Grrl Power #420 – Shipoopi
It will be a long road for Sydney, since she’s used to playing games with little to no death penalty. At least with games like this the worst that happens in that you have to sit out the rest of the round. If this was a game that involved high level raiding, she would probably be a lot more careful. Once Peggy starts making her do 10 pushups every time she dies, Sydney will quickly start valuing self preservation in the game more. Of course there’s a good chance her hands will start getting shaky from all the exercise, but… well, Sydney could use the exercise.
Yes, I know it’s page 420 and no pot references. I do wonder what Sydney would be like if she was high. Probably pretty calm actually… though considering most ADD meds are stimulants, I don’t know, maybe she’d be sedate but borderline self destructively distractable? Like she decides she’s hungry and it takes her 30 minutes to make it to the kitchen, then turns the oven on then it takes her another 20 minutes to decide what to eat and she microwaves something and leaves the oven on. I have no idea really. I don’t partake myself. Well, I did once, but I was the asshole going “How long before something happens? How do I tell when it kicks in? What am I supposed to be feeling?” So as far as I could tell I didn’t get even a tiny bit high, and if I did, I don’t see what the big deal is cause I didn’t notice anything.
Over at Patreon, BrainBlow asked “So how do superpowers factor into video games here?”
Well, pretty much like you’d expect. People with speed powers would have an advantage, stuff like danger sense would be a bit more iffy, depending on iffy it’d work for non life threatening situations. Other physical powers wouldn’t be so useful either, and could actually be quite detrimental to the equipment they’re playing on. You could definitely build a much tougher than average laptop for guys like Maxima, Stalwart, Ren when he starts getting jazzed up, etc, but there’s a practical limit to how much you could reinforce the thing. Really the better solution would be to just plug in a really cheap keyboard and let them pound on that instead.
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1-20 is a kill right? Right?
sooo she killed herself 4 times?
At least. But she may have gotten peggs a few more times
If she’d already gotten her a few times she wouldn’t have reacted as strongly, and been yelled at.
well then, that was the first, we dont know it was the last do we?
Heh…gad. That reminds me of when I was learning to play Counterstrike. Three months of six people doing stupid crap, two people who actually knew how to play, and more deaths than we could count. With one guy who couldn’t see to play (and didn’t want to admit he needed glasses), one guy who was, at best, completely effing nuts, one guy who spent eight months convinced camouflage was for losers, as well as myself, whose reflexes are best described as “glacial.”
First time I played, it was five on one, and I wiped out my entire time and then killed myself. All of it by accident. The second, third, and fourth times weren’t much better (on the fifth try, I got lucky, and managed to kill the only guy on the other team…before accidentally wiping out half my team).
It was pretty pathetic.
Honestly, I think those guys were playing us at first because they felt sorry for us.
Of course, then we actually learned all of the lessons Peggy is running Sydney through, and then some, and actually got good enough to stand a chance.
One thing I never liked about games like this is just how much ammo is on the map
In counterstrike you have 3 clips and one grenade and that’s it. You can pick up other people’s guns but if you’re running out generally you also aren’t making any kills so no guns to pick up.
A lot of games have variable / adjustable levels for that sort of thing.
It may be more realistic to have the Difficulty wound up as high as it’ll go but, for the majority, it’s also less fun. It’s probably basic human nature to wanna be a Bad-A$$, instead of a Redshirt.
Meh, speak for yourself or the masses. I will play a game a few times on normal mode to learn it, but once it is clear that the AI sucks, and they all do, it’s highest level and damn the torpedoes for me. I’d rather lose 6 times for every win than walk all over a game just because the programmers can’t make a non-stupid AI.
It is a little annoying in strategy games with an economy or tech research system or both for the computer to arrive at your single village of mud huts and fire-hardened sticks or whatever with tanks and wipe you off the map, just because the AI gets +300% of all resources or whatever. But then the times that you win just become all the sweeter.
A programmer here (although not a game programmer). Just wanted to throw in that writing good AIs is really really hard. In fact it is amazing how much is already possible considering computing is only a few decades old while nature had millions of years to perfect the human mind. The only way to compensate for that and keep the balance is to give AIs an advantage somewhere else.
Of course that doesn’t excuse publishers cutting corners on AI. It doesn’t excuse replacing both programming and fun with quicktime events. And it certainly does not excuse errors in basic things like stability.
But then the best programmers are doing stuff like programming rockets, cars, cellphone towers, simulating natural disasters and other more important stuff. So if no video portal out there can get video right or if you need to play against humans because AIs are dumb… isn’t that almost acceptable?
Oh, and if you think the solution is to get more people into programming: YES. That is the core problem, and one we have struggled with for a long time. I’m open to any suggestions!
So, as a “sorta” game programer here, and with my secondary education in game programming, I feel I have to respond to the “really hard” comment. It’s not actually that hard to make a good AI, the problem is that having them in games they becomes that they are TOO good. There are definitely learning AIs (look up neural networks on youtube), and they start off dumber than a box of rocks, but once they learn they become exceedingly good at what they do. For a game this means that they might never ever ever make a single wrong move, have perfect reaction time, and will learn to counter (eventually) any tactic you come up with, and even learn its own tactics (ex; how to rush if it works once or twice).
You don’t see this often in games because one; it’s not fair to the players, and two, it’s a different methodology from what’s “usually done.” It’s not really that hard to make them either (I made several in school), but it IS hard to control how “good” they get, thus keeping it engaging to players. I don’t know about you, but playing against opponents that have reactions that measured in picoseconds, know all of my moves, know what moves work against me, are more accurate than me, and that basically I stand no chance against sounds more boring than opponents that are too easy.
That’s an interesting comment because we seem to have different definitions of an “AI”. When I, with my limited game development background, think of AI, I’m thinking about programs that interpret images or speech, that classify websites according to child-friendliness, that predict movie preferences etc. Of course game programmers don’t face many of these really hard challenges. And there are other differences: for example as good as neural networks might be, managers often don’t like them in “real” applications because it’s really hard to discover their tactics after they have learned, which makes them hard to predict. You don’t want your twitter bot turned into a Nazi after all. (as recently happened to Microsoft). And you certainly don’t want your trading bot to bankrupt you. That might be different in games where results trump predictability.
On the other hand while I agree that just being fast and having perfect strategies does not make a good game AI, I dispute that that is all a game AI should be doing. A good game AI might be one that adapts to your skills and makes the game engaging without ever breaking the rules. It could always feel intelligent but almost beatable. It could know which mood you are in so it can help lift your mood or help calm you down or help you learn skills or whatever your goal is. And how do you predict mood? Analyzing camera images, speech patterns, movement patterns… and we’re back at the hard problems. Of course there are a lot of meta-issues with that approach – but that does make good game AI’s even harder, not easier.
And even if I’m completely wrong with that interpretation: Think about path finding. It’s more or less a solved problem – and not even necessarily an AI one if you know your map – but look at how many games still struggle with that today. I feels like there’s just not a lot of appreciation for quality code in game development. Note that I’m not talking about the individual programmers here but about the industry culture as a whole. It’s just a sad but inevitable result of the current business model.
As an avid gamer and consumer of video games I’d rather NOT be having my games having access to my webcam and microphone unless they had something to do with the game itself(IE Kinect or Eyetoy). Having a program that gauges my mood being integrated into a game would be cool from a development standpoint but from where I’m standing it sounds like something that could easily be abused by less ethical businesses.
I mean Candy Crush is already designed to be pathologically addicting to force you to spend money on micro transactions just to keep playing. Imagine what a game like that could do if it could also adjust itself to my preferences and then right at the moment I’m most vulnerable ask me for more money. Ya no thanks this is a technology that should NOT be added to gaming, at least until legislation is passed to prevent addictive game design.
*Laughs* this is all true, and goes to show how much territory the study of intelligent computing is. Personally I consider “AI” to be programming a computer how to make an intelligent/non-random decision without explicitly telling it how to do so in a specific case. Some are termed “expert systems,” like the ones that scan a site for child-friendliness; they have a bank of information and specific algorithms for looking at keys, and they don’t learn, they have to be told what they know and what their algorithms are. Other system, like what most people think of when you say “AI” are “Learning systems,” and are something that can adapt and change its actions inside a certain scope.
A Lot of image recognition software, especially for facial and expression matching, can make great use of neural networks; able to learn what a smile is just by being show examples of what is and what is not. What I was focusing on in the above post was more about the “learning systems” part of AI, which in a limited environment become scary good at what they do. (For the programming inclined: Think a huge self building “If-else” block.) However, the ‘limited’ part is important, because it can only learn about what you tell it specifically to pay attention to. It’s easy to tell a system what to look at when you (more or less) have a list of all the variables in your header files, specifically give it eyes ‘looking’ where it needs to look, and can record and analyse every aspect of it’s ‘universe’ afterwards and give it a success of failure rating.
The problems (as I understand it [games background, not full simulation mind you]) with making both “expert” and “learning” systems work in most real world applications is there are just so many unknown variables. They also CAN learn the wrong lesson. In a game (/simulation), you have a very controlled environment and can let your AI learn and monitor its success rate. It’s going to fail a lot at first before it gets really good from learning, which is a trivial problem when you can afford to let it fail, and turn the timestep up on a game so you can do hundreds of iterations a minute.
In the real world where you _can’t have exposed it to every variable_ and you might not be able to even afford one failure? … no thanks, not for anything important at least, we are not there yet.
nature doesn’t “perfect” anything, ever. it filters out from “horribly bad” up to “inefficient” and then stops.
nature is outright bad at making good working things compared to intelligent design.
Yup, ‘nature’ (or ‘unguided evolution’) stops when the balance reaches ‘0’
…
I recently managed to lose a strategy game on an easy difficulty in under a game month (1 second/day).
A random event occurred on day 1 and brought on a revolution. I lost without ever completing any structures, units, or spotting units from anyone else.
Doesn’t matter how good you are or how good the AI is if the RNG has your number. At least counter strike minimizes the role of the RNG.
Wow! You must have been a really bad leader if your people had a revolution so soon :P
pftt… i haven’t even bothered to open the DVD case for Civ 5 (i got it as a x-mas gift) because i got tired of constantly getting destroyed by NUKES when my most advanced tech was a frickin’ CATAPULT in Civ 3… on the EASIEST settings too!… blargh… i could never get past that tech level no matter what i tried. so i never bothered with 5.
I’m doing OK in Fallout 4 with it’s open world- but still quest based system, it’s not quite so bad, though I’m kinda obsessed with more settlement building vs furthering the quest-lines right about now, though i suspect that’ll even out in a few more weeks of playing… though i guess for just dinking around doing “whatever” i feel like at the moment, i still can’t beat Minecraft (modded of course)…
Haven’t played Civilisation since the first one (or maybe the 2nd)
I honestly don’t know what your doing to not be absolutely destroying any of the easy difficulty bots in Civ 3 (Best civ game IMO). They get a science penalty and don’t expand very fast… And they build their cities right next to one another…
As a person with ADD, weed has a small calming effect on me. Some of my friends with ADD, and more experience with drugs, tell me that a lot of them have very different effects compared to the general public.
The biggest example is of course: speed, which is extremely similar to the Ritalin we take every day
My ADD/ADHD friends tell me that effect vary depending on the person from “nap time” to being the perfect drug for them. It also seem so to depend on the form of the Stuff.
Biochemical individuality is a term that’s finally been making the rounds the past decade or so. It pretty much works this way with every drug there is, might work for you, might not. I’ve got my share of “Failed experiments” treating my own issues.
I had a two expiances with pot one on a school art trip to Amsterdam the second at a harly Davidson event. Didn’t smoke myself but the passive smoke made me go a little loopy, a lot in the case of the HD event were I got violent. I have been diagnosed as dyslexic which I understand is related to ADHD/ADD. Anyone else have that experience?
First time I’ve read the term “Biochemical individuality” but yea – it’s a scary thing. And it’s why those ads for depression drugs warn that it might get WORSE on any medication.
That also has to do with the drug companies not really having much of a clue about brain chemistry in general, and the FDA clearing medicines for foot fungus as anti-depressants. Ok, that was a tiny bit of a stretch, but not by much.
Only a stretch if you take foot-fungal medication orally :eek:
Luckily, neither foot fungus nor anti-depressants come in suppository form. I hope.
Actually the best medication for toenail fungus is taken orally… And you can take a lot of drugs anally if you want… The idea generally is to get it into the bloodstream, and pretty much either end will do that.
Isn’t it usually a cream applied directly to the site? That’s like taking a suppository for a coldsore on your lip
Nope. Well, not for me. Seems it’s not ON the skin sometimes as IN the skin. So orally kills the roots, so to speak, instead of just the leaves. (Pardon the metaphor.) “They are reserved for extensive or severe infection for which topical antifungal agents are inappropriate or ineffective, because of high cost, potential side effects and drug interactions.”
Oral meds kill it wherever it is, not just where you KNOW it is.
I’m pretty severely ADHD and have done my fair share of the stuff. I get the usual effects but my ADHD goes into hyperdrive. It gets pretty bad. So bad that it actually prevents me from effectively playing my video games. Which are my true addiction in life.
I usually end up spending hours distracted by sorting my inventory, fiddling with the gamma correction, or some other odd thing. And when I do actually get to playing the game. I’m awful. Zero hand/eye coordination, terrible decision making, reaction time down drain, etc. I’ve come to the conclusion that I only do one or the other.
I usually just end up listening to music, eating an entire package of Oreos, and zoning out for a few hours.
I found cannabis to be quite enjoyable compared with the few other intoxicants I have tried. With Alcohol I tend to do things I would normally never do, mostly bad things and I don’t like the taste or the loss of control. With cannabis I don’t lose control and I am VERY calm. I also have been able to do lucid dreaming. I can see how some mystics saw it as a holy drug. It does blow away any concentration but not for long depending of course on dosage. It also made anything funny hilarious. I also found food a better experience.
In my case (hyperactive iimpulse with a touch of add) I’m sensitive to both codeine and pot, they actually make me hallucinate. Unfortunately, I’m also allergic to pot. So I was having visual tactile and auditory hallucinations while covered in hives and emptying myself from both ends.
Alcohol is a stimulant for me. Caffeine helps me focus in small amounts, takes the edge off tired to a certain point, then puts me to sleep. I’m almost immune to most caines. Novo, lido, ect. The numbing happens faster then most, and is gone about the time it kicks in for most people. (dental work SUCKS).
You mean my dad and I aren’t the only ones immune to novacaine? Every dentist I’ve ever been to has tried to tell me it’s not possible, and every time I’ve had to prove them wrong the hard way. I’ve concluded that I’m going to save up to be put under next time, I am NOT enduring more fillings while feeling it all.
I feel for you. I’m not at all immune, but it once took 5 shots before I stopped feeling the shooting pain from the drill. I have a new respect for people who had to undergo dentistry before the existence of pain killers, and for those in third world countries who still have to deal with dentistry without painkillers.
I had a dentist a few moves ago who went on a yearly Africa trip for some charity whose name I unfortunately cannot remember. I asked him once what it was like and he said me mostly pulled teeth since the dental hygiene was so bad that by the time he was there to take a look the tooth was not able to be saved. That, and it was both faster and cheaper, allowing he and his fellow dentists to serve more people in the limited time they had. I shudder a bit at thinking of a situation where “faster and cheaper” means having a tooth pulled when it could be filled instead. First world problems, eh?
The response to the dentist who doesn’t believe you is, “I don’t care if you don’t believe me. If you refuse to use [insert preferred option here], then I am getting up out of this chair, and this appointment is over. Naturally, I will not be paying for the cancelled appointment, since you will have failed to provide adequate care.” And if they balk, do it. Don’t be bluffing, just go. Unless it’s a dental emergency, you’re better off with a caregiver who actually listens to you.
Well I have ADHD, and when I was a teen I tried pot a few times as it was available and I was curious. The only effect it had on me at all was annoying burning sinuses. No perception/behavioral effect at all, no enjoyment either. So the bit about biochemical individuality has some real merit. and like many of the above, stimulants calm me and alcohol revs me up.
Explanation I’ve heard, that makes sense, is that ADD ADHD are caused by a delay/weakness in the part of the brain that filters incoming information. So stimulating that gets you to where people without ADD are and calms you down / lets you focus. Sedating that part of the brain leads to data overload and complete lack of impulse control as you try to react to everything at once.
Considering that the grenade isn’t likely to roll very far, it looks like a “Pineapple Salad” is in the making…Grenade = Pineapple; Sydney = Salad.
I should guess the resulting matter should more resemble a jam than a salad
Chunky salsa.
You realize that you are all horrible, horrible people, right? Besides, I think “Chutney” would be a more descriptive and/or poetic result.
Oh, I dunno about that. I personally think it’d end up being more of a bunch of M.A.S.H, really.
+1 for description +2 for the reference -1 for dating your self
i’m gonna have to ask the judges about that -1. there is a thing called syndication, after all…
Besides, the only problem with dating yourself, is if you end up having a ‘headache’ and not putting out :P
I keep forgetting…
…after dating yourself, do you have to respect yourself in the morning…?
Yes, unless you stop talking to yourself afterwards.
The walk of shame can be awkward as well…
Graphic animators for games like this would more likely say, “Gibblets. It’s what’s for supper.”
When you respawn so easily, you don’t often worry about the consequences. Capture the Flag type games that don’t bother with kill count have the most suicidal players.
In real life, you don’t get to respawn, so take care. Even though Sydney has a shield, she may have to drop it. If she needs height to hit something with the PPO, she is going to have to drop the shield and fly exposed.
Yeah…superpowers or not, she’s in a fragile, human body. Something at the wrong time in the wrong place, and it’s over.
One of the best fight moments with Sidney – for me, anyway – was when she was pulling out her big plan against Vehemence that involved her being inside the shield with him. Moment of pure clarity about the reality of the situation for Sidney, and she’s terrified (#279).
Some moments of extreme bravery are actually moments of acting without thinking it through. If Sydney had had time to reason it out, she might not have trapped herself inside like that.
Then again, unless the Skill Tree updates the Shield so that she can use it on others without having to be inside it, she had only two viable options.
Your situation is a bad example. The solution is use the shield all the time and change PPO and fly with the other hand.
How do you hold steady in a spot to aim and fire? Practice dropping like a stone and quick changes?
Also, when dropping a shield to extend it around an asset, you have a vulnerable moment.
Ballistic stall.
Fly upwards at high speed, swap flight for PPO, fire at the apex, swap back to flight before you build up too much fall speed.
What about the part where her shield has a limited oxygen supply and thus needs to be dropped periodically to keep Sydney from suffocating?
Just “flicker” the shield a few times when it is relatively quiet.
Don’t have to completely drop it to refresh the interior air, just provide a chance for air to circulate (however briefly). It mightn’t be as effective as a complete change (drop shield, wait a bit, then re-raise). but it’ll do – AND it minimuzes the time she can be targeted.
That’s fine if you just want to hit the planet, but it takes time to properly aim at anything smaller, like a moving missile
To be fair: She could literally face-plant into missiles with her shield up or grab it out of the air with her Lighthook. Unless, somehow, that missile is stronger than Maxima’s blast that glassed part of the ‘hey look at what we can do’ bit she’d be completely and utterly untouched. And we saw the lift-capacity of the Lighthook a few pages ago so we know what it’s capable of in terms of force exertion.
Point of order – we’re now finding out the limits on her orbs (Mach 4, 16 tons…)
I think she’ll want to AVOID hitting the limit on the shield…
Weight limit yes, speed limit still to be determined (same with her ceiling)
Actually, this is an interesting notion. With her shield up, moving at Mach 4+, how much damage can Sydney do in a direct impact? It depends on how the shield works–if it just protects her/disperses the impact, then it won’t do much at all–she’d just run into someone at top speed and come to a dead stop without being injured. If, OTOH, the field is a functional wall, she might be able to take out a battleship….
She…upgraded…a billboard on her way home, so we know she doesn’t just stop if she hits something with her shield. So…yes, she is a living Kinetic Kill device.
That’s not canon. She has referred to an ’embiggener,’ and we were not shown the shield dropping when it got bigger. So it is quite possible that the new shield comes up at the larger diameter at the same instant as the old shield drops. Or even that the shield just expands, but allows anything it encounters as it expands to pass within as long as whatever it is doesn’t happen to be on a collision course with Sydney.
The things are not just dumb tools, after all. They respond to Sydney’s mental wishes with an accuracy which seems to be better than that which Sydney could pull off by herself, indicating a decent amount of interpretive capability. The ‘hammer and anvil to the nuts’ event demonstrated that. No one can throw an object the way the orbs moved for that maneuver, because you can’t throw something at both the front and back of a person or object at the same time. So it seems clear that Sydney just mentally ‘wished’ for or envisioned the result, and the orbs acted on that desire.
Which is why I quite like to play defensively on capture the flag games. There’s something very satisfying about opponent after opponent blindly rushing into your fire…
Yep. Setting traps for them is fun too.
My favorite trick is with snipers. I find a way round behind them and take them out. Then hide and wait for them to return to the same spot and headshot for a second time. Next time they will be looking for my hiding spot, so drop a claymore and get out the area. Most learn by the third death.
You got proof we have no respawn? o_O Stupid ads reporting that 18’000 children die every day (not counting adults), and yet, the population is not going down, either double or quadruple that number are being born, or some of them are respawning
Besides, that is precisely why Sydney is doing this ‘little exercise’: better to learn these things I an environment that does allow ‘respawn’, or at least a non-permanent way
If you want to test your respawn theory, go ahead. Post your results.
That may be the best response to a Guesticus post ever. You just won the internets for today, Wee Red Bird.
Ouch! That was mean :(
But why would she have to use PPO? She could just as easily use the Lighthook or fly into them whilst her shield is up with enough force to knock them out? She could do both things whilst the shield is up with zero issue, in face her shield being up is a must for the latter of the two options. The likelihood of someone being able to stay up after getting slammed into by that is very low especially given what we know about the strength of her shield (it was able to resist an energy blast from Maxima with enough heat to glass sand) and how fast she can fly. All she would need to do is fine tune her speed or fine tune the amount of force she applies with the Lighthook.
Don’t forget, she took out an advertising billboard with the shield while trying to fly home.
Ah, those are SUNGLASSES in the first panel. I thought they were some sort of enormous eyebrows for a moment xD
Wasn’t sure what that was
Err? 420 isn’t PoT. Next one up is 512.
What the hell is 512?
Acetaminophen. All the cool kids are doing it these days.
Yeah! I just took like 3 of them, and I feel great!
Doesn’t really do it for me these days, I need some stronger stuff.
Isobutylphenylpropanoic acid is great after a night of drinking though
Acetaminophen + alcohol = liver damage
Ibuprofen + alcohol = stomach ulcer
Water is the best thing after a night of drinking.
There’s no alcohol left in my stomach by the time I take the iboprofen. It’s for the hangover. A small dose only, and works great (in combination with water and a good breakfast of course.)
I think this is in reference to this. I had to google it, though: I’d never heard the term. People use numbers for this stuff?
Jup, that’s 420
The internet gets a little pod crazy on 20-4 (april) (because USA is silly and writes that as 4-20)
Some people build an identity around weed, it’s best not to peer to deeply into that rabithole
I have honestly never understood the DD/MM/YY dating system, MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD make much more sense from an organization standpoint, especially the Year first system. So much easier to sort things in a system that doesn’t recognize dates and is just Alpha-numeric for sorting.
it comes from our language, in british english, the long form of dates is perfered saying the day first, then the month and the year. in america when saying the date, we say the month first.
the 5th of may, 2016 vs may 5th 2016
The year first system is pretty smart yes. But the day-moth-year is just smallest unit-medium unit-biggest unit. The unit that changes the most is in front, and the unit that changes the least (and isn’t as important in every day conversation, because it stays the same so long) is last
Year first is that in reverse, great for computers.
Month first is medium unit-smallest unit-biggest unit, which is just silly
Not sure why, but for as longa as can remember, have gone MM-DD-YYYY
Thinking about it, it just seems to help narrow the time frame to a month as opposed to a whole year
Sydney’s face in panel 4. I think I just died.
She must have hit a barrel, or one of them explodey bricks, but yeah, adorakitty face :D
Peggy’s face in panel five is a good one as well, a good learning lesson for her as well: those who always win, tend to not take losing very well
For a less-destructable keyboard, use a projection keyboard projecting onto a steel plate or similarly resistant substrate. Or they could treat it as practice for delicacy of touch in stressful situations and dock them for each keyboard they destroy.
You can buy keyboards for cheeper than a steel plate. Especially if you get them in bulk.
It being a government agency, there would be the tendency to use the best money could buy, rather than trying to get economies of scale (such as paying enormously extra for precisely five 3/8″ nuts rather than a bag of 12 at lower cost but having to inventory and store the surplus 7 [an actual and infamous example]; and, besides, when have you ever seen government furniture made of plywood when curly maple will do just as well?). Besides, replacing a cheap keyboard every 20 seconds or so would get old really fast.
Agree, steel plate would be useful, because if they are able to smash a keyboard to tiny chunks of plastic, imagine what they would do to the surface underneath :P
Maybe Governmental flunkies who sit in offices and ever actually do anything get fancy desks, but not the military service personnel (the soldiery grunt types, or those like General Faulke)
Your thinking of elected officials, most furniture has to go through a vetting process and the word cheap is what the bosses want to hear.
I work for the government (at state level, mostly of confusion). The stuff we work with comes by way of ‘lowest bidder’, such as office cubes and furnishings. And if you can get state prisoner labor to assemble it, ever better.(true story). There is a tendency to not care about what happens to the old stuff whenever there is an eventual upgrade. So if you are looking for bargains, show up at state auctions and make a bid on something you like. Unfortunately, if you happen to see something you like you can can buy it cheap, as long as you buy it and the 50 similar items all bundled together on a pallet. It is kind of like a giant Costco for out of style furnishings.
A good keyboard solution would be a tungsten steel or titanium plate on a steel or concrete desk and just use one of those laser projection keyboards. The plate would be tough to destroy casually, and easy to replace or polish smooth again.
Ahh. I had missed that someone already posted this idea. DISREGARD!!
Can’t comment on weed, never partook in it myself.
I’m similar with alcohol though, I get tired (and oddly chatty, though that happens without the alcohol if I get tired) and I don’t get hungover.
I don’t tend to drink much now (no binging, I do drink socially), once you have spent more on alcohol in one night than your monthly shopping bill and you still end up walking other people home, it starts feeling like an expensive waste of time.
Not saying I defy laws of chemistry and biology, just that I’m definitely less affected than most, the effect seems to mostly lean to tiredness and less to inebriation, and I’ve not had a hangover or memory blackouts ever…
Drank a bottle of wine in one sitting once, ending up being a better typist on mIRC (was more focussed and paid more attention, was just as fast as before, you needed to be back then with live-chats)
Heh, “Anime Inside.”
Yup :D
The Keyboard it’s not a Dvorak or QWERTY is it? maybe she’s also doing back because it’s not one she’s familiar with?
Space is on there twice, I think it’s just listing what keys she’s hitting.
I like that theory better, but the two most fundamental things that puzzle me about that “keyboard” are:
1. Why her phone would have ANY keyboard active while it’s in her pocket?
2. If it’s connected to the game, why is it in her pocket (or vice versa)?
I don’t have a problem with the “keyboard” not being qwerty or dvorak. (On my phone and tablet I use an alternate keyboard, MessagEase, that has only 14 keys.) But to me the fact that there are three space keys visible strongly argues that it isn’t a keyboard.
Umm, she didn’t use her phone, panel six is what her butt ‘dialled’ on the laptop in panel five
Really? Try it. For that matter, arch all your fingers (and thumb) backward and try typing that with the base of your thumb – which is a lot smaller than one of Sydney’s butt-cheeks.
(This argument would apply equally well to a mechanical keyboard the size of a touch screen. But we all know touch-screen keyboards do weird siht.)
Didn’t say it made any sense, but we saw her butt-dance on the keyboard of the laptop in the prior panel
Wait, if it’s not Dvorak or QWERTYUIOP? Then what is it? o_O
I think Panel 6 is meant to represent all the keys Syd accidentally pressed while badonkadonking her keyboard in Panel 5.
I imagine Heatwave would have given up on gaming after a spawn camper angers her into pushing her superheated fingers through her third laptop motherboard.
After the first one, they forced her to plug in a cheap $20 keyboard.
How much longer can Sydney hold out in a real life situation as opposed to a simulated one?
Do you remember the bank robery?
I like Peggy so much right now.
Peggy has been awesome since day one. But yeah, this just raised the bar a bit.
Also, love her pose in panel 1. Saw a player do that in paintball once (I was refereeing) and it made me snort like a warthog (it’s bad form to laugh at a player who just got smoked when you’re refereeing).
Yep, this is definitely me playing FPSes. Getting my ass kicked all the time. :(
Wonder if she also did a classic “throw the grenade up the stairs, then it bounces back down at your feet and explodes.”
This reminds me of the time I fireballed myself accidentally in Amtgard. Opposing wizard started tossing a curse at me. My instinct was to iceball myself (which takes you out for just as long but doesn’t lose a life…though the wizard could just as easily just used fireball to free me and then kill me I guess). Anyway, so I take the bolt in my hand and toss it into my chest. Then realized something was off, partially by the surprised look on the other player’s face. Look down and see that the ball I had been holding was red. And said “oops” and walked off the field.
I got an Order of the Doofus for that.
Reminds me of a time in Fallout 3, when I was going through the Anchorage sim.
Quick explanation for anyone who needs it. FO3 is a post-Apocalyptic game, sort of RPG and FPS in one. The Anchorage sim is a VR that puts the PC into a major battle just before ww3 – US versus Red China, in Alaska. One type of of Chinese units are ‘Crimson Dragoons’ – basically their stealthed (read ‘invisible’) commandos, very nasty.
Anyhow, for that playthrough, I had acquired a Missile Launcher (and reloads) which I had been gleefully using on all and sundry. Fighting was INTENSE and I was very much “in the zone”.
… Until I peeked around a corner – whilst still having the Missile Launcher equipped. Yep, you guessed it, a Crimson Dragoon was right there, at point-blank range (you can spot the ‘fringe effect’ – if you are way too close). I was so keyed-up that I literally JUMPED in my chair, and my finger involuntarily twitched on the FIRE button.
BLEW the Crimson Dragoon to pieces (wish I could have seen the expression on his face, it probably would have been hilarious), and did a significant amiount of damage to myself, needless to say.
Two extremely important lessons I learned from that:
(1) Never ever startle the dude carrying the Missile Launcher.
(2) If you’re the dude carrying the Missile Launcher, have someone else peek around corners.
I once threw a Nuka Grenade in VATS mode in that game, only to have it bounce off an overhead obstruction and land at my feet.
Value Added Tax System? o_O
VaultTech Assisted Targeting System
Never played the game (the Hentai is good though, specially TheShadman’s ‘Vaultgirl’ series, with his own custom ‘perks’ :D)
Here’s what you need to know: VATS is basically bullet-time mode that allows you to make attacks with high accuracy and a high chance of scoring a critical hit. Nuka Grenades are the most powerful grenade in the game and the second most powerful weapon period.
Learned the hard way:
Never ever EVER use a Nuka Grenade for the ‘Shady Sands Shuffle’. The blast radius is an absolute bitch.
I never noticed that the lighthook orb had an image of the lighthook inside before…
[Squints at the mystery orbs]
It won’t help you.
As a patreon, you get double resolution images, so you can zoom in more
From a pharmaceutical standpoint, ADD and ADHD are most commonly treated with stimulants to improve focus and decrease distractability. Marijuana is – chemically – a depressant so it would not help Sidney with her distractability. Also, ADD and ADHD folks are much more prone to obsessive behavior and impulsivity and consequently are at higher risk than the general public for developing dependency if they drink, smoke, or do drugs. Sidney seems to already be highly distractable and impulsive so I’m guessing illegal drugs (or abusing legal ones like alcohol and nicotine – or her ADHD meds) would probably be a bad idea for her.
A lot of ADD/ADHD drugs are amphetamines. Combining those with pot really isn’t a great idea to begin with- they can interact with each other in unpleasant ways.
Any medication combined can have ‘interesting’ reactions
Once upon a time, way back when, pot was pretty expensive in my neck of the woods, so we tried to boost it with alcohol. No fun.
So my pal tried to kill the alcohol with some low-grade speed. Even less fun for all.
Don’t do drugs, kids. :D
But if you do, NEVER mix them. It never works out well and you end up wasting all kinds of resources.
i never touch the explosives. i always blow myself up. -_-
I don’t know what ‘wark’ is, but it’s friggin’ hilarious.
It’s a sound of a bird in some cartoons (maybe some games and real life?), but mostly it’s the sound of exclamation (a real one, not that bullshit ‘ding’ from MGStupid)
It’s the sound of surprise a Chocobo (large rideable bird) makes in Final Fantasy games.
Considering many drugs have an opposite effect on many people who have ADD or ADHD, like for example myself, if I drink without having taken my meds recently the effect on me is much more like I have taken a stimulant than a depressant, increased heart rate and occasionally increased or racing thoughts. Having had and inadvertant drug reaction that essentially gave me the high that most people get with Adderall between Adderall and another legally prescribed drug (that in retrospect wasn’t the one that probably should have been prescribed) I have decided personally that trying marijauna would most likely make me paranoid or have other really bad affects and is not a good idea to try.
Actually, Sydney could have worm-crawled away under cover of the wall in panel two
So I’m not the only one to think that. Of course we don’t know what’s at the end of that wall and how far it goes.
that’s probably the reason for the “don’t get yourself cornered” kill-shot voice-over the next time Peggy says something…
If she moved forward, she could jump down a ramp, but Peggy probably has the reflexes to HS Syd as she’s jumping down. But assuming she made it, she’d still have nowhere else to go where Peggy couldn’t see her.
Actually blind fire is a perfectly fine once the combat is joined, only it has another name, covering/supressing fire. It’s goal is to prvent the enemy from shooting at you by pouring fire on his position in order to force him to duck down, because IRL the sound of bullets whizzing by is scary.
Unless you are Maxima.
Yeah, but I think that distinction between suppressing fire and blind fire is pretty important. I’m willing to bet the blind fire critique came from Sydney ducking behind cover and then firing over that cover without even looking at what was there. Something I myself have done out of fear/desperation when getting overwhelmed in an FPS.
In the case of CS:GO (the game they’re playing), you can’t even do this: you can only shoot where you’re looking, and the game code makes it so that your bullets actually come from your eyes and not your gun!
Blind fire is a desperation move. If you’re pinned and can’t risk sticking your head up to shoot, your first choice should be to hurl a grenade.
Without knowing where the enemy, your friends and any other people or things are? That’s about the worst choice possible. It might work in games and maybe (a big maybe) when you know for sure that you’re the only ally on site. Otherwise it’s just a very bad idea.
Unless you meant throwing a smoke grenade and using it as cover to move. (Or bluff your enemy into thinking you did.) That could work.
That’s why it’s a desperation move
What, and blind firing is perfectly safe? With a grenade you’ve got a better chance of actually doing something useful to the people shooting at you.
Huuummm… Ren isn’t in last page’s Who’s Who…
Unless he’s using a special keyboard, his speed isn’t going to be an enormous advantage. Keyboards have a minimum physical response time, which I’m betting Peggy pushes pretty hard at her level of practice and expertise.
Now, admittedly, really high-dollar keyboards have a shorter response time… but any conventional build will still have pressure-switches under the keys, a narrow input into the system, and will buffer while waiting on the CPU.
That MIGHT be part of the secret of Leon’s success… Wireless, switchless keyboard with an enhanced port, reset the input priority higher, over clock your CPU… If you’re the sysop, you could also arrange for the system to take your data-stream first; but that actually WOULD be cheating (somehow I can’t see Leon doing that).
He wasn’t in the Who’s Who because he didn’t speak
I definitely do not have super-speed, and back in the late 80s I had a computer that I frequently overflowed the keyboard buffer on. (When that happened I reached for the power switch.)
386 processor: 33 Mhz, single 16 bit core. Modern processor: 3.3 Ghz, quad 64 bit core.
If you really want to experience slow, I remember trying to go online over a 300 baud modem. (OK, boys and girls, can you say ‘Atari’?) You can literally read the text faster than it appears on the screen.
Still have two Atari 800XL’s, and the legendary “E.T. The Extra-terrestrial” game cartridge :P
Infamous. Not Legendary.
Depends on your POV, personally never had any problems with it
Ballistic stall. Fly up fast, swap flight for PPO, fire at the apex, swap back to flight before you build up too much fall speed.
Sorry, that was meant to be a reply in thread further up. Not sure why it posted as a top-level comment.
Sydney Sydney Sydney, maybe you could try Minecraft.
With the Creeper?
No, the problem here is that Sydney is competing with someone who actually knows what they are doing, and attempting to teach her how to stay alive in the Real World
TIL the Shipoopi song came from the 1962 movie The Music Man. I thought it was a Family Guy original. I also never noticed the similarity between Buddy Hackett and Peter Griffin.
For some reason, until watched the clip (linked it further down the page), thought you were talking about Buddy Ebsen and was thinking “You think Peter Griffin looks like Jeb Clampett? Just how much of Granny’s rheumatoid medicine have you been drinking? o_O”
Back when I played CounterStrike, your opponents were human and could be challenging. The one thing I never did understand was the idea of dropping your gun to duke it out with knives. ‘Macho’ my foot. In the game my role is either to blow up something or to stop bad guys from blowing it up. If you want to bring a knife to the fight be my guest, but there is some wisdom about proper weapon choice for gun fights (bring a mortar).
Orbital bombardment cannon for me.
Worse grenade ever in an FPS. Arabian map, oil area, at the refinery…and there are storage tanks there. Have to stop other team from setting xplosives and blowing it sky high. So we agree in chat no white phosphorous…frags well that is part of basic armament. I go with shotgun (not enough pen for tanks to leak or blow…enough to open doors and spread jihad all over the walls.) :D
Garage port and rain gutter (yeah in desert) team moves into sweep the gas tanks (don’t know if they’ll spawn at gas or initial oil storage tanks) I see guy in window other team’s unis. Okay too far for shottie, so I throw grenade- single pane glass should be easy…well for some reason that window is ballistic (to give spotters chance to get away from snipe campers I’m guessing) I’ve thrown through it before in other games. TOSS. BOUNCE ROLL ROLL and it’s PUTT PUTT TIME…I gave it a two count after popping spoon…why hasn’t it blown up? Grenade rolled under world and right under the gas tanks where 3 of 5 of my team is sweeping.
POP POP POP WHOOOSH … well there goes the fuel park and my teammates. Chain reaction.
Ooops? :D One of the enemy mined a car in carport too so right as I’m climbing over it BOOM I end up decorating the top insides of the carport…that is one tough roof there… it of course looks just like quansit hut roofing/wall material and a low call pistol will go right through it… Not this damn car port. We lost the map big time Our sniper just started shooting the oil tanks and then used tracers…at least the enemy didn’t get the mission bonuses…I’ve hated frags in that game since.
I dunno about pot, but booze keeps me a bit less distractable and slightly more focused and that’s a depressant as well. Though, it’s hard to say because even though there are trends every body reacts slightly differently to each drug
I’ll never know what it’s like to get high from pot. One good breath of that stuff and it triggers nausea and migraines in me. I don’t give a rodents donkey if any one else smokes it, just don’t expose me to it. Or my kid as odds are that she will have the same reaction. Or a good friend of mine, who doesn’t get as sick as I do, but still has to take pepto and tylenol if he takes a hit.
As to Sydney, it’s hard to guess. She might react the opposite, and that’s just because biology and reactions to drugs isn’t the same in everyone. Of course, I wonder if the orbs have some blanket effects on their bonded host even if an orb isn’t being touched that just haven’t been noticed yet.
A friend of ours with similar reactions claims that a combination of catnip & damiana does for her what pot does for most people. I can’t say, I’ve never tried it – and while I’ve inhaled fresh pot smoke, never enough of it to produce a reaction that I or anyone else could discern.
(Allergies? One time we went through the people we knew with food allergies/sensitivities and realized that it wouldn’t be hard to make a pretty fancy pizza consisting solely of ordinary things they couldn’t eat (plus a bit of water) – and if they ate it anyway about eight people would be seeking medical attention, no two of them for the same sensitivity.)
Actually a easy fix for the super strong when it comes to keyboards, would be to get one of those light projection keyboards. A laser jsut paints the keyboard onto any flat surface and then a sensor reads where your fingers are reading what key your hitting.
So the actual keyboard could just be a slab of steel or stone or what have you.
That doesn’t really work for gaming though. Most gamers will tell you that a mechanical keyboard is best, which is basically the opposite of a laser keyboard.
When gaming, you’re resting your fingers on the keys so you can quickly access them (the movement keys at least). That’s not an option with a laser keyboard
If I were training supers that had superhuman strength, teaching them to operate a delicate keyboard under duress without breaking it would be one of the exercises I would require.
I recognize those locations! Very nice art!
I just clued in as to why this page is entitled “Shipoopi”…
It’s because Peggy is the girl who’s hard to get!
;-)
The original “Shipoopi” :D
Attempting to figure out Panel Four: is that when she got Peggy?
Asking because, well, that ‘cat who ate the Peggy’ look combined with the ‘PPPOW’ ‘EEK!’ is different to the usual ‘BLAM’ ‘WARK!’ we had been hearing followed by Panel Five (with Peggy’s adorable face: is that because of the Neutron Dance or because Sydney actually got her? are we going to see that take down? you just know that Leon is busy editing it before sending it to Maxi and the rest of ARCHON :P)
Yes, she probably got a lucky hit on Peggy there
…Has Sydney ever played any FPS before? I mean, Sydney said last page I I though I was pretty good at this” but she seems to lack the basics of any multiplayer shooter.
Sydney may have played FPS before, may even be moderately good at it, but what she is playing right now is “Surviving a Gun Fight 101”
Your missing my point, your not even ‘moderately good’ at a FPS unless you already know what Peggy has been telly Sydney for the last two pages. Just watch some videos of CS: GO game play.
If Sydney said that she thought she was pretty good at it, kinda sorta maybe implies that she has played it before and had been decently okay with it, maybe only playing against other amateurs and not a highly trained professional sniper
I can see her being good at it in other circumstances: she has fast reflexes and a periodic bouts of incredible attention to detail and heightened memory.
I just don’t see her being good at it *consistently*. Being Sydney, she probably normally goes off to do something else after her kill/death ratio starts to go south.
My understanding of CS is that it is where seriously good FPS’ers go to hone their skills. So people who are pretty good at COD or HALO generally get their asses handed to them.
But, I’ve never played it so I don’t know from personal experience.
“it’s page 420 and no pot references”
I’m slow – finally realized this was a reference to California’s Prop 420.
And the reason it’s called ‘Prop 420’ is probably because of the already connection between pot and the number 420