Grrl Power #711 – Love is a burning thing…
There was probably a warning about the nature of Grakz’s effect on humanoid metabolism, but it obviously wasn’t in English, and Sydney wasn’t wearing her Universal Translator contact lenses to complement her UT earpiece. Which she also wasn’t wearing at the time.
The contact lenses translate the written word, and also does a 3D overlay thing so everyone’s lips look synced up with what they’re saying. At least that’s how some UT’s handle it. Some don’t do the audio translation, and just project subtitles across the wearer’s field of vision. Those are a lot cheaper.
Huh, look at that, I think I’m slowly getting better at drawing butts.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Ah! ‘Ring of Fire’!
I’m surprised Sydney isn’t familiar with that one….
She is, she even used some of it on her noodles way back in the early pages.
“Guaranteed to make you feel like the prettiest boy in prison.”
Insert joke here: “Ha ha! You’re joking? Right? Cora … you’re a great kidder. RIGHT?”
Yeah, Sydney can relax: Cora’s just messing with her. It’s really only nine times as hot on the way out.
So far she hasn’t messed with Sydney all that much…
So far she hasn’t needed to. Sydney has entirely inadvertently made Cora into the Straight Man.
She’s kidding. Ten times as hot on the way out is about as real as there really being a tentacle room, which we all know is ridiculous.
PS I didn’t read the last strip, anyone want to tell me what happened there? I’d check myself but I don’t want to.
Have I got some bad news for you…
I fell i to a burning ring of fire!
It went down down down, and the flames went higher.
And it burns burns burns, the ring of fire! The ring of fire….
If she’s messing with Sydney, then maybe Frix applied some sort of counter-agent or antidote to the grakz so it at least isn’t as bad as it could have been.
She probably would have made a bathroom that could handle the explosion and apply appropriate medical care on site. This is a ship Dabbler has been on.
Maybe she’ll get lucky, like I am, and experience nothing on the way out. (Literally nothing. Unless my food was onion-rich, there is no backside bite.)
Mystery solved. Now time for a scene break I take it.
.. this will give the expression “Fire In The Hole!” a whole new meaning! :o
That expression is currently used for this situation.
I often use that expression myself in those situations, yes.
On a complete different topic: where did this years VDSD go?
Doesn’t look like DaveB submitted an entry this year
You’re getting better at drawing butts. How about a show of Sydney’s to prove it?
he did, actually. In this current arc, even!
Moar. Unblocked by intrusive hand trying to cover up.
Hey, that was a pretty great butt regardless! XD
I think we have enough imagination to add in what is obstructed.
Interestingly enough, Sunday’s chest seems to have gone through a dramatic reduction. Granted, I realize she’s wearing someone else’s oversized shirt, but I wouldn’t expect it to make her flat as a board.
The thing about oversized padded and lined coats is that they are rather stiff and don’t contour all that well onto a smaller frame. Add to that the lack of supportive undergarments to counter the flatiron effect and you end up with a walking burrito.
So did she acquire a set of UT earpiece & contact lenses between pages?
I for one can skip over Dave’s drawing skills regarding Sydney’s butt for the next 6-10 hours (Comic time) as I can suspect its going to be something along the lines of the the first three minutes of this……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE2bA5E3ems
I’m thinking Dave is being factitious there.
Funny you should ask though; next page over Cora is replacing Sydney’s broken glasses. The new ones… might not be your standard, Lenscrafters variety. ;)
Prep the bathroom ventilation to process weapons-grade flatulence!
Connect it directly to outside and flip open the valve as soon as Sydney exits the room…
Hopefully, no ships passing by view the expulsion of a toxic cloud as an act of aggression.
I just hope the venting doesn’t happen during the venting event though it may be both good and bad for Sid.
As for passing [snerk] ships, such reactive biochemical off-gassing is accompanied by a very high particulate count when vented.
I just hope that the Head (That’s the term for the toilet on board of a ship!) has an anti-corrosive finish, otherwise the cleanup afterwards will require a replacement plus industrial-grade detergents.
Next panel, Frix crawling in a duct for repairs near her bathroom and collapsing.
I’m pretty sure Sydney just confirmed that while her Mouth can take the Heat, her Butt can’t. Better find something to cool it, like ice, ointment, Woof semen, gel. Y’know whatever works
One of these things is not like the other.
Yeah,
….you should never apply ice directly to a burn (heat or chemical) as it can damage the tissue.
I’ll try to remember that in the future
;)
When eating really hot food, one thing you can do to lessen the heat (with varying degrees of success) is to eat something starchy. Bread, corn chips, tortillas, beans, etc. The starch absorbs some of the oils and can cut down on the intensity &/or time involved with the burn. Again, situational dependent on several factors for just how effective. Now, Sydney, here’s a bag of corn chips …
Probably best off putting an emergency call in with Frix. A medical specialist probably has something or another for the situation. Apart from laughter.
I’m sure Frix have a nice bedside manner, especially when it comes to this patient.
I think she might just want to skip to the fire extinguisher hose suppository.
Or maybe call ahead to Dabbler and have Doc Chevy standing by. Although with Sydney’s track record with Doc, the cure might end up being worse than the ailment.
I can see it now. The Grakz discharge is every bit as bad as Cora says, leaving Sydney a whimpering mess and unable to sit down. Yet the next time Sydney has an opportunity to fill up on Grakz, she only pauses for a few seconds before deciding, “Ah I can take it!”
She never learns…
The sad thing is, there are people who just never learn.
“Last time I had vodka I went full on stupid, right? I don’t remember much of the evening.”
“That’s putting it politely.”
“Well, down the hatch!”
Poor Sydles, she should ask if Dabbler left any Tucs pads in the med bay.
Oh dear, now it’s hoping the ships plumbing and airfilters are up to the task.
Considering that a spacehip’s life support system is all about closed-loop ventilation…Well, one can hope.
Ok Sydney, time to grab that unknown orb. No Idea what it does, but it can’t be worse than what’s about to happen! :-)
That was my first thought.
It could only be funnier if she scored a level point from surviving the ordeal
Forget Sydney surviving, how are the Alari going to react to chemical warfare after what they already endured? o_O
Admitted, it would be hilarious if she got a point from butt burn.
However, it is entirely possible that the unknown orb is indeed “sick bay” and will fix her right up.
It’s also likely that Cora is trolling her.
given the abilities of the known orbs, the last unknown being a medical system seems probable.
make you wonder how many arms the original owner had.
(also.. did Sydney ever record the location of where she found them? because if i was Archon, i’d be sending people down to scour that area in the hopes that maybe the original owner left other clues about their existence.. maybe even some fossils/remains.)
Considering how many times she has been hurt already, the possibility of the Brown Orb being a Medbay is very not likely
As for where Sydney obtained her balls, the General and Maxi (or was it Ari?) both have their doubts regarding the veracity of her story
as far as we’ve seen she hasn’t tried using it while injured though. if the orbs are an Nth tech spacesuit/shuttlecraft set, a medbay function would fit. either she hasn’t met the required prerequisites for the orb to activate, or it doesn’t recognize her biology enough to do anything (yet). since the rest of the orbs seem to interact with her just fine, her biometrics being incompatible with a medbay orb seems unlikely though. and the orb had enough time already to figure out a baseline for her biology.
She got smacked in the face during the Restaurant Rumble, she burnt the surface of her eyeball with weapons grade sauce. You don’t believe either time she would have tried? o_O
Reading that episode again, they were just asking Sydney where exactly around the Florida Keys she had found the orbs when Harem interrupted the meeting by teleporting in uninvited, pissing off Max and generally derailing the converstion. It never came up again, as far as we’ve seen. Personally, I would have expected searching that area would have a really high priority, since there may well be wreckage or something else that can give insight in the origin of the orbs. Right now, Sydney is running around with some extremely powerful, beyond-transcendent technology, and the only thing we know about the builders is that they have a technology that’s beyond even the most advanced civs known. And now that Sydney’s been on the Space-Internet with them, the builders might be alerted and decide they want their orbs back… and then what?
She was just being asked to give a more precise location when Harem interrupted the meeting, and it never came up again, as far as we know. Finding out more about the orbs, their origin and former owner(s) seems to be a high priority though. I mean, all we know about the orbs is that they represent a level of technology that’s beyond even the most advanced civs Cora knows. What if they decide they want their orbs back?
No, her mentioning where she gained her balls was after the initial meeting, when they were out in the lounge area with the rest of the rabble
Oh, and remember: if you don’t get an error message after posting, then the message did go through and you just have to give it time
Can Sydney earn Orb Points for successfully completing non-orb tasks? I don’t see how that works.
This, sir or ma’am, made me actually Laugh Out Loud.
I’d think the “air ball” would be more likely to include other forms of health or environmental care.
https://youtu.be/gT392RggH9U
Oh god. That last panel is the face of deepest regret.
I’m having all sorts of Dragon Half flash backs… ‘I the great Sydney Scoville Jr. shall forever regret this!’
ah yes – time for the toilet terminator terrors. Or maybe she’ll call it the analpocalypse. So many possible puns!
Sydney is the butt of this joke.
Nice butt. All that is really missing is the dimples.
Sidney will live to regret her decision. But she won’t enjoy it.
Shiny. The butt, not the situation. She’ll be fine. I mean, how bad could it be, since it wasn’t that hot?
Beware of the hot one.
Well if Sydney manages to overcome this she’ll probably make humans famous the Galaxy over. Honestly I can’t help but wonder if part of sitting you superpower is that she turns chemical heat into well whatever fuels her ADHD and super power
If she survives the war on the porcelain throne she might have a level or three waiting for her
Yes.
Panel 1.
It’s almost as if that butt will be important
to the story later.
About Sydney’s impending situation…
She could ask Dr. Furry to remove the grakz beforehand.
I’m not sure from which end at this juncture.
There’s eating something that doesn’t agree with her, and then there’s
eating something that ignites with contact with air.
Hopefully they have teleportation technology. The “end results” could just be teleported out just before the reach the end of the large intestine.
(as someone with bowel problems I’ve thought alot about this)
Really a enema with milk and antacids should avoid that “afterburner” pretty well.
jasole, if you ever read larry niven, they had teleportation there, and in one story, character realized his alcoholic drink was in glass with small teleporter in it because no matter how much he drank it was always the same level.
they also had devices called autodocs, that took care of you medically with automated machinery. i always wondered if you could miniaturize both and put in bladder to relieve yourself and one in colon. you could also put on in stomach to remove anything dangerous or that reaches levels to high to stay healthy, like pills or alcohol or food poisoning. a lot of heavy drinkers woould love the bladder one.
Actually if you think a bit more about it a bit more deeply there is a more efficient methodology.
Teleport systems [TP] at the waster collection sites transporting to a replicator system at the top of the digestive tract would eliminate the need for ingestion.
The only requirement for ingestion is the need to top up the net mass in the system due to perspiration, exfoliation etc.
I think that butt is important to the story right now.
I’m pretty sure it will be shown to be complicit in a football-smuggling operation.
I think she will need an ANALgetic
How does Cora, an alien, know the digestive speed of a human who has just eaten spicy food from another planet? That’s highly dependent on how many stomachs humans have, our stomach types, types of digestive fluids, length of intestines, immune system responses, intestinal flora and what these systems do when encountering certain spicy chemicals that may or may not be recognized or processed. *gasp!* That’s why the aliens start with anal probing!
Humans aren’t an unknown species in the galaxy it seems, despite us not yet having FTL engines or the existence of extraterrestrial life forms being public knowledge on Earth. Not saying Cora is an expert on humans and knows all about them, but humans are known well enough at least that the people on the station could recognize Sydney as one by sight and that Grakz was something they normally wouldn’t be eating.
Or maybe ‘six to eight hours’ is a general average for humanoid species to process food.
Most people I know see 1-day turnarounds; one friends has 9 hour turnarounds; I have 2-/3-day turnarounds (green dye is not digestible by me, just passes through).
I eat pretty hot food. I grow habenero, ghost, and Carolina Reaper peppers in my garden and cook with them regularly, plus make several mason jars full of hot sauce from them to tide me through the winter. 6-8 hours is an unusual hang time. If I really dose my dinner up heavily with hot, 3-4 hours and sometimes as little as 2 is more usual hang time.
You know when you’ve REALLY loaded up on the hot when you pee about 45 min to an hour after a meal and THAT burns as a precursor to the main show on its way. Learn to love the burn. You know you’re alive.
A great hot sauce taste makes me endure the burn afterwards, but I cheat with Scotch and Benadryl when I know my gut has express train running to the exit.
BTW nice handle, Carlos Wu was smart man too in Niven’s universe
Louis Wu was Carlos Wu’s son, but didn’t know it because of memory erasure by the puppeteers.
It is also possible that Cora is just a troll.
Right now Sydney is very much hoping so. And the newbie is often the target for such, so the hope is not hopeless.
How does Cora, an alien, know the digestive speed of a human who has just eaten spicy food from another planet?
My question was, how does Dave, the human writer, NOT know?
It’s been some time now since she ate; many events and pages. That gurgle probably means the fun is about to begin… like now.
Perhaps he meant to write Cora’s line as “over the NEXT 6-8 hours”.
The future needs to hurry up so my new fetish of hardlight bodysuits can be realized.
The lovely Cora once again providing cheesecake courtesy of her lovely rear end <3
Don’t forget the front end in panels two and three
I wonder how it’s going to compare to the Blaster’s ultimate from Fractured But Whole.
https://youtu.be/gMn8LAFGY7w?t=13
Don’t even mention that. I remember in the first game, with the big Fart-off between the player and Cartman, I was laughing so hard I couldn’t finish the fight the first 25-30 times.
And in eight GP-hours, we learn Cora was trolling Sydney :D
I was wondering if anyone else considered the possibility. Cora IS supposed to be 10% Renegade, after all.
She is also great friends (with extra benefits ;) ) with Dabbles :P
Oooooh, digesting spicy food. Not going to lie, it’s not going to be easy on that bathroom stall.
I hope Cora isn’t upset at Sydney for taking refugees aboard her ship…!
Oh dear, have you caught butt’s disease off Jeph Jacques?
Jeph is just a carrier, @damnyouwillis was patient zero.
RIP Sydney. Death by spicy butthole.
Do they use toilet paper in this technological corner of the universe? Or is it something more like the three seashells? Sydney is going to want this information in rather short order.
The use a bidet system. (Americans are weird in that we don’t use bidets very often, yet they’re very effective…and yes, you can have them with pre-warmed water in the pipes.)
Anything flushed down the drain gets recycled via the blackwater composting tank, which gets a high-tech version of UV treatment to kill off all bacteria & viruses, then it gets sent to the arboretum to give water & nutrients to the plants that in turn swap out the carbon dioxide for oxygen (and also provides fresh plant-based foods for the crew, hence it being very important to sterilize the blackwater “compost tea” before it reaches the planting beds).
Humanure (composted waste from composting toilets, septic tanks, or sewer systems) can be very nutrient-rich and thus quite suitable for gardens once it’s been composted, but it is not usually recommended for use in vegetable gardens or fruit/nut orchards because it doesn’t get sterilized before it gets composted. If it could be reliably sterilized before being mixed in with the beneficial bacteria and fungoids that break such things down into useful compost, then it could be quite successful. Our current early 21st technology doesn’t have that capacity, but there’s no saying that a high tech spacefaring society doesn’t. (In fact, it’s probably one of those unspoken prerequisites for long interstellar voyages.)
A lot of people don’t know that urine is actually a pretty good fertilizer (and is considerably more sterile than the other stuff, though only by 99.998% sterile (approximately) on average over time). But it’s NOT very effective as a fertilizer when directly applied. Instead, it needs to be watered down to about 20%-25% strength to avoid chemical burns on the grass or whatever. Uber-green-home off-grid systems take advantage of this by using biodegradable nonharmful soaps for things like bathing, handwashing, and kitchen uses, which then turns it into greywater which either goes into a vegetable garden or into the toilet systems, where it becomes blackwater and gets pumped out to be used in non-edibles gardening (or septic systems away from veggie garden spaces). There are case of earthship homes in desert locations with remarkably vibrant green patches of local flora (or even imported) flora thriving because of this “natural recycling & fertilizing” system.
The only thing stopping us from doing it on board a spaceship is (aside from the lack of actual interstellar spaceships) is the lack of a suitably thorough sterilization system. But it would be a literal waste (pun intended/not intended) to not recycle that waste as fertilizer…which means recycling it via sterilization and then composting.
Assuming energy is not an issue, and that one doesn’t mind using a propeller to circulate and thoroughly mix the waste (and disassemble the hard nuggets), why couldn’t a spaceship mix the waste with some extra water, and then raise the temperature to an even 150C? A high-temp high-ohm resistor array could provide the heat. All you’d need is the array, the water, the waste supply, the propellers, a steel high-pressure container for the sterilization, and … 500-5000 Watts. Voila! (Jeepers!) Sterile waste.
Oh, and a centrifuge, or high-G tank (generates 10G-100G in the tank but not outside), for the post-boiler settling process.
(Yes, there are germs that thrive in 150-200 C and survive 220 C, but those are usually inert at 50C; hence, they might as well be called sterile when compared to feverish humans.)
Probably because excess heat is something we currently try very hard to avoid on spaceships. Space may be “cold” but it transfers heat terribly (No convection, since there’s no medium, no conduction, since there’s no medium, and radiation is very slow to bleed heat, especially since the sun is probably radiating head far more effectively onto the ship. Currently, this is compensated for by including a heat shield (highly reflective) faced towards the sun, and a black heat sink faced away. Darker surfaces radiate heat more effectively, so the spacecraft/satellite/whatever can actually lower its temperature, but it’s slow.
So, heating a tank of waste up to sterilization temps would not only be very expensive in terms of energy budget, it would produce waste heat that would prove very problematic.
Despite what you seen in some movies, a human body wouldn’t freeze for hours if thrown into space, though the hard vacuum would render you unconscious in 15-30 seconds (mercifully, there are some massively unpleasant effects of being unprotected in hard vacuum), and dead in about 90 seconds.
I work in Pharma and there are number of methods for sterilization.
Pure steam at 121+C
Dry heat at much higher temperatures
UV as long as the material isn’t opaque or has a high particulate count
My favourite since it is low energy and only has a small chance at self electrocution if you are really dumb – ozone through electric discharge.
The dissolved ozone will rip apart any and all organic compounds into CO2 H2O and whatever minerals are left over.
In reference to the authors commentary, Subs not Dubs!
In respose to the author’s “under the comic” comment, am I the only one to mention anything about the depth of the situational humor?
As a capsaicin aficionado myself, I can say there is nothing quite as unpleasant as a bad case of flaming anus.
Bah humbug! Food is not spicy unless you experience palpable fear of going to the toilet afterwards!
My first experience with Habenero peppers was me being an idiot. The guys were being wimps about how to eat a pepper. I walk up, “This is how you eat a pepper.”
I take half a pepper, crunch crunch swallow. Yes, I crunched and swallowed the entire pepper, including any seeds. See my above statement about “me being an idiot.”
2-3 minutes later my face is flushed in sweat. Five minutes later I could feel my tongue again. The next morning, oh lord.
“Momma, call the fire department! There’s a fire down south!”
Oh lord did it burn coming out.
That’s one very Edward Elric panicking impression you got there Sydney. Makes one wonder what she’s thinking when she gets the bodypillow.
Two things..
‘Insert joke about yoghurt suppository here…’ to ‘Insert a joke yoghurt suppository here…’, and..
If/when Sydney returns to Earth after being on Cora’s ship, ‘and’ has a tender rectum, that will be comedy gold for Dabbler ‘Really Sydney, while I APPROVE, of course, any of the maliens on Cora’s ship are a bit.. large for the uninitiated’
And Krona’s not there to hack her bladder.
she can only stall it not prevent it. in this case its like the bandaid rip it off to get it over with XD
It is a nice arse
Okay, if Sydney’s ‘quake in her boots’ scared, I want some of that Graxz.
I think she’s afraid to quake in her boots.
You know, I consider myself a gentleman, and pretty well-mannered, but if Cora walked by me like that, it would take every fiber of my self control not to give myself a nasty case of whiplash.
And also say “DAT ASS DOUGH”
Gluteus Maximus
I hadn’t realized how much of a freak I am. I love hot food – not Sydney levels, but hot enough that the only people I know who enjoy anything close to me is my wife and one daughter. (Our older girl only likes “hotter than most”, not “weapons grade hot” – a sad disappointment). Every food that can be hot, is. And yet I don’t recall any of us ever succumbing to the Infamous Ring Of Fire. Is THIS my family’s signature superpower?
On that note, I like a bit spicy myself but I still don’t get people, who like food that tastes like pain. Twice.
It’s literally an addiction. Capsaicin triggers the heat sensing cells in the mouth, causing the autonomous nervous system to respond by flushing the brain with endorphins and similar “happy” chemicals. Many of these chemicals are VERY similar to opiates.
The flaming anus is an unfortunate side effect…
Plus, some people are just…non-sexual masochists. It happens. *shrugs*
Can’t be that much worse than lacking-a-gallbladder, ate-spicy-hot-fatty-things, now-I’m-having-bileic-ACID-and-capsaicin-coming-out-the-far-end diarrhea… That’s a level of pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone EXCEPT a gastronomical masochist.
See, what the doctor doesn’t tell you when you have your gallbladder out is that, for some people, they can start having spicy food again. Other people, BAD IDEA to have spicy food…and for a LOT of people…you’ll start having problems with bileic acid.
The liver produces bile whenever fat receptor cells on your tongue sense incoming fat (especially animal muscle fats, though olive oil gives me problems, too; oddly, dairy fats, not so much a problem). The liver normally shunts that bile–which digests the fat, breaking it down for the intestines–down the bile duct to the gallbladder, where it gets stored until fat gets through the stomach. At THAT point…in a normal body, the exit of the stomach senses fat and sends a signal to the gallbladder to “release the bile-kraken!” At which point it finishes the trip down the bile duct, hits the intestine when the fat does, and voila, digestion continues and you get fat energy.
If you don’t have a gallbladder (gall = bile, more or less the same thing)…it dumps into your intestines the moment you TASTE fat, even if you spit it out again. And it’s acid. And it’s not being neutralized by the fat being right there on hand. And it’s acid. Did I mention it’s an acid, one powerful enough to dissolve fat? Fat that makes it through the hydrochloric acid in the stomach mostly intact? Yeah…it can get pretty intense sometimes Previous comments about eating starches to kill the fire of capsaicin? That also helps immensely with the burn from bileic acid.
So as much as Sydney dreads the upcoming visit to the head/bathroom…it could always be worse. She could be missing her gallbladder, too.
After a couple more hours this weekend testing and tweaking, I present the unofficial Grrl Power comments highlighter. Saves your last reading time and highlights new comments when you come back, and adds buttons for scrolling to new comments.
Should work on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, bugs and features ideas can be reported here.
…and since I posted that before reading today, I just discovered that I didn’t take into account what happens when the comments haven’t tipped into a second page. Doh! Tested thoroughly on previous strips but they all have multiple pages of comments, and I was relying on the paging controls to be present.
I’ll work on the fix tonight, but since we’re about to tip onto page 2 it should start working shortly.
It kinda, ALMOST works for me.
Windows 10, latest patch, HP Notebook PC, Latest patch Firefox browser.
ISSUES:
1) Doesn’t highlight all past/read comments.
2) If I click your URL it appends an new “control header” to the previous one, one per click.
Minor quibble: Can the highlight color be lightened up/changed to something a litter easier on the eyes?
THANKS so much for the effort put into doing this for us!
Prev/Next buttons also seem to not be working as does the SAVE button. Doesn’t seem to “remember” what was last tagged as “seen.”
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions and I will do what I can to be of help. While I am rusty, I’m not clueless. I’m a retired Sr. Programmer/Analyst that specialized in integrating business data systems and processes into the Internet for both business and public facing interfaces.
Speedy “HeroHog” Mercer
EDIT: SAVE does appear to do SOMETHING, at least the “last saved” time changes…
The Page Selection buttons to the left work as well. It is the Prev/Next that don’t appear to respond to clicks for me.
Thanks for the feedback! Specific responses are on the issue you wrote up (thanks!), but mostly it appears you’re getting a cached version instead of latest fixes. Looks like I may have to switch CDN providers to someone with a less aggressive (or any) caching policy so people don’t have to edit their bookmarklet every time I add or fix something.
A moment of silence for the plumbing.
Her plumbing or the ship’s plumbing? I’d say they’re both in danger right now.