Grrl Power #672 – Engage… your advanced math skills
On the plus side, Sydney does have her phone on her and it probably has a graphing calculator app. Not a 4 Dimensional Space Calculus one though.
If I was Sydney, I would have put that second point into either the shield and topped that out, or immediately put a second point into the warp tree. It would suck to get the warp speed upgrade, and only be able to go the actual speed of light, because, you know, as fast as that is, it’s still like 4 years to the nearest star from Earth. 4 years. Sydney may have all the air she can drink, and she’s got a granola bar in her utility belt, but she certainly doesn’t have the supplies for an extended trip.
Let’s be honest, she doesn’t even have the patience to get from Earth to Neptune at lightspeed, which is like 4 hours.
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Syd…
You remember what happened last time you said “What’s this do?”
Yes. She discovered she could teleport.
It’s what happened after she decided to make a lot of noise so her team could find her you’re interested in.
Well she discovered she could teleport and very nearly got involuntarily Exanguinated.
I’d almost like to see someone voluntarily get exsanguinated.
Your reply made me think of Buffy and Willow:
Buffy: “What should we do with the trio over here? Should we burn them?”
Willow: “I brought marshmallows.” (Everyone looks at her.) “Occasionally I’m callous and strange.”
There is that guy who can restore his own blood in a flash and chooses to feed two vampire women.
It showed up on the flight orb along with the super confusing …space map? So and I’m just guessing and hopeful, but it might be save points? Probably not but how cool would that be.
That would be cool if it was…
Just *BOOP* and she’s back!
I think it may be a while before she gets another point though…
I can’t see anyone mention it, but could the “central” node be how many orbs can be active simultaneously? I mean, there’s seven orbs, and space for seven segments in the middle node. It had two, and she could only have two active previously. Just a thought?
unless she suddenly grows a third hand, I really don’t see that being the case; they have only been able to be active when in her hands
Varia might be more useful now; perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to activate another orb before this upgrade.
I have been wondering if the orbs don’t NEED her hands to activate, but she just cant visualize activating them without touching them yet. She thought ‘I need air!’ And the air orb came to her even though she didn’t know it did that. I think there will come a time when she can use them without touching them at all.
She probably doesn’t *need* a third hand. The orbs are linked to her nervous system. They respond to mental orders she gives them in the same way a limb responds. More than likely, she’s only grabbing them to use them because she’s thinking of them as tools rather than appendages.
If you look at the number of wedges that fit into the skill tree’s center, it’s 7, which is exactly the number of orbs she has total, 2 points were already there and she could only use 2 orbs.
If LordSynos is correct, when she realizes that the orbs don’t need to be held to be operated, she’ll be able to use 3, but no more than that simply because she only has 3 points there.
This seems unlikely simply because it eliminates the purpose of Varia being able to control two more orbs in the narrative long run. It’s bad story telling.
Or it’s great storytelling because now another person can potentially use the orbs. Varia could have gotten any ability from Sydney, and rather than it being genetically random, it keyed into the power set that Sydney already had, that is arguably better than anything else Varia could have gotten.
I agree with the benefits of this power set override – after all she could just have gotten Sidney’s appetite for food that is considered to be a torture device by most.
Also: They do not know, that she might have that orb control power… yet.
Also²: It was only hinted at – and the power may be something completely different – like… Varia could just touch one of the orbs and get the same powers. . . or understand what they do!
Or….. imagine that Varia touches the orbs, and gets entirely new powers.
Since when did the whole “Varia using orbs” thing become more than fanwank?
Maybe she can toggle? Grab shield orb, turn it on, then let go and grab a different orb with shield still on?
If a third body part is now viable it may not necessarily be a third hand. Maybe only her left foot for example can now also be used.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you were spot on! I also wouldn’t be surprised if Sydney’s physiology means she can only use two, buuut we do know of at least one potential solution to that, and whose to say there aren’t more, let alone more available to her (maybe even orb provided ones). I suspect we’ll see soon.
That’s my thought on it. Then she’ll accidentally find out that the way to operate the third orb now is to hold a kiss on it, and then we’ll get to see the orb-tans and a surprise shojo arc. ^_-
Who knows? Maybe she’ll think about using one of the other orbs, and it will activate? There’s much that Dave hasn’t told us.
A bit crude, but she could stuff the third orb in her pants or something…
Or in a shoe. Just realized how the pants thing sounded…
She could put one in each of her armpits–that would be 4 she could hold at a time…
I don’t think the author really explained how to contact of the orbs actually works, Like does it have to be finger contact? If so, how many fingers? Can’s she just touch multiple orbs with the same hand? Or is it set up that only 2 work at a time regardless of how many she touches? Then how do the orbs know which 2 orbs to activate if she is touching 3 or more?
Just so long as she doesn’t accidentally kiss the tentacle orb. I’ve seen enough hentai to know where that goes. xD
I’m sure there’s a name or Trope for it.
The principle that kept the castaways from being rescued on Giligan’s Island.
Sydney has to use her hands ONLY.
It’s in the premise, the ‘Bible’, of the comic.
Maybe she needs to use her hands to activate and control them, but she can now have an active orb that she’s not holding? e.g., grab the shield orb to start that up, then grab flight and PPO to move and fire while the shield stays running?
Against this idea is that we have seen if she loses her grip on an orb it turns. On the other hand (pun not intended) it’s *possible* the idea of activating an orb and leaving it running just hasn’t occurred to her yet; it’s not entirely intuitive so maybe you have to consciously choose to do it.
Of course, that theory suggests that every orb has powers which can realistically be left on autopilot. Most seem obvious – forcefield stays up, you keep floating, life support keeps your air fresh. Others are possible but less obvious: comm orb keeps giving you Truesight or aura or whatever; lighthook continues holding stuff in whatever configuration you left it; maybe the PPO has a sentry mode?
If we continue with the idea that the orbs are some kind of alien expedition kit, it would make sense that they have some automated abilities. It’s nigh-unthinkable that a race could develop stuff as advanced as those orbs and not ALSO have invested a lot of through into usability and automation. We’ve been seeing that the orbs HAVE interfaces. And legit not awful interfaces, either: good enough that an alien (Sydney) can make sense of them without an explanation.
Except we know her CO2 monitor kept going off while transporting people to the veil council or whatever. The aif orb was not auyomagically scrubbing the air for her, even thoigh it’s the one with the double outline point pip filled in, the one where people speculated it’s an automation assist button. (Counrerpoint, if she doesn’t KNOW what it does, she cannot think it active, and she was thinking AIR in the pool…but again, it didn’t refresh her bubble mid fight when she knew she needed air then, too…though that wasn’t nearly as pure instinct a moment as the pool…
She also had never activated that orb. If she first toggled it to “keep refreshign air every xx intervals” then it would probably work fine.
I disagree. Notice that the center is a single area consisting of up to 7 slices, each connecting to one orb. I think it’s a case where once she spends 4 more points there, she will enable something for the entire set. My bet is on some level of “internalization” of the orb powers, allowing her to activate some aspects of them without physical contact.
Or she gets a multi-task mode that temporarily lets her use all of them simultaneously, at the cost of cooking her brain a bit (literally or metaphorically) XD and then the next fill-in of the middle is a self buff that gives her brain more “sturdiness” to handle a longer duration.
and it turns out that her form of ADHD is explicitly required to use orbs because it’s similar enough to how aliens multitask, and is thus a requirement for handling the set.
I imagine it may have something to do with the lines connecting each two orbs. The one between the Flight Orb and the Pew-Pew Orb is already bought – perhaps she is now able to fire while flying and/or fly while firing, using a single hand, and by buying more connections, she could unlock other combinations; but until buying another wedge, she would still be limited to three powers at once.
Just a reminder for the discussions going on….Sydney may be time-displaced at the moment as well. Went through a faulty wormhole, ended up on a world that was destroyed despite Sciona having been in contact with it ‘Just a few days ago’, and while they were there…Harem shorted out because she had 6 bodies now instead of 5.
I mean, if Harem had extra bodies, that means she’s still alive…so she’s not too far time displaced. At least within a human lifespan.
Or Universe-displaced….or otherwise ‘Not in Kansas Anymore’ for whenever she warps back to Earth…assuming she can.
So if she ftls home she can find a harem node and harem could figure out who can send her back in time.
With the firepower Squidward has shown, a few days is plenty of time, to wipe out a planet.
Given an unknown number of Squidwards and a mothership with swarms of easily replaced drones, yes.
So,
I told to my children : if you get lost, you DON’T move, or at most go to the last place we were together.
Here Sydney looks intent to leave for any direction.
Space is quite large and earth quite small. good luck finding it on your own.
That would work except for the squids.
To be fair though, if she hits any (almost) any other spacefaring civilization, she’ll be able to find out where Earth is by asking a travel agent. It’s a tourist destination.
Also if she’s getting extra information from her orbs now because of the center unlock, I.E. You have to put points into “Usable UI” that would be a total dick move on the part of the creators of the orbs.
“Security? We’ve got an unclassified sophant here at the main desk and her language doesn’t appear in any of our translation aps… no, it’s not acting hostile… except to herself, she’s struck her own head several times, maybe it’s a religious ritual? … yes, desk 3, can you see her on the feeds? …. that’s right, the one with the orbs around her head… yes, thank you, a caster with a translator spell would be perfect.”
….
“Okay, miss, what’s the name of the world? Earth? …. do you know HOW MANY sophants call their homeworld some variation of “earth” or “dirt” or “rock”? Does it have any other names? …. sorry, Ma’am, ‘Terra’ just translates as”earth”…. okay, look, here’s a list of standard pulsars, can you say where any of them appear in your night sky? …. you can’t. Could you at least tell me where nearby large galaxies appear in your sky relative to our own galactic core? No? …. Can you describe the world and star system? …. I’m sorry, we don’t use any classification system for stars with an entry called G2… no system for planets with something called M-class either… could you describe your star’s spectral signature? …. you can’t. Okay, physical characteristics of your homeworld? Nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, that’s pretty common, 80% ocean coverage…. … wait, if you have 80% oceans why do you call your world ‘dirt’? …. Ma’am, please stop hitting yourself….
The fact that Earth is a sex tourism hotspot, probably means that if she can find a friendly alien race, they can probably point her in the right direction based on her appearance… maybe. Lol would be funny if they got it wrong and sent her to a planet of primatives that sort of look like humans…
Okay, let’s try this. Do you know the structure of your solar system? Yellow Dwarf star about two-thirds of the way from the centre of a spiral galaxy, 4 rocky planets, with the 3rd one having life, and asteroid belt, 4 gas giants, the first being the second largest body after the star and the second having wide rings. “Spectacular” rings would not be in survey data, ma’am. Then there is a wide cometary belt and a more distant “Oort cloud’. I’m sorry that did not translate properly. Do I have it all? Let’s see if there is a system with those characteristics. Hmm, I have 34 hits. You might be surprised how many star systems have their gas giants close to their stars. Let’s take a look at those third planets to see if that is your world.
Syndey: Nope, nope, what the?! No! There we are! That’s the one. How do I get there. [ Starts clicking her heels ] There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. Drat, still here.
There we go, that makes much more sense. Use the in-system configuration to whittle it down to a managable number. Could go even further by combining it with a list of planets with a dominant pre-FTL pre-contact population, by adding that it’s on the outer half of the galaxy, possibly by adding the sex tourism thing, etc.
Aliens:’Ma’am, are you sure you can’t tell us anything else about your planet?’
Sydney: ‘Uuuhhh… no. well, Dabbler said it’s a popular covert tourist attraction… mostly sex tourism, though I guess Dabbler would focus on that… What?’
Alien: ‘You’re from THAT Earth?! Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?! One ride to Earth coming up!’
“Oh that Earth”
Yeah I suspect a lot of names for planets would translate the same.
I’m reminded of a Schlock mercenary clip where the guy introduces a planet and says something like “I can’t pronounce the name in their language but it roughly translates to ‘Wet'” the other person (a human) replies “That’s not very creative” and the first guy goes “They compare favorably to the natives of ‘Earth.'”
We’re basically living on a planet we named ‘Dirt’ and that always makes me laugh.
Which came first? Did we start referring to things we pull out of the ground ‘earthen’ because they come out of the world called Earth, or did we call the world Earth becausr that’s what we always called the ground?
Pretty much, there is a page on the origin and meaning of the word here: https://www.etymonline.com/word/Earth
Maybe we should have used the alternative: middangeard as the name of our planet.
I always get a kick out of the ones that name home ‘the third rock from the sun’ or something mundane, but name the local stars and planets after gods or other interesting names.
Mike, here’s the strip in question – https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2006-08-07. One of a great many Shlock lines that are just full of win.
Syd: Oh and I forgot the aliens that tend to come here always seem to be interested in ‘Anal probing too’
Alien: *snickers* “Yeah, they would tend to do that miss”
I feel like the average attempt to describe the solar system to aliens in this day and age will get derailed by rambling about Pluto.
Our sun, is actually, a white Dwarf, it only looks yellow here, because of the atmosphere.
A white dwarf is post-main-sequence star, that is no longer performing 4H->He fusion at its core; it is just giving off residual heat left over from its time as a sun and after a while only shows up in an infrared survey, no longer producing visible light. Our star is expected to become a carbon-cored white dwarf in about 10 billion years or so.
while technicly accurate, not completely so.
white dwarf is used for post main-sequence dead stars but is acutally a sub-dwarf designation, but Class F and A stars (white ones) are considered Dwarf stars too. our sun being a glass G (yellow) ‘Dwarf’ star.
it takes a lot for a star to not be a dwarf or sub-dwarf, its like the differences between planet and dwarf planet, except making more sense.
Thank you Reltzik. Ice tea is spilled down my front and across my desk, and I almost wet myself laughing.
*BONUS math challenge: compute the probability that any luggage she brings actually gets back to earth?
(At MIB terminal) Agent Q, be careful of that one with the orbs around her head. She’s just a might bit cranky after spending 13 hours in customs trying to prove that she actually lives here.
Wouldn’t a genetic scan of the host, not the orbs, show that she has human genetics, and is therefore at least ancestrally from Earth?
Not if the human genome sequence isn’t in their system it won’t.
Sydney: Look, just call Max, my commanding officer in Archon or Krona, who is on the council of weird beings, which includes aliens if I recall. So I did not take my U.S. passport with me because I was not expecting to leave the country, let alone the world, on a mission to south-western New Jersey.
Next morning (after Dabbler’s late night cooking “show”), Archon gets a call.
Harem (with the cowboy hat) (answering phones as something to do): Good morning, Archon. How can I direct your call?
Male voice on phone: Good morning. This is the United States Customs and Border Protection in Buffalo, New York. Can I talk with Lt-Colonel Lender?
Female voice [ overheard on the phone ]: Leander!
Male voice on phone: Um, Lt-Colonel Leander?
Harem: May ask what this is about?
Male voice on phone: We have someone here without a passport who is claiming she is returning after an accidental exit from the country on a mission.
Harem: Where exactly are you?
Male voice on phone: The Peace Bridge in Buffalo.
Harem (in the kitchen, preparing a sandwich): [ Presses her throat mike ] Boss! Sydney’s over at the U.S. side of the Peace Bridge in Buffalo, New York!
Maxima is seen flying around, burning off steam. Suddenly she turns north and accelerates.
Maxima: Archon-1 to air traffic control. Emergency flight plan. From Archon headquarters , vertical climb to flight level 100, then supersonic flight to Peace Bridge, Buffalo NY, decelerating over Lake Erie for final descent at east end of the Peace Bridge. I do not anticipate entering Canadian airspace.
Harem: [ to CBP agent ] Our commanding officer should be along shortly to talk with you.
Male voice on phone: Thank you. [ Pause. Overheard speaking to others near him ] Did anybody else hear that thunder? I thought today was supposed to be sunny. [ To Harem ] Will take long to get him on the phone?
Harem: Him?
Male voice on phone: Your CO?
Harem: Oh, firstly, Lt-Colonel Leander is a she and second, she is coming to you.
Woman’s voice over the phone: Where is she?!
Other male voice on the phone: Where is who, Ma’am?
Woman’s voice over the phone: Sydney Scoville, dressed like me, but smaller and, well, not gold. No passport. Has a bit of an anger management issue.
Other male voice on the phone: Hey Russ, where’s that girl in the fatigues? No passport?
Woman’s voice over the phone: Never mind. I see her.
Other woman’s voice over the phone: [Gasping] Can’t breathe!
Original male voice over the phone: I see. I think you CO just arrived.
And you have just demonstrated why a “universal translator” cannot be a thing: so many words that are used as proper nouns in one language have simply changed their meaning over time, and if they then get used as a proper noun in another language ( I think of many works where we live in the Sol system) it would still be translated. Basically, you need a machine that can read intent, or a solhont that knows the language.
I think Star Wars used a ‘Universal Translator’. I don’t think Yoda ACTUALLY talked that way, the translator just didn’t have all of his race’s verbs or something like that :)
or Yoda was actually a hand puppet and there was a real jedi hiding in the bushes suppressing a giggle.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, the closest match seems to be this one with life also on the 4th planet and the moons of the 5th, 6th, and 7th planets. Are you sure yours only has life on the third …. ma’am? What are you… ma’am! ….. hello, medical? We’ve got an unclassified sophant going into some manner of fit…”
That’s great advice to give to kids on Earth. Buuuuut there are two important caveats:
1) Their current location has to be safe. Don’t, y’know, stand around in a forest fire or on railroad tracks. And the Alari homeworld in general is all kinds of not safe, especially the location where the wormhole was – and the Mega-Nega-Squidwards still are.
2) There has to be a realistic chance of rescue at that location. On Earth that means your location has to be findable and that someone has to know to look for you. Which is almost always the case, granted. But for Sydney, while there are plenty of people who know she’s on the Alari homeworld, she has NO IDEA if they can get there. As far as she’s aware, interplanetary wormholes are generally not a thing – I mean, Sciona had to break into the Black Reliquary to get a special doomsday artifact to open one in order to have an invasion. So twiddling her thumbs may not seem like a great option.
Which, okay, with what she knows she probably SHOULD chill for a bit, but Sydney’s really impatient, and with limited food supplies getting started on project “Find my own damned way home” is probably not a bad idea anyway.
Plus, she’s probably keeping a very tight lid on her panic and exhaustion and fear, but she knows she’s going to have a breakdown sooner or later, so she has to do what she can before it’s too late. If she allows herself to fall apart on Alari Prime, odds are the Squiddies are going to get her.
Sydney sees that there are words that show up over the 3 filled in spaces in the middle of the web. The lit up ones form the pattern “Be sure ___ ___ ___ Ovaltine”. I guess she will have to fill in the rest to read the remainder of the message.
Now there’s an old-school reference – wonder how many readers would have to Google for that one. Stupid decoder rings!
(See also cereal box tops.)
What’s a ‘decoder ring’?
What’s a ‘box top’?
What’s “Ovaltine”???
The most recent reference is from that Christmas movie where the kid wants a bee-bee gun and every single adult he tries to express this to – parents, teachers, department store Santas – tells him, “You’ll shoot your eye out with that thing.” It’s the running gag, until a ricochet hits his glasses and breaks them.
The decoder ring was a fifties advertising thing, intended to make kids nag their parents into buying more Ovaltine chocolate milk drink mix. When you decoded the message, “Be sure ___ ___ ___ Ovaltine” was “Be sure to buy more Ovaltine.” Total rip-off.
I hated Ovaltine. I preferred Hershey Syrup.
Since we don’t see the orbs when she puts the point, or even the non-center bit, it’s hard to know where the point went (center yes, closest to what orb info missing). Unless the level up always puts the orbs in the same place and the author expects us to manually look up past pages for that, which STILL wouldn’t prove they’re always oriented the same?
Given its position, it looks like she chose the one pointing to the Mystery orb. Maybe it’ll do something if she fills the pip on the second ring that is linked to it?
Given that she just says “center ring” and doesn’t mention a specific orb, I suspect she didn’t choose the mystery orb. I think it was either auto-selected as the next pip in a pre-defined sequence, or the center ring isn’t actually aligned to specific orbs at all.
Looks like one of those diagrams is a basic theoretical worm hole.
If Sydney figures how to travel into it to try and get back to Earth … I wonder … what type of worm will she find in there?
One of the worms from Dune, or the desert in BeetleJuice.
The one from Dune can be trained, as long as you are not afraid of heights.
The one from Beetlejuice just eats what ever it can gobble. (Not sure it was going for the body or since they in the neither world, going for the soul.)(Maybe both?)
I do like your imagery. Still one BIG Worm.
One navigation problem is identifying your detination’s location in relation to your own. Sydney knows where she wants to go, she just has no ide where it is or where she is in relation to anything else. Which means without additional data, she has a very good chance of flying off in the wrong direction to reach home. Course if she stumbles across a friendly, they might be able to help.
Worm-hole,is the common name,the scientific name is, Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
Also known as the Bifrost, nowadays.
That is one specific example.
Finding the solar system with nothing but a display like that would be pretty much impossible. That is to say it would be like finding a needle in a haystack, with the added problem of not knowing which haystack in the entire world was the one with the needle. Even if by some miracle you did find our solar system, you would not automatically know that it was the right solar system. You would have to observe Earth with your eyes, so you would have to be really close to it to see it as more than a slightly brighter star, this means you would have to search each solar system you reach for planets with naked eyeball, which even with FTL could take hours or days to accomplish. Then you would have to do that for every non binary star system with a star of about the right size…
I would love a copy of the skill tree mandala where someone has filled out what nodes have been selected and in what order – i.e. the original skill tree filled out with all the nodes currently filled, with all the node chosen since the beginning of the series annotated with numbers in the order they were selected and footnotes for each number as to what was unlocked.
Preferably without Sydney in the background – she’s obscuring a portion of the mandala.
Not quite what you asked for but a really awesome person has made this:
https://jcc10.gitlab.io/GrrlPowerSkilltree/?
The script doesn’t seem to be working for me. It’s just a big white block… Any way to make it work?
Same thing happened to me.
My fix?
Click the highest of the 3 buttons in the bottom-right corner to REFRESH the image.
For me it took a few moments for it to fishing loading but if that doesn’t fix it maybe try a different browser? It worked on Firefox in Windows for me.
I finally got it to work with the Brave browser.
It works in the “Silk” browser running on an Amazon Kindle. Slow to load though.
Holy shit that is amazing.
That is darned near exactly what I was looking for – TY!
It’s pretty cool, i only discovered it the other day so pread the word.
It works fine for me with firefox
Replying to you for everyone in this thread.
Hey, if you know people are having issues please go and open a issue. You guy’s are lucky I’m sick and am mostly browsing through the comments.
Turns out I was loading the normal JS instead of a MIN-JS file. Took ~1.80 minutes to start displaying and full load time was ~2 minutes. I also was loading said 2-minute file first instead of last.
So yeah. That’s fixed. Now it’s all coming from CloudFlare. 3 seconds to start displaying 30 for everything to be loaded.
Finally, I recommend using Chrome or Firefox since I test on those. IE does not work. Edge should, as should Safari & Opera. JS Versions, the tree requires ES6
Tl;Dr: Tree should be fixed. Please get someone to tell me in the future when something is that jacked up.
I think I know what the red circles are for in the interface for wormhole transit. They are similar to Bezier curve control points, with the 4 outside the blue contours of the wormhole defining its range and possibly shape, and the small point inside used for finer control of the destination point.
The two internal red curves show how you’d travel if you went center-to-center of the entry and exit wormholes as compared to how you’d travel if you followed the interior of the wormhole surface. Those may be linked to your velocity when you enter the wormhole, where the path that stays closest to the central control point reflects entering at very low velocity, and the contour following path reflects entering with very high velocity.
Actually the central pie could very much dictate how many orbs can be used at a time. Now maybe the creators of the orbs have more hands than Sydney does which is why the unlock exists. However just because she only has 2 hands and just because only hands can be used, does not necessarily preclude her from using three or even 4 orbs orbs. :)
First person to work out what I’m talking about gets a noprize.
i was thinking about that too, like how could she grip tree orbs in two hands, maybe holding them in a group wouldnt be so hard. problematically she already tested the possiblity of just touching her skin in other places, even if it was one orb, she found that it had to be touching her hand…
Somehow I doubt DaveB is going that route – Sydney’s already potentially the most powerful member of Arc-Swat, and that’s while she can use only two orbs at the same time. Imagine if she could fly, have her shield up, use the PPO AND teleport at the same time. Not going to happen is what I’m thinking.
Hmm, the distance from Earth to the closest star is actually about 8 light-minutes, as it is our own sun. So to get the nearest star to Earth travelling at the speed of light, would take just over 8 minutes, but Sydney’s shield would be getting quite the workout for the last minute or so due to the radiation levels.
Yeah, the next star after that, Proxima Centuri is a little red dwarf about 4.2 light years away.
What’s this? Oh, she’s still holding the blue one. I was thinking that the brown one is the instruction manual with universal translator. It could probably dumb things down enough for humans to have a chance of understanding, and maybe not just A. Einstein or S. Hawking.
I’m starting to doubt Einstein as being that smart. After all, he got that ‘I before E’ rule wrong. Twice.
https://edge.alluremedia.com.au/m/g/2017/08/tongue.jpg
That’s how his name is speeled, depending on the word it could be Stein, or Stien
The “i” before “e” is too inconsistent to be easily memorized. And if you understood our brain you would know we lose some things in compensation for having more of something else. Also his first language wasn’t English. FYI
The rule is simple: “I before E, except when it’s not. Use spell-check or a dictionary.” Simple.
The rule, as I learned it as a child, is “I before E, except after C, or sounds like A like in neighbour or weigh.” There are still a bunch of weird exceptions, but that should make it a more reliable rule.
Odd thing is, English has more words that violate the I before E rule than it has words that comply with it.
No. By the power of cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -i ‘ie’ | wc -l (and with the reverse for the other way) I have determined that there’s around 4000 words that obey the rule and around 2600 that deny the rule. That’s a ratio of 20:13 in favour of you being wrong; even with weird duplicates and stuff like that, the chances that you are right are minuscule.
It’s not a very good rule.
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/02/exceptions-rule-e-except-c/
As far as I’m aware, most words that violate the ‘ie‘ rule do so because they’re recent imports from other languages that have been adopted as ‘proper’ English words. I hadn’t previously come across David Nuttall‘s modified version of the rule a few comments above, but it should cover many of the remaining examples.
don’t forget there’s quite a few words that are spelled weird (including that one) and some of that is due to them coming from other languages (rottweiler for example)
Remember, the Event Horizon of the original wormhole was unstable; based on Harem’s and Dabbler’s conversation after they returned there is a high chance that the orbs must not-only compensate for Where but When.
It’s entirely possible the orbs are silently tracking Sidney’s “Proper Time” and are aware that there was some temporal shenananigans with the first wormhole and knows that she *wants* to go back to her previous temporal co-ordinate.
It might be interesting at some point in the future Sydney has to shut down her orbs or go into low-power mode or something so that her past self can grind during this event.
Then again, it’s also possible that the jump forward was only a month or so, and Sydney’s trip back will take her a few weeks later in time to the Rest of Archon’s reckoning, even though it’s only been like 6 hours for Sydney. Thus providing a time-skip and bringing us much closer to “Present Time” as of the flashback at the very beginning of the comic..
A location save point would be a great feature, and is good UX design. Just like with a web browser, you bookmark a couple places you go all the time, and by default you track the last few places you’ve been so you can jump back to do whatever you need to.
Depending on how fast (and safe) the warp tools are, this would make Halo an amazing resource for deploying experiments (and maybe even habitats!) around the solar system. And beyond, once Archon comes clean with NASA and the general public about the state of intergalactic travel.
I keep thinking that the brown orb has some kind of earthbending power. There seems to be some sort of elemental relation with the orbs. PPO=fire, green=air…
Sydney, have you never seen Event Horizon? Or played Warhammer 40K? Or even Doom?
You don’t want to just “go FTL.” You don’t want to get lost in Hyperspace, woman!
Maxima: How’d you get back here, Sydney?
Sydney: *eyes in a wide but blank stare* I went through HELL. Literal. Hell.
Dabbler: Ooooh! Did you get to talk to anyone? Slaanesh maybe?!
Sydney: No. Just someone who wanted my skull. I’m going to bed now.
*one nightmare later* “I’M NEVER GOING TO BED AGAIN!!!”
…meanwhile in hell countless demons are having nightmares about a crazy death-dealing blue ball that swears constantly without even pausing to breath.
“what’d it say, what’d it say?”
‘I don’t knowwwww, I can’t write them down fasssst enough!’
*for all that’s evil, it’s words are burning!*
Space Tourism Montage imminent? Or will she accidentally go the the edge of space/time and realize she is in a flashback?
Has someone who suffers from dyscalculia, I would be dead if my life depended on math.
If your life depended on Math, on the other hand, you’ld be pretty safe…
Since I’m not a hot chick, I don’t know…
If your life depends on it tell him you have a good looking sister/cousin/relative/women’s prison pen pal.
And this is how Sydney discovers the “Change Language to English” setting/ User manual.
Good thing it wasn’t set to full invisible mode when she found them, her life would be incredibly confusing right now. Assuming she wasn’t kept in a medically-induced coma in her 3rd mental hospital, after the first 2 were destroyed 5 minutes after she was admitted.
Folks she already has a micro-warp ability. This one is point wait and click and poof yer there. It’s with the comm ball. Neh? So is that linked to the flight orb? Could be a big hint by DaveB intentionally or not.
Macro-warp flight might take a bit more effort. Primarily having data on your destination.
The orbs may do the math themselves or have a basic GO HOME feature. useful as hell now, not so much once she’s on earth and is forbidden from trying again until she passes Dabbler’s space time calculus and how to pick up alien hitchhikers class.
As for red lines inside warp tube – entry and exit lanes… you might not be the only one traveling the wormhole especially if it’s between two popular destinations. Following your lane prevents galactic level accidents and quark scattering of evidence…ruining the trip for both parties.
So queue up your end point and start point and off you go…stay inside the yellow (err red lines) and ignore the blue shifting…it’s a side effect.
If she could go the speed of light, It wouldn’t matter how she had prepared for it, as from her point of view any travel would be instantaneous. :D
Sucks to get back to earth and find everyone you knew dead or extremely elderly though.
Disappointed that I had to read this far down to see this comment.
Going from mach 16 which lets you get around planet-sized objects in a reasonable amount of time, to a wormhole which lets you get anywhere in the galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, with only one power-up seems pretty ridiculous.
What are the rest of the pips on that line going to provide, if that is the case?
The next pip gives her a wormhole she can actually traverse without getting torn apart by tidal forces. Yes, spaghettification is a word (just not according to my spell-checker).
Maybe I’m too much of a gamer, but I think she should go grind out some more points. Sure it seemed dangerous, but she seemed to be getting the hang of it. Elapsed time during the battle seemed to be fairly minimal and thus further grinding shouldn’t really affect her food and water situation. In fact, some of the monster parts might taste like chicken.
I keep thinking if she finished grinding, she could steal the spaceship and fly it home.
Calling it now: filling the center slot adds another orb to the set.
I think it adds some sort of meta-capability that applies to all the orbs, but I’m not sure what yet. Perhaps it has added the ability to toggle a power? That would be immediately and hugely powerful and useful, especially if Halo keeps the (probably) telepathic control of what the powers do (within some limits). Super shield, super flight, henticle and PPO all at once? That’s a huge upgrade, and a good reason for the squids to have reacted with extreme measures.
If she has that, she should be able to take on the mothership.
Oh that would be cool.
And that’s what’s going on with the other orbs- It started with Brown Unknown, which is a general energy absorbtion/passive learning orb. The skill tree was initially just it, with pips that increase rate of experience gain. You get a pip, you fill in the single ‘wedge’ that it had- someone decides, “You know what, I want to be able to FLY!”- and the Flyball is born. Then, as they fly, they level up with IT, fill in the two ‘wedges’, get a third orb, that goes with what they then want/need.
Eventually they build up a whole spaceship.
Filling in the centre summons the celestial dragon who will grant one wish before the whole centre slot is reset.
She’s right about not wanting to go “light speed” in atmosphere. E=MC^2 is a thing, and going light-speed in atmo could trigger a nuclear explosion, and we’re talking “making Bikini Atoll look like a cherry bomb” kind of explosion.
If I was Sydney I would have put that point into one of the skills that links 2 orbs together.
For the last panel, I can imagine that is a destination selector, like a ‘location history’.
Eh, it’ll be fine.
I’m wondering if one of the orbs (maybe the “sensorb” or the one [two?] still unidentified) is an information system. (Going all-out, imagine it being an AI with the full manual and training outline for new users. “Maybe you should get the auto-target before you upgrade the firing power, Boss.”) As to why this isn’t an obvious starting point, that might be security by obscurity, as only selected people are supposed to have access to this kind of system.
And yes, “system”. If this is like a ship, it might be some alien / alternate reality version of a servicemember’s field kit.
I just realized that she may not need to get “home” to her own time. She simply continues along this vein with warp capability, and gets to Earth a week or so later, simply to find out she was only about a month and half into the future. The reason for this is Dave is barely within a week or two of the comic, and it would take another 5 years to get up to current date of the first comic. So, she fast-forwards through her trip to Earth, and the convenient “time-hop” from the portal puts her really close to “current day”. Then she is promoted to private for all of her effort to do this on her own, and the comic moves forward starting with the current date/time of the comic. She is playing games because she was given time off to get caught up with the store and to play much needed downtime games with her friends.
This jump forward to the current “present day” has been suggested a few times – personally I’d dead against it. Skipping 5 years of team dynamics and political evolution around supers would completely waste all the character and world development that have taken place so far. It would basically be a reboot to the entire strip, and there’s way too much fun to be had still.
Besides, DaveB would likely just continue at basically the same pace after a jump, so in 5 more years (2023) we’d still be in late 2018 instead of 2012 or whatever; not much of a gain.
The comments often get weird around here, so you know it’s bad when I have to come in just to point out that “The comments are getting weird.” >_>
It’s be hilarious if that “Wait, what’s this?” is a history tab that remembers the location and (importantly) timeline of places you recently visited.
Which would include Earth, as the orbs had to get there somehow.
My money is the above diagram is for a wormhole.
Since Sydney wasn’t the original owner, there would be a STRONG chance that pushing the HOME tab would take her to the orb factory, or possibly the original owner’s house.
One of the great things about going at lightspeed would be that she wouldn’t even experience the time passing, due to time dilation.
In a universe with all of our physics except relativity, maybe. But chances are good that a world without relativity would have other differences as well, so it’s probably more plausible that there would still be a limit to the speed of light, it just wouldn’t be associated with experienced time or effective mass, possibly both.
Once you introduce the possibility of changing the rules, the rules can be changed.
Placing longshot bet now, on the ‘latest accidentally unlocked power’ is actually in fact the drooled over by all ‘ultra fast ala’ improbability drive style’ movement power’…BUT IT ONLY TRANSPORTS THE ORBS. Syd is left to very quicky ‘stop being alive’ in space above the alien world, while the Orbs ‘POOF’ and are back on Earth…in the ocean….in the now deceased Syd’s PAST….because of how insane distances traveled in space at high velocity work (because any concept of how it actually works are THEORIES, folks…just THEORIES). This makes the comics story wrap back to ‘before the actual first comics, thereby making the entire Syd story arc actually a ‘mobius time loop’ kinda thing.
Oh, that Syd, in the first few comics? Alien space slug doppleganger, sent back to our planet to study our worlds medicines, as their race suffers en mass, from ADHD, and desperately wants in on our good medication.
*gives odds of 75:1 on this bet*
I really hope Sydney’s space map comes with accessible index of recently visited locations or that it bookmarked ‘home’ or she is sure as hell not finding it on a starmap, regardless of how many dimensions it is displayed in.
Turns out that the sun looks like a shockingly unremarkable little dot among literally billions of others when seen from any significant distance.
Nice 2001 A Space Odyssey reference …
Hah! She found the last guys’ Browser History! He went to Gazorpazorp a LOT.
Hi guys. First time commenting for me! So far, speculation has been about what the new flight power can do, but my curiosity flows toward the point placed in the middle of the graph. Since before she’d only had 2 points apparently in there…..and there seems to be space for 6…….I wonder if she just unlocked the ability to use 3 orbs at once and not know it…….
Seems unlikely. There are 7 slots in the center, and only 5 orbs. Being able to “use” 7 out of 5 orbs at once would be a bit of a design flaw.
Apparently I can’t count…
I have to point out that if Sydney were travelling at light speed, it wouldn’t take her 4 hours to get from Earth to Neptune; it would take less than a second. For her. Because time dilation. The tricky part is accelerating to light speed (or 99.99% light speed) in a reasonable amount of time without squishing.
Depends on the distance traveled, if where she is, is 1,000,000 LightYears, the Earth would be 1,000,000 years older when she arrived. Also the Earth, would be in a different place 1,000,000 years from now.