Grrl Power #1293 – Ambivalent leg syndrome
Dabbler knows medical stuff. She can do stitches, set a bone, mix up some alchemical nonsense to soothe a burn, even whip up a variety of healing potions. Reattaching a limb? Brain surgery? Organ transplants? It’s not like she can’t do that stuff – she is an otherworldly genius tinkerer/enchanter/inventor, but… she’d need a pretty comprehensive reference guide, or at least she’d need to bone up on the procedure quite a bit before hand. And there might be some necessary follow ups to tweak whatever she didn’t get quite right the first time around.
I know some people consider sitcoms pablum for the masses, but as Sturgeon’s Law clearly states “90 % of [X] is crap, then again 90 % of anything is crap.” So yeah, there’s a lot of formulaic and bland stuff out there, but IMO all the ones Sydney references in panel 2 are among my favorites. Though to be honest it’s been an age since I actually watched the Munsters or Mr. Ed, so I don’t imagine they hold up quite as well anymore. And shows like Red Dwarf and Blackadder aren’t really sitcoms or sketch comedy, but they have laugh tracks, which I know drive some people batty, but they’re top shelf comedy in my book.
Oh, and as far as Dabbler hoarding body parts, they’re mostly alchemical ingredients and trophies. Trophies like the skulls of impressive kills, not a necklace of ears or anything squidgy like that.
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.
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Sydney takes her nerdiness to the final frontier.
It is going to be a two-way process. We have been told time and again that Earth pop culture (including porn) is very good by galactic standards. Besides supers, we have something else the aliens shall want.
We may have relatively high quality stuff, but the sheer number of people out there would likely make their catalogue dwarf ours.
Of course, if their stuff isn’t all that good on average, *finding* the good ones may take some doing. Yes, there may be AIs out there to sort through it, but I don’t think forcing one to watch all of it just so you don’t have to is a good idea.
I mean, it’s pretty clear the Xevoarchy grants AIs certain rights. I mean, AEtholiths are magical AIs, and they’re citizens, so I’d be surprised if mundane ones are treated worse. Pretty sure that forcing an AI to watch millions of hours of bad TV for ANY reason would violate those.
They did mention that aetholiths were relatively recently emancipated.
And slavery certainly exists in space, from other mentions. Not just the succubi; I mean what were they going to do with Max, who was Lapha’s original target (I’m reminded of a guy in a rowboat going after a great white shark, but still…)
Still, assuming there aren’t a bunch of aetholiths in a “sweat shop” (do aetholiths sweat?) on an obscure moon somewhere churning out space-Yelp reviews might be taking an optimistic view of their society (or societies rather).
I assume more or less the same incentives work on aetholiths as humans not to escape/call for help.
The problem is that a good part of comedy is topical, or at least strictly tied to culture, kinda of a “you had to be born there” thing. Slapstick is pretty universal, I guess, or at elast adaptable, but would aliens, or ancient romans find “The Addams Family”, or “Night court” funny?
Humor mostly works by taking a normal situation and putting in some twist that make it ‘not normal’, but would aliens even know what ‘normal’ is?
We see this already in human movies.
The midlist comedy movie has more or less gone away, replaced by Adam Sandler slapstick and Ryan Reynolds “explosions plus references to other explosion movies”.
Why? World box office.
Despite being American, I enjoy British comedy. Red Dwarf and Are You Being Served were excellent. SG-1 had some great comedic moments, and Orvill is also great. There is not a whole lot of slapstick stupidity in any of those, really.
But Red Dwarf is still purely filled with references to English-language pop culture. And pretty much anything by humans is about air-breathing apes trying to get sex and status from other air breathing apes. It’s very narrow in scope, on the grand scale. (Thankfully, apparently most of this particular galaxy is made up of ape-shaped folks that want sex and status, so it all may translate fairly well.)
Archer apparently has an appeal for the Captain.
Even niche market of Non Earthborn Humans, who can reconnect to ancestral humor, that is likely greater than Earth itself at this point. Then connect others with possibly similar neural responses that likely are from a common advanced ancient species life seeding. Pop culture tends to be contagious with sufficient exposure.
This may translate fairly well indeed.
Yeah, but British and American are not really so different. They are even the same language. How would you feel about, for example, Chinese comedy? How do you appreciate comedy if you must rely on a translation, just to start.
I’ve watched plenty of Japanese comedies that I needed to rely on subtitles to understand. They can be plenty funny even if I know I’m going to be missing some context here and there.
Even Shakespeare, modern humans miss much of the humor, which included lots of digs at the politics of the time.
I grew up in various northern parts of Canada with no cable and only CBC to watch, so I was exposed to British comedy when I was young. Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Father Dear Father, Man about the House, Robin’s Nest (ported to the US as Three’s Company), Are you Being Served, Two Ronnies, etc. That has definitely shaped my approach to humour as an adult, which is probably why I fell in love with Red Dwarf when I encountered it.
Wasn’t “Robin’s Nest” the sequel? “Man About The House” was the one that got downgraded into “Three’s Company”, wasn’t it?
Fairly sure George & Mildred weren’t part of Robin’s Nest
“Latchcomb!”
Flix: I do not know the athletic endeavour called baseball well enough to get many of the jokes. Also, the jokes seem to rely on knowing English better than I do; the confusion of names vs. pronouns does not translate well. “Hugh” as a name makes sense, but the pronoun “who” translates in my language to something entirely different.
It may not so much be that it’s particularly good, but rather that it is different. You know how the overwhelming majority of narratives fit into just a few basic structures, like the Hero’s Journey? It’s not that those are the only narratives there are, but that everyone grows up exposed to them exclusively, so that’s the kind of narrative they know how to make. Earth is a world where its entire media output is free of the artistic assumptions that pervade galactic society, so everything we make is weird and new and different.
I guess the real question is is that when Dabbler lost her arm (upper right IIRC? The one where the connector port is disguised as a bracelet)Is was the arm too “spiritually damaged” or something to replace organically, or Dabbler just figured: “I can rebuild it better”.
Or was it obliterated so decisively or the wound so heavily corrupted that there was no other choice.
More likely she had to flee before something more important got cut off and wasnt able to grab it on the way out.
She’d better hope that arm doesn’t end up in the hands of someone skilled in sympathetic magic or cloning, then.
Dabbler clones…the mind reels…
And the neck hairs rise.
Bottom left is the cybernetic.
It’s the one with the teleporter: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-195-a-fearful-commitment/
Teleporter demonstration: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-164-stop-hammerspace/
After losing a fight so hard she lost her arm, she decided she needed to be better-armed.
A super space future tech prothesis is handy to have when a meat arm just don’t cut it.
The meat arm didn’t meat expectactions.
With her job losing limbs could happen too often. She prefer to pick new arm from the rack when it happen rather than regrow a new one every time. :-)
I imagine that Dabbler just went “well, a cybernetic one is better anyway
Her cybernetic arm and eye each confer some serious advantages. Her arm has a built-in space-usb connector (seen when she fixed Sydney’s glasses) and teleporter (for storing things in “hammerspace” and retrieving them); note Sydney offered to have her arm cut off and replaced to get access to the latter. Her eye doubles as an ultra-high-definition camera, and I’d imagine it has useful zoom features and the like. And that’s just what we’ve seen so far. This isn’t The Deathworlders, where meat can readily outperform technology (at least not until the Superion Field gets involved… but then The Deathworlders seemed to have something roughly akin to that anyway, so maybe it’s not so different after all). Dabbler presumably didn’t have a strong emotional attachment to the bits she lost, and also seems to want the reminder to help her avoid making the same mistakes in the future. Plus, she’s already part of galactic society and thus can have all the toys. Peggy, on the other hand, has to choose between the best modern Earth medicine can manage and getting a brand new leg – a fancy cyberleg isn’t on the menu for her.
or perhaps the magic interfers with replacement or reattachment?
I doubt that magic would interfere or be interfered with.
Space society appears to have large numbers of magic users, -and- high-tech cybernetics, -and- the ability to fairly routinely regrow and replace limbs. It’s a shipboard facility rather than restricted to a few large hospitals, so it can’t be that difficult for them.
If either cybernetics or regrown limbs interfered with magic, they would have researched other means.
It’s possible though that these facilities all exist in different areas. Cora may have gathered together samples from different places because she moves around a lot. So she has both the hard light limb replacement for herself and also tissue cloning facilities aboard ship, bought at different times.
It definitely does not have anything to do with the existence or quality of the severed limb. Peggy didn’t have her severed limb, and she had it built.
It could have to do with the quality and state of the body at the point of severance. However I would assume that this would also be largely irrelevant – you can always cut just a bit deeper and get a clean cut to reattach.
I really think that what Cora is saying is that Xuriel is a tinkerer, a jill-of-all-trades, and limb reattachment probably needs a master, or someone with more specialization in this sort of things, like a doctor-mechanic, therefore enter Frix.
Also, contrary to Peggy, Xuriel’s limb is not a regenerated one. It’s a cybernetic one, that’s also connected to her hammerspace. This could be by choice or serendipity, only DaveB knows for sure. Point is, Xuriel’s arm and Peggy’s leg are most probably vastly different in terms of ability to attach to the host, so Cora is probably saying that Xuriel is just not experienced enough to reattach a human leg.
It was never expressly stated that Xuriel herself reattached the limb either. It could be that she had somebody do it for her.
At any rate, none of the above justify Xuriel’s reaction IMHO.
Dabs took that personally.
Too bad for her; Cora’s perfectly right.
Either that or she’s offended that Cora got to first base with Peggy before she did.
You can look as affronted as you like, Xuriel, but your own alias already says you are widely skilled but not HIGHLY skilled. Not in the areas where it counts in this case. Better to talk to a real doctor – one who won’t throw sex-hexes into the operation for their own amusement.
Is it me or did they just kind of made Dabbler sound like the Dr. John Zoidberg of Grrl Power?
Naw. Zoidberg usually meant well and didn’t do weird things to his patients for funsies. Out of spite or ineptitude, sure, but not funsies.
Dabbler does weird stuff to everybody for kicks and giggles, or because her pride won’t let her admit she can’t do a proper job of it.
Different beasts.
Being really smart makes you good at things that go smoothly, and ok-to-terrible at things that go badly. Only experience can make you consistently good-to-excellent, no matter what is thrown at you.
Well said!
Surgeon is one of the professions I know of where being a perfectionist is pretty much required. And Dabbler is no perfectionist.
Now I’m imagining a surgeon with a less diligent approach. “What are you complaining about? I connected almost 95% of the nerves!”
The Munsters were really just a cheap rip-off of the Addams Family, which DOES hold up well.
But did the Addams Family (which does hold up, I agree) have not one but two named hot rod cars used in production like the Munsters (the Munster Koach and Drag-U-La)? It did not, so there’s that.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually LIKED the Munsters. Perhaps I should have said it was an expensive rip-off of the Addams Family. But it was still a rip-off, and didn’t age as well.
Dark humor ages better than light comedy.
The Munsters were ALSO a vehicle for Fred Gwynne and Al Davis who were a well-established comedy double-act of the time
* Al Lewis
‘Car 54 where are you?’ was a Gwynne/Lewis vehicle before the Munsters, back when the world was black & white.
Dang, I’m old. I’m so old that I actually saw that show in first run, forgot all about it, and the minute you mentioned it, it is was calling liltingly in my ears…
No it wasn’t, it was a rip-off of the old Universal Monsters (Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, Werewolf) with the added ‘normal’ cousin, there was none of that in The Addams Family
It was a rip-off in that it took the basic premise of a family of deeply weird and in some cases monstrous beings and put them in the context of and made them interact with normal society. That they were Universal monsters instead of Charles Addams’s creations is a side point. That’s like saying A Fistfull of Dollars wasn’t a rip-off of Yojimbo because AYojimbo didn’t have any cowboys.
So, Brady Bunch was a rip-off of The Addams Family? Don’t tell me Marcia wasn’t ‘weird’, or Greg banging his step-mother was ‘normal’
Beverly Hills Cop was a rip-off of C.H.i.P.s, right? Because they were both about cops, in California
I will agree that the Munsters didn’t age as well as the Addams family but I think it is at least partly because the situations have not aged as well. Even though they could be in the same universe, the Munsters are solidly middle class and a lot of the gags are rooted in the 1960’s lifestyle. The Addams’ are aristocracy or at least old money and while there are admittedly some overlaps in the two stories a lot of the humor in the Addams Family come from their disconnect from the rest of the world. Jumping forward a bit I really wanted to like the latest Munsters movie. Despite his professed love for the series Rob Zombie really lost the thread. His version of Herman is just an unlikable dick. His casting of Grandpa Munster was good but it never came close to that Gwynne-Lewis chemistry. One thing about the Addams Family movies is that they haven’t strayed too far from the source material. Even the animated movie managed to work in some material from the original Charles Addams cartoons.
I wonder where the New Yorker cartoons would fit in Sydney’s pantheon of comic art?
Blackadder held up pretty well though a few episodes are now very off. Series 2 “Bells” comes to mind.
Spider Robinson’s Corollary to Sturgeon’s Law: Only 80 % of everything is crap because the good stuff gets reprinted.
I thought that the first Blackadder was a bit rough in some of the episodes, but Blackadder II and III are both excellent.
Blackadder series 1 was just ‘medieval Mr Bean’. It got much better when it became it’s own thing.
* Al Lewis
Relax, Dabs. She is gently ribbing you. Nothing to ruin a friendship over.
And that necklace of Space Elf ears Dabs keeps are actually spell components, not trophies! Also a health remedy among several major species and a tasty snack to one of them.
Ribbed for her displeasure.
Also, Dabs is eating a chili dog – still hung over, or does she just like the phallic symbolism?
Well she is a succubus so of course it’s phallic but it could be hangover munchies too.
Love how she mentioned a lot of Britcoms, they’re by far the best especially the 70-80’s ones like ‘Are you being served’, ‘On the buses’, ‘Allo Allo’, ‘Keeping up appearances’, ‘Open all hours’ and one of my favourites ‘Waiting for G-d’ :)
I’ll stand “All In The Family”, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, “The Bob Newhart Show”, “Happy Days” and “Mork and Mindy” up against any of those. Plenty of other great American sitcoms from that era as well, that wasn’t meant to be an exhausative list.
For modern American sitcoms, “The Good Place” is an all-time classic. Hilarious, goofy, and one of the most intelligent shows even to come out of Hollywood.
Keeping Up Appearences is a course in what abuse looks like and how it gets downplayed by society.
… What abuse?
Still, none of those top Monty Python or Benny Hill. Granted, these are sketch comedies rather than sitcoms, but still far more uproarious than those mentioned.
Blackadder, from at least the second series, was filmed in front of a live audience.
So was Red Dwarf, at least the BBC production.
I sincerely wonder what the extraterrestrials of the cast would think of the sitcom Third Rock From The Sun.
“Huh, how about that. So uncle Harry wasn’t lying when he said he got a big break in local entertainment.”
Also Mork and Mindy and My Favorite Martian. And the current Resident Alien.
You need to fix that sentence in the first Speech bubble on the last panel.
What’s wrong with it?
You know, rather than a superheroine as in Marvel or DC, Sydney oftem reminds me ofLooney Tunes character…
Humans in Looney Toons cartoons are frequently superhuman. They may engaging in slapstick rather than causing millions of dollars worth of property damage with unwarranted brawls, but there’s no way they could survive those without super durability. How many times did Elmer survive being shot at point blank range with his own shotgun in Duck Season, and yet he was still fine, just as one example.
That’s a fair statement. Dabbler’s cybernetic hand is proof that re-attaching a limb isn’t part of her skill set.
Yeah, space society has much better means of anesthesia, and Dabbler has extra hands, but attaching your *own* hand is likely a lot harder than attaching someone else’s.
Trying knotting your own necktie with one hand, then knot a tie on someone else with two.
Agreed on the “not reattach a limb great” for Xuriel, at least for a full biologically-grown replacement with nerve endings and such.
However, why are we even discussing reattaching a limb? Xuriel is great at creating new tech, so why doesn’t Peggy have a hammer-space leg by now? Just like Cora’s limb’s and Xuriel’s arm. It could even exactly look like her “normal” prosthetic to fit in, without any toes to bang on a table.
I can’t believe this would fall under the “don’t share tech with primitives” rule.
Maybe Peggy didn’t ask her for one, and Dabbler doesn’t know quite how to ask Peggy if she wants one, given that Peggy hasn’t?
Dabbler is still an alien, and that’s the sort of question that could go sideways even between two humans of the same culture.
Also: Peggy is a member of the US military. Dabbler likely didn’t want to put her in the position of refusing to obey when a superior officer orders her to send the leg in for analysis by “top men”.
If you don’t think that the US military (or really, any military) wouldn’t do that, you’re much more optimistic about human nature than I was.
See the previous strip where they argue with Cora’s crew about salvage of the Feld(?) ship after Max nuked it.
Dabbler is reeeaaaally good at boning up.
Of course Peggy might prefer a ‘bionic’ leg that can kick an M1 tank across a football field instead of a ‘meat’ leg. And you can turn off the ‘hurt’ response when someone’s kid spills Lego all over the house in the middle of the night.
Then you have the problem of needing a hip capable of that as well.
Or how about a Bionic leg with an Antigrav generator and a thruster in the heel? Being able to take to the air would be very useful for a sniper.
A stealthy ninja leg would be more practical for a sniper.
Whether she prefers that or not, it’s not a matter on the table. Dabbler has an artificial limb and she hasn’t demonstrated such feats of strength, so I doubt it would even be an option if Dabbler were willing to share her tech. Just because they have technology that we cannot possibly make today does not mean they have all tech we can´t make today.
She’s only missing the leg from the knee down, she’d need a full replacement from the waist down in order to pull off that kind of kick. And there’s no guarantee that she’d be able to keep the breeding bits or if the bits that come with the set are just as fun as the basic human set. All that aside, a foot that can be taken off and rearranged into a gun would be ideal for a sniper. Especially if it’s got shielding tech that prevents it from being detected by regular earth tech and magic.
… Is that why she has so much hardware in her when they could reasonably grow her replacements? Is her excuse that she was making enhancements because she’s actually just bad at replacing the wet works? That would actually be really funny.
Actually, Sturgeon’s actual Law (as originally stated by Sturgeon) is “Nothing is always absolutely so.”
What is actually taken as Sturgeon’s Law these days, “Ninety precent of everything is crud” (or “crap”, depending on the telling) is actually Sturgeon’s Revelation. (I’ve also seen it called Sturgeon’s Observation.)
My own corollary to Sturgeon’s Revelation is, “Flowers can grow from crap.” Someone may see the crap, say “I can do better”, then actually go out and do so.
I loved Sydney’s expressions in this one.
We haven’t had a Dabblers Science Corner in a long time.
i hope we get one focus on body part replacement.
When did Cora and Peggy happen?
Possibly during “The Night That Shall Not Be Mentioned For The Sake Of The Easily Triggered”, or it’s just a friendly kiss because Cora is friendly to most people, nothing sexual or romantic
Not saying it didn’t or couldn’t happen but I see this as more of a warm supportive moment between friends.
When Peggy went with Cora and crew to deal with the Fel stuffths, if I remember right.
Peggy went with Cora while she was trading in the Fel ship, dropping off the Fel artifact they were carrying, and dropping off the Alari refuges (pages 817, 818), though it was only hinted at on page 827 (you can see Peggy’s arm peeking out from behind Frix), and not fully revealed until page 856, where Peggy is shown disembarking Cora’s ship, which is also when the replacement leg is first shown and discussed.
Show of hands for TBBT being on the list of earth sit-coms?
Anybody?
Sydney didn’t mention SCTV.
Someone no doubt has already brought this up in an earlier comment section, but I haven’t seen it (or if I have, I have forgotten): Considering the relationship between time and space (spacetime), have you pondered the relationship between Hammerspace and Hammertime? You can’t touch this. (Because it’s off in Hammerspace.)
well, like Weird Al I can’t watch it either.
somehow that song seems more appropriate for this page.
sounds like Frix has a leg up on Dabbler in the medical department.
meeting a new friendly species = access to their entire library of entertainment.
bet humans have been contacted to sell their shows to the galaxy at large.
Just for the record, Mr. Ed does NOT hold up (even if, when rated against TMZ, it registers as Edward R. Murrow-level intellectualism).
I’ll be honest, I haven’t liked how Peggy has been illustrated in this who scene. I get that you try new things as an artist and sometimes characters change over time, but she looks a lot less ripped and most… plasticy? Something about her skintone is just coming off fake-ish to me.
Now maybe you decided to tone down the muscles since a Sniper doesn’t need biceps like corded steel, and/or Peggy isn’t working out 24/7 in Archon the way she did in the army, but overall just to be honest I prefer her previous look better.
Sydney still being a goofball is fine; carry on there :)
Peggy seems to have de-agged to a teen
Almost like she hooked up with an alien and got rejuvenation medicine of some sort. Of course, that’s crazy talk, how would such a thing happen in this comic?
I fully acknowledge that we can invent all kinds of possible explanations, I even suggested one myself. But nothing like that has been commented on, and I’m being honest about the new design or updated artstyle, that’s all.
THE SHADE ON XURIEL
it’s not so much shade as it is a little drink parasol
Yes Red Dwarf but the entire cast are GELF’s
I can imagine Dabbler keeping a troll head, AD&D standard type, “on ice” in hammerspace. Might need a solvable infestation.
Nice call. Anything infectious risks becoming a problem she can’t handle, and I expect turning planets into Resident Evil / Prototype hellscapes makes you unpopular.
So if Dabbler were putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, while trying to save an injured soldier, does that mean we’d end up with a soldier that has a literal extra large cannon as a body part?
I’m sure Dabbler has at least a couple of forgotten quest item body parts. “Head of the bandit chief” or “bear gizzard 17/16” type stuff.
So… Sydney has influenced the translators. She identified Hammerspace as the name for the trick, Xuriel went “oh, so that’s the local name” and programmed it in, and Cora’s using her software. Since they’re the aliens with the easiest open access to Terra aside from the unpopular Alari, this version was possibly in the latest update to the general population too.
Why are you making that face, Dabbler? Your own supranym (that you chose yourself, I suppose) suggests that you’re a jill-of-all-trades, not a specialist, pointing out that limbs grafts are a bit outside of your wheelhouse isn’t an insult. Or are you upset that Cora beat the literal sex-demon/goddess to smooching Peggy? It isn’t even Cora’s first public display of affection toward her fellow pink-haired cutie with an unusual number of limbs. (See episode 856)
I wonder if the aliens would have another answer to the question, “who is Vectron?”, from Mitchell & Webb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icTrzUuWlHI
Why is this site asking for access to my personal information on chrome now? And why can’t I just click no instead of having to go through 20 pages of check marks?
So, basically, Dabbler is EMT-level trained in super-advanced space-medicine, Frix is surgeon-level trained.
Huh, did we know Cora and Peggy were more than friends before this and I just missed it?
It was somewhat confirmed here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-856-space-kickstand/
Please refer to some of the posts further up this page.
Wonder if Dabbler is more angry about the flirting, or the aspersions on her surgical skills.
Yes :)
Not sure why Dabbler would be angry about the flirting. She never stroke me as the jealous type.
She might ask for details later.