Grrl Power #1292 – Pod psychology
You see, it’s like the Odd Couple, except one of them is like My Favorite Martian, and the other is a relentlessly ravenous amoeboid covered in eyeballs and teeth. I speak of course of Pirpo the Enlightened Loves Azbblethog the Jubilexian. It’s funny if you enjoy sophisticated, layered humor and obtuse references. Plus there’s a ton of fart jokes. Don’t worry, Pirpo does fart at least once. It’s not totally racist against Jubilexians. Though to be fair, their language is called Flatulese.
I’m not saying Garamm was a therapist before turning to mercenary work, but it’s possible he has a minor in a Mental Health field. Or possibly he just has a subscription to Brain Fancy magazine. A favorite among psychologists and Illithids.
There have been plenty of shows and books with Space Doctors, but imagine being a space psychiatrist. I don’t mean like Deanna Troi. Calm down, she was a counselor. She was a psychologist at best. I mean like having to deal with different brain chemistries, or like, some Starship Troopers bug scuttles into your office and is like “I just don’t feel as connected to the hive mind as I should be. I had an independent thought the other day and it really scared me.” Or having some race that goes into heat, except it’s not sexual heat, but a compulsion to bake pies or lick the knees of as many different species as possible. Managing those prescriptions would require a supercomputer.
The new vote incentive is up!
Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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“Pirpo” sounds like the Marx brother nobody talks about.
it’s their stepsister
Frix is like *grins: ‘…and There’s my girlfriend everyone.’ “De-Ham” spittake was hilarious
Supercomputer? It can run on Sydney’s glasses! … ok, Sydney’s glasses MAY have some parameters putting them on list of top 100 supercomputers but for Cora it’s standard mass-produced device.
apparently Garamm doesn’t have an internal monologue…
Or the translation device has been set too sensitive and it’s translating his subvocalizations.
Rule of funny says this is the reason.
the probably have a live version of Bill The Galactic Hero. Id pay to see that.
That’s ‘Bil’. Only officers get two ‘l’s.
Bill is too stupid to know that
Have I mentioned that I really really really like Garamm?
That last panel is just PURE gold!! ADHD is really like that. I’m so glad Frixx is loving this, and it’s a shame Garamm isn’t available. He’s becoming a lovable lizard Himbo.
Sydney jumped straight up so fast that she went right through the middle of her orbs? That’s a cute touch.
She has also blown a few hairpins.
Possible proof she may one day eventually get added to the list of people who’ve beaten math.
Seriously the DOD are all-in on getting the best damn prosthetics money can buy for people who lost limbs in action. It’s not just a major item at the VA hospitals; improving prosthetics is one of the biggest perennial non-weapon projects funded by DARPA. AI movement prediction, limb control, transdermal and subdermal nerve conduction pickups, and you name it other, the DOD is all over it and people like Peggy do in fact get selected on a semi-regular basis as test cases for new tech in prosthetics.
If this works well for Peggy, somebody in the DOD and a whole department of somebodies in the VA is going to be pushing just as hard as they can push for negotiating a technology transfer, and it’s going to be really hard to come up with any ethical reasons to say no to them.
Of course it doesn’t mean a whole lot of individual vets will be able to afford it any time soon, but the US has a standing policy and history of pushing hard on limb replacement technology in particular at its military hospitals.
Well, depending on the subsidiary technologies, there *could* be some incredibly strong reasons to not provide that kind of tech transfer. Biotechnologies have the potential to absolutely wreck an ecosystem.
Just as an example, someone with a reasonable knowledge of antibiotics and germ theory could pretty easily show up on a pre-industrial world and create a merry little extinction plague using nothing only the biota resident on the planet.
Presumably the tech to grow limbs has potential to be weaponized – running the gamut from “Could create sentient slave races with built-in weapons” to “Wow, that culture now has an entire economy based around people growing spare organs for rich people, that’s fucked up.”
Plus there’s the entire question of whether Earth has the necessary supporting tech to implement it anyway: knowledge of nuclear isotopes isn’t really useful if you don’t also have the machining tech to build high-speed centrifuges.
So there *could* be valid reasons to not provide the tech. But maybe not. And it’s not like anyone has shown up and said “Hey! We’ve got lotsa cool tech you guys would want! Sell it to you for cheap!” Even the demons didn’t put that on the table for Deus.
High speed centrifuges…calutrons work reasonably well, and do not demand a chemically stable gas for the element of interest. Gaseous diffusion also works. If you have good organic chemists, well-designed crown polyethers can separate isotopes via column techniques.
Did you not read anything Garamm said?
It’s not about whether Peggy can get a prosthetic (or even re-grow her leg), it’s about how her identity and support group is all about the missing limb
So, how about offer it to someone who has recently lost something (and still getting use to the loss, and hating it), someone like… Heatwave who lost a toe?
“Of course it doesn’t mean a whole lot of individual vets will be able to afford it any time soon…”
If this phrase doesn’t infuriate anyone who has any respect for people who volunteered (or were forced) to pick up a weapon to fight for a flag, then they are straight-up lying about having any respect.
But big insurance companies give so much money (bribes? “campaign contributions”?) to politicians and talking heads on TV that they’ve convinced voters that government or single-payer healthcare is “bad”. It works beautifully in countries often ranked among the best places to live with the happiest citizens, but it would be “bad” for the USA.
Are you referring to GB and Canada? You know, where critically injured patients can spend HOURS in an ambulance because by law they have to be seen within an hour of actually arriving at the hospital, and where you wait 6 months or more for an appointment to diagnose whether you have cancer, giving the cancer another 6 months to “Dig in” and make itself at home?
Ah yes, those wonderful Single Payer Healthcare systems…
Is that better or worse than some people (the wealthy) receiving care immediately, and others never receiving care at all? One of those problems seems easier to solve than the other.
Eat the rich?
After talking to various Canadian friends, I have concluded that everything you just said is right-wing propaganda, also known as lies. Yes, there are long wait times in Canada…for elective procedures like hip replacement. Yes, there are other aspects of the system that are not perfect. Waiting in an ambulance for hours during an emergency? No.
Canada is not single payer healthcare coverage, there’s been plenty of movement towards the American model since the 80’s and that’s hugely undercut healthcare quality.
1. Everything you said is a myth (lie). Elective surgeries might have a waitlist, but emergencies and life-threatening appointments for things like cancer are generally treated quickly. Or as quickly as anywhere; emergency waits at crowded hospitals can be multiple hours even here in the USA.
2. I’m talking about countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, Austria, most of Europe, etc. Places with universal taxpayer-funded and government-negotiated healthcare, where the healthcare spending as a percent of GDP is a fraction of that in the US, and where life expectancies are much higher than the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care
Seriously, go check the VA website about the PSAS program. The US VA hospitals are the largest provider and developer of prosthetic devices and services in the world.
The minute something is an accepted form of treatment, and if you need it for a service-related injury, it’s free under VA care. People who lose a leg during active military service get the best “approved treatment” that the VA can provide at no cost. An even-less-lucky veteran who loses a leg when his lawnmower hits a slinky, can get best-available prosthetics, but won’t get them for free.
Peggy, who is still active-duty, would normally have a chance at being selected as a test case for an “experimental treatment” which are often considerably better than “approved treatment,” also at no cost. A discharged vet would not normally get that opportunity.
(My age is probably showing. I remember when slinky was made of stainless steel and hard enough to shatter into a thousand razor-sharp chunks when a lawnmower hit them. After a few actual lost hands and feet, modern examples are made of plastic.)
It is amazing just how terrible US military health care programs are, for how much US culture idolizes their military. I’ve heard people joke about TRICARE being named that because “you try to get care, but you don’t actually get care.”
Like what happens to some blind people when they get cutting edge treatments and then lose all the friends they made in their support group.
Or the crazy thing going on in the deaf community with opposition to cochlear implants; There are deaf activists claiming that curing deafness is cultural genocide.
Garamm is obviously the emotionally intelligent one of the duo.
Ayup. He’s a bit of a himbo, but that doesn’t have to mean he’s *stupid*.
Funniest part of this is how she stood up fast enough that the orbs haven’t noticed yet.
I don’t feel as connected to the group chat as I should be. The other day I had an independent thought and it really scared me. There wasn’t even any store staff to vent my anger on! Walmart was closed and my spandex was in the washer and I DEMAND TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER NOW!!! Oh, I feel much better. Same time next week?
I wasreally disappointed what they did with Troi after Roddenberry died. In the first two seasons she was more like a political officer, there to make sure the actual officers didn’t do anything against the rules. Later she became an actual counsellor and then even a bridge officer, removing a good source of conflict.
Just gonna say, he’s awfully emotionally intelligent for a violent criminal.
(Yes, there are plenty of emotionally intelligent criminals. But I’d tend to assume that people who are readily able to empathize with others prefer to not engage in actions which directly cause trauma. Unless they’re a sociopath – but those really struggle with even an intellectual concept of empathy, and also he seems to pretty firmly not be a sociopath.)
The sociopaths *who tend to get caught* struggle with the concept. The ones who don’t get caught instead exploit it.
Personally, I’ve got Asperger’s, which means that, while I’m not actually a sociopath, (Because I actually DO care about the feelings of others.) I have very little instinctual capacity to anticipate other people’s feelings about things.
This doesn’t mean I can’t do it: I’m *high functioning* Asperger’s, after all. It means I had to learn to do it explicitly, like learning anything else that doesn’t come naturally.
This actually sometimes has advantages, because my own emotions don’t tend to get in the way of reasoning out how other people will react to something. The downside is that it’s something I have to remember to deliberately do.
I expect it’s the same for sociopaths: Just because they don’t have normal empathy doesn’t mean they’re not capable of learning to emulate it if they find doing so necessary.
Garamm does not appear to be a sociopath, though. He’s just a member of a different culture. Cultures can tell you that there are people whose feelings you should care about, and other people whose feelings you shouldn’t.
Harley Quinn is still a trained shrink
Strong emotions can trump almost anything. He clearly loves Lapha. One logical explanation is that he’s only a criminal because he’s following her around.
Another explanation is species-based. Many (most) non-sociopath humans have no issue at all with how animals are treated in the meat and research fields. If Garamm believed that humans are primitive apes, similar to how many (most) humans think of actual apes, then his participating in a plan to kidnap and sell a human is reasonable. He could see their actions as little different from a human capturing and selling a monkey to a research lab, or a pig to a butcher. Or eating a piece of ham.
Not sociopathic, just uninformed.
It does tell you something about the milieu he’s coming from. I don’t say “society” there because space is large enough that it’s more like Earth was in the 17th century than anything we have direct experience of.
– Yeah, if you’ve heard of a place you can go there, but it takes a while. That space station seemed to be maybe a day’s travel from Earth via Cora’s ship – which probably goes faster than most cargo vessels. I got the idea the planet Sydney was first stranded on was further away than the station; maybe I’m wrong.
– There’s a police force, but they’re limited in budget and ships, so many terrible things can happen that don’t even get investigated, or not for months or years.
– No satellite coverage, neither for observation nor communication. With the proper tech and infrastructure you can get relatively fast communication between two points. Good luck if you don’t; a ship will have to carry the news assuming it’s going that way or you can pay or persuade the captain to change course.
– Any given government has a fairly limited volume where it can actually affect things. Outside that area it has to send a warship or fleet, and then it’s a matter of whether it’s a priority.
– Yeah, slavery is a thing out there. Apparently it’s no big deal either. That there’s a planet with sapients who a) are low tech and b) have weird powers, is enough for at least some aliens to say “Hey, let’s go gather some for medical experiments!”
I would see Garamm more as a survivalist who’s fallen in with a bunch of violent criminals in the past. Emotional intelligence tends to be part of the survival package when you are around people more violent than you.
I love how Penny is like “I am not sure if she’s doing this because of the awkward silence, or if she is just being Sydney…”
I high recommend ‘Bussom Buddies’… probably one of the best to come out of Tritolana 6 before their star went nova
Just looking at the last two panels, I really like the way beefcake and cheesecake is presented here.
It reminds me of a photo by Howard Schatz in his collection “Nude.Body.Nude” where he’s taken a picture of a female model and a male body builder, sitting side by side, with their backs to the camera.
The proportions are quite similar.
Yeah, from behind, where you can’t see the secondary sexual characteristics, the most visible difference between male and female is the structure of the pelvis. (There’s a bit of difference around the elbows and knees, too.) But for heavyweight bodybuilders, the skeletal structure is so obscured by muscle that it can be really difficult to distinguish male from female from behind. At least until they start walking.
True.
However I was referring to the huge difference in sheer body volume here, and how tiny the four females (two earth women, one terran bio-enhanced terran alien and one built-to-order female body carrier for an aetholith) appear next to the four male aliens, and also the fact that the way they are drawn in the pre-last panel, reminded me of a photo I had seen 20+years ago.
With regards to your comment about ability to distinguish, I’d say that I think men bulk up more (not necessarily easier, just…more) than women, and they tend to look stockier, so even without taking into account the pelvic area, where there is actual skeletal difference, you’d probably be able to tell a heavyweight bodybuilder male from a heavyweight bodybuilder female, by looking at their respective back, if you have some perspective as to the size of what you are seeing.
I read a novel set a few hundred years in the future. Custom bodies were readily available, both through genetic engineering and transplants. The average woman’s height was not different from today’s. The average man had gained a foot in height.
This seems realistic. People generally expect males to be much larger than females.
According to the Google, current averages in the US are males 5’9″, 200 lbs. and females 5’4″, 171 lbs.(!)
I say (!) because if they had the same proportions, then the average male *should* be about 30% heavier, not 17%, by volume. Not sure where that’s coming from though I can make some guesses.
This page makes Garamm all the more complex as a character.
In my current headcanon, his background is that he is a rich boy, who was studying for his PhD in pre-FTL species psychology, when he met Lapha by accident during one of her jobs. He fell head over heels (or whatever equivalent for his species) in love with her, and actively spent a significant part of his fortune to track her down and forge a past of mercenary/outlaw for himself just to get her to add him to her crew, and he’s been trying to get her on the “straight path” ever since (that’s almost what he said to the other aetholith before he was captured by Cora’s crew).
That’s my headcanon and I’m sticking to it until proven wrong by DaveB :-P
The “lots are mercenaries more for the thrills than the money?” bit? Could be.
“Again Tenri I’m sorry for this. I just get caught up in Lapha’s schemes
Is the dude in panel 5 meant to be recognizable? He kinda vaguely possibly looks like should know who he is…
I’m waiting for Sydney to point out that if she DID take the replacement leg, it would only be a short term fix, and before long either the new leg would stop working or another injury would require its amputation and leave her in a situation suspiciously identical to where she started.
It’s called Xavier’s Law.
…
(Mostly I’m waiting to see the hell Sydney would catch for voicing the idea.)
I want to know why the menu board has a buxom female stick figure with purple hair punching a beefy male stick figure wearing a red cape.
Is this some inside joke at Archon that Max could beat up Superman? And who drew it (or would dare to)? I would pick Sydney since she owns the comic store.
thats… surprisingly thoughtful of Garamm, guess assumptions are just that.
Regarding the vote incentive, I didn’t realize Dabbler had two bellybuttons.
She also has two sets of bewbs and a tail
“Sydney are you really sure you want to watch As The World Munches”
Hey unrelated thought but what would happen if a werewolf bit Frix would he then be a werewolf woof?