Grrl Power #1332 – Al-ari, al-ara, al-ari, al-ara ha ha ha ha
I don’t know if only a wolverine could be specifically responsible for Lorlara’s speech pattern. I don’t have any esoteric knowledge about wolverine digestive processes. Maybe a goat could also work. Possibly a housecat with pancreatitis?
I think propriokinesics is a made up word. If you’ve read my Tamer fanfic novels, you know I have a tendency to do that. Not… inveterately. Just like, once in every hundred thousand words. Anyway, it’s supposed to mean “how people move.” In this case, we can blame Lorlara for not being satisfied with just saying that instead of needing to do a bunch of googling then slam two words together like she was speaking casual German. Not that I did the exact same thing >cough<.
Essentially though, what she’s saying with the Neural Voltage Potential bit is that nerves carry a certain amount of voltage, (with many factors contributing to that voltage, including the coating on nerves (the myelin sheath) and attenuation of voltage etc, etc.) and that voltage affects everything from reflexes to how hard someone can flex their muscles, and the differences in the neuromuscular biology between and alari and humans is a tell-tale in how they move. Sciona grew up in an Alari body, then most of her inhabited a troll for a while, then back to an Alari, and now a human. Lorlara is saying Deus is perceptive enough to notice all the little signs of the different bodies she’s inhabited.
Which is simply not true. Deus might be able to tell if an alari recently Freaky Friday’d with a human, but the brain would probably start to compensate and smooth over any weird propriokinesic quirks after a few weeks.
Speaking of English being a fine and/or sucky language, I always want to capitalize race names, but you just don’t. If you’re talking about a klingon, you don’t. If you’re speaking in Klingon, you do, so that’s another irritating thing about English.
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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Yay, the best Alari is back.
She already was, she tried to recruit Sydney as her eyes in Archon, or did you miss the last few pages?
Wrong Alari
You think Sciona is the best Alari? Let’s fight!
*grabs popcorn, scribbles odds on a whiteboard*
Fifty cornbread muffins on Sciona. She may be a bitch but I like her more then Deus’ little trollop.
I like them both. Lorlana is funnier when she’s in the comic than Sciona, but Sciona is a great antagonist, so her big audience draw isnt necessarily being funny.
As a rule, I find Alari a rather interesting ‘Space Drow’ concept, and Lorlara funny and informative in the sense of being a cartoonish caricature of her species and culture with everything dialed up to 11. In the end, however, I find Sciona, esp. in her current, more nuanced version, orders of magnitude more interesting, appealing, and admirable (in an amoral sense) than her. Sciona is the kind of ‘strong female character’ in a ‘could not care less about feminism, too busy being a badass, taking over the world, and fucking hot guys’ sense that I can hardly get enough of. Lorlara I can only take in moderate amounts. Besides, Sciona is no doubt the ‘best Alari’ in the Might Makes Right ethos of their people, although Lorlara admittably comes close.
Compared to Foghorn over there? Yes
Please, she does not need to settle with Foghorn. Even in canon she has achieved Malfunctioning Bullhorn.
Okay, ‘Malignant Bullfrog’ it is :)
It took me two readings to figure out what the title was referencing. Then I sang it and BINGO!
I’m still lost
I was looking for an example and I found a version by Bad Company. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIPqSzUCKr8
Numa Numa as per https://youtu.be/Cqd1Gvq-RBY?si=Xu2yDobA-vEz1Dcs I presume.
Numa Numa
Ask the Von Tramps as they fled Nazi Switzerland, they might give you directions
A “proper” version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuT3MvLJtLI
A “Muppets” version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpanPmIfBs4
And now, a version by Dave Lister and (not) Adolf Hitler…
https://youtu.be/47ovarDBX9M?si=pYaXtvaPSeEHZduX
The Muppets one is clearly superior. :)
That’s true for so many things
Mahna Mahna.
I like what you did guy, but vat use needz iz de tuba more ya? https://youtu.be/Zqxati5Ir14?si=w0S6T1fgkbFAkULr
But yes, me poor brain no make the connection.
Is that our favorite mad as a honey badger on crack alari working for Deus?
A who’s who has been procrastinated.
She always was
A wild Lorlara leaps from the grass.
She uses Stream of Consciousness. It is not very effective.
But the flow is epic.
Going to be very interesting to see what happens between these two this time
Both of them still have pretty murky goals so it’s going to be interesting to see how much the align and how they treat each other
_Questionnable content_ just did the “english is bad” thing.
I wonder if that’s why Grrlpowercomic is doing it right now?
It feels like when erfworld did pew pew to activate a magic gun and the pew pew orb was named that day.
Any other shoutouts I missed?
The Jagganoth reference is from the incomparable KSBD.
I was going to say this too. This is the second webcomic posted today I’ve seen that’s complaining about how terrible English is (and oh boy it sure is).
Are you guys doing a bit or something?
I assume at this point of the internet’s history, the “big” webcomic writers in a given language all know each other and exchange often enough that if someone/something influences one of them, they’ll share about it and they’ll all have the thought on the mind.
For Erfworld though… was it ever huge? I only knew of it through GiantITP because it’s the house of the OotS. That might just be a coincidence.
For me, it was the other way round: found Erfworld first (and then lost it :( )
I loved Erfworld. It’s a shame how it just ‘stopped’ midway through the story, just when the Charlie storyline was getting really interesting.
I just came here to comment on the apparent QC connection. :) Either Dave and Jeph know each other, or that’s a heck of a coincidence. :)
And U.S. pith, not British Raj pith.
It’s fine to fire shots at the English language, everyone knows it loves to jump other languages in dark alleys then rifle through their pockets for spare grammar.
Lorlara really does make the best hypewoman
A certain pun-loving lawyer may have questions for you regarding that statement :P
Pun loving lawyer? Where? Has she escaped the evil universe again? You can tell it’s her because of her midriff-revealing outfit.
And then just use the exact same spelling as that other language, conventions be damned.
It’s weird that English is better at taking loanwords from languages that don’t even use the same spelling system because then we have to transliterate it and so we apply actual conventions to it.
Deus’ hype woman is one of the funniest characters. We need more moments of Lorlara and Sydney in the same place.
Just waiting for a shot of her doing the hype man gif.
Matter of time, surely.
Yes, at SmugD’s funeral (with a matchbox as the coffin because there wasn’t enough left to fit anything bigger)
As someone who studied English Philology, I know that the English language is indeed a linguistic abomination (but unfortunately, it is that abomination-ness that makes it almost universal).
Exactly. It’s the compromise everyone hates, but is also one everyone is willing to accept.
English is three langage in a trench coat (Dutch ,Norman French , and Latin )
… You believe English stopped at just three?
Name a language and English has already violated the corpse :P
Bri’ish ;P
Actually (and the linguist – Lysbeth – here can probably confirm this or more likely expand on it since I’m probably simplifying a lot), I believe that English was a Germanic language and it originated from Ingvaeonic languges brought to Britain from northwest Germany, Southern Denmark, and the Netherlands, then mixed in with Latin (because the Celts in England spoke dialects of Latin). It didn’t incorporate French words until much later (around 1066 I think, largely because of William the Conqueror).
Only reason I know this much even is because I did a report on it when I read the Niebelungenlied and Beowulf.
“Ingvaeonic?” Had to google that.
Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. OK…
I still have an impulse to shout “Yngve is a louse!”
It’s just a language grouping, like Afroasiatic or Dravidian or Anatolian or Austronesian. :)
the Dutch similarity is because both Dutch and “Old English” come from a similar root, splitting when the Angles (English) Saxons, Jutes, Frisians etc moved to Britain in about the 6th Century
– so Old English, kicking out some British languages, and noticing some bits of latin etc in the process, then picking up a little Danish in the 9-10th C, then stapled to Norman French from the 11th Centruey (this is where /most/ of the Latin influence comes from)
English is interesting because it’s sentence structure is so flexible.
“And after investigating and examining the evidence, the murderer is obviously, Sam, the butler.”
In some languages it’s difficult or impossible to structure a sentence building up to reveal like that. It more rigidly requires the subject be named first.
In “The Uplift” Science Fiction series by David Brin (recommended) one character talks about how rigid language structuring may stifle creativity. The character speculated that highly regimented galactic languages caused stagnation. She also speculated that the extreme flexibility of English allowed words and ideas to be put together in unexpected ways that fostered innovation and revelation.
English had been the lingua Franca only since WWII …
In the 18th , 19th and 20th century in much lesser extend due to the scarcity of formal education French was the language of the cultured …
The two are pretty flexible and modern french influenced castillan ordinateur -> ordenador in castillano for computer
and informatique -> informático for computer science and management.
And English is a two page grammar and an endless list of exceptions, French is a complex grammar with a comparatively small list of exceptions.
Almost feels like Sciona and Lorlara are competing with their busts.
Whats impressive to me is that Sciona complains about how difficult english is then unloads a tirade which could impress Sydney
Speaking of this tirade that would impress Sydney – I definitely read it as “Yous sound like as if Wolverine ate a tbesaurus” not “a wolverine”. I was like, why does Sciona know about Wolverine – I guess she has shown to be learning Earth stuff.
Same, was thinking she was talking about a certain short tall Canuck from Downunder as well :)
Sooner or later, Sciona will be exposed (not THAT exposed)…!!!
“I think propriokinesics is a made up word.”
Kinesthetics then.
Kinesiology (from Ancient Greek κίνησις (kínēsis) ‘movement’ and -λογία-logía ‘study of’) is the scientific study of human body movement. Kinesiology addresses physiological, anatomical, biomechanical, pathological, neuropsychological principles and mechanisms of movement. – Wikipedia
Wouldn’t it still be DNA? Since ours isn’t DRA, there’s still the Nucleic aspect…
Space Cornies! Huzzah! X’D
Anyone else get the ‘Sciona reminds me of Taarna’, from cell #2? (You know Taarna – the animated Heavy Metal badass heroine!)
Yep. If Sciona in her current body were to let her hair loose and take a few lessons from Dabbler about adventuring and the Stripperific dress code for it, she might be an excellent Latino cosplayer for Taarna. She would just be considerably more well-endowed than the original, but that would only improve things. The Most Common Superpower makes everything better (yes, I know about back pain; that’s part of what Nth beings gave supers ideal bodies for).
Of course Deus rumbles her without a thought. Mentally he’s on the same level as Max is physically and we don’t know the Hell his game really is. There’s no way he’s going to allow her even near Sydney or anyone else so where we go from here is anybody’s guess. I feel that in the Long Game he’s playing he wants Max as a true Partner,but he’ll settle for Her being his Vimes to his Vetinari. I just don’t want to imagine what Deus would do if a Carrot came into the mix.
@Daveb Spontaneous question, but does Lorlara speak/sound like Yzma from: The Emperor’s New Groove? Because thats how I read her.
Dammit, now I can’t unimagine it. :D
Most of that movement stuff is stored in the cerebellum, and executed way below the conscious level, so I seriously doubt possession would alter it much. Otherwise possession would result in you being horribly clumsy for months.
The cerebellum kind of acts like a look-up table of all the motions that *didn’t* result in you face planting, organized by what you were trying to do, and gradually optimized over time to reduce energy expenditure. You kind of tell it what you’re trying to do, and it outputs the appropriate motions, sort of interpolating when you’re doing something new.When you’re doing something completely outside your experience, like learning dance moves or starting out in gymnastics, it just sort of passes through your orders without doing anything but noting whether they worked or not, for future reference.
It’s a really cool section of the brain, that gets a lot done when you consider exactly how slow biological computing really is relative to how fast your body has to move to not fall on your face routinely.
Excellent description! I’m totally going to steal that for future use.
And because most of it is non-myelinated, the cerebellum actually contains more neurons than the rest of the brain put together. By, like, a lot. I have seen estimates that say that 90% of our neurons are in the cerebellum.
(Cerebellar neurons are like tapped delay lines. Myelin coating speeds up transmission, which is totally what you *don’t* want in a delay line.)
Lolara discovers Mt Dew Code Red, superhero strength. Halo just has meds and super drugs interact in a weird way.
How that affects Alari is best left to imagination.
Will the next team urinalysis show three very weird positives?
Sydney of course would convince Lolara to try her favorite dishes at canteen. How that affects Ala
“Will the next team urinalysis show three very weird positives?”
That is EXACTLY why she sent them off to eat salty snacks: So they’d drink a lot and piss themselves clean.
Yep, but only in the sense that the three staying noticeably high for long would create a serious liability for Sciona. I very much doubt Sciona’s special juice would be at significant risk of being discovered by routine drug testing for Archon or Twilight Council operatives. First, many drugs do get removed from the body relatively quickly, and I doubt Archon or the TC test their personnel all that often. Second, barring the odd case of cross false positives, you cannot find any drug you do not test for, and it is all but impossible Archon or the TC have the right means to check for Sciona’s special juice.
Lolara: Ooh, I love bacon!
Sydney: Oh, yuck. An animal had to die for that. Here, try this omelet instead.
Lolara: Ooh, this is different. I think I like this.
Sydney: Yeah, a couple of eggs, some milk, diced onion, peppers, celery.
Lolara: It seems to have a bit of an afterTASTE! Why is my mouth on fire!?
Sydney: That might be the scotch bonnet peppers in there. They can take a bit of getting used to.
Lolara: WATER! When you said pepper, I thought you meant those little black flecks.
Sydney: Oh, that’s in there too. Umm, the water won’t help that much. Here try this; mayonnaise can carry the heat out of your mouth. Mind you, you will probably feel it again tomorrow.
Umm, Sydney? A couple animals didn’t even get to live for that, enjoy!
I’m having flashbacks to a can of super-hot peanuts I ate years ago. Delish, but the next day was super hot *with abrasive particles!* Brrr!
Did you really reference “Mein Vater war ein Wandersmann” in the title?
It is Dragosta din Tei. AKA as The Numa Numa Song.
Just checked DaveB’s links. I was wrong. Forget what I wrote here.
English is a fine language… if you didn’t have to learn to use it
It is such a weird mix of inclusive (we’ll include words and phrases from any language!) and restrictive (Latin grammar rules! Why? Because someone a century or two ago thought it was more proper!) with a fair amount of the oddities resulting from the conflict between the two (a good bit of the spelling comes from a mixture of Webster having set rules, England having changed their mind on the spelling of things, and us keeping the spelling from the original language for words while pronouncing it differently). And, of course, there’s the whole lack of gender in the language, which kind of results from English getting mashed together from languages that disagree on which gender to use.
As a grammar nut, and someone who had to diagram sentences in his youth, I go back and forth on how proscriptive the language ought to be. On one hand, I’m a huge fan of clarity and correctness, and having rules, however arbitrary, is handy for that. On the other hand, it’s often used more to exclude people because they don’t use “proper” grammar even if what they’re using is standard for their particular cultural subset.
It’s a Latinate overlay with an attempted regularization on top of Germanic grammar.
With sprinkles.
And gravy.
English is a fine mix of a number of languages. Fine as in “good enough”, not “excellent in quality”.
English is a perfectly cromulent language. And the fact the spell check had my back on a Simpsons word proves it.
If you look up “The Chaos” poem, it shows just how different English spelling is from English pronunciation. It helps a lot if you recite it out loud.
There are a number of reasons for this chaos.
– English (in its many variants) is spoken by so many people. For many, it’s a second language, so it inherits the other language’s patterns.
– It doesn’t have an Academy (unlike say French) to tell people what the official version is. Though many try.
– There are at least two main variants for spelling anyway. Neither is willing to give way.
That’s because the other side are wrong (they also drive wrong :P )
Speaking as non-native English speaker whose native language is phonetic, I am going to say once again we could have gotten much worse as an international language, but English spelling is a crime against humanity. So is the persistent inability/unwillingness of English-speakers to agree on a proper spelling reform to make the language phonetic. It is only matched by the stubborn Yankee reluctance to discard that horrid relic of the Middle Ages that is the Imperial system and join the rest of the civilized world.
The trouble with making the language phonetic is that you’d then end up with at least a dozen different languages.
Inglish.
Bri’ish.
Scawts.
Oirish.
Murcan.
Strayan.
Nu Zild.
Seth Efrican.
Cajun.
Cockney.
West Country.
And Geordie, which is already a different language…
Cajun contains French and Castilian (Castellano)
“Le samedi après-midi on allait puis … wringer le cou de la volaille. Et le dimanche, well, dimanche ça c’était notre meilleure journée qu’on avait plus de bon manger. Ma mère freezait de la volaille et on avait de la poutine aux craquettes.” cajun French
cajun french is a french with occasional English words..
Considering Cajun came from the Arcadian’s who migrated down from Canada
Acadians. And less ‘migrated’ and more ‘were deported there by the British’.
there would be close to a dozen “Inglish” alone, then a similar number of “non-Inglish style Bri’ish”
(I am a native speaker of Strayan- and in my continent you would only get a couple of dialects- but the island of Britain is of a similar size to my state (the second smallest, not much bigger than Utah) and has sooo many VERY distinct languages and dialects that a full phonetic rendering would be a glorious, unreadable mess)
>I think propriokinesics is a made up word.
Buddy do I have news for you. All words are made up. All of them
Agreed, somebody sees a need for a word, cannot find said word, and makes up a word. Then others see this word and find it useful so they make it in common usage. Which is exactly how the thagomizer got its name.
A meeting between the two best Alari in their new circumstances is welcome and something this webcomic did not know it needed. It was going to happen at some point as long as the paths of Deus and Sciona kept crossing due to their involvement in the dungeon project. Comedy aside, I would welcome a few updates of Lorlara and Sciona crossing notes about living on Earth almost as eagerly as Deus and Sciona doing the same about the supervillain life. Either would be highly and equal parts funny, awesome, and informative.
This update apparently settles a question I had harbored for some time. Apparently Deus had fully recognized the new identity of Sciona (not just the fact of her being an Alari mind/soul in a super body) since their previous meeting in the Senator’s office thanks to the unique nuances of her body language. I assume for someone with Deus’ abilities to acknowledge the subtle differences between a super and a very fit/attractive Muggle by similar Sherlock Scan means was trivial at this point.
I suppose Lorlara is making a reference to Alari using a different substance as the basis to encode their genome? Or the Alari use DNA all the same but a different word for it? I am left confused by that bit.
Whether it is deoxyribonucleic acid or deoxyhexanucleic acid the “N” would still be for nucleic…
And how would you change “ribo” for “hexa”? Ribo is a sugar, and hexa is a count…
Deus’ professional glazer has once again arrived.
May I point out an interesting nuance about this meeting? As long as the existence of other Alari refugees outside Earth remains an unknown, this is the meeting of the new leaders of the surviving members of the Alari species. Dunno if Sciona has designated a right-hand (wo)man for her faction like Deus did, but otherwise this is the post-apocalypse Alari’s G-20 or UNSC.
“Speaking of English being a fine and/or sucky language, I always want to capitalize race names, but you just don’t. If you’re talking about a klingon, you don’t. If you’re speaking in Klingon, you do, so that’s another irritating thing about English.”
Bingo! Which is why it’s irritating as all get out EVERY time I see someone try to be cute and capitalize “Black” when writing about black people. We’re not a separate species, you pecksniffians!
That’s why you have a Black Appreciation Month
“Honestly, we had sex. I ALWAYS remember my partners. Even when they’ve been reincarnated. Which can get a little weird, not gonna lie.”
Admittedly, an extended session of horizontal gymnastics seems an excellent opportunity to get familiar with your partner’s body language. The only other situation I can think of that seems equally convenient would be fighting/sparring.
Just like Sciona herself, Deus won one of the many jackpots in his life with the body she got reincarned in, in the hopeful/likely contingency they are going to hook up again at some point.
Deus had sex with a draugar – it’s gotten a LOT weird.
Non-house aligned news caster sounds like a very deadly job.
I found the mini comic in panel 3 really confusing. I read top to bottom, so saw the mini before the main, but the main happens before the mini. So the text above the mini made no sense in the context of the mini. ‘Where’d this other chick come from? There’re only two people in this conversation.’ It was only after I read the whole panel, and then looked again, twice, before I figured out she super-sped into the frame, amd the mini was an aside happening after that.
Am I the only one who imagined Logan eating an actual dictionary – while Scott Summers smirked after having won the bet – before squatting over a smartphone?
(Which – and let’s be honest here – would still have been better than what they’ve been doing with the X-Men, with the whole “Krakoa” thing and all)
Before squatting over Scott’s smartphone :)
Wait, they going back to Krakoa? Didn’t they send that into space seventy years ago?
I did imagine the Logan part of it, so you’re not entirely alone there. :)
I think the words you’re looking for are ‘proprioception’ and ‘kinaesthetics’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinaesthetics
“Speaking of English being a fine and/or sucky language, I always want to capitalize race names, but you just don’t. If you’re talking about a klingon, you don’t. If you’re speaking in Klingon, you do, so that’s another irritating thing about English.”
Actually you sort of do. I’m not saying you should, but speaking as an avid sci-fi reader and a writer, it’s one of the quirks separating sci-fi from fantasy. You don’t capitalize elves, dwarves, etc., but you do capitalize Klingons, Romulans, etc. You also capitalize Terrans, but still don’t capitalize humans, which clues you into what is really going on; in science fiction, alien races are generally named after their planets of origin and we capitalize named planets as proper nouns, so the associated race-name is also properly capitalized. The same way we don’t capitalize black or white but do capitalize African or European, British and Botswanan, and so on (not really separate races, but still).
Beyond the proper use of proper noun race-names, though, most writer and readers have come to expect that all race-names in science fiction will be capitalized and look at it askance if it isn’t.
Capitalisation has been declining for Centuries. Back in the Day, all Nouns were written with Capitals.
English having two cases is a relic of Latin being both written on papyrus and chiseled into stone. They demand somewhat different letter forms. There are languages that don’t have these cases.
It’s possible that capitalization will decline and disappear since almost everything now starts out on a screen even if it is designed to be printed out. OTOH there is the German habit of Capitalizing Important Items.
What didn’t help Sciona just HAD to change her hair back to white… sort of a red flag there. Even Max would look and go hmmmm…
As a linguist (damn, I love starting sentences like that) English is a mess about much more than the plurals and possessives. Sciona gets a point.
Damn that’s a rebuttal. You know, if she’d cool it a little I think Sciona and Sydney would actually get along.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned about ‘English’ it’s that little enough of it makes sense. It doesn’t so much absorb phrases and words from other languages as much as take them into a back alley and mug them for spare syntax.”
Williams, J.L.. Between Worlds (The Occupation Saga Book 1) (pp. 9-10). Kindle Edition.