Grrl Power #1300 – Zeroing
Happy Halloween! Everyone dress slutty!
FYI, the final panel is what you get if you type “Stick that rocket up their ass!” into google translate and tell it to Arabic it. I have minimal faith in the accuracy of that translation. It probably says something like “That branch and rocket are in the rectum!” But from Peggy’s point of view, if she could hear what they were saying at that distance and over the noise of the engine, she’s hear a bunch of Arabic “blah blah blah-ing.” She doesn’t speak Arabic or Farsi or Pashto or anything. Well, like 2 dozen words in each. The kind of stuff you couldn’t help picking up if you were living and working among native speakers.
I’m going to point this out because it becomes relevant in a few pages, but that truck has a sunroof. Now, I’ve never lived in Afghanistan, but I have lived in Texas for over 40 years, and I have used the sunroof in my various cars for a grand total of roughly 48 seconds. Basically just to confirm that they work, and that on this one day of many, it’s not like walking into a schvitz or a sauna when you go outdoors. While Afghanistan is a little further north than Texas, it’s also posted some pretty impressive record heat numbers over the years. My point is, I’m not sure how much use I’d get out of a sunroof there. It’s also entirely possible I just don’t care for sunroofs in cars. I like my environment conditioned and a little external noise as possible. I’m not a window’s down kind of guy either. And I suppose if I regularly drove around with guys in the bed of the truck, hanging on to my aftermarket rollbar thingy, I might have the top open so we could yell back and forth easier.
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.
Downside of being non-English: I had to google what the hell a Sunroof is, only to realize that it’s how you guys are calling the Hatch. In this particular car I would probably even call it a Manhole, because it’s obviously used for that purpose a lot.
In countries where AC takes a significant amount of fuel and car power, we love those hatches, because they allow for a whole lot of fresh air that does NOT go straight to your face.
Not really. A hatch is the big door at the back, see hatchback cars.
Sounds like somebody with a boot where others have a trunk.
Gets really fun when talking about the hood of the car.
Yeah, we always must explain that cars have hoods to USAmericans, but cars being uncut is the norm in most of the world.
No, I will not apologise
So this is why the size and price of the car are so important to dudes.
Yeah man, other countries get everything wrong. dont get me started on the english calling parts of their cars shoes and other clothing. lol
pretty sure the shoes thing died with front drum breaks.
I know it’s not a massive caliber rifle, but I’m still a little surprised it didn’t penetrate through the glass to the guy behind as well.
I’m amazed the back window survived.
Skulls can be considerably more dense than you’d think. Also the rounds are standard.
You’d think things would explode with a 7.62×51mm NATO round. And well… it did. Just think it ping ponged around in the skull first. It’s not really anti-armor though so going thru both the window, the skull, and the second window is unlikely. Anti-armor would go thru the engine block and out the back.
If it had enough penetrating force to splatter the back window, it should have enough force to at least put a dent in the glass
let me guess, she did a bullseye on the RPG right as the guy was firing?
I’m thinking she shot the rocket guy, making him fire it as he fell backward, so the RPG goes up and then falls head first on their pickup, resulting in a nice little explosion.
Or it goes straight up and nearly clips Maxima: this is a how-they-met flashback after all
Yeah, I’m expecting her to fly in at any moment there. As in they fire the launcher, Max takes the hit with no damage, while giving them her “finger”, It explodes, throwing flames and bodies everywhere. Peggy fades to black as Max checks on her, the medivac can be heard crossing the desert in the distance… Sure, Max could scoop Peggy up and fly her out, but the risk of a sudden bleed out is high if the pressure is removed from a crushed limb.
Max catches it mid-air, hence why Peggy really wanted to say Maxima is the only one allowed to point guns at others since “she can catch the bullet” all the way back at Sydney’s first training.
Or it hits her, vaporizing her clothes which we will see in the next vote incentive.
If I remember correctly Max’ clothes only get vapourised/shredded when she lets them…
Her personal forcefield is not as big as Syd’s, but enough to prevent …. unintended risquée exposure… when headbutting RPG rounds if she dials her Protection setting up to something sufficient.
Unless the next vote incentive is “petite blondes Sydney surrounded by Frix and his 7 big blue friends”.
I was thinking it could enter the barrel, jam against the rocket and stop the rocket from leaving the chamber. Then they fire resulting it the equivalent to then standing there holding a grenade with the pin pulled and the timer counting.
Dabbler’s head just involuntarily turned towards the cafeteria.
Last we saw her, she was clucking with Cora in the cafeteria
As a language enthusiast, it’s time to push my glasses up and use my Sid the Sloth voice. Aktuaaaly, the Taliban in Afghanistan speak Pashto, Farsi and Urdu, but mainly Pashto. Those languages do use the Arabic script and borrow a lot of words from Arabic, but are in a different language family from Arabic, kinda like how English borrowed heavily from French, but is actually a Germanic language.
It’s also my understanding that Arabic is mainly used for prayer and religious ceremony, these days.
Additional possibility that the specific vehicle team was came as a group from an Arabic speaking land as a unit, to Afghanistan. Possibly not Taliban, but guests of Taliban?
*pushes your nerd glasses up your nose, and has you dro the mike. Then shakes your hand and smiles.*
That’s hilarious! That you think they ever strapped anything down in the back of those things!
No, dangerous explosives and expensive, delicate equipment never got exemptions to the Never Strap Anything Down In The Back Of An Open Bed Truck While Driving Fast Over Rough Terrain rule.
“Someone take that rocket launcher away from Jamal before he kills all of us.”
Jamal is the strap holding the case down.
Jamal was the passenger who painted the window in red paste :P
No Hilux in AFG had a sunroof. They were all the cheaper models with a lot of safety features missing which are required in the USA. Basically just a truck shell and a motor.
Maybe these guys are higher status and were assigned a better truck stolen from somewhere else.
My critique is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 2-passenger truck with a sunroof. Those typically only have a sliding opening in the back glass for communicating with people in the back, as hinted in panel 6. For a “luxury” fully-open sunroof, the total roof has to be long enough so the sliding covers (one glass, one opaque) have room to slide backwards. This requires the length of a 4-door “crew cab” pickup. But then, it’s been all but impossible to get a 2-door pickup in the USA for years, so maybe designs have changed.
For the one shown here and the previous page the sunroof cover would have to be manually removed and stored elsewhere. Something like old-style sports car “T tops”.
The driver wanted a sunroof, so he had the guys at the shop carve one out and then reinforce it. They never figured out a way to have the glass be removable but not just fly off while driving, however, so they just drive without it. Sucks if you get into a sandstorm, or during a rare rain, but otherwise it works and was easier than getting A/C installed.
At least, that’s the headcanon I’m going with. I don’t think anybody in the truck is around to ask about it at this point.
Not hard to add a couple screws around the opening and a plate held on with wing nuts. Add a bead of silicone around the edge to seal if needed and throw it behind the seat when you don’t need it.
I’m starting to wonder if there’s a technical term difference problem, here. Trucks in the US do not have sunroofs; they can’t. It’s either an open bed, the width of the driver’s cab and the length of vehicle, with about a foot extending past the rear axle, or it’s covered with either a tonneau or a truck topper. It sounds like you’re talking about what we call an SUV?
Late 70’s to maybe the mid 80’s trucks did indeed have the sunroof. Now a days you find them on the four door pickups.
I had google translate go back and forth with the english sentence a bit and even though the arabic result was completely different from what’s in the comic, the english translation stayed more or less the same.
Also I’d prefer my gf un-gangbanged, but since Frix is doing a two-way open-relationship kind of thing here I guess it makes sense he’s fine with it. I wonder if he ever did the reverse.
Its not that complicated. Sydney is being even more of an ass than usual, and Frix is winding her up
Tip: Don’t use Google Translate. It’s become so bad the last few years that it is only useful for words or maximum a short sentence. Paste a paragraph and it will start to ignore punctuation and skip short sentences, which makes it quite unusable. I assume the introduced some new AI model to improve it.
FYI, Google maps have also become terrible. It was always bad colour wise and giving someone good visible information about nature and such, and that is still the just as bad, but now the map geography information have degraded a lot and the path finding tend to do weird shit. Yeah, it’s quite up to date about addresses and such, but for everything else? Yeash. Seriously, look at something like an archipelago and then go to satellite view. There will be a lot more islands and some are quite large, with many houses on. Whole lakes are missing, and don’t even get me started on seeing bogs and what is a field or forest.
Funny.
I’ve translated the arabic text to my native language using Google Translate.
Translate that back to english, it would read: Eat this rocket on top of your lathe.
I wonder if the part where it says “lathe” has something to do with the tendency to use slang for everything.
“Lathe” (or some synonym) is probably slang for “ass’, as per its mode of operation. Namely “Sit on this, and rotate”.
Google translate suuuucks lol.
If you feed it in but say its Japanese (to English) instead of Arabic you get “If you’re an Air person, there’s a
difference.”
Chinese simplified poops out “EA San Ha DHA ALS AA Like k Haha ta Eminem AK Ha Ri ATI him” XD
I wonder how the hooked bungee cords hold the case in place.
Is there some hook system on the side of the truck bed?
Does “blacks on blonde eight-on-one” have some specific reference, or is this just the normal racist, sexist nonsense? It took me out of the comic, and as a sci fi writer, I can assure you, that ain’t good.
Yeah, agree. I realize that’s a sizeable subgenre of porn but that whole “white women getting ravaged by black men” thing is hella racist. It was racist when Mandingo came out. I don’t think Sydney would go there.
It’s literally a meme. It’s the one with a petite person – typically a woman but not always* – sitting on a couch with a grin and a bunch of much larger people – typically men but not always* – standing behind it, looming, with the implication the person on the couch is about to get their brains fucked out. The original image was from a blacks-on-blondes gangbang porn video.
*There’s a funny MCU one with Peter Parker on the couch and the ladies of the MCU all looming behind him, for example.
Being a meme doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly racist.
That’s a specific reference to a clip involving a pornstar by the name of Piper Perri.
I say it’s something she got from Lalpha’s memory.
(This will be my head canon for anything inexcuseable Sydney says from now on.)
It would be a reference to this image which has been heavily memed over the years:
https://a.pinatafarm.com/678×452/ecc7a9905d/piper-perri-surrounded.jpg
Sydney was saying inexcusable shit from day one, don’t blame Laph for her bullshit
There is a fair amount of racial porn out there where the men are one race and the women another. I think is the kind of thing Sydney is referring to.
5 black guys and blonde Meme Generator-
Is the infamous culture ref, so I don’t know why DaveB said 8.
Possibilities include (but are not limited to) not remembering the exact number of men in the meme (which would mean either not knowing what it’s formally called – I didn’t until someone brought up it starring Piper Perri, which let me search for it – or knowing it by a different name – KnowYourMeme calls it “Piper Perri Surrounded,” for example), the meme actually involving more men in the Grrl-verse, and Sydney purposefully boosting the number for emphasis in her joke (basically a case of “turning it up to eleven”).
As for the people getting their knickers in a knot over Sydney saying something funny* but somewhat-racially-insensitive, this is hardly the first time. She just didn’t have anyone calling her out – Peggy probably doesn’t feel like derailing her story for it (and may not care), and nobody else at the table is familiar with all the cultural racial nonsense. Well, Lapha does, thanks to her mindjacking Sydney, but it’s really not something she’s going to care about.
*Well, humor is subjective, and I’d imagine those who are taking offense don’t find it very funny. Just read the above as though it had scarequotes around funny.
Lots of people are replying “here’s the source”, as though it having a source somehow means it *isn’t* racist and sexist. Because, you know, interracial gangbang porn is famously a champion of progressive values.
It’s a weird thing for Dave B to put in the comic.
A meme reference is not a weird thing for Dave to put into his comic though…
If the men are black, and the girl is white, and they are the aforementioned genders, is it automatically racist and sexist just because you point out those physical characteristics? If so, how is anyone supposed to describe anyone or anything? “That woman is not a tree” becomes sexist or discriminates against trees or something, it’s stupid.
I haven’t seen the actual video and cannot comment on it (or any other similar videos).
No, it’s racist and sexist because the interracial sex and stereotypes about races, and the gangbang sex and stereotypes about the sexes, ARE THE MAIN SELLING POINTS to the people who constitute the market for this work.
Racist and sexist material is more or less defined as the stuff that racist and sexist people care about.
If the market honestly didn’t care about the races of the performers, or if their interest in multi-partner sex weren’t rooted in stereotypes about slutdom and exploitation, these videos wouldn’t be made the way they are.
If preferences in porn, i.e. sexual preferences count as sexist, you’re taking out all meaning from the word. And whether having race counts as racist / is bad in the sense usually implied by the word racist is also rather unclear.
There’s nothing in the universe which forces reality to make any objective sense.
They’res an infamous porn video of pornstar Piper Perri, a petite blond, getting gangbanged by 8 large black males. It’s actually become a meme at this point.
Yeah, I had seen it in the “little room” at a rental place, some years ago. I didn’t rent it, but they were on the cover. That meme is just that, the cover.
An RPG in a weapons case? Fancy! I’d only ever seen them shoved in a sack.
I doubt any Malice of Ill intent was put behind it nor is that necessarily a case of “being ravaged.” It’s simply a genre of porn. There are two categories to investigate here. One, the one I immediately thought of when I read the text and the more common of the two, is interracial which in itself has little to no connotations of racism present. After all, a white woman can play with 8 white guys, 8 black guys, or a mixture in between without the need for any connotations present. The “ravaged” portion of the sentence simply refers to the way a woman looks typically by the end of the scene. Not inherently racist.
Now race play, on the other hand, can have plenty of said racism in it and often times plays up those tropes a lot harder but is a far narrower scope of kink that doesn’t get used often enough. Could Sydney be into that? Maybe, because people contain multitudes and she might not realize the connotations behind it, but I took no interpretation on that in my reading at least.
Overall I believe this is a matter of personal preference more than anything. It didn’t take me out of the story and made me laugh because my thought went to the couch meme that you see floating around, which I think is the most fitting source of Sydney’s knowledge.
Sorry, this got put into the incorrect comment thanks to using mobile. Sorry
About those 300 yards: You know that the effective firing range of an assault rifle like the M16 is already double that distance, right? And those assault rifles don’t even have any optical sights, just iron sights.
These aren’t new, well-maintained AR-15 variants – they’re old, likely poorly-maintained AK-47 variants. And “effective range” is “this is the point beyond which the mechanical accuracy of the weapon doesn’t allow reliable hits” (“reliable” I think tending to by something like a 70%+ probability) – that is, it’s a function of the weapon’s MoA. The shooter’s MoA is normally the larger deciding factor. And these guys are firing from the back of a moving truck, not from a stationary bench rest. They also aren’t world-class marksmen – they’re more like minimally-trained militia.
In RPG – specifically, GURPS – terms, these guys have [i]maybe[/i] skill 11 and aren’t Aiming. They do get a +2 for firing full-auto (RoF 10 in GURPS, or 600 rounds per minute), but that’s negated by the -2 to target a supine target with a ranged attack (and realistically, without proper training for full-auto fire they should be at a further -2, completely negating the to-hit benefit of firing at RoF 10). They’re likely using All Out Attacks, for a +1. So, net skill 12 (the bumpy ride technically just limits the benefit they can get from Aiming, but a further -2 or so would be justified) before accounting for range. But 300 yards is a doozy – a whopping -13 to hit. Forget getting lucky – they don’t even get a roll to hit (you need skill 3 or higher to be able to roll, while they have effective skill of -1).
Now, realistically, it’s certainly possible to get lucky and score a hit, but the probability is so low that most systems will just say “You missed” and move on.
Yeah, scoring a hit at 300 yard with iron sights is doable, but it calls for knowing the range exactly, knowing the ballistics of your weapon system (these two together tell you how much bullet drop you’ll get), and often calls for adjusting the sights (yes, irons can be adjusted). For rifle qualification, shooters typically get a fairly long amount of time per shot to line things up juuuuust right with the longer shots. That, plus not being stressed from having your target shooting back at you, allows for scoring such difficult shots with relatively-modest skill levels (more than your typical AQ, but generally not into sharpshooter territory).
Incidentally, Peggy probably has Guns (Longarm) at 20 or higher – I’d probably say a minimum of 25. I’m not sure what her zoom level is on that scope, but considering it’s misaligned anyway, we’ll just ignore the bonus for it. Being supine is not great for accuracy, so we’re probably looking at a -4 – possibly worse – there, but if anyone in the Grrl-verse has Gunslinger, it’s Peggy, so she can disregard that. Her weapon likely have Acc 5 or Acc 6, and she’s taking her time between shots, so that should be good for a +7 or +8. So that’s effective skill of 32 or 33, -13 for Range for 19 or 20, and -5 to aim for the Face (since the rest of the passenger is covered by the truck), or net skill 14 or 15. That’s a 90-95% chance of a hit; even if we tossed that -4 back in, we’re looking at 10 to 11, or 50-60% hit chance. Ridiculous skill and a good weapon will help a great deal! Of course, further realism indicates that there should be – before accounting for Range and Hit Location – a skill cap of 30 for an Acc 5 rifle, 32 for an Acc 6 one, which changes things to 12-14… but that’s still around a 75-90% chance of a hit (with the -4, that’s 8-10, or around 25-50%).
Couch meme voter incentive next month then?
I’m mentally picturing Cora’s crew as the male part of the meme and laughing inwardly at the mental image.
I love how Frix gave Sydney the eye-twitch with that line, but she had it coming. Syd has no combat experience, so I doubt she understands what Peggy’s mind-set was at the time. Those grenades look like the old fashioned WWII grenades for the M-1, rather than an RPG. They had a weak range, were intended to “pacify” fox holes. I’m not expert, so don’t mind me. I was classified “4-F” when I tried to join up in 1977, mild case of scoliosis. (grumbling)
The eye twitch was also probably stimulated by the ear whisper while being drawn in close to him for a moment.
It can be a great way to make a partner squirm. Not a move I’d recommend before already knowing them well, for some women the sensations from that are negative and uncomfortable.
True, to this day if I sneak up and kiss my wife on the neck, I still get the young-girl giggle :) even after 40 years. I was thinking though that I remember how Sydney reacted when Harem wanted her to flash her boobs for knocking Harems top off.
That shot that killed the passenger would have gone through the rear cabin glass and possibly hit that guy going for the RPG. Also, a right hand drive in the middle East? Most of their vehicles are left hand drive, from my experience.
Sorry, I’m a little distracted by the mental image of being passed around by eight woofs at once.
sounds like you’re weaving a very long scarf
Fun fact, half the time translation in Afghanistan was putting it into Google translator and hoping for the best, because just like in China there are a crap ton of dialects and its almost impossible for the translator to know them all, so you play a guessing game of well do you know this one? and in the end they both almost can speak most of one language but really you rely on an app, that may or may not have caused more than one international indecent because it SUCKED (ah lowest bidder for the win)
I just noticed that Cora is no longer chicken fighting with Dabbler. Does Dabbler now sit at that table too? Is she already planning that twelve guys one succubus setup?
Dawg, what the hell even was that comment by Sidney? I know she’s supposed to be awkward and low-filter, but that’s not the kind of thing you have someone say if you want people to like them.
Like, if this and the earlier “Succubus makes everyone at ARC Headquarters super horny” plot cul de sac were some kind of subliminal suggestion that you want to draw porn, you can just do it, man. I read several of the PixieTrix Comics collection back when they were still a thing people cared about. I’m not going to think less of you for just drawing porn.
Not to nit pick, but no one except civilians carry their primary weapon in a case. Even during transport you unloaded it and it sits between your legs or if there is a weapons rack in the rack. Reason for this is speed of access, also snipers really work hard at keeping their weapon dry and on them. RPGs are shipped in crates not weapon cases again easy access as for the ammo you keep that in it’s tube until you need it unless you are expecting heavy fighting.
As a fellow 40+ year resident of TX, I can confirm that sunroofs are something I have traditionally found ridiculous. However, my current partner has successfully swayed my opinion a few degrees on the merits of them. His sunroof has two opening options. It can slide fully open, withdrawing into the roof of the vehicle, or the back side can pop up at an angle. This may be how all sunroofs work. As someone who always found them ridiculous, I never bothered to learn before. Sue me. Anyhow, on clear, hot days, he’ll park the car, and use back side pop-up feature to create a vent for hot air to escape. Then, he’ll close the sun-shieldy thing that also slides in and out of the roof to block out the light (no extra sunlight baking the car, please and thank you), and keeps that cracked just a couple of finger-widths open to allow air flow. It doesn’t prevent the car from becoming an oven in the summer, but it does make a noticeable difference. The days when we couldn’t do that because of the threat of rain were WAY worse.
Plus the night driving with the sunroof open actually can be lovely once it’s not full sauna temps after sundown…at least, it’s not terrible as long as I’ve got my hair in a ponytail and not whipping around into a rat’s nest that I’ll hate detangling later.
As somebody living in the northeast where rain and snow happen with regularity, I always questioned the sanity of anybody wanting an opening in the roof of their car, as the question of them leaking is matter of “when” not “if”
When I worked at a TX Cadillac dealership, I became convinced that the only reason to have a sunroof was so you could tell when it finally started raining.
Because that’s when water started coming through the sunroof.
How is Sidney not calling out Peggy for making a doodle with lunch condiments just like O’Neill did in (one of) the time-loop episodes of Stargate SG-1?! The inscrutable geek reference is RIGHT THERE, Sidney!
They’re all acing getting a little snippy in their own ways, this month.
My brother tried to get Spanish speakers from various countries to tell him the *actual term* for “sunroof,” and no one had anything. They didn’t know any term except the one they used, which was “coconut baker.”
……
I learned *to* speak, in Spanish in Mexico City. But, when we moved back to the USA, and I grew up to *communicate* in English……………
In other words: I have no fucking clue, I was 5, and don’t know anyone back down south who has a vehicle with a sunroof on their car.
How did the Hilux, barreling directly at her, not come to an uncontrollable stop?
Usually driver’s body would jerk, spasm, or jam accelerator.
Unless she cut spinal cord at C1/C2, or nailed lizard brain.
I totally expected her to watch the Toyota swerve at her, hit a rock and yeet itself over her, hitting helo body pulling it off her.
The other passengers, learning belatedly, that Inshallah seatbelts always lose to physics.
She could mention that she was able to ascertain that the fact they wear nothing under their robes was true.
You have to look closely, but the steering wheel on this particular vehicle is show as being on the right and not on the left. Perhaps it came from the UK? In any event, she hit the passenger, not the driver.
Probably direct from Japan, which still drives correctly on the left
Heck, watched a Thai drama that showed a modern hilux with right-hand drive
Unsaid dialogue for panel six: “Shit! That fucker still owed me 10 shekels!!”
In mountainous areas which are further north than Texas, you get daytime heat but it cools off significantly in the evenings and nights. For example, Pueblo Colorado is in a high desert area (4700 ft) with very warm days but cool nights. The effect should be more in Afghanistan which has an average elevation of over 6100 feet.
I’d assume in Afghanistan if someone used it at all, it’d be more often as a moonroof.