Grrl Power #529 – She is not getting her security deposit back
I don’t think immortality would make someone immune to boredom or impatience. You’s still have to sit through the same amount of intervening time, and regardless of what percentage of your lifespan that interval takes, assuming your brain functions at the same clock speed as a mortal, the fact that you might outlive your enemies doesn’t make your TV dinner defrost any faster.
Panel two is a bit odd for a few reasons. One, Dabbler is wearing a T-Shirt and not something that looks like a guy with long hair should be ripping it off of her on the cover of a lady smut novel, and two, they’re looking at math and not code. I guess this is the math the code generates? I hadn’t given it a ton of thought, but I guess Krona’s got to be pretty smart to do any of the things she does. Most coders probably trend above average intelligence, (at least in the analytical and arithmetical spectrums) but some get by repurposing and mashing other people’s code together for their own uses. Krona doesn’t have the luxury of being a script kiddie. She has to do everything from scratch. Some things don’t require any actual coding, though. Binary flags for instance are as difficult as just finding what she wants, almost like looking through a hex editor and replacing the 0 with a 1. Checkpoint code obviously requires more work.
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I bet they need to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow…
I love how meaningless that technobabble is. Neutrons have no polarity to reverse. And I also love the line from the stage play, “Reverse the linearity of the proton flow.”
Well maybe the neutron flow itself is generating said polarity? What the point of that would even be, I have no idea, though. Or the how. So basically more technobabble that is even more meaningless.
Sure neutrons have a polarity. Several different techniques for producing a polarized neutron beam exist. For all I know, polarized neutron beams have other uses as well, but here’s one: Since a neutron has magnetic momentum (consisting of three charged particles – quarks), a polarized neutron beam can be (and is) used for neutron magnetic imaging.
The neutrons were flowing left, now they are flowing right. Yeah, that does not change the polarity, just the direction. Nope you got me on that one.
Maybe you reverse the polarity by putting the bottom quark on top and the top quark on the bottom?
(Actually, no, that doesn’t work, because there are no top or bottom quarks in neutrons. Just an up quark and two down quarks… and if you swap that to two ups and a down, you get a proton.)
You can swap them, using a Mad Hatter, provided the Hare handles the time constraint.
What about the poor dormouse? Is he sleeping in the teapot again?
Likely, but it’s one of the better places to hide from the Existential Feline.
Did you know that originally, back when only the first three types of quark had been discovered and their names weren’t yet fixed through peer-reviewed literature, one of their discoverers gave them the provisional names of Vanilla, Chocolate, and Strawberry? That’s why the types are still referred to as ‘flavours’…
^_^
Then they discovered the more distant Quarks, namely “Brother”, “Nephew” and “Nephew’s friend Benjamin Sisico”. The latter is not one, but they are close enough that they usually get caught together.
With the reverse fluctuation of the arcane neurons, they can cause a quasi-polarity shift which resets tachyon entanglement to an earlier preset condition.
But wouldn’t that also reverse the quantum flux of the negatron field?
That is why she coded the flux capacitor to operate at much lower power levels than 1.21 Gigawatts. Now they just have to reverse the magnetron and lower the frequency fluctuations of the negatron field, causing the positrons to become electrons and the up-quarks to redshift into down-quarks, and a whole bunch more wibbly wobbley timey wimey stuff.
and if you do that you also cause nuclear fission caused by the intersection of down-quarks with the positrons of unaffected molecules and *BOOM* goes the neighborhood.
Hmmm… but if we introduce a phase variance of no more that .003572 picometers we could shunt the unstable quarks into a matrix of gravitic particles and siphon the resulting energy into a containment loop.
* Last panel fuzzes out and is replaced by Deus behind a desk.*
” Painting summoning circles by hand is so last century. We at Machina Industries have developed a fully automated way of creating mystic runes for all your summoning needs.”
*Walks over to what looks like a Roomba with a storage tank.*
“Simply upload your image into our new Runemaster 3000 or let its optical sensor scan an image from the tome or grimoire of your choice. Then load the holding tank with blood and let it do all the work. Its internal GPS guidance system and 3D(emon) scanners will lay down a perfect image every time.” “Customers who need to lay down protective salt barriers can upgrade to the optional hopper that can handle solid materials.”
He he.
+1
“If you buy two? Why we’ll throw in a third on the house! Free anti-coagulant with every purchase while stocks last, remember…”
Ominous Close up
“…Blood is always thicker than water.”
…I can see that AND Deus going on to have ARCLight handle the delivery, too. Thereby retaining the goodwill of the heroes AND getting paid by the bad guys to screw them over. Deus has shown himself to be a definite Xanatos type – someone who only resorts to pragmatic villainy when it profits him, and otherwise retains a lot of loyalty because he’s quite decent otherwise.
“…our deluxe model auto-scans the floor & auto-scales the size of your design to cover whatever percentage of the floor that YOU specify! With the included USB-cables, you can output a preview-image to your laptop-screen of how the resulting layout will appear, BEFORE investing in hard-to-renew materials, such as exotic blood-types &/or salts. This simplifies many important details, such as adjusting the line-width of the drawings before you start.”
And if you get into this sort of techno wizardry, you really need to make sure your computer has a good, up-to-date spell checker.
+1
…and with that, autocorrect goes from an annoyance to a destroyer of worlds.
It’s always been that. Ask anyone who sent a text that was supposed to say “we’re having dinner” to “we’re having d–k”
Wow, that is a heck of a lot of math, just to adjust penis size. But I can see that Dabbler is making very careful notes.
Um, that’s a Klein bottle in the diagram…
Clearly you’re supposed to stick it in the bottle.
But topologically nothing can go ‘in’ a Klein bottle.
You lack imagination and reality hacking powers
Lol.
A Klein bottle is practically the definition of imagination and reality hacking…
…of course, if you decide to work with higher-order manifolds, you can get into some even odder shapes, such as the Calabi-Yau manifolds used in superstring theory…
and I was putting them on Oldsmobiles that lacked fuel injectors, silly me.;p
That explains the Cutlass in the 12th dimension.
The equations are Krona’s; Dabbler is pondering what a vagina shaped like a Klein bottle would feel like!
Most coders use other people’s code, it saves time, even the best do it. The real trick is parsing the code you have gotten from the internet and adapting it to your environment without causing further problems.
When using someone else’s code, if it’s big enough, complex enough, after folding it into another project its going to have behaviors best described as ‘Bugs’. Sometimes you can ignore them. Sometimes, those bugs will prevent it from working at all… (some fixes tend to be all or nothing) – the challenge becomes understanding not only someone else’s code enough to fix it, but to understand how and why things failed.
Let’s not forget the most annoying part – including the commentary in the source-code’s documentation, because how likely are you to still have all this memorized when you need to return to the code for the purpose of debugging &/or upgrading?
legends state that Pro/e used to ship with the comments still readable in the executable. did not help much. pro/crash still crashed regularly.
My feeling has always been that documentation in the source-code is not to PREVENT crashes, but rather to minimize the time it takes to figure-out how to FIX it afterwards…
…After fixing a bug, I try to find the time to compile one more time, AFTER it’s fixed, in order to include in the source-listing the method-&-motivation for the ‘fix’…
…but that’s just me.
No, the best study other people’s code, and adapt it for their own purpose and build their own, pissant script kiddies
stealborrow other people’s code, change a line or two and call it their own new codeThat’s also the difference between real musicians and ‘rappers’
You don’t know much about musical history do you?
“There should be a resonance cascade; each particle emits anti-chronitons as it folds backwards along its n-dimensional time-lattice, and the anti-chroniton cascade destabilizes other time-lattices. I suppose in retrospect, there is a maximum range for the chroniton cascade, but in that case, things further from event zero would have diminishing torque on their time-lattice, resulting in less and less folding…”
“So, the further away you are, the less you go back in time?”
“On average. There could be a fractal distribution of anti-chronitons. I suppose in the worst case there could be a severe time-shear right through the middle of someone’s biology.”
“There is a word for that. It is time cancer.”
“So…”
“Fix it.”
in a better phrase it would be Temporal Annihilation, also known as Vanishing, as said “Cancer” is basically slowly but surely erasing you from the timeline rather than actually killing you
So now Sciona has a clone? That can’t be good for anyone but Sciona…
Dave is currently experimenting with borderless windows. So this is far more likely to be that. An effect that I rather like actually. It establishes the overall shot, and then zooms in for a close-up, of the face, all in one panel.
It will be interesting to see if others have the same take as you. Of the comments I have read so far though, there has not been a mention of a second Sciona. Amongst other things regular cloning would create either an orc or a vampire/drow, depending on whether the body or the upper head was sampled.
Although anything is possible with magic, of course. It is just not the explanation I would leap to myself.
Never even considered the idea of a Sci-clone (and if she did make a clone of herself, then it would more likely be of her real self, the bit with the brain, rather than a copy of a defective rush-job), like Yorp said, it’s just a borderless closeup (now those people who don’t count those as a separate panel can have their counting validated, but still be wrong :P)
It to nit-pick…. but the techno-text is backwards. Oh, it’s forwards for us, but they’re seeing it from the other side. That’d make it backwards to the people in the frame.
Anywho: “after mapping local space/time and setting a waypoint, you remap local space time onto a 5D Klein bottle, using the unique geometry to join the start and end points. Then you subdivide the Klein volume into segments, selectively discarding segments. You then remap the remaining segments onto the imaginary plane and perform a transverse transform to the…” – “and what happens to the space time segments you discard?” “They hum… happily, go away?”
-.-
“But then how do you integrate tachyon flux across the resulting discontinuous function?”
“Oh, I’ve been fudging that part.”
“[swears in a language you need a forked tongue to speak]”
What if the magic-hologram-thingy has a perception layer, so no matter how you look at it its the right way. So u could have a room of people from every surgeon seeing the same thing.
Yep. Which would give it a similarity to the orbs. In that they have properties that work in a selective fashion too. Allowing living beings to see the glyphs, but not cybernetic eyes or cameras.
Whilst that is clearly a different effect, it could be achieved by using the same basic principle (whatever that may be).
For instance both could be projecting a telepathic image directly into the part of the brain that distinguishes recognisable objects (such as faces or writing). Clearly the writing would have to be the correct way round, to be understood (regardless of the orientation of the viewer). Likewise this would not appear in CCTV feed.
However it may be picked up by a sentient robot (or construct) if its ‘brain’ is similar enough, to a living brain, for the effect to work.
Of course we should not forget simple artistic necessity. It is very hard to draw mirror imaged writing, and there is an awful lot of it up there. The time taken to invert that lot would severely impact on the amount of time available for drawing the rest of the page. With very little return.
In fact the first-glance comprehension of the scene is easier if the reader can immediately categorise the text as ‘math/programming symbols’ thus allowing them to move on easily to the rest of the scene. Plus it avoids misinterpreting such as ‘alien text’ or something similar.
Neither is particularly significant mind (although we an see similar things, to the latter, happening often enough that it should not be dismissed out of paw). So is not enough to make right way round text better. But it does further diminish the returns from time lost in inverting the text.
“I don’t think immortality would make someone immune to boredom or impatience. You’s still have to sit through the same amount of intervening time, and regardless of what percentage of your lifespan that interval takes, assuming your brain functions at the same clock speed as a mortal, the fact that you might outlive your enemies doesn’t make your TV dinner defrost any faster.”
This would be true for the first 1-2 hundred years. But after a while you simply wouldn’t care as much. You’d know it was going to get done… and and you would have internalized the idea that you have unlimited time so it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to do it.
Not to mention… can you imagine a 1600’s era farmer’s wife complaining about how long it takes to microwave a TV dinner? She’d laugh in your face and tell you what it was like to cook in a pot hung over the fireplace. Then she’d cut off your head with her zweihander while muttering, “there can only be one,” with a hint of germanic accent.
Yeah there would be times where an immortal would be in a hurry… but the default would be not to sweat the clock unless they had a specific reason to do so. So that would be a no to impatience and a yes to conditional hurriedness.
There’s also a consideration of personality. Someone who is commonly impatient or bored is not likely to change that view/behavior very quickly. It could also be neurological. An ADHD immortal for instance.
funny you should mention that, one of the main reasons Undead tend to seem insane after some time, well the sentient ones anyho, is that their minds in the beginning when they are still “sane” are still mortal, a mortal mind in the process of being corrupted, but still mortal, and mortal minds are not made to handle eternity, it basically breaks down and stops being mortal after some time, for other mortals it seems they go insane, but in reality they have simply stopped viewing the world as a mortal would as mortal concepts such as time starts to become increasingly redundant considering you have all of eternity, unless something ends your existence in a violent manner.
Also, our perception of time skews as we age; days and years are perceived to pass faster as they become a smaller and smaller percentage of the time we’ve experienced. Personally I know that a monthseems to just slip right by at 40, when I remember that it took ‘forever’ when I was a child.
Life is a pair of scales. We sit on one side, with a time-glass on the other. One with a hole in the bottom. As the grains, of our remaining time, spill out the balance shifts. The more that are lost the faster we descend. Until, just before the end, it reaches a critical point, and tips up completely – making our life flash before us!
Then we fall off.
Reminds me of that one scene from Johnny Dangerously. “Cook a whole turkey in just under a day.”
Despite the other information going on, the thing I like seeing most is Halo finally getting to go to bed. Don’t wake her up, Max!
+1
Based on her preferred choice of words, we can ask “Do Sydney’s dream of electric *BLEEP*?
“So why did you divide this bit by Pi?”
“…”
“Dabbler?”
“I’m thinking!”
oh, that’s a spelling error, I actually divided a pie
Dabbler is sexy as hell in a plain white t-shirt (X-shirt?) Showing her casual side gives her more depth and character.
*nods*
It shows she thinks ahead too. We see her contemplating a mono-surface object. And how to get her shirt wet.
Not that I would want to imply that Dabbler is mono-dimensional. She is just good at multitasking.
It mostly depends on the particular individual, what brand of immortality you are talking about, and whether the individual is an immortal human or has a human-like mindset.
For example, some immortal beings are described as being able to speed up or slow down their own perception of time, some can actually affect the flow of time itself, others can just choose to think slower or faster, as it suits them. Thus 60 years could feel like an afternoon, while the world seems to blur by around you.
Another factor is external factors. The evil bad guy may have all century to wait for a taks to be comepleted, but other factors (such as potential heros uncovering the plot and interfearing) or other more time sensitive events, may not have all century to wait. As the saying goes sometimes, Time waits for no one, even immortal beings.
RE: Panel two: http://www.reddit.com/r/vxjunkies
Sciona doesn’t have identifying scars, she is her identifying scars.
Any fingerprint records they had for her on her file are pretty much useless at this point. Previous height and weight stats probably aren’t too accurate either.
considering she transplanted herself onto a Troll it would be more accurate to say she (he?) is not her(him?)self anymore, in the literal sense of the word also is the transplanted body that of a male or female? and does that impact Scoria’s original gender-name-thingy in any way?
Just use the gender that Sciona herself has. So she is female.
For the umpteenth time, it’s not a bloody troll body, it’s either an orc or an ogre body, if it was a troll body, why the frackinzee did she have to leave the area to get a troll-blood infusion? o_O
The troll Blood infusion is probably because her undead nature causes her to radiate Negative Energy one of few things that can actually kill a Troll, because of her body literally being an animated corpse that effectively counteracts a trolls ability to regenerate naturally meaning that even if she was using a troll body she would need to infuse it with troll blood to keep it’s regeneration going, (in the fantasy settings where trolls regenerate anyho) as of such it is jsut as likely she is using a troll,.
That being said trolls are usually much larger than what Sciona currently are depicted as, most standing two stories high or more with only a few exceptions so i have to agree it’s more likely an ogre, some would probably argue Orc, but she seems a tad to big for that, as she towers over a dude that seems to be average, Orcs are bigger than humans/vampires, sure, but not that much larger, I mean the Vampy traitor reaches Sciona to her armpit and he looks to be close to 6ft if not more.
fun fact; do you have any idea how redonk a trolls regenerative ability is? It makes a werewolf seem like it cannot regenerate at all in comparison, let me put it in perspective for you, one of the ways trolls reproduce is ripping their own body parts of, letting the torn off bits regrow into completely new trolls, in fact the only way to actually kill a troll is to use either fire, acid, Negative energy or to petrify the damn thing, Acid nullifies the regenerative abilities of the area it hits and fire… well, trolls are combustible, highly combustible (read a few sparks and they go up like the Human Torch, only they are far from fire proof) and negative life energy would suck the trolls life energy out of it rather than actually wound it, making it’s regenerative ability do bugger all and petrification, well can’t regenerate if your stone.
As of such you infused yourself with enough troll blood you would quite literally have a troll regenerate inside your own body, with all the horrific consequences that entails, meaning that it is far more likely that Sciona, or whomever patched her together on that body, used blood magic to make her host troll body accept her as a part of her body rather than Sciona risking an horrific end by injecting herself with troll blood.
I hate the lack of an edit button *grumble* the last part were supposed to be removed as it was written before me remembering the whole troll blood infusion thing (which means Sciona is really playing with fire or are somehow just leeching the regenerative ability off the stuff by tampering with the blood to prevent a full on regen.
woe be to me loosing focus on the typed window and enter pressing the Submit comment button instead :/
Which just re-emphasizes that it is not a troll body
Dabs and Krona are just figuring out what went wrong with the time loop.
Back in the operations center Leon hears about Krona’s stunt and rigs the room’s PA speaker to start playing ‘The Time Warp’ from Rocky Horror.
Followed by Rod Sterling saying, “You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!” then 3 different versions of the Doctor Who theme (60’s, 80’s, 2010’s) interspersed with the theme for Time Tunnel and Quantum Leap (full narration).
I read somewhere that your sense of time depends on the longevity of your life. For instance for adulut 15 minutes is short time but for a kid is a lot of time becouse he lived less 15 minutes lenghts than adult. Thats why you remember your summer days as a vry long days but as an adult you summer day is short. So If we have a being whose life is counted in millenia our whole lives could be seen like a blink of an eye, I hope my mussy line of thought and writing is understandable as english is my 2nd language.
Again, it depends on the type of longevity/immortality involved. If your biology simply renews itself on a continuous basis (examples: Wolverine, Deadpool), you’ll end up feeling the same about waiting for an hour when you’re 20,000 as you do when you’re 20. If you’ve undergone a sudden alteration to something vastly different (example: vampires), you start perceiving time the way the new type of creature views time… which could be identical of vastly different. If you’re caught in serial reincarnation (examples: me), then you get the aggravation of the worst parts of both systems: strong impulses of impatience and an inability to feel pressed for time unless a deadline looms in the immediate future. As Gandalf said (paraphrased): “Three hundred lives of men I have walked this Earth, and now… when it is of most vital import, I have no time.”
No, you’ll become more patient the longer you live. That is hardcoded in human brains.
I’m almost 65. Patience is not one of my more noticeable traits. On the other hand, I’ve learned to just ignore a lot of stuff that used to irritate me. On the gripping hand, I’m less tolerant of noise.
I can debunk this immediately. If you’ve ever worked in retail at a cash register just watch how impatient the customers get… some of the most vocal whiners about waiting in line are the older ones. Seems that 3 minutes is too long for them to wait.
I think prompt service at tills is a good thing. One of my local shops has four tills and whenever a queue starts to form they call in as many till-trained staff as they can. Never have to wait more than a couple of minutes there.
Before I went into law, I initially wanted to program video games, and I majored in Computer Science for the first… 3 months of college. It was ALL math. They had us doing pseudocode, using math, for made-up languages that don’t even really exist in any practical way, like LISP.
It was so boring and so math-intensive I eventually just gave it up because it wasn’t anywhere remotely close to what I thought computer science would be. Or maybe the professor just sucked.
I guess you didn’t last long enough to be introduced to emacs.
LISP is real language and most other languages are still busy implementing ideas it came with.
Felt made up to me since we learned about it right after “pseudocode”… regardless, I hated the class
Yeah, well, it may have felt made-up, but hkmaly is right… LISP (LISt Processor) is very much real, dating all the way back to 1958. The only high-level computer language that is older is FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), which was invented the year before, in 1957. And both of them are still in use today, although both languages have gone through multiple revisions.
LISP has an interesting alternative acronym. Because of all the levels of nested brackets, some people say it stands for Lots of Irritating Stacked Parenthesis. xD
What happened to you, pander, is that (like me), when you went to university, most universities had not yet developed specialized classes for game design. At the university I went to, you had Computer Information Systems, which taught you what you needed to know to write business applications, and Computer Science, which taught you what you needed to know to write scientific applications.
Frankly, I don’t think every university had a firm grasp on what classes should be taught even in those classes. You got saddled with a freshman class that sounds suspiciously like my 3rd-year “Survey of Algorithmic Languages” course, and I got saddled with a “Logic” course which had absolutely nothing to do with computers. (Hint: It was taught by the English department. It was, basically, a debate class.)
The only time I seem to use math in computer code is when I’m modding something which itself does math.
I actually dropped out of Computer Science and AI after the first year more than twenty years ago and I don’t regret it. My brain couldn’t take another year of studying.
What you would actually benefit more from is a software development unit of a course. When I did that (about ten years ago now) they were using Visual Basic to get the beginners into it.
Bit too late for me to get into programming again now as a profession. Already became a lawyer and took the bar in a few states and got federal court sponsorship. :)
My head of form lost my application to join the sixth form. Meaning that none of my choices for classes got registered, and I could not take any of the ones I wanted. They were all full. Including computer programming. So I got stuck with the unpopular classes, that did not have enough applicants. All of which I hated.
Especially A-level maths. I told them that at my previous school they had only taught us maths to CSE standard, and that I would need to take O-level maths to be able to follow the lessons. They disagreed, arguing that I had a grade B O-level, in maths already.
Which I explained that was purely because I was very good at the lower level stuff and could use that to muddle through the exam. But could see there were whole sections that I had never even been taught the basics.
But they told me ‘you will be fine, besides which it is that or nothing’. I was right. They could have been speaking Martian, for all I could understand! Not having followed a single lesson, I had to drop the course, within a few weeks.
I was speculating, just yesterday, with my mum, how things might have turned out if that had not happened.
How
horrifyingsurprising, to realise that I might have ended up as a lawyer!Actually a reasonable prospect, given that my headmaster was very keen on me joining his Latin class. And that would have fitted well, with my English language preferences.
I wonder where I might have ended up?
Don’t all lawyers end up in hell?
Quite a few do. But I should think not many of the ones who do as much pro-bono work as pander.
However even Hell might have an appeals process. If that involved representation, then lawyers would need to consult with their clients.
“I don’t think immortality would make someone immune to boredom or impatience. You’s still have to sit through the same amount of intervening time… assuming your brain functions at the same clock speed as a mortal.”
It’s been demonstrated that the internal clock slows down as we age. The easy way to test this is to count out a minute in your head without looking at anything. People over sixty often take noticeably longer than people in their prime, sometimes as much as 50% or more. There haven’t been enough studies to say whether this is a slow process over the course of you life or an accelerating process when you start reaching old age.
We also don’t know if it’s simply a matter extended experience or if it’s related to to biological process of aging, since of course there is no way to separate the two. Even in a single universe, such as this strip, different “immortals” could have different time perceptions based on the details of their situation.
Besides, Sciona is presumably old enough to have learned patience, or at least to realise what could go wrong if a big spell like this is rushed. Going slowly is just prudence.
On the other hand, there could be external factors which may also be contributing to the impatientce. The speel might be needed for another event to occure, which might be even more time sensitive. Or the knowledge that certain super hero type may have a hint of somehting up and may be working to gain more information toward thwarting evil plan.
Besides nothing I thing would be more anoying than going through a lot of work to setup a carefully planne dout and crafted speel just to miss that special tri-planetary eclips by 2 minutes and having to wait another 300,000 years to try again.
Oh? You want some technobabble for panel two?
YOU GOT IT. :D
“Now, despite all this math I’m still a little shakey on how all this really WORKS. But to sum it all up, I’ve basically utilized the Fifth and Sixth Dimensions to imprint a Kleine Bottle onto the a localized portion of the fabric of space and time, trapping it all into a loop that triggers whenever a set of predetermined criteria. Which I think is pretty useful considering what happened earlier today.”
“So how do you handle paradoxes?”
“Honestly, I have no idea how that works, but on the few times that’s been an issue, I just get this loud and obnoxious buzzing noises in my head like 5.25″ drive makes on a read failure whenever I try to implement the loop.”
“Well, that’s useful, too. Knowing if a loop is going to create a paradox is usually a pretty clear sign that you might want to back away from the situation a bit. Though I’d see if I could have it use a different means of warning you. Obnoxious is a pretty accurate description of those things.”
“Eh. I figure the more obnoxious the warning, the more dire the consequences of disregarding it.”
While I agree with granting worse threats with more annoying alarms, I see almost no technobabble here. The most technobabblly bit here is ‘localized portion of the fabric of space and time’ which is, itself, too direct in application and actual physics to really be technobabble. It’s still cool though.
well, what are we looking at here? Oh, that? I’m not really certain, but it only ever appears in realtime as a big blue box with a Doctor in it.
Eh, what can I say? I kinda prefer my ‘techno-babble’ to sound at least a bit realistic. Besides, even the Star Trek writers kept it to a minimum – just a clip or phrase here and there. And they pretty much originated the trope.
Glad you liked it nonetheless. :)
That….is either alchemy or a summoning. Either one is bad. I’m smelling demon summoning. The demon in particular could be that one we keep seeing in Dabbler’s flashbacks.
And with how much Dabbler reminds me of Raven, I can’t help but wonder if that demon is her dad.
it would be a horribly bad idea to attempt to summon a demon in a magic circle made out of blood, as demons tend to materialize in a flash of fire and heat, heat great enough to vaporize water, blood is a liquid and so would more than likely follow suit and the dried remains would crack and crumble away breaking said circle, the absolute LAST THING you want to happen when you summon a demon is for the circle meant to contain it to go and break on you as it is meant to contain it and prevent it from ripping you into tiny tiny pieces, which is why permanent circles made out of metal sigils that are set into the floor and ceiling are more commonly used among summoners which regularly summon Abyssal or Infernal beings, of course she could be trying to summon something else, like an ice elemental or beings from the Void, the Negative energy plane or even worse, the Outer Planes, but such beings tend to be a really bad idea to summon as they don’t really follow conventional rules of summoning and most have the ability to just flat ignore summoning circles and the restrictions they are supposed to impose.
That being said, that looks less like a summoning circle and more like a ritual circle, which would benefit from being made out of blood, and depending on the ritual in question, blood taken by force from an enemy would be even more effective than blood given willingly, and judging by the size of that circle said ritual is probably something nasty.
Wait, I’m confused… Is the implication here that Pixel saw the core hopping away in the last strip but didn’t do anything to track or stop it? And then didn’t mention it to the people doing the analysis?
No, she thought she heard something (which she did), and dismissed it as the people trying to get the rest of the not-a-robot into the Osprey. But she didn’t see it hopping away.
Yea. Although I am not sure about the ‘dismising’ part. As hinted at by Dave’s commentary I think it was just a matter that the other noises were drowning it out, whilst it was making its escape. I think Pixel was disgruntled at the end, but realised that, whatever it was, it had managed to get away.
Just an idea, but the code could look like Blueprint Visual Scripting. If Unreal can use it, so can real life, or comic life…
PS.:Thats one nice Klein Bottle you have there
Would it make sense for them to be looking at code, though? If you have some super-smart physicists taking apart an incredibly advanced engine, you wouldn’t expect them to be picking through COBOL or something. It’d be all physics equations and stuff.
Klein bottle for sale: Inquire within. ;)
+1
ROFL.
You deserve a Yorpie Snack™ for that
*places one inside the Klein bottle*
My head keeps misplacing the “I” in her name. All fear Sconia… and the wrath of her scones.
Scone army.
Thought… Kronachrome’s power seems OP even for supers (“hack reality” could easily be “I hack myself to have godmode” that said, her power could easily have different limitations. Since their reality has some semblance of the laws of physics, she may be limited to her hacks working within moderately close confines of the law of conservation of energy, and limited to the energy and objects within a given radius (which would explain how she could make the mistake of screwing up local time vs universal time). Means instead of her worst being destroying all reality, worst would be releasing the energy-mass of all local matter… which would be massive, no doubt, but not necessarily universe ending, and potentially not even world-ending (although definitely city-ending) making her lower down to closer to Maxima’s (relatively) benign level of power.
Maybe the only limit on her power is computing power, and since she can only use her own computing power, it makes her more powerful than most supercomputers but erasing the universe would take a matrioshka brain.
I think that, what with Krona being a reality hacker, the real danger is that she might tweak other supers to be far more powerful than is safe.
For example, still working within the bounds of energy conservation, what if Maxima’s energy beams didn’t dissipate on impact creating an explosion as normal, but instead caused a particular kind of molecule (let’s say water) to vibrate really quickly?
Suddenly, Maxima can boil away a lake with a sweeping gaze.
Or, if Krona creates a hack which allows Maxima’s energy beams to stop the existing vibrations, she can freeze it instead.
I know that Krona seems like she means well, but that kind of power can corrupt.
In panel 2, they are looking at the equations from the back, so they would appear reversed.
It probably doesn’t faze them. Leonardo had no trouble with it.
Or perhaps the the ‘magi-display’ being used is omni-directional?
The Klein Bottle has one surface I’m told, but how much liquid will it hold?
It has no bottom or topper, no stem or stopper. Some fear that it might even explode!
But take it into space, it’s not out of place, you can use it as a Zero-G commode.
The real head scratcher is that, since a klein bottle’s “inside” is on the outside, every klein bottle in existence contains every other klein bottle simultaneously.
To stop headscratchers like that, I like to think that Klein Bottles don’t have insides at all. So _everything_ is outside it.
You might be interested, I just did the math from panel two and the answer is 41.3
Just in case you wanted to know, I’m also occasionally dyslexic and can never remember how to spell alzheimer’s.
pretty sure the answer was supposed to be 42 ;P
My calculation is approximately 95141.3, in exact agreement with calisto01.
Now I know at least one person got my joke.
My work is done.
For being that smart, you deserve a reward.
*presents a 98.33333333333333333333333333333333% fish*
I’m more concerned with whether it should still be called a “T” shirt when it has four arm holes.
‡ – shirt?
No, a Ŧ-shirt. If it was ‡-shirt, it would have a turtleneck.
+1
+ ╪
In one clothes shop, years ago, I noticed a shelf labelled ‘mock-turtlenecks’. Unfortunately other commitments left me without the time available to investigate …
Well you would not want ones made out of real ones. They are endangered!
Dabbler is probably doing the Tshirt thing to make Krona more comfortable. (As to why she wants her in a more calm state of mind, well that’s not something I’m going to guess at.)
The math is probably part of an explanation about the time loop/reversal or even the storing of the save point information. The existence of a Klein Bottle in there, a kind of 4 dimensional bottle that can pour into itself, really rather fits with that idea. After all, Krona might not always have to use the full blown math, but sometimes you still need it to explain to someone else why A+B=Lepton Flavored Bananas.
I’m sure someone will get around to mentioning the big crystal thingie they didn’t find in the wreckage.
I learned Boolean Algebra and Machine Language before I left High School. Alpha-Numerics were replaced by FORTRAN and now by C++. We have PCs that run Windows 2000, XP, and Linux. These comput r s that still run systems that were designed in the 1970’s.
Judging by the Klein Bottle as a clue, and assuming they are not talking about the sigils from Halo’s orbs but the timeshift code, this must imply a simple autotopic topological quadridimensional loop, curving existence back to the reset point on 4 dimensions- 1 for time and 3 for space. The use of integral symbols makes me think it is designed to cover a finite portion of existence, meaning the effect to all 4 dimensions are constrained to a limit within the code. Based on the nature of the loop, it is unlikely but possible that Sciona still owns a Halo corpse and a set of orbs. Since the field of the “savepoint” follows Krona (else they would all be dead with or without a lump of rock, in space) it makes sense for the saved copy to expand starting from her, and nobody here is dead so it must happen instantly, i.e. at the speed of light. If it has any effect other than appearing, the infinite acceleration given to any or all weighted particles in its path, even on a finite length, would generate waves with limitless blueshift. Energy equates Planck’s constant times the frequency, meaning infinite energy blast. The code itself must limit the properties of such happenings, tearing down impossibilities, but perhaps on the border of the “save” will be gravitational, energetic or temporal singularities to keep an eye on.
Hey, the idea was to create fake technobabble, not real technobabble!
Replacing a zero with a one in a HEX editor would… not do what you think it would do, if we’re talking binary ones and zeroes. Just sayin’.
I’ve used a “hex” editor that also displayed and let you alter the binary of whichever nibble you had selected. Yes this is non-standard which is why I put “hex” in quotes, but the ability is out there ;)
Oh look, a Klein bottle.
Dabbler: “Krona: wouldn’t using a 4-dimensional manifold to fold 4-dimensional space be more efficient than using four 2-dimensional manifolds?”
Krona: “Um… look, a Klein bottle!”
Dabbler: “My point exactly.”
When hacking the universe, makes sense to use it’s language… MATH!!!!!!
How this should actually go down:
Dabbler: “Krona: wouldn’t using a 4-dimensional manifold to fold 4-dimensional space be more efficient than using four 2-dimensional manifolds?”
Krona: “Since you know nothing of either what I’m doing or how, it’s hard for me to even begin to explain to you exactly how wrong you are, and how stupid that sounded.”
Seriously, people, this is just ridiculous. Krona is supposed to be the only one of her kind. Even hinting that she can be taught to be better at it by people who can’t (or at least shouldn’t) even understand what she is doing, much less how, is simply very bad writing. It trivializes the character, removes all mystique about her capabilities, and leads to Archon being the ‘go to’ for knowledge about power sets they learned about all of a couple hours ago. It is a “jump the shark” moment for the story.
Just because she is the only one of her kind, doesn’t mean she knows what she is doing, which resulted in that mess with the ‘Save Point’, the same mess she admitted to knowing what caused it and panicked, which led her to sitting at a table with Dabbles looking at Math backwards
What “mess” with the save point?
You keep clinging to this line of *ahem* ‘reasoning’ *ahem* as if it actually means something. It does not.
Please detail the mess you think exists, so that I can understand it from your point of view.
Because I don’t see a mess. I see Pixel no longer hanging upside down, unconscious, having her blood drained out. I see several other people also rescued from that situation. I see Sydney being alive so that our story can continue in its current format, since she is the protagonist. Aaaaand then? I got nothing. No mess, no danger, no problem, no fears, nothing. Just a warrantless arrest and interrogation of the person who facilitated the lack of the messes that existed before she acted.
Krona has committed no crime, rather she deserves to have a medal pinned on her. And yet some readers have decided to invent capabilities she may or may not actually have, and then use that invention as some kind of justification for her being singled out for this so very special mistreatment, while they blithely ignore the actual, known, canon cases where characters in this story could destroy cities or even the entire planet.
It is hard for me to understand people with such a willful ignorance of what the story is showing them, people who are willing to invent capabilities and then use those inventions as the justification for what is happening in the story. Perhaps being a fan simply overcomes their typically normal functioning intellectual capabilities? It makes them desperate to justify the author, even if they have to invent things in order to do so? Perhaps they are just idiots, too stupid to tie their own shoes much less put together a cogent argument (and Guesticus is clearly in this group, by her words as well as by her own admission)? I don’t know the answer.
Clearly you are talking cannon versus fan headcanon. Allow me to cite the facts you asked for:
1) CANON: Pixel becomes infuriated with Krona for creating a time loop.
IMPLICATION: Messing with time is incredibly dangerous. Examples, such as being trapped in an eternal loop, are well documented in many different stories. From Tales of the Unexpected (many episodes), Star Trek (likewise), Dr Who (ditto), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Groundhog Day (despite the happy ending, it did illustrate the perils too). To name a few of the popular TV & film versions.
Let alone the innumerable novels and short stories which show this and the It is culturally widespread enough that it does not require further explanation, in comic, being self-evident.
To belabour this point, in the dialogue, would not only make the characters look they were treating Krona as an idiot, it would be unnecessary exposition for any readers who have exposure to TV, or film, or comics, or science fiction books!.
Thus this is not fan-fiction. It is blatantly obvious that it is the intent of the scene. Pixel, one of Archon’s trusted experts, believes that Krona has done something incredibly dangerous. Characterising it as ‘a mess’ is therefore fair.
HEADCANON: None.
2) CANON: Krona realises that she has messed up. Note in panel 5, when Sydney says “Huh, that didn’t happen last time.”, Kronas response is:
She then goes on to indicate that it could be any one of several different things that has gone wrong. Requiring her to cancel the power immediately (final panel).
IMPLICATION: Although it is comically delivered, this is clearly a confession that she has realised that Pixel is right and these were risks to Krona cancelling it. Short of getting Krona to write out, and sign, a confession, Dave could not have made this much more obvious!
HEADCANON: We can make a further implication that this is why Krona later co-operates, however that is a personal inference, rather than explicitly stated in the comic. It is not much of a leap mind, but as interpretations vary, this is is just opinion.
3) CANON: Maxima states that she is acting in a formal capacity and accuses Krona that:
If Krona was innocent of this, then this is the point at which it would be appropriate to claim that. Rather her reply is as follows:
IMPLICATION: This is a second confession!
HEADCANON: Oberon, or anyone else, thinking that Krona has done nothing wrong.
MORALITY: The fact that Krona did it with good intentions is praiseworthy, however does not negate the endangerment that she has caused. The latter endangered literally infinitely more people than her good intentions did. Just because she lucked out and did not trap everyone in a time loop, or shatter the universe, does not make it all OK! You do not get medals for risking killing or trapping everyone in the universe!
Preventing Krona from continuing to do that, and provide her with assistance, to help her use her power safely, in the future, is therefore a highly moral act!
Your complaint is ridiculous, Oberon, for one reason:
They’re not teaching her how to be better at it. They’re trying to analyze her power to make sure she won’t blow up the world or something while doing it. Totally not the same thing.
You speak in circles. Your “one reason” is no reason at all.
Let’s put aside the constantly repeated and completely invented capability for Krona to “blow up the world” for the moment. I’ll assume that it exists for the purpose of this discussion even though it is completely non-canon and has been invented from whole cloth by the readers with nothing in the comic even suggesting that it is actually possible for Krona to accomplish, either on purpose or by accident.
Wouldn’t you have to admit that if she has this capability that someone else being able to “make sure” that she won’t do so accidentally is in fact “teaching her how to be better at it?” That is the very essence of teaching, after all. And it presumes that her utterly unique power is able to be understood and explained to her, the sole person with this ability by one or more person at Archon.
It is very poor writing, because it trivializes the character and their capabilities. It makes them mundane rather than mysterious. Consider as a point of comparison the examination of Sydney’s orbs. Various people with various abilities were called in to consult on them, and they pretty much got nothing. Oh, sure, they could make various comments like “I don’t scan Sydney as having any kind of powers ,” “as far as I can tell the tube is empty. A little too empty,” “they are indistinct,” and “I’m not getting anything off them at all.”
They remained mysterious.
Meanwhile, Dabbler is busy training Krona up on how to write her own code, better. That sucks a lot.
It is all canon. Please refer to the points cited in my reply, just posted, above.
The stated purpose of the comic is to look at the mundane events, which surround the combat and the other extraordinary things that happen in super genre stories. As such it is very good writing because it is exploring just such issues.
It is examining the mundane. In particular showing that the basic morality of facing the consequences of ones actions does not vanish simply by acquiring (literally) god-like powers.
Therefore it is actually masterful writing! Krona was allowed to show off the awesome potential of her power, in a highly dramatic way. Along with exposing the perils that can be inadvertently caused, by using such powers, without wisdom.
Getting us, the readers, to actively look at the morals of supers, and see that they have meaning even in our own day to day lives is also of great social benefit. Leading to us have these debates, in addition to giving us a lot of laughs, along with various dramatic and emotional scenes, underlines Dave’s talent.
Moreover, as you acknowledge yourself, Dave has pulled this off whilst retaining the mystery of the primary protagonist. He has created many characters, so that he can use each for for the various purposes that he wants to explore. Some of those are to do with fun powers. Others are to do with personal relationships. Whilst greater issues such as social, economic and political dynamics have all been explored, at various points in the comic.
Krona gets to both have a cool power set and serve as a morality story. I believe Dave is perfectly correct though to give the greater emphasis to the latter, in the way that he has done, for this particular character.
Albeit that I do very much appreciate the fact that you feel Krona has been diminished by this. And it is a shame, because you are correct in saying that. But it is absolutely vital for characters with cosmically vast powers to have some constraint on their ability, for the story to function. Others have complained that this, in itself, was risking breaking the story.
Dave prevents that however, by the route he took. Krona has bounds, placed on her activities, by being a good member of society. Realising that she is only human, despite her nifty power, she will now not take unnecessary risks with causality. Meaning that momentous events can play out, even in this arc, without Krona getting to use ‘Groundhog Day’ techniques to solve it.
Plus it this is a far better route to removing a nuisance power, to prevent that happening, than the usual ham-pawed approach of just killing them off. Especially as fans would, justifiably, feel upset that they did not get to see more of the power.
This route suspends Krona’s capabilities until they become useful again, at some point in the future. Whilst still keeping the character in the story, as an interesting person, in her own right, rather than just for her powers.
Finally Krona does have much that yet remains mysterious. What are her origins? How did she gain this power? Is she really unique? Do any higher powers have plans to curtail her activities?
Is there some kind of link between Krona and Halo’s orbs? Will Krona be able to shed light on the orbs (and, in answer to your fears, maybe not)? And more besides.
Dave will have googled equations to fill in here. Perhaps using something like ‘time travel equations’, then picking the ones that look most aesthetically pleasing?
I would laugh if that methodology accidentally creates something that does have significance to time travel.
Maybe having a bit of code that an Einstein-like figure had created as ‘well this would almost allow time-travel if not for X’. But incorporate an elegant looking solution to some seemingly unrelated problem, and all of a sudden it actually works!
Just do like that one guy in Stein’s Gate. “Invent” time travel by copying the theory from a scifi novel.
time travel already exists. we are doing it at a rate of one second per second, forwards.
Movement through time is relative. For instance, when I am with my relatives time seems to go *really* slowly.
Have you considered that may be literal, rather than just a joke about subjectivity? Physics shows that time is just a construct of our minds, after all. Therefore there is no reason why it should be perceived as moving at a consistent rate.
Elsewhere in today’s comments we had other examples of time moving at different rates, at different stages in our lives. We all experience this variability.
Which should we trust, our own perceptions, or an artificial device, using an arbitrary means of measuring the ‘progress of time’?
My guess at Sciona’s ritual – I think it’s some sort of binding spell, incorporating the blood of different supers/magical beings. Using the blood of a were will allow her to control were’s, using blood of different supers will allow her to control supers etc.
I just figured she was turning that courtyard into a Neon Genesis Evangolem.