Grrl Power #1248 – Do aliens dream of astro-sheepazoids?
Dreams are about processing the day’s interactions as memories are sorted away… is something people say about dreams but which I firmly believe is total BS. If that was the case, why does anyone dream about anything other than the stuff they did that day? Why have I dreamed, multiple times I might add, about walking around the halls of my high school, which wasn’t actually my high school, (but I had that dream knowledge that it was) except instead of lockers, there were glass tanks up and down the walls filled with skinned things. Maybe they were students, maybe they were mutant experiments, the dream knowledge didn’t say. And before you’re like, wow that’s a crazy nightmare – it wasn’t a nightmare. I wasn’t scared in it. I thought it was rad, not because I’m some secret psychopath, but because it was like walking around the set if someone made a live action Splatterhouse movie.
Or, why did I dream about meeting April Ludgate (from Parks and Rec) – not Aubrey Plaza, mind you, but April Ludgate, at a convention, and I told her that when she got married, instead of changing her last name to Ludgate-Dwyer, she should have portmanteaued her last name to LudWire, then tell people that a LudWire is the proper name for a clothes hanger when it’s in abortion configuration, and she said “Oh my god, that’s awesome, babe!”
She said “babe” because she started the sentence talking to me, but finished the sentence talking to Andy, who wasn’t there, because dreams are random nonsense. They have no meaning. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either trying to write a book, or has read a book, or let’s be real, a Facebook post, and is trying to make “knowing things about dreams” part of their personality.
By the way, whenever I dream about going to a convention, which seems to happen about 3-5 times a year, I’m always there on Sunday while all the vendors are breaking down their booths and I realized I’ve missed the convention and everyone I wanted to see. I guess it’s a variation on the “have a test for a class I’ve never attended” dream, which I’ve also had, but thankfully less than the convention dream.
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.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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I agree with the line at the end. You should totally make out with a poet.
Not with this poet, please. I’m like 90% straight.
can’t be that straight unless you’re only 2 dimensional.
The Orbs were sleeping until Sydney woke them up in panel 5.
They usually do
My dreams tend to be either quickly forgotten either for being nonsensical and mundane or something woke me up too abruptly and my brain works like an etch a sketch apparently from being shaken…or I have cinematic dreams and parts stand out. I have taken to the habit of trying to write down as soon as possible the ones I remember more than a fleeting feeling about. I can sometimes tell what in real life got incorporated into it, and it feels sometimes like the dreams are on a delay but yeah there are things not in real life, and some dreams have this creepy reoccurring elements like some reoccurring characters that play different roles in different dreams and behave a little too much like they have their own agency like they are aware it’s a dream even when I haven’t in some case.
I have even posted some dream journals to my DeviantArt account to keep a record of them that has a better date posted to them than the offline copies do. But these dreams I have are sometimes the inspiration for stories…of course I also have a hard time sometimes writing a story past where the dream ended. Why I got into the habit of just posting the dream as is rather than try to edit it into a short story. Plus the dream as is keeps the surreal elements and the stuff that if I adapted into a story would be cut out but might mean something in a dream
some recent examples:
March 18th written down
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Dream-Journal-Adventure-on-Randomizer-1032794703
March 21st written down
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Dream-Journal-Vampires-to-X-men-1033765001
April 8th written down
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Dream-Journal-Demon-Queen-and-Leprechaun-troubles-1040117090
So here’s a kicker, in many dreams when the dream tries to get out of control I will often turn into a character from my stories, as well as frequently have super powers, but I used to be able to go full lucid…but the dreams have gotten weirder over the last few years, like the reoccuring characters I mentioned before acting like “dream staff” or the dreams *glitching* basically the entire dream feels like it goes all static and distorted images and resets back to non-lucid and the scenario changes up abruptly. and one of the kore recent oddities are the “game dreams” where I know its not real but the dream has convinced me I am playing a video game so just accept the rules and setting in that context…so less likely to turn into a demon-goddess-sorceress and turn the dream into a power fantasy.
actually another example, one that pulled the video game bit
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Dream-Journal-from-Thanksgiving-to-cyberpunk-1018767970
I won’t post a bunch more links, but let’s say my dreams do anything from “I am at work but then Kid Goku shows up fighting the Red Ribbon Army” to My family goes to a road side attraction but it has real monsters inside or I am a giant demon queen roaming Hell among the vampire adventures, fantasy adventures, and so on…
which given all the anime and videogame influences its a surprise I ever have dreams like…I’m at work and there is a long line of customers, or we are in the car driving some place but never get there, or everything is normal but now I can fly or crawl up the walls but its not acknowledged.
What is up with Dabbler’s head in that last panel? It looks like it’s on backwards.
She’s looking towards the now awake Lapha and all we can see is her hair.
I’m more curious about if her secondary arms have shoulder blades
Her joints are like the insides of a Rubik’s Cube.
It kind of looks like the upper shoulder has an inverted socket. A double socket would take some engineering.
I’ve actually tried designing a proper 2 arm shoulder, being an engineer with a biology background. It’s not easy.
The muscles that move the shoulder around cover half the back, extend up the neck, and cover a good deal of the chest. Then there’s the clavicles.
Best I could come up with was modifying the lower shoulder to omit the clavicle, and have the shoulder blade floating around on a bursa pulled around by a complex arrangement of muscles. Which would have to be interleaved with the muscles moving the upper shoulder around.
And, frankly, Dabbler’s shoulders are too close together vertically for that to work. For a proper four arm body you need the upper shoulders to be reasonably displaced from the lower. Look at some of the original illustrations of Burroughs’ green Martians: The torso is very extended, and the two shoulders separated by at least 18″ to 24″.
Comic artists are always throwing additional arms on people like all the muscles moving them around were confined to the arm itself, when at least half of them are anchored to the sternum and spine. Don’t artists study anatomy anymore?
I think the most “realistic” variation for two pairs directly atop one another would be to essentially split the attachments from the pectoral/trapezius muscles between the two pairs of arms. The deltoid and levator muscles of the lower pair would web together with the lats of the upper pair to form a sort of linear muscle chain for vertical movement a bit like what’s in the palm of your hand.
Each individual arm would be like 1/3rd weaker than a normal person’s arm alone and have slightly less range of motion, but working together would be stronger.
The classic discussion, aliens/mythical anatomy with recognizable framework, Why most series don’t bother to explain it, but have seen plenty, and myself included as thought experiments work it out.
So in my opinion you are making a classic mistake when trying to make a design work, trying to reconfigure or add onto existing human anatomy. While not impossible in some cases, can be a bigger headache than its worth, For example the classic centaur or lamia issue, where one tries to just stitch together human with horse or human with snake, or trying to make a harpy and stitch bird wings in place of human arms. Naturally it doesn’t work.
So the only solution I have is to break it down to the shape you want, cross reference different organism with the same shape for references *floating shoulders, hydrolic joints* etc… and rework the entire structure up from the frame, the shape you want, basically change it from anatomy to engineering, to what could work and then make that organic.
I once ended up with a centaur so super flexible it could roll up in a ball, or rise to its hind legs if needed. Lamia were actually tricker as that is almost all muscle and that takes a lot of energy so the digestive system needs expanded regardless, etc..
basically don’t limit yourself to human anatomy, give them floating shoulders, gear joints, an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton with two to four sets of hydraulic motor controls and floating ball joints where ridged joints would be present before, collapsable structures, super dense muscle fibers, change the cellular structures have a cell membrane that can turn into a cellwall as needed, make the cells out of fluid filled crystalized carbon filaments,
heck look at Dabbler from a zoological perspective, her horns aren’t even anchored properly (most demon horns aren’t, compare to images of horned mammals with the same horns, its rare to see a demon with large horns that the proper skeletal and muscular anchorage), but series will explain this out as the horns are lighter, they are actually a hearing structure and not for fighting, etc.. or the bone structure isn’t calcium based etc..
or just “cheat” and have invisible mana veins/fibers holding them together (an explanation for living armor and skeletons, “astral organ/support structures” that hold the body together from the astral plane, and why magic attacks do more damage to them.
I think she’s doing, like, alien demon yoga or something, and got startled in the middle of three-headed dog with two backs pose, which does not REQUIRE three heads, two backs, or four limbs to perform, but each one definitely helps.
I do remember from college courses that it’s either REM dreams tend to be super weird nonsense and NREM dreams are tedious day-processing, or vice versa. Can’t remember which was which, but I know they had distinct tendencies (as opposed to being hard rules for one way or another)
Points for the Rampage reference.
There’s some evidence to suggest that dreams are at least partially about processing the day’s interactions as memories are sorted away, but mostly in the case of novel interactions and happenings. The more routine your life/day is, the less likely you are to have interesting dreams or to remember your dreams.
“Dreams are your brain processing what happens during the day before…”
Yeah, if it is, then definitely not all the time. Especially since it wouldn’t explain a dream I had back when I was a kid…
We were driving along a stretch of road through the middle of a suburban park, lake on 1 side & wetlands on the other. Suddenly the van we were in swerved off the road towards the wetlands side, only to go over the edge of a massive cliff. As we’re falling, I get changed instantaneously into a Superman type Superhero, fly out of the car and catch the van, holding it above me by the nose as I take it back up to the street…
Somehow, I don’t think anything like that happened when I was a kid…
Dreams are many things, as far as you know, it could be you read a comic, or watched a super hero tv/movie and it stuck in your head. who doesn’t secretly want to be a super hero? Dreams can also be how your subconscious deals with a trauma, In my case, after my wife and I started dating, I kept have a nightmare that I was reliving my car accident, but she was in the car with me. It was only about 6 months after the accident, and I was terrified that it might happen again. I had spent a day in ICU with more machines than I had ever imagined hooked up to me, with a crash cart on one side of me and a ventilator on the other side. What really got me was hearing my family talking with the ICU doc, they asked if I was going to be ok, and all he said was “The next 48 hours will tell us that.” Meaning he did not know…
Yeah…most of my dreams…can’t really post them here. But a lot in my younger days involved anthropomorphic fire alarms. They fuggin’ terrified me for years in my sleep.
[blink blink blink] … Since when do people scream entire book summaries of their dreams upon waking from them. Have to agree with Syd there. Stupid subconscious with its denial fetish! Although now I’m wondering if their psyches are slowly taking on traits from each other from the unconventional way she ejected Lapha.
I have a tendency to rant out my dreams to my husband when I wake up. The fact that most of them involve him in some capacity…and we’re both furries (He’s a dragon, I’m an otter)…dream me is VERY familiar with how useful a tail can be…in more ways than just what the comic shows…
Normal people usually think before screaming out whatever is currently on their mind, but this is Sydney.
And Laph
But yes, sometimes, people will scream out entire sentences when startled awake (even if it’s self-startlement)
Lapha and Sydney shared each other’s memories, good and bad. So having all that new data and experiences flooded both their minds giving both of their subconscious’ a crap-ton of things to muddle through. Weird and event-based dreams would be “normal”, if anyone could say that about Sydney…
The last panel raises several questions about dabbler’s anatomy
No it doesn’t: anyone who has been paying attention to the last 1200+ pages know Dabbles is very flexible (and not just physically)
As someone who watched Ranma 1/2 on bootleg VHS more than 2 decade ago…
I approve of this rambling.
OK DaveB, I’m still wondering what ARCHON (at least the “HON” part) stands for! :D
Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon
Very interesting, but what did DaveB come up with for the (admittedly forced) acronym A.R.C.H.O.N.?
You forgot the chocker. She was under direct orders to wear it 24/7 for the time being.
It’s pages like this that make me wish the patreon was doing NSFW continuations of these scenes.
She woke up before she found out about hemepenes…
I firmly understand humanity has yet to even scratch the surface of how dreams or the human mind works. The techbro claims of neural VR are laughable at best, terribly thin veils for human experimentation at worst.
My pet theory, given there is no answer yet, is it’s basically a burp of the cocktail that is emotions, long term memories, and human imagination. Sometimes, it related to stressors new or old, sometimes it’s just memories going from short to long term, sometimes, it’s pure make-believe because we have the capacity for that, and often it’s a mix. The positive takeaway being that it is proof the human mind is beautifully flexible, because it can imagine things outside the realm of conscious possibility — like the idea of improving things in a bleak society.
So my 12 year old brain + Ranma = how I figured out I was trans when I was a kid. It never dawned on me that other people might have had an even more intimate relationship with that show.
Now my brain is trying to identify which character she was “Awkward Teenage Fumblings” to. o.O
Not a character: Sydney was the awkward teenager fumbling on the couch
It was a memory, not a dream
Yes, I’m aware it was Sydney’s memories. I’m wondering which character in the show Ranma that she was doing that with. I mean Ranma might have been crucial in my own personal realization of ‘Oh ok, well I guess I’m not a guy apparently’ which is why I ended up eventually transitioning to female when back I was in my 20s…
But I never imagined anyone doing something like Sydney did while watching it.
She wasn’t, she was making out with someone (presumably a boy) on her couch while watching the show (or more likely, he was attempting to make out with her while she was more interested in watching the show)
You know that’s one dream I’ve never had, the test day and I never went to class one. I guess that’s because I had that happen IRL when I went to a school that was having semester finals the day I started. That’s another nightmare I had to endure because the DoD moved us in the middle of the school year twice that year.
After seeing lapha on a shelf I had to ask myself a question. (OK I had to ask twice. I wasn’t listening the first time.)
Does Dabbler have to take out her cyber eye at night and put in a charger?
Lapha: And WHAT THE HELL is a Ranma 1/2?!? I know the name for my dream, but it does not include any information on what it is, or why I’d want to watch it during coitus! STUPID DREAMS!!
That’s the first Ranma ½ reference I’ve seen in a while… makes me happy.
That it was there, or that it took so long to show up?
Hoo, boy…. so, my GF’s dreams are…. well, ‘mundane.’ Like seeing dead relatives at old houses they used to live at, or me cheating on her, or seeing her exes.
MY dreams….. lets see, there were at least three apocalypse dreams, only one I survived, several demon dreams, a dream where I was several people on multiple factions of an imminent war (and I was getting full sensations and emotions from ALL of them, simultaneously; and when I woke up, I felt like what I could best describe as “my soul was contracting like a stretched rubber band to fit back in just my one real body”), last week dreamed I had to kill a guy and avoid the orphan I just made– but then some god or overseer or something said “You did it wrong” and reset time over and over, and I was forced to do increasingly elaborate ‘side quests’ that only seem tangentally related to killing this one guy repeatedly, and when I finally got to killing him AGAIN, “nope, did it wrong. Do it again,” and one where I was at a sex-themed amusement park and apparently snuck back in after hours– which seemed to really piss off the owner, LUCIFER HIMSELF, causing him to glare at me (not dream-me, ME me) and kick me out of the Dreamtime, leaving me to wake up wondering “Did….. did Satan just tell me to fuck off??”
If you don’t remember your dreams, how do you know you have them?
One of the stressful dreams I used to have involved running through a garden, on curving gravel paths between densely planted beds of shrubs or bushes.
While being chased by a looming, threatening, anonymous dark entity and unable to keep my eyes open.
With no straight lines to run in, that was quite the problem.
I figured it was a result of a fear of being blinded, or otherwise unable to see. So I trained myself to navigate the house I was living in at the time at night with no lights on.
Never had the dream again.
To be fair, my girlfriend at the time had agree’d we’d both jump in the pools. Til she decided to fuck some random guy in college while I was deployed.
Is it just me or does Sydney look like she went up a cup size when she woke up?
? no one.?? D&D basic…
I had a dream i was on a airplane with one of my friends.
stewardess comes out and tells everyone that the pilot is unable to pilot the plane and if anyone can take over
My friend instantly stands up “I will do it!”
I instantly panic because this friend of mine is a complete failure at anything tech related. but i cant stop him.
the moment he goes into the cockpit and begins to pilot the plane. it spins out of control and we crash.
We lay in the rubble next to each other suddenly. and i just go “Your an idiot”
he then goes “yeaaah.. i know”
Told my friends this dream and they all agreed with how this would play out if it happened.
There has only ever been one time when haven’t had at least dream per sleep-period, and that was as a kid kneeling vertically between a folded mattress (it was the most restful sleep ever had: went to sleep, several hours later woke up with nothing in between)
One of the most annoying recurring dreams is: going down a street (any street, usually a well-familiar one) and then suddenly being inside a building (didn’t walk through any doors, just… inside a building) with no way out, as in, no matter how many doors go through, it’s never the door leading outside (even if immediately turned around)
Have learnt a technique to counter shit like that: reach down to the bottom of the wall, push until can get a hand between the wall and the floor, and rip upwards, voila! instant doorway :) (works similarly on doors that insist on being too narrow: push the sides apart until can fit through)
Just a question, is the first panel a nod to the youtube song “ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny”? The background and the starting words “just walking around” reminded me of it.
Background is the classic game “Rampage”
Believe that is ‘Ralph’ the lizardman scaling that building (or was ‘Ralph’ the Monkey?)
From memory, I believe Ralph is the werewolf, Lizzie is the reptile, and… George seems too obvious to be the name of the gorilla.
Looking it up, however, my memory appears to be correct.
Oh right, the lizard was the girl, right? Haven’t played it in decades
Yeah, figured George was too obvious (and was trying to ignore the movie)
Someone list off all the objects on Dabbler’s Shelf. I only recognized the Sankara Stone from Temple of Doom, and maybe a rock-em sock-em robot.
Bottom of first page (this is second page)
that face
that fucking face
that fucking fucking face
Ranma ftw!
Ashamed to admit it, but do want more lizard Sydney.
I felt that way too, that’s why I made some AI fanart of her that way the next day :D https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GK9FWATWcAADTHw?format=jpg&name=large
Your blog title makes me want to write a web commic “Exploitation of the Astro Sheepazoids”…
Come to think of it, it’s probably better not written, it sounds like something that could devolve into a furry/impreg extravaganza faster than you can say “lanolin toxicity”
You have to love Sydney’s “First Edition Player’s Guide” T-shirt.
Used to have two recurring dreams fairly regularly; both have been less common in the last decade or so, though:
In the first, I would have the ability to fly, but only while holding my breath. As soon as I started breathing again, I’d start to float downward, so I would have to go high, at first, then gasp and hold breath again to get horizontal thrust, then kind of move in a sort of wave-like motion. Sometimes this would be accompanied by other people being annoyed at my flying.
The other one is right up there with the Classroom Dream–the Inappropriately Placed Toilet Dream. Damned things being placed in the middle of a living room, or in front of a window with no curtain, or just an open closet, or even outside, like on the lawn or something. No one around… until I decide to take a seat, at which point there’s a goddamned parade going by….
Going to be interesting if Sydney crosses paths with Garamm during his processing tomorrow.
Maxima: “…Sydney, why did you immediately turn bright red the moment you saw this guy?”
Sydney: “Do you think I would look hot with a tail?”
Garamm: “Oh, absolutely!! …although I’m not sure what that has to do with the current line of questioning.”
Sydney: “Hur hur hur hur”
Maxima: “PRIVATE SCOVILLE, EXIT THIS ROOM, NOW!”
Sydney: “What? What did I do?”
Dabbler: “You know what you WANTED to do… and so does everyone else.”
President Obama: “I’m suddenly less sure I’m really needed on a Zoom call for this interrogation.”
Sydney: “Oh DAMN! Did I not notice him on a screen AGAIN???”
I know this comic has always had a horny streak, but it feels like we’ve passed the event horizon. Well, to be more accurate, we passed it after the entire base was hypnotised into horniness and the whole thing was written off as not a big deal and everyone who objected was aggressively shouted down by other fans, but this just feels like an extension of it.
Eh, as one of the objectors to the arc you mention, I think this is more a case of this scene being colored by that one’s implications. This still feels to me like pre-Incident shenanigans–sexual in nature, yes, but without the consent issues. Hell, Sydney’s even still very clearly wearing sweatpants in the dream-sequence.