Grrl Power #57 – Why is this computer so loud?
Wait what comic is this? Oh, we’ve just switched scenes for a moment. Don’t worry, we’ll see some Sydney antics on the next page, which honestly is the most fun to write and draw, but I’m also trying to tell a story here (of sorts).
Hopefully I’m not setting Arianna up to be too much of a bad guy here. Her and Maxima will butt heads a lot but she’s still a good guy in her own way. Bear with me as I learn how to draw someone who isn’t in their 20’s or early 30’s. I think there are a lot of artists out there, especially in manga that have no idea how to draw older people, so they just put bags under their eyes. I figure Arianna’s is a healthy early 40’s since she is a lawyer and in charge of PR for the team. It bugs me in manga how there’s usually no one between the ages of 23 and 60. (Depending on the genre of course, but when I say manga, I mean stuff of the shounen, seinen and harem bent, which is 90% of the stuff that I was introduced to manga with.)
Oh, and I had to spend $800 on brakes this weekend, so there goes my advertising budget for a while. If you do enjoy the comic, do me a favor and share it with a friend. Don’t spam anyone, just… you know – if you know someone who’d like it, send them a link, click the Like or +1, tweet it, whatever. Thanks!
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Proof reading is a dying art even as it is needed now more than ever. It is being killed off. And spell check doesn’t begin to cover it.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just have someone else look it over before you ink the lettering. Anyone. Another pair of eyes is all you need.
The current lack of proofreading in the publishing industry is my biggest peeve. It ticks me off when I’m reading a book from a major publishing house and I spot errors any ten-year-old could find. Wrecks my enjoyment of the story.
Well, at least the online readers will have caught most of the errors before Dave starts printing these in book form. On an unrelated note: do you have any plans to release these as a book when there are enough comics, Dave?
Oh yeah definitely. I’m not going to try and make 24 page issues or something, I want to get a good 100-120 together and do it like a trade paperback. Obviously have it wrap on some kind of story point and put in some unpublished stuff and all that. Of course if I want to put out books in a reasonable timeframe I need to find a way to draw more than one a week somehow.
Many errors happen because of spelling checkers. It is called Auto-Correction in Word. When it changes something correct to something wrong, it is a real bother. I disable Auto-ScrewUp.
A spelling checker is useful for a quick, general check. Then, one checks thoroughly by hand.
What I notice from this is that it sounds rather unlikely that this was intended as an operation to smoke out Sydney. If not, then I’m impressed by Max’s awareness of the odd things happening around Sydney (which even Leon seems to have missed – bad geek, bad – attention to detail is what geekdom IS) – even with all the other crap going on in the bank.
What, Arianna and Leon don’t get spots on the Cast page? Leon’s the best character so far (and he might be someone that Sydney could go all geek over…)
Oh they will, I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I actually only had one sketch of Leon before I drew this page so I’ll probably do that this weekend.
Normally I would agree with you about Sydney geeking out over Leon, but I think he’d have some stiff competition from Mr. “Catch a bullet between those buttcheeks.” If I remember correctly, his sister/cousin was in the role-playing game with Sydney at the very beginning, (before the flashback.) I doubt she still hang with her and not with him.
heh i love that the directors cell has the options to Accept, decline, Vmail, TRACE, Trace and accept and decline
Well now, I was going to post a comment about how banks used closed circuit T.V. systems, so the actual camera system isn’t hooked up to the internet, but after a bit of research I found out that many modern banks have cameras that actually send data over the internet so things can be monitored remotely.
Which is kinda scary and bleh.
On another note: Just use for your online anonymity needs (Although I am sure he knows that.)
Ha, I messed up the HTML. That’s amusing, it should say, Just use TOR for your online anonymity needs.
Annd since I have all this empty space here, lets see if I can break something.
</div>
alert(‘If you see this popup, there is a huuuge problem”);
Darn, it removed HTML tags… Hmm…
I wonder how good the regex it uses to check it is.
>
Anyway, love your comic. Keep it going!
Sydney‘s endearing in her spastic actions. Her histrionic raves. And her other super power, George Washington had it, to curse to the the high noon anyone under a table for hours on end.
Panel 2: Did he mean to say “responsible,” or was it meant to be “irresponsible?” ‘Cause the second…makes more sense to me.
Dave, you considered getting a forum for the comic?
You’re getting a ton of comments for the individual strips. All these nested replies are hard to keep track of :D
Yeah it’s not ideal, it’s a nice problem to have though. I like the comments on the comic but it is a lot to scroll through after you get over 50 or so. I may ask over at the CMX forums and see if I can join there. I’m sure some of the readers here already have a login there. I’d keep the comments on the comics though and just suggest the forums for some of the longer topics.
It is indeed a nice problem to have.
That was indeed what I meant, having both things so comments are less cluttered and people can discuss the comic in the forum.
Indeed, indeed. Got to stop using that word so much. I blame Christopher Judge! :D
funny thing, that… it can be a bit of a pain to surf down through all the comments, but I, for one, would stop following the comments if it meant having to go to a separate forum (the hilariously funny, and comment-worthy XKCD immediately comes to mind).
just sayin’
Hey Dave, since you talked about Einstien and movies making mistakes, I did want to mention you made one tiny mistake. Leon’s dialogue implies that enchancing photo’s is a computer problem when it infact is actually first an optics and astrophysics problem that just computer scientists are taught the basic solution to and then use their computer skills to make better. You see many satelleties even spy sattelite . This optical uncertaincy has the exact same science and mathmatical logic behind it as Dr. Werner Heisenberg Uncertainty principle except the constant is different and 96% infact larger than Heisenburgs. (The other 4% has to do ultrafast optics and storage of quantum memory which still has not reached prototyping stages because the devices are still to fragile to be even carried around by regular human hands.)
Effectively though more most E&M signals translates to most computer scientist and amateur optical scientists as the uncertainty is greater have the wavelength of the signal. (lambda/2). Now GPS miltary signal is reported to be around 1575 Hz (GPS military/civys) and one at 1227.60 (GPS US military only). Effectively(*) this means that minimum pixel length resolution each picture from a satellite using GPS was 9.5 cm-12cm, which if you think about the exact size of a persons head looking from above like the head was a blurry dot. So a single GPS and if I gave you the numbers (which I won’t if I value you my life) spy satellite, does not emit at right wavelength . This is because mostly the right wavelength happens to be near the peek wavelength that our atmosphere attenuates high in (or absorbs/blocks).
So what is the solution to get around this fundamental uncertainty?? Simple we use more than one satellite and the actual enchanced image is a comparision between images from different spy satellites over the same exact 19 – 24 cm.
I hope this makes thing clearer,
neoshadow
P.S. The Equation is lambda = c/frequency then take half of lambda.
Leon’s just being facetious about the fact that every movie and CSI show seem to think that every piece of security cam footage has infinite resolution hidden in it that can be revealed by the click of a mouse. :)
Time marches on with Sony working on a dual scan 32 megapixel system.granted it will be a while before that monster becomes commonplace, and even then it has limits.
Ever since “Blade Runner” (1981) and the scene where Dekard uses a computing scanner to search a digital photo, so many others have the same idea. Only hi rez digital filming isn’t that common today, but maybe by 2017 where the movie was set. And the CSI TV programs also showed their labs to be so well equipped as to be science fiction! Part of it is enhancement programs they depict in the shows. I look upon them as SiFi, not reality based procedurals like Law & Order.
You can stretch it as you like it DaveB. As far as I’m concerned this is a parallel, or the future, so you’ve got means to do what you like anyway. It’s entertaining so who cares?
The problem is that even with 4K systems come ing on line and dual and multi scan systems being developed, most footage is still coming from cameras that are hopelessly out of date.
Against stupidity, the gods themselves, contend in vain.
Isaac Asimov
“Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens,”
which means:
“Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.”
(Talbot, in: “Die Jungfrau von Orleans” (The Maid of Orleans), 1801)
a play by:
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805)
I [Copy/Paste]-ed this from Wikipedia.
The “Asimov”-connection is that he uses this quote for the title of his book, “The Gods Themselves”, & credits Schiller in the Introduction.
Benny made a better mousetrap, God made a 300 pound mouse
-Anonymous
God sometimes likes to show off….
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephoartigasia_monesi
By comparing the skull with various extant species of rodents, the authors of the original paper estimated a mass between 468 and 2,586 kg (1,032 and 5,701 lb), with a median estimate of 1,211 kg (2,670 lb).[1] A later researcher revisited the numbers and came up with a more conservative estimate of 350 to 1,534 kg (772 to 3,382 lb), with a median of 900 kg (2,000 lb).[2
Vmail Decline
Trace cantreadthatlastone
it’s trace + accept dont know why.. interesting
That would be a good option to have when answering a call from a kidnapper, and/or a supervillain who has captured the team. and a few other things along those lines. You could avoid all the scenes in movies and so on of one person answering the phone and having to wait until everyone is ready for the trace or wildly gesticulating to the room for someone to trace it.
Dave… Hadn’t you sad several time that we should expect your art to change for some time (while there were little things like guys being quite similar) – well, from the form of her head I’d say that she’s over 30 and below 50. No need for wrinkle if you keep it this way – so I say.
Thanks, I think I hit it pretty close, but I need to sort out a few things, basically to normalize some of the elements of her face. She looks pretty different from one panel to the next, the height of her forehead, the size and positioning of her eyes, stuff like that. Unfortunately spending years drawing manga style and anthropomorphic characters has had an effect on my ability to draw normal looking human faces consistently. Hopefully that will improve quickly.
Fitting custom ringtone for Maxima. Nice way to show the pregnant pause as the geek turns to look at his boss. Why do I get the feeling besides the tech jokes, that he’ll get along just great with Sydney?
Also he’s not much of a geek, only four empty soda cans sitting nearby? That or someone just cleaned up recently. All joking aside, nice way to show he’s a hardcore tech without excessive detail. Four monitors side by side … nice.
Well… he IS working for the military, and they ARE kinda a stickler for cleaning things, as well as having “a place for everything, and everything in it’s place” so i’d imagine that even though he’s gone thru a case of Jolt, and a few bags of Doritos, the office policies just make him throw the empties in an ACTUAL trash can /recycling bin that will get emptied everyday (or sooner if needed).
Why does her phone have a trace option?
PS: the age thing, that hair is all you need. I don’t think you’ll see alot of young people with that kinda hair
I think Leon just became my new favorite character.
o snap!
I love Maxima’s caller ID! That’s a really nice detail. Also, techie’s face cracked me up!
I think, for a character with eyes that aren’t that much bigger than normal, she should have deeper eye sockets. Will make her look older too. I’d say she looks an underfed 25 or perhaps 30 with a lot of paint. 40 year old people don’t look like that without lots of bondo!
For instance, here’s a photo of Meryl Streep when she was about 40, presumably with a lot of paint:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Meryl_Streep_1989.jpg
It’s been a week, and nobody’s pointed out that a lack of posts on Google+ might be a concern about privacy rather than Luddism. I’m shocked. I’m also shocked that Leon hasn’t apparently noticed that particular blowback.
Aye. The Google terms and conditions SAY that they believe your data belongs to you, but they reserve the right to use anything they get their hands on in “derivative works”. So, in practice, “All your word are belong to us!”
Oops! I forgot I had already posted on this page. This about my 4th reading of the archives (because it’s so good). Dave, feel free to delete these 2 comments.
i dont think you needed to add the arrow and “slow turn” to the techie, the expresion spoke volumes and the question was indeed a bit… meh, so i think everyone wouldve understood
I thought it was a nice touch. It sets the tone of the next panels and fits in with Leon’s sarcasm.
…and we have two people missing on the cast page…
Art-wise, I think the eyeshadow on Arianna is a bit over the top. Someone her age obsessed with “appearances” and making herself and her team look good, would probably wear her eyeshadow better-blended and a touch less purple; people like her, if they’re going to wear eyeshadow (which they often to, because it means looking “put together”), are going to do it “right”, and traditionally “right” means “barely noticeable, but accentuates your features”. The purple color doesn’t quite do this the way a softer blue would.
I say this as a young woman who only recently started learning about makeup in order to wear it (must have done something right, as I wore it to a job interview where I got the job!), so I’m more conscious of a lot of the details on it and the logic behind them. With eyeshadow, unless you’re trying to be “outrageous” or “wild”, you usually go with colors that are in your eyes or soften them; if you have brown eyes, you go with brown or maybe soft pinks, but if you have blue eyes (like Arianna), it’s best to go with a soft, carefully-blended blue, to bring out your eyes without drawing attention to the makeup itself. Purple-ish is too red to complement it.
And by “blended”, I mean… basically, you start with three different shades, right? The darkest shade is on the bottom of the upper lid, right above the eyelashes, but doesn’t go very high at all (really, a line of sorts, covering the lump that forms the inner edge of your upper lid), then you have the second-darkest shade, which is blended into the top edge of that and covers part of the upper lid, and then the lightest shade, which is blended from that, and fades as it goes higher, until it disappears into the flesh; the lightest shade doesn’t go above the eye brow, and should really stop or appear to stop a bit before it. The way her actual eyeshadow is in these shots is a bit strong, and not very soft at the edges. It’s like she started her eyeshadow, and then didn’t finish, in addition to either picking a not-quite-right color or putting too much of it (it’s very easy to put too much if you’re not careful or used to it, but usually one would blend it a bit better to cover that up, or else remove it and start over… and I doubt someone like Arianna wouldn’t be careful with her makeup or unused to using it).
The lipstick, though? Excellent. Way sharper than I would ever wear – I almost think of it as Hooker Red – but blood-red is popular with women who are or want to appear to be confidant, and looks striking on paler skin (I’m fair-skinned, but not really pale, since I live in a sunny clime). It’s also one of the acceptable “business casual” colors. I can totally see someone who’s into PR and media/legal manipulation, of fair skin, wearing that color. The hair is also perfect for someone in that occupation and age range; practical, but just fussy enough to say “I’m a grown woman who knows what she’s doing; outta my way”. As someone else said, it’s not a style common to younger women.
The last panel we see her in here she looks exactly right for the age range you intended, though she looks younger in the one before that. Comparing and contrasting the two, I’m convinced this is why:
1.) She has more personality in the latter panel (the smirk looks very appropriate), whereas in the prior one she looks less confidant and more “open”, perhaps even naive in comparison. It’s the expression, really – like she’s not sure of herself, but hasn’t had enough life experience to get stressed at this? Gah, it’s so hard to describe it without sounding like I’m projecting what I know of the intentions onto it. Just trust me, it reads as “young and naive” whereas the last panel’s expression reads as “older and confidant and a bit cheeky”.
2.) Her lips are fuller and plumper in the former panel; this is a sign of youth and fertility (lips plump up when a young woman is in estrus), whereas the thinner lips seem more reasonable for a practical, slightly older woman. She looks like an innocent sex kitten in the former, and a seasoned PR handler in the latter, partly because of those lips.
3.) The eyes are slightly bigger in the former panel; this gives her a younger, more innocent, less mature appearance. Large eyes are associated with youth precisely because babies and children have them, and usually lose them a little as they get older; the smaller eyes are much more appropriate to a mature late 20s-early30s character, who is intended to read as a “seasoned professional woman”.
I normally wouldn’t overanalyze art like this, but, well, you asked. ;) Not coincidentally, I like the art best for her in that last panel; it’s the least-generic and most interesting, precisely because it kind of hits that spot you were aiming for.
Wow thanks for the breakdown. I fully admit that my coloring skills are pretty amateurish. I mean, they get the job done but I’m terrible at blended colors, I haven’t actually figured out a way to do eyeshadow yet. If you lay it on as a solid color then you lose the contour of the lid, so then you have to put those depth queues into the eyeshadow colors which seems like extra work since the lid is already colored at that point. I’ve tried putting it on a different layer, but then different blending modes change the color of the eyeshadow. I guess what I need is some web page that has “here’s ‘morning mist blue’ as it looks applied to alabaster, fair, medium, tan, and dark skin” so I can just sample those colors directly. I’m sure that exists somewhere. Google image search is terrible though. I don’t think it indexes photos on Flikr or facebook, which is where about 80% of all photos live online.
There definitely is an art to makeup, I should study it a bit. Haven’t really needed it yet as Sydney doesn’t wear any but there will be plenty of characters that will.
I agree her lips should be a little thinner, I’ve gotten used to drawing Maxima’s porn star lips and it transferred over to Arianna more than it should. Smirks and full lips are hard to combine. Unfortunately, the standards of beauty being what they are for women, it’s hard to find a photo of one with her makeup done up all nice with any expression on her face other than a smile or that lusty far off look that’s so common in fashion photography. And subtle expressions are even harder to convey. The panel of her looking down at Leon, she is a little unsure, she thinks he might have done something that’ll give her trouble later on.
As far as the shape of her face goes, unfortunately I’m very inconsistent as an artist. I know more or less how I want her to look but getting it just right is something I have trouble with. In that last panel, her chin it too small and her neck is too long. It’s obvious now but as I’m zoomed in and trying to get all the other details right it’s easy to get a little proportion blind. I actually want to go in and fix that now but the page I’m working on at the moment is more important. Combine all that with a character that I’ve never really drawn much before and I was giving myself quite a few challenges right out of the gate. Hopefully her appearance will normalize quickly as I get better at drawing a variety of face types and obviously figure out a better technique for doing makeup.
Love the caller ID image on her phone. I guess Max doesn’t like getting her picture taken, given the hand partially obscuring the shot. Arianna must’ve had to ambush Max to catch her. The fact that she’s still alive makes me wonder if Ari’s a badass in her own right. After all, she appears to be in charge of some insanely powerful folks.
Well Max isn’t a fan of having her photo taken, usually cause it’s people going “look at the freak” of trying to get a photo of her bending over or something, but she’s not gonna snap your neck for it. If you’re a particularly aggravating paparazzi she might accidentally smash your camera though.
About that comment about Google+ : You need to carefully read the Google terms of service. Though they SAY they consider your data belongs to you, the practical upshot of the detailed terms is that they can do whatever they want with any info they get their hands on, even after you update or delete it, and even after you terminate all Google services.
I’m sure they just have that language in there to cover themselves in all particular legal angles. I don’t think anyone is worried about them running off with their IP. No company wants that PR backlash.
They have already been guilty of violating both privacy and copyright. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google and the references therein.
What a choice of ringtone…Maybe I should get that too.
If you have the music you can create it pretty easily on itunes or various apps. I use it for my wife.
Of course, it was the music we used for our recessional at our wedding. All our wedding music was sound tracks. Her bridal march was the love theme from Conan the Barbarian.
That useless Hollywood technojargon-babble. Good for a small laugh I guess.
I really hope people don’t believe that bouncing a signal off of multiple satellites is a way to “hide” the origin. Cause the signal has a return address.
It’s the same thing as a piece of physical mail. The destination, and the sender are held on the envelope, and paying multiple companies to ship around the mail isn’t going to change the address on the package.
“Nothing from Google+ though”… And this was written back in the day when that existed, right? He’s right, it was a good platform. I enjoyed it. But they discontinued it, because it didn’t have enough activity…
At the time the page was published, the bottom left panel was crime series TV pseudo IT nonsense.
Now it is possible with deep learning. (Though forensic accuracy is probably debatable, since ultimately the added detail can’t restore data, just guess what it should be.)
Showing its age again – google+
But, what I find much funnier, in a rather macabre, absurdist sense, is that, apparently, DaveB believed that pile of farmyard waste was actually ever going to amount to anything. That’s just sad, that you gotta laugh…
I bet someone took Sydney’s epic swearing and remixed it into a song.