Grrl Power #349 – Inverting and abusing
Sydney’s abuse of genre savvy may eventually backfire on her. She could be burning trope karma for all she knows. But this is the beginning of the media circus that will be an important part of all the supers’ lives. Endless invitations to grand openings, clubs, morning news programs, talk shows, cooking programs, whatever. Eventually they’ll be rejecting far more than they’ll be accepting, though most of that will be filtered through Arianna’s staff.
I struggled with Aurelius’s use of the word “demarcation” because I had convinced myself there was a better word to use there. I wanted a word that meant something like demarcation, milestone, achievement or threshold that signifies a quantity which once achieved, tips you into a new category. Those words basically mean what I’m thinking of, but I still feel like there is an actual word that means exactly that, like it’s buzzing around on the tip of my tongue. Demarcation works, but it would be grammatically better if he said “A curious demarcation of wealth.” instead of “for” The word I want to exist would be grammatically better with “of.” It’s weird, even though English is, if not the language with the most words, then certainly a contender, but even in English it’s possible to find these sorts of gaps. I’m not sure if this is one of those times or if I’ve totally blanked on a perfectly cromulent word, but hey, new words get invented all the time.
In Sydney’s mind, the ability to afford an infinity pool means you have crossed from being a fiduciary plebeian into being “rich.” I’m not even sure those are especially expensive (and neither is Sydney) – more so than a regular pool to be certain, but they just feel opulent. That’s probably because while it’s possible to install one in your backyard, they certainly have more impact when attached to a house on a cliff, an ocean front property or a penthouse, so they’re more of an icing on the cake affair.
Sydney grew up in a very middle-to-upper middle class home. Her mom and dad do ok but were generally quite conservative with their money most of the time, to make sure they had enough for an annual summer vacation, to help Sydney with her first car, general planning for the future stuff. Growing up, Sydney was never flush with cash, but had enough to support her hobbies, and now that she’s living on her own she usually has enough to keep up with the usual luxuries but has to scramble whenever a big ticket item comes around like a new console or a trip to ComicCon, but little future proofing. We’ll have to see what having a flush bank account does to her in the coming chapters.
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Sydney, you lovable scamp you! :D
I like it especially how Shrapnell is also looking around in panel 6. :)
I wonder if he knew what she was trying to do, or was wondering what she might be waiting for.
Maybe he was looking for the hidden camera, or the nearest exit :D
Wouldn’t the nearest exit be stage left?
Even more fascinating is the way the PPO (yes, of course I’m hip) casts that light on Sid’s face in the last panel. Don’t tell me it doesn’t look evil.
Sorry, to me she looks insane, not evil.
Looks constipated to me :P
Oh boy I might be the first here. Quick think of something witty!!! ……………eeeeeeeeeeeeh………
Curse you Guesticus!
:D
That’s what happens if you don’t come up with anything witty or relevant :P
Oh well…There’s always going to be somebody wind up in second place.
…Unless there’s only one in the race…
At least Sydney isn’t thinking of a Dead Pool (Dirty Harry movie or the marvel character) :P
Yet.
That… shouldn’t work like this.
Well, we are talking about Sydney here :p
About Sydney. Who lives in a world with real superhumans. That are in part more destructive then some nuclear weaponry.
Her superpower is to take advantage of genre-savvyness. Her lack of… “obvious superpowers” and other such traits is all to make people underestimate her.
Let’s just hope she doesn’t get carried away and continues to use her genre-savvy power for good!
What’s the name of the pool with a current you swim against?
The Infinity Pool is the one with the illusion it has no edge, right?
endless pool is one of the brands of pools with a current to swim against
What I want is a natural swimming pool; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_pool
No chemicals to hurt my eyes, and I get a nice water garden as a bonus. And if I get a house with the right view there’s no reason it couldn’t have an infinity edge too.
Agreed, my parents live about 12 km away from one. During the summer I visit as often as I can.
Were you thinking “standard of wealth”?
Aurelius could have said “That’s a curious standard for wealth”, actually there are a lot of ways he could have put it. I guess I got hung up on my word hunt.
I do that rather often. Sometimes I find the word, or I call someone that is able to guess it, but very often I find that the word I’m searching for is nothing but a figment of my imagination. Or I find that it is in the wrong language, as I know about two-and-a-half.
My guess at the word you were searching for is “yardstick”.
I second the recommendation of stackexchange made further down. The one for English is really good, the ones for anything Linux or similar and most things computers are simply great. I’m not that happy with the math and science ones but they are certainly better places than many other places for those questions.
I’ll just point out that, at least around here, participating in a game show includes a contract that has a clause that the winnings are yours only if the show is aired. As such, if you participated in a pilot that never got aired, no money for you.
Shachar
Really? That sucks for the people in most of the pilots, but I guess it makes sense.
And there’s more. Those gameshows don’t compensate you for all the taxes you’re going to have to pay. So if you win a lot of expensive prizes but not a lot of money, you’d better make sure you have enough money on hand when the taxman cometh.
In some contests (usually not game shows, but other contests which may or may not be advertised on television), you also sign an agreement NOT to sell the cars for at least a year. That’s so they can take promotional photos. I remember a contest a few years ago on VH1, on the 36th anniversary of the Corvette… 36 Corvettes (one from each model year), one winner.
As far as I know, they didn’t even include any cash to pay the taxes on the cars, so you’d probably have to sell some of them just to pay the tax. Then there’s the insurance… The good news is that the most recent televised contests I’ve seen are the “Dream Car Contests” in which you donate $10 or $20 to charity in exchange for entries into the contest, and if you win, you win two vehicles (I can’t say “cars” because it’s not always cars; sometimes they’re trucks, or one of them is an RV or motorcycle), and they do give you enough money to pay the taxes (usually around $30,000).
Ah, to live in Canada, where winnings from game shows and (legal) gambling are not added to your income before determining your taxes. Illegal gambling gets taxed at 100% (plus fines). Most U.S. casinos withhold 30% for taxes, so Canadians have to apply to get the tax money returned when they get back here. Some forms of legal gambling, like day-trading, are taxed using our weird capital gains formula.
It’s the same in the UK: the taxman prefers to take his cut up-front (‘Betting Tax’), so winnings are not taxed at all. You won “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, now you are one.
This leads to an anomaly for the day-traders. If you buy and sell contracts, you’re ‘trading’, and your profits attract capital-gains or income tax. By contrast, ‘spread betting’ is classed as gambling, so there’s no tax on profits.
Assuming there are any.
There was a contest a few years back where the winner got a very rare sports card. The IRS hit her with so much in taxes she had to sell the card to pay them. Found it!
There’s also this.
There’s a big lan party in Dallas each year called Quakecon and for the past few years one of the sponsors have given away a car, like a decent one, something with all the options, weighing in around $45-55K. I imagine very few people being able to win something like that and not immediately having to sell it in order to afford winning it.
In Britain you don’t have to pay taxes if you win something. I was shocked when I discovered that the opposite was true in the US.
To be fair (using The Price Is Right as an example), I would probably sell several of the prizes anyway. “A sailboat? I don’t know how to sail, *and* I live 330 miles from the nearest place where I would want to be seen sailing anyway. Guess it’s time to put a ‘for sale’ ad in the weekly inklies.”
(There’s a place less than 20 miles away where you could use a sailboat. But it’s a lake, owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and almost all of the other boats on the water are aluminum fishing boats in the 11 to 18 foot range. Not exactly a place you would go to impress women with your expensive sailboat, so to speak.)
Or “a Dell computer? I already built my own computer that’s twice as good for half the price (and isn’t loaded with bloatware). Let’s call the newspaper and take out an ad.”
This is one of the reasons that many contests have the option of getting a cash equivalent. Most car giveaways I’ve seen have such stipulated in the fine print.
I’ve seen giveaways where you win a 3 year lease on a new car.
If you win a new car and can’t afford the taxes, a lot of places will give you a title loan against your vehicle.
As mentioned in an earlier page (either last or previous page), mum brought us up that way as well: we didn’t have many luxuries but we didn’t go without on the necessities which is the important thing (apart from one time we had to eat nothing but potatoes for about two to three weeks, but was too little to remember :()
Actually Dave, depending on how you do it, an infinity pool can actually be less expensive than a regular pool, especially if you DIY. Think of it this way, if three sides are cinder block lined, and the fourth is glass, even tempered glass, especially when building on a cliff, caulking glass into a wall is going to be less expensive than pouring concrete, or using the standard cinder block, rebar, and concrete structural walls. Time was waterproof transparent caulking was hard to come by, but nowadays it’s cheap, China-made, and comes in bulk too.
except for the additional pumping constantly
I take you mean to compensate for the spillage that is oh so common with infinity pools. Actually that’s pretty easy to fix, using a simple system that drains and fills the pool using buoyancy physics in a very similar way to a toilet. Most modern pools, infinity or otherwise, have the same system.
But the way an Infinity Pool works is with the spillage. The point is that there’s no ‘fourth wall’, just a barrier almost-wall that keeps _most_ of the water in- the constant flow is what gives you the ‘horizon line’ that demarcates infinity.
1) Just glass, even tempered grass wouldn’t be enough to hold several TONS of water, it would need to be THICK glass (4-6 inch) which is expensive, hard to get, and impossible to work with without heavy equipment.
2) the “infinity” is that the water constantly flows over one side hiding it from view, which requires pumps big enough to move 1/4 inch of water for length of one side.
Wikipedia explains that due to the precariousness of their location (on the edge of a cliff) they need extra engineering to make them stable, plus the cost of constantly running the pumps, that they are HUGELY expensive.
Tempered GRASS? That’d be a sight to see. ;-)
But yeah, that’s why “infinity pools” are never full-sized. I can’t even begin to imagine the sheer cost of operating a full-sized (read: Olympic size) infinity pool.
Also reminds me of the apartment I lived in when I worked for Texas A&M. It had a swimming pool that was green more often than blue, because the landlord was a cheapskate who never shocked the pool properly and kept turning the circulation pumps off to save money.
(After moving back home, I found out later that the problem has been permanently solved… the college bought the land and bulldozed the apartment complex so they could build their new science building there.)
HULU pokemon you’ll find grass with a temper after a dozen episodes I would bet.
The funniest part about money is once you reach a certain level, it’s easy to get more and hard to lose it as long as you aren’t completely stupid with it. It’s getting to that point that is so tough, and the reason why (insert topical economic political debate of classism here)
That’s because once you get past the point of meeting your needs and swatting your debts, everything after that becomes fodder for either savings or investment.
Sydney has almost certainly just passed that point on basic income once her initial spree spending is dealt with, and after a few months watching her savings balance relatively explode, might hire a financial manager if she’s got any interest in serious wealth.
I believe she just hired a financial advisor.
Of course, she’s sharing him with probably most of the team. But even in her situation, it’ll be a while before she needs her own full-time financial manager.
Tell that to the over 60% of NBA players that are broke 5 years after they retire.
I find myself in the position of having to agree with Mikey… it’s true. Three-fifths of basketball players are broke within 5 years after retirement. Though I’d bet that in ARC-SWAT, there isn’t as much pressure to “keep up with the spending habits of the other veteran players”, like there is in pro basketball.
Because one, they probably don’t own/pay for a lot of the luxuries (private team jets, etc)- those are owned by the team and ‘loaned’ to the players.
B, because they’re usually muscle-headed athletes who don’t realize that they probably shouldn’t spend $50,000 on a shoe closet filled with $75,000 worth of ‘designer name’ shoes after they’ve stopped making money.
Athletes are a little different than most folks, because they usually start young- their first major purchases are made with major moolah, so that level of ‘luxury’ becomes the ‘standard’ they expect everything to live up to. Whereas someone who’s gotten to their late 20’s or mid 30’s in the middle class spending bracket or lower is going to realize that a $250 per-night hotel room is just as effective a place to crash after a day of vacationing as a $1,000 a-night (or however much) penthouse suite.
Funniest part is, I work at a hotel. A decent hotel in a business area. Rooms here go for between $160 and $230 per night, depending on the room and day. Cheaper hotels (i.e. ones with less prestige and/or less amenities) in this area go for about $100-$150. However, I have seen rooms at some of the really nice hotels in the area go for upwards of $1500/night.
So I can say that yes, this is true. The reason why lottery winners/veteran professional athletes go broke so fast is because they spend money as though it’s an endless resource. What I should have clarified is that once you have money, it’s easier to continue to gain money and gain it faster because you have the ability to invest in ways to earn a profit.
For instance, people who win the lottery and use it on things that don’t make them money (plastic surgery, drugs, parties, vacations, etc) instead of using it wisely go broke ridiculously fast. The smart way to spend an influx of a ton of money is to start by getting completely out of debt, then to take what you have left, determine how much you’d like to spend for yourself to get the urge to blow money out of your system, and take the rest and invest it in something(s) that will return you a consistent yield. That way, you have a budget to live off of and will never have to work again.
Alternatively, you can continue to work so you have a constant income, but then invest in higher risk items that can either return you a much higher yield, or nothing. This can be really lucrative, or stupid, but the higher the risk, the higher the possible payoff.
But, as I said, the more money you have, the easier it is to make more money. But getting to that point is the hardest part for most people. Many will work for their entire lives and never reach that point. And that is the sad truth.
Indeed. As one of Boddicker’s gang said in Robocop: “It takes money to make money.”
Standard or guide would work.
“Infinity Pool” in your rant is set up like a link, but it doesn’t actually seem to link anywhere. Or at least nothing happens when I click on it.
…I hope it’s not a virus.
Checked it. Seems he simply forgot to set a real destination for that link. It is currently a Ref. to “https://infinity pool”:
infinity poolNot sure how that happened, but it’s fixed now. It’s just a google image search for “infinity pool” I wasn’t sure how common that term was so I thought I’d link some examples.
Examining the code, it seems to be a link to “https://infinity pool”… I think the editor messed up the URL?
I have a lecture regarding needs versus wants that I have often given to the children of my more financially stable friends. I also have a lecture regarding poor being a relative term, considering that what us Americans consider being poor, is considered significant wealth by a good 50-70% of the rest of the world’s populas.
True. And that’s why they are working out complex indicator lists for poverty, and ideas like “relative” poverty. And it’s different if certain countries. for example not being able to afford warm clothes or heating in a cold climate country is more relevant than in say the tropicals.
Right. So not caring about the larger “carbon footprint” makes them a commie. Like so many of your comments, Mikey, that makes LESS than zero sense. Or are you saying that being an environmentalist… that is to say, actually giving a crap about NOT turning the world we live on into a 7,917-mile-diameter landfill… makes them a communist? Well, since I don’t want to live in a giant landfill with temperatures over 100F, I guess I’m a communist too.
And that’s aside from the fact that communism only works in small groups of less than a hundred people. Even during the Cold War, the Soviet Union (or more accurately, the United Soviet Socialist Republic) wasn’t even communist… it was SOCIALIST. It’s right there in the title.
Sneaky. Ruminate about trying to find the perfect word and then sneak in a non-word. Cromulent, indeed! Did you think that would embiggen your readership?
I have been in your situation too many times to count. Once in a while I will find/remember/discover the one I wanted but usually not. Not having a perfectly clear definition in my head doesn’t help.
Dave, if you still want to find the best word here is a site that might help:
https://english.stackexchange.com
It appears that yours is a common type of question.
I’ll check that out, it looks like a Yahoo answers but presumably with a slightly higher educational standard of participants.
They are not even in the same ballpark. Post your question on both and see the difference.
English is both a constructive language (it builds words from a large collection of standard patterns of prefixes and suffixes) and a somewhat agglutinative language (it builds words by shoving whole words together – not to the extent that German does, but vastly more than French does). Therefore it is pretty much impossible to build a list of all legitimate, valid, easily comprehensible English words.
If you’re referring to “demarcation” as a non-word… not only is it a valid constructed word, but I’ve seen it several times before. For that matter, it’s in several online dictionaries and Wikipedia, not only as a word but also as the name of a specific historical event of some significance (particularly if you happen to be Brazilian).
Something else? If you understood what the person writing something meant, and it isn’t misspelled, it’s probably a valid English word – even if it’s a googlenope.
No, I said/meant nothing about demarcation. Don’t know how you got that idea as it is a well established valid word. I specifically mentioned “cromulent” and “embiggens”. Do google search and get educated. It is quite enlightening.
Perhaps the word “Quantifier”?
How about “Benchmark”?
And yes, english does not have that many words. For every word you have, german has 2-10 words. That can make translations difficulty, as often you mean multiple german meanings at once.
For some reason languages only get more complicated with exceptions to rules as they age.
Claiming that one language has “more words” than another is, at its core, nonsensical.
Here’s my cite: https://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/06/counting_words
I disagree. Strongly. There are many pairs of languages which it makes little or no sense to compare, but there are pairs of languages that do make sense to compare, and languages where the number of words is actually a well-defined number rather than an approximate value.
Of course, the enumerable languages are either artificial or dead (despite the best efforts of the French linguistic authorities to define what is and isn’t French), but it’s still not fundamentally nonsensical to make comparisons between languages that have a common concept of “words”.
Achievement unlocked.
Not quite. English has far more words than German has.
That is because English steals words from everybody. ;P
Actually they just copy them. The original language does not loose the words.
Unfortunately, English seems to be in the process of losing the word “lose”.
Nah, he meant that the original language didn’t set the words free, thereby losing them. You know, like Pidgeotto. (which the internet spell checker apparently wants to correct to “Bridgeport”. Huh.)
German has nice cleanly defined words like the word that means “a face that needs punching” & “taking pleasure in an enemies misfortune”. English people not only argue what IS IS but what the IS IS in ISIS.
No, we pretty much KNOW what ISIS means, Mikey… the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), sometimes called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Their own word for themselves, Da’esh, translates as ISIL.
Yes, German does have nice cleanly defined words, if you don’t mind saying things like “profoundly upward-thrusting breasts holder” instead of “underwire bra”. Rather than create new words, or using a loan word (like English does), they simply string together existing words until they have the same meaning.
threshold?
I think “rubicon” may be what he was looking for.
Bah, thats a river!
You never heard the phrase “Crossing the Rubicon”? o_O
I have, and that particular phrase means going too far to come back (technically)
“Categorization” of wealth?
Maybe event horizon? Bellwether?
Perhaps the word Plateau was what you were thinking of? That sounds like what you were trying to describe.
Otherwise, Metaphore could work as it appeared that Sydney was using “infinity pool” to describe a particular kind of wealth….
Still, I think demarcation also works as is considering it literally means “dividing line”
I bet ‘media events’ will be limited until she has been through PR courses and most of the furvor dies down.
They have a clip of her blowing up a tank and beating the crap out of supers, if she goes too loco that is just going to scare the crap out of people.
I love her, but the idea of Sydney with as much power as she has terrifies me. And I live in a different universe.
True, but anything comic related is by definition meant for her to handle. So send her out to the movie premiers and such that have to do with that field because no way can anyone else fake as much enthusiasm as she would really have for them.
That wasn’t genre savviness; that was outright Dramaturgy.
Hah, good word, I hadn’t heard that before.
After you’ve swum the length of your infinity pool, you can try running the infinity gauntlet.
No, you wear the infinity gauntlet. If you’ve got the stones for it.
Your infinity pool link, doesn’t For those interested, this link may be useful:
https://www.endlesspools.com/infinity-pool.php
As for the word you’re looking for – yeah, I HATE that feeling, that you’ve got a word-shaped hole in your brain, and you’re just CERTAIN that the exact, precise word for the concept you have EXISTS, but you just can’t find it.
Is it possible that you’re missing it because it’s actually a kind of everyday word, after all? It sounds to me a bit like “A curious definition of wealth” or “”A curious signification for wealth,” or A curious qualification for true wealth” might have been what you meant? The latter two words are ones that work better with “FOR” instead of “OF.”
The words “individuation,” “exemplification,” “characterization,” or “representation” kind of work there, too.
also maybe “denotation” is the word? That literally means “explicit meaning,” I think that one works better with “of,” though.
Have you considered the word “threshold”?
Score one for the “At Least Nothing Could Get Any Better” gambit.
OK. Your comment makes me think I I am missing something here.
I took it to be a reverse psychology (it can’t get any worse), on the universe but apparently there is more. What more is there?
Nope. That’s exactly it. Turning Murphy upon himself.
don’t forget, Murphy’s law also applies to itself.
(addendum to Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong, likely at the most inopportune time)
I like Cole’s Law better.
Doesn’t Sydney have that media course to attend or is Arianna using that Avengers 3 as a bait and switch?
Why would it be a bait-and-switch? Age of Ultron was the second Avengers movie, so Arianna’s working with a timeline of at LEAST months, to possibly more than a year to get Sydney media-event-ready.
Since Marvel has several other movies to put out before it can begin to film Avengers 3, it will probably be years.
And considering the time of the comic puts it before ‘AoU’ (possibly even before the first Avengers movie itself)
Avengers 3: with guest appearances by Halo and her phenomenal orbs
omg that sounds like a Porn movie premise, doesn’t it?
I am feeling that the last panel is wishful thinking on Sydney’s part.
Maybe “measure of wealth”?
My threshold for filthy wealth is of course, Scrooge’s money bin.
Doesnt his money bin hold more cash than the entire worlds economy? I seem to recall someone doing the math on that.
All of the gold ever mined would fit in a cube the height of the Arc de Triumph.
Not sure where Mikey got that figure, but it sounds about right. We’re talking about 165,000 metric tons… that’s 363,762,732 pounds, with another 2,500 metric tons being mined per year.
To put it in slightly different terms, all the gold ever mined would fill about 3.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
It also violates several building codes. Xkcd did a “What If” on that.
Did they remember to allow for the fact that his 2/3’s full bin is only about half cash (including a lot of coinage). The bottom of the bin is filled with gems and ingots.
Mine is similar. It’s where I can afford enough gold/gems to be able to have a straight up sack/bin of gold or gems I can run my hands through.
I’d love to make a bed from a tub filled with little tiny smooth nodules of gold- it’d heat up to my body temperature, support me perfectly, and massage me every time I move a little.
Not Smaug’s cave?
I would simply say “sign of wealth”.
Speaking of ComicCon. If there is one in-universe, I’d lose to see Sydney go and see all the Cosplay of her and her friends. Because you do know there WILL be some of Maxima, Dabbler, some form of Harem, the guys and maybe even Syd herself.
I meant love not lose. :P
There was a voting incentive of that a while back.
And the real Sydney lost :D
Yeah, the winner had 2 ‘bonus orbs’ and deep cleavage.
I’m gonna laugh if the last panel turns out to be an imagine spot again…
She’s definetly not out of trope karma, she definetly earned a lot for serpenditious tumbleweed failing to appear at an expected moment.
https://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-048-j
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouJustHadToSayIt
Sydney knows the magic word.
what else could possibly go right?
Delineation? I likes me an online thesaurus for dilemmas (quandaries/predicaments/impasses/tight spots) like this.
I just realized that that Sydney’s orbs give her the power of dramatic lighting.
There needs to be a major Deadpool-focused Marvel crossover called “Infinity Pool”.
they kind of did that one, the ‘cure’ for zombie-ism turned out to be Deadpool cells/DNA, but everyone treated became an offshoot of his consciousness…
Maybe the word you wanted was threshhold?
Demarcation seems an apt word, unless you go for milepost, which is sort of a cowboy kind of word. “Ah’ll be a-puttin’ me in a new infinity pool up to the ranch next week.”
I agree with Christopher. “Benchmark”, meaning a standard by which other things are measured (an off the cuff definition) would seem to be the most appropriate word. Not that I think demarcation is incorrect.
My attempt to help solve DaveB’s word conundrum! Perhaps if he had said:
“That seems a curious place to mark the distinction between wealthy and not, but . . . yes.”