Grrl Power #1287 – Cultural exchange
I accidentally drew that apple way too realistically.
You’d think that “trying to steal my body” would put Lapha on “The List” (which come to think of it, we haven’t seen in quite a while) but, Sydney also has a checklist of superhero tropes that she’s working her way through, and it would be unfair for her to add someone to both lists for the same action, so instead she’s trying to be magnanimous.
People who lose a limb are often said to have Phantom Limb Syndrome, where the brain is just used to that limb being there and starts making up sensations for the missing bits. It’s far less common for someone to have a limb added. Not reattached, but like someone born with one flipper arm having it replaced with a donated limb from some generous motorcyclist. Actually… I’m not sure if that ever has happened. But if it does, there’s probably some reverse P.L.S. situation, where they poke their new hand and their brain is like “Nope. Didn’t feel nuttin’!” And of course there’s probably a considerable adjustment period where that guy is walking around just bangning his new arm into everything the moment he stops thinking about having a new arm. But that would still be different that having a new limb that your body and nervous system is not evolutionarily equipped to handle. Like if you woke up with wings, the adjustment period just from your brain learning to process the sensations would probably be considerable.
But for races like Lapha’s, the meatblanks they customize are always sold with the appropriate motor and sensory bits all ready to go. Sure, there’s still a bit of a learning curve, but they have the software to match the hardware. That doesn’t mean you remember to tuck your tail when you sit down. Even Garamm’s race needs to learn that, but usually they’ve figured it out by the time they’re about 5 years old. (Their tails aren’t long enough to dangle on the ground when they’re very young.) Garamm has a vested interest in Lapah liking her tail, so he’s trying to be helpful.
I think it would probably kind of suck to go from living in an technologically advanced society to a much less advanced one. Sure, all the isekai to the past books are fun to read, mostly because it allows we the readers, who mostly have an average modern education, to imagine that we could become the grand sage of metallurgy, steam, warfare and medicine. Of course, those books usually never really dwell on just how awful those first few months would be until you got established somewhere and invented hot showers and food that isn’t mostly stew.
Let’s say the tech level Lapha is used to is ST:TNG levels, and now she’s stuck living on our early 21st century world. Imagine reading about tech news, like the next Playstation or whatever and seeing that it can store a terabyte of information and render games at 120 FPS with anti-aliasing and volumetric fog and clouds! To a 2-dimensional screen. Using the same controller that the PS1 debuted with, (except for the updates that happen after Nintendo does something innovative). Playing games with pre-set dialog trees and no face-scan emotion recognition, etc, etc. It’d be like handing a Gen-Z an Etch-a-Sketch and telling them it’s the cutting edge.
Knowing you have to wait like 200 years for these people to catch up to what you’re used to would probably be a little exhausting. Sure, there’s the argument that there’s such a thing as too much tech, and going to a restaurant and seeing half the tables just staring at their phones supports the idea, but I think that says more about the people and culture using the tech than being any sort of criticism against particular technological milestones.
Although, given that Lapha will be working with Arc-LIGHT, I’m sure whoever her handler is will be taking notes whenever she is grumpily tapping away at a phone screen and grousing about “You people really should invent [billion dollar idea.]” And the handler is all, “Oh? That sounds useful, how does that work?”
Huh. I didn’t think I’d have much to write about this page, but I hit the ADHD button and off I went.
The new vote incentive is up!
It’s Escorpia/Sciona, fresh off her successful… extortion campaign? I’m not sure if extortion is the right word. Addicting someone to superpowered narcotics then withholding to compel directed behavior? Kind of a ransom/extortion/generally being a butt kind of thing. There’s probably a better word for that. Anyway, check out Sciona’s business casual getup at TWC, and Patreon has a bunch of… let’s call them increasingly casual variants.
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If you’re used to the three shells, it must be hard to use toilet paper.
Toilet what now?
What’s a ‘toilet’?
You know, the poopin’ hole.
Fancy city folk call it a toilet, like they french or somethin’. Even keep it indoors and fill it with water.
I just use the lawn…
We actually do have examples of humans today growing new parts, and having to adjust to the new sensations.
Just ask any trans woman about bashing her tits on things.
Technically, men have tits. Just usually not large enough to matter.
Except for Bob. Bob has bitch-tits.
His name was Robert Paulson.
His name was Robert Paulson.
We usually call them moobs.
Having had both, I can verify that they feel increadably different.
Can confirm. I have bonked my boobs into many things (mostly doors) post augmentation from not paying attention or trying to turn around quickly in doorways. It doesn’t really happen anymore years later but there was an adjustment period at first.
I also felt P.L.S. for year or two after the reconfiguration betwixt my legs, but thankfully that sensation also faded with time as that was awkward. ;)
Yep, bonding, but Peggy is looking VERY doubtful about the whole thing. Staw and Lapha are acting like an old married couple, but then again she was in his head too for a while as well. My wife and I banter sometimes like that, but it’s all in fun. Sydney and Lapha already know WAY too much about each other, so Lapha shouldn’t have much trouble knowing how things are done, but knowing and understanding are 2 different things. Peggy is no doubt being watchful in case there’s some lingering mind control or something. Sydney did start crying over Lapha’s history, so there might be some doubt since she’s acting so forgiving. I just think Sydney is being understanding and is willing to give the duo a shot.
No, Peggy (and Sydney) are looking like that due to the PDA
Porque no los dos?
I do wonder what Lapha does if there’s a way of doing something that she’s used to from Space Society and it’s completely different from the way Sydney would do it.
Does she sometimes do it the Sydney way by accident, or the Space way? Does she have to think “No, that’s wrong here.”
I suppose it could be like someone going off the to the wilderness in a way. There won’t be toilet paper behind that bush, so you have to take it with you. You have to shake out your shoes, or you’ll eventually learn what scorpion venom feels like.
For that matter, going to Japan. Yes, they see you’re a foreigner so they make allowances. Pity the person of Japanese ancestry (so not obviously foreign) that goes to Japan and is expected to e.g. know when and how to bow, and just how much.
Lapha is acting or thinking she’s being forced to live with primitives, like if you woke up in a Teepee in precolonial north America. She wouldn’t be right or wrong, and that is the entire point of adding her and Staw to the team, to have someone on hand that knows things other than Dabbler. Dabs gets waaaaay too cocky and smart-mouthed when she has to “school” us dumb ole humans about the galactic know-how. That’s what I loved about the entire story line when Deus schooled HER! (when the goon squad and Darude attacked Deus’s base… and Max got a hi-gloss polish to her face))
It’s a bit like suddenly gaining an instant family member, although I must admit there’s some curiosity over the slashfic.
My first thought was “Instant ‘childhood friend'” but otherwise, yeah.
Lapha has been in both Sydney’s and Staw’s head, so yeah, childhood friend, a family member, or long-time married couple. Lapha is showing the same love/hate feelings for both. I can’t help but wonder, how many times has she done that? How many other peoples’ memories does she have?
From context, I’m guessing by “Staw”, you’re referring to Garamm.
Yes, I think Scarsdale saw where Lapha shouted Stawp! and assumed that Staw was Garamm’s name, rather than that Lapha was saying ‘Stop’ with an exaggerated emphasis on the ‘op’ part of the word.
Yeah sorry, damn readers broke wasn’t sure what i was reading so I was guessing. I know I could have blow up the page, but that’s a pain too.
NP, I was just explaining what probably happened. :)
Now that I think about it, in some way the old Sydney is dead. a person is the sum of his experiences and sydney is now the sum of lapha and sydney. unless lapha’s experiences are literally in the drawer lapha’s life and sydney perfectly distinguishes her conclusions and experiences from lapha’s.
She lost nothing of her experience, just gained new ones.
If that is dying, you die every moment of your life.
It depends how novel and redefining your new experiences are.
Look at people who have gone to war or lived through a 9/11 or Pearl Harbor or some traumatic event. Those experiences are very often the death of who you were and someone new and more burdoned awakes from your tears.
On 8/31/01 I literally died after I got hit with a pickup truck going about 60 MPH (100 km/hr). When the EMTs got to me I had no detectible pulse or respiration and a gaping hole in my lower leg that should have been pouring out blood but wasn’t because of no heartbeat. I had multiple broken bones and a TBI that was the true reason why I divide my life into before and after the wreck. I lost all my foreign languages and computer languages, and my ability to hear rhyme and meter as I wrote which kinda spelled the end of my poetry, and severely impacted my self-image. When you have “the Poet” as part of your name not being able to make poetry is a body blow to your identity.
The saying “You are the sum of your experiences” is woefully oversimplifying all the things that go into making a person, a person. It leans way too much on the nurture side of things, when there’s a fair likelihood that nature has just as much to do with it as anything – the chemical processes that go on in the brain, the current structure of neural pathways. And for nurture, there’s also the fact that plenty of things can shape us that we just don’t remember, little day-to-day things, things from before our memories switched from primal baby brain to conscious child brain.
Yeah, it’s not quite “Where does the newborn go from here?” since their personalities didn’t merge directly, but you’d think it’d be close.
Without any foundation, I had adopted the “drawer” theory: Sydney can look at those experiences if she wants, the way you or I could recall a book or movie, but they haven’t irrevocably melded into her core being.
I’d argue that we don’t really pay much attention to our past at any particular time – we also make up stories about our past rather than even be aware of the exact truth – so it’s EXACTLY like having watched movies of another person’s entire life. They made decisions that you would not have done, but you understand why they did what they did, even if it doesn’t line up with your morals or decision criteria. Each of their personalities are generally unaffected, but there will be an “inertia” of “fuzzy attractor” toward the other person’s thinking, just by virtue of understanding it thoroughly. In both cases, that should manifest as having far more options in any given scenario.
It looks like some others have already explained this and I’m no neutral physician or psychologist (professionally), that said, what makes a person who they are isn’t just memories, its also the associative memories, that is emotional connection to memories, the biochemical components of human instincts and physiological conditions that influence intelligence, reflex, reactions, things like phobias born from early traumas (even if adult you wouldn’t consider it a trauma), basically summed down to memories associate with one another based on lived experiences.
It also looks like this is more a memory upload than a personality combination. I am honestly surprised Sidney has retained as much of Lapha’s memories as she has. While connected is one thing, but a full lifetime copy/paste is weird. Now had Sidney experienced this at a young age I could see it causing some developmental problems. But as an adult I can see her correct for the memories with some good old fashioned disassociation, remembering something but clues inform her “oh that happened to someone else”
while we don’t have any real world examples of a memory download (yet), we do have the next best thing and next best thing after that. Dreams and works of fiction. Humans dream, now most dreams don’t make it into long term memory and thus not remembered, but even those that do most people can disassociate the events of the dream as events in real life, (this event didn’t really happen), same to with reading a book, comic, movie, etc…even videogames where you are actually doing something, but you are able to reason away *this happened to someone else, this happened in fiction, this didn’t happen to me*….although the level of emotional investment sometimes may bring one to question just how much some people manage to disassociate vs it impacting them personally. But that’s for those people experimenting with human self awareness levels to ponder (yes actual real studies going on to determine just how self aware most people actually are).
The complication is imagination and memory are the same part of the brain, while this can cause problems it also serves the other way around, just as much as someone can convince themselves an imagined event was real, a person can equally convince themselves a memory is imagination and reroute the associations to treat it that way (disconnecting, disassociating from it) which just means seeing the memory, feeling it in that moment, but after able to push it aside to not influence them anymore than a vivid dream or virtual reality game, or really engrossing movie might.
It is hard to stay mad at someone when you know exactly how much of a mess they had been through… And you are helping them get that one chance in which they might become a better and more happy person.
Just look at how many people like redemption fics and then knowing you could make one happen in real life.
The first time is hand shakes and awkward understanding. If they mess that chance up? Well then comes out the bats and aiming for their knees. As they knew they could have had a better or slightly more happy life and knew exactly how bad it would be if they drop kicked that lucky save out a window.
So what happens when the next time Woof and Sydney are getting physical and in the throws of passion Sydney yells, “Pull my Tail!!” ?
A- Takes her shopping for a functional Holotail?
B- offers to surgically attach a “real” tail?
C- stares in confusion?
D- asks “what would that enTAIL?”
E- plays along and says “you don’t have to TAIL me twice”
F-That’s a de-tail I missed.
And that’s when a group of ninjas come in to attack.
Always Expect Ninjas.
I’m not scared, I’ve had ninjas after me before, and I’ve always lived to tell the tail.
Ninjas and pirates are being sent en route for using the same pun twice. Which is even worse than just using bad puns.
It’s not the same pun twice, the first one was tell -> tail, the second was tale -> tail.
You must have missed that de-tail.
(Now that was using the same pun twice, even though it was Ro Jaws the first time. If I’m getting pirates sent after me anyway, I might as well.)
I’m adding koalas to the hit squad now!
That’s some serious eskoalation!
thankfully we are at the tail end of the eskoalation. as for the pirates… all of them are using American VPN’s so well… they won’t be pirates much longer. also they are The Pudgy Pirates.
Aren’t the pirates how the koalas got chlamydia?
Okay I can’t actually send more for that one, because it was sort of clever.
Bringing it all together, I would say that it is all telltail signs of eskoalating pun-ishment.
You get a ninja hit squad because that was just lazy copying of puns. Boo I say. Boo.
Do you mean tailtail signs?
Okay now I’m throwing zombies into the hit squad mix for that one, you cad.
So now it’s ninja, pirates, koala AND zombie hit squads.
I guess we should take it seriously now, koalas AND zombies make for a downright eucalyptic threat.
You’re assembling a grand koalition of anti-pun assassins.
Oh get off my tail.
Ro, Ro, Ro. You can do better than that. :)
I’m amazed you didn’t say ‘boater’
I try not to use the tools of the enemy.
Although that was clever.
Apparently, appendage apellations agravate active associates acting as aperture attendants, accentuating already assinine acts, activating assemblies, armed, armored, and appointed.
Always avoid absolutely awfull alliterations.
I only send hit squads at people for puns, mostly for bad puns – not for alliterative speak.
If anything – that sort of impresses me because of the ingenious use of vocabulary.
and alliterative pun might be fun, although rather difficult to achieve
I’d give you a pass on that just because of the difficulty and writing skill involved in pulling that off.
Well I didn’t have much to work with this time. You can’t make that many puns about tails.
It’s not a word tail-ormade for puns.
If Lapha’s tail is an extension of her spine then I can all but picture that feeling and I would not like it at all. XD Reminds me of a Mortal Combat animation, but from the other end.
But if we’re talking lizard tails then let’s hope it’s not one of those that come off in an emergency.
for a human the sensation is probably as difficult to describe as an octopus trying to describe what its like to have mini-brains in eight arms. the closest approximation I could think of its like stretching your back or neck, but a tail is less sensitive than a neck, so maybe like when a limb is pulled. Heck given how many animals will intertwine their tails and S&M being a thing it might not be far off from people who want stretched out or their hair pulled.
Not even Lapha has THAT much memories of having a tail.
Feh. That going through the Industrial Revolution again is weak sauce. Just skip straight to the smart matter.
Neil Gershenfeld “We are working on that.”
“Concerns about grey goo are completely misplaced.” according to a statement released by SmartNano Inc on Monday. “It’s actually more of a beige.”
What’s an “apply”? Since I can’t think any of the appliances in this strip are drawn too realistically I’ll just go ahead and assume you meant “apple”.
I hate to admit it, but when Dave wrote “I accidentally drew that apply way too realistically.”, I went up to the art and spent several minutes wondering what the hell an ‘apply’ was.
I felt really dumb when I realized the apple was drawn more realistically than everything else in the scene.
… Why do I now suddenly want to see if I can find such a slashfic?
Shouldn’t be too difficult
I haven’t read enough of it to be much judge of such things but how good would Sydney’s slash fic be?
She doesn’t seem to be currently writing it, so I would guess about average. Namely, pretty cringe when you read it again six months later.
Admittedly, she might be putting it off because she’s having those adventures personally.
I think if you haven’t got the writing bug, i.e. must write or you will die, then having adventures probably removes the temptation to write about them. And there’s always the security aspect, so writing a fictionalized version might be pretty difficult.
please give into such temptations, then report back.
why are we thinking Sydney writes it? miss ‘squirrel’ probably read massive amounts of it. ranging from ok, to the crap in the toilet tells a better story.
I love how Lapha is giving a subtle bird at the last panel.
Lapha only has three fingers and a thumb on each hand, so that’s the equivalent of her pinkie.
Wrong end, that’s the equivalent of the Index finger (the one next to the thumb)
S.M. Stirling’s recent book “To Turn the Tide” does deal with people from a technologically-advanced society (2032) adjusting to a much lower technological level (165, on the outskirts of the Roman Empire). There is a lot of culture shock, much of which could get them killed, like having to mix wine with their drinking water, so they don’t get terminal collywobbles…
L. Sprague de Camp’s “Lest Darkness Fall” is a classic example of this genre with a modern (1970s) historian being sent back to the late Roman Empire. He never does get gunpowder to work, but he becomes prosperous by inventing distilling. He also eventually gets a printing press going, but sourcing paper is a bitch.
I love when authors take this route, rather than (J am future man, so I know how to make aluminum, copper wires, vacuum bulbs, a mini electrical grid, gunpowder, and build a combustion engine with a hammer over night).
or aliens crash on a “primitive world” and while they scoff at first realize, “Oh crap, I don’t know how any of this stuff works”. Its like someone who only knows DVD players and DVDs being shown a phonograph…and I mean knows as in they read the manual once and can repeat things about lasers and data grids and what not, and not realize they couldn’t begin to know how to build one from scratch. Worst case when an ascended being is made physical and realizes they don’t know the models used by physicists or the names of stuff they just *did* what they did and can’t explain it like, “well I grabbed this wobbly thing that felt a certain way to me and this cushy stiffy wobbly something. That I felt and mixed them and did stuf…oh crap I have no idea how to make a physical machine that can do what I did or even where to start.
I remember a book somewhere that summed this up well. the technologically advanced person told the less advanced. ‘you do not know how to make the tools that make the tools’ this sums up the issue in a lot of places.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain yet.
Didn’t mention it directly, but kinda hinted at it in another post (American going to England at the time of Boadicea)
True, true.
Something like that happened in a DragonLance novel: some people went back in time and one of them had to make the tools needed to make the tools to make himself some weapons, at least he knew what sort of ore to look for in its raw-state
Can remember a book (forgot the name or author) about a guy going back to Hungary prior to the Hun-vasion
At least he didn’t have as much of a problem with the language as a modern American would going back to England during the time of Boadicea, or even as relatively recently as the time of Robin Hood
Could that be “Hard to be a God” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky perhaps? It seems to cover a similar concept.
Got the country wrong: it was Poland not Hungary
The book “1632” is about a small West Virginia mining town which was transported whole to northern “Germany” during the era of the Holy Roman Empire and the 30 Years’ War. Substantial culture shock in both directions.
LOVE. AND. PEACE!
Is there a back up plan if Lapha betrays Arc-LIGHT or worse, does something to have the entire Arc-LIGHT division compromised?!?
Yeah, the same as if anyone did that
Sidney should be more concerned if she (HAS ANYTHING ELSE) she isn’t telling Archon then Lapha could tell them if persuaded to.
Tech wise, I think Doctor Stone did some interesting aspects, namely making it take a long fucking time to figure shit out even with A) knowing it can be done B) having a rough idea of how to make it happen. Of course, he’s pretty close to a chemistry teacher in knowledge base, which is probably the most useful as there’s a lot more ‘and this common compound has these neat applications’ compared to an industrial chemist where ‘hit up the supply closet’ is the main issue for sourcing unless you have to *shudders* custom order.
I do recall 1632 (I always get the numbers mixed up, it’s by Baen tho) focusing on that when a ~2000AD town gets yeeted into past Europe and all the shenanigans that happen as a result.
Awesome books. 1632-33 are some of the few books that I keep and reread fairly often, especially for a couple of scenes. The scene in the second(?) book where the CEO-type guy suddenly finds out how different he and his wife are from the nobles and royals, and how they’ve been perceived, always gives me chills. There’s a couple of scenes in the first two with the valkyrie-type that I love rereading as well.
Your discussion regarding new limbs reminds me of a book I read maybe 30 years ago. Think it was called The rapture? Anyways it was set in current times (well current at the time1980s now), and it was a scifi play on the religious concept of the rapture. A whole bunch of people got sick their diets changed, their bones became hollow, their muscles became thin and like piano wire, and they grew wings (so like functional angels but just people). The whole book then after was about their adjustment, other peoples adjustment to them, how they were percieved by religions at first and the conflict when they were still just human how some coped and other didnt, various conditions they went through, and other accomodations that needed to be made to society. Quiet interesting… I should see if I can find it and give it a re-read now that I am much older.
Looked it up, just called Rapture by David Sosnowski in 1996.
Is it just me, or is Peggy getting prettier?
Dave’s art skills are incrementally improving.
In regards to books that do a great job of building modern technology and science in a primitive world, and a lot more realistic than isaki usually do, here’s some recommendations;
Destiny’s Crucible series by Olan Thorensen
Cross-time Engineer (First book of a series) by Leo A. Frankowski
Island in the sea of time (First book of a triology) by S.M. Stirling – This one is a real classic and masterpiece.
Cross-time Engineer, is that the one where the guy goes back to pre-Hunvasion of Hungary
Late 20th century engineer goes to 13th century Poland actually.
Thankings you, all could remember was it being just before the Hun rolled over Europe (and the talking horses and the guy who forgot to blink at a bad time)
May be diffrent stories. If I recall correctly Frankowski’s story had some intelligent biotech horses that could not talk, but communicatewith body language and letterboards. And the invading army were Mongols, not the Hun.
Probably me getting details wrong: intelligent horses that could understand German (later ‘inherited’ one that could only understand modern English), and got Mongols mixed with Hun (knew it was from Asia, and possibly thinking Attila the Hun, also possibly why thought it was Hungary not Poland)
Did it have a couple of time travellers who ended up going back a couple hundred thousand years or so with no way back and it took until the end of the series before they were found?
Yeah, that is it. The two travelers were sent on punishment duty for leaving a time machine unsecured. Then had problems being retrieved.
I had forgotten about the List… I started one in a notebook after I first read the one about it. I need to drag that out and add more people/things to it…
Oh hey, random thought; wonder what the space police are going to think when they find out that the wielder of that weird technology has ADHD?
Also how much is the experience of driving a faulty meat suit affecting Lapha?
They’d probably just think ‘oh great, another Doctor Who.’
Oh no, force empathy via memory sharing!
Now that she is stuck with Earthtech for the foreseeable future, if Laptha is asked to hack a top of the line 2008 computer or laptop, will she even fit, or will she be stuck having to stay outside and use a wire connection from it to herself? (much less any older ones a lot of people hang on to as long as possible)
Well she has been locked into her body, so she would have to use whatever user input devices the system or ArcLIGHT has available.
“Fitting” wouldn’t be the concern, the concern would be the computer being able to provide her without enough power and data to avoid terminal corruption. I suspect it would be up to the task, as I don’t think Aetholiths are power or data hogs, at least for long enough for her to get what she needs out of it and then hop back to her body. Although it may work out better to either install a universal data jack onto her current body (so she can still draw from it, and also doesn’t have to have her transference ability unlocked) or have her carry a portable Aetholithmate to plug into machines and then hop into that to do the hacking. I’d imagine Dabbler could set her up with either option.
Does that menu read “Meat” and “Not Meat”?
Yes
just need that 3rd option: ‘Fake Meat’
..Hey, shouldn’t this be 1287? Last comic was 1286, too..
I think a more relevant comparison than an Etch-A-Sketch would be Mattell Electronic Football from 1977. Handheld, 9-volt battery, LED display. I played that thing a lot.
Two quotes from The Godfather saga (which I’m sure Sydney has watched multiple times) that are relevant to her attituda towards Lapha:
“It’s strictly business – nothing personal” from The Godfather.
“This is the business we have chosen” from The Godfather Part II
… That situation makes me wonder about something though. Does she get sensory recall with that as well? Those could make for some real wild memory shares for Sydney.
Both this page and the last seem to be labeled as page 1286.
“just how awful those first few months would be until you got established somewhere and invented hot showers and food that isn’t mostly stew.”
This is really funny, since it shows just how much Romantic and Industrial Revolution disdain for the medieval period is still ingrained in our collective minds and “education”…
And it’s all untrue and quite a lot of it is Church Propaganda by mostly the catholic aescetic orders, and later the Calvinists ( in various flavours ) who….well… hated any kind of fun and luxury..
On average, people ate well and varied, even the poor in the cities, because there was a serious alm culture that ensured well-off to wealthy sponsors for various shelters for people with afflictions/disabilities.
You don’t do heavy manual labour on minimum calories, y’know… Not for very long anyway…
Up until the second Plague wave, there was an extensive bathhouse culture. Which the fanatical elements in the Church *hated* with a passion.
But until the Rumormill and the Church clamped down on it with the slogan “A Good Stink Keeps the Plague Away” there was a solid culture of Cleanliness.
Sloth ( which smelling like a boar pit falls under…) is, after all a cardinal sin, and people who didn’t take care of their body were looked down upon… hard.
Etcetera….
What people think of as “the evils of Medieval” is actually mostly Renaissance and Romantic period, where things for most of the population went really downhill, because you had a serious beef between two major ever-increasing fanatical religious groups ( splitting up like the cats-in-a-sack they were…) driving most of the Unpleasantness of the 16th/17th Century. Enduring well into the 20th C even.
And you thought people’d learn, but it’s happening *again*, just this time the “Prophet” was a goatherd, instead of a carpenter. Different flavour, same result.
I can see Garamm giving an affectionate nuzzle but isn’t smootching more of a lips thing?
Sulk all you want Lapha but you’ll appreciate the pop culture references when it helps you esccape a tricky situation
Vash the Stampede! Been ages since I’ve seen that name.
So glad were going to see these two more moving forward now that they are part of the Arc team.
“But that would still be different that having a new limb that your body and nervous system is not evolutionarily equipped to handle. ”
You’d be surprised. Basically brain plasticity is equally effective with whatever kind of limb you want to add as long as the connections are there and you don’t add too many different limbs. A blind person has had the skin on their back turned into a low resolution grayscale eye by making a camera-linked device poke the skin based on light intensity of the various parts of the picture. Or something like that, loooong time ago that I read about it. But it actually worked and was actually perceived as vision. Likewise, you could probably wire up new limbs, and I think some animal tests have been done on that. Not a lot of course, the ethics committees have something to say about that.
And it doesn’t even have to be an actual limb, it can even be a tool. I think I read somewhere that being so good at guitar that the guitar feels like an extension of yourself actually has measurable effects on the structure of your brain.
Anyway, neuroplasticity is awesome and I want two more arms.
The human brain and body is quite flexible in that way with adding limbs it seems, and sometimes not.
I know someone who was born without a lower left arm, but she couldn’t get used to a prothesis for a lower arm and hand.
There are also shorts on youtube where people are convinced a fake hand is theirs. The setup is simple, there is a fake left hand on the table, the person at the table keeps his left hand below the table, and put the right hand besides the left one. The fake hand then gets poked with a needle, and the brain interprets the visual of the needle going into the fake hand as a real pain signal.
Never did like when average Joe goes back in time or to a less advanced world and has the knowledge to create modern technology. Especially when it’s a wide variety of stuff. Because tech has steps, can you make the things needed to make the things in other words. Can you make the metals or have access to the right chemicals and construction or tools needed to make the base components.i saw a program once about modern circuit boards saying even a half a century prior they wouldn’t have been able to reverse engineer them if they got them because the materials, needed factory conditions, and other discoveries weren’t available. Sure they might get some ideas and try to copy it leasing an acceleration in it, but that would take a committed team effort and the resources for it.
Not one guy sent back in time, not going to build a car in 750AD even if you were a car mechanic. Lack of tools and metallurgy to make the right components. Especially not the spark plugs.
You’d have to have the knowledge to build the basic version, but then spend a lifetime trying to convince the governments and academics of the times you ended up in to pursue your invention…that it’s not witchcraft and other social issues , to supply via slow moving trade the materials you need, some super rare depending on where you are or non existent as they too are synthetic components that needed invented and refined over time.
In short the time traveler is more likely to build a puppet show with strings and gears than get a simple computer working.
Now this gets worse for aliens, imagine a world that doesn’t use the same models, yeah physics is the same but not how we label it. Also maybe your alien is a diplomat not an engineer. Or worse yet what is their tech is so advanced and has so advanced interfaces and ao advanced tools, and they aren’t one of those ascended or anything species, just some one from a species whose tech reached that level that they can name the parts and what they do in their tech but show them much simpler machines and they have no idea how the simple machines work without their tech. We see this in humans looking at the past and confused how people could build things without modern equipment, or anyone that has looked at old tech who was confused how they figured out the simple mechanics could do things while they tech they use requires all this precise AI calculations and billions of logic gates and so on.
The know it all because we’re more advanced trope is right up there with the less advanced tech interfaces with future or alien tech trope as just a way to avoid the logical complications these situations should have. But it is always fun to see when they subvert the trope or call them out.
Didn’t Rome have steam engines and just mostly didn’t see the point of them?
Rome, Greece, and a few others did invent stuff that would be lost to time that could have started an Industrial Revolution much earlier had those cultures seen their value beyond (novelties) and then competed with each other over their developments.
We had vending machines, concrete, steel, sewers, heated water, heated floors (using the heated water, a method that was rediscovered and some homes and such even use it today), valves, water screws, seed separating devices, levitating statues (load stone trick used at temples), so using magnets to levitate things was also a concept, etc…
the biggest problems were.
A: rich people toys (no other use considered)
B: privalege (how dare the poor (AKA: the method that spreads technology as a whole) want what we have)
C: Secrets of the priesthood *some temples throughout history hid what they were doing and called it magic or miracles…see talking statues in Egypt*
D: Not seeing the practicality (A Greek inventor had designed mechanically powered farming devices that never got built *not funded* because the government said slaves were cheaper and pushed back on any social changes *familiar story*.
E: the idea is there but the means to actually build it aren’t, so it doesn’t get funded as too expensive or *there is no material light enough and strong enough to make this…funny enough a continuing problem…like no battery small enough that last long enough inhibiting some electronic developments and robotics.
F: clashes with the culture. Aside from big events like the Holy Roman Empire intentionally throwing out ALL PAGAN INVENTIONS…thus loss of all those nice Roman and Greek inventions…heck we also lost good looking art for a long time because the Church insisted art always be “divinely symbolic” (AKA based on some religious leader’s art tastes and got stuck that way for centuries) and all other art based on the human gaze *looking real or having depth and perspective* was blasphemous to them…not imagine the hardships of trying to invent anything in that environment. Heck this continued and continues into the modern day, see the pushbacks on using lightning rods as “an offense to God” and so on.
This is why war gets so much credit for inventions, because without a big push to make it necessary most of these cultures would just shove any changes or new ideas aside because those in charge don’t understand them, or don’t see a need for them, and “can’t you be happy with what I HAD growing up” mindsets.
Slavery accounts for a lot of it, and the relation between people and work.
Why build a machine to wash your clothes badly (it will certainly start out doing it badly)? There’s slaves to do that (in Roman times).
Even in England after they got rid of slaves, there were still a lot more people than things to do, resulting in very low wages (often just food and shelter). See also India for an extreme version of this – though they coped with this by subdividing up any possible work so that only certain castes could do certain things.
The Black Plague did change things a fair bit, because suddenly there weren’t as many people around looking for jobs. But that was a good deal later.
As for how the Greek and Roman stuff got lost? Much of their writing was on papyrus. Which doesn’t last all that long unless the climate is extremely dry. That’s OK if you can recopy things onto new papyrus. When the Moslems cut off Egypt as a source, basically papyrus became quite difficult to get more of.
You can use parchment, but it’s animal skin. Which requires a lot of animals. Lest Darkness Fall, mentioned above, had a section on that. The protagonist tries to start a newspaper, and has a very successful first edition. Then for the second edition he finds he’s already bought up all the parchment in town, and there won’t be more until they can ship more in – or next year when they slaughter more animals.
Yeah, the Moslems are credited with “saving the classics”. Except they were the ones who cut Europe off from them in the first place.
If you don’t have enough animals, you end up prioritizing the things that get recopied, which tend to be the documents that the people rich enough to get parchment find of immediate value: patents of nobility, treaties, the Bible, etc. Works of philosophy tend to be lower down on that priority list, even if they don’t fall under suspicion.
This also leads to fewer people having any encounters with writing. Which leads to fewer people becoming literate, as there’s always other things to do. If almost everyone is illiterate, then people find alternatives.
For instance, for treaties they would find very young people, the younger the better. And have them bear witness to the treaty being recited. At the end, the witnesses would be cuffed on the side of the head, so they would remember better. The witnesses could then testify as to the terms of the treaty, and since they were young, ideally there would be witnesses around to testify for a long time.
There’s a great sci fi story that covers this. An up and coming star empire traces back and finds a race that had mentored them long before, and finds a small population of them living in little domes in the shadow of abandoned mighty cities. They keep asking questions about how all the tech worked, and the mentors keep telling them, “we have forgotten much”.
The empire is all condescending about how their mentors had fallen into primitivism.
Finally, the mentors get pissed and say something like, “How do you dry a deer skin so that it stays supple? How do you pick wood that will make a good bow, and treat the deer sinews to make the bowstring. YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN MUCH AS WELL!”
And wave their hand and send all the empire ships back to their own world.
The fact that Doctor Doom bodyjacks people probably means she’s hyped to have something in common with some of her favourite fictional characters including Spider-man .
I have sometimes thought about the time traveler stuck in the past, and concluded that probably the best you can do on your own is going to be building a mill (for grinding grain or similar) or importing small-scale architectural knowledge like how to build efficient wood furnaces, efficient chimney and wind-tower cooling systems, etc.
But the vast majority of the modern world requires the rest of the modern world for it to even make any sense, let alone to manufacture.
I think it would depends enormously on where exactly would you end up and if you would find some people who can help you fill in the blanks, the parts you don’t remember or need to do differently because you miss something else. And also resources of course. And you would have much more success just helping them with something just century after them than trying to jump over all that and go directly to modern stuff.
That’s the important thing: finding people around you willing to listen who can do what you can’t, they may not be able to do it the way you remember it being done, but it still gets done with the resources and technology at the time
a good “present day person goes to the past” is in Johnny and the Bomb – kids from late 1990s end up in London during the blitz for a while, and one of them get left behind. They catch up with him as an Old Man (very very rich) – he invented fast food franchises, he might have used plastics and computers and whatever every day of his life beforehand, but he didn;t know how to make them – but he also went to mcdonald’s every day, so he knew pretty much how it works.
Speaking of The List. If Lapha has some of Sydney’s memories, then she knows the purpose and full content of the list (as well as the flipped version). Based on that alone, she should be extra cautious when interacting with Sydney to avoid being put on said list. Or, if she messes up, she can use the content of the flipped version to stay off the list (once per mistake) by blackmailing Sydney with threats of exposure.
I think Sydney is more forgiving of Lapha BECAUSE she has literally been able to see things from Lapha’s perspective, with her really terrible life and history of available choices. Even though Sydney doubts she would have made the same decisions, she can understand why Lapha did with her upbringing and not having a loving family or moral framework that would emphasize making decisions other than ‘survival above all else’ followed by ‘try to get to a point where I don’t have to only worry about survival’ and ‘The universe is a terrible place and no one will help you ever, so you have to be terrible in order to get anywhere.’