Grrl Power #297 – Morning errant
This page is exists almost entirely due to the fact that when I’m descending in an airplane, I have enormous trouble telling where I am. Mind you this is on the return trip – when I’m coming home to the city I’ve lived in for ~20 years. Obviously I know I’m near and/or heading toward the airport, and sometime I can pick out a massive landmark like a huge mall, but if I’m high enough and can’t read the store names, I’m not positive which mall it is. Also, you’d think one of those big mix masters on the highway would clue you in to which road you’re above, but a sufficiently large city has one every 5-10 miles, so you can guess but you still might be off by quite a bit.
This is mostly my own fault. I mean besides the fact that everything looks different from above when you’re used to seeing it from 6 feet off the ground, but for all the time I’ve spent living in Dallas, I really don’t know it very well. 90% of my haunts are probably within 10 miles of where I live. Once every 3-4 months I’ll wander down into Dallas proper for one reason or another but considering the size of the DFW metroplex I really don’t go exploring a lot. That’s why when I spot a mall from the air “near the airport” I still rarely have any idea where I really am. Sydney’s probably the same way, most of her regular destinations are ~10 miles from where she lives, with the odd trip out further to the specialty game store or a small comic convention in a satellite city. If she wanders too far off her beaten path without a working GPS she can get lost real quick.
That top panel took like six hours. :…..( While I have a functional understanding of perspective, a city scape like that is more or less beyond me, at least making it look convincing. So my solution was to take several photos and stitch them together, then use that as a base to paint from. That’s harder to do than it sounds cause finding aerial photos taken at roughly the same altitude can be tedious, plus most of the pictures I found were either taken smack in the middle of the downtown area, were suburbs with nothing but residential housing, or they were countryside and farmland. Maybe I’m bad at Google but industrial urban sprawl aerial shots all in the right perspective were few and far between. Once I have the reference pictures melded together I wind up fudging a lot of details anyway, but it’s useful to have the base to work from. I do that partially cause I don’t want to just plop a photo in there, even with attribution and permission I’d still want to paint over it, and partially because I want to be vague about what city they’re based in, at least until I decide it’s relevant to the story to establish it. The point is the characters may fly over this exact spot a lot. :)
It occurs to me that I didn’t draw Sydney with a purse. I gave her a little blue one in some of the early pages when she was at the bank but then I completely forgot about it for the next 250 pages. Even though she doesn’t carry cosmetics around with her, it seems unlikely she’d be able to get by with just a phone and wallet in one pocket and keys in the other. (And The List in her back pocket) Yes, if she was only running to a grocery store and back maybe, but she’s leaving her apartment for the day. Very few women are so minimalist. I don’t blame them. If I could carry around a purse like thing that was acceptable for a man, I would fill it with all kinds of garbage. The perfect example is a shoulder bag I bought for carrying stuff around conventions. It’s exactly the right height and width to fit an iPad, but obviously it’s deeper than that with three separate zippable compartments. Now it has, in addition to a small sketchpad, some pencils, a phone charger with 4 separate USB outlets on it and the appropriate cables attached, and a small stack of the postcards I use to pimp the comic (perfect for a convention naturally), it has every adapter known to mankind so I can hook the iPad up to any video display, with the possible exception of UHF. The bag is now weighs 18 pounds. Oh, also one of those very small screwdrivers with all the interchangeable heads stored in the handle. Because I’m a guy.
March snuck the hell up on me. :P I seriously thought there was like a week left in February. :/ Edit: The vote incentive is finished finally!
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Honestly I’d probably find it *easier* to tell where I am from the air. I spend a lot of time on Google Maps though…
If you read through the various pages of comments, you will see that we number some pilots amongst the readership. And they disagree. If you can’t spot a familiar reference point, you are lost. And that is very easy to do. Especially if you can travel at the kinds of speeds that Sydney does!
Unlike Google Earth, the real world has weather. So that nice familiar view you think you know, may look very different, in the afternoon light (from an areal perspective), or with part of it mottled by a cloud blocking some light.
Also throw in the fact that Google Earth views are from a fixed perspective (always oriented with North at the top). Which is unlikely to be the one that you are seeing things from.
Sydney: I guess this is like reading a map, which I don’t know how to do well. Let’s see. Ooh, there’s a smashed building, and there is the broken bridge construction site. Yes! I know where that is. So that means I should find the comic store, … there!
I just realized something. What is Sydney’s flying weight being supported by? For example, whenever Iron Man is flying all his weight is being supported by the jets in his feet and little bit in his hands. After seeing multiple flying characters across multiple series I only just realized this. The only thing I can think of is that the flying orb doesn’t act by making her fly but by negating the downward pull gravity has on her and by activating an artificial gravity for propulsion. (It’s a small difference but the community for this webcomic apparently cares about this kind of thing).
It is, we do, and that is the conclusion we have come to too. And it is provable, by when Sydney flies upside down, yet her hair hangs down, in relation to her own body, not towards the ground, as normal.
Although there are a few scenes which suggest that it is not quite as simple as redirecting the gravitational field. But such may well just be down to artistic licence and the readership over-fixating on the minutiae.
You know, you’re right. I can easily see over-fixating on the minutiae killing the fun in any series that has physically impossible phenomena such as super heroes, or other stuff like how spellcasting would work in the real world.
If you try too hard to figure out how something like that would work (such as *how* the orbs generate anti-gravity) in the real world then eventually you would reach the conclusion that it can’t. After over-analyzing something in such fine detail eventually you need to accept it works that way just because the author says it does and hope he/she stays consistent with that otherworldly concept.
So for some people I guess knowing more about the real world (combined with the mindset of “this is how everything in physics must be”) cuts them off from enjoying some fiction that is inherently unrealistic/impossible. Maybe that’s why some people or so critical, because they always watch/read something with a deconstruction mindset instead of just accepting that’s how that world works.
*are so critical
Actually at least one Nobel prize has been awarded because of a kid making a statement to his dad, about something which ‘is not possible in the real world’, and his dad trying to explain to him why. Being a physicist he could do this authoritatively. But he needed to do so in very simple terms, so that his young son could follow the argument.
When he followed this chain through, he found that conventional physics could not explain it. In order to do so, he had to uncover a new principle of physics. Thus earning his Nobel prize.
Conversely someday someone may find that attempting such a task uncovers a principle which overturns conventional physics thinking.
We may yet discover how to produce usable anti-gravity.
What was the original thing that sparked that discussion?
I was simply bringing it from the comic world into the real world. That is one of my super powers.
Six?
My first trip to “the lower 48” from Alaska, I tried to ‘orienteer’ my location in a city by where the water tower was….(Cause, ya know, I was used to mountains.)
Turns out, in this larger city, there is more than one water tower. : /
Best hire a local guide if you go on holiday to Europe. I cannot recall having seen any in cities here. Although I do have memories of many in Africa.
I just feel like, once more, requesting that you turn the top panel into a wallpaper. :-)
*applies paw print, to second the motion*