Grrl Power #1330 – Order of order operations
Sciona panicked just a little there. She’s in a really good position and doesn’t want to have to disappear and rebuild another power base. As a professional antagonist, that’s the usual pattern. Build up a power base with some questionable yet never fully explained economics, get into a disagreement with local authorities, make some headway in a takeover bid for actual political power, then some young buck hero comes along and smashes it all, rinse and repeat, since the heroes are okay with gunning down 7,000 storm or shock troopers, but when they get a chance to finish of the main bad guy, they give some superlatively incongruous speech about how “that would make me as bad as you,” as if they didn’t already have a million gallons of blood on their hands. But it’s okay. They were faceless goons.
Speaking of the economics of bad guys… Where did the First Order get their funding? Like, the Empire was smashed, and sure, maybe a few Star Destroyers got away and rendezvoused somewhere – I’m not sure if The Remnant forces are canon anymore with the new movies, but then they convert a planet into a multi barreled Death Star and then show up with a 40 KM long flying wing Star Destroyer, and… well, we can just forget the third one. The new movies weren’t all that well written. I mean, in the second one, the rebels put out a call for help and no one shows up, and in the third movie, they put out a call for help and the whole galaxy shows up. To mention but one of many problems with those films. Like… okay? Did the use Space AM Radio the first time and Lando’s “Moustaches are Cool” podcast the second time? And another thing – did the New Republic or whatever they were called have no navy whatsoever? The First Order blows up a few planets with their Starkiller Base and, like, what? The entire NR navy was in orbit for some reason at the time? That would be incredibly stupid, but the next movie the remnant of the NR, i.e. the Rebels are down to like 5 ships? The Star Wars-verse has tens of thousands of systems. In the 30 years since the Empire fell, the NR couldn’t muster up a police/peacekeeping navy remotely the same size as the Empire managed in the same timespan since Palpatine took over? Those movies just get dumber the more I think about them.
Anyway, that’s not my point. I always wonder when the bad guys show up with a massive army of goons, all with matching uniforms and usually a bunch of high-tech gear, I can’t help wonder about the economics behind it all. How much did it cost to build the volcano lair with the retractable fake lake on top and the orbital vehicle that can swallow up other space modules? Couldn’t all that money just be used to bribe a bunch of politicians to achieve those goals?
Yes, I KNOW. It’s so the movie can happen. Or at least so the movie can be interesting. Watching a guy hand an envelope of money to a guy to get him to vote for Parliamentary Order 3281/b. It would be a bit of a slog to get through. Not that it couldn’t be done interestingly I suppose. But it’d be a harder sell than showing Sean Connery swinging a crane hook into a guy’s crotch, then the guy swings screaming off the catwalk and into garbage compactor and then Bond quips “I guesh he had Prinsh Albert in a Can.” as his feathered-haired companion in a silver onsie with flared bell bottoms looks on in horror.
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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I think DaveB had a Sydney moment in the newspost…
I th8nk it’s Sydney who has a dave moment lol
“That’s on me.”
She’s really mellowed, hasn’t she?
Sydney really needs some propper training in this field. She really should have given some of her colleagues a heads up if she was going to do something like this.
Sidney is indeed, very very bad at this. Of course, she didn’t KNOW what superpowered BS was about to slap her in the face…. Kinda the risk of a superpower fight, the first hit is always going to be a free surprise attack.
If you don’t know what a cape can do, you have to assume they can beat you.
The ruthless thing to do now would be tell these three to go sneak off together and get drunk. On the other hand, Sidney couldn’t sneak a look Sciona’s cleavage phone without getting caught, so odds of her getting a drunk dinosaur out of a construction site are slim.
So on the NR not having a central navy; Apparently lore wise that was a deliberate choice, to avoid the potential repeat of the founding moments of the Empire. But they let each planet/cluster/whatever build their own navies for use as they saw fit…
Which will, obviously, not cause any problems down the line whatsoever. No Sir!
So they went for a feudal lord system of ruling… no way that wouldn’t backfire…
Remember the Old Republic apparently…didn’t have a military either…until the clones and then ‘oh hey we have an army now’.
Not that that makes it any better, just saying it’s *consistent* stupidity at least.
I think whoever was writing this had heard something of the organization of the USA when they were founded and came up with a cross between that and a feudal organization. With some Rome stuff mixed in that they got from Gladiator I guess.
When you have independent planets or systems banding together for defense, they would likely want to keep their militaries, since giving them up also means giving up a lot of power. Having a (very small) national army organization which can federalize system units under certain circumstances can work if there’s not too much threat of invasion.
It does have its problems:
– That US system predates mechanized warfare and its enormous logistics demands. Standardized ammunition, etc. Fifty state armies, each with their own standard rifle?
– It doesn’t really provide for a Navy (long range offensive spaceships in the Star Wars universe). Again, huge capital and logistics demands, which might be doable by a rich system but not otherwise. You can issue letters of marque as long as capturing ships can be done and can pay via selling cargo and ship, but not otherwise.
Which is why the system fell apart and the US instituted a national navy more or less right away.
– If they don’t train regularly together, there’s potential for much confusion. Which is why e.g. NATO has regular multinational exercises.
For all the bad writing, I don’t have a problem with the source of the First Order’s funding. At the scale of the Empire, diverting those sorts of funds wouldn’t have been impossible and they had some 30 years to get things moving again (bear in mind, it was 19 years between the Duel on Mustafar and the Battle of Yavin). Also, the planet that would host Starkiller had its equatorial trench mined out during the days of the Empire and the primary challenge with the first Death Star was the forging of giant kyber crystals from smaller ones.
In short, them rocking up with a new, bigger Death Star rip off isn’t the worst stretching of the lore in that awful sequel.
The sequel trilogy was an object lesson on why your high stakes trilogy has to be written, ahead of time, by the same writing team. Even if the directors may differ between movies.
The first one had only one job and that was to renew interest in the franchise with a new generation of 10 to 15 year olds. It was quite succesful at that, and the fact that they largely copied the story from the original is a big part of the reason for that. Unfortunately, because the director loves them, the actual story was restructured as a puzzle box. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it requires that what is inside the box must be at least as interesting as the hype of trying to open it makes it appear.
So, the second movie got saddled with the job of explaining the puzzle box and to make its contents (luke skywalker and the reason for his disappearance) compelling. Because this director likes them, we got a story with parallel plot lines and different shadings of the same central theme, in a story that borrowed critical plot lines from the third original movie. Overall the 2nd movie was competently made (it had its problems of course) and did a decent job of setting up for the final movie. (with a humbled jedi, an empowered and suitable crazed sith, a rebellion that was at rock bottom and chased by the empire, sorry, first order).
But the third director did not like the premise he was starting with and instead decided to wipe the slate clean. Cramming three movies worth of story into one, and we got what is basically a McGuffin chase with an over the top charge of the cavalry tacked on at the end. Visually the third movie was exceedingly spectacular and in many place beautiful. Plotwise it was best not to think about it. Not ‘not too much’ but ‘at all’. It was a spectacular romp that did well with its target audience. Everybody else, not so much.
(and let’s stay well clear of the youtube outrage merchants and the alt-right inspired hatred of everything that is not exactly as their nostalgia makes them think it used to be. There is enough fault to find from objective analysis with these movies that we do not have to get involved with the ‘disney dooms starwars’ and ‘everything is woke now’ crowds).
At least Ian McDarmid did a good job as Palpatine again.
There is also what I call “The Space Opera Problem”. In real life dying from carbon monoxide poisoning from a broken water heater is just as tragic and dramatic as dying at the hands of a crazed killer. Books and movies feel they have to keep ramping things up to keep the reader interested.
Forging a new republic from the remains of an overthrown empire would be good drama, but it would not be bigger drama and bigger drama is what space opera demands. So over the course of six books or movies you get heroes go from just trying to make it through exams at the academy to some ruthless enemy throwing worlds at them with the power of their mind.
Well written, except the first director was also the third director (J.J. Abrams). I agree all three were visually stunning, and there were lots of good scenes and some good story telling. I actually enjoyed the first watch of the first movie because of that. But when I watched again, I kept finding soooo many logic, continuity, and laws-of-physics violations that took me out of the story. There were so many glaring problems in the second movie I didn’t even enjoy it on the first watch. I only watched the last one to finish off the saga. It was at least better than the second one.
I unironically fully enjoyed the prequel trilogy, and of course enjoyed the originals. I actually watched V (ESB) and VI (RotJ) in a drive-in theater (yes, I’m that old) when they first came out. But the sequels were just… no.
Personally only problem had with the Unmentionable Trilogy was relegating almost all of the lore that was written in the years between the original and the prequel trilogies
Any one of those could have made for a better movie (the whole ‘Rogue Squadron’ series with Insane Icearse burying a SSD, upside down, on Coroscant; or Han’s and Leia’s real kids, Jaina, Jacen and… forgot the youngest {cereally, why would either of them name their kid after some old fart Han didn’t like and Leia never even met?}), heck, they could have even had the re-clones with Luuke
About the only thing they kept canon (cannon?) was that Chis dude
Scale is right. If memory serves, the Empire hid Death Star 2 in the budget and then the Emperor told the rebels deliberately. So their actual spending is so vast that this is somewhat reasonable.
Already been established the orbs have some ability to ‘back-up’ Sydney’s mind somehow… so this won’t be a long term condition…
when?
When was this established? If you are referring to how she remembers being stabbed, that was part of Krona’s ‘save point’ spell, not anything specific to Sydney or her orbs.
More importantly, unbeknownst to Sciona, Sydney’s glasses have a real time offsite data recording function. Sydney’s brain might be rebooting right now, but Cora is definitely going to know about all of this.
Only if she or Xuriel reviews Sidney’s data.
Which will certainly happen if Sydney is discovered to be high on duty.
And how would they be able to tell the difference between Syd being high and her normal baseline zaniness?
There is a difference between being an ADHD spazz and being completely high out of your mind.
Also, Sciona told Sidney to forget, not the other two. When they come to their sense, they will be like:
Sidney:”uh, ho, what was I saying? I can’t remember”
Katrinia: “something about Sciona and the governor’s aide, I am not sure. I feel like the first time I tried weed in college, only more so”
My understanding is that the New Republic had declared eternal piece and scrapped all their warships because no bad things could possibly happen ever again and the rebels were antifascist extremists who kept calling the peaceful Imperial Remnant Nazis…
Ye calling the people who blew up a solar system “peaceful imperial remnant” and the people fighting against them antifascist extremists?
I’ve had games and days that went like that. Do something in the wrong order and them realized shit that wa wrong order
For the first order cash in star wars , we could refers to historical inspiration the NAZI..
The nazi after WWII they had stockpiles of cash and gold in Switzerland – I’m a bloody dictator and I will to hide the fruit of my plunder – at least 1.7 billion Swiss francs worth of gold was deposited by Germany into the vaults of the Swiss National Bank in Bern.
And during Juan Domingo Perón period in Argentina 1946-1974 Argentina was a nazi reserve …
About 12 000 Nazi where in argentina in 1950’s – Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann where on the list-…
Some nazi like Wernher von “V2” Braun ( membership number 5,738,692; 1937) are in charge in US in the 60’s ..
Vergeltungswaffe 2 produced in slave labor then Saturn V.
The funding of the first order is at my advice not the most implausible thing in the new star wars canon. But perhaps I’m a cynical European.
I guess I’m dense as I think I misread the comic. I took Sydney’s comments in panels 5-7 as trying to cover up her recognizing Sciona. However, I am beginning to suspect that Sciona’s slap is meant to depict a mind wipe and Sydney now truly no longer recognizes Sciona. A little help here – which is it?
I’m thinking she’s trying to keep it together and at the same time tries to deceive Sciona.
The latter. Sydney and the others have been dosed with Sciona’s biochem attack. Now, what’s unclear is how long the effects last if not renewed regularly; it’s possible Sydney might recover after awhile.
The slap was Sciona giving a superpowered chemical high (though not full strength or they’d be more… orgasmic…) to the group. She then told Sydney to forget what she knew about her. How well that works om a very stimulated ADHD brain is yet to be seen, but for now, Sydney forgot. I’m hoping once the high wears off, it’ll come back to her, or that at least it’ll jog her memory the next time she sees her.
In the second panel you can see Sciona with those red sparkles in her hand.
She tried to use them on Sydney when she met La Scorpia a few pages ago.
Well she got Sydney this time, only it’s made them all high as kites.
I’m getting that Sciona can alter the bio-chem functions. For the original two uses we saw (when she first discovers the power, then with the senator) it’s an orgasmic-level ultra high. Once addicted the recipients act just like any other junkie willing to do anything (such as vote for a specific bill) to get the next high.
In this panel it’s doing something completely different, like a hypnosis. And while she’s looking at Sydney, all three of them heard the “Forget what you know about me” command.
Yes, loot THEN burn. Not just good advise for raiders.
I’m sure that didn’t affect her and she’s playing along like the dork she is
For that she would need to know she was drugged and what effect that drug has on her. Until a moment before she just knew she was slapped.
She certainly noticed she was suddenly high, so at least that part affected her. When Sciona told her to forget about her, I could see Sydney’s ADHD brain figuring out that her being high wasn’t a coincidence and Sciona was trying to use it to brainwash her. I could easily see her going along with it (just look at that grin), just like she did with the truth serum way back when (purposefully rambling to buy time for Cora to show up).
That said, I suspect she’s being sincere here, and no longer realizes what’s going on. The question will be if the “reprogramming” actually sticks once the high wears off. Or if it will ultimately matter – others have noted the possibility of the glasses recording and/or broadcasting (probably more likely narrowcasting, honestly) what she sees elsewhere, plus they aren’t the only ones here (Anvil was seen transporting some steel beams last page, and she probably heard the ones Slam headbutted and caused to clatter down, so it’s possible she noticed them scampering off with Sciona following them) so someone else may intervene and make it a moot point.
Please. If any Bond Girl is gonna have a silver bell-bottom onesie, it’s a Roger Moore Bond Girl. Moore *could* pull of a smarmy, slightly sexy “Prince Albert in a can” line, but he’d be better off going straight to the pre-fade-to-black innuendo line for the Girl.
As I reflect on it, that was a serious mistake on Sciona’s part, which is going to blow up in her face.
Sydney knew she was Sciona. So, when ordered to forget everything she knew about her, she forgot everything she knew about Sciona.
The moment Sciona comes up in a conversation at work, and Sydney is all, “Who’s Sciona?” it’s going to be defcon 2.
Granted, it’s a time bomb, and if Sciona realizes this she has time to make even more ill considered choices, but the bomb IS ticking now, all Sciona can really do at this point is escalate.
The day Sidney realizes she should share suspicions like these with her supervisor, rather than go off on an afterschool special stakeout, she will have truly started “thinking three steps ahead”.
Pssst… DaveB, I don’t know how to tell you this, but…. <..>
ALL the Star Wars movies were badly written.
The original trilogy just benefits from a mix of nostalgia, a lack of lore (making it easier to have fewer contradictions of same), and low expectations (it was originally expected to be little more than a Buck Rogers rip-off, so the bar for success was incredibly low).
This didn’t make them not-fun, and both the prequels and the sequels have an easier time passing when watched by kids (like most of the folks who really hate them were when the origtrig came out).
The prequels lacked Lawrence Kasdan and suffered because of it.
I disagree but how would the originally trilogy benefit from nostalgia? It was the first trilogy, nothing was behind it to hype it upm
Did you mean ALL 3 SW trilogies or just the 3 movies from the sequel trilogy?
I believe they mean that those of us old enough to remember the OT have hyped them due to our nostalgia. Kinda like people who had decent childhoods tend to believe “times were better” when they were kids. Not because times were actually better (they really weren’t), but because they were kids and didn’t have to deal with adult problems such as bills and politics.
The original trilogy was a good romp. ‘Empire’ had the bad writing of paranoia affect it, trying to hide the big reveal – at the expense of making Kenobi a liar. ‘Return’ was the assault of the killer marketing, but was not that bad as a 3rd movie.
The prequel trilogy had terrible dialogue, but the actors in ‘Clones’ & “Revenge’ did well to sell the frothy plot.
Movie 7 was written fairly well, overall. Movie 8 was a sh!tshow, but could STILL be salvaged by about 20 minutes of edits & a few reshoots. It would have worked and been killer if they had let Rey fall to the Dark Side as they kill Snokes. Have THAT as the end tease with Rey/Kylo as a power couple in control!
Then with Movie 9 – sure have Palpy come back & have Kylo realize that he loves Rey – and that be motivation enough to redeem her/end Palpatine.
The only part Kenobi was liar about was who killed Little Orphan Annie (it wouldn’t have gone over too well to say that he was the one who cut him in half and pushed him into lava and left him to die, now would it?)
As for it being a Buck Rogers rip-off, no, it was inspired by a little-known Japanese movie called “The Hidden Fortress” (complete with Artoo and Threepeio)
Just to be clear: there is a vast difference between a ‘rip-off’ and an ‘inspiration’ (“Kill Bill” was a rip-off of another Japanese movie called “Lady Snowblood”, complete with it being in two parts)
Movie 7 was actually a very bad plagiarism of A New Hope. But without a lot of the logical backstory and consistent follow-up that A New Hope had.
Movies 8 and 9 were just awful. A lot of which was because neither of the directors had any agreement about the overarching storyline, and they seemed to be trying to just screw over each other instead to cutting all hanging plot threads and nonsensical misuse of characters and stupid actions taken (killing off Snoke, the identity of Rey’s parents, the lost potential for using FINN as the potential force user instead of Rey which was also a problem in 7, how they done Poe dirty like that by not telling your second in command even a hint of what the plan is, “they fly now” shock over something they should not be shocked by, the dumb dagger map idea, Captain Phasma’s story going absolutely NOWHERE, etc -there are really too many flaws in both movies to even list). A Youtuber called MAuler did like 4 hour video listing every single problem.
The biggest problem IMHO was making Rey both the new Han Solo AND the new Luke Skywalker for the movies. If they made Rey the new Han Solo (which had some foundation at least in the movie 7 with her technical expertise, natural flying skill, history as a scrapper, idolization of Han Solo’s career as a smuggler rather than as a rebel, and inexplicable ability to understand Wookiees), and made Finn the new Jedi (which would have been a good reason why he was able to break out of his stormtrooper brainwashing/training and would have given him a good character arc as opposed to Rey’s character straight line), the movie might have been at least a little saved. Also if Rian Johnson had not completely destroyed every potential plot thread that JJ Abrams had set up in movie 7 for no good reason.
“the lost potential for using FINN as the potential force user instead of Rey”
I think we all know now why they *really* didn’t go that route with Finn.
China.
“Empire” was well-written. Someone might quibble about loose plot threads et cetera but it was serving its purpose as the middle third of the trilogy, and it did so admirably. It also has many or the most quotable lines of the original trilogy.
Also people have to remembered that they had no idea how successful “A New Hope” would be (or as it was simply known back then, “Star Wars”), which is why it ended like it did (they didn’t expect it to do as well as it did which is why ESB feels so different)
Won’t their chokers record biometric data like sudden changes in heart rate, breathing, EEG (brain waves) that the chem high slap just triggered?
This page reinforces the need for a dual pinup with Kat and Slam.
Stories tend to get the size of space empires extremely wrong.
For the next 4 billion years or so our solar system could house 10×18 people in unimaginable luxury. 10×21 in mere billionaire level luxury.
That is one sun out of 200 million or so in one galaxy.
It is unclear how many planets and brown dwarves exist in the interstellar space that might be capable of hosting less extensive civilisations.
Now, not every solar system in the star wars universe is going to be a fully built out kardeshev level two civilisation, but plenty of them will be. Those that are could produce star destroyers by the hundreds, per month, if on a war economy footing and sufficiently ruthless leadership that can force everybody in a food or warships production role.
Not that this would help the First Order as they would need a couple of centuries first to establish a kardashev 2 around a sun sufficiently out of reach of the rest of the galaxy. It’s not like those are not trivially easy to spot for advanced space navigating species with access to ftl. (the energy output of a sizeable sun, but with the heat signature of a glowing ember kind of stands out to infrared observatories magnitudes more advanced than the JWST)
Ah.. The old mistake of panic before thought. A very valid concern to be sure, but also a very common one made worse… By how her opponent’s brain operates.
And herein lies the problems with supers messing with minds, memory to record is cheap and small.
At conventions for over a decade, I was running a 24/7 audio record just to deal with handing off people to the local PD that the Kon decided to press charges on. So any review would show the discrepancy of verbal interactions.
Sure Xavier level telepaths are an issue, but we got whole species in DaveB world that mess with brains and they are not subtle.
And this is exactly why Sydney should have snuck a text to someone, anyone about Sciona and who she’s hiding as. Or at least, who she suspects.
Although it’d be pretty funny if Sciona gets caught because of the memory erasure bit. Especially as that probably includes ‘everything about Sciona’ being forgotten too. And well, Sydney isn’t going to have forgotten THAT. Bit hard to connect to who she’s hiding as, but it’s at least ‘Sciona might still be in play’.
And that’s not counting the idea that Sydney set up some ‘recording mode’ on her glasses. Or transmitting. I forget what all the tech she has in there can do, other than translating.
yep, somehow I believe Sydney can absolutely figure out that she’s Sciona later by absolutely random chance again.
*Smash cut to Sydney stumbling in the auto record function of her glasses*
Uh huh. So Sciona can speed-slap three people with radically different body mass, two of whom have distinctly different supernaturally-enhanced metabolisms, and before any of them can so much as bat an eye they’re all so disabled by her drug they can’t make even an intuitive counterstrike, much less a more thoughtful response. And the dosages work just right for everyone despite all that without the puny little human overdosing or the hulking dinosaur going “nice buzz, now you die” and beating her into mulch. And she’s grown an undefined level of super-speed that’s at least good enough to trump a were-rabbit’s reflexes, when rabbits are one of those “flight response” species that are really good at avoiding attacks.
That is quite the high bar to set on every future use of her powers.
Really hit the jackpot when it came to finding a random corpse to possess, didn’t she?
It’s superhero stuff, none of it stands up to real world science
Remember Sciona is also an alari and a blood mage. She’s been shown to have superhuman speed and strength while possessing that body, right from the very start. So none of this is actually out of line.
And it’s a super power, not a medical attack. Her superpower does what she tells it to do. Dosage is effectively an act of will, not of measuring CC’s.
What order is Sciona talking about?
Had she not slapped first any one of them could have disabled her easily and that would have been the end of it.
How she figured it out, THEN mindwipe. She can’t answer questions after she’s been mindwiped.
She told Sydney to forget _before_ telling her to cough up how she knew. Now she doesn’t remember anymore.
This was, upsettingly stupid to read. Like I get that Sydney is an Airhead but like… I really hope she at least sent an SMS to maxima like “Hey the politician is maybe Sciona, I’ll do some recon”
Like she had to read enough stories and comic books to be aware to never go lone wolf.
Because JJ Abrams thinks deconstructing a mythos into not particularly good and both irreverent and irrelevant eye candy is creative homage. Both the Star Trek and Star Wars of my youth are extinct.
Such a wasted opportunity to not have some new kind of antagonist like for example Thrawn, Abeloth or the Yuushan Wong. Instead we just got the Empire 2.0.
Umm, no they are not, OG ST and SW are still around, including the SW books written before the Great Purge
Thrawn is still around, they did keep him, just got rid of everything else, including Mrs Luke Skywalker (Mara Jade)
It wasn’t Abrams doing the reconstruction as such. He was director on 7 and 9. He has his own faults (puzzle boxes, lens flares and remember-berries), but deconstructing isn’t one of them.
The deconstruction was in 8 and is the fault of Rian Johnson. Everything you thought was good, was bad. Everything you thought was bad, was good or misunderstood. He loves deconstructing stuff (see his other films), which makes him a reasonable choice for small arty films where e.g. the viewpoint character does bad stuff and you end up saying “He’s the villain?”
For a summer tentpole though, Johnson is about as good a choice as director as putting Carrot Top in charge.
What is it about the hand that induces brain damage? And yes, I’m talking about Jojo.
As a person with ADHD who frustrates the hell out of people when I’m off my meds I can only imagine how much worse it’s going to get for Sciona if she tries to mind control Syd into doing her bidding, and Syd’s best efforts at obeying her commands are no less chaotic and unpredictable.
Possibly more if the mind control goo makes her even more distractable
Like Sciona could try commanding Syd to spy for her, and Syd would get distracted by a strangely shaped paperclip and while distracted inadvertently blurt out the details of the mission Sciona sent her on.
Wasn’t it cold enough that everyone had scarves and touques on? Now they’re all cleavage and rolled up sleeves and tank tops. Not that I’m complaining for the view, just curious. Though I guess if this dungeon is being built in an arid area, that kind of temperature variance between night and day isn’t that uncommon.
It looks like time passed after Kat kicked the cement drum. It was night, now it’s day.
Never been to a desert have you? Or any really really large open space.
Thr temperature difference between night and day is very drastic. Wake up before dawn during summer and you’ll see it night time gets cold enough for you to dress up warm and as soon as the sun is up for a few hours, you’ll want to shed those extra layers.
Unless you are close to the equator or the poles where the temperatures are much more stables, that is something most of the world will experience
I had also noticed the drastic change in clothing, but quickly remembered a few work sites in the California desert. Before dawn it was heavy coats, gloves, and hats. We were in short sleeves well before noon. I’m guessing this site is somewhere in remote Nevada due to tall the government-owned land there.
She wasn’t even eating any Indian food.
The Star Wars 7-9 objections about “How is the New Republic STILL the underdogs?” weren’t fridge logic for me, I was questioning that while sitting in the theater.
On no one responding to the call in 8 and everyone responding in 9, I think that was a deliberate choice. I think there’s a plausible read that the takeaway, intended or not, of “The rebels call for help, nobody come” in 8 is “No one cares about Star Wars”–I felt like 8 tried to position the New Republic / First Order conflict there as somehow a small-scale conflict, that the rest of the galaxy doesn’t have a reason to care that these people are fighting (see also the “reveal” that both sides are buying their weapons from the same dealer?)
I’m suspicious that having a message of “No one cares about Star Wars” is part of, in general, why fans hated 8 but critics (who resented being forced to watch Star Wars movies) loved it. Thus why 9, which felt like it had to walk back a lot of 8, ends with a call for help that _everybody_ responds to, to be read as “Everyone cares about Star Wars.”
They got Stooge Slapped!
I get the distinct feeling that Sydney is not as affected as she seems and is trolling Sciona. Sydney is acting differently enough from the other two that it looks like a different effect.
I remember Sean Connery go thru multiple firethrowing trap patterns firing in continual cycles…
…in the sewer of Alcatraz. For that prison escape movie.
Imagine the fuel costs meetings.
Guard 1: Our trap is useless against simple timing! We need 5% more fuel budget per minute if we’re going to keep refusing to build a goddamn superheavy door that can only be lifted from the prison chief’s office from a button in a safe behind the fake safe!
Guard 2: nah, who would wait a little to know the timing then just jump or something??
Guard 3: nah, we should totally afford a little more fuel, or a far more economical spike trap group.
Guard 4: but then I wouldn’t be able to sell the fuel to the prisoners so they can sniff it to get high!!
The fuel costs is probably larger than all the guards salaries combined, considering you have to deliver the fuel to Alcatraz and not let any of the prisoners notice of all the arson potential stuff, and ESPECIALLY not notice how they could get high on the fumes of the fuel WHICH THEY COULD SMELL BURN EVERY DAY. And presumably many guards would want to steal the fuel since who watches lowly guards in THIS place?? Surely not the guy at the cameras, that guy is useless.
But noooo for logic, next movie will have an entire sewer with multiple ecosystem all meant to protect a sign that says “your princess is in another castle”.
… Which prison escape movie in the sewers of Alcatraz?
Can only remember three movies set on Alcatraz: the one starring Eastwood about the escape that lead to the shutting down of Alcatraz, one of the ‘Dirty Harry’ movies (also starring Eastwood) and “The Rock” that did star Connery but that was set decades after it stopped being a prison
They were probably burning garbage/sewer gas. If you have lots of human excrements they’ll produce quite a lot of methane.
Best part about this: knowing Sydney, it’s difficult to tell if she has been affected… or just screwing with E-Sci :P
Specially with that cheese-eating grin :P
Only problem with panel three: it shoulda been “SLAP” “SLAP” “BOOP“, because that was clearly a nose boop on Slam
That’s like wondering about where COBRA got all its specially designed tanks and other vehicles and wore uniforms and stuff like an actual military despite being an underground terrorist organization. And yet the world’s governments couldn’t figure out where they were coming from until they got their own island nation.
Sciona’s Super-Psychoactive might have an interaction with Sydney’s meds.
As mentioned in the Discworld novels, she might briefly “come out the other side”.
…
How did Sciona’s hypercrack permeate even a were-triceratops’ hide that quickly? It’s still a chemical. It needs to get into the bloodstream to affect the victim, yes?
Which is why she booped Slam on the nose
For al her genre savvyness I can’t believe Sidney pulled a “let me withhold critical information from my superiors and investigate on my own”
why do i feel like she is faking it