Grrl Power #183 – Confirm skill upgrade Y/N
I really had to resist the temptation of digressing the conversation into exactly what portion of the EM spectrum succubi can see and drawing a panel of how the world looks through Dabblers eyes. For instance a shot of her looking at Maxima and Anvil but she sees Max with much more muted purples in her hair because she doesn’t see as far into the violet/ultraviolet spectrum as we do, but further into the red/IR spectrum, so Anvil’s hair is blown out.
It kind of bugs me how other races in everything are always human plus. Klingons are taller and much stronger than humans. Vulcans are smarter and stronger and have tactile telepathy, elves have infravision and live for 1000 years or whatever. At least an orc is stronger than a human but presumably less intelligent to balance out the point totals. Dabbler has a lot of advantages over humans even without all her extra curricular skills, but at least she has trouble telling mauve from lavender. Until she tweaks the dials on her cybernetic eye that is. Normally it’s set to match her natural vision exactly, (with some added heads up widgets of course) ’cause otherwise I’d imagine having mismatched vision would give you a headache. However her cybernetic eye is capable of a broader range of vision than most natural eyes. It’s just not always scanning into radio frequencies.
I realize just before I posted this page that the orb switches hands between panel 3 and 4… it was too much work to redraw her arms or flip her around so late, so lets just say she can switch hands while spending the point as long as at least one is still touching the orb.
I know DaveB said he’d throw the Patreon pimpage over to the tipjar, but considering that it’s becoming his primary source of income (at least until there’s a book ready to print) it seems both prudent and practical to have it front and center for a while longer. Again, thanks to everyone for the support so far. As the celebrity endorser, I get 10%, and I’m paid in hotsauce, so keep em coming! Also he’s added some support levels and milestone goals, so it may be worth re-visiting the page.
Patreon, for those of you who haven’t heard of it before, is like Kickstarter for microtransactions. Instead of funding one off projects, Patreon is for giving ongoing support to independent artists you enjoy. It creates a steady source of revenue they can come to depend on to help support their projects or even just pay their bills so they can concentrate on making more of what you love.
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Not reading the starter guides is a good way to waste your skill points
That only counts when you get a starter giude.
Reminds me when my brother borrowed a game and didn’t borrow the guide. He is the kind of male that needs no help.
Life’s more fun that way. ;)
Dave b humans shouldn’t be able to see into the UV range at all. So if Dabbler can see things invisible to us without aid in the UV who knows all the rays would be in her line of sight?
Interestingly, the human retina CAN detect light up into the ultraviolet range. Normally, most of it is blocked by our corneas/lenses (because UV light can be damaging), but people who lack lenses, or have had them replaced with artificial ones sometimes become able to see a color the rest of us can’t.
When I started with life, I didn’t get a copy of the manual either.
Ha ha ha ha! “Sydney Moment” indeed!
Now to find out what it does…
And Dabbler as experience guidance counsellor… Who’da thunk?
That’s something I like about this strip. When Dabbler isn’t trying to be an over-the-top sexpot, she demonstrates her intellect nicely, and acts as a good mentor for Sydney. I also like how she’s able to converse normally with Max about the subject. Makes her much more believable as a team member.
And yes, I know she would totally point out that I just said ‘member’.
^ This.
HAHAHAHAHA!
So Dabbler is like the sexiest alien succubi librarian ever. Gotcha.
I actually think she’s rather unattractive.
I don’t blame you for thinking that way. The tribal tattoos deter from from how much more appealing she could be to humans. On the other hand, others can argue that adds to her Mystique
I don’t know, Dax from Deep Space Nine gained considerable appeal by her racial birthmarks. Granted the rest of her package is exceptional, but the markings and just how far they went down and looked like below the collar line was more than a little intriguing.
You also have to remember the “Tattoos” are the Illusion’s analogue for her natural markings.
Very interesting did not know sid spoke tauntaun
I wouldn’t have thought someone as young as that reporter seems to be would even know what a Tauntaun sounds like. Wasn’t she in diapers when The Empire Strikes Back came out?
At first, I thought she meant the cow people from WoW, but I don’t remember what they’re called, not being a WoW player myself.
That would be the Tauren.
So? Just because she was probably young when it came out, you don’t think she would have seen a classic like Star Wars since? Hell I am twenty something and I grew up loving Star Wars all my life.
1980? That was like 34 years ago. I think Suzi was like a decade away from being born when Empire came out. Maybe her parents were big fans of the movie. I guess she could have been in diapers when the Special Edition film was released in 1997, 17 years ago, but remember the original was way back in 1980.
You never know, she might be name Suzie Leia News … or Suzanne Solo News… Parents can latch onto the craziest ideas. I for one latched onto cheap. Named both kids starting with ‘R’ so could match initials.
Actually Suzie’s last name is Wen. She just misspoke at the bank when introducing herself for Sydney’s interview.
It is Suzie News now though. Her ‘stage name’. All officially registered with the appropriate unions. Intern she may have been this morning, but having scooped an interview with the world’s strongest super hero, and a new contender for the throne, even before she was ‘discovered’ or supers were announced, she is now one of the heavy-hitters of the industry.
Her studio will be capitalising on that big-time and be referring to her on-air as Suzie News at every opportunity.
Star Wars came out after I’d already finished High School…Oh God, I feel old…
I was a sophmore in college when Episode IV came out.
They replay those old movies on TV all. the. time. If one channel doesn’t have it, then another does. Then there are always the nerd-owned Mom & Pop theatres that rerun the great oldies. Of course, it might be as simple as Mom and Dad, or friends owning the DVD’s or ordering them on Netflix. So many possibilities for a child to be exposed to classic media these days.
Well, I’m as nerdy as the next guy and it’s been 20+ years since I’ve seen it.
I guess the reason is there’s just so much new stuff coming out all the time I just don’t have the time to revisit. I guess I just figured Suzie for a Twilight or Harry Potter fan or something.
She’s to old for Twilight. Potter works though.
Or lord of the rings
Not so much of the “too old” thank you muchly, more that she is too intelligent for that garbage barge
+9000
Please, no insulting important official vehicles.
No offence intended for the barge
Or just new popular reviews, like Red Letter Media.
Someone not having seen Episode IV-VI (any version) in the last 20+ Years is something that is odd by todays standards. Very odd.
And quite often corrected at the earliest convenience, thanks to DVD’s.
may be reference to avatar last air bender aung’s(?) flying pet (I think)
That was called a bison. Other than it was an obvious herbivore I didn’t see anything close to being bisonish.
I meant the creature species or the individual ones name in the show not that my study of the show was that careful when it was a pop sensation
Aang’s pets were a winged lemur named Momo (small) and a sky bisont named Appa (giant)
I remember sitting in the movie theater and thinking “gee, that Tauntaun sounds just like the Hamburgler…”
OMG! You just trigger a flashback – DYTH!
Oh Jeez! I even remember watching the Hamburglar from those Mickey D’s commercials…Now I REALLY feel old, because now I’m even thinking about Gilbert Giddyup & Mighty Mouse on TV.
I vote for the ability to change the appearance of her telepresence self.
Perhaps allowing her to animate it in a way that does not mirror her real body actions? That is quite a significant limitation at the moment.
That also sounds pritty powerfull. Probably more aproriate for that to be at the end of a longer chain
Chains imply scales. Eg flying faster (or making gravity stronger), defending harder, blasting more energetically or seeing through stronger illusions. Whereas animation is rather digital. Either you can animate an image or you cannot.
But the comm-ball has a branched chain as well, maybe additional abilities are implied by that?
Maybe different channels become accessible?
One ability, not this one I think, might be the ability to use the true sight function through the remote image. The reason i think not this one is I think the remote image is one already unlocked and it would logically be one further along that chain.
I see an ability on the Com Ball that looks like it needs a double unlock too. That one must be pretty powerful. If it was between the Pewpew ball and the Com ball I might think it allowed the used of the beam(s) through the remote image. The flight orb has a chain that seems to require they all be unlocked, all but one already is, before the first of a greyed out chain can be chosen. I kind of wonder if that one enables space flight.
Looking at some of the previous wider shots of the tech-tree we see each of the orbs have a chain-spur with just a double-unlock node. The green unknown orb has at least one point in it’s double-unlock node as well.
Also – every orb has a node connecting it directly to each other orb, if any node were to allow her com-ball image to use the pew-pew beams I’d expect it to be that one between the two.
It had three nodes in different branches already(in no particular order):
Truesight
Telepresence
Do we know the third?
Now we got a fourth one is what I call.
Also, if you ever played Path of Exile you will not immediately think that advancements in the chain can only lead to a “flat boost” of the ability. It think it could be altered just as well, who knows?
Or maybe DaveB said something about them I missed somehow, in which case… you know what, I don’t care, I’m right, IT CAN BE ANYTHIIIING (unless he’s already drawn all the pages explaining it, in which case I should just shut up)
Here are my guesses for the various branches coming off the Comm-Ball (excluding the ones connecting to other orbs). From the top and going clockwise:
Single node with double connection: Truesight through the image. It is powerful enough that putting it at the end of either the truesight chain or the image branch would make sense. But it belongs to both, rather than just one. So makes more sense that it appears on its own. Perhaps it was greyed out until Sydney (or a previous owner) unlocked both the truesight and projected image chains.
Four node chain, currently with none illuminated: Anti-disguise. The ability to see through mundane disguises. Perhaps upgrading to the ability to see in the dark or other parts of the spectrum. Maybe ending with some form of x-ray vision, which is the ultimate way of seeing through mundane disguises. No clues for this. Just guessing. It is adjacent to the truesight chain though, so there is a nice symmetry to it.
Five node chain, with four filled in: Truesight. Given that it can already break the most powerful known illusions, I suspect the fifth is something more esoteric, such as the ability to see the auras of others. Which is always something strongly associated with those who have The Sight, in tradition.
Five node chain, with last having a double connector, and an open-ended line. One filled in: Projected image The three unfilled ones being enhancements to it, such as being able to feel things through the image and the ability to solidify, so that it can manipulate objects and/or be touched itself. I quite like the idea of one of them being to project multiple images. The final node being the ability to swap the image and the user’s positions. Ie limited teleportation.
Five node chain, with single branch and one point filled in:.Illusion. The ability to project an image of something other than Sydney. With the various points on the chain increasing the area or versatility of the images. No particular reason for suggesting this, other than it is thematically in keeping with both projecting an image and the ability to see through illusions. The various upgrades can include adding sound, thermal images and other layers to make the image more convincing to scrutiny. Hopefully including an ‘artist’ package, as we have seen that Sydney’s artistic skill are as limited as my own. Which would account for the single branch, as it would not apply to the chain restricted to projecting an image of Halo.
Single node, not illuminated. Animation The ability to animate any illusion projected. Either Halo’s own image, or an illusion from the Illusion chain. This is the one that Halo selected, so we should find out soon hopefully, one way or another.
Any thoughts on the suggestions?
Dave already showed the draw back to x-ray vision way back when Sydney was heading to the showers, #137 in archives. but it could be something similar.
You’re over-thinking this.
Way too much.
Go on please! :D
What is your theory on the unknowns?
I had a stab at that here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1167/comment-page-3#comment-54284 Albeit only in general terms.
From the image, it looked like the forb has only one chain activated, so enlarging the force field must be part of the field itself. Unless the centre wedge or second inner ring does that.
You can’t really tell where the upgrade went, in the view of the skill tree, but based on the last panel I’m speculating that there is a link or upgrade on the Telepresense orb to help with the PPO.
Maybe remote targeting, a la Darkseid and his Omega beams (or whatever they are called).
Panel 5 above specifies that. It even has a handy little red arrow pointing at it.
Has anybody thought that the yellow /COMM orb’s new function might be a universal translator. She’d be able to read the runes on the orbs, translate Dabbler’s native tongue, read and write aramaic, ect. If you think about it, the reason why she grabbed it in the first place was to “see” what she was looking at, with better comprehension. Little did she know that grabbing an orb with a thought in mind would essentially select a node.
or maybe that node downloads the man pages
One of those chains might be remote viewing. Like being able to take what she is seeing and translate into an top down view or projected image. Would make remote targeting easy and allow her to see through walls without having to use X-ray.
An interesting option and very much in keeping with the video game theme.
Possibly enacted by viewing the world via a higher dimension. The kind of dimension that is implied when you extrapolate from a 2D state to a 3D one and work out what lies beyond the world we can sense. Just as anyone in a 3D environment can see everything in a 2D one (such as on a sheet of paper), so anyone in a higher dimension would be able to see all over in our 3D world.
I will avoid calling it the 4th dimension, as that is time. And I can’t be arsed looking up the actual term for it.
A lot of games refer to that as ‘Eye of God’ mode.
With optional hand for spanking of minions.
Dungeon Keeper, anyone?
The trouble (for us) is, that we only know, what Syndey knows how to do.
So far:
truesight is known – (an accidental revalation)
inner orb – could be separate power or part of the telepresence.
telepresence – shows a copy of Sydney and she can interact both ways with it. (even that may be more than one power).
it would be logical if the telepresence+inner orb is the forked path – one fork is the presence the other related to the inner orb.
The very broad definition of the yellow orb seem to be things that influence the own or the perception of others – probably all five senses.
A very curious thing is the double edged single path (first clockwise on every orb). Only the green version is active. So far the speculation is (I think) either two hands or always-on power.
Anyway so far the powers look very well structured and meant to be combined and together with the built in modifiers (“embiggener”) is very versatile. One orb alone with enough invested points seem to be comparable to the powers of the average other team members.
@Yorp – Chains DO imply scales, but they can also imply ladders (i.e. prerequisites)
Granted. I think that a stronger argument for my case is that truesight through the projected image belongs to both chains. So putting it on one, but not the other, would be misleading. Solutions being to either have the chains link up, which we have no sign of. Or to place it separately.
We know Sydney wants it; https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/494
Sydney wants the Shocker? She DID ask for it on that comic page.
Panel 7 dude.
She was asked to do it. To which she replied ‘No’. She may employ colourful language, but is basically a nice girl. Who gets embarrassed if the wrong audience gets to hear her language, for example. Thinking of the nun incident here. And she tried her best to keep her language clean on TV.
Of course she might yet go down a less innocent path, but at the moment she has her defined limits and will not be pushed past them.
I’m betting on teleportation.
“It happened in* two separate fights.” Cookie.
On a separate note: I was never too fond of Dabbler’s previous blondie look (slightly over the top) but this one is amAAAzing.
Are you talking about that we know she can take out one of her eyeballs?
I guess that can be attractive to… some people.
Lluks k’cuf, as a succubus would say.
I’m talking about how her breasts are no longer suspended by… claws? https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/601
An extra orafice ?
Love the look other than the cybernetics. Of her, not the disguise.
If you want to compare it to animals, humans have the most extreme endurance on this planet.
We also heal way faster than any other vertrabrades (A human can recover from almost anything that doesn’t kill him. A horse that breaks it’s leg is cripple for the rest of it’s life)
Humans are one of the weakest species on this planet. A broken leg is enough to KILL a human if not treated properly. The only thing allowing humans to heal faster than other animals is KNOWLEDGE. Without a proper medical treatment, the injury that cripples a horse, kills a human.
Other way around. It cripples a human and kills a horse.
Has anybody ever seen a three legged horse? I think not! A one legged human, on the other hand are if not commonplace are around.
Humans, before the advent of riding horses used to hunt animals by just walking after it until it wore out. Of course we also used tools and weapons to make things easier for us, but we have a lot of endurance as a species.
Actually, horses no longer need to die because of broken limbs. It comes down to how much the owner is willing to spend on surgery and post-surgery recovery on the animal.
You’d need to spend alot more on a horse than on a human though
Only because there are abundant systems and doctors in place to treat humans, while treatng horses is considered to be much more niche and specialized.
uh….yeah… you want the most extreme endurance on the planet? try looking up the Tardigrade. it can survive the vacuum of space, lethal amounts of radiation, go for ten YEARS without food, survive temperatures ranging from near absolute zero to way over 100 Celsius, oh…. and survive Pressures six times those found at the bottom of the Marianas trench, and are found pretty much living everywhere. THAT is endurance.
That’s not Endurance, that’s Defense.
Endurance is running for days at a time without pause. Endurance is swimming across the Great Lakes. Endurance is ROWING ACROSS AN OCEAN ALONE.
It’s scientific fact that humans (those odd, naked plains apes) have THE most efficient method of locomotion backed up by specialized bones and joints, and THE most effective anti-fatigue systems on the planet built into our muscles and circulatory systems.
Like Pickle said- humans used to hunt down horses and other creatures simply by running after them, without stop, until the other animal died of sheer exhaustion. Remember that for hunting to be any use, you kinda have to expend less energy than you get back in return.
Also, we got ballin’ vision.
uh… “going for ten years without food”? i’d call that endurance.
This is exactly why I said ‘VERTABRATES’
Or maybe we’ll define it in terms most people understand. Mammals.
Offcourse there are microbes or whatever that can survive extreme things. But you can’t compare those things to complex organisms, because microbes lack alot of the systems that complex organisms need to survive. Such as individual organs. Or the need to breathe.
The big deal here is relative mass. Most humans can stand on one leg, but a horse can not. I have seen several 3 and even 2 legged dogs. They can survive and move around because their mass is low enough that the remaining limbs can support them. Most horses or other things that size need all 4 legs to be able to stand and run.
Most humans can handle a three-foot drop without any difficulty. An elephant or giraffe will have to step down than very carefully, but because of their much greater mass will break its bones when it lands. A mouse falls that far, and it has no problems, even though that is so many more times than its own body size; a fall that will kill a human could be survivable for a mouse. The wonders of the Square-Cube Law.
Nobody. I really really dunno where you got that notion, but pretty much ANY vertebrate that breaks a leg in the wild ends up dead dang quickly.
Either because it can’t move quickly enough to avoid becoming prey, OR because it cannot move quickly to catch its prey (food), OR because the attendant problems (pain, shock, infection) do the animal in.
The primary exceptions may (not guaranteed) be found with certain primates (including humans) known to look after injured members of their groupings, and in anatomies where the injured limb may not be necessary for locomotion (eg. the front legs of Kangaroos, the legs of some birds, etc).
Don’t forget that many lizards can regrow severed tails and limbs. A trick that only young human children can match, and then only with the tips of small extremities.
Certain small lizards (as in an inch or two long) manage those tricks, not the bigger critters.
And it should be noted that the regen isn’t perfect even then – the regrown tail is generally shorter.
The types of lizards that can choose to shed their tail actually have a cleavage plane in the vertebra just past their pelvis. In less than a second, in response to extreme stress, using a group of muscular contractions, the lizard can cut off the blood flow to the tail and break the vertebral cleavage plane to drop the tail which starts twitching to attract the predator to it, while the rest of the lizard goes to hide. Regrowing the tail takes a lot of work and a lizard that drops its tail will be extremely unlikely to breed again until the tail is regrown, about 6 months to a year, depending on species.
None of which alters the fact that most vertebrates (including horses) breaking a major limb in the wild will inevitably wind up as crow food.
Another exception are manatees: These animals have massive levels of white blood cells. “White blood cells make up 90% of the blood cell count in manatees! White blood cells make up only 40% of the blood cells in most mammals. Manatees have an enormous ability to fight infection because they posses so many white blood cells.”
Ever heard of Persistance Hunting? It’s how humans used to hunt. Some tribes in africa still do it
It works pritty simple. Follow an animal until it dies for Exhaustion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
Fun fact. The reason we used dogs for hunting, is because they are one of the few animals that can sort of keep up with humans
Broken legs don’t kill humans. Infected wounds might, but that’s something completly different.
Set the leg, and it will heal completly, if given some time. A horse? Cripple for the rest of it’s life (IF it survives). Why do you think people kill a horse if it breaks a leg?
Also: Not counting our massive brain as a strong point when ranking us as ‘weak’ is a huge mistake. We are on the top of the food chain purely because of our brain
Mosquitoes are above us in the food chain.
Fair enough. Insects beat everything
I am happily referring you to the opening credits of “Dexter”. *SMACK*
The bugs beat EVERYBODY…Of all non-plant lifeforms on this planet, bugs were the first to adapt & evolve for land-based living.
We also survive loosing organs frequently.
Our strongest can throw cars around and pull trucks and jets.
Some are known to be over nine foot tall.
The worst have multiple sets of arms or legs, others have horns. Some have scales rather than skin or hair all over, even on the face.
They eat their own and even kill there own family’s.
There planet is always at war with different parts of its self, even using atom splitting bombs.
Some how despite this they still number billions.
This is probably due to the sex drive targeting anything of any gender or age, alive or dead, even animals and inanimate objects.
They entertain themselves with torturing others, scareing themselves and when they make multimedia it’s primarily used to watch others kill, torture, scare and also porn in any combination.
Humans are dangerous and monsterous on many levels.
got it backwards humanity and creatures operating as one work well at keeping up with k9 for long endurance pack hunters just humans maintain the climbing/ herbivore option where a dog (and the old wolfs that evolved into them) are carnivores with the ability to near sleep at a jog faster than most humans run
Nothing can function like that while sleeping.
I don’t know where you picked up that little myth, but it’s bullcrap
near sleep or waking trance while running is not unheard of in humans IF the human has trained themselves to do so while the wolf does so without training allowing for sustained runs in excess of 6 hours blocks and only short water breaks before resuming running
That is something I have truely never heard of.
You caught my curiosity, can you share the source?
I take the Star Trek thing with a grain of salt.
Every species appears superior to humans, and yet humans tend to dominate in that universe. The same goes for DnD.
This suggests we’re overlooking something. Probably because we’re too close to it.
Humans adept faster is probably the thing
The Human – A jack of all trades, master of none.
Personally I think that unless there is some kind of seeding going on (the building blocks of life being spread by meteor impact, for example), then the likelihood is that alien life will be vastly different to us in capability. Very different to us in a variety of ways. Even understanding what they think being a huge challenge. The ‘universal translator’ widget being a very unlikely prospect in my books. First you have to figure out how they view the world, what they think about it, and then try to find some common ground. And there may be none.
Ironically, if we do establish communications with them, they might find it easier to communicate with other species on our planet than us. For instance they might consider our social abilities to be massively under-developed. Whereas elephants (which can remember far many more social interactions and for much longer than humans) might be more akin to their society and thought process.
Of course elephants, cetaceans and the great apes are all mammals and therefore easier for us to communicate with than aliens. And we do not do a good job at that. What if the closest though processes on Earth belonged to squid and octopi? Then we would really be stuffed.
Like a Time-Lordy morphic field or some damn Ancients that had nothing better to do than pollute innocent eco-systems with their junk-DNA.
You should check out the book “A Miracle of Rare Design”. It deals with that, as a matter of fact- though it starts like a bad Avatar rip-off.
Jack-ass you mean XD
The big things for us being competitive with other critters is: very high endurance (for somebody in shape), a very big brain for our body size with a highly creative mind, and the ability to manipulate our environment with our very flexible hands.
If you have ever watched orca (killer whales) hunt, you know they have endurance and smarts. Some pods of orca actively hunt high-end sharks, like hammerheads and great whites, by swimming after them for several minutes, until the fish run out of steam, then the whole pod moves in for the kill. Although smart, creative and having endurance, they have a limited ability to manipulate their environment. While dolphins and whales may actually rule the seas, but not being able to grab and build things hold them back from true dominance. While a dolphin may be a physical match for a shark, when a dolphin turns it into a battle of the wits, the shark is effectively an unarmed opponent destined to lose.
A gorilla has a much greater ability to manipulate its environment than we do, based on flexibility and strength alone. In fact, while humans are the second largest great ape (and primate), we are the weakest of the great apes. A bonobo or chimpanzee is much stronger than most of us. I am not weak as humans go, but where I might be able to bend a small tree, a female adolescent gorilla could pull it out of the ground. A gorilla has the ability to manipulate things with its hands in ways that we can not, but its mind is not as creative as ours, so they do not dominate; we do.
If you include the books than the Klingons can’t see the color red at all. Their version of ‘red alert’ is amber. They can however see 2 shades of ultra-violet. They found out about this when a Klingon refugee wandered into a restricted area marked with black & red warnings, and when asked why he ignored the red warnings he said “What’s red?”.
So that’s why the Doctor called a mauve-alert.
So, when the Klingons board during an attack your best bet is to light up the decks with red light thus making them blind while your forces counterattack?
Wait, so are their flags just the symbol hanging there, black on black or something? Given the dominance of red in their decoration, that seems…unlikely.
The dyes appear red to our eyes, they are something else entirely to the Klingon.
Peuce
That sounds needlessly convoluted and contradicts a great deal of what we’ve already seen of Klingons.
The main reasons for Humans dominating in such settings is either/or a) Adaptability/innovation . (Elves for example are very slow to change or create new things b) The fact that where we might not have their Strengths, we also don’t have their Weaknesses. (Elves while being slight smarter or more agile are also are either physically weaker not as tough) or c) Sheer numbers (Humans can breed 3 generations of soldiers before a single elven generation is out of it’s collective diapers.)
It’s probably mostly the numbers thing. We simply outbreed anything else
ingenuity is why Asia and Europe advanced faster than the rest of the world. East Asians and Europeans evolved under similar conditions where they had to build shelters and plan/store/gather/farm in order to survive winters. Using g weighted IQ tests the east Asians and whites are almost the same on spatial orientation (3-d images that match up down to square peg/hole) while everyone else orders of magnitude worse.
ingenuity is why Asia and Europe advanced faster than the rest of the world. East Asians and Europeans evolved under similar conditions where they had to build shelters and plan/store/gather/farm in order to survive winters. Using g weighted IQ tests the east Asians and whites are almost the same on spatial orientation (3-d images that match up down to square peg/hole) while everyone else orders of magnitude worse.
Europe and Azia advanced faster than the rest of the world because Europe and Azia enslaved the rest of the world for quite some time
Australia? South America? North America?
I’m sorry. I don’t see any logic in that particular assertion of yours.
About the only species that breeds faster than humans, are tribbles :P
Let’s hope we’re not making any prissy warrior-race out there allergic to us.
Regarding Vulcans specifically, it seems to me that the only (or at last main) reasons they appear to be smarter than us are their total adherence to logic (and suppressing their emotions) and because they happen to have been around longer than we have. I’m pretty sure it’s stated in one series (possibly Enterprise) that we’ve developed and advanced as a species faster than they did. Like the gap between achieving interstellar travel and achieving warp travel was smaller for us than it was for them.
The two most likely reasons for this:
1. Humans are writing this, so the story is going to be humanocentric.
2. Humans think small and are very egocentric, so they will look at the world in a way that makes them seem to be the superior race.
IIRC, they actually attempted to touch on this in one of the ST:E episodes, but in reverse – essentially, humans have lesser versions of several key traits from multiple other species, but without the drawbacks from it being so dominant. (e.g. the Vulcans had to train to repress their emotions because they warred to the point where their planet was almost destroyed – but humans had the Cold War instead, and continued to develop without having to completely embrace logic)
Essentially, we may not be better at any one thing, but we have more options to take.
There are quite a large number of factors that contribute to species survival & trying to pick out only a few of them for analysis doesn’t work very well. For example, humans have the advantages of fast breeding rate, adaptability (enhanced greatly by our tool-making & technology) & willingness to organize in huge numbers.
Check out the sci-fi novel, The Mote in God’s Eye, to see an example of an alien race that outstrips humanity in all three qualities! As quoted from the first Jurassic Park movie, “Life will find a way.”
There’s a YouTube of a miniature horse getting a prosthetic leg.
The search keywords “horse” and “prosthetic” shoud find it.
Warning: D’awwww!
Humans are not that tough in reality. People with medical knowledge always wondered how people in Africa who had their limbs hacked off with machetes survived because if someone had their arm hacked off in the parking lot of a hospital in the 1stworld a person would most likely die before the area was safe from the attacker. In the book “Shaking Hands with the Devil” written by a former aid worker it is explained that a strong tribe will gather the children of a weak tribe, put tourniquets on them when they hack off limbs and then charge aid workers protection money to provide aid to the victims. She said that less than 10% of the money that actually makes it to Africa gets spent on actual charity.
I also read that humans are much better generalists than most animals, so while we can’t run as fast or climb as fast or swim as fast, we can climb and swim better than most runners, run and swim better than most climbers, and climb and run better than most swimmers.
The only animal that I know of that comes close to being able to out-compete a human in all events is the bear. The biggest drawbacks for humans is our brains, which require a lot of energy to grow and keep them fed, energy which might otherwise be spent on muscle mass. Overall, I think most people accept the tradeoff.
“…humans have the most extreme endurance on this planet.”
Interesting. Do you have any scientific source on that topic? I couldn’t find any.
Sydney, Sydney, I told you no touching until you had made your decision! Still, plus side, you put it where I suggested you should, if only by accident.
Absolutely! Although I tend to fear the one Mary Sue-o-matics with stacks of different powers (so I’m seriously wary with this comic), the rule has always been put points in intelligence and senses. So glad the gamer at least incidentally put a point on the int orb.
Shh! Don’t use the term “Mary Sue”. It is a despised term that will awaken many sleeping dragons.
I’m a Dragon, hear me roar.
I went to Monsters University to learn Roar is a Greek letter #swot.
no it’s I am dragon hear my enemies roar ….. (cricket chirps….. cricket chirps…. cricket gets stepped on by dragon sound). yes naked apes fear not the darkness for we reside within it.
Just remember to bring ketchup.
*YAWNS! Showing many long teeth* you called?
*ear twitch* something going on over here?
I took my nick from a race of shape-shifting, lightning throwing dragons (Mercedes Lackey’s Halfblood Chronicles).
Well, she had no way of knowing touching an orb would force her to place the point with that Orb groupage (now she does)
yes now she knows and knowing is half the battle
So, in a way, Sydney put her point in one of the best powers (for increasing intelligence or senses), but she did it only by serendipity.
DaveB, your comments about humans not being as good as other species makes me think of a post from tumblr I once saw that covered that point very eloquently. I went looking for it, and turned it up here. https://imgur.com/hINj1xf
Those guys are right – we are scary motherf___ers.
To that I would add the range of biomes we can adapt to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger%E2%80%94Human
’nuff said.
I always thought it would be cool to have humans represented as the warrior species in a sci-fi novel simply because we live in a universe where everything happens to be smaller and weaker than us. Like all the other aliens are the equivalent of Grays, so they’re half our size, 1/4 our weight and strength. Another race is like an insectoid version of pixies, so humans barely fit in their cargo bays, and another is a hardy but slow moving plant like species. Stuff like that.
“But they’re dumb at least, right?”
“Individuals can be, but they’ve split the atom and discovered FTL travel all on their own.”
“Well shit.”
Remember reading a SF book couple decades ago about Earth being invaded, the invaders thought the Terrans would be an easy conquest (poor invaders didn’t stand a chance: not only were they strnger, they were vastly more devious and treacherous and skillful in hunting/killing the invaders)
At the same time, there was an old “Future Shock” story in 2000AD, where this astronaut was abducted/saved after the rest of the planet was destroyed and taken to an alien slave-planet: he was making such a big deal about how Terrans had managed to get to the moon a few times (ignoring the fact he was just captured by an inter-solar space-ship), and then he got squashed by an alien that got tired of his noise :P
You’d like the first short story in this book, I think. https://www.amazon.com/With-Friends-Like-These-Foster/dp/0345323904
I believe it is called the same as the book, “With Friends Like These”. But if not, it’s the one with the war against the Yops.
Ah, yes, “With Friends Like These…”, where humans are the Sealed Evil in a Can.
Alan Dean Foster went back to the theme in his trilogy “The Damned”. An alien alliance engaged in a desperate war needs new allies badly enough to look for them among pre-FTL races, and sends a team to Earth. It turns out that, while humans are not the smartest species in the alliance and are technologically primitive, they are–by the standards of galactic civilization–nightmarish killing machines. I’m particularly fond of the first contact scene, which gives the (mutually panicked) perspectives of the aliens and the lone human they choose to approach first.
His Commonwealth novels have a touch of it as well, though more as historical and background flavor–first contact between humans and the thranx was…awkward. Humans superficially resembled dangerous predators from the thranx homeworld, which scared the thranx, and the thranx look like giant insects, which creeped out the humans. Once they got over it, though, they teamed up to become legitimately scary to everyone else.
I love the Humanx stuff- simply because it’s one of the only series out there where humanity forms a symbiotic relationship with a non-human race- and one that’s not humaniform at that. It’s really heartwarming, in a sociological way to me.
Yea, I love that too. The way the two races are Ying and Yang for each other. The philosopher Thranx teamed with the warrior Human. Seeing past physical differences to find soul-mates in another species.
The ‘Valor” series by Tanya Huff was the same way, Million-year old Galactic Civilization finds itself attacked, but they have absolutely NO warrior-instincts whatever. so they Contact a half dozen races who were just getting off their own planets (Humans included) and basically made a deal. “We’ll let you join us and have our technology if you’ll fight this war for us.”
Of course there is the Stephen Hawking argument to consider. That we should not assume that aliens who are advanced enough to have interstellar travel would be automatically friendly. Which is a position I agree with.
Currently we are ringing the dinner bell, sending signals out into space announcing our presence. Eventually those broadcasts will reach some other race. If they have the capability of reaching us or affecting us in any way, we would be best off assuming that they want to destroy us. Simply because that way we can take suitable precautions, and if they turn out not to be necessary fine. But if we handle it the other way around, and complacently think they will be friends, we are unlikely to survive a pre-emptive strike by an advanced civilisation.
Of course if they’re UN-friendly any species suitably advanced to cross Interstellar distances could pretty much wipe us out without getting any closer than the Moon.
Agreed. If they are overwhelmingly powerful, then whatever whim they have they will be able to take regardless of our actions. But if they have limits to their power, then our attitudes and precautions would be what makes a difference. For instance if it is not economically viable to send mile-wide motherships, but they are limited to just sending a probe. They could pack some very nasty things in there. Biological, chemical. nanological, uber-nuclear or the like.
If we detect it incoming, should we assume friend or foe?
Likewise it will take some time for our dinner-bell signals to reach any likely alien civilisation. Which means that our actions between now and when they retaliate could be what makes the difference. Let us assume that enough time passes that we can develop interplanetary travel, and even generation ships to travel to other stars.
If we follow Stephen’s advice, we would put a moratorium on broadcasting the destinations that those ships will be travelling to. And when they arrive they can take the precaution of only using cable or other non-broadcast means of communicating. Why? Because if hostile aliens do arrive to wipe out Earth, they will not also have a convenient list of all the other infected planets to go to afterwards and finish the job.
I will offer Dabbler’s argument – if they had the ability and desire to come here, what purpose would that meet that couldn’t be done easier and cheaper elsewhere? Resources? Unless Terra has some galactically anomalous thing not found elsewhere (highly unlikely), it can be mined elsewhere (see: The Ice Pirates). Slave labor? 1 word: Robots (counterpoint, see: Mars Needs Women, Space 1969, etc). Clean air? Scrubbers. Real estate? Space stations. Critters? Possibly, but that would then be a quick pick-up for raw breeding stock, and go away.
Bottom line: if they bother coming here at all, it’s probably for interaction and fellowship (counterpoint, see: The Man-Kzin wars).
Well, first off we have no idea of the motivations or thought processes of aliens. They may have no motive that we would understand but if they undertook actions to wipe us out, their reasons don’t really matter. But, if you want to assume that parallel evolution will ensure that all intelligent life will think like us, then how about the following argument.
We are like bacteria, expanding to fill every possible niche in our ecosystem. Spreading toxins and killing anything in our way as we go. We are also developing technologically at a geometric rate. The presumption being that they possess interstellar travel indicates that they know it exists. And they can easily anticipate that we will figure out the trick too, at some point.
Whilst we are confined to a single planet it would be relatively easy to exterminate the disease. But once we escape from it and start breeding and spreading on other planets, all the time increasing our technology and threat capability, their options become more limited. Leave it too long and we might out-strip them. Especially if we locate them and start to learn about their technologies.
And if they have any doubt about it, all they need do is watch the documentaries we broadcast (again assuming that they think enough like us to even understand their significance) to see just what happens every time we encounter a different culture. Although humans have both altruistic and hostile natures we tend to be far better at destroying than protecting.
What motives would they have to come to us? Look at it the other way around, if we know they exist we will want to get to them for 100s of different reasons. And bring all our casual destruction, pollution and contamination with us. And if they have something we really want, then the Avatar scenario is more than plausible. Pre-emptive eradication of humanity would be a priority if they wished to survive long-term.
Well stated, and very persuasive – I would counter that by loosely referencing Fermi’s considerations (not in detail – I have no desire to fill pages with other’s work)…
“I will explain… no, too long. I will summarize” (- Inigo Montoya)
it really does come down to mankind’s base nature, and either we will 1) overcome it, eventually becoming more peaceful, less destructive, and hopefully cleaner (which I would argue we have, over the course of the last few thousand years), thus becoming less of a threat; we will 2) fail to overcome it, thereby eliminating ourselves from the equation; or we will 3) continue our tenuous balancing act, repeatedly bouncing back from the precipice, as we navigate our way to other places. In the 3rd case, as somebody else has already raised, then there’s little we could do about our looming destruction anyway, thanks to the overwhelming technology advantage a sufficiently advanced race would have over us. Thus, it would be the first case that I believe would enable us to meet other races, and for them to WANT to visit with us.
i was going to mention the damned trilogy to. the idea that we are much more psychologically inclined and physically capable of violence then every other sentient species was an interesting take.
You might enjoy the “Worldwar” series by Harry Turtledove. It’s an alternate history science fiction series about what would happen if aliens invaded in the middle of World War II. The aliens are small humanoid lizard-like creatures that expected humans to still be much like the data from their probes, where the most dangerous thing is a knight on horseback. When they show up and see guns, airplanes, tanks, etc. and far more humans than they expected, they’re actually thrown for a loop. And then human and alien psychology is totally different too, so they have to get a handle on that even in the areas that they do manage to conquer. It’s all very well done, and it’s amusing to see how alien terms for technical terms supplant the terms we developed in our timeline (for example, instead of laser, everyone calls it by the alien term “skelwank light”).
Completely separately, there’s a short story (also done as a new “Twilight Zone” episode, though I forget the title of the story) where aliens invade and express their disappointment the way we’re committing war against each other and they say that they’re going to wipe us all out. One of the country leaders contacts them and promises to impress them with change if they let them live. The aliens, surprised and a little amused, give them a few days. After some harried talks, a world peace agreement is settled and all countries agree to it. After much self-congratulation they contact the aliens to let them know. The aliens respond, “Apparently there has been some confusion. We created you to be warriors for our race, and instead you find peace? Nope, I’m sorry, this won’t work out. We’ll be wiping you out after all and then we’ll try again.”
that was from the “Twilight Zone”? huh, i thought it was from “The Outer Limits”…no wonder i couldn’t find it… either way, that was an Excellent episode… i especially liked the head alien’s laugh at the end when he told us we were supposed to be their warriors….
There was a set of kids books that had this as a ‘reveal’ and plot-point at the end of the first book, “Aliens Ate my Homework”. Essentially, the Galactic Standard for adult height is about 4’8″ or something, so the villain is hiding as a kid.
Oh, and the super-smart Galactic hero (who turns out the be the protagonist’s father) is human, from Atlantis, and survived from its destruction to the present due to testing an FTL drive without taking into account the time-dilation
I replied to the wrong section above first time.
Humans even eat anything.
Items extracted from other animals dung.
Bugs, fish, animals and birds. Anything that moves.
Metal, glass, foliage, even tree bark, roots, nuts and fruit.
They even season this food with known poisons such as salt.
Some even eat each other.
They will eat ANYTHING.
One correction. Since most mammals actually need small amounts salt for our bodies to operate properly that should be.
“They Survive on POISON!!!
Never mind salt, chocolate is a dangerous poison to most mammals. And we eat it as a TREAT.
Chocolate is poisonous to us too, sadly. Eat enough of it in one sitting and you will die. The active ingredient is the same that is lethal for dogs. In their case it takes 72 hours to metabolise and they have an extremely low tolerance. We have both a higher tolerance and metabolise it out of our system faster. The purer the chocolate the more intense the poison. So dark chocolate is the most dangerous, followed by milk then white.
Technically ‘white’ isn’t even chocolate (has no cocoa/whatever it is that makes ‘chocolate’ chocolate)
Yorp, too much of ANYTHING even Oxygen can kill as well. Of course we’re assuming the hypothetical alien space bats are also oxygen breathers. Imagine a Methane Breather meeting a Human.
“kliekdo trokig bytedop WSLVR qlimft frok?” (How can you BREATHE that stuff?)
I don’t know why, Adamas, but your comment reminded me of the joke about the elephant encountering a naked man.
“How can you breathe through that thing?”
that’s space mosquito not bat get a translation guide. jk lol (slaps self for use of text talk)
Well exposure to too much oxygen can kill preatty much anything.
…Especially if anything makes a spark…
That goes under “they ride vehicles powered by EXPLOSIVES!!!”
Hey DaveB, can we get the Orb Grid as a standalone wallpaper for the next incentive? It looks awesome.
Here is a link to DaveB‘s reply to an earlier request for that, last week:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1167/comment-page-2#comment-54090
I can actually imagine quite vividly how Sidney would try to let go of the orb. Not being able to do so ends up using her other hand on it for support and pull the first hand away with a victorious “HaHA!”
Then noticing only after a few seconds that her other hand is stuck now. (^_^)
Considering what you’ve just described, your avatar is VERY appropriate.
Tape anyone?
That was pretty much my thinking. I actually thought that she had both hands on the orb and had turned herself over trying to get it to move.
Remember that telepresense Sydney doesn’t (or perhaps now DIDN’T) have truesight.
Good point.
Yeah, but wouldn’t giving “telepresense Sydney” truesight be an extension of an existing power? And therefore be on a chain and not in an isolated node?
it would actually be a combination of two separate powers. Of course it would depend on which power is the default, was the orb original just telepresence that added True-sight? or True-sight that added Telepresence?
If there was a default power, I am pretty sure the two unknowns would have a default known power already too :3
begs the question what if they are imprintable and halo needs a super to grab one so it can copy there power, or if one need to be held by a super so halo can use their power by holding the other one?
Telepresence needs to be triggered by sending the smaller holo proyector ball to the desired point.
True-sight was activated when Syd was not even aware of it existence, just by grab the orb.
True, but that doesn’t mean the projection was part of it’s original powerset. The projection could’ve been one of the ‘points” that was spent on it and Syd doesn’t know how to turn it off.
Come on Dave! Give us some hints!
No, no spoilers please! Dave gives us plenty of hints in-comic to work with.
Anyone else wonder why it looks like shes looking at one of her unknown power balls holding the now upgraded telepresence/truesight ball? Like she’s about to find out what the unknown ball does now maybe??
Very likely. True-sight is a divination power, so she would be wise to try testing it to see if the new feature gives information about other things. And a mystery orb is a good test-subject for that.
Check out the wallpaper download of the skill tree. Be sure to use the download button, on the right, rather than just right clicking the image and saving. That way you get a very high resolution wallpaper. If you examine the comm-ball you will see more detail than is visible on the lower resolution
In particular, look at the chain which already has a single light at the start of it. The end was originally disguised by the haze of the horizon, but you can now see that it ends in a node connected by double-lines. And then has an open-ended line leading off of it. The former (according to the theory I subscribe to) likely indicating that the top power of that chain requires both hands on the comm-ball to use it. And is presumably a pre-requisite to unlock prior to gaining future access to that open-ended upgrade.
Thanks to that hi-res wallpaper, I also notice that the comm-ball and the green unknown have a brighter halo around them. Maybe that’s something else to consider?
I thought the fly ball was brighter than the PPO, but when I covered the orbs, I realised it’s an optical illusion due to the fly ball’s colouration.
Fly-ball has bright halo thingy around it too o_o
Perhaps the new power enhancement will allow Halo to look up other supers’/peoples’ skill trees?
*Halo turns to examine Peggy, with the comm-ball in hand*
“Whoa!” You have a heck of a lot of points in both sniper and helicopter pilot! Err, what is this chain adjacent to a black symbol?”
That would be a very cool power.. and very disturbing.
“…what is this chain adjacent to a black symbol?”
Mmm… you really got me in that one.
Black ops. Strictly tongue-in-cheek as Peggy seems too nice to get involved in assassinations and other nasty business. But she is a sniper so that is a viable career route that she may have followed, covertly.
Funny that – most “Blops” guys (to use DaveB’s vernacular) I’ve met are actually quite friendly and social while off-duty, if a bit… focused on the short-term (i.e. drink like fish and burn through their entire paychecks in the first week).
Trouble is jobs like that get to you in the end. Like customs officials who have to watch 100s of hours of depravity of every sort as part of their job. They can put a brave face on it, but eventually it takes its toll. Sure they can be good company in the pub. But they better hope they get decent support, or eventually it will take its toll of their mental health.
But, point taken. Black ops folks have more need than most to blend in and appear normal.
Customs? Or censor-ship people (you know, the ones that watch all the videos and movies and decide that a movie with kids killing kids rates a ‘PG’ but a movie with 2 swear words {and no violence} in 2-hours deserves an ‘R’)
No, there is quite a distinction. Censors get to look at material that is submitted as being suitable for publication/broadcast. So the makes will go to lengths to ensure that the material is at least legal and likely to pass without being cut or banned. As re-shooting is a costly expense they will want to avoid. Banning may help sales in the long-run, or in other jurisdictions, but is likewise costly in the short-term and could be ruinous under the wrong circumstances.
Whereas the stuff that I was referring to customs officers having to view (ignoring the regular material they have to sift through too) are the extremes of pornography and other bizarre perversions which are considered outright illegal.
Oddly enough those subjects seem to get through censorship quite freely now. Such as mutilation in sex or extreme torture scenes. Of course it is one thing to go to the cinema and see scenes like that, knowing it is faked for ‘entertainment’. Quite another if you are watching what could very well be the real deal.
Correction: “Oddly enough some of those subjects seem to get through censorship…”
Doesn’t need to be a *Blop* job.
I’ve worked in customer relationship for years (cashiering, phone, etc.) in various companies.
That’s where you can see the depravity humans are capable off.
Personally, I can feel Syd’s pain when she’s asking “Is murder still illegal?”
Heck, I’d even hand her a nuke to take care of the problem.
Unknown/untrained ability? Perhaps it’s the genetic potential to BECOME a Super but whatever triggered the others never did for her?
I just think it’s hilarious that she chose something not connected to anything else. Off the beaten path, across the psycho path, around the bend. That’s so Sydney.
I choose TRANSLATOR as the new power.
Ooh, interesting one. And plausible.
Good one. I had not thought of that either. No matter who or what built it Translator makes sense to be on there somewhere.
Hey Dave!
How about Dabbler’s visual spectrum point-of-view as an incentive page?
Error: “It’s OK, it happened IT two separate fights.”
…
On the topic of what that orphaned branch of the Telepresence Orb can do, you gotta ask, “What ties Telepresence and True Sight together as related superpowers on the same power orb?” I think more than individual powers, we should be looking at the most general, unifying, overall ability each orb gives. We may even end up renaming each orb according to its truest nature that way.
Dave B if you are looking for a Sci-Fi series that depicts Humans as sentients that enjoy slaughter and war for it’s own sake check out Alan Dean Foster’s The Damned series. We Kick Alien ASS!
+1
I can agree with that one, (although I’ve only read the first book.)
Also, David Drake’s “Ranks of Bronze”, Roman soldiers are sold as slaves to aliens to fight their wars. It doesn’t go well for the slavemasters.
“Excalibur Alternative”, same universe. Other aliens come back to pick up some Romans of their own, and get English Longbowmen…they’re a little surprised at how fast things progressed on this backward planet.
David Weber’s “Apocalypse Troll”, Kangaroo aliens panic when they come to earth to wipe it out, and are met at the Oort cloud by humans who went from spark-gap transmitters to space flight in LESS THAN 200 YEARS! They try their old standby. Genocide. The book starts as the war is wrapping up with humans on top.
Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” Humans are…lucky. The puppetmasters bred them to be more so. Whoops.
John Ringo’s “Legacy of Aldenata” series. Humans are..almost as industrious as the makers, almost as conniving as the shyster rulers, and frankly MORE deadly than the centauroid crocodiles that have the rest of the galaxy scared senseless.
Christopher Anvil’s “Pandoras Legions”. Aliens land and take over the earth. Whoops. Humans are, on average, smarter, more clever, and flat out dangerous to listen to. So much so we waste intelligence on little things rather than treating such as the rare treasure it is. It gets better. The smartest of the smartest of them give two seats on their galactic council to the new earth-run planet that proves out as the wisest led.
Whoops. Forgot James H. Schmitz “The Hub: Dangerous Territory”
A collection of short stories. Humans are declared off limits after two humans, masquerading as members of a master race manage to throw alien invaders off their water world home. The thing is, the alien council decide they really ARE members of a master race, and poking humans, which seem to want to stay peaceful, could be the end of them all, so declare death to ANYONE ELSE who tries.
Three other books to find and read. ‘Telzy Amberdon”, “Trigger Argee & Friends”, and “Telzy and Trigger”. This book is actually book 4 of the short story reprints.
…has anyone else noticed how the Halo tab at the top of the page has changed?
I think Sidney is seeing shit.
they change everytime the page refreshes
I really like that, just the header makes me laugh every time!
Yeah, the first 5 are always the same people (just different images), but the 6th one uses more than one persons images
Max, what are you doing in your maw in panel 1? Not even talking.
Looks like she is swallowing a comment.
Actually, I do that sometimes. I want to interject a comment into a conversation, but I don’t want to be rude and interrupt the flow, so I kinda stand there with my mouth open slightly, primed to speak. I never noticed until someone pointed it out to me. :P
gonna back up a bit but has anyone else noticed on the orbs they all have a single double line spot at the start and only the green(unknown) one has it lit. I think it could be the no hands needed option.
Try thinking in the opposite direction.
while interesting as far as I can see it has little if any real use. meanwhile hands free option increases the usability and versatility of the orbs considerably. take for example making flight and forb hands free, sid could now fly with a force field up while using true sight ball and ppo to take out opponents. andso many other combos are avalible
The reason is balance. Halo has a shed-load of powers. If she can access them all simultaneously she would be overwhelmingly powerful By having a limit of using two orbs at once, she has to make trade-offs. And will occasionally face difficult decisions.
Flying whilst holding a hostage by her tentacle she comes under attack, what does she do?
That is what makes for an interesting character and story. How they cope with moral dilemmas and find ingenious solutions to tricky problems. If she could simply throw up her force field and blast through it to kill the bad guys, all the while keeping flying and holding the hostage then the story becomes boring, plain and simple.
Obviously the skill-tree indicates that Halo is going to get more capability than she already has. And that is quite considerable as it stands. So also adding hands-free or the ability to use multiple orbs simultaneously would ruin any possibility of compelling stories in future. Or at least make it much much harder.
Whereas if some of the more powerful extra capabilities can only be accessed whilst having both hands on a single orb, that is a significant limitation. But one which gives her interesting options to choose depending on the circumstances.
She could pull the hostage inside her shield, assuming he isn’t hostile
but yeah i know what you mean, 2 orb limit is tricky in a fight.
But she can swap them on the fly, she can use the flying orb to launc herself up, than switch to shield and tentacle for a meteor smash.
Ultra Boy has (or had, not sure what the multiple resets have done to the Legionnaires) all the powers of SuperMan/Boy, but can only use one at a time (so, Sydney is already one up on him :D)
your point would be viable in a game but as this is a story and sid is the “hero” my sumise makes some sense. also if you take some of the incidents that have occured and look at what they could mean in a possible story arc you can see the all that power would be needed to deal with a situation that has been hinted at.
also if you look at all the character info you will notice that there is no balance to them there are just different levels of power and ability.
and speaking as a gamer with 30+ years of experience it would not take a lot of power to take down any member of arc except dabbler the rest would be easy with just a single medium power psi ( call it rank 5 on daves scale)
there is a reason why all the aliens look human
their played by humans in rubber masks
or in the case of Guinan a silly hat
If only Guinan had worn a fez.
Fezzes are cool.
No, no they are not, neither are bowties (he only wore that stupid thing because he had a fear of getting caught by a regular tie in a car-door again)
well,, i love your work,, and about your comment about humans beeing under anything else in some way in scifi,, well a good exemple of that is Farscape.
in that series there is pretty much only one human,, and every species are alot superior to human,, and yet the hero, john craighton, repeatedly prove himself throught ingenuity and perseverance
Then what the hell were the Peacekeepers? They bloody well looked to me! (well except for Scorpious but lets not go anywhere near that freak!)
they were sebacean,, not humans realy,, they lacked the ability to regulate theyr own heat,,had way better vision,faster healing,,and so on,,,altough in the minie serie peacekeeper war that happen after the series,, we learn they were once humans taken from earth by an alien race,, and then geneticly modified to serve theyr needs.
DaveB said “Normally it’s set to match her natural vision exactly, (with some added heads up widgets of course) ’cause otherwise I’d imagine having mismatched vision would give you a headache.” Not true. Almost everybody has miss matched vision in one way or another. The vision part of the brain sorts things out just fine without us even noticing. As for color differences I see more blue from one eye (right) and more red from the other. I am fairly good at seeing heat waves and I think that might have something to do with it. FYI. :)
Love the comic, Grrl power, Girl Genius and The Gamer (manga) are my top three things to read, in that order.
I think he meant if one eye was seeing “Normally” and the other was seeing IR/UV that’s a fairly noticeable dissonance. or look at an object through a telescope with one eye and not close the other. That tends to cause me a headache.
An experimental technique some opticians (or is it opthamologist? I can never keep the two straight) are using for people that need bifocals but want contacts is to provide one each for distance and close-up vision. The users then train themselves to focus with one eye for reading, and the other for driving. Initially, it results in pretty bad headaches, but apparently the average adjustment period is less than a week.
I got them a couple of months ago. No headaches, and I was fully adjusted in about 30 seconds. :)
Go to the movies.
The 3d movies.
The Ooooooooold kind of 3D movies.
Put on your 3D glasses, the ones with blue and red plastic lenses.
Tell me your two eyes don’t get vastly different color inputs (mind, watching any large areas with all blue or all red is wierd). People have done this for years, for 90+ minutes at a go.
I can’t use 3-D glasses. Old, New, whichever are both totally ineffective for me and the new ones also give me a migraine to boot!
I like that, but can’t find anywhere that sells those!
I love those too, but I prefer Paranatural to girl genius.
Rather than the points to/from orbs, I’m very curious about the ring of spots that seem to make the center fill up when lit. Maybe since they don’t directly link to any orbs, they increase her other stats? Like making her taller/stronger/faster/harder (que 70’s porn music.)
Also, the last few weeks I’ve been having this amusing image of the underwater site where she found the orbs, and a couple feet away is a manual for them.
harder. faster. better. stronger. work it. make it. do it. makes us. punk out daft man
Calling it now; can’t use orbs while the skill tree is open? Levelling up is someday going to come around and bit Sydney in the ass at an inopportune moment.
well there HAS to be some disadvantage to the overpowered artifact
I would like to point out that Dabbler said she lost her hand in a sword fight.
It wouldn’t happen to have been against her father by any chance? And were the swords glowing?
Also Sydney is reaching for the PPO in the last panel. Now, now miss Scoville, Mr. Pew Pew is an outside toy only!
No no no, look closely: she is reaching for the Brown Unknown (the Green Unknown is on the table)
It might be. Too bad the orbs don’t come with printed labels. Oh wait, that is what she is looking for using the truesight function.
That’s kinda why they are now feature as part of her “Who’s Who” side-listing (PewPew is red with cracks, Unknown Brown has a white ‘splodge’ in the middle)
I MUST RESIST ANAL SEX JOKE ABOUT BROWN ORB!!!!
still waiting for a blue ball joke from someone (FORB)
Yoda: No, Dabbler. Your father I am. Hmmm
Yoda of Borg I am.
Suzie’s coolness factor has jumped up through the stratosphere with the last panel :D
And loving poor Ari’s face :D
Hate to be the wet blanket on this week’s awesome strip, but there’s a typo in panel 1, bubble 6. Second “it” should be an “in.”
There’s always something. Thanks for the heads up, it should be fixed if you CTRL+F5
So if I may give some advice here, Dave, it would be KEEP ADVERTISING. Mention Patreon in some fashion at the bottom of every post. New people find this comic every day, and one of the first rules of business is to make it easy for people to give you money. Just my two cents.
Now, Now, Sidney…you can’t go respeccing when you don’t even know what does what…you could completely change how every ball works by putting slotting way different than your original setup.
Oh, and I found a group of villains for the Grrls – http://www.thekronies.com
Wait, are those for real? o_O
Just watched the clip, and it seemed like a spoof or something O_o
ok…I’m lost, ARE they a spoof? An actual “Parody” toyline?
Originally, just a joke website and youtube clips, but I’ve heard the creators are considering a kickstarter campaign to make actual action figures.
Dave about what you wrote up top there, about the cyber eye, there was a group of experiments done in the 60’s with sight where a person used, what looked like night sight goggles to see the world upside down, after a few days, surprisingly the world turned right side up they found that the brain when exposed to extended stimuli would filtered out what it considered wrong. Correcting vision to something more acceptable.
If I recall correctly, it was prism glasses that did indeed turn light upside down.
Though the brain had simply adepted to ensure that what you see makes sense, in the same way that an infant would simply do something with an arm. The brian than notes what happends, and files that command with that responds (it’s how you learn new skills)
So, are yo going to start selling ARC tshirts, like the one Max is wearing?
That’s not a bad idea, I’ll look into it.
kickstarter run for the merchandising cups posters and a regular stock of t-shirts like the always expect ninjas and max’s one
I’d totally buy a “Got Cookies?” tank top…
what about the Seal one Elfguy?
I’d rather have AnvilXD.
You know all things considered. I think that would be what I would have picked as it would be the quickest means of starting to figure out what the layout entails.
Maybe one of the unknown orbs is a recorder/knowledge database. It would have info on the previous owner and his/her experiences, and probably info on the creator of the orbs as well. But wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out the previous owner didn’t know how to use them either?
And if it IS recording Sydney’s experiences, I wonder if it’s relaying that information back to the orbs’ place of origin.
Sydney has already thought of a version of that (in panel 8).
It’s official. Suzie is a nerd. :)
Also, Respec, Sydney? You know you have to pay for a token to do that!
And get a mind-flayer to stick his tentacles in your brain.
AHA DDO reference. And with that I’m off to login to Cannith
Here’s a theroy on what will happen the next comic:
Sydney:”Wow Maxima, I didn’t know you had a rose tattoo!”
*Everybody else looks at Maxima*
Dabbler: You’ve been holding out on me!
Sydney with naked vision? This could be wonderful or terrible or both for her.
Remote viewing unlocked ?
Full spectrum sight?
Magic detection vision?
Cosmetic choice of the other powers of the orb? telepresence appearance?
Magic or holographic disguise?
Invisibility ?
Walk through walls?
Accident leveling choices can leave the possabilitys being weird, fun and endless.
Invisibility would have nice synergy with the projected image. Assuming that it transmitted a visible version of her, even though she could not be seen directly.
Sort of like Displacer Beasts?
Oooooooooooo: combine that with the Hentorb and she could become… Displacer Sydney!!!
Or actual see-through-stuff sight.
Just to top the cake and ‘up yours’ all the other females in ARC.
“Ah, about that x-ray note in the showers? Guess what…”
Sydney grinning from ear to ear, heading to the showers.