Grrl Power #303 – Ratings are plummeting, film at 11
Yet another page where someone is weirdly cool discovering they know a person with super powers. For some reason my instinct was to move the dialog forward and not spend any time on the “OMG” factor, which is often the funnest part of a lot of superhero stories. I may revise an upcoming page to make Olivia a little more excited about it, though I’m fairly confident she’ll be the last person Sydney meets today who doesn’t already know about her powers and the events from the prior day.
I think I’ve decided that women just don’t carry purses in this universe. I forgot to give Olivia one on this page, after remembering several times during the drawing process that I should give her one, but the forgetting won out over the remembering. Honestly though I’d probably forget it on every subsequent panel anyway. It does make me wonder where Olivia keeps anything though, as she’s wearing yoga pants and a fairly tight… shoulder hole thumb hole shirt. I’m sure there’s an actual name for that. The lexicon of women’s fashion is enormous. Let’s call it a long sleeve tank top? With thumbholes? She might have her phone strapped to her arm under the sleeve like a jogger, and maybe a credit card and driver’s license jammed in under that, or she could be one of those women that carries stuff in her bra. A credit card or a few folded bills I get, but when I see a woman stick her phone down the front of her shirt I start thinking about greasy, sweaty phone screens and want to attack her with Windex. None of this helps us figure out where Olivia is keeping her keys. Certainly not down her bra. Anyone who does that isn’t allowed to complain about an underwire poking them. You might as well stick “that darn pointy sea urchin” or “a handful of razor sharp peanut brittle” down there.
Wasn’t quite sure how to end this page. The point of it was simply to reintroduce Olivia, other than that I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. Originally the page ended with Olivia realizing she just said she gets all her news from the Daily Show in front of a gaggle (herd? school? murder?) of “real” reporters, then she turns and says “Sorry but…” and did some mini rant about how 24 hour news networks suck, which I personally think they do, but that may be because I watch the Daily Show and they spend a fair amount of time skewering them. Well, I watch it on and off. Depressing news is still depressing even if you’re making fun of it. I had to stop watching John Oliver’s show for the same reason. All I can think after watching Oliver do 15 minutes on (insert organization here) is how scummy and crappy and greedy and selfish and short sighted people are – So instead I ended the page on a ratings gag! Ha cha cha! I’m sure there are plenty of twenty somethings that watch the news, but I imagine it’s their weakest demographic. I’m not much of a newshound myself, but I usually have a tab open to tweetdeck, and if something important enough happens it’ll show up there faster than the shockwaves of an earthquake.
I’ll try and be around and catch comments today (Monday) but I’m having my whole house recarpeted so I may be a little distracted. I’m not looking forward to disassembling my office. It should be nice though, the stuff we’re putting in is so plush compared to the old carpet that I may have to plane the bottom of my doors so they fit.
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Man, last frame….
I almost feel for the guy and news people in general…almost…
Dang you Dave! Making me feel sympathy for reporters! :P :)
+1
Actually I feel sympathy for a lot of them. They do an important job, and it can be tough at times. They are just let down by a few elements within their profession.
The biggest problem that real journalists face is that those “few elements” that give us the worst impressions are those most likely to be facing the camera when they talk. Most of the blame for that can be put on the editors & administrators that decide in favor of putting the more “sensationalist” types on camera.
i got to disagree The biggest problem that real journalists face a chose. ether they can do the real news and end up in a low pay dead end job or they can bend to the will of the coperute sponsors and have they’er work on a ‘serious network’ and provide for their family.
the problem is money in the news.
… Or is it news in the money? Can be hard to tell.
In the good old days, it was actually possible to have reporters and commentators who knew what they were talking about.
Now it is solely about presentation. Style without substance or, as the late great Sir Terry Pratchett expressed so well in one of his books, “All sizzle and no sausage.”
CNN unfortunately was the harbringer of the end of professionalism in News for sensationalism. When you have a 24 hour news cycle you have to fill up those time slots with *something* to get those add revenues. Hence the PT Barnum approach to journalism.
The thing about Ali Brown is an actual thing. The Philly bit I have no clue.
Media has too pick and choose the things they can use to whip the masses into a furor with, and it needs those things to fit with their decades long selective narratives.
*shrug* what can ya do? Pass a law for the media to report truthfully instead of sensationally? I won’t hold my breath for it.
Sensationalism is not something you could stop, true enough. So long as people keep consuming such, they will carry on. Maybe a few high-profile campaigns to boycott the worst offenders, might get them to shift their focus?
But truthfulness? Yes, that could, and should, be a legal requirement for any organisation providing news. Given the quantity of news that larger organisations cover, and the speed that we expect them to keep us informed, we need to be realistic of course. So a certain margin of error should be allowed. Especially if a rapid correction is made, and they do not attempt to hide it away.
But deliberately distorting the truth, outright lies, inadequate fact-checking, overstating hearsay as if it were fact? All of these things should be punishable by law. Having fines proportionate to both the offence and the wealth of the company.
With jail sentences for the most serious cases. The ones where actual harm could have resulted. Such as people following incorrect health advice. Or somebody being lynched, because they were falsely accused of a crime.
One European country has even made it a criminal offence to make false psychic predictions.* I think this too should be implemented for newspapers and other purveyors of horoscopes. Every reader of a newspaper, who finds that their day does not match their horoscope prediction, should be entitled to sue the paper for fraud.
* Amusing though it is, this was actually as part of the process of making fortune telling a legal and taxable profession. It turns out to be a very big business, even in a minor nation. But anyone who is given a prediction there, which does not come true, now has a legal recourse to remedy the situation.
I agree 1000%. News should be unedited unvarnished truth and facts to inform the people what is going on so the people can come to a personal honest opinion without persuassion. It should be as it was meant to when tv nightly news was established as a condition for use of the nations airways for the tv signals which were broadcast. Any lies or op-ed pieces aired during the mandated news segment should pay heavy fines and give immediate retractions. I am only talking about the 1hr nightly news here let Cnn and Fox pollute the airways with thier opionion pieces and ‘reality tv’ news the other 23 hours a day to their hearts content. We need to put our footdown and demand truth from our news and polliticians and hold them accountable. How can we expect crap to change for the better if we not only readily assume all we are told is lies and that the majority simply accept it as ok, the price of politics. Bah, sorry its a sore spot for me.
Nothing to apologise for. It should be something that we are as up in arms about as the USA’s preoccupation with protecting the right of Freedom of Speech and the UK’s current fixation on the EU influence over policy making.
Whereas we should all be much more concerned that the cornerstone of a properly democratic society, namely an informed populace, is subject to the whim of such institutions.
My reply refused to reply. Grrr.
What’s a podcast?
It is a modern term for broadcasting.
Which, as we all know, is the act of throwing seeds, into a ploughed field, by hand. Pods are just seed cases, from things like peas. So presumably the guy has taken up horticulture, as a fall-back job?
Or maybe he is just taking the pee?
Yorp. I have never agreed with you more about anything.
You just have to be careful that you don’t podcast with the seeds of Body Snatchers…
Soylent Really Green, made from the best pods on earth.
Not really, Dr.Revenge. It varies from person to person.
What the people are pod people!!!!
I’ll repeat my joke.
Soylent Green is not always great. It varies from person to person .
Can’t go to sleep the pods will get me.
Explaining the joke further…. In the movie, Soylent Green…
Spoiler alert:
Soylent Green is made from people.
See, it’s funny because it’s a play on words. From person to person can mean based on the person eating it, or based on the person being eaten.
And explaining the joke makes this all the funnier, doesnt it?
sorry,wasn’t funny the first time, and explaining it just makes it worse..
Please refer to the earlier reference of Body Snatchers if you haven’t seen the original 1956 film with Kevin McCarthy or the 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland you should. It is a red scare movie which came out shortly after Robert Heinlein wrote Puppet Masters, The movie had pod that became people in it. The book is better we win in the first movie we may win in the second movie we clearly lost. Don’t sleep the pod people will get you. Oh and read the book much better than either of the movies. Also it has a movie starting Donald Sutherland as the old man in it I personally found that ironic.
There was also a near-remake called “The Invasion” (2007), with Nicole Kidman. In it there were no pods, instead alien spores that took over human brains when they slept.
Another difference: the humans fought back and clearly won.
SPOILERS:
“Soylent Green is people!”
You are what you eat, so…
People are Soylent Green!
Therefore…
People are people!
should I stop boiling them with a pair of lambs for dinner?
How is it that Olivia is more beautiful than any Super in the comic?
Consider her the Mary Jane Watson of Grrlpowercomic?
Closet Super heroine??
She is a Super with the power to look beautiful
The Eye of the Beholder.
Btw, DaveB, since no one else gave you the answer….
The type of shirt Olivia is wearing is called a halter top shoulderless (or shoulderless halter-top). Basically it’s a top which is like a halter top, but with attached sleeves.
Da spaghetti is trying to return
Confirmed. Just a tiny bit of Alphabet Soup this time – at least, for me.
“Oh geeze yeah, I guess there’ll be footage of me on The Daily Show” *The footage of her that’s shown on The Daily Show*
“No one my age watches ‘news’.” Hence, the flaming ignorance of friend and boss about the events involving Halo and her new super pals.
How does John Stewart and John Oliver not count as news?
Um… because they’re comedy shows by comedians? You do know John Stewart is a comedian, right? His jokes just happen to be mostly about politics.
The biggest hint is probably that it’s on COMEDY central. But if you get all your news from the Daily Show, I can understand how that might have slipped by you :) hehe.
News can be funny, every news outlet has it’s drawbacks, and all of them are about politics these days.
Thanks for PANDERing to me
Have you seen the latest diabolical plot that the evil squirrel overlord is up to?
Yorp you are a strange puppy.
When I saw this video, I immediately thought of the Grrl Power universe — and the recent battle. Perhaps this is what Archon players do for fun and team building?
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=968894583135824
Some good moves there. And Iron Man does have a distinct disadvantage against Magneto.
Nice to see that one wizard rules them all.
I just realized something… “Dabbler’s IQ can’t be measured on a human scale” doesn’t mean she’s smarter than any human can be, just that the way her mind works is so different the methods humans use are inapplicable. In fact, if she had that much brain power, her abilities would be vastly superior to those demonstrated so far; she would have out-though Vehemence almost as soon as he said he was a vehemic user, and it wouldn’t have taken her so long to remember what that means. The tech may be advanced, but only by human standards, something she most definitely is not: for all we know her tech is something high-school engineers knock together in their parents’ garages on her homeworld.
Either that, or she actually is that intelligent and is just playing the entire team for fools in a futile attempt to distract her from the crushing melancholy that is reality.
She is probably off the human I.Q scale for raw power, but that doesn’t mean her processing speed is any faster.
Plus as Dave has said she has a short attention span, mostly.
Queing up the phrase “the attention span of a sugared up child” from Dave’s character writeup on the cast page. There is also a reference of “ADHD genius” liberally peppered throughout the comic & Dave’s blog writings.
The key bit is that IQ is keyed to measuring human intelligence. It simply does not work on other species, as they have no common points of reference. In Dabbler’s case, as an alien, a magic user and a psionic individual, she is operating on planes that we cannot even see, let alone properly visualise.
It would be like a fish trying to measure the intelligence of a human, judged by the hand that comes into it’s tank, to move the castle. What the fish might consider to be more important, say bringing more food, need not necessarily be what the human’s motivations are.
We can’t properly judge Dabbler’s IQ because we don’t know enough about how her various species think, and behave, or what their value judgements are.
They PARODY the ‘news’ reporters and pundits. They are not a major source for information and should not be considered as such, even if you by pass the actual biased reporting by only looking at The Daily Show.
“Ah the ‘it doesnt count if she doesn’t see it’ defence.” Sounds a lot like the guinness world record people.
They’ll watch the “News” if you put a d in there.
But that’s a no d. Or would that be a yes d?
Yes, as in they want the d in there? Or no as in the word doesn’t have a d?
This is quite the big d I’m discussing here, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it got censored somehow.
Nobody likes it when the d’s hang out like this. Not even d ladies.
Oh.. Uh.. I got distracted. Back to your content! BACK! BACK I SAY!
Unless she has very few Facebook friends and none of them watch the news either, and she never checks her home feed, her getting her news from there doesn’t explain her not knowing, unless she didn’t check it yet today (which she should’ve mentioned if that’s what she means).
News channels have a problem. They need people to watch their ads, or they don’t get money. Which means the viewer has to stick around through the ad.
Also they have to be showing something that will make people turning it on stay. Which usually means something dramatic. Or funny or cute, but those don’t make as many people stay watching.
Which means if there’s something both dramatic and boring, e.g. a hostage standoff, they need to voice over dramatically or something, anything, to keep people from turning it off.
It doesn’t make it less scummy, but looking at the incentives makes it both somewhat less irritating and also easier to turn off.