Grrl Power #430 – Sweet dreams are made of deez orbs
There’s only so much they’re going to figure out by studying Sydney’s skill tree like this, as it’s basically all speculation. Plus I’d rather show Sydney discovering stuff on her own in the field than on a whiteboard. Also, believe it or not I’d like to move forward with the plot eventually so we won’t linger here. This scene was mostly to show that they are making some attempt at better understanding the orbs, and also to introduce Pixel and Specs.
A link for anyone unfamiliar with Sydney’s reference in the last panel. That phrase that has for some reason stuck with me ever since I saw it. Yes the 80’s were occasionally terrifying.
Since I didn’t have room on this page to zoom in on it, here’s a link back to the original shot of it.
Specs took off between pages. She doesn’t have any particular experience with magic, she was just there to see what she could see. Now she’s off to see why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch. That was a weird ad campaign really. They have cinnamon sugar on them, it’s a pretty easy solve. Trying to understand a culture by viewing its ads would at the same time be entirely misleading and hugely illuminating I think. I’ve avoided Dabbler doing the typical misunderstanding of idioms or taking metaphor literally and stuff like that, because she’s visited dozens of cultures and she’s smart enough to take them for what they are. Eventually though she’ll probably comment on a meta-analysis of human culture here and there.
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Naps are good.
ohhhh i agree
Not I you have Chronic Fatigue :(
Went to have a couple hour nap, didn’t wake up for 14 hours
People underestimate how debilitating life can be with that. You have my sympathy.
“Now she’s off to see why kids love the taste of cinnamon toast crunch.”
They don’t sell that in Norway. They used to for a short while, but i guess it didn’t catch on. I literally imported a box of it. Delish! Cherish it, you who have easy access!
When I want candy for breakfast I’ll eat Lucky Charms as the non-existent God intended!
“Can Heimdall see what makes Cinnamon Toast Crunch?”
+1
Heimdall can see grass grow under snow. If he can’t, no one can
The part of the C.T.C. commercials that I find creepy is that the little squares are apparently so tasty that they spend most of their time trying to eat each other. I’m not sure I can be comfortable with a cereal that promotes cannibalism. And if this scenario were true, by the time you got a box of the stuff home and opened it wouldn’t you probably find just one big square surrounded by scattered bits of its brethren?
Perhaps they are put into the box as toast, but only about half get eaten, and are pooped out, from the survivors, as cinnamon?
Well, in Dune ‘the spice’ is effectively worm poop, and does smell like cinnamon.
I think I just realized where full size Shredded Wheat biscuits come from. It ate all the mini ones.
https://listverse.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Shredded-Wheat.png
Teddy Grahams had that too. Teddy bears singing about eating teddy grahams? Just seemed kind of cannibalistic to me.
I much preferred the old commercials, back when it was Wendell and the other two (who sadly were never named). I even have a singing coin bank of them.
The concept of one giant CTC showing up fills me with hope (in vain surely) that I may one day eat some thing so wonderful.
It’s the cereal that wants to be eaten. It’s ethical!
There is legal precedent on this, from a case in Germany. Consensual cannibalism is still illegal.
Even worse if it is a cereal killer!!
Actually, I should put in some caveats. There is an exception to the above. In survival situations, where supplies have run out and everyone will die shortly, it is morally acceptable to draw straws to see who gets eaten. If that is agreed by all involved.
Legally though, I suspect that you have to hope that the prosecutor, for the relevant jurisdiction, will apply common sense and not prosecute.
Oh, and finally, my comments only apply to the killing and eating type of cannibalism. Nibbling bits that folks have already lost to accident or natural causes is a different matter. Still gross mind.
How she can fall asleep so soon after “Come on Dabbler, put that thing away” is beyond my comprehension. I’d be wide awake even with only 1 hour of sleep. :-P
I am still wondering what Dabbler was doing with lower-righty. To me it just looks like she is holding on to the tray at the bottom of the whiteboard. Nothing weird there.
Sydney is putting her hand up to block her view of Dabbler’s …. very fine and shapely (and highlighted very well with the pants she is wearing) … a$$. Not what her lower right hand is doing.
Her right hand is supporting her as she leans against the board and sticking out her ass which if you examine the angles is what Sydney is blocking from her view
I can fall asleep almost on cue. My doctor says it might be an extremely mild form of narcolepsy or epilepsy. Riding in a car for more then 10 minutes will knock me right out. Trains are worse. Driving the car myself takes longer, a couple of hours. White noise drops me like a brick. I can resist it for awhile but it will get me eventually.
I know you’re thinking that you do this too, but not to the extreme I do. It happens regardless of how much sleep I’ve had. I can be tweaked out on caffeine. I’ll drop off while in a conversation. I’ve damn near killed myself driving a million times until I just stopped driving anywhere long distance without a copilot. When it hits me, I just have to stop and take a nap to reset the timer. It sucks.
I’ve had this problem until I got diagnosed with sleep apnea. With the cpap and 8 hours of sleep, it doesn’t happen anymore. I can now drive longer times but I can no longer easily sleep on a plane. :P
Self-driving cars will be a godsend when they become viable.
And a mass murderering hacker’s wet dream (did you not see that episode of “CSI: Cyber”? Some arsehole hacked into self-driving cars and used them to kill people)
Note that this is a response to someone describing their narcolepsy. According to Keneth, driving a couple hours risks falling asleep at the wheel (and personally, I wouldn’t gamble my life on hoping that it would take that long every time).
Hacking a car for purposes of murder would probably be a far more difficult way to kill someone than most other methods. Also, I saw an episode of CSI: Cyber and it was even more ridiculous than other CSI shows. Do NOT get your science from that show!
They have jumped the shark so far that they are somewhere in the megalomaniac cloud
You just gotta love autocorrect
Those are nearing public use. Beyond that even, self-driving flying taxis are being tested in Nevada.
And some time last year Tesla released a software update that enabled a degree of self driving for some of their models. I don’t know the details but there are a number of videos on youtube where people tried it out. To most it was a very scary experience, and in all videos I looked at the verdict was “Nope!”.
Self driving cars will come, but it will take time before people starts trusting them. The first time a commercially available self driving car that is expressly built for this purpose is involved in an accident where someone dies there will be a huge backlash. And even once there are enough of these cars out there that the statistics can show that they are safer than the average human driver there will a lot of people that won’t listen. After all we know that when you no longer can lie about something you bring up statistics…
Yeah, most of those self-driving routines use forward-looking cameras to follow the lines, which doesn’t help at all on roads where there aren’t any lines, or where the stripes have faded to the point they’re not consistent.
And before I will consider purchasing any car that has a remote app, the car manufacturers need to work on their security. Just to provide one example, until Chrysler released a patch, you could hack into any Chrysler vehicle equipped with the UConnect system from miles away and do things like engaging or disengaging the brakes, cut the transmission, toy with the air conditioning, radio, and windshield wipers, and even hijack the steering wheel (but only when the vehicle is in Reverse).
Until I hear that the manufacturers are closing those security holes, I think I will stick to pre-2010 vehicles that are not connected to the Internet.
To someone who can easily fall asleep at the wheel, it seems a bit safer to me. It will get far less disconcerting with time and I doubt they will remove the option of manual control any time soon. Did these people try it out while sitting in gridlock traffic a dozen times? Gridlock seems to be the most boring driving and the easiest for autonomous vehicles to handle. They probably drove on a closed course and only once or twice. People used to be terrified of automated elevators.
If I was exploiting the potential of the online format and not concerning myself with trying to fit these pages into a book (and also had all the time I needed to draw what I wanted) Sydney’s dream sequence would have been more than one panel, and in fact would have started off more subtly, making the moment she dozed off a bit ambiguous. It’s not so much a sequence now as just a dream panel.
Why not make that an extra page for the book?
Some people can have trouble falling asleep under the glow of the full moon (specifically Dabbler’s), but apparently Sydney isn’t one of them.
As a heterosexual kind of guy, I couldn’t sleep under those conditions…
Is it just me, or is that inner ring Dabbler drew wonky?
For some reason I expected Dabbler to be able to draw a perfect circle
It takes a top artist to draw a perfect circle freehand. Whereas Dabbler only dabbles in things. Like her sword-fighting, she never reaches the peak of any one field.
If you want to see superhumanly impressive, ask someone to draw a perfect circle on an etch-a-sketch. =D
Or an alchemist. Who then does it right every time, even behind their back with a screw.
Even Logopolitian Block Transfer Calculus can’t give you the last digit of Pi.
Yea, they actually made every Lego block in the virtual city set they built in the Lego movie. Yet even that was not enough to calculate Pi.
It is a fundamental mathematical problem. Lego bricks are rectangular but pies are round.
…I wanted to say that Logopolis and Legos are two different things, but then I remembered there’s Lego Doctor Who now.
Are there not two who?
Pi probably doesn’t have a last digit, sooo
You’ll have one less digit if you go near my pie.
I immediately imagined Sydney passing out in that chair: head back, tongue out, and generally being obtrusively and annoyingly (Sydneyingly?) unconscious.
I haven’t looked at the link.
It’s a Genesis music video using Talking Heads puppets. The line is near the beginning when the president is going to bed.
Please not, David Nuttall is referring to the old 80’s TV series that used puppets (no, not The Muppets) and not the band called “Talking Heads”
These puppet heads are from a British satirical TV show “Spitting Image” which ran at ITV from 1984-1996. I remember when Spitting Images started, and remember seeing that video in Music Television when it was brand-new. Somehow I feel old…
I dunno there are certain advantages to having been born in the previous millennium. Being able to remember when man went to the Moon, and when we operated space shuttles and supersonic airliners.
Ever get the feeling that society is regressing?
We are regressing–my town had cell service ten years ago, but no longer has it; and just this week, the street I live in was unpaved–I now live on a dirt road;
add to that the scaling down of our ambitions–when I was in high school, it was assumed that we’d be at least constructing, if not living in, Legrange point habitations and moon bases, and we’d have touched down on Mars;
and crown all that with the regressive social attitudes and policies popping up around the world, especially in what are supposed to be progressive societies:
Yorp–I’d say you are scarily perceptive (but please don’t declare yourself a prophet and start a new religion–it would be less frightening if you were to write a book and make many Euros by promoting yourself on talk shows).
Thank you for your kind words. Let me make the world a less scary place for you. I certainly would neither declare myself a prophet nor found a new religion. What I have done though is found a new philosophy.
The philosophy has no intent, it is simply a different way of looking at the world. However if that is achieved it has several benefits, as side-effects. The one which would be of most interest to you is that it allows people, with radically different world-views, to co-exist much more readily.
This would potentially allow the various world religions to exist in harmony. The one catch being that religious extremists may not take kindly to being exposed to a new way of thinking. Especially if they found that the more liberal folks, in their own religion, were settling differences with traditional rivals or enemies.
Finding an optimal way of explaining and promoting the philosophy, without triggering such animosities, is what was keeping me busy this winter. Still not quite there though. Winning over moderates and free-thinkers is easy. But doing the same with the extremists is what would make the world safer.
I may take up your final suggestions though. Restricted to something nice and safe, needless to say. A book would pay better than an unpublished philosophy. :-/
That’s because you are either old or becoming old.
As am I – very fond memories of seeing the Land of Confusion video for the first time in college.
To quote my favorite character from Bones (the tv show), “Oh, rock and roll, I miss you so.”
That was it, remembered both the show and the video when they were new (although in the case of the show, possibly a year later for it make it’s way to the Antipodes)
You are real! I knew it!
Darn, your photo has not come out clearly though. Do you have some kind of chameleon ability?
To paraphrase a famous quote:
Well, the chair-swiveling drama escalated quickly…
So the big question: Did Dabbler remember the grid accurately?
Nope. I checked, and there’s at least one mistake.
But IS it a mistake? Paranoia Time.
AronIronHead
may have called it right.
Thanks Yorp!
Where is this that he called it? I’ve been checking for his other comments and can’t find them.
*faceclawpalm* I see now that you linked it.
I am gonna guess she can only see the grid when she “levels up”/has a point to spend.
No, any talent tree worthy of being called such has a hotkey that can bring it up. You just need to find it
Perhaps, but last time it only appeared when the orbs suddenly did the spinny thing.
Well in a new game you’d spend 10 minutes trying every key combination in order to find it
…Or you could just look up the hotkey list to find the right key-combo…
Unfortunately, Sydney’s balls did not come with the Player’s Guide…
All puns intended.
Nerd that I am, I’m now thinking about authoring a Player’s Guide for my own balls… you know, as a gift… for my next girlfriend. :D
As the umpire would say, “PLAY BALL!”
BATTER UP!
https://media.giphy.com/media/pW8IdjDvfxceA/giphy.gif
Remembering too that Sydney previously had problems activating and controlling the orb with the Big Zap. I’m thinking it is a similar problem with the grid – deliberate activation requires giving a specific set of mental connections / images. Almost like a combination code in some ways.
Sydney: Hmm, let’s see. Alt-Ctrl-F7 is Show Current Skill-tree. Now where would my Alt button be?
Dabbler: Is this it here, where your umbilicus used to attach to you?
Sydney: Cut that out! That is my belly button, not my Alt button!
Max: I want to know how to find her Control key. That could be so handy sometimes.
Mind you, Ralph Hinkley didn’t have the instruction manual for his powers either.
Well, he did get another instruction book after the aliens saved him from dying. However, when he tried to use the book the first time. he read in the book how to shrink down to the size of a grain of sand or dirt, put the book down and automatically regrew to normal height. So he lost it again. I think the show creators made it clear they didn’t want him knowing all of his powers as it would make the show more enjoyable to watch with him trying to figure out how to use the suit. You would have thought the first thing he would have looked for was how to fly and land correctly as he always crash landed and could never fly correctly.
It also meant that the writers could “accidentally” find new powers for the needs of a particular episode without making him too powerful in future episodes because Ralph did not remember how to do that again.
I liked My Secret Identity better since there was no machination on “loosing” the instructions through some inane methodology that the makers could have easily circumvented. Too bad the writing went downhill on season 2 and 3 before they canned it.
This is better than my imagination
This is more than a dream come true
Without the slightest bit of hesitation I knew what I was meant to do
You’ll never guess my secret identity
Whos on the inside hidin’ out
You’ll never know what you’ll see
When you unlock the mystery
Sometimes this double life gets outta hand
But its all in a days work, for Ultra-Man!
Ooh, ooh. I volunteer to find it! Sydney, if you don’t mind stepping into my office and slipping out of your clothes, we can commence immediately.
Later heard in Yorp’s office:
Sydney: You try to touch me there and you will find out first-hand why I tried to call this one “The Violator”!
Yorp! You Hound Dog, you!
O.o
Dabbler heard,” Operation Buddy Bye Boys Time”.
I love the level tree idea.
My only concern at this point is that at the rate at which she levels up, how little they know about the orbs in general, and the pacing of this comic, will mean that it’ll be 2025 when we finally figure out what the other 2 do, and 2050 before any significant upgrades happen.
Is it though? She gained a level after a single battle.
She’ll probably get a few during basic training
Actually, no. She got it after the press conference, possibly after blowing up that tank. She never got it after the actual battle. Which still leaves the question of what actually triggered it. She had used the PPO at least once before, when she started that forest fire.
Could be deliberately using the powers enough triggers it?
It didn’t really kick in until after her force field fended off Maxima’s plasma bomb explosion, could be at least one of the conditions for her to ‘level up’ is blocking/absorbing massive amounts of energy with her force field. At least she’s lucky enough that whatever causes her to level doesn’t lock in her options to just the orb that led to it (probably from an in-universe reason that once you ‘maxed out’ an orb you’d be waiting forever to level some up if the opportunities to meet its conditions were limited).
The thing is, the shield has to be the power she’s used the most, at least since the beginning of the story. During the battle, it was on pretty much constantly, fending off many blasts as well as Vehemence’s aura. And she still hasn’t seen the skill tree before or since. Although…
Before Sydney joined ARC, she’d be less likely to find herself in dangerous situations where the shield would be needed, so using it that much may be a new thing, and that *could* be related to why it showed up now.
While the PPO has to be the power she’s used the least (apart from the unknowns) because it’s so dangerous.
It might be the level and use of multiple orbs. During the press conference Sydney was able tap into something that she hadn’t before with the PPO, and Max helped put her shield through it’s paces. With the diner fight, she didn’t use the orbs outside the range in wich she was familiar. The only new usage was the Comm ball when detecting the “Agro Aura”. There might be a cumulative function, like not only banking XP but pushing her limits like she wasn’t able to before joining ARCON.
Correction: as far as we’ve been shown she never got the skill tree after the battle (or at any time since).
I take it as being definitive, now that we have Sydney’s comment in panel 1.
Coincidence (at least as much as you can get in a planned story). She got the level-up after accruing sufficient XP – that happened to occur after using her shield to fend off Maxima’s Omega Murder Blast.
The very simple fact ios that we (and they) really don’t know for sure how or why Sydney “levelled up”.
One can assume that she accumulated enough ‘experience points’ D&D-style to “earn” a new level (or set of upgrades), but there is exactly ONE instance of this occurrance to draw that conclusion from. ONE.
We cannot even say for sure how said (hypothetical) xp were accrued. They might have come from simple usage time, number of activations and/or deactivations, total property damage done by the Orbs as calculated in Sirian megacredits, as defined by the Beta Proxima Convention of 4427, or absolutely anything else.
Altermnatively, these ‘level ups’ might be purely time-based, coming precisely every 137.4838 days (or whatever); be based on specific astronomical alignments (not necessarily in this star system); entirely random; dispensed at the whim of some awesomely powerful cosmic entity; or any and all combinations of all of the above.
We really don’t know. Not yet. Probably not for quite a long while.
Or one or more of the balls houses an intelligence that is metering out abilities based on actions and interactions. Would be funny if we get to see at some latter date the various obs in conference with personality clasehes etc, sort of like a certain pixar movie to remain unnamed for copyright reasons.
How the … did you come across the “Moskau” thing? I thought *that* was buried safely in the 80s… and “GLASER” are people who work with glass, while “GLÄSER” are the things being thrown in the song.
I really wonder what piece of audible cruelty will replace that thing ringing inside my head now.
Hey, I still like to dance that at parties. Though normally in a wide circle with other crazy enough people. ;-)
It definitely got me laughing. And if you look closely you’ll see the points above the A. Though the question remains where Dave got the song from. I didn’t expect it to be known outside of Germany at all.
I can confirm it was a hit in Australia as well. Though what remains of my memory says the lyrics were in English.
You probably did hear it in English, but the original were in german.
It resurfaced as a meme with the rise of Youtube about a decade ago.
Ah yes, in video’s such as here!
hmmmm why did that not work? let’s try again, video’s such as HERE!
I first encountered it in this video, back when it was a Flash animation.
It is really well known in Russia, actually. Although the mocker version with verses going like “Moscow, Moscow, we’ll bomb you, that’s Olympic games you wanted HAHAHAHAHA” (translated meaning, in russian it sounds a lot like the original) is a bit more famous
I like Moskau, it is one of their best songs and far better than their “title song”. ^_^
If you want audible cruelty instead, you could try … was it Rebecka Black with “Friday”?
But if that is too cruel, I instead recommend Middle of the Road with “Cirpy chirpy cheep cheep”, or if you are swedish, I guess “Icko icko” is better (you’know, a knot in one end, a cone in the other, and legs that are so short they don’t reach the floor when it walks?)
Personally, I prefer the pleasant-sounding “Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” when it comes to removing unpleasant songs from my internal play-list.
^_^
same as with Rick Astley. once you are Rick roll’ed, it sticks…
That song has a special place in my heart, as it is one of the few reasons I passed highschool german. It was just doing the rounds online at the time, and I needed inspiration to get me to study, so I learned the entire song, which helped me get through four semesters being able to remember every line with context and then apply it. The other reasons I passed include an awesome teacher and my eventual girlfriend supporting me the whole way.
Moskau…
Fremd und geheimnisvoll Türme aus rotem Gold Kalt wie das Eis…
They never seem to finish the “s” on “Eis”, so it ends up sounding like “kalt wie das Ei”
So it’s “Moscow, Moscow, take [alt: throw/(see below)] the glazier [alt: glasses/glazing] to [at?] the wall”… at least according to Google Translate? Just out of curiosity, would it be drinking glasses or eyeglasses or either?
BTW, the second alt translation for “wirf” was “available on zaz***.co.uk”. Apparently, someone was to hack (I’m sure there’s a much better word for it that tech savvier people would know… manipulate, maybe?) the translation process to get free advertising.
… someone was able to…
“Throw the glasses at the wall”
It’s drinking glasses. The sentiment is “party hard (because you’re in Moscow)”. All the lyrics are like that.
So, it was kinda like how the Greeks through plates in restaurants?
If you look very carefully, you’ll see that there IS an umlaut. It needs to be somewhat more visible though.
Well, if Sydney is hungry enough, here is a lullaby for her.
Today, Sydney is tired. She was hungry back on Tuesday, after she fear-vomited her lunch onto Max’s boots.
There’s something odd about that skill tree branch they’re looking at. The assumption is that to “unlock” the faint part, you need to unlock the prerequisites. If that’s the case why show all the other points joining at the new branch? From what we know it’s not like you can unlock the top segment without unlocking all the lesser ones first anyway, so a single line from the top point to the new branch would suffice.
As an aside, I think i’d like to play an RPG with an unlabelled complex but comprehensible skill tree. Provided you could get the mechanics of it right, it’d be a fun experience (like a mix between Sydney’s orbs and Ralph’s suit? Both powerful artifacts with no instructions :-) )
That last is a very interesting idea, but it would also be dang frustrating if not done exactly right.
Most RPGers (including myself) prefer to have some real say over how their characters evolve. Unless they are able to figure out at least some of the skill tree early on, this basically turns character development into a more or less randomized thing.
Well then you make the skill tree one of the mysteries in the game that you will have to solve.
Say for instance that the game starts off with the character fleeing from a laboratory where they woke up with memory loss (pretty standard RPG opening). The only piece of equipment they’ve got is a prosthetic hand that proves to have a strong enough grip that they are able to crush a lock and escape.
Then you keep feeding the player upgrade modules and software snippets for the hand but no instructions on what they do or how they can be combined. The character itself doesn’t change much, but tinkering with the hand and the available modules can provide all kinds of more or less useful features.
Something like this can work with a gadget that evolves through assigning skill points. It’s harder to justify for character development. Actually I feel most character skill development should be tied to the use of said skills. The old “Yay! Now I’ve killed my 1000th monster, and I assign my new skill point to lock-picking!” I think is quite stupid…
In general, I agree. In practice, when I’m the GM, I end up ignoring such systems, or partially subverting them via house rules, for the sake of convenience. My rule of thumb is that as long as my players are not obviously trying to pull one over on me, to trust them to be sensible with their skill point and/or XP allocations.
When I’m GM’ing in GURPS, I ask the players what skills or attributes they’d like to spend points on next…That way, I can design a scenario so that they can earn the XP the along the way & also make use of the skill at the current level in order to improve it.
“From what we know it’s not like you can unlock the top segment without unlocking all the lesser ones first anyway, so a single line from the top point to the new branch would suffice.”
We’ve seen exactly ONE segment being unlocked. We don’t know anything. To my mind, the fact that several segments all have a line pointing to a new segment implies that all of them are prerequisites and perhaps you can get them out of order. We won’t know until she tries it.
True, or the alternative is that our esteemed Author DaveB is trolling us. I find this possibility too great to ignore. :-)
And… after the first week there would be a fully labeled skill tree on the wiki. :p
Make the layout of the skill tree variable with every player. The wiki would then only be able to show a typical example (or commonly found variants), but it would make it a bit harder to cheat.
I think that this might be a good time to crossover with another webcomic; The Dreamland Chronicles or make some references to it???
Could the unknown orbs be modifiers? A shift and Ctrl?
The are nodes lit for the unknown orbs, so they are active. Perhaps Dabbler, Pixel and Gwen can focus on the mystery orbs.
In this comic I think Dabbler had a pair of her own ‘orbs’ that she was trying to get people to focus on.
“Had”?
Considering that Dabbler’s boobs are literally hypnotic, I can’t help but imagine Dabbler taking the place of Matilda in this strip of DMFA (and replacing Dan with whoever she’s trying to *ahem* “distract”):
https://missmab.com/Comics/Vol_662.php
Dabbles use to have two sets of hypno-bewbs
Yes, I remember, but that’s an alternate continuity.
Still can’t remember if that was set before Grrl Power (shame it never finished :()
Wait, what is this? I want to know, even if it’s not finished.
He’s referring to WereWorld. DaveB gave the author permission to use Dabbler; in that strip, she had four arms and four hypno-bewbs. It hasn’t been updated since January 2013, though.
The reason DaveB draws Dabbler with only one pair of breasts (or so he says) is because every time he tries to draw clothing designed for four breasts, it never quite looks right (if I remember correctly. I could be wrong.)
Link to the first page of wereworld here:
https://wereworld.comicgenesis.com/d/20020420.html
It is worth mentioning that Dabbler’s activities in Wereworld are canon, with respect to Grrl Power. But, because they have not been revealed in comic here, they would be spoilers.
Hence folks very kindly avoid discussing any details of Wereworld, in these comments. For the benefit of those of us who want to see the story unfold from Sydney’s point of view.
Wasn’t sure (blame Als Heimers) if WereWorld was set in GP-verse and canon or not , or simply set in an alternate universe (not only is WW on a different world, it’s fairly much either set in ‘modern’ times or the future)
I like the play of words you used there, Guesticus, but I’m going to blame Al Symmers instead…
;)
Yes, he is a better choice to blame, thank you
I miss them. :(
I was just wondering if the orbs need at least 2 “points” in order to be active for use (or the use isn’t obvious until they have 2 points – like 1 point on shield means you get a spider sense, perhaps, but it already had more points when she got them, so it wasn’t detectable).
Every orb but the unknown ones have more, so…
i hope there will me more bigger nap of skill tree:D and i love this part, hell, i was hoping for it when we saw it last time
Bigger nap? Yup that is what Sydney is going for right now. She will stagger back to her room, kick off her boots and flop into bed. Just as she starts to snooze, Joel calls asking when she is coming in to work.
“Hi, this is Sydney. Leave a message after the beep and I will get back to as soon as I can.” “This user’s voice-mail is full. A message can not be recorded at this time. Please try again later.”
Do you mean a bigger map of the skilltree?
Yes there is. I think I saw it on Dave’s DeviantArt page.
Well that didn’t work.
Let’s try this.
https://davebarrack.deviantart.com/art/Halo-s-Skilltree-Wallpaper-01-428873707
There is also another one that is useful for the discussions we are having here, namely this one. It is a cleaned-up one, which removes any ambiguity over finer points which were not so easy to see in the original.
It has been linked by DaveB himself, in the past. So we can take it to be reliable enough, if it passed his inspection.
/tosses Yorp a treat. Good boy.
Glad to see you’re back on the interwebs.
*gobble, gobble, gobble*
Yummy! Fanku.
btw, the drawing is missing a node, and most aggravating: it’s the node that Sydney upgraded last time
Dabbler isn’t perfect
She has a cybernetic eye, I’m very surprised she didn’t just take a screenshot of it.
Dabbler mentioned her cybernetic eye couldn’t see the skill tree (just like the reporters cameras).
YES
And since this is a US military team, there would be helmet cams and nowadays a drone cam.
The officer calls the tactical orders of the mission, the superiors safe back in Washington DC get to quarterback any strategic implications.
Whilst the orbs themselves have appeared on camera, we have no evidence that the skill tree (or glyphs etc) show up that way. To the contrary, Dabbler’s comment about her cybernetic eye implies that it will not be observed by any such medium.
TV viewers may well have been very puzzled at their behaviour, when looking at it.
On the page after that Maxima laments the skill tree being “revealed on national television,” but Dabbler corrects her, “It wasn’t. I mean, the cameras didn’t pick it up, just like my cybernetic eye couldn’t see it. Bud don’t worry, I memorized the grid. I’ll draw it later and we can speculate all we want.” This is of course when she freaks out the waitress by showing them all that she does indeed have a cybernetic eye.
Ahh, I had forgotten that detail. Thanks for the refresher!
Did you see anyone wearing a helmet at the former test site?
And Dabbles said that cameras couldn’t even see the Skilltree
Wait till we find out that the unknown orbs are actually the interfaces to a reality menu screen and control. The power of Load & Save! O_O
*activates Foz‘s character screen*
Mmm, yes, I see you have quite a high intuition score.
So in future training sessions Sydney could do a ‘save’ and then try her skill at the firing range. If she did not like her score she could just go back to her save point and keep trying until she got perfect marks.
A save point is also recommended for Sydney before a recon into hazardous territory or any mission involving the words ‘bomb disposal’.
Too bad real life doesn’t allow save-scumming. I can think of lots of places in my own life where that would’ve been useful.
Is it just me, or is something wrong with dabblers top?
In panel 1 it seems to go up and over her left shoulder, but in panel 3 it only goes over her right shoulder.
it goes over her right shoulder behind her neck and to the left side of her back.
I’m reacting more over that it’s yellow while on the previous page it looked to be the same colour as her pants.
It does look like a continuity error. And since Dave doesn’t have a ‘colored by Keith’ tag in the comments he can’t blame him for this one.
And for those of you who would point out ‘she has magic’, I guess it is possible that the top is just an illusion that she is projecting and she can change the color at will.
I go with the latter. :-D
Have you considered the possibillitty of her leveling up just as she lose conciousness and wake up, and dash around to show it off?
Will Sydney be dreaming of Succubus bums, or being vivisected, in a laboratory, by a puppeteer?
Both; and in the dream, it will somehow all make sense.
She’ll have a guilt-induced dream for taking Batman’s name in vain.
Considering how much sense dreams usually have, I’m sure both can fit into one dream.
Shes off to the land of confusion?
It looks like you live there.
Cool avatar and name though.
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to throw glaziers at walls.
(To be fair, throwing drinking glasses at walls doesn’t end well either, it just has more historical context. That would be “Gläser” or “Glaeser” though, not “Glaser”.)
I was hoping for a “pull the strings!” from Ed Wood myself.
Gwen has shown some promise in reading magical books and artifacts and Dabbler knows several dozen languages. Since the floating symbols on active orbs are visible only to the user, maybe Sydney can hold an orb in one hand while copying the symbols down on paper for each in turn. There is a chance that Gwen or Dabbler might recognize one or more. Especially any marked ‘self destruct’.
Maybe they are only visible to the user for a good reason?
Perhaps they need to have Sydney go somewhere remote, put her shield up, and have Maxima throw increasingly more powerful booms at it to see if they can level it up again?
…once Sydney is rested enough to maintain a consistent shield and not accidentally fall asleep that is.
…Or runs out of air, in the case that she might have forgotten to use her re-breather.
Naps are great. No joke , the “Key” or Power nap has been developed and used by many famous scientist and scholars, including Einstein. The idea there was that if you hold your keys loosely in your hand, while reclining in a good chair, that when you hit the right point in a sleep cycle your hand will full open and drop the keys, thus waking you up.
These days we have better methods for tracking human sleep patterns, thanks to the motion and microphone equipped super computers we keep in our pockets. I use a Power Nap app which uses the accelerometer and microphone, paired with studies on sleep behavior, to monitor my state. With the aim of avoiding sleep inertia. Usually less then 20 minutes or by running through a full 90+ minute cycle (including deep sleep and REM).
Depending on the time in the comic, if they can give Halo about two free hours to ‘sleep’, she could be back up and running at near full power for the rest of the day/night. But I’ll guess she doesn’t have that time, so a 20-ish minute nap into light sleep will likely be enough to hold her over. Although with caffeine working its way out of her system, I’d still suggest a full cycle nap to help get over the residual of the stimulants.
Of course this was also the method used by Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, to keep the ideas coming. So I’d be a little terrified of the ideas that will occurre to Sydney after coming out of her nap.
If Halo “feels” like pulling another super late night, a sleep monitoring app would not be ill advised. To maximize the amount of quality rest she can get in a limited amount of time. I used to hate alarm clocks and am by no means a morning person. I was always getting up groggy. Which really says they were going off when I was in deep sleep. After using a Sleep Cycle app for almost a year now, I’ve been waking up less groggy (but still not a morning person), and usually about 30 minutes before the time I’d set on its alarm. That 30 minutes difference was what was putting me back into deep sleep, to be violently awakened by the unsensing dumb alarm.
From watching the video, Regan saying “Beddy Bye Boze Time” was probably a reference to his most “famous” movie, Bedtime for Bonzo. Lots of references to it at the time.
Also I’ll bet Dan Rowan though he was being sarcastic when he mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall and President Reagan in 1969.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nQkvSbAvxI
It looks like he made a mistake in the drawing… He drew it the way that WE saw it in the original comic, but since Dabbler was on the other side of it, the entire drawing should have been from HER perspective, which would be the mirror of what we saw in the comic.
Good call.
Mind you Dabbler is smart. She knows that a skill tree implies an external player being involved. So probably drew the tree from the perspective she anticipated would be taken by the 4th wall.
It’s “magic” it probably looks the same from both sides.
Clever brionl .
Plus advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so the same goes for using that for the same end.
Clearly that was a miss for the bingo.
So it occurs to me, the press conference was the first time Sydney saw the “Level Up” menu, and yet there were already several spots filled in… Which implies it was the Orbs leveling up, not Sydney, does that mean the Orbs are in fact alive?
No, it implies that the previous holder of the balls levelled them up and they don’t reset upon users’ death
What if the Unkown Orbs are actually the previous ‘holders’? You use the orbs for long enough, they’re linked to you- then, when you die, instead of dying, you get converted into a new Orb, conferring powers suited to you upon a new wielder. The two unknowns might be the newest Orbs, with not-clearly-defined powers.
Sydney would probably confer some sort of SuperSpeed- of the mind, of the body, of the reflexes, etc.
Clever twist. Possibly, like the Truesight Orb, she might grant extra powers. Immunity to spicy food, or the like, being the one that springs to mind.
Increased skill in stringing profanities together?
Combat Cursing: The skill that allows you to Mentally Stun your opponents (as they blush, stammer & haw around, perhaps even looking down & shuffling their feet), provided that all of the listeners understand the language being used. Roll vs. IQ each turn to recover from the Stun.
Sydney does have the necessary rapier wit.
A rapier mounted on a sledge hammer.
And with extra dots in that path, the power to make listeners who don’t have a language in common with the user hear the cursing as being in a language that they can understand anyway?
Wouldn’t work, literally translated curses don’t make much sense given that they’re tied to the culture of a particular zone. Shoot, sometimes i don’t een get curses from three provinces over.
That is one implication, true. To me though, given that the inspiration was actually drawn from skill trees, in addition to being referred to in comic, as such, I feel that it is more likely the tree is associated with Sydney’s use of the orbs.
Whilst I can see the utility of requiring a user to familiarise themselves with basic features, before more advanced ones are unlocked, that logic does not extend to incorporating the skills learnt by the former owner.
Yes, you can make alternative rationales to explain that. I have done so on a couple of occasions myself. But they are a bit more convoluted to explain, deviate from the normal gaming skill tree concept that we are familiar with, and feel less satisfying, from a story point of view. The latter being because we emphatically associate with the protagonist, as opposed to their tools.
If the tools turn out to be intelligent, or have a pseudo life, then the latter becomes less of a problematic issue.
If we want to keep it like the idea of a Skill Tree in a game then I’d say some of the already purchased spots are more like a free form RPG system where a Class just determines what points you start with, so these are filled in already from her unconscious class decision.
When envisaging it as a literal skill tree, I assume that any of the experiments which Sydney made, to find out what the orbs did, that actually had a result, will have filled in a skill slot. Try to make it rain, nothing happens. Try to light a campfire, burn down the forest, and gain a skill slot in the PPO.
But sooner or later Halo will have unlocked all of the obvious powers. Or at least all of the ones necessary as prerequisites for the obscure powers. It is at this point that the user gets to make a free choice. Hopefully selecting one of the hard-to-guess powers. But they can put it in something obvious, like upping the blasting power or increasing the flight speed, if they so choose.
I would not suggest that this is the most likely solution. It does not even include any XP point system, which many folks feel would be integral, for example. But I do raise it as a possibility, if anyone precludes it as impossible, in favour of other models.
Where it would overlap with your pre-filled in concept is for powers which are automatically granted. Let us assume that one of the mystery orbs does grant the non-detection capabilities. Simply owning the orbs automatically grants points in those, with no experimentation or practice required.
If you like surprises, don’t click, on the following. It is only a guess, but if it happens to be right, it would spoil a fun future page.
If the user does pick a hard-to-guess power, I would expect it to enter some kind of demonstration or tutorial mode, to show the user what the power does.
Sydney really needs to figure out the “show skill tree” and “toggle labels” hot keys. Maybe moving her orbs into the configuration they were when the skill tree appeared will pop it up (possibly while willing it to happen)? Worth a try at any rate.
Ooh, clever.
*places paw in ink pad, and stamps the Yorp paw print of approval, on the suggestion*
I was in the Navy, but never tried for being a SEAL…But you’ve also got my Seal of Approval nevertheless
https://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/019/211/sealapproval.JPG
Totally recognized where “Beddy Bye Boze Time” came from before playing that clip :D
Sydney food https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMX8TwlvDck
That got my mouth buds watering. Sadly the vet put me on a chicken and rice diet, so I can’t make it.
*hangdog expression*
I do go part of the way though. I give my Jack Russell the basic dish (she can’t handle the spicy stuff) then add loads of peppers and other sauces to mine. I do not go to the extreme that the chef you linked did mind. Namely having the same ratio of peppers to that of the meat!
It occurs to me that putting Sydney in a safe place in the middle of the ocean somewhere with a few different console controller, a keyboard, and fully medded up might be a way for her to find a mental analog for her Orb controls.
Maybe with Dabbler’s orbs along in case some hypnosis would be helpful.
Hmmm… is it only her boobs that are literally hypnotic, or does That Thing She Needs to Put Away have that trait as well?
Dabbler did say that any part of a Succubus is hypnotic. It is just that the boobs are particularly strong.
Sydney was not just making the comment from a taste point of view. She will have been feeling the hypnotic pull.
Now I get it. Thanks for the reminder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQAKRw6mToA
for those wondering about the song
Thanks.
*gives in to the irresistible urge and starts Cossack dancing*
DAT DABBLER ASS!! :P
DaveB could we get a GIF of her in that position doing the WIGGLE WIGGLE BUTT? :D
Actually it’s more likely that Sydney would do the Wiggle-wiggle-butt pre-cat pounce thing when she is off meds a bit and focused on something she really wants… I can see MAxima and Dabbler playing games with Sydney like you do with a feather stick and cats… But Dabbler would use Magic… have a slight breeze seemingly keep blowing said object just out of reach and I bet she goes cat-stalker on it (Sydney).
Then Dabbler can show Sydney what she was doing – and then we get the Dabbler Wiggle-wiggle-butt GIF!
Right? :D
So you want to see Dabbs do something like this?
If Dabbles starts the wiggle, would she be able to stop before every viewer becomes a drooling mess?
One Sid has had her nap she and max should go back to bomb range and let max go hog wild on shield since that seem to trigger it last time. (Perhaps it absorbing the blast energy)
That isn’t a bad point though, about the connecting branches. Perhaps instead of prerequisites, those represent a zoom (like, tier 1 levels 1-5.) Then, on finishing all 5 connections, they would all empty, the single connected dot would fill, and new commecting lines would be drawn to the second dot (tier 2 levels 1-5) or something to that effect.
That was supposed to be a reply to a comment earlier -_-
Was it just me who was thinking of Mickey Mouse with panel four? Fairly sure one of the variations of the theme tune sounded similar to “Moskau” (or Mooska, or similarly stupid like that)
Here we go: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme
Just want to say how well the mini-panel insert, of Pixel pointing at which power to buy next, works out. It seamlessly allows you to follow the intent. Aided by the red arrow, pointing at the spot, where her hand would be in the larger panel.
Plus I love Sydney’s affected despairing look, when she does her dramatic swivel. Not to mention the really funny dramatic unswivel!
Bravo DaveB.
Wait, does this mean no more chasing poor Ms Pixel up trees and growling at her?
Not sure if impressed, or disappointed
I you can get Ms Pixel to say her name backwards does she go back to her home dimension?
That would be a heck of a lot easier to pronounce than kltypzyxyM…