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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SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Sciona should still have been careful of what she says. After all, she has fought Sydney before even in the main timeline, and given her general situation, should work hard to avoid raising suspicions.
Then agin, her patience for social stuff has always been limited.
And Sydney has a way of straining one’s patience.
She also has a gift for adding 2 and 2 and getting 5.
Storywise, this meeting had to happen.
@DaveB There appears to be an issue where trying to post a comment returns a 403 error. Has anyone else encountered a similar problem?
Last week it worked fine. Different browsers and devices made no difference.
I have to use a VPN to use post this (I’m from Germany).
I had this problem on Monday.
Was able to make a successful reply, tried to make another and got the 403 error.
I’ve been getting 403 for months, I rarely comment anymore because of it.
Did you try using a VPN? It helped for me.
Same, the only time it allowed me to work is after internet provider resets the ISP (no idea why it does it, or when, but it often has me located in a different part of the country)
I had been for about two weeks and no longer get it anymore. According to DaveB it’s something that the server does when you post too many times within 60 seconds. It puts us (our IP address) on a naughty list for some amount of time.
And yes, if you use a VPN, it lets you post, because that changes the IP address that the server sees. It’s not based on our name or anything like that – just our IP address
For me, it was three posts total, no matter the speed of posting
Butt it seems to be fixated now, let the pun-valance re-commence :P
What really gives her away as an alien is the left-handed handshake.
Maybe she is trying to imply she was in Girl Scouts when she was younger?
Simplest explanation is Sciona is left-handed, or Escorpia was and muscle memory lingers. We left-handers are like 10% of the population and I have lost count long ago of the times I instinctively gave my dominant hand for an handshake, convention be damned.
One of my friends in elementary school broke his right arm. He couldn’t manage to do anything with his left because he’d never tried or trained it.
So I started using my left for almost everything possible.
Now decades later, I automatically reach for things with my left rather than my right.
Just because some of us are left handed does not mean we are aliens! I love Earth and doing Earth things like a normal Earth woman does! I love breathing an atmosphere of 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, 0.25% water vapor, and trace amounts of noble gases such as neon, helium, krypton, and xenon!
I love consuming nourishment through my frontal face hole.
I love being a normal bipedal homo sapien sapiens. Don’t be ridiculous.
That second ‘sapiens’ is seriously on doubt sometimes
I offer my left hand to shake, just to mess with people. But if they reach for my hand with their left, I quickly switch to my right.
Not because I’m left handed. I’m right handed. And also not because I’m a lkdranjian from what you call the Pegasus Galaxy. That would be absurd.
We know her power is not limited to her left hand and can work from her feet, so it’s not just trying to zap Sydney.
It’s probably just because it’s an easy way to show her chemical bliss touch-based power for the reader’s benefit.
Yeah, asking someone if they ever stabbed you isn’t something to bring up casually, much less someone on a Super Team.
Also I like the simpler art style. Honestly points I miss a slightly “toony” style that this series had early on.
Same, my favorite art style for the comic is the original-up to about 2015/early 2016? The new style is amazing, don’t get me wrong- but I liked the older one for sure.
And the simple style seems to fit with Anime Grrl :)
> It’s impossible not to feel like a lifetime of art skills have been rendered meaningless in the last few years
They haven’t. “AI Art” generators are just copying machines that spit out meaningless slop very very fast. Art is not slop.
Don’t fall for the hype, they aren’t worth it.
Usually breaking several copyrights on the way.
This is called “progress”. By some. Mostly billionaires.
The future of AI isn’t to take away jobs. The future belongs to those who use AI to advance their jobs. In addition to actually drawing, Dave’s skill is to create the storyline, dialogue, and concepts. If he can use a new tool to assist his art (example: generate a starter background with store shelves full of soap and cereal; or a background full of parked cars: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1213-vitamin-t-injection/ ) he should do so because it’s just a smarter use of his time. And it would leave more time for things like the character art, or vote incentives, or taking care of his mom.
AI already takes away jobs. Like and absolute shitload of jobs. Largely outside of the art field, but also within it. Been on Amazon lately? Almost every independent author has novel covers done by AI lately, cause why pay and artist $500-$2000 for a painting of a busty elf girl that takes 3 weeks to turn around when you can have and AI do it in job lots in seconds?
Like any new tool introduced to and industry, AI art generation tools will cost a lot of jobs, but will also cause people to pivot how they work. I do guarantee one thing that will happen though, in a single generation, the number of people who have any actual art talent will plummet, because why bother learning the whole painstaking process when you can just tell a prompt to do it for you, and the results are objectively pretty stellar?
Yeah, but still. For your grocery store example, I don’t trust an AI to create something reasonable enough. But one thing I can see a use for is having it take an editing pass over a picture you’ve taken at your local Walmart that makes it fit your purpose and art style. I consider that a way less egregious use of AI than having it generate an entirely new picture. That’s basically a more modern version of things like filters.
There’s a difference between that one and the plagiarative “generative” AI being rightly vilified.
Sadly (or not, depending on your point of view,) technology in general eventually does that. Take it from an ancient programmer who’s old enough to confirm: yes, eventually EVERYONE’S job (or at least some aspect of it) will be made obsolete by new tech, and yes, it WILL impact the skill level of those who come after.
The trade-off, of course, is the creation of new jobs that we never could have even imagined, some of them actually being important, alongside a lack of real NEED for nearly as many people to have those obsoleted skills. After all, other than maybe being a hindrance to those who want to carry on the trade, it’s not like there’s any need to have more than a handful of excellent horseshoe-makers in a country that produces cars. At least not until some civilization-wrecking catastrophe strikes, in which case, no one’s going to be in a good spot anyway.
I was totally unclear, so I’ll clarify. Yes, I agree, AI has and will continue to take away jobs, just like the automobile took away jobs for wagonmakers. What I meant by my statement was that removing jobs is not the purpose of AI.
There is no way that AI can take over full creation of Grrl Power. That universe exists in your head and goes where you want it. Theoretically someone could feed the past 1300+ strips into an AI engine and ask it to draw what happens next, but I guarantee it won’t be as good as what you dream up. It therefore cannot eliminate your job as a content creator (yet). On the other hand, you definitely can use AI to improve your work-life balance by you coming up with the ideas then asking AI to help generate the actual art.
I also agree with you that AI will seriously hurt human development of digital art skills, but you could say the exact same thing about digital art harming physical art skills. How many people develop pen-and-paper comic strips these days when you can just fire up a computer touch screen? That said, AI still can’t create a real-life oil painting to hang in your living room, or create a bronze statue for a park.
Oh, my. OK, for a few of the people working on AI, who are really enthusiastic about, just, getting it to DO stuff because they want to solve the puzzle of getting it to do stuff, the future of AI isn’t INTENDED to take away jobs. For ALL of the money people investing in AI, taking away jobs is the ONLY INTENDED future.
WHY LEARN?
Two reasons:
1) To keep the skill alive. This is kind of like the Amish, they do it that way because they can.
2) For the love of the process. There’s a reason the starving artist is a trope, because you do art because you MUST not because you get paid for it.
It’s the actual knock-off effect of the loss of practitioners I worry about. All of the things we’ll have to rediscover when the AI eventually fails.
Have seen that on a lot of YouTube thumbnails: AI generated art that matches the description of the video, but when you preview the clip, the little child isn’t as young as depicted, or the female soldier isn’t fighting in a skimpy bikini
That last thing is an unforgivable reason and why AI will ultimately fail in the end.
Yeah, specially seeing how the bikini wasn’t around in the Ming Dynasty :P
Kickass female soldiers were
That’s an easy thing to say, but a lot of AI generated pictures are already way WAY better art than anything I’ve ever drawn. Yeah, there are some goofy straps or strands of hair that go nowhere and occasionally the hands or proportions are still weird, but the amount the algorithms have improved in the last year alone makes me certain that it’ll be basically perfect in another few years. Along with tools that let you adjust parts of a generated picture, it’s going to turn into a serious tool, albeit only functional because of terabytes of stolen art, and it’ll become more and more tempting to use.
AI is not different from things like cars, the more things it does will make changes in every walk of life. I’ve attempted to use AI to help me design models for my 3D printer, it was a dismal failure. In art or writing, I can spot an AI creation over a human one easily and so can most people. It’s just off, no simple mistakes, and it has an odd quality. Even CGI in movies, it just feels fake, and easily mistrusted. AI can never replace a human artist, but it can, with intervention, make somethings in life easier, IF you don’t trust it, it’s a powerful tool. IF people use it just as a tool, and NOT trust it to do ALL the work that’s all it is, a tool.
AI is far from things like the the Terminator franchise and I don’t worry about it. a TRUE AI is like a child, it has to learn everything just like a human baby. So if it’s taught right, it’s no more dangerous than a child. And don’t do stupid things like hook it up to the internet or give it control over things like nukes ;) That would be like giving a 2 year old a loaded hand gun.
“AI can never replace a human artist”
Technical tradesmen thought that about their field for decades. $20 says that in just 5 years you’ll be so convinced otherwise that you’ll willingly concede that that statement was wrong.
“IF people use it just as a tool, and NOT trust it to do ALL the work that’s all it is, a tool.”
That’s my real concern. It SHOULD be seen as just a tool. But when bosses are literally asking ChatGPT who they should fire to help their business–and then following through on it–I have to suspect that the moment a super-intelligent-seeming AI comes about that demonstrably helps people improve their lives and that never (to their knowledge) makes mistakes, they’re going to rush to elevate it to godhood.
Well, we’re too far gone, so all hail Skynet!
I, for one, Welcome our new machine overlords!
Even chatGPT can be spotted, the students that use it, or the employees at businesses get in big trouble if they use it. Mainly because it can’t tell between opinion and actual facts. I have ran across AI generated comics and never go back. it’s just lazy to use an AI and pay yourself on the back for the “work”. “AI will ruin peoples jobs” isn’t wrong, but that was said then people started buying cars instead of horses, when robots in car factories started, and so on. As I said it’s a tool and used only as such, There’s people out there that only buy restaurant food, which is basically the same thing, and don’t think about the health risks of that.
I look at that the same way I do the greenies going on about EV cars, what do they think is used to make the power to charge them? I seen a YouTube short where a guy was driving through a Amazon parking lot showing the EV vans they use, then showed where the power was coming from to charge them. It was a semi trailer sized diesel generator! Just because the corp insisted they use them without checking if the power grid could handle the drain. That’s the biggest problem, if we all started to drive them, it will take 10x the infrastructure that is currently available. Some people just don’t think things through.
> what do they think is used to make the power to charge them?
Solar, wind, tidal, nuclear. Or they should be. (Also, economies of scale, and large static generators can have better pollutant scrubbing than the one spitting out toxic gas where people are walking)
Cars are dumb, anyway. We should have proper trains again for most transport needs.
Depends on where you live, in the USA personal transportation is expected and often demanded of anyone wanting a job. The tech for generating the millions of gigawatts of power we’d need to charge the billions of vehicles that might exist, but lets look at that idea of power generation; people whine and complain that nuclear is dangerous and has either stopped the building of new or forced the shut-down of old plants. Solar, even if you covered the planet with panels, it would barely power the USA, much less the world. The same goes for wind, unless someone comes up with a practical way to tap into the global winds that are passed the 100 meter level above the ground.
It all depends on tech we just don’t have yet. Or allowed to have.
Another issue is simply convenience, even Musk’s toys takes hours to charge, and there’s always some “Karen” that unplugs the EV at charging stations. Now my gas car, it takes 5 mins to “recharge” at a station, and can go up to 350 miles on a single “charge”, most EV’s have maybe 200 miles. Not to mention batteries don’t charge well in colder climates or winter.
Again, the tech just isn’t there yet, nor is it going to be in 30 years, much less 4.
Of the four things you mentioned:
1) Solar is a good supplemental power source, but not good as a primary one (I have solar in my house).
2) Wind is awful – it actually uses MORE oil and we don’t have the infrastructure for widespread use of wind anyway. We wouldnt for at least 30 years if we didnt use anything else in the interim. The TV show ‘Landman’ has a really good part in the show where they explain that and the facts stated are… actually facts instead of typical ‘author did not research the subject’ statements. Nothing clean about the windmills used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmbZwxEnAFc
3)Tidal – this is actually very useful but the problem is limited installation sights and it’s a very intermittent power source. Which makes it good as a secondary source of energy but a terrible primary source, and it will not be able to supply the high demand of energy required. Also it has a lot of environmental problems, which defies is the whole point of having green energy. It creates low level noise beneath the surface of the water which negatively impacts marine mammals and the turbines kill a lot of fish and mammals (seals, dolphins, etc), similar to how the wind turbines kill a lot of birds, but magnified a lot moreso.
4) Nuclear – Probably our BEST option. It can provide our massive energy needs, while having zero emissions (just water vapor). Plus it can use our existing infrastructure with very little alteration. In addition, the very few times that nuclear power plants have failed (3 times) have been for reasons that frankly have very little to do with nuclear power itself. Fukushima was from the combination of a VERY powerful (magnitude 9.0) earthquake, followed IMMEDIATELY afterwards by a 15-foot tsunami, which not only disabled the power supply, but also all THREE of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. The odds of something like that happening were astronomically small. The odds of it happening a second time with all those precautions in place are ridiculously minute. Chernobyl failed because the Russians are TERRIBLE at maintaining and managing equipment, even if they’re good at getting stuff built quickly (space station Myr being a good example of that). Chernbobyl had a flawed reactor design, massive operator errors, and no safety features. It’s amazing that it didnt fail a lot sooner. The last one, Three Mile Island, was actually rather well contained upon failure, and was still even used for 20 years following the failure, with minimal environmental concerns afterwards. The MAIN problem with nuclear power are twofold – 1) People have a negative view of it because of nuclear weapons (there’s a weapon proliferation risk), and 2) the half-life of uranium is so long that once the rods are no longer useful for producing energy via steam, it has to be disposed of somehow, and currently that means burying it (nuclear waste risk)
Also totally agree with what Scarsdale said about the convenience factor and effectiveness factor. Especially about cold climates and winter. Wish it weren’t so but that’s just the facts of the current state of technology.
Frankly, I wish they’d start doing more research into geothermal energy as a possible solution to the energy crisis.
Now you lot have the Space Farce, you can start sending it to Planet Musk (or PFKaM, Planet Formerly Known as Mars :P )
Love to tell you this, but their are real live people who can’t tell the difference between ‘opinion’ and ‘actual facts’
Speaking of greenies going on about EV cars, couple weeks back saw a news headline about a guy who wanted to use ammonia in car engines as an alternative source for… didn’t bother reading the fake news to find out
In case you are confused, ammonia is toxic, specially as a gas
AI art lacks the nuance that I see from real artists though, from what I’ve noticed, and is never quite as exact as a real artist makes the artwork look like. Especially if there’s more than one character in the artwork.
> a lot of AI generated pictures are already way WAY better art than anything I’ve ever drawn.
No, it isn’t. Don’t ever let anyone convince you otherwise.
> makes me certain that it’ll be basically perfect in another few years.
It’s not going to be. LLMs can’t get around the “hallucination” problem. It’s a fundamental flaw in their design that no amount of data will solve.
I can almost always tell when artwork is AI generated vs made by a real person. And I usually prefer the real person’s results if we’re talking creative output – it’s more creative, closer to what I want to see, and less ‘uncanny’ if that makes any sense. I get what DaveB is saying though. The technology is progressing fast and I have no idea if eventually I won’t be able to tell anymore.
Happy to see the anime-esque style. I actually did not notice until you pointed it out.
Love seeing more comic =)
Hope the transition for your family goes well!
Changes in technology have affected Art frequently. Something that is as seemingly obvious as perspective took until the Renaissance, and then changed representational art completely (at least in Europe). The camera changed Art from mainly representational to abstract, because cameras did representation just fine (and threw a lot of commercial artists out of work). And some decades back, the famous comics artist Wally Wood set forth his Wood’s Rule of Art:
1. Never draw what you can copy.
2. Never copy what you can trace.
3. Never trace what you can cut out and paste down.
In the next to last frame, that should probably be “fantasize” rather than “fatasize”, but with Sydney, you never know…
I feel like this is the kind of portmanteau Sydney would do.
But also, AI art has a ton of complexity to it that you won’t be aware of, and you’re not gonna get the best results if you aren’t. I’m pretty active in the field, so if you want tips feel free to poke me — you can see my email, right? Maybe? If not, it’s baughn (236112302590394368) on discord.
It’s the least I can do for all these years of great comics. :D
Did Sydney just demonstrate immunity from skin-contact drug-transfer? Could that be what one of her orbs does?
Hands never touched, she got defensive about being called a snoop and crossed her arms.
Which…is probably good on 2 levels – 1, we’ve seen Sydney have EXTREMELY anomalous reactions to drugs, so I don’t think ANYONE wants to see what happens if she’s hit with something as powerful as what Scorpia is packing. Secondly, the level of endorphin/lust rush that drug causes would have been a dog whistle for Dabbler, who would waste power teleporting in to see wtf just happened and can she join in? Followed immediately by a VERY ANGRY succubus trying to murder a blood mage, because no one enslaves her teammates but HER!
Probably on another level we should be glad that we don’t have to see Sydney in re-hab, because that’s always a depressing arc.
Who says that Scorpia can’t do a memory-erasure drug?
When did Dabbles develop teleport tech for anything bigger than can fit into her hand?
Fatasize?
You mean fantasize right?
I wouldn’t mind seeing a chubby Sydney
Let us know if you start using genAI for any piece of the comic so I can stop reading it. No support for the plagiarism machine.
Reality of time loops: consciousness is an independent variable, so…sometimes memories survive resets.
And by ‘reality’ you mean ‘my headcanon of how this fictional thing works’
headcanon: for when your mind reallllly needs to be blown
ADHD: Mind altering stuff HAS NO EFFECT!
Sciona should have offered to give Sydney the phone and tell her to go nuts.
Sciona missed her chance to administer the drug since Sydney got defensive about (rightfully) being called a snoop and withdrew her hand.
Sdyney’s ADHD indirectly played a role since it made her suddenly switch gears from curious-friendly to defensive about Sciona’s remark.
Yes it does, just not the way that’s expected. Sciona could, without meaning to, over-dose Sydney or just kill her. Sydney is not as dumb as everyone believes, she would report to Max or Hiro that she’s feeling weird after contact with her and that would start the whole end of her shot at power. Sciona is like most supervillains, they get cock-sure of their power and ignore the “bad idea” aspect. Besides, Sciona just outed herself, saying something about trying to stab Sydney before.
Cereally, how many who have met Sydney hasn’t considered stabbing her?
If Sciona gets outed, any chance we get another show-down with Super Husk (ch. 507-528)? been awhile since we saw it and i wanna know how its been upgrading itself.
In all likelihood we saw him in #1264-1269. He evolved in a fully sapient and independent supervillain with his own operation. His master plan apparently includes terrorizing and extorting all the OC gangs of the West Coast (as discussed by Max and Anvil in #1273). It seems unlikely he would come to the rescue of his creator if she is outed, unless he still feels a loyalty or protective bond for Sciona.
My enthusiasm about this arc just sank, since the plot went just the way I really did not want to. All the good parts about Sciona’s current arc (her hard work at rebuilding her power base and developing a new take-over-the-world plot, her messing with the dungeon project, her humanization character development, her romance subplot, heck even the chance of befriending an enemy) suddenly got seriously imperiled and quite possibly derailed by premature disclosure of her identity to a core member of Archon, through a bout of terrible bad luck and almost the worst possible slip of the tongue. And for what narrative gain? Rewarding Sydney for being her insufferable worst and allowing her to save the day once more through no real merit of her own? I undwrstand she is the MC, but she did not really need or deserve this.
Really bad choice of words, Sciona. I understand you were exasperated and confused by temporal shenanigans, and the urge to harm Sydney when she is like this, but you should have mentioned any other way of doing it. Like strangling, or punching, or anything else really. Oh well, no good crying over split milk.
Not doomed yet, there’s a big difference between Sydney having a feeling and actually revealing Sciona. being a super obviously isn’t illegal, and we have no idea how difficult detecting an Alari blood mage in an intact body might be, plus accusing a congressional aide could get tricky fast.
Also, this is Sydney, she might try THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP!!! before actually trying to expose Sciona.
We can only hope.
I’d argue that given the comic was never intended to be that deep, this turn of events pretty much should have been expected. At the very least, it’s not at all out of place.
(“Mostly it’s about the girls. Doing the things that super powered girls do. Fighting crime, saving the world, dating, shopping, etc. There’ll be explosions, cheesecake, beefcake, heroes and villains, angels and demons, cyborgs, probably ninjas.”)
I know, but it is a real pity and waste if Sciona’s character arc gets wrecked by Sydney outing her. The former was really good stuff that gets rarely explored in the genre. On the other hand, we already got doses to last a lifetime of Sydney-centered comedy filler and the MC being the oh-so-special heroine that saves the day again and again with adamantium-level plot armor and Mary Sue luck.
Sciona is a superpowered gal too, and a really interesting supervillain character, esp. in her current version. It is a real pity if she loses everything before her arc is not even halfway to fulfillment (we do not even know what she meant to do with the dungeon) and is forced to revert to her fugitive default, or worse captured and made a source of comedy filler like Lapha, in order to make Sydney even more special.
Don’t fall for the ai bait friend. Your an artistic person. Dont take the easy theft way out. Your abive that
Dave – some wisdom about moving that I picked up somewhere in life:
2 moves is equal to 1 fire.
The upside to the moving you’re about to get overwhelmed with is that it clears out a lot of the deadwood we all accumulate in houses.
Auction houses that do estate sales will often come pick up your excess stuff if you are downsizing very much. They won’t carry off the garbage but they will sell off the stuff that won’t fit in you new home. It’s gone and you may even get a bit of cash. My wife and I lived in a large Victorian two story house and it is amazing the stuff that collects over twenty years. It’s also easier than a garage sale.
The Puerco Pibil by Robert Rodriguez video is, by far, the best cooking video I’ve ever watched. Now I need to figure out where to source some banana leaves. And I didn’t realize it, but I’ve been following his advice on cooking. I don’t have an extensive repertoire of fancy recipes ready to prepare at a moment’s notice, and generally prefer simpler meals on the healthy side. But the nicer recipes I know have been honed to an art.
O.M.G.
I just checked out the MST3K link. Dave, you’ve doomed me. DOOMED ME, I say.
Sydney needs her own Vadinho to learn how to use her powers.
Whooo!! I’m not going to argue that move! Over the last 10 years I’ve had multiple such issues and none of them were either easy nor fun.
As for the story, now’s a good time to use episodic shorts or even ‘filler’ to save time for the heavy work ahead of you, then return to your real storyline once things settle down again.
I think Syd just felt her heart sink into her shoes. The greatest problem is she’s got *no* evidence she can use with anyone else. The entire team would trust her instincts,but that can’t be used to arrest Sciona, because as a human she hasn’t done anything that can be proven.
She doesn’t need evidence. She just needs attention.
All she needs to say is “Hey, something about that woman was really weird, but I can’t put my finger on it, and investigating unknown supers who have access to US Senators is in our job description, right?”
And then Arc-Intelligence can say “Sure, we’ve got nothing better to do, we’ll run some background checks, get a few ‘special’ scanners close to her, have someone follow her around for a day. Nothing illegal of course, but Maybe something will pop. It’s good training.”
and once they do it, it only takes one more alarming fact to be found in order for them to prioritize this, and then one more alarming fact for them to start escalating the investigation…
Sciona’s OPSEC isn’t THAT good. She’s made too many friends, too many enemies, and moved in too many important circles for her OPSEC to be ‘good’ once people start asking the right questions.
I don’t think Sydney’s ADHD brain would allow her to be THAT subtle about it…
Escorpia was a criminal before Sciona took over. That alone can raise some interest from investigators.
In all evidence, Sciona already managed to bury or obfuscate Escorpia’s background well enough to pass the background checks to get her job in the first place. They can check again, but chances are what worked once would work again.
When the first check was done there was no suspicion on her. And it was done by a different agency. Different procedures. What worked for one agency with a default check might not work for a different agency with an extraordinary check.
Maybe, maybe not, and I am leaning on Archon not being able to out her this way. If you ask my opinion, Sciona has relatively little to fear about her tie to Escorpia and her ability to pass background checks because those would have been among the most predictable tasks for her about setting up her new identity. She is far from incompetent or lacking resources, so I expect her to have been thorough in burying/obfuscating her ties to Escorpia and setting a fairly foolproof cover.
At this point, Sciona’s best hope to salvage everything she built for herself in her new life is her ability and willingness to lay low for a while and stick to what can be justified with her cover identity.
Do her aide job, do nothing about the dungeon project that cannot be explained as Congressional oversight and mundane lobbying, do not mention her background in any form to anyone and tell her associates to do the same (yes I know there is a contradiction here but she can only do her best and hope for the best), stop any effort to give hosts to any Alari ghost in her faction still remaining if they exist (if there aren’t any left it is a big help), do not hang around with the same, date 6xguy and do lots of porn and romcom good stuff with him.
Pretend she is a naturally sexy and fit hot young woman that got a Hollywood bombshell bod thanks to good genes, the right lifestyle, and some serious effort. Alternatively, pretend to accept the idea she might be a closet super that was unaware of her status so far and has no superhuman ability she knows of, but likely a lame superpower. Hope nothing damning gets revealed if she is made to touch Varia.
Apart from this, she can only hope her enemies do not have any means of detecting her status of an Alari bloodmage soul in a super body if she does not use her powers. I guess it helps a lot that her soul/body situation is much more akin to reincarnation than classic possession.
Sciona doesn’t do subtle and views everyone around her as disposable idiot tools. Sidney is the 3rd person to catch on only if we discount the people in the bar who though she was a serial killer.
Odds are very good she’s been less clever than she thinks about hiding her past.
That might well be the case since in all evidence her learning a more nuanced M.O. is a work in progress. However, she is already good enough to keep a professional cover as an aide to a prominent US Senator.
Her hookup style is no doubt unconventional, esp. in the light of gender stereotypes. However, 6xguy’s friend was way overreacting and factually wrong by assuming Sciona at the time was a serial killer on the prowl instead of a liberated woman with an itch to scratch and looking for a quick and easy hookup in a singles bar who knows what she wants and has no time for dating mind games and standard procedures.
I fail to get your head count of people who realized Sciona’s identity on their own. Deus is obviously #1, and now we have Sydney as #2, but #3? 6xguy does not count, Sciona outed herself to him. His friend does not count, she accidentally guessed something close to the truth for the wrong reasons and in the wrong situation.
Does the senator’s daughter count?
Nope. Sciona showed the truth to her in the successful attempt to make her a willing accomplice of hers.
RE: Friend in the bar
That she was able to guess says Scion’s mistakes are more than Dave can put in the comic. She picked up on non-human body language, general behavior, and other subtle clues. For that matter Deus was able to do the same.
RE: Outed
Sciona telling her lover counts as “outed”. She knows he’s an idiot and could accidently talk about her. Because of him she just managed to out herself again with Sid.
She’s being massively loose with her security. After Deus guessed she should have dropped the entire identity and made sure to never be in the same room as him.
We have a lot of evidence that she isn’t good at maintaining a cover and needs to be able to kill whoever guesses. That’s a problem if she’s interacting with supers and high level politicians.
She spent decades in a half-orc body hiding from everyone in some hole in the ground. That’s not great practice for hiding in plain sight.
I don’t think you are really being fair to her.
She does in fact do subtle, and has shown it, both by remaining hidden from all of her enemies the first go around, until her plan forced her to go public, and by how she manipulated them even after they figured it was her, and how she planned things such that even her failures worked in her favour.
As for “views everyone around her as disposable idiot tools”… not really. That sentiment seems to only extend to about 70-80% of non-Alari. She was willing to sacrifice her body, which she fought extremely hard to get back, to aid a mass of Alari soul of which I assume she only knew a portion. She also likely didn’t plan to betray more than half of her underwater heist team, until Deus pissed her off(anger management and perspective, now those I’d argue she may be lacking). Her attitude via disposability also seems to differentiate “I’m forced to work with this person” and “I chose to be around this person”, with the former creating inherent animosity.
Scion is smart and talented. She’s also brutal, ruthless, arrogant, and doesn’t value trust or loyalty. Hiding in a hole wearing a half orc body isn’t “subtle”, nor is reflexively engaging in murder and/or mass murder. When she wanted to disable an alarm she engaged in mass terrorist attacks. When she wanted to reach for that magic knife she put her hand through one of her minions. When she wanted Deus’ help she stormed his office.
Nothing in that description or history is “subtle” and a lot of it was unforced.
…Except she wasn’t just “hiding”. You’re way underselling what she achieved.
She, got a collective to believe she was dead for a long enough that they assumed her dead, while amassing power, planning a heist, recruiting allies, building others, capturing and draining supers and magical creatures and contacting her home-world… all without raising suspicion. She even took knowledge of the capacities of the council to create a small hit-squad that managed to get passed council safeguards unnoticed until Sydney spotted them sheer luck. Yes, they’d been loud to the people in the room, briefly, but beyond them, they could’ve gone unnoticed, possibly killing enough players that they would’ve failed to associate her. (she also, despite her shape, took out Pixel quickly and quietly enough that Pixel couldn’t warn anyone and no one heard– despite Pixels apparent enhanced hearing, though we don’t know what actually went down there) Subtle definition 1: “not loud, bright, noticeable, or obvious in any way”.
Further, she convinced people to take actions that furthered her true goal, with loud misdirects, layered in false goals. She’s trying to reveal us, oh wait, she’s convened us to kill us, oh no, actually she’s after the vault(but going there is a trap),*apparently* to reform herself, but also secretly to obtain a tool specific for creating a portal to her people! She successfully subverted defences repeatedly, turning them to her advantage. A lot of her failures came down to dumb luck and a handful of people stronger than her targets suddenly amassing. Subtle definition 2: “making use of clever and indirect methods to achieve something”
Was she always both, or either of those things? No, but it’s quite the hyperbole to accuse her of not doing subtle.
Also “unforced”… you took all the context away to use that word as an accusation. I said “*her plan* forced her to go public”, as in, being loud and/or outing herself was required to further her plan by design.
Oh wow, I left an excessive amount of typos and/or cut text in this.(That’ll teach me to use mobile)
That’s supposed to be: “got a collective to believe she was for a gone enough that they assumed her dead/a non-factor until someone with her skillset showed up”; “past”; “beyond that, they could’ve gone unnoticed out side the room,”; “Pixel’s”
Is the yellow orb glowing in the last panel or is it just a coincidence that one of the “glow points” in the background is behind the “intelligence gathering” orb?
I wish I was on time to be one of the first commetors today.
True! The yellow orb looks especially glowy!
Oooh, a reveal of a new orb ability? It’s been too long!
Please, *please* don’t use AI. I don’t know how much of your audience I speak for here, but I for one would rather see more persistently simplified art than have to stop reading because one of my favorite authors started using the Plagiarism Machine to fill in his backgrounds.
What’s the difference between using AI and ‘stock photos’? Or any other pre-made art that was being used well before AI started being so prolific?
The fact she has to specify recently makes me wonder what else Dave has yet to show us..
My reaction too: “recently”? How many times have people attempted to stab you, Sidney? :P
Probably a typo, but an interesting one…I’d be curious on what this would spurt out:
“make grocery store soap and cereal big boobs”, emphasis on the last words…
So, is Sciona more a Arc Dark or Arc Light case?
if she reports on them, she can be an Arc Narc
We just spent the last year adding ~1000sqft to our house so my in-laws could move in. My FiL has Alzheimers, so we wanted them closer than they were. They’ve been with us since just before Thanksgiving now. We sold their house to pay for it. It’s working out well, but we’re continually learning new things. I wish you all the best.
Well, THAT was an incredibly stupid thing to say.
Let’s see AI draw Jesus flipping over tables at the temple.
Between refreshing did Sciona just become more ethnic?
Yes, Latin American by way of the body she is now possessing
You should make shepard’s pie! It’s easy, delicious, and nutritious. Does take about an hour to cook though.
Add mashed potato and you get cottage pie :)
Uh, wow. So much unfiltered rudeness in a single page.
Lmao. I really hope Sydney calms down before she tries to explain this to anyone because it is gonna be REALLY unconvincing.
Sydney: “Max! Sciona’s back and she’s a super!”
Max: “WHAT?”
Sydney: “Yeah! I saw her texting to a guy that she was a super and then when I asked she said she was and then she sort of had a memory of stabbing me! Sciona’s the only one who sort of stabbed me! It has to be her!”
Max: “… So you are saying you saw a woman texting a guy and saying she was a super. Then you asked her if she was a super and she said yes. Then she said she wanted to stab you. So she’s Sciona.”
I know Max would really try to give her the benefit of the doubt and then some, but she is really the worst person to try to convince people of things on a normal day. And this is gonna be a tough sell without proof. Queue the shenanigans from failed “proof-getting”.
To be accurate, Sciona did not even confirm she is a super. She just failed to deny Sydney’s accusation, but that could be easily explained as her being distracted by being pissed off at Sydney’s snooping. Pretending she was just roleplaying or exaggerating in her sexting with her lover is still plausible deniability. Alternatively, she can pretend she is a closet super that just recently got around to assume her true nature because of her body, but she has no power she knows of (and likely a lame one).
This is good comedy. Allow me to extend the scene:
Harem/Dabbler (*): “Sdyney, don’t take this the wrong way, we love you to pieces, but almost everyone that knows you has felt the urge to do you bodily harm at some point. What did you do to that woman?”
Sdyney: “Well, I sort of accidentally looked over her shoulder (don’t ask!) and read her sexting with a guy. They were talking about her being a super, or maybe having a super body. It made so much sense, since she had that kind of great body you guys have. I called her out on that friendly-like and she got all angry and defensive about me snooping. As if. Then she said she sort of had a memory or fantasy of stabbing me. How rude. I parted ways, then I remembered Sciona was the only one that actually stabbed me in that timeline Krona resetted. She has to be her, back and remembering me even if she looks entirely different… (Insert long-winded stream-of-thought tirade about temporal shenanigans).
Archon People: “…”
(*) Max is likely too straight-laced to say this.
Speaking as a boob-haver, those absolutely aren’t c-cups. DD at the smallest. Though perhaps Sydney isn’t the best at estimating.
Speaking as a fan of well-endowed women, I absolutely agree with you. Sydney is a well-known bearer of A-cup angst that hangs around with super gals and succubi all the time. Quite possibly envy and warped standards distort her estimates.
In Sydney’s defence, she did say C or greater, and double D would fit that description…
Sciona’s original updated Alari body literally took the effort to make her breasts bigger, so more or less than her new body though?
I’d say roughly the same after the magical boob-job and more so after Sciona temporarily gave herself superpowers with blood magic. Maybe Escorpia’s ones were slightly bigger, but it is difficult to tell, given differences in art, position, etc. Only the author could say for sure.
If you do start using AI to help with tedious background work, make sure you can get it to copy your style and look closely to make sure there aren’t major AI fuckups. If a tool will help you do your job without impacting the quality too much, you should take advantage of it (assuming it’s ethical). Blurring the background a bit or adding foreground objects/speech bubbles in key areas can cover up issues.
If you figure out how to train a model using your art style, you can make it match better while simultaneously removing the ethical problems of art theft. You might also be able to use it to convert an open source reference image into your style. I think this would be the most ethical future use of AI-art, outsourcing your busy-work to a model trained off of assets you own.
Do we know the art is Syd coming to a realization? Or is that the chemicals affecting her, or being caught by something in the orbs?
E-Sci never actually got to touch Sydney
If backgrounds are a problem, you could always take a page out of Shive’s book and use SketchUp to create pre-made backgrounds for you. Granted, having the time to do so would be a factor, especially with what you have going on right now. ^^;
I don’t know how Sydney would call attention to Sciona without managing to also call attention to her non-spec specs. Unless, as someone suggests, she just tips off ARCLIGHT and they do the rest. *shrug*
A bigger issue might be passing on her realization without outing Krona.
Krona’s role is not an issue. She admitted her doings and was thoroughly grilled by Arc-Light in the aftermath of the event to ensure her powers did not threaten the stability of the universe.
Costco sells frozen Samosas….just sayin’
DAVEB — I think we can make you a custom 403 page, but we’d need to know about more about your server choices to help you get it into place.
If you have an actual WebMaster they should be able to do it.
WebMastery has been largely killed by WIX and other “WYSIWYG” designers, kinda like AI is going to do to artists.
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just waiting for a minute or two so I don’t trip the 403 with my 403 comment. because while I appreciate a good ironic twist, I also want to make sure you see this, and I will forget if I don’t post it now.
When most people in comics get have a realization, a shining light bulb appears above there head; with Sydney, we get a lightning storm. I wonder who she’s going to tell first.