Grrl Power #1313 – Da Ba Dee
The exception to exotic skin colors applied to pre-sexy people is that baby-shit yellow color that major appliances were in the 60s and 70s. You can call it “Harvest Gold” all you want, but it’s baby-shit-yellow. On humans that just looks like advanced jaundice. Almost any other color is fine.
Sydney is being pretty peak ADHD here, explaining a thing to someone without helping them connect to the 3-steps-down-the-road conclusion her brain already jumped to.
“Of course the old Russian Czars were six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon’ed to Caesar. Why else would the Space Shuttles’ booster rockets be constrained by the width of two horses’ butts? Duh-Doy!”
Did you know “Czar” is Russian for “Cesar?” Because I did not. It seems super obvious in retrospect, and now I feel a little dumb.
And just then, one of Cora’s arch-enemy bounty hunter rivals (probably named something like “Forrestal” or “Bellosh”) breaks into the Archon cafeteria and attacks, thinking blue Peggy is Cora!
Honestly, with Maxima and Sydney right there, it’d be a pretty short god damned fight. Cora is somewhere around Iron Man levels of tough, where as Dabbler is more of a Spider-Man. (As an aside, why is Spider-Man hyphenated, but Iron Man is not?) That is to say, Dabbler has less out and out firepower and gold-bricky defense than Cora, but is much more flexible when it comes to ability selection. Actually, I guess Dabbler is more like Batman, if Batman had Spider-Man’s powers, but also used all the gadgets. And also knew magic. And his gadgets were crazy alien space tech. But didn’t have the vehicles… Look Dabbler is in a weird category.
Speaking of Forrestal, did you know he was not only a rival of Dr. Jones, he was a professor at Princeton? Can you imagine, showing up to class one day and being told that your professor was impaled on an ancient (somehow light activated) spear trap? Sure, you might get some kind of bereavement bye on your mid-term, but at that moment you’d also learn that not only is field archeology harrowingly tedious, it is also occasionally winnowingly dangerous. I just like to think of the ecosystem of 1930’s academic archeology having annual “In Memoriam” newsletters and a 30% churn rate in Ivy League professors because they were all getting slaughtered exploring booby-trapped catacombs looking for a moderately-sized gold cross or the foreword page to Beowulf.
This is entirely unrelated to this page, but allow me to digress for a moment. I always find it amusing when Indiana Jones or Lara Croft or that guy from Uncharted or the Goonies stumble across a Rube-Goldberg trap made of hemp rope and wooden gears that is 4,000 years old, and that shit still works? Absolutely not. If Master Chief or Daniel Jackson stumbles across some ancient alien tech that’s 1,000,000 years old and it all still works? Fine. Super advanced aliens obviously have super advanced material sciences, maybe even self-healing alloys and quantum circuits and what have you. Maybe repair drones or nanites. Maybe they were so advanced, they didn’t have planned obsolescence and contractors using the cheap concrete so they can pocket 35% of the cash and don’t care if the building will fall over in 40 years. And look, not to disparage humans of yor, maybe they had some great tree sap/wax/bug squeezing combo that was incredible varnish-slash-twine preservative, but come on. There is a limit.
Okay, yes, I know One-Eyed Willie didn’t set up his cave 4,000 years ago, but the Indikipedia (not what it’s called) says the temple at the beginning of Raiders was 2,000 years old. And… sure, the locals could have been maintaining it… without disturbing the dust and cobweb buildup. Obviously there are service tunnels behind the dart walls and under the pressure plates. The entrances to which are clearly marked with back and yellow striped doors, via OSHA. They’re super obvious, but for some reason, archeologists always approach the temple from the other side. BUT STILL. It does make me laugh.
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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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“Did you know “Czar” is Russian for “Cesar?” Because I did not. It seems super obvious in retrospect, and now I feel a little dumb.”
Wait till you find out where ‘Kaiser’ originated from.
Add ‘Tsar’ and ‘C-section’ to that list.
It’s interesting just how many English words are Latin in origin (including placenames ending ‘caster, ‘chester or ‘cester), so when you turn to a language that’s heavily influenced by Latin (lit. a ‘Roman’-tic language), like French or Italian, it is rather overwherlming.
English is a mishmash of all the “romance” languages + latin. Italian isn’t considered a romance language either but it is a form of latin.
Not surprisingly, most european languages are rooted Latin or Germanic origins
English is a bit more mishmash than most of the other Romance languages; there’s a LOT of Germanic influence in the mix, too. (My father once told me about a paper that noted that most nouns in English have a synonym from the other root; the author suggested that a given writer’s ratio of Romance :: German origin choices was directly proportional to the degree of bullshit that writer was spewing. I think my second-generation German father just really liked anything that took a dig at the French, but it was still a fun theory.)
English also has a lot of Celtic influence from Welsh, Gaelic plus from the languages of the Scotii and Pictii.
Yeah, apparently this Caesar guy was a pretty big deal.
It makes even more sense when you realize that Latin has a hard C and no soft c. We mispronounce Caesar.
Likewise, in Latin the “ae” is pronounced like “ai”. So Caesar is supposed to be pronounced very similar to kaiser. And if I’m not mistaken, Latin didn’t have a J either, so his first name is actually Iulius.
Peggy’s right arm shows one flaw with this idea. How many of her tattoos will look too “off” with the new skin color?
I think the idea is for her to have just the replacement limb painted blue.
she would still need to carefully chose any tatoo on that part, but the rest of her tatoo wouldn’t change
I don’t think Sydney’s limited the leg to turning blue, especially not with the collar turning Peggy’s whole body blue.
Alien limb replacement that will ruin all of your body mods and tattoos would probably be a stronger disincentive than having blue skin for some people. I mean, if I had lost a limb(s) and the cost of a fully functional replacement was blue skin I’m sorry, but get out the spray paint and call me an Ultramarine, because I’d be all in for that.
Hell, if the cost of a braoin chip that would let me turn off my ADHD at will was blue skin I’d be all in for that too.
I’m sort of surprised that hasn’t come up yet, like Frix offering a brain implant that would let Syd turn the ADHD off with the flip of a switch. Could be a pretty funny and thought provoking story thread, like the off the wall way our ADHD brains work is what makes is so effective at creative and off the wall solutions to problems, so Syd ends up happier because her life is no longer a chaotic mess, and at first Max is all in for it, but over time they all want/need her to go back to being a disorganized goofball.
Pretty sure Sydney just borrowed the collar Dabs made for Max for quick demonstration purposes. Remember they had to heavily tweak the “shader” for Maxima’s unique color and texture issues, then lock those settings down more than expected initially.
Betting they could just give Peggy one with default settings since her skin isn’t metallic and doesn’t need the shader locked, that would “fix” the problem of her tattoos color being overwriten.
Ryan George made a good video about ancient booby traps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwu1rCjb1Fk
So I just finished Tamer Enhancer, coinciding with this strip and I’m starting to sense a pattern.
Tell us more about yourself and blue girls, Dave.
Considering he doesn’t have Outsider listed under Webcomics I Like, I’m not sure about that.
What happens when Peggy accidentally starts a fashion for blue skin?
Spider-Man is a human with some spider stuff mixed in. Iron Man is *not* a human made of iron. Thus the hyphen.
Then Squirrel Girl should also be hyphenated and it’s not. She is a Girl with some Squirrel stuff.
“Yo listen up: here’s a story
About a little guy
That lives in a blue world
And all day and all night and everything he sees is
Just blue like him inside and outside
Blue his house with a blue little window
And a blue Corvette and everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
‘Cause he ain’t got nobody to listen:
I’m blue da-buh-dee-da-buh-dy…”
Random trivia:
He didn’t have lyrics for that part.
To Sydney, she can just say, “I’m good.” :-)
Or she could reply with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFLTXGu8SrE
Comic book history time! Marvel had Spider-Man hyphenated because it looked too close to “Superman” and the Distinguished Competitor made a strenuous objection.
The blue skin complements the pink hair nicely.
I think she should go for a lighter tone. Perhaps there is a shade that looks better with the tattoos.
I can’t remember the name but I remember a short story about a group of people who were far more interested in the death traps than whatever treasures they were supposed to protect, they were part archeologists and part dungeon explorers. They were looking to find a lost temple that had traps that automatically reset that was designed by a famous master death trap maker. Really cool concept and I wish I could remember where I read it
That sounds DiscWorld/Pratchett-ish. Or -esque.
I remember hearing stories like these on the Escape Pod podcast; a quick search found this author: https://escapepod.org/people/marjorie-james/ .
That sounds like responsible archeologists. Working traps that automatically reset? That’s FAR more valuable to a seeker of knowledge than a gold idol.
get a limb. but you get targeted by racists.
And here we are at r/hypotheticalsituation. At least this one doesn’t start with a monetary figure.
I actually find that too much of a Sydney solution and I don’t mean that as a positive. The guilt she would feel in just idylly replacing a limb and still have to have ties to fellow veterans would be immense. Peggy isn’t the sort of person who can shrug and do it. Syd really should have a greater sense of what is appropriate as well, she didn’t really have permission to do this, right?
Do what, make Peggy blue in the last panel? She just grabbed one of Dabbler’s party-favor chokers (or borrowed Max’s hacked one) and applied a temporary illusion of blue skin. It’s not that different from holding up a piece of clothing against a friend to show how the color suits them, or putting their pic in an app that simulates a different hairstyle on them to see how it looks.
As to Sydney’s solution…well, Peggy says she wouldn’t call it “perfect”, and I think that’s a fair assessment. On an emotional level, it would be sort of like a penance–taking on a burden to balance a choice she perceives as selfish. On a social level, as Frix explains, it would deter some of the questions, complaints, and possible demands that Peggy fears. Certainly there would still be some people who were envious and some connections would that would break, but I think reducing the fallout moderately would ease Peggy’s doubts.
Re: The trap-in-old-temple-conundrum drove me half mad until I “solved” it in my campaigns… it is just a another form of Mimic!
“Am I blue? Am I blue? Aren’t those tears in my eyes telling you? Am I blue? You’ll be, too.”
Nice image of all my parents’ original kitchen appliances there, very nostalgic. The last of the damn things only died and got replaced around 2010. Which is also about when they stopped using their stove at all because the new one frightened them.
That only works until the “alien chic” influencers all start rocking the blue/green/fuscia/etc. color skin.
Homer says d’oh to your skin color assessment.
But I do remember the 70’s, and the standard 3-5 colors, harvest gold, avocado green, Catalina dressing red/orange/burgundy, mahogany brown, and sometimes some kind of way off white pudding cream color.
So – what collar is this that turns skin blue?
And if Sydney already had it, why is the plan for Frix to turn Peggy’s skin blue?
I’m not saying there are no answers to this – but I don’t know what they are.
Frix gets Sydney. He figured out what she meant right away.
Wait…. Is Sydney implying that Blue is an unattractive color or just that most Earth people think so??
The Skin Color Changing Collar is a novelty party favor Sydney picked up
at Space-Spencers on one of her trips to the Space-Mall.
Dabbler made one for Maxima programmed to conceal her gold skin.
It’s super effective!
This seems like not a great solution. If adding a leg back has the side of effect of just having a weird skin color, a lot of amputees will be willing to make that choice. At a minimum, they’ll want the *option* of the choice. The New Yorker a few weeks ago had an article about new prosthetic legs, and much of the article was about people who had lost their legs in sports, especially rock climbing and mountain climbing. I strongly suspect a very minimum that those people would be willing to make the trade so they could go back to their preferred sports.
The page made me laugh. But, not a fan of blue Peggy.
#tuareg
speaking of adhd moments, behold the author’s notes
Well I definitely know for sure that my adhd and autism are legit. I picked up on Sydneys plan immediately after she suggested changing the skin color. Them braincells sync in the weirdest ways sometimes
Sydney, there is a whole other problem with turning your skin blue due to a side-effect.
Two words: blueberry fetishists.
It’s a subset of “involuntary transformation”.
Counterpoint: they already have a golden-skinned team-leader, so… something in silver?
Surfer?
Spider-Man is hyphenated to differentiate it visually from Superman. Really.
Really Really. And I despise the fact that I know this fact. Is so dumb.
Okay, see, until the last two panels I was thinking Sydney meant make the NEW FOOT (and maybe a bit of spread up the leg) blue, not, like…. Full blue the entirety of her. So that the new foot still seems like a Separate And Distinct Piece(tm) that is more akin to a high-end prosthetic or transplant than “natural” new foot.
Just say the blue skin was a side-effect of the Anti-Rejection drug used to keep the body from treating the new leg as a foreign body until her immune system adapts.
Now Peggy looks like a giant Smurf…!
No blue terrans? What about the Fulgate family of Kentucky. https://allthatsinteresting.com/blue-fugate-family-of-kentucky
Item 1: Blue Peggy doesn’t seem to catch my eye as well as “Earth-Human-Colored” Peggy.
Item 2: Am I the only one remembering the trending color fads from 1978’s “The Wiz”? See that sequence here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-UJR2tip3c
Dabbler’s wide powerset is more of a Doctor Doom set. She’s CAPABLE of truly insane power feats… She just doesn’t do them often.
Worth noting that, on the rare occasions that Spider-Man has had access to Tony Stark’s kind of resources, he’s proven himself more than capable of hurling technology at a problem. As it is, he tends to rely on cheap gadgets (such as his spider-tracers) or reusable gadgets (such as his webshooters, or his belt mounted flashlight). He also had a spider-mobile, when a company offered him money for a marketing deal (it crashed in the river his first time using it).
And I actually agree very much about Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. It always made little sense to me that they would be more interested in the golden artifacts than in the ancient structures – there’s so much MORE to learn from the deathtraps than from the statues.
And once again Sydney demonstrate that when your ADHD-fu is strong enough, thinking* and acting on that thought is pretty much the same.
I also love the wordless interaction between Peggy and Max, especially Max’s shrug.
*admittedly for a rather wide definition of the word Thinking.
Spider-Man is hyphened because Lee thought the logo looked to too similar to Superman logo(not the emblem, the logo). DC had already proved litigious when it came to anything copying their most successful property, and Lee wanted to prevent that.
While I think skin color is a moderate issue in comparison to missing a forelimb (admittedly, Peggy’s mentioned she’s already used to it), I don’t think it would be anywhere near the level of deterrent it could be. Admittedly, I’m a scifi nerd, and I’m hanging around a bunch of scifi nerds, so ‘mild change to personal appearance’ may be an underestimation of how the filthy neurotyps would view a change to skin color thanks to the large amount of exposure I’ve had from my entertainment selection.
Roman concrete it’s better than the concrete we use today.
My vote for the 2000 yo rope. Yes it’s ridiculous but if we examine each movie like this you are not gonna enjoy most movies.
If anyone reads Matthew Reilly (You should, his books read like action movies) in his series that involves this sort of thing (starting with Seven Ancient Wonders) he plays around with this trope – Some traps are based on water and so naturally reset along with the water level. There’s one that comes to mind based on sand which is retained until the trap is sprung, but is one-use. I believe that there is a trap system that is maintained by a local tribe at one point – and the best (imho) is one where the traps have all been destroyed by time and wear and tear, leaving only treacherous terrain either side of a chasm, with the good guys and bad guys each racing each other on opposite sides.
Great fun.
> Roman concrete it’s better than the concrete we use today.
Better in some ways, worse in others. It’s ridiculously weather-resistant, but it takes years or even decades to fully set, unlike modern concretes, which develop most of their strength in a few weeks.
No it isn’t, that is an urban myth.
That colour reminds me of my time on the wards, and not in a good way
Chandler: its not Peter Spidermann. Like there’s a last name Goldman…but there’s no Gold Man
Phoebe: ::gasps:: there should BE a Gold Man
If someone suddenly clips something tight around my neck I will react violently.
I don’t think that would really work at all. A missing limb is a major disability, and being blue is a minor inconvenience at best, and among some people more of a bonus. That kind of side effect is not going to dissuade anyone from wanting to use offworld tech to regrow limbs.