Grrl Power #422 – Out-patience
I’ve talked about Harem’s powers in my post under some of the comics and in the comments, but only a few times actually in the comic. Plus I just liked this scene with Harem having to, as she suggests, knowingly do something that would hurt as much as breaking her own hand. Something Sydney almost gets to experience anyway since when there’s only 4 Harems, they’re each twice as strong as a fit but otherwise normal 5′ 8″ girl. Or 1.72 meters if you live in a part of the world that doesn’t use a completely arbitrary measurement system. (I was going to bag on how old the Imperial system is as well, but turns out metric has been around for nearly as long.) It’s embarrassing to me that Americans are too belligerent to change over, even though 1.72 meters is an almost meaningless value to me. I mean, I’m 6 feet tall, and 2 meters is like 6′ 6″ so I can kind of work from backwards from there, but geeze, just put kilometers on all the roadsigns in a different color for a generation, then in another generation remove the mile numbers. Have all the characters all the pop culture make fun of the old fogies that say how much they weight in pounds and how tall they are in feet. Oh and guys can start bragging about how many cm their cranks are. Weight? You’re 140? How would you like to weigh 63 overnight? Done. Easy.
Sorry, that was a hell of a tangent.
In the second to last panel Sydney’s really trying to say “I’m distracting you from your pain with different pain.” I considered changing it, but between extra strong Harem smushing her hand and all the flailing, I thought it was ok that she wasn’t belting out Sorkin-esque perfect dialog. People sometimes flub their lines in real life.
Edit: So I thought I’d explain what’s going on in this page as some people are a little confused. Strawberry blonde Harem’s wrist got broken during the big battle, so she immediately de-teleported that one which puts her in a timeless storage of sorts. Effectively she ceases to exist until that copy of her is recalled. In other words, she doesn’t feel the pain of the broken wrist. When she finally ports back in, she feels the freshly broken wrist which is why she wanted to do it right in front of the doc, who can start healing it right away, thus minimizing the amount of time she’s in pain.
Edit 2: Ok I did some art edits tonight to make some things clearer. Panel 6 is zoomed out a little so it’s clear Harem is grabbing Sydney’s hand, and panel 8 is zoomed way out to show Sydney flopping on the table. Apparently people thought she was doing a poorly executed flying arm bar on Harem which come to think of it is actually funnier, but was definitely confusing people. Hopefully that clears it up for everyone anyway. Here’s the old version if you’re curious.
Patreon supporters can view this page at twice the size! (as soon as I wake up and post it then immediately go back to sleep since Patreon doesn’t have a way to schedule posts yet.) $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)
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.
It might be difficult, but I propose that, when you click on the image of the characters up above, it will take you to the page that image was taken.
Way to difficult: the images keep changing, the first five are always the same character, but the last one is Gwen, Ari or Peggy
That, and my friend and I were here at the same time on different computers. The top pictures he had were not the ones I had.
The would definitely be nice, but at the moment its a simple 4-6 line bit of PHP that randomizes the pictures displayed from a folder. Linking them up to the pages they came from would require actual coding work that’s way beyond my level of ability. Not saying it couldn’t happen, but it’d take more than me banging on it.
With an SQL database it wouldn’t be too hard to do but filling in the info for all the images would be a pain.
Not to forget, some of the images are not from the comic itself
i`m pretty sure they all are.
No, there is at least one image each of Maxi and Harem that is pre-comic (the one of Harem in a hoodie)
You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be, Mike. You wouldn’t need a database. Just use the existing mechanism to pick a random file from a folder. Except instead of a folder full of images, have it full of HTML snippets that contain the requisite link and image tags. And instead of putting the filename in an image tag, just print the file contents as raw HTML.
Dave, I think that would be really cool. I currently have several of Dabbler’s pics saved. It would also be really cool if the entire folder of pics was accessible. Would you be willing to get reader help with the coding? Mike and Random832 seem to know how to do it. ^_^
The thing with the Metric system is the internal logic.
One example:
1 cubic decimeter (10x10x10 cm) contains exactly 1 liter. 1 liter (of water) weights 1 kg. Etc.
I am from Spain. And I can tell from a friend that was raised in USA that the metric sistem is more intuitive
According to the Encyclopedia, the Imperial System’s measurements are older by…looks like almost a thousand years.
As to America’s refusal to use the metric system…this statement is not entirely true.
The reality is that the Imperial system of measurements had a number of holes in it, which have, as time has gone by, been filled by new units. The kilogram is now part of the Imperial Measurement system, for instance–it is the unit that measures mass, as opposed to the force exerted upon an object (or area), which is measured in pounds. There is actually a formula for direct conversion between pounds and newtons. However, because the definition of a kilogram is “an object that weighs X pounds at Y gravity,” the point rapidly becomes moot…at least as far as your bathroom scale cares. The same holds true for energy measurements–a watt is part of the Imperial system, even though it is a metric measurement, while the joule is typically replaced by the BTU–the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. I could go on, but you get the point. The metric system generally does not reciprocate the favor, by the way–rather than adopt existing measurement systems, such as the BTU, it instead prefers to create new measurements out of whole cloth. Why, I am not sure, except that the traditional keepers of the metric system are the French, and they would rather die than accept ANYTHING that even might have originated in England.
The US measurements are not exactly the same as the old English units of the same name. Standardisation came only after your independence. And the US measurements differ somewhat from the British Imperial measurements, which were standardised in 1824. Both were changed several times and were combined into a single standard in 1959, slightly different from each of the old ones. The US uses its old standard in a very limited number of fields (survey), but mostly the US measurements used today are a quarter the age of the metric system. (There were proposals to simply adopt the metric system several times, but they were rejected with great arguments: My favourite was the 1880s declaration that the metric system is atheistic)
1) BTU only replaced joule in heat-related situations such as stoves, heaters, air-conditioners, furnaces, etc. Joule is still used for measuring other forms of energy such as electricity and impact.
2) how is pounds/ Fahrenheit metric? Your comment was how Imperial filled hole by borrowing metric, BTU isn’t metric, it was a hole, but it’s not metric.
Why do I care about the internal logic of how much water weighs? How is that more logical? Why not a system where 1 kilogram contains exactly 1 liter of oatmeal?
Especially how is it more logical than a system where we can express the vast number of temperatures in nice whole numbers, where a 3/4 rise/run roof is easy because measurements are based on a number easily divided by 3 and 4 (and 2 and 6, instead of only 2 and 5 — seriously, who builds a 1/5 slope roof).
So the number of feet can’t be changed to a mile by moving a decimal. Name one real life scenario where we measure lots of things in meters and then need to convert to kilometers. There isn’t one. Either we measure in thousands of meters (like ordering building supplies — you don’t order 3 km of rebar, you order 3000 m of rebar), or we measure in kilometers. Being able to easily convert is useless in real life.
Wake me up when the comments get done being about ‘blah blah MY measuring system is better than yours blah blah’ and get back to ‘DAMN, this webcomic is the BEST one around!’ ;)
Sincerely,
Me
So… Harem’s cute.
And Sydney’s Sydney.
Wow! I didn’t know Harem was so buff. Takes some dedication to get a set of muscles like that.
Could be because of the strength boost granted by the de-teleportation. Increased strength would likely come with increased mass.
No, it’s simply we haven’t seen her in
makework-out clothes before, if you check her Playboy shoot, she is similarly ripped with all five on show (literally)What? AGAIN I have no idea what’s happening on this page.
Seriously, no other comic is as bad as this one at showing the reader what’s going on.
I’m sorry but that’s just how it is.
Harem got her wrist broken.
To save herself the pain, she de-teleported Broken Wristed Harem – as in de-materialized. As in NO LONGER EXISTING. As in stasis.
As long as Broken Wristed Harem is in stasis, the other Harems don’t feel that pain.
Blonde Harem is trying to bring Broken Wristed Harem out of “stasis” so the doctor can heal that wrist. She’s bracing herself for that pain, because it’s going to hurt like hell.
Does that help? :)
No, sorry, it doesn’t. The problem isn’t with the logic in the comic, it’s the visuals. I understand exactly what is happening from a story perspective. But WTF is going on in Panel 8? I realize that Sydney is reacting to getting her hand crushed by Harem but the visuals do not communicate that well at all. It looks more like Sydney is trying to put Harem in an arm bar. I realize now that Sydney is trying to use all the strength she has to pull away from Harem’s grip but I don’t think that was shown very well.
That is exactly what Sydney is attempting to do: put Blondini in an armbar because she crushed Sydney’s hand
Agreed. If Sydney was wearing a watch or a ring, or if her cuff was visible, it would be a lot easier to tell what’s going on in panel 6. As is, there’s this floating hand in front of Sydney that someone is grabbing…
There is a trick of sorts to dealing with pain. Not what I’d call a nice trick or effective one, but let’s say you stubbed your toe. It’s a very annoying pain, so your friend “helps” you forget the toe by smashing your fingers in a door. Pesto: you no longer care about your stubbed toe. Now you care about your fingers, and more importantly, you want very much to strangle your former friend.
Now my read on the scene is that Harem has a death grip on Sydney, and Sydney is spazing out to get away, using the ‘pain to cure pain’ to explain the details of her spazing.
Yes it do help
Part of the problem is the pace (now bi-weekly). Go back and binge read from the restaurant fight till now. It will make way more sense.
This page is very understandable if you’ve been following this comic for a while. First 3 panels is setup for the gag, with Harem bracing for the pain of a now re-existing injury. Panel 5 is another Harem teleporting in with hammer to give to Halo, highlighting what the anticipation of pain is like to the reader. Go seriously think about doing yourself injury with hammer for a moment… errr that almost want to stop tying in sympathetic pain.
Panel 6 is a “I’m going to hold your hand while I’m in pain” gag, although the angle strange and makes this the most unclear panel of the page, but still understandable. Panel 7 is the pay off on this gag as Halo’s hand gets crushed. Which is evident by the twist and deformation of the skin around Harem’s thumb (nice arting there). Panel 7 is also the pay off to the gag setup in 1-3.
Panel 8 is the “Sydney” moment. The overly dramatic attempt to leverage herself out of Harem’s hand crushing grip.
Panel 9 has a reinforcement of the pain Harem is in, with her holding her writs in harmonium pain that her other body is feeling. Which is something that’s been established several times in the comic already. Getting a Maxima wedgie, and the resulting domino chain of additional minor injuries, and getting socked in the face by Sydney at first meeting.
Again, if you were reading this as a fully printed issue in one sitting it would be easier to get as you’d have more current knowledge of 1) Harem’s powers and how she tends to use herself, 2) Sydney-ims , 3) Harem and Sydney’s personal/work relationship. All of which is easy to lose track of in a longer running format like bi-weekly page releases.
If you haven’t done an archive run from start to now, lately, I’d recommend it. Makes many things much clearer.
I am all caught up on the comic up to now, but I still had no clue what happened in panels 6 & 7. The perspective is too close in panel six. (Wild hands appear!) With the foreshortening of Sydney’s elbow cut off below the panel, it left me “WTF?” as I my eyes moved to it from the panel five. (I thought Harem was breaking her own wrist, or something weird lie that.) If Dave would have pulled that shot back a little, and show Sydney’s arm to elbow, it would not be as ambiguous as it is. Then, from panel 5 to 7, (with a wild, distracting “Vorp” in seven,) it does not help that (blondie) Harem goes from a defensive stance to a pooping pose before random legs appear. From an animation stand point, the In-betweening of those three Key Frames is hard to imagine (for us readers). The timing is good for the individual frames, it’s the camera work that hinders the comprehensibleness of the action. If panels 6 & 8 were bigger, i.e., had more page real estate to show their actions, with a few actions arrows thrown in for good measure, then I feel there would be no question as to what is happening.
I added a comment to my post to explain better what’s happening, since this page requires people to know how Harem’s powers work, and remembering all the events of the battle doesn’t hurt either.
All that said, yes the flow of events could have definitely been clearer. I probably could have cut Harem’s whinging to 2 panels on the top row and given myself more room for the art in subsequent panels.
Looking over the entire layout of the page, Dave, yeah, I agree that you could have cut out most of the white space at the top of the first three panels, and lowered all of the speech bubbles, so that would have given you more room to play with in the other panels. Live and learn … while cranking out fabulous work on the regular. Eh? :P (Or maybe even it can be something to correct, exclusive, for the print version…. #NudgeNudgeWinkWink) Regardless, nice tweak to the sixth panel, as it helps with its “readability of action”. You might want to shrink Sydney’s hand down a tad, too, just so it sits more plush in the image. As is, it looks a little too big to be attached to her arm. That, or you got a Dolly Zoom going on there. @_@
Additional Thought: Please comparison the size of the foreground hands in panel six to those in panel seven, while keeping the idea of foreshortening in mind. The hands are nearly the same size, a tad smaller in panel seven, but the main thing is their distance(s) from the size of the bodies in frame(s). The “vorp”—the second pair of hands in a triple stack of hands (from panels six to seven)—is one of the things that throws off what the eyes are supposed to be tracking from panel to panel. This is the gun range-thing again, where I’m not quite sure what I am supposed to be looking at in what order, in panel seven, if that makes sense.
You are supposed to be looking at everything in panel seven at the same time: everything happened at once, not one followed by another
“You are supposed to be looking at everything … at the same time.” … I’m sorry, Guesticus, unlike you, I do not have the visual acuteness of a fly.
Did you change panel 8 to include the examtable? It looks better than what I remember seeing Thursday.
Yes, panel eight and panel six, he included a link to the original page in his comments
Take me to your liter!
But only if it’s measured in proofs’.
Okay, I also feel the need to chime in on the measurement system debate. The metric system is the most useful and intuitive system for the sciences. If you want to launch a rocket or you want to measure molecules, use metric.
However, Imperial is by far superior when it comes to day to day use. All of the measurements are intuitively named and convenient even if you don’t have a full system of measuring tools. For example, Imperial kicks metric’s ass when it comes to cooking. Need a cup of baking soda but someone stole your measuring cups? Well, any CUP in your house contains roughly a CUP of liquid. Same thing for tablespoons and teaspoons. Trying to finish a DIY carpentry project but someone stole your measuring tape? Well, guess what everyone has handy that is roughly a foot long? And the fact that there are 12 inches in a foot is also by design because 12 is an easy number to divide into halves, thirds, or quarters which are all also fairly easy measurements to “eyeball”.
The length of a mile is a little bit more confusing and is based around the length of a furlong, a common unit of measure in agriculture in the 1600’s. But kilometers are just as clunky and non-intuitive, so I still say that Imperial is the system of the people while Metric is the system of snobby, holier-than-though, scientist assholes.
You do realise that not all ‘cups’ are the same size, don’t you?
And as for ‘feet’: a six foot man’s foot is not going to be the same size as a five foot girl’s foot
Again, obviously. However, I preluded my explanation with the caveat that we aren’t trying to launch a missile or invent a new element. We’re just trying to cook some rice or pace off the right distance for a game of touch football. Honestly, that’s where the imperial system came from in the first place. It was all measurements that people could easily understand and utilize without requiring clarification from the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Weights, Measures, and Coinage.
But again, not all cups hold the same, and not all feet are the same length
You’re missing my point. I understand that if you and I have different size feet, we’ll have different measurements. I’m giving examples, though, where that difference is small enough that it doesn’t matter. If you wear a size 8 and I wear a size 14 and we both try and measure off a field for our friendly, Saturday football game, you may end up with a field that’s only 90 yards long and I may end up with one that’s 110 yards long. But it doesn’t matter. If you’re trying to cook rice and you need one cup of rice and two cups of water, sure, you may end up with .95 cups of rice and 1.9 cups of water. But it does not matter.
I think you’re missing the point. People who use metric never has any need to measure things in FEET anyway.
Are you claiming that people who use metric never lose their measurement devices when they are cooking or playing games? Because if not, then you are missing his point.
Imperial is also generally better about keeping it’s measurements in daily life between 0-100 without resorting to negatives or decimals.
Also, if metric was truly intuitive and didn’t require modification, it wouldn’t be that .001 L water occupies .1 m^3, and weighs 1 g.
most people who use feet, yards, etc. have at some point measured themselves against a ruler and know about how far off it is. My foot is almost 12 inches. My thumb’s first joint is almost exactly 2 inches. When I spread my hand the distance from thumb to pinky is exactly 6 inches. My stride is about 4 inches short of a yard.
What metric measurements can you do that with?
You assume imperial i’s easy because that’s what you grew up with. People that grew up with the metric system have the same mental picture as you, but in metric. Scot up there said “12 is an easy number to divide in halves”, I don’t get what about division or multiplication by 10 is so difficult.
I’d guess that most people with latin languages (spanish, portuguese, italian, french) may have a slight advantage in remembering the divisions since the prefixes deci (1/10), centi (1/100) and mili (1/1000) are reminiscent of the words for 10, 100 and 1000.
My thumb to pinkie spread is 20 centimeters (8 inches), my foot is about 25 centimeters (10 inches), my first thumb knuckle is 4 centimeters (1.6 inches, or 1 and 19/32 of an inch) and so on (love the 19/32 by the way)… :/
There’s A, which is sort of the introductory level, then B, and C, which are delightful, then D which begins to intimidate…
I think I went off track somewhere…
Another reason why the US can’t go to the metric system is that we would have to change all the old folksy proverbs. I can’t see someone saying “Him 2.54 centimeters and he’ll take 1.61 kilometers”.
Dang it. the comment system took my ‘give’.
“Give a comment system a proverb, and it will take a word.”
Nah, where I’m from is part of the ‘eurozone’ we still use all our old sayings in regards to currency, and many of them are no longer applicable because the euro coins and notes have different numbers in some cases and just havce different names in general.
Why would they even convert to exact numbers in a saying? They could just say “Give him a centimeter and he’ll take a kilometer.” Or use a version not focused on a meassurement, like in my country it is (translated): “Give him a finger and he’ll take the whole hand.”
My personal fave was “Give him and inch… and he thinks he’s a ruler”
Wait, are people really that clueless about what is going on in this page? Or are they simply trolling to be clever? o_O
ANd Sydney’s last line in panel eight makes perfect sense: she knows that Daphne considers all five her as being her, and the pain experienced by one feels no different to another without the injury, and it’s like how some people will squeeze someone’s hand to distract them from the imminent injection: it’s psychological, overload the senses with one pain will hopefully prevent them from feeling the pain of another
A better solution is biological. If you send another signal through the same nerves, the second signal overrides part of the pain signal. In other words, squeeze your arm/ shoulder above where the shot will be given, and the pain signal will have to fight its way through the pressure signal and be reduced. I figured this out during years of allergy shots, then heard it explained on a science show.
Since the brain interprets all touch/ pain in the same area, adding a second signal to reduce awareness of the first isn’t psychological, it’s biological, the brain can only process so much at one time in the same area. Using the same nerves further limits the bandwidth of information (pain) that can be carried to the brain
From the number of times I’ve had to explain it, I think it’s for real, especially since after I posted explanations to three questions, I did not get more questions. Trolls would have been ‘clueless’ about some portion of my explanation. It makes me sad, really. I understood the comic perfectly, and it even appears that Dave has changed a couple of panels since then.
The comment threads frequently get massively scientific, and I know a large number of former and current soldiers and scientists read this comic. I know the usual commenters are smart.
Stef, above, actually got Dave to comment. I have no idea what is so hard to understand about this page that it brings out commenters who reveal that there are quite a lot of readers who are not as intelligent as most of the usual commenters.
Makes you wonder what sort of comics they have been exposed to previously that they can’t follow what is going on, and not all of the ones ‘clueless’ are new readers
If Daphne wanted to avoid some of the pain, she could de-teleport most of herselves (and that’s a odd word that only makes sense in context) and then leave the broken wrist version as the only one.
…..Is it possible for her to de-teleport all of herselves leaving no one behind?
I doubt that helps much with the pain, since she only has 1 mind that experiences the pain anyway
That would be a hard one to test. Well, easy actually, but it would be difficult to inform Harem of the results.
Oh yeah, something tells me that Dr. Chevy would get along a certain holographic doctor on Star Trek. ;)
“She doesn’t the pain of the broken wrist.” I don’t care if that was intentional or not, it was still a great way of putting it.
On the Metric vs Other debate: Can we stop calling US Customary “Imperial”? They are different systems that happen to share names for some (different) measurements, after all.
…if we could get ourselves organized enough to change the name, we could probably just finally convert over
my thought on the whole imperial system/metric system thing has to do with the US being the equivalent of an unruly teenager when it comes to national age and maturity. The US is currently at the stage where it knows best, everyone else is wrong and omg no dad it isn’t just a phase!
Truth is, we’ve tried switching to metric. We even formed a government commission to encourage the adoption of the metric system. Want to know what happened?
Two words: budget cuts.
Off topic for the page, but I wanted to say that I enjoy Maxima’s look in the new (current) vote incentive. It’s a “I’m through with your shit,” kind of look, which is perfect for her…. And Doc Chevy, apparently.
Would it work to have Harem have a local anesthetic before un-de-teleporting?
I thought about that too, and I’m inclined to say yes. Although the medicine is only in one body (presumably), she’d feel the effect in all of them. But possibly not entirely since she can tell her arms apart when she’s not surprised or overwhelmed.
Local anaesthetic only works by numbing a specific part of the body. You can’t numb the part that actually hurts, because it’s de-teleported
You also can’t numb the brain… well, not in this case
And this is more a case of anticipatorial-pain: Blondini knows it is going to be painful, because she remembers why she put Berry in storage for two days in the first place, and that is building up the pain potential beyond what it would normally be
The old system does have some advantages, and it wasn’t entirely arbitrary. The measurements were often related to the things around people in their everyday lives, and intended to divide up easily by as many different integers as possible, and given names related to how they were used, all created by people who weren’t blessed to study advanced mathematics in their standard education. (For most of human history, the math we teach kids in high school was pretty specialized knowledge.)
There’s a lot of “the rest of the world must know better, because Americans are stupid” that goes into the metric-uber-alles discussion inside the US.
“For most of human history, the math we teach kids in high school was pretty specialized knowledge.”
No, up till my grandfather’s time what is now considered a 4th-grade education, was about the most that poor people received. The “little red schoolhouse” era rarely went past long division. “For most of human history,” long division was advanced math only taught to scholars.
That doesn’t change what Killjoy</b said, they just forgot the 'now', as in "For most of human history, the math we teach kids in high school now was pretty specialized knowledge”
What kind of star power is Harem using? Is it somehow related to teleportation?
That’s not “star power”, that’s “OH MY GOD, IT HURTS” power (a visual indicator of where the subtle action/ pain is).
Man, Harem looks incredibly fit and gorgeous on this page.
I’m a relatively new reader, so apologies if this question has been asked before (and especially if it gets asked *all the time*):
Any plans to set up a line of tee shirts? I’d love to have any number of Arc tee shirts. And I’d *really* love a polo shirt with an ArcLight logo embroidered on it. (My boss insists on shirts with collars; he never said I couldn’t geek them out a little. ArcLight would go well with my other work shirts, which variously declare my allegiance to the Autobots, SHIELD, and the Rebel Alliance.)
Also: it strikes me as odd that ArcSWAT all refer to each other by their code names, even in private. Is there a reason for that? Or is it a supers cultural thing — kind of like Magneto saying “What’s your *real* name, John?” to Pyro? You take a new name because you’re not really the same person you were before you had your powers. (I’ll stop yammering. Great comic, go you, please keep making it forever.)
It’s like pilots referring to each other by their flight handles. As long as everyone knows who you’re talking about, it probably doesn’t matter what name you use.
It also depends on where they are and who else is around
I actually wandered back through a bunch of the pages for awhile, and it’s harder than I expected to find situations where one team member is referring to another by name in a context where it’s not clearly “professional” (in front of outsiders, say) — except for Sydney, who is almost *always* referred to as “Sydney”. I did find a few times where it was entirely off-duty (on the roof of the dance club, and Sydney talking to herself when she was alone in her room) when Sydney called Xuriel “Dabbler”. I’m not sure I can think of a single comic when anyone called her “Xuriel”.
I think I notice it more because everyone calls Halo “Sydney”, and also because I still remember when it was jarring (after being raised on Super Friends) for Justice League members to call each other “Bruce”, “Clark”, and “Diana”. So now I’m hyper-aware of it whenever supers *don’t* call each other by their given names when off-duty.
On the whole, I’m sure I’m overthinking it because of the previously-mentioned hyper-awareness. I’ve got plenty of friends with nicknames, which different people use at different times for whatever reason, and I never feel the need to have them explain themselves.
It bugs me in super cartoons when the heroes casually call each other by their secret identities in person or over the radio. Considering that the Mirror Master could be hiding in Batgirl’s compact or anyone with electrotelepathy could be hacking their line, or just someone with super hearing a few blocks away.
Must have been tired when first read that: thought you said Mirror Master could be hiding in Batman‘s compact >_>
It seems to mainly happen with DC’s “Main Three”, raising the theory that, even though JLA has been around for awhile and they have all teamed together several times, only the Triumvirate know each others real identity (or maybe it was only The Crimson Flasher who was clueless)
I’m pretty sure it was that Batman knows the secret identities of EVERYONE.
It was like that in Young Justice as well. The only person who knew that Captain Marvel was Billy Batson was Batman. Even among the triumvirate.
“We need to change outfits to blend in.”
“Wait, what about our secret-”
“Wally West, Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne.” – Batman, cutting to the point.
That’s the scene was thinking of :D
That was a great scene. It reminds me of another scene, where Batman got a taste of his own medicine:
Batman: Who are you people?
Amanda Waller: That’s a national security matter. And if I were you, I wouldn’t probe the situation too closely … rich boy.
Oh and as far as the t-shirts go, I should probably do that at some point. :/
Just do it as part of the kickstarter for the book. Add the shirts as a stretch goal. At +10k (or whatever you find out they cost) everybody above a certain donation bracket gets a t-shirt. And maybe order extra with whatever money you have leftover to sell here.
Don’t wait for the kickstarter, start getting money now with CafePress. Patreon is good. It’s nice that people are generous. People are more generous when they get something to show their support, like an overpriced t-shirt.
Well, here you go. ;)
The transition between panel 7 and panel 8 was very confusing. It’s like, “Wait, Sydney is literally doing a handstand or something.” I get what you were going for after reading it a couple of times and thinking about it, but it was jarring when I tried to make sense of it. Maybe it would have been better to pull back more so we could see all of Sydney and not just her legs. Maybe it would have been better just to have Syndey pulling away really hard rather than flipping. I dunno. Definitely one of your visual storytelling experiments that didn’t work as intended.
Guys already brag about how long their equipment is in cm. They just *claim* it’s in inches.
I’m about to date myself really badly…
The USA already tried just that, with the adding of the KM/Hr underneath the MPH speed limits.
Google Metric Conversion Act of 1975
I remember the signs, and thinking that it was a good thing, to join the rest of the world… but then there were budget cuts during the Reagan Administration, and the funding (and the signs) went away in 1981.
I think I basically all boils down to money, yes there would be some long term gains to going metric, but you’d have to regulate and enforce a conversion. That would produce a short term cost that out ways the fiscal benefit of metric for quite a long time, plus you still have to make parts for the old machines and equipment and essentially make two manufacturing limes in each plant till the conversion is over
“…essentially make two manufacturing limes in each plant till the conversion is over…”
Why? Australia officially completed the switch to Metric in 1988, though the manufacturing and building sectors acheived this much sooner. Guess what? “Pre-metric” appliances and other goods are still to be found in working order – it’s just a matter of finding the parts to keep them running (as with absolutely ANY item over twenty years old). It’s not like the laws of physics or the power voltages suddenly changed.
More importantly. why would you be wanting to manufacture limes? Does Oz have a surplus of coconuts and their trees aren’t producing enough fruit naturally to fill them? o_O
I strongly suspect it was a typo on Orz’s part. Ayt least. that was my assumption …..
And what the frick does coconuts have to do with limes anyhow? Totally different species, dude.
Put The Lime In The Coconut –
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5LxC3M-Yngs
That was it :D
In 1988 australia’s gdp was about 290 billion, the use had a gdp of 5.3 odd trillion, 18x that of Australia with a well entrenched measuring system, the cost of conversion, as well as maintaining special lines to ensure that the vast infrastructure covering a vastly larger area that Australia could be maintained till they could be replaced in time needed government funding to keep online, without that there just isn’t any economic incentives
I understood the “Harem is about to feel pain” part, but why is she trying to actually break Sydneys arm? Do they have some kind of enmity between them?
She’s grabbing Halo’s hand for support and probably forgot how strong she is with only 4 of her around. Or thought Sydney could take it.
No, panel eight is Sydney’s reaction to Blondini’s attempted pain diversion (although, how is that going to work anyway? Divert her pain into someone else? o_O) and attempting to break the hold, Blondini isn’t saying that the boot to the face hurts (although, it probably does) but that the broken wrist hurts
It’s much like when we were kids and about to get a shot or have something necessarily painful, and a parent would say “squeeze my hand”…
Is it me or is Harem, for the lack of a better word, “Bigger” than before?
Yes, according to Dave, her mass and strength increase among the remaining bodies when each body is “un-teleported”. I used as a reference.
I don’t think un-de-teleport is the right nomenclature for what is about to happen. I think Harem likes saying Undie Teleport like it’s a thing.
Re-teleport or reappear would be more fitting. Re something, you don’t un-de anything.
Well, Daphne is still, technically, only around eighteen or nineteen, and she does de-teleport when she puts one of her into ‘storage’, so, un-de-teleporting is correct in that usage
The term gives me a visual… it’s a naughty visual
Then after the undie teleport, step 3: profit.
Just… don’t try it on Maxi, or it will be ‘step 4: five funerals’
Hopefully Sidney’s comment about strawberry being two days younger means Dave will finally address the issues of Harem being potentially immortal(among other things). Given how Harem’s powers seem to work it seems like she ought to be able to teleport one of her other four bodies without destroying the original to “overwrite” strawberry if she wanted to avoid the pain more than she wanted to avoid going through the work of turning a copy of one of her other bodies into strawberry. Which means she should also be able to keep one body of optimal age permanently stored and copy it to replace any bodies that get too old for her comfort.
Since Harem seems to have control over a pocket universe where she can store any bodies that are currently unteleported along with any gear they are carrying outside of time and her maximum number of bodies has been increasing over time then she is only a few power tricks and a bunch of years from reaching minor deity status.
Finally I should mention that the limitation on her being able to carry other living things must have some loopholes, if she lost her gut bacteria every time she vorped she would likely have died shortly after discovering her powers.
This relies on the fan-conspiracycrap that Daphne has a dozen more ‘bodies’ stashed away for emergencies that ARCHON doesn’t know about (same as that BS ‘loophole’ everyone seems to be picking at about her living matter transportation limitations: the gut bacteria, and the mouth bacteria, the yeast infection she can’t get rid of and the toe-jam are all part of her, that’s like saying she should be *VORP*ing bald because hair is typically dead tissue)
I don’t see the problem, she can teleport with dead objects (like the stuff she fetched from the armory during the restaurant fight).
It also relies on the completely baseless assumption that Harem can overwrite a body.
And where do people come up with this “increasing number of bodies over time” crap?
As far as I can tell from the COMIC, she got her powers, teleported, discovered there were now two of her, did it three more times, had five of her, teleported a fifth time, and didn’t leave behind a copy. How, precisely, do you propose that she destroys one of those teleport clones? There is ZERO evidence that she has that power, and there IS evidence against it: she has not been walking around with five bodies in meatspace since putting Strawberry in storage, and she considers this being “blind in one eye”. If she could overwrite copies, she would have made a temp, at the least, while one copy is in storage, if not simply deleted Strawberry.
Of course, maybe the Harem in storage counts against her limit. However, there has been no indication that she has the ability that you so casually talk about her using.
We don’t even know if Harem will be able to make another body if one of her DIES.
The “increasing numbers of bodies over time” came from DaveB himself when he explained how Daphne ended up with four ‘extra’ selves, and it was just extrapolated that she will gain another in a few years
We don’t know if one of her dies results in all dying, and she’s not going to try because she herself no longer remembers which one is the ‘real’ original Daphne (Berry is simply the least modified)
LaurieCheers: objects that were never alive (like guns and flash-bangs) don’t count the same as a living being
I think I know what is off with the arm-bar panel. We can’t see Sydney’s face. The first time I saw it it looked like her head was getting smothered into the table. Also I wonder if it would have been easier for her to use her lighthook to get free.
The pain of her hand getting crushed is stopping her from thinking straight (well, straighter than normal Sydney-thinking), or she could have used all seven of her balls to pummel Blondini (resulting in two of Harem in need of urgent medical attention and Sydney ending up in serious trouble)
Actually it’s metric that’s arbitrary; imperial is based off of naturally evolving measurements people made in real life, such as oh, the foot. Plus, don’t kid yourself— the GOVERNMENTS of the world use metric but the PEOPLE still use things like foot, yard, inch, pound, stone, etc. Plus, imperial can be divided 2,3,4,6, and 12. whereas metric can only be evenly divided by 2,5, and 10. Kind of important if you need a third of something.
That may be true in North America and possibly the United Kingdom, but if you actually bother to do the research, I’m sure you’ll find it’s not the case everywhere that uses metric.
DaveB: one thing your panel eight edit doesn’t explain: how did Sydney end up on the table when she was clearly standing behind it beside Blondini?
Flailing. Sydney is a 3rd Dan Flailer.
Much better, only Sydney was standing up next to Blond Harem in panels 1-3, then in panel 8 she is lying on the table.
There’s some truth in this. Sometimes I explain distances on a street by “average width of a house”. And I never thought of a larger distance as, say, 2.1 megameter instead of 2100km. (But I could, it’s a no-brainer :D)
:-( That again.
I want to point out that, for whatever reason, people using the metric system normally use centimetres rather than metres for their height. So, rather than saying you’re 1.72 metres tall, you’d say you’re 172 centimetres tall.
Avoids the point.
No, literally, the word “point” not the point of the discussion.
If I say I’m 74 in tall, converting that to feet is awkward, despite being easier to say than “6 foot 2 inches.”
If I give it in cm, converting to m is easy.
If I instead say “I’m six two” for ease, that’s similar to someone in your example saying “I’m one seventy two” instead of “one point seven two,” which is similar to “one seventy two cm.”
Warning: metric ahead.
I’m born with the metric system, but I have to admit that foot and inch are both conveniently human-sized. They are easy to eyeball. The meter itself is a bit awkward, it doesn’t relate directly to anything on a human. Same with the decimeter and centimeter. The millimeter, though, is good. If you need a precise measurement of something human sized, like furniture or a car, it’s very appropriate. Small enough to be precise, big enough to be seen with the naked eye. Certainly better than 1/32 of an inch.
Liter also wins on its own merits. It’s conveniently sized for liquid that you drink. The standard milk carton is Sweden is 1 liter (or 1.5 liter). A Coca-Cola can: 1/3 of a liter. A beer can: 1/2 of a liter. A gallon is too big.
I remember a tongue-in-cheek proposal that the meter should have been defined as one billionth of a light-second. That would have made it about a foot, and a light-second would have been a gigameter, _by definition_. But then you wouldn’t have the convenient millimeter and liter. It seems impossible to have everything convenient at the same time.
Actually, your middle finger is about a decimeter. Fun fact to demonstrate! ^_^
Panel six looks kind of awkward. Arms don’t bend that way, I think.
Yes, they do: bend your arm an have your palm facing you
Hiya DaveB & Peeps,
Hmm, I’m gonna wade in on this debate about imperial/metric debate as well.. ;)
I’ll be straight up here, I was born into the metric system here in oz (aka Australia for all you weirdo’s who live in different countries… :P ) which is neither here nor there as most of the time we use both systems all the time, as well as a third system to measure distances.. time.. ie: the next town over from where I live is about 1/2hr/30min drive away (at the speed limit){roughly about 30km}, so if you hear a “native-born” (aka someone* born in oz as against someone who moved/emigrated here) aussie talk about distance, we generally use time to measure the distance between places….. strange I know, but like you heathens in the US ( :P ), we live in a big country compared to the like of some places in europe (UK, etc)…. (* = generally someone of european descent, as compared to someone of indigenous {Aboriginal/Torres Strait islander} descent)
A lot of Americans measure distance in time, too.
Nice attempt at a grapevine armbar there, Sydney. Wonder if she’s an MMF fan?
I find myself wondering why the lights on Sydney’s hair from the orbs were in the older version but not the newer.
Blame that on the ‘special’ ones who couldn’t follow what was going on, forcing DaveB to recreate the page, he tends to add the ball-lights after everything else
Actually… this does raise a point.
Suppose she de-ported one of her selves full-time. Pop it back only when she needs the extra hands.
Then, fifty years down the line, her other selves having aged a bit too much for regular crime fighting, she pops the last one back in. She now has a vivacious twenty year old self that is also super-strong.
If she ran all her selves in series rather than parallel, she could live for a very long time. Just having only two going at a time (to prevent the possibility of sudden death leaving the other four in limbo), she could easily reach 200 years old.
Except, did you miss the part where just having one in storage is like being blind in one eye? They are not just ‘body-suits’, each one is her, and while they do share the experiences, shared experience is never the same as experiencing it first hand
I think that’s mainly because she’s gotten very used to having all five bodies going at the same time.
Ask yourself: if you had the ability to create a few extra bodies, would you not use them all? Or would you keep a few in permanent storage, thus negating the point of creating extra bodies?
ESPECIALLY noting that, by all accounts, Harem is a full-on sensory experience junkie. Tell her to put a sizable portion of herself on what would effectively be permanent hiatus? I don’t think so.
If it were possible, would you consent to having 20% of your mind / senses / etc. shut down and basically put into long-term storage against possible future needs. Again, I don’t think so.
That does lead credence to there being other Daphne’s out there, experiencing all life can offer without the restrictions of being under Maxi’s thumb, but no way would she leave any in storage longer than needed (and this couple days is possibly the longest she has left one in storage for a very long time)
The English vs metric argument is mostly a pointless debate anyway. Both are legal for all purposes*, both are taught in schools (metric is probably used more in the classroom), and the conversion is supposed to be voluntary anyway (it actually says so in one of the statutes).
Frankly, the U.S. is better understood as an English dominant bi-metrical society.
*There are some areas where one or both systems are required, but nowhere is either of them forbidden.
Lol
“Bi-metrical”
seems to me the doc should have given her something to squeeze
She did: Sydney :P