Grrl Power #713 – Bloopberry or malted flerg?
So first off, yes the page is screwy. If you’re on the home page and you can’t see a comic, just click on the title above (Grrl Power #713 etc.) and you should be able to see it. I had some back end work done including moving everything to an updated theme, and I don’t have all the CSS back in place yet. I should have the page back to looking cromulent by the end of the week hopefully. On the plus side, future proofing! Also I should be able to make non-comic posts and edit previously posted stuff, which I haven’t been able to do for a few weeks now. I’ll have to go back and put in all those direct links to the patreon comic for the ones I missed. Also, I need to make Who’s Who badges for the rest of Cora’s crew, but I want to get the page settled before I mess with that stuff.
This is kind of a transitional page, mostly just covering the Grakz aftermath and then moving them to a weirdly spartan kitchen. If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen me complain about various stuff I don’t like drawing – perspective correct backgrounds is a big one, but honestly one of the most difficult and tedious things to draw is stuff like a set table. Silverware, plates, cups, centerpiece stuff like? Man that takes a surprising amount of time to draw correctly. I could just say that Altus keeps his kitchen so tidy you could perform surgery in it but that’d still be a bit of a cop out. I just sort of ran out of time to come up with alien kitchen gadgets and I was having too much fun drawing Altus’s obliques.
So speaking of alien milkshakes… if a race has access to sugar and dairy, or a dairy like substance at least, it’s a fair bet they’d have come up with something like ice cream. Personally I’m blown away by bread. That doesn’t happen accidentally. You have to take this grass stuff, which I would only think people would consider food once they saw animals eating it, then pluck these little grains out of it by hand, then grind it up, mix in water and cook. Forget all the baking soda and yeast and eggs and whatever else, the first piece of ‘bread’ was probably like a cracker where someone got some wheat grains wet and it sat on a hot rock and they ate it anyway. The evolution from that to shit like croissants makes total sense to me, but the very first caveman who invented bread had to have done it by accident.
BUT I DIGRESS. The point is, space ice cream is totally realistic because people like experimenting with food. Whether or not there’s such a thing as space vanilla is another matter. Sydney has to choose if her milkshake will be blin flavored, cahola, bloopberry, shabazoz, or flerg. Oh, what does blin taste like you ask? Well, it’s like flibbib, but more shoozy, and with a hint of glulb. Yeah. The Universal Translator is of no help here, because there’s no equivalent flavors on Earth.
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Yeah, I often have similar thoughts about food. “Who thought to do ANY of this?”
This bewilderment is also reflected in one of my favourite Fact Sphere quotes from Portal 2: “The first person to discover that cow’s milk is drinkable was very, very thirsty.”
(Though oddly that’s actually one of the more understandable cases — it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to conclude that if one’s own milk is drinkable, another species’ milk might be drinkable too.)
The fact sphere was also defective and proneto giving incorrect data as facts :)
If there are no true facts to digest, then let them eat cake!
I’ve always figured the first human to eat an oyster, and survive, must have been extremely hungry to try a hard rubbery booger found inside an even harder to open package.
I figure that a lot of “first foods” came from watching animals. Various sized birds, for example, picking up critters and dropping them on rocks to get at the creamy middle. Oysters, clams, that sort of thing. Bears knocking salmon onto shore. Everything and its prey trying to get the turtles before they make it into the surf – and after. “They eat it – must be good.”
1Firsts probably drop into a group of categories: 1) Observing animals 2) Desperation 3) Someone dared you 4) That is your fetish.
Snails, Sea cockaroaches (Lobsters and shrimp), Curdled moldy milk (Cheese) – a lot of these things had to result from someone on the brink of starving to death.
I’ve heard that lobster was considered a trash food for a long time. People in Maine and similar lobster-adjacent places would bury the shells rather than throw them out so their neighbors wouldn’t know they were ‘reduced’ to eating the things. Then some enterprising robber baron decided to start serving them on his railway as an exotic dinner, and the transition was made from trash food to delicacy.
The same thing was once thought of cheezeburgers. Up until the great discovery by Bill and Ted!
It was thrash food because people ate most of the insides, it’s like eating boiled egg with the shell included…
There is a somewhat well-known statement about Scottish food: all Scottish food started as a dare.
Given that Scotland is the source of haggis which is moderately frightening by description (haven’t had it; the US won’t import it, American restaurants don’t serve it, and I’m too lazy to make it), I have some inclination to believe it. Same goes for deep fried Mars bars. If Scotch eggs are truly Scottish, they make me doubt it, ’cause they are tasty.
Squirrels, eat poison mushrooms.
As a plot to kill hyu-mons: they know hyu-mons are idiots and believe that if a harmless aminal like a tree-rat can eat it, then it must be safe for a hyu-mon to eat it
Gaah! Clearly it gives them the ability to wipe memories. I had forgotten to warn anyone recently about the evil squirrel overlord!
It’s kind of weird how the first thing that I noticed about this page wasn’t the beefcake or the still-too-obvious-bahonkadonkers, but the fact that you went for the details and made Sydney visibly pale.
Yes, that was a nice touch!
“Too-obvious”? They’re just as obvious as she likes in the comfort of her own ship where she is the master, and has her own space-harem of beefcake. I, for one, would not try to tell her to put away her chest-cannons, as I like my arse un-kicked.
Cora knows enough about humans to see that she looks “a little pale”? Or just compared to the “really pale” she was an hour ago….
Considering Sydney is whiter than a whiteboard, yeah, fairly sure Cora has noticed something, and set up this scene to put some colour back in her cheeks (well, her facial cheeks, her butt doesn’t need any help in that regard right now :P )
Huh, pale humans must be very hydrated.
I’ve not checked that comic in a while.
Butter-bugs is what ice cream is made from in space. ;) https://vorkosigan.fandom.com/wiki/Butter_bugs
Butter bug vomit is added to ice cream, or is used as the base for it, especially with maple mead added.
Um daveb can you please delete that previous post. The webpage went screwy when i posted from my phone.
Also I am hoping the squidwards attack so sydney can do something awesome :)
I got you, boo.
Would she DARE try Grakz flavored-ice cream at this point? Or would it be a few weeks before she could take the dive?
It occurs to me that most cooking originated wwith “Let’s mix it with some water , heat it up an see what we get then.”
Chasing that antelope – five guys with pointy sticks – in Yellowstone. It tries to jump over a geyser, but didn’t time it quite right. Tasty, tasty venison.
Salt water crocodile being chased by great white. Neither notices the lava beginning to overflow from an overhead ledge. That ain’t sushi. I heard the croc tastes sort of like off-lobster
Or the 1981 comedy movie “Caveman” where they accidentally cracked a giant egg on a geiser. and had scrambled eggs
I loved that movie. But I think they discovered “poached egg,” not scrambled.
oops lol
But no look at Hákarl.
– You catch a Greenland shark (it is poisonous but why not).
– You dig a hole, put in the shark, cover it and use a big stone to press out the liquids for up to three months.
– Then you hang it in stripes and dry it a few more months.
– And before serving you remove the crust and it still stinks of ammonia…
To get to that process someone really wanted to eat that shark.
Yup. But not much food up there, so they would have gone to a lot of effort, during lean times.
Just look at how people cope during extreme situations, such as when Hitler was trying to blockade the UK, or even more so during the siege of Leningrad. Even non-edible things like boots found themselves being subjected to cooking experiments!
are you sure it went that way? the way “I” heard it was more like from this Icelandic Cookbook…
I really don’t think we should be eating the things mind. They live up to 500 years. We should be exclusively studying them, to learn how to keep going that long ourselves!
Yeah, some cooking processes makes you wonder what they were thinking, and how many died refining the recipe
Reminds me that Poke Salad (or Salit) is toxic unless prepared correctly, and has been a Southern thing for centuries now.
Actually, I’m going to guess that making dough was mostly intentional. You see animals eating grain, so, like other foods, you try it, but grains are tough to eat. the notion of grinding up hard foods isn’t too hard a leap for any society with a pestle. So now you have flour, but it’s unpleasantly dry, so you add water and holy Ptah, you’ve got bread-dough. After that, you’re most of the way there–it’s the realization that heating it will make it better that might’ve been accidental; although even then, if you’re used to cooking meat on a fire at that point, it’s not too hard a leap to figure other things might be interesting with a bit of heat, too.
In some cultures, the first “bread” was made out of a combination of water and mashed acorns. Plus stone chips because it was ground on the only cutting board available- a huge granite boulder that was kind of flat.
Similarly, whoever watched a bird eat jalapenos, and then tried one him/herself, was probably QUITE surprised…
Raw Jalapeños wouldn’t exactly have been a pleasant introductory experience but humanity is much more likely to have started with something like Chiltepins – A variety with tiny, berry-like fruit that’s more than ten times the heat of a Jalapeño and grows readily in the wild in south america. Just don’t believe its wikipedia page because it’s full of ridiculous fallacies.
Oh, like these ridiculous phalluses?
http://www.crystalinks.com/penistree.jpg
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/508f1ce2b5912fb195115aff8b065709
http://www.crystalinks.com/penistreeman.jpg
I think we need to see the buttons for comment pages at the top as well as the bottom. Comments on the previous pages didn’t get much attention before, and as it is now you can’t even tell there are more comments until you scroll all the way down.
Yes, I had a comment, on the previous page, so this is VERY important!
Plus the list of tags would be dead handy too.
Yeah, nah, people barely even read the comments on the page they should be reading, let alone when there was a comment counter and a page count at the top of the comments
Instead, why not have all the comments on the same page? Saves all that bother.
One question about the translator. Is it only translating words or does it take context/ idioms into account?
if it didnt take idioms into account, then sydney would make very little sense to anyone she was trying to speak to without being very specific with word choice.
They are from a galactic community which has faster than light space craft, Dyson spheres and innumerable alien species. I think we can take it that their software is advanced enough to handle idiom.
When combined with the fact that they seem to be communicating with ease, anyhow. Just to cover the extreme outlier that humans may be very rare or unique in using such.
Who’s Whom.
If the cast pages are finally to be updated, can we get pages for recurring council members?
I still hope to eventually see a reunion of Team Tiny.
I suspect that DaveB will be concentrating on the functionality of the site for the moment. However you will find that the Grrl Power Wiki has more entries than the original cast list.
Wait which one is Slyv
The guy who was giving Cora a back massage, he’s not on this page
Pander I direct your attention to a story called Death worlders, in which Humans are considered monstrously awesome. Basically, We come from a world so deadly to other sapient species they call us death worlders, Gravity too high, Pathogens too deadly, Predators Too Deadly etc. Compared to us even the most dangerous Sapient species in that universe are nothing more than wet tissue paper.
and Yes we have about 20 years or so before it is too late and our climate is permanantly fucked
granted it started because the humans that landed didn’t realize everything was telepathic. so when they saw a predator and “kaboom” it sparked the world trying to reject the pathogen violently
(i read that series a lot)
Forget bread. CHEESE. Anyone here know what rennet is? I’ll tell you. Now days you can get it in a bottle, but back in the day the only way to get rennet, the catalyst needed to make cheese, was to take the stomach of a calf that was still breast feeding and extract it from that. The easiest way was to just salt and dry the stomach lining, then drop chunks of it in a batch of milk to get the cheese started.
Who was twisted enough to think about that?
Using the lining in pieces came much later when the process was more sophisticated. Originally the milk was just being stored / transported in the stomachs, which were one of the only waterproof vessels available for handling liquids. The curdling and associated preservation benefits were almost undoubtedly discovered by accident.
“The most exciting phrase in science is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny …’” –variously attributed to Asimov and Fleming
Huh, the more you know. I knew about the whole handling liquids thing, but didn’t even put 2 and 2 together. Thanks for the insight.
“Wait, I thought you said you didn’t have ice cream? What are you making the milkshakes with?”
“No, we just don’t have bathtubs of ice cream. Though I do know a place that sells ’em in that size.”
If I may add another thought….
I *really* like the way Sydney looks of late…the style of art that you’ve chosen, & the way you’re drawing her, her expressions…they all really appeal to me a lot. She really looks cute this way….
…not that there was anything wrong with the anime-style kooky-cartoony way you usually draw her, I just happen to *personally* like the more realistic expressions that don’t defy human anatomy more.
She especially looks cute when she has her eyes half-opened, like in the last two panels of this page or the last panel of page #705.
Sydney says to Cora “I can’t believe I had such a bad experience at the restaurant. I checked Space-Yelp and they said the Grakz got glowing reviews. Oh… so THAT’s what they meant.”
Food is interesting. Some of it was deliberate, necessity and all that, but really, what’s preoccupying me, is that Max is still stressing out on Earth. Was Cora able to tell Dabbler that she’s found?
That’s actually a good point. From their perspective, it’s probably been well over a day since Sydney got marooned. If this is after the stated ‘time for a nap & a meal’ that Cora used to describe the travel time to Earth, then it’s probably closer to 2-days now?
Cora must have phoned back to Dabbler….unless the method that Dabbler used to transmit her message requires similar power levels to receive for some inexplicable reason….no way that Jiggawatt could keep up that kind of power output for days on end waiting for a reply.
I’ve been where Sydney just was and lemme tell yah, there’s a reason she’s pale.
Work with the ‘public’ long enough and you get used to the norovirus.
I was astonished that no one has yet pointed that ‘blin’ is an Earth-made foodstuff… and now I am thinking about bliny and milkshakes )))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blini
Also, Maslenitsa is coming soon; the timing of this reference is just perfect :)
I was thinking of who has clearance for Sydney’s to tell about her space adventure.
I can imagine Sydney coming in and saying “guess what just happened to me” and someone from the intelligent agency running in and trying to stop her.
As a W.A.G.: It’ll be The General and Maxima for sure, Dabbler because she IS an alien, Probably Major Hiro because he’s the XO? and after that nobody else, other than Arc-light/Dark in the debrief?… YET… i assume that Harem will be “Read In” on the fact aliens exist and that Sciona was one of them and that’s where they went … but will that include Dabbler in that process as well? or do the NCO’s in Archon (Corp. and above) already know about her? i seem to recall something about corporals getting told SOMETHING, but i’m not remembering exactly WHAT they get told…
So if https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-295-ovareaction/ is the start of Sydney’s cycle….. Just how many days has it been? And is she ready for puppies?
I just caught up today, coming here from Wearing the Cape. I was going to peruse the “other comics I like” section, but it seems to be missing now? Or am I just blind?
Almonds used to be filled with lethal levels of cyanide until we bred it out.
So… Altus and Slyv are canon? interesting… I liked it