilities and their purpose), the glasses are not. If Sydney is without the orbs, they know *exactly* what she can do without them, and have trained her to operate without them.
The glasses on the other hand are an unknown quantity that may or may not drastically effect Sydney’s combat viability(at least in shooting, but who know if they’ve been subtly doing other things), as well as some tactical bonuses like the language stuff they don’t know. If they were to get in a shootout in an area with civilians and/or teammates, and Sydney were to have had to swap glasses for some reason, she might be a sudden unexpected danger or non-contributor to the fight. And that’s before accounting for the fact that she intentionally, for personal gain, deceived multiple superiors.
Comparing the orbs and glasses here is like saying, if she were a martial artist, that the brass knuckles grafted(analogously to show she cannot be entirely separated from them) into her hands that everyone knows about are equivalent to the performance enhancing drugs she takes behind the scenes. Yes, both give qualitative advantages, but one is based on deception making *her* look better, while the other stands out as a tool she is using.
If Sydney had to use a random pair of glasses, they’d be basically useless to her. Glasses don’t just magically make your vision better — they have to be designed for the person wearing them. Otherwise they’re about as likely to make your vision worse. She’d probably be better off not wearing glasses than just picking up a random pair.
I accounted for prescription in my other comment ten minutes prior, right below this one, and felt no need to repeat myself, since it would just inflate the message.
I am well aware of how glasses work. I said swap glasses, not grab a random pair off the street. Many glasses owners own multiple pairs(spares in case they break them, indoor and outdoor, glasses for different uses, glasses for different outfits, and so on), but also the military probably has her prescription on file, meaning they could get here replacements if needed.
She used the glasses to help her in the gun training, she didn’t use her orbs
So the glasses were a cheat for the test, the orbs weren’t
And if they were normal glasses, she still would have used them to help her in the gun training. They wouldn’t be quite as helpful, but she’d still do better than she would without them. She’s not expected to qualify unaided, so it’s a difference of degree rather than kind.
Don’t think Max knows, though it would be kind of funny if Sydney’s glasses broke in the near future, triggering a convoluted chain of events, because her prescription is suddenly wildly different, but she didn’t need to switch glasses.
“And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for my meddling tech– wait I can make a better jo–” “Back to the gun range. NOW.”
And yeah, I think it’d be reasonable for them to care. Peggy getting a new leg won’t artificially increase her aim or make her a god-tier runner or whatever. Whatever Peggy gains from having two legs again will be gained through hard work. Meanwhile, if Sydney loses the ability to shoot straight the moment she gets a pair of glasses the help her see but don’t correct her aim, then she never had the ability to shoot straight in the first place and was cheating her tests to fake it.
I don’t actually suspect she’ll have as much trouble as we might think, because she’s still used to correcting herself, even if she’d no longer have the indicators telling her to do so, but her aim would probably suffer a bit. That would hardly matter compared to the fact that she was actively deceiving basically everyone though(in a non-approved manner). She’s misrepresenting her capacities and that could be a danger to her team or innocents in a situation where she doesn’t have access to this *specific* pair of glasses.
… I don’t think those glasses will break. They must be much more durable than normal glasses and Sydney won’t risk something which would break normal glasses anyway, so …
She’s an active combatant dealing with supers. Her glasses could be bulletproof(*cough* *cough* bullet resistant *cough*) and still would be at risk. But also, I doubt it. They are thin, “hollow”(to contain the electronics) and wireframe. If anything, even if made with more durable materials than average, they are probably *more* fragile than normal, not less.
She’s been shown engaging in physical activity without her bubble shield and also shown having been caught off guard repeatedly. Breaking her glasses(or at least taking them off) would be easy for a prepared villain with the right powers, and a great tactic for reducing her capabilities. Breaking them would be the smart thing to do to make sure she can’t get them back(and this is a comic that’s dropped *a few* comments about logic versus comic logic).
But in what situation is Sydney actually going to be shooting a gun at people?
In any number of situations? Ones where her powers(e.g. PPO) are “too much”, but she still needs to fire something at range. Ones where her powers have been proven or rendered ineffective(e.g an enemy that can “bend energy”, but not physical material, or can neutralise super powers entirely). Ones where she cannot access her orbs(which happens to her a surprising amount, considering they are tethered to her. Ones where she has to pretend not to be Sydney. etc.
Heck! It doesn’t even have to be “at people”, it could be at an object, in a situation where she cannot afford to miss.
Max has probably figured it out (she has super hearing, and maybe vision) but she will swear she knows nothing. Otherwise she would be forced to write it in a report somewhere and we all know that bad things would happen when the politicians found out (remember how they were demanding to keep the literally cursed spaceship that was going to turn people into zombies).
My brother-in-law was into those types of shows, I watched an episode with him and I could feel my IQ points dropping! No thanks, reality shows have ruined TV, they are worse than the morning soap operas. In ’83 I had a bad car accident and couldn’t take care of myself, so I had to move back home. My mother TORTURED me with shows like “General Hospital” and so on. If I want drama, I’d just go to a union meeting…
For a few years now, I’ve been of the opinion that Soap operas and sitcoms should come with a disclaimer label, akin to the one that fantasy novels do–“The events you’re about to watch have been made up by our writers, do not reflect normal incomes or human behavior, and any resemblance of something that has already happened or people with similar names is purely coincidental.” Kids watch these shows, and I’ve noticed quite a few people are acting more and more like certain characters have been portrayed, in the few episodes I’ve managed to catch, since they don’t have anyone to point out, “you know (behavior, extravagant vacation, extravagant apartment, etc) is not normal, right? People don’t normally act that that to their friends and have it all swept under the rug the next day and ignored the way these people are doing.”
Basically, I’m thinking a lot of the weird behavior we’re seeing exhibited these days stem from these TV shows, and people haven’t had enough reality checks when it comes to the behaviors and monetary spending levels shown. Don’t resent your parents for not taking you to [Disney, Paris, the Alps for skiing] every year, just because this TV family does it. The TV family doesn’t represent 80% of people’s income level, just what the writers and producers want to depict!
Fiction mimics a distorted version of reality, and reality mimics that in a horrific cycle.
Yeah, and it’s debatable whether real people influenced the behaviour seen on those shows, or those shows influenced the behaviour of real people
There were a few stories about 24 influencing military interrogators who took cues from the show for valid techniques, and I know there was some psychology investigation on how Jersey Shore was influencing bad behavior. It’s a relativity and slippery slope issue. You see terrible behavior of people on the shows, and that can become the new bar people have for “To be a ‘good’ person, I just have to be better than people acting like that!”. Then the shows get even worse to keep the shock value up, it resets the low bar to be even lower.
See also: Trump.
And that is quite possibly the single worst thing he’s done: move the bar for how awful of a person it’s acceptable to be in public.
Which is also quite possibly why some people support him. They resent “civilization”, and want to return to a brutal, perhaps more “honest” mode of interaction, in which power and status are all that matter, rather than neutral rules that everyone has to follow, that treat everyone as equally deserving of rights and protection.
Real people have locks on their doors and freak the heck out when someone they hate shows up in their house.
This is why I like my Sci-fi shows and Fantasy shows. They do not even try to pretend to be reality as its obvious fiction, but you get fun stories sometimes and occasional sillyness. Shows like Babylon 5, Star Trek TOS, TNG, DS9, Ent, Farscape, Xena Warrior Princess, Herculies Legendary Journeys, Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis, and a slew of anime.
It cant be worse then Ghost hunters can it? that shows been on for 20 years and never found anything.
That’s what they want you to think. Do not underestimate the power of Big Ghost in keeping you in the dark.
“The power of Big Ghost…” that’s it, Marquar has won the internet today, everyone go home!
Bravo, sir! Bravo!
Depends on the show: the one with Jack Osbourne and ‘Haunted Towns’ with the… Tennessee Wraith Chasers(?) don’t claim to find anything definitive, they are just investigating the rumours (specially the one with Jack: thy just come in, do some investigating, and leave what ever they find up for debate)
Well, I came to think—and this was long before those shows started running—that, if there ever was any treasure buried on Oak Island, it was long ago found and is gone.
I predicted that the glasses can change prescription since it’s actually not a prescription – it’s a digital interface thing. :)
I guess whoever said Dabbler was going to torture Lapha was correct. Making her watch The Curse of Oak Island is terrible torture. I didn’t realize Dabbler could be that cruel.
Dabbler has plugged the rc into her container. Forcing her to watch that would definitely be cruel and unusual punishment.
Where is that series anyway? I checked Netflix, and it’s not there.
just watch ‘One Piece’ same premise. ;P
It’s on the Used to Be About History channel. You can watch episodes at history.com.
I’m sort of surprised that the doctor with healing powers isnt able to fix myopia and hyperopia. Seems like a relatively minor thing for a superpower to fix since we can fix that mundanely with LASIK, etc.
That would depend how her powers work. If it is just accelerated healing she can’t fix anything that the body itself can’t fix. There might also be a time limit until something is considered a pre-existing condition, which would be why the doctor can’t fix Sydney’s eyesight, or Peggy’s leg.
The healing power may be something along the lines of restoring the body to its “natural” state. IE, speeding up (and enhancing) what your body does normally when it heals itself. The power just speeds it up and does more. IE, your body can normally heal torn muscles and a broken bone over weeks, but the power can do it in minutes. Sydney’s body’s “natural” state has poor vision, so the power can’t do anything to correct it. Same reason they can’t adjust her ADHD so she doesn’t need her medication.
I’m pretty sure that the doctor can’t fix those because they’re not injuries. The doctor’s ability seems to just speed up (WAY UP) a person’s natural healing processes. That’s why when Heatwave’s toe went necrotic, she couldn’t save it. Also, she can’t re-grow Peggy’s leg or completely fix Jiggawatt’s hearing loss. Such things would be less “super-fast healing” and more “regeneration” or “psionic (or magical) surgery”.
Oops. I didn’t realize more comments were loading “in the background” while I was writing. But, yeah, what these folks said.
It’s fine. Your post explained the reasoning very well.
The actual treasure hunting moments on COOI are at least a little fun, and are worth watching. Some of the weird stuff on this island is fascinating, though I think a lot of it is first nations structures that have nothing whatsoever with treasure.
The insufferable parts are where they attempt to tie the site to historical BS and play geometry games with random large rocks. Guys, you talk about that AFTER you find treasure to explain how you found it, not BEFORE when it’s literally got no substance to it.
I fast forward past anything that isn’t digging and lab work, and it’s gotten to the point where watching an episode takes less than 20 minutes.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and assume that for a teenage succubus, making a down-the-cleavage shot your portrait photo is VERY normal.
Demon1: Parf-who?
Demon2: Parfait. That chick from last night? Paraphael?
Demon1: There were two chicks? *he’s a little hung over*
Demon2: No… *shows photo* This girl!
Demon1: Not ringing any gongs…
Demon2: *sigh* *shows cleavage pic*
Demon1: Oh, somersault girl! Yeah, she was cool…
Hey, you recognized her by her cleavage, and you haven’t spent nearly as much quality time with her cleavage as Sydney has!
Unrealistic. The Demon2 would START with the cleavage pic.
Yeah, I’m with Lapha on this one. Watch cartoons. The plots are normally more reality-based than adult-intended TV programming is, at least. (Adult programming is heavier on the escapism and unrealistic behaviors/expectations.)
Okay, so now I really want Sydney’s glasses to be our reality. One feature at a time, I suppose; with the high-tech ones we have, translation might become available, but like Google, it’ll probably be literal. :P
Cartoon villains are more realistic than adult show villains these days as well.
Don’t sleep on adult-targeted animation either. Blue-Eyed Samurai on Netflix is excellent, for example, and even something like Rick and Morty has a surprising amount of emotional depth
Hey, Phineas and Ferb is nominally child-targeted, but the amount of more sophisticated, grown-up humor (not the “adult [=porn]” type) makes it absolutely binge-worthy!
The translation on those glasses wouldn’t be “like” google. It WILL be google translate.
Even better, she can binge ATLA and ATLK, One Piece, The Dragon Prince… there’s LOTS of adult-oriented cartoons out there! The Iron Giant, Castlevania…
Cyberglasses have an integrated translator, do they “traduce” teenage emoji into readable language ?
Now that is Science Fantasy…
The problem with emoji, considered as a language, is it doesn’t really follow any structured grammar and completely lacks verbs.
that may not be true. I’ve seen an article written by someone who teaches linguistics having her students develop the grammar for emojis after one of them was having a quandary of how many smiles to send to someone they ‘liked’
Sydney is viewing this message on a normal iPhone, which means unless extraordinary effort was put into software development, the message was written in a human alphabet (as those are the only ones in Unicode)… so unless Parfait’s native language uses a human alphabet, she had to go to the trouble to transliterate it, and at that point she might as well just translate it into English herself on her end, meaning Sydney’s translator wouldn’t do anything because it’s already in English.
(Unless you’re saying the translator would translate English to different English, which would be rather curious…)
The real problem is, who wants to know what they mean? It’s like translating the barks of a dog – most of it is just “HEY! HEY!! HEY!! LOOKAME HEY!”
Once I was in a roleplaying game (fantasy hero if you remember that) where the entire party had been transformed into dogs. One of the results of this was that we couldn’t talk. We could bark but not say anything more specific than that. The GM allowed us to run it using the one word, “Hey!” with different inflections, timing, etc. And pointing at things.
On the whole it worked surprisingly well. If you’re not trying to communicate anything too abstract or complex, and you’re not trying to communicate about things not actually present, “hey” can almost be its own language.
In fairness to them, and the viewer, there is, or at least was, clearly *something* there. It merely a question of whether it is still there and whether they will ever get smart enough to do what they need to in order to find it.
For one, they could have stopped the flood tunnels years ago by driving sheet piles 50 feet deep inmto the beaches.
Glasses that auto update to match your eyes? Finally, a pair of glasses that’s worth the price.
Except that those glasses would cost at least an additional zero, if not 2 (10x-100x $$)
Thought they did eventually find the treasure on Oak Island
Have seen parts of a couple other treasure seeking shows (one about a Blind Frog Ranch and a large log box in a sunken mine?), and personally don’t give a shit if they find anything, it’s the searching that seems fun (like when they added some dye to the watery entrance to the mine in the Blind Frog show and used a digger to mix the dye to see if they could find another entrance or something)
They haven’t found a treasure trove. They’ve found a piece of jewelry or two with semi-precious stones (garnets if I recall correctly), one small piece of decorative silver, several old coins (not made of precious metals), two Venetian glass beads (likely from the 1300’s), and a couple of archeological treasures of historical significance (like a lead cross pendant made in the style of a Templar cross, with the lead coming from a mine in southern France which closed in the 1200’s.)
That’s pretty slim when it comes to treasure.
But they pretty regularly find interesting stuff while metal detecting like buttons or belt buckles from British military uniforms,
Is it bad that I had a feeling I knew what show was being talked about in the penultimate panel before seeing punchline?
I thought they were talking about Gold Rush, about gold prospectors in Alaska, which has at least 14 seasons. I don’t generally watch reality shows, but if I did I’d stick to cooking competitions like the Great British Bake-Off which don’t have all the manufactured drama. My limit would be something like Below Deck.
It’s possible the translation magic is removing emoji’s because they don’t work in English or maybe succubus do address anyone who summoned them with a degree of formality.
More importantly we never reached to of the webcomic popularity contest last month and we need to do better.
They may not find actual gold on that show, but they certainly found some kind of rating gold. Maybe better called fools gold, because of the fools it draws, both as audience, and participants.
That is a masterful summary of the Oak Island series Dabbler. My brother is addicted to watching it.
Yeah, I got hooked on it several years back. It’s about the only thing I watch on the Used to be about History channel. My wife and I have proposed the Oak Island Drinking Game. If somebody says Templars, take a drink. If the say Templars with an implied question mark two drinks. If metal detector guy say one of his catch phrases or the bald guy give a canned reaction shot those are each good for a drink. I’ve usually polished off my Angry orchard about ten minutes into the show.
… you’ll destroy your liver like this.
Judging from my typing, you would think I was drunk when I typed that comment.
Hmmm… and here I thought she was talking about that gold hunting program, not Oak Island. At least on Oak Island they’re discovering history, even if they’re NOT finding the supposed treasure. Those other guys…? They’re just playing with geology.
“That gold hunting program”, be specific, there are at least 4 different versions of the gold hunting shows.
I wonder if the orbs actually COULD correct Syd’s eyesight. Probably would be a result of linkages between orbs. Or an option unlocked from there.
Trusight and life support/air generating Orbs? Because what else would that realistically result in? I suppose lack of knowledge of what those linked connections actually DO. If there’s anything special for having an Orb have all the connections linked. Or if there’s anything for having an orb maxed out. And well, the life support Orb seems like the Orb that’s closest for both those options; well have both conditions at the same time. Assuming that the orb connections don’t just add some more places to put points. Which they probably will.
It’s been awhile since she last got a point to add into it. Less so in-verse. (Still remember the author notes/commentary section having a line about how Sydney was going to get a ‘bonus’ point in the PPO, due to author error on the skilltree display earlier on, when she put a point in there. But then, it’s probably for the best Sydney doesn’t get more Destructive Potential. At least for free.)
…Although I wonder if being possessed/de-possessed was worth a point, or was enough to ‘earn’ a locked in point. Like her large scale emergency ‘terraforming’ project did. And how upset she’d be, if it was the ‘mystery pie slice’ option, getting another point dumped in it.
Perhaps unknown orb is actually healing, i.e. “fix to optimal”, and she’s been doing it the hard way all this time.
Bummer, I was hoping for an unexpected improvement to Syd’s eyesight.
So, nobody has mentioned Parfait’s avatar/icon yet on Sydney’s phone.
I am curious if it’s from a chat program where Parfait picked it, or if Sydney was the one that picked the picture for Parfait’s contact. Either way, it is a good choice. I mean, they are memorable. Thank goodness though they don’t hypnotize through the picture.
Yeah, could be either. You wouldn’t THINK Sydney would choose Parfait’s cleavage, but then we are talking about the literal hypnotic bust of a succubus, so its perfectly possible Sydney found herself focusing the camera there when it came to taking the shot
Is “Fit Bits” now generic for smart watches like Kleenex is for tissues?
I believe the comic is still in the early 2010’s (not much time has passed in-comic since the start), at which point I think the Fit Bit was the only device available that had such functionality (although it wasn’t able to monitor much more than how you were moving). Apple Watches and the like presumably don’t exist in the setting yet.
The commentary on Oak Island does [b]not[/b] make me regret falling out of the habit of watch TV years ago…
Yep and that show was taken off the air when it was proven that they planted actual expensive items in the storage containers for the participants to find. Thus creating the illusion that there is worthwhile crap to find where none actually existed.
Why is she still hiding the existance of the glasses? Archon is ok with peggy getting a new leg. Extraterrestrial entities living on earth is now public knowledge. Heck isn’t she contractually obligated to reveal that info to her supperiors?
Also did her vision without glasses get better or worse?
Considering she’s squinting at her phone in the first panel, and not wearing her glasses, I think we can conclude that her vision got worse.
The glasses helped her pass the firearm proficiency test
She doesn’t want people to know she cheated on the test (and it might have some consequences for her if they did know)
So how do you spell it?
Lapha or Lapah?
Because in you’ve used both.
Lapha
The character list in the upper right calls her Lapha.
(of course, this is ultimately a romanization of the aelolith language, which probably does not use our alphabet, and it’s usually possible to invent multiple reasonable systems for romanizing another language; so perhaps another line of translators might spell her name differently…)
I’ve never heard of Oak Island, and I’m getting the feeling I should be happy about that.
…
*google*
…
How in the actual fuck have they gotten away with keeping that going for so long??
check how many episodes are available for ‘One Piece’
“and prison is indeed supposed to be punitive”
That’s I think the biggest flaw in the American prison system. It ONLY exists to punish. But that easily creates a death spiral, with inmates only learning to hate the law more. Plus once you get out of prison you have basically nothing. Way too easy to fall back to what got them there in the first place.
Makes more sense to make it an institution for rehabilitation, to help address the reasons why people resorted to crimes in the first place. One part punishment, sure – but also give them security and peace of mind, offer education, encourage creative outlets, etc.
Of course predators or psycho killers should be kept away from society. But someone who got into gang violence because they grew up too poor to get a decent education? Or a person pushed to their breaking point by their surroundings? Give them the tools to avoid falling back to that once they get out. That will improve society overall.
Actually, it primarily exists to incapacitate: While you’re in prison you’re not committing crimes against the general population.
Deterrence is a major component, too, but most of the people that works on never end up in prison, because it worked…
Being punitive serves two purpose: First, something has to be punitive in order to deter: If prison were pleasant, too many people would commit crimes just to end up there! And it satisfies the general public’s desire for justice.
But mostly? Incapacitation. It’s the only one of those it reliably accomplishes.
Rehabilitation? Honestly, most of the people who end up in prison are not realistically capable of being rehabilitated. There are rare exceptions that get a lot of attention, but that’s what they are: Exceptions.
The primary function of a prison is a political debate and as such differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
The USA has chosen mostly incapacitation.
Scandinavia has chosen mostly rehabilitation.
The Chinese have chosen deterrence.
What SKY argues is that the USA choice is bad for society.
I argue that this is a cultural insensitive consideration to make. Fighting a lot of wars outside of your borders, without proper support for traumatized soldiers and than giving everyone guns is also bad for “society”, just as bankrupting your public transit, etc. “society” as most Europeans define it’s just a lesser priority there.
The entirety of the USA is founded on the idea that the European definition of “society” is an outrageous attack on personal freedom.
On the topic of the hopelessness of rehalibation:
That depends how you design a prison.
A prison designed for rehalibitation can get 80%+ success on the worst category of offenders when designed such way(norway), but those prisons suck at revenge(punitive).
Well, there’s a segment of the population that believes the US was founded on those particular biases that they happen to hold.
And you know most people in prison are incapable of being rehabilitated how? Just because we have high rates of recidivism in the US doesn’t mean that rehabilitation doesn’t work — we barely make any effort at it at all, under the justification that we have high rates of recidivism. It’s circular logic. Other countries are much more successful, so unless you think they’re just populated by fundamentally better people, it’s more likely down to our system.
I thought the reason American prisons don’t do proper rehab is because they want the prisoners to come back so they don’t lose their slave labour?
(Prisoners are legally allowed to be used as slaves in the USA)
Well sure, that’s probably one motive.
But a tangentially-related question for you: which is worse, to believe that some group is less than human, and treat them accordingly, or to believe that they’re equally human, and yet still treat them as sub-human?
The second one, obviously.
Otherwise we’d all be monsters for how we treat our cats and dogs.
Willful ignorance offends me more, but the second certainly seems more malicious.
I guess maybe my real question was whether blatant, conscious evil is worse than self-deception, where the person sort of knows, underneath, that their actions are evil, but lies to themselves, makes excuses to justify it.
Put another way, whether the Nazi leaders were more evil than the people who were “just following orders” or “just doing their jobs”.
They’re probably just different kinds of wrong, not really directly comparable. But an interesting question regardless, I think.
The leaders are more evil, for one simple reason: Propaganda works.
It doesn’t work perfectly, and it doesn’t work on everyone, but it does work.
A substantial portion of America insists that there’s no external causes to crime, that criminals are just bad people, and there’s no point trying to rehabilitate them.
Mostly because considering any other possibility would require them to be less selfish, and actually work to better society, rather than just disavow any responsibility for the condition of their country.
Before you decide what the primary purpose of the penal system is you need to define what the *goal* of the penal system is. If the goal is to reduce recidivism, the the U.S. penal system is deeply flawed, and we’d be much better off adopting the Norwegian Model. If the primary goal of the penal system is vengeance, as Dabbler once mentioned, then it is working perfectly.
I’ve seen some people argue that having the death penalty for murder reduces recidivism….
Hehehehe… Someones Salty.
I was thinking that she would get some points to use with this happening to her.
Rumor has it that they have long since found whatever treasure is on Oak Island, and that’s what they we using to fund that damned TV show. Whatever government agency has possession of said treasure is keeping it under wraps, probably because it reveals historical changes that they would rather not let out into public domain for right now. A lot of these “new” episodes, if you look for the clues, are actually a couple years out of date. It’s all rather interesting. I want to stop watching, but it’s like watching an incredibly slow train wreck. Can’t tear myself away.
They more likely keep the show funded with money from the History Channel (from some of the ad revenue produced by the show). If it wasn’t making money, and the goal (finding the treasure) had already been met, there’s no real reason to keep it going. If it is making money, we don’t need to posit that they’re funding it with the treasure. You could potentially have a case where they have indeed found the treasure but have decided they’ll ultimately wind up with more money by just keeping the show going indefinitely, however.
Nonsense. The show runs more or less in real time, 6 months to a year behind the calendar, depending on how early in the season it is. They couldn’t possibly slip in older video and make it look current – there’s too many time signifiers in the videos – position of equipment, logos, bore holes, visible construction, and the people themselves.
There’s no conspiracy, and no “changes of history” that have been found, other than that the island was populated way earlier than first thought, by first nationers, explorers, and settlers. And “treasure” to date is a couple gold and silver buttons. Nothing that could fund even one episode. The history channel and the various obsessed people digging are plenty enough to keep the show funded so long as it has viewers.
If they’re out of date that likely means they’re just using old footage they filmed for an earlier season, it’s possible they aren’t making the show anymore, just compiling all the old footage like how dead people keep releasing “new” songs and whole albums. They, could also be filming just whatever they need to pad out the old footage, I’ve long wondered if that’s how a lot of these shows operate.
Would anyone really notice if the ghost hunters (whichever set of them) were in a different house in one scene? How would anyone tell? They could even stay in the same hose and fill the same room from different angles to get extra footage.
They could be filming almost all those Bigfoot chases in the same part of the same forest, so long as they don’t show the same exact tree configuration over and over no one would know.
I find it amusing that I immediately recognized what was being ragged on there. A FB friend ranted about the show and loved my response about the insanity of the show to the point of reposting it separately years ago. The idea some pirates would bury their treasure over a 100′ deep on some random island, layer it with a fiber mat to constantly drain water to the pit thus ensuring they could never recover it is so absurd. That they’ve practically removed the island at this point with nothing yet want to insist pirates a hundred years ago with nothing but shovels dug and buried all that is real conspiracy nut delusional thinking there.
I get the feeling Dave’d be much happier if his wife discovered Yukon Gold. As far as “Treasure Hunting” reality TV it’s far closer to reality and a lot less stupid. It also might be good fodder for future “redneck” characters too.