Grrl Power #1328 – An accidental outing
To anyone getting 403’d when posting comments: Apparently there’s some firewall rule set up by the host to reduce spam. Basically if you try and post two comments in under 60 seconds, it flags your IP and puts you on a naughty list for some amount of time. I’m working with the host at the moment to make that a little less aggressive. It’d be nice if the 403 page gave you any information about why you’re seeing the page, but I don’t know if that’s possible to update.
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Sciona wouldn’t give herself away like that under normal circumstances, but she really doesn’t remember the encounter with Sydney in the basement. Or… mostly really doesn’t remember it. Chrona’s kinda-sorta timeloop didn’t quite work as expected, and it left some artifacts in its wake.
So the art took a bit of a… you know, I was going to say “a bit of a hit,” but I don’t dislike the simpler art. I actually really like the more anime-ish stuff. It’s just really hard when I’m coloring not to add more layers of shading and then do another pass for highlights, then an ambient occlusion pass, then a reflected bounce light pass. Or I could just type “make pretty girl big boobs” and have an AI artripper do it for me in 5 seconds. It’s impossible not to feel like a lifetime of art skills have been rendered meaningless in the last few years, but… I still might look into some AI images for the occasional background. Like if the choice is between me drawing a stocked aisle in a grocery store and drawing 2,000 bottles of shampoo all lined up on the shelves across from 1,300 boxes of cereal all in perspective (because this store has soap and cereal on the same aisle) and having to spend like 6 hours to pencil all that in then ink it then color it with the shadows of the shelves above each row of products falling on the products below – or I could type “make grocery store soap and cereal big boobs” and have all that work done in a few seconds. It’s hard not to feel that’s a better use of my time.
Right, so the point of what I’d started to say there was we’re at the stage of taking care of my mom that we’ve all concluded that she’s going to move in with me and my wife. Which involves selling her house, buying a new house that can better accommodate all of us, moving nearly everything in her house to the new one, then fixing up our house, selling it, and moving nearly everything from it to the new house. And that is an absolute ass rogering amount of work. I met with the realtor today, scheduled a guy to come take measurements for new carpet, did grocery shopping, picked up “letters testamentary” papers from the attorney, which is the “this will is good and has been executed” paperwork – and admittedly, I should have picked those up about a month and a half ago, but I am kind of terrible at doing… things? If you’ve ever emailed me and it took me two months to respond, well, let’s just say that Task Avoidance is part of ADD that I never knew had a name. It’s like Professional League Procrastination. Really, it’s “procrastinate until you legitimately forget you have something to do, then three weeks later go, “Oh, shit. I should get on that thing.” then “Hah hah, Tom Servo said something funny on the perpetual MST3K streams I’ve been watching since two thanksgivings ago and I have every moment of the show memorized at this point, and now I’ve forgotten about that thing for another two weeks.”” I know I’m using a lot of clinical terms there but hopefully you get the drift.
Anyway, then after dinner tonight, I filled 9 and a half bankers boxes with my mom’s old cookbooks. Basically I spent less than half the day actually working on the comic, and probably every other day for the next two-ish months will probably be like that for me. I’m really hoping to avoid reverting to stick figure theater if at all possible, but the last two times I moved burned the considerable buffer I had when I started the comic. So we’ll see.
Once we’re all moved in, my wife will be able to help out a little with my mom. Not that I’m going to foist my mom’s care on to her, just that she’ll be able to at least do the occasional errand and some (okay, most) of the cooking instead of me doing basically everything. I do some cooking normally, but really the only things I make are gigantic breakfast omelets and puerco pibil. I can grill up a steak or do pork chops or whatever, but usually if I’m asked to take care of dinner, usually that means hitting up Grubhub. But that’s because I like eating samosas, and have no idea how to make them and would not have the patience or time for it anyway. (Best way to eat samosas is to dip them in extra korma sauce. Yeaaah, that’s the stuff.) Essentially, I’m assuming that making samosas is super involved and takes an hour of prep work before they even go in the oven. In my mind, this is how all cooking works, even though I know it doesn’t really take that long for most recipes.
Here’s the part where I assure you I’m working on nudie vote incentives but I don’t know when it’ll be done. Hopefully after all this house stuff settles down I can get back to a proper monthly (cough) schedule.
The new vote incentive is up! (Finally.)
I’m revisiting a panel from a recent page, but I included some comic reactions and a few outfit swaps, so hopefully you all enjoy it. I also plussed up the art from the comic version a bit, though I suspect that despite the time I spent on that, not a whole lot of people would immediately notice that, so I’m gratuitously pointing it out here.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Sydney is acting oddly rude and kinda presumptuous on this page.
If this wasn’t a secret super villain she’d be in quite a bit of trouble.
Par for the course, really.
Sydney constantly speaks and acts without thinking and without regard for other people, then banks on her cuteness to bail her out.
And Sydney hasn’t learnt that it’s rude (and an offense) to try and motorboat a woman without her consent, certainly an HR Violation (#MeToo may be a few years away in the GrrlVerse, but who’s to say it didn’t start early?)
She definitely did learn that. From Maxima in the showers. When Maxima told her about when Dabbler did something similar to her and got punched through a wall for it.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-592-funhouse-funbags/
I was hoping for showing Sydney being immune to Scorpia’s addictive power.
Because she seems resistant to her ADHD meds, and certainly resistant to capsaicin to an absurd degree??
May be the unknown orb would do something if she was attacked subtly.
It would be cool of the last orb was medical and it’s passive is a “warning, warning, you’re being poisoned!”
Halo’s last Orb is her ‘Omega 13’.
Dave’s saving it for a hopeless situation.
You mean… almost getting stab by Sci-Fright didn’t count?
Or are you saying that Kronachrome wasn’t responsible as she thought?
Scorpia is left handed, apparently.
Is her entire species left handed?
How about Sydney, is she left handed??
Or is this just the artist no paying attention and there isn’t any handedness lore in the grrlpowerverse?
It’s so I could show Sciona’s chemical handshake and also for some reason I really don’t think about handedness when drawing a lot of the time.
Sydney’s actually wrong in her reminiscing, although in her defense I’m not certain she considers the last entity that sorta-kinda-stabbed her to be a person – the giant monster/machine she dubbed Nega-Squidward. During their fight, she got stabbed in the gut with a sharp fragment from one of its explosions – but only sorta-kinda, because it failed to penetrate her uniform.
Well, unless we’re including figurative stabbing, in which case Frix has them both handily defeated.
Before the reset of the checkpoint trigger, Sciona stabbed and killed Sydney in issue 501.
Krona’s power creates a ‘time loop’ in which Sydney respawns at a different point in time after being killed by Sciona. However, aside from that specific event, everyone’s memory remains unaffected, including Sciona’s. It’s like a strange checkpoint system.
The storyline spans from issues 490 to 507.
Sciona is the only one who stabbed Sydney and remembers that she did.
Technically the checkpoint may not have been triggered by her actual death, as Krona was saying.
But Sydney couldn’t hear that because she was busy crowing about getting another item on the superhero bucket list (“death denied!”) checked off.
Yups: it’s probably simply the fear was enough to trigger the reset
That last panel.
Very nice.
Sydney’s Inland Empire stat is higher than you’d think. It leads to weird and weirdly accurate observations.
My first thought was that Sciona is an absolute idiot for giving Sydney the hint that she stabbed her.
Then I recalled it happened in the time loop reset. I always figured Sciona must have remembered the reset because she sent the robot, maybe having simply watched Pixel and Sydney vanish. But this suggests her and her memory were reset along with it, so she only has a vague memory of those events happening which might have prompted her to check for observers and release the robot
Yes, Sciona got confused by her vague memories of an erased timeline and spoke her mind. Still damning, but more excusable. Sdyney was at a major advantage here since she was the only one having clear memories of the event. No doubt Sciona had incredibly bad luck in this scene, first with Sydney zooming from afar on her damning texting, and then with this slip of the tongue.
Perhaps the scales were balancing after all the good luck she got since the destruction of Alari Prime: escaping Archon and her planet’s destroyers, finding a prime super body as a new host, infiltrating her way in the US government, meeting 6xguy…
I assumed that the “loop effect area” included the warehouse and general area. They were discovered after the reset because they started making so much noise on the rooftop. Pretty sure Sciona did not clearly remember the loop, or else she absolutely would not have said that. More likely she reset without clear memory just like everyone else.
Although, Pixel had a memory of already being out scouting the warehouse, but then she was right next to Sidney when the reset was triggered.
Lots of noise happening in this panel and the next few, plus quite a bit of time passed between the reset and the robot showing up. I still think Sciona remembers the reset as sort of a deja vu thing at best. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-502-checkpoint-checkup/
Last panel: are those meant to be continental silhouettes of australia, africa, and south america?
They look like the same silhouette, stretched and rotated. Probably not meant to be anything in particular.
I think you’re experiencing continental pareidolia.
Top Right and Bottom Left do vaguely resemble Africa
Sydney just rolled a Nat 20 Intelligence check. AT Disadvantage. Shit is about to go spicy…
or her lunch of super hot chilly just did a roll in her guts and the destruction coming forth is near, her body just reacting in shock.
AI is an… interesting topic, legally speaking. Would highly recommend reading up on the Zarya of the Dawn lawsuit(s) to understand the implications of integrating AI art into your workflow.
Agreed. Actually, recent opinion piece by the Copyright Office suggested that they’re considering any art that doesn’t have the framework defined by a human (in addition to/outside of the prompt) isn’t valid… See article here (replace the (dot)): https://arstechnica(dot)com/tech-policy/2025/01/copyright-office-suggests-ai-copyright-debate-was-settled-in-1965/
There are a number of famous artists who ended up leading a studio. When the artist got a commission to e.g. produce a large wall painting, he (the ones we know about are all male) would come up with the overall painting scheme and do the primary figures.
But often background figures would be done by apprentices.
The overall painting is attributed to the artist, rather than listing all the apprentices. Admittedly this is often because we don’t know many of those apprentices’ names.
You could say they were “work for hire”. But I doubt that even existed as a thing, since this was before copyright in general, and certainly before copyright in its current form.
A lot of Manga is done that way: primary Artist designs the layout and writes the dialogue, and then it’s handed out to trainees to do most of the grunt work
Instead of Error 403 with a reason, it should be Error 418 with Sydney in the form of a teapot , saying something like “I learned what the last orb do do do du”
AI is able to make soul-less art in great quantities. Some few people are able to make good art with it.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a plugged in expert on the matter, but I’m of the opinion that AI generated images will settle down to the level of “just another tool in an artist’s repertoire” in the same way that photoshop is today. Some people will make good art by interrogating the tool and the process itself, the majority of artists that use it will do things like adding backgrounds or irrelevant details (as described in the author notes above), and relatively few (but entirely too many) people will think that they can get away with using the AI to do everything.
I think AI will end up doing a lot of “corporate art”. You know the paintings in head office that are inoffensive and the prime requirement is to match with the wall colors.
Unfortunately that may be a fair percentage of the income for a lot of artists.
Given how extreme Sydney’s ADHD is, I can only imagine that the only way this will affect her is that she will be very productive and focused for a few hours. Given the fact that ADHD is caused by difference in brain chemistry severe enough that one of the primary prescriptions is literally a form of meth and all that, since it just affects ADHD people THAT differently. (And that’s when it affects them at all)
Sciona’s mouth looks a little off in panels 1 & 4. Seems that when the lips were placed the line from her nose to chin was not adjusted. And did some of Sciona’s chemical mix jump to Ashley in panel 4?
Meant Sydney, not Ashley?
Not, that was just showing Sydney moving her hand away in the nick of time
I have been following, recommending, and generally being a fan of this comic since I think about your 12th page.
If you decide to delegate any portion of it to the Plagarism Machine That Boils The World, shampoo bottles or no, I will stop.
This is a poisoned well for both artistic integrity, and real world harm, and honestly, I am disappointed you’re even considering it. Please don’t. I would rather just, not see the shampoo bottles.
I’d be interested in you explaining how the example of use described by Dave inn his commentary would cause “real world harm”, or be harmful in general.
About thirty seconds worth of research on the ecological impact of generative AI should provide ample evidence of the negative ramifications of this particular tech bubble
DaveB: I know nothing about the market, wherever you live, nor about where it will be by the time it matters, but….
We recently had to make a rather urgent move. Under the circumstances, we had more-or-less resigned that we would need to work with the flippers. What actually happened, however, is that we found out that the local move&fixup market was active. So we put $10k in cosmetics, and sold for about 30% more than we had been hoping for.
Sydney the type of superhero that will say bloody near anything and when she needs to make a plan boom all kinds of random bits of information even stuff she said before shows up like a dart board and she connects them into something that’s improbable but works anyway. They really do need to put her through a couple more training sessions on how to plan. Can’t always rely on the superpowered ADHD brain
I admit, I feel a bit of Sympathy for the Devil on this one. She’s getting caught because she voiced her feelings of deja vu and the person she’s talking to remembers the alternate timeline that caused the feelings more fully than she does. If that happened in a TTRPG and I was playing Sciona I’d be so pissed at my GM.
At the same time, this is a really cool and original way for Sydney to figure this out. And it’s another point that sells her “genre savvy as super power” that we’ve seen two or three times in the series.
I think Frix is the last one to stab her…
@daveB. Re the 403.
If your site is a virtual host on a server hosting other domains you can’t change the 403 page without affecting all of the hosts on the server.
If your site is a stand alone virtual server with its own webserver instance, you can change the error pages from the defaults. That are located within the web server’s directory structure.
However I don’t know if the content of any error redirect can contain scripted elements about the function that caused an error to be Generated. I do know that cloudflare generates a ‘ray id’ onto certain error pages, I just haven’t looked closely on how they accomplish that.
I just want to say thanks for the GREAT comic, i’m on probably my 8th re-read now and it still cracks me up.
Keep up the amazing work and cheers for the laughs.
If you’re afraid of AI ripping your work you can use Nightshade.
It’s a simple tool that makes human invisible changes to the art to make actively harmful to the AI if it is trained on it.
https://github.com/Shawn-Shan/nightshade-release
nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/downloads.html
Even if they detect it all they can do is throw it out of the dataset.
For me, getting 403’d was after three posts, no matter how much time passed between the posts (including the posts that don’t show up straight away)
Well, the genitals have been revealed.
When/who sort of stabbed Sydney? I’m not recalling it…
I don’t have the page but it was the raid where she got killed, and sent back to the ‘respawn’ because of the reality hacker.
It’s only vaguely recalled because it got ret-conned…
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-501-1-down/
And now I want to build a Character Cross Reference page for the archive that uses the tags for the Who’s Who to find any comic with selected characters in it, because archive diving 1328 pages is annoying.
It wasn’t ret-conned, it did happen but then it didn’t because Kronachrome tampered with the time-stream (or something)
In issues 409-507, Sciona stabbed and killed Sydney before the Krona’s reality-hacking power was triggered. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a true time reset. This means that while everyone on the team could return from death, their memories remained intact. Although Sciona was the only one who actually killed Sydney, the checkpoint reset prevented that life from being permanently lost.
It was never revealed if Sci-fright actually killed Sydney or simply stabbed her, with the stabbing-trauma triggering the reset (heck, knowing Sydney at the time, simply showing her the knife could have triggered it)
I’d also point out that the time-retcon in question was established to NOT REALLY be a temporal effect, anyway, so Sciona having vague memories of the stabbing isn’t that surprising. In fact, someone should really check with Pixel, see what she remembers now…
This has a dangerous potential to turn into an idiot plot, and I really hope this comic is above that. I think Sydney is smart enough to know she should go to Maxima immediately with this.
You have a high expectation of Sydney, good for you
That’s probably the best option for her, also b/c her teammates tend to give her the benefit of the doubt and trust her intuitions, and she has little to lose by doing so. At worst they won’t believe her and shall send her to a mandatory therapy session or admonish her against harassing an important member of the US government.
However, Sydney ATM has very flimsy and circumstantial evidence to support her wild claim that a Senatorial aide is Sciona reborn in a super body. For all that Archon knows, Sciona either got killed on Alari Prime by the same mecha-kaiju that attacked Sydney or is still stranded in her Alari body on that dead planet.
Sydney ‘accidentally’ read the aide’s sexting suggesting she might be a super (but could have been sexy RP or bantering), noticed she had something similar to the ‘super bod’ (but she could be a fit and hot woman by mundane means), and heard her claiming she had a vague memory of stabbing Sydney (but could have been a half-remembered dream or fantasy about a well-known celebrity) that resembles an event in a retconned timeline that only Sdyney witnessed and remembers clearly.
To make the claim this is Sciona back on Earth in a wholly different, superpowered body on these clues alone is a big leap of logic and an outlandish claim, even if the tropes of a superhero setting make it factually correct.
https://www.recipetineats.com/samosa-recipe/
This samosa recipe looks like it’d take around 1.25-1.5 hours total.
“The day Sconia stabbed you was the most important day of your life, but to me it was just Tuesday”
She should probably be cognizant of the fact that in general she’s stabbed a lot of people in her time, and it was a more memorable event for them than for her.
She might not have remembered the specifics because of Krona’s save point rewind function.
It was a paraphrased quote of the great General Bison :)
Take care of family business, the comic will keep and we’ll be here for you when you can deal with it again.
Huh. Today’s art definitely is a noticeable and significant shift from the usual. Guest artist?
Nah, Dave just didn’t do as many render passes, on top of doing semi-chibi style, which is somewhat regular for the comic on pages that are dialogue-heavy but relatively non-serious.