Grrl Power #769 – Incoming (eventually)
Cora and her crew have heard of the exploits of the supers that Dabbler has been hanging out with, but it’s obviously different seeing it in action. Probably a touch humbling too.
I’m not sure why Maxima is standing like a model. It was a weird confluence of me randomly deciding to tilt her head up a little and not being sure what to do with her other arm. I threw her coat over her shoulder and suddenly she’s all vogue.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the previous page. There were some votes for leaving it as it. I think it’s a bit too far for Sydney for forget she was watching a press conference 20 minutes ago, but… she has had a few busy days. My favorite suggestion was Sydney complaining that she was iced out of the XP from taking down the Fel. Honestly, the team should be involving her in as much combat as possible since she’s the only one who gets a direct benefit fighting. I mean, everyone on the team benefits from fighting, but Sydney literally levels up.
So… I guess for now, imagine she says something about that, or the original thing.
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To head off the inevitable comments:
1) Yes, the flag is still hanging wrong.
2) No, he has not reposted the previous pages with this error, so he probably will not fix this one either.
Hey, this is an alternate universe. Maybe some of the regulations are different, like instead of “when displayed on a wall, the star field should always be in the upper left corner.” it’s “If it’s on a wall sideways, simply rotate it 90 degrees to the right.”
I’ve read the flag code everytime someone comments this.
Why would you hang it by reverse? The union should never be down, Unless in situations of severe distress. That’s what it says about the union.
I think you may be confused, as no one is claiming the Union should be on the bottom. If you look at the flag in panel 2, the Union is on the right side. It should be on the left, if hung according to the Flag Code.
No. I have read it, again and again. The flag code does not specify that the flag should show the reverse. It says that the union should always Point upwards. Good flag use in the rest of the world is that If you are to hang a flag like in This comic, the obverse, not the reverse side should be shown.
Well my comment appears to have been eaten, so I’ll just simply say that you are mistaken. The union should be on the viewers left if the flag is displayed horizontally, this is in the flag code:
Since this is something I’m not remotely knowledgeable of, what do people mean when they say ‘the union should point upward?’ (what part of the flag is ‘the union’?)
The “Stars” portion of the “Stars and Stripes.” It’s one star per state, representing the union of the states. Thus, the union.
Thanks for the info :) And the stars are supposed to be on the left when the flag is hanging from a wall?
Yes.
To be fair, his reasoning for hanging it wrong is silly in my opinion. “My way makes more sense than the official way” really, REALLY, would not fly in any group that actually cares how the flag in hung (I only sorta half-care, more out of mild OCD than patriotism). If his argument were “this is an alternate universe where I get to make the rules and the customs are different here” it would bug me a whole lot less, but the argument he gave the first time it came up was “the way it hangs as dictated in the flag code doesn’t make sense.”
To be more specific, hanging the flag “Backwards” or, on a flagpole, upside down, is a distress signal, meant to be a low key way of telling friendlies that something is wrong at a particular base or facility.
The argument is “The way it hangs as dictated in the flag code doesn’t make sense to me”….so it’s depicted otherwise in the universe that he is making, because he makes the rules there. It seems kinda implied.
Exactly. The attitude that constantly offending those who care about how the US flag is displayed “is fine because it doesn’t make sense to me anyway” is an ignorant one.
If we were talking about some obscure floral arrangement ‘rule’ this would be a completely different matter. But this is not some trivial thing, it is something that screams out “HEY, THIS IS FUCKED UP!” to anyone who cares every time it is noticed by them. And there are a lot of people who care. Which is why there is usually at least one post commenting on how the flag is being displayed wrong in every comic where it is shown being displayed wrong, and which is presumably why O.B. Juan felt it necessary to try to head off such posts preemptively.
This is a comic where the superheroes are supposedly in a United States military organization. The kind of organization which would and should take this very seriously.
I understand that the author has no military experience and hardly understands many facets of the military, but he has been notified many times, so it is no longer a case of simple ignorance but of a deliberate choice. To allow this error and offense to continue to pile up and compound upon itself is a really poor choice and demonstrates questionable judgement.
It’s just a flag, man. It’s not that serious.
In America it is. It’s one of the weird quirks of our culture.
FTFY: “In parts of America it is.”
I’ve lived most of my life in very conservative areas of the US, a few even leaning towards ‘right wing’, some with a strong military tradition in the community. While the flag is always shown a healthy respect, I’ve never personally come across anyone fanatically devoted to the flag itself rather than the ideals it represents.
I think the general attitude has been “Hey let’s observe some ceremony and do it right, to show some respect to the long line of people who have sacrificed under that flag to make the USA a pretty good place to live. If someone doesn’t care enough to get the display right or even wants to burn it, I don’t get that personally but whatever, they have the right to do it, even if I find it a little offensive and myopic.”
Concur –
With the exception of the “a little” part, regarding the burning.
ya these days its fine for some whale to wear the flag cut up as a bathing suite or ball cap.
none of the “conservatives” cares now and the same “conservatives” get crazy over a baby swaddled in a flag.
unpack all the crazy in that set.
More that Archon is military, and in the MILITARY in America it is.
I can’t imagine a parallel discussion in any country but the USA. Googling “respect the flag” produces thousands of US hits, but almost zero for other countries. My country’s flag is just a nice symbol of our country.
Isn’t there some Christian thing about not worshipping idols?
Technically, USA isn’t Christian.
Strangely, one of the few denominations who generally give a damn about the idolatry thing is the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s pretty funny, since a lot of the Protestant denominations would say that Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t really Christian, since they’re a non-trinitarian sect of Christianity.
America is explicitly NOT Christian, actually. It’s a secular nation. The problem is that the Republican party has installed a bunch of theocratic monsters to the Supreme Court, over the last few decades. If the watchmen of the Constitution are corrupted by people who have no respect for the Constitution, we’re kind of screwed. Civil rights in this country are hosed for at least another generation, thanks to Trump voters.
Can you please take your political crap somewhere else? I get more than enough of this shit from my relatives.
I think you’re not getting nearly enough. I mean, if you still call an opinion that the Constitution should be followed over the desires of some religious extremists “shit,” you obviously need some kind of education in how things are supposed to work in the US government.
Interesting, that you view this as just a “political” issue. From the outside, it looks like religious discrimination at federal level. Even I know that is contrary to the US Constitution.
America is by Constitutional law not Christian, but it has always been a majority Christian nation (if we use a loose enough definition of “Christian” that includes people whose idea of being Christian is “I go to church on Christmas and Easter” that is). And we’ve got all these puritan influences in our laws across broad swaths of the nation (do you realize how many states there are where it’s illegal to sell beer on Sunday?)
While the nation does not have an official religion, saying America isn’t a Christian nation is only technically and legally accurate. The Christian influences is both our culture and our laws, regardless of what the Constitution says, is indisputable.
The constitution only mandates that /government/ is secular.
It does this to ensure that nobody’s rights to having a religion can be infringed.
So while the USA can be a christian nation (well, it was at its founding. Nowadays all kinds of groups that the protestants deemed ‘unchristian’ have been welcomed back into the fold to keep christianity the largest denomination for a few years longer), it can not have a christian government.
This used to be unique in the world, but the USA has stood still since and is being passed left and right by most other countries in the world. And even the USA is indeed Christian only by stretching the meaning of being a christian to self-identification and fully ignoring actually practicing a faith.
True, but the Venn diagram where one circle is Americans who get really worked up about “respecting the flag” and not “desecrating the flag” and the other circle is Americans who profess to be Christians is going to have a lot of overlap.
And it does seem a bit odd for people in that overlapped area to get worked up about “flag desecration,” since that would involve removed the sacredness of something they’re not supposed to consider sacred.
The crazy, jingoistic types are often Christian Dominionists who deny the secular nature of our history. It makes some sense, within their screwed-up worldview.
Look up David Barton, if you want to see what the fundies are up to, in terms of what they’re trying to do to the country.
He got his “education” at Oral Roberts University, so it’s no surprise that he is an uninformed basket case with delusions about actual history and science and who couldn’t research his way pout of a paper bag due to his heavily biased predispositions.
Religion makes you stupid, folks. But if you are an unscrupulous asshat it can also make you rich, because other stupid religious persons will gladly give you their money.
Being an atheist makes you an uneducated fool. Unable to look at history and realize that science was Started by religion. So stop being an @$$hat yourself.
While a lot of scientists were religious, I wouldn’t say being an atheist makes you an uneducated fool. Although religion does not make you stupid either, so I disagree with Oberon as well.
Oberon:
Gregor Mendel was a monk. He’s the father of modern genetics.
Max Planck was extremely religious. He’s the father of modern physics.
Marie Curie – was a devout catholic until her mother’s death, then was agnostic, but was NEVER an atheist
Albert Einstein – was raised jewish, but in later life he rejected the idea of a “personal god”, a benevolent, human-like entity who took an interest in human affairs. He did not describe himself as an atheist, though he did not believe in an afterlife — he believed that God existed, but that he was nebulous, universal, and not comprehensible to the human mind.
I would not call any of these people ‘stupid’ for being religious, in any of the varying ways or degrees of their religious affiliations.
Also flag desecration is not uniquely tied to religious fundamentalism usually. There are quite a few atheistic socialist, communist, and fascistic nations that have had severe banning practices on flag desecration, just as there are many religious fundamentalist countries which also have severe banning practices on flag desecration. It’s more about how authoritarian the government is, and both secular and religious-based governments can be unbelievably authoritarian, depending on the laws in place and who is in power.
Religion requires you to believe in fairy tales. Anyone who truly believes in fairly tales is stupid.
The “Big Three” of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all rely on “holy books” which are full of the same sorts of stories that every one of the many mythologies I have studied have in common: Thor rolling around in the sky causing thunder, Raven rolling around fooling people, Zeus fucking every woman ha can and because he was bored of regular sex doing a lot of it in the form of a bull or a swan or a golden shower. The list goes on and on and on. The fairy tales of Jonah and the whale, Jesus transmitting water into wine, Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt, all these are clearly fables.
And there’s no wiggle room: You either believe that every word of the bible is absolutely true, even though it is self-contradictory, is full of fairy tales and ‘scientific facts’ which we now know to be incorrect, or you must admit that parts of it are falsehoods. And once that is done, then comes the discussion of which parts, and why should we believe any of it when some of it is acknowledged to be lies? Hint: It is all lies.
Through scientific means prove god does not exist.
I will wait.
“Anyone who truly believes in fairly tales is stupid.”
Have you never learned an important life lesson from a fictional story before, that you would not have been able to learn from a non-fictional story without great suffering happening to real people?
You don’t need to believe the fairy tales are true, but you should at least be open to the lessons being imparted by them. They might be useful in creating a stable society where non-related people do not go around killing each other just because one is stronger than the other, like what does happen in nature. Even more often than people use other fictional stories as an excuse TO go around killing each other.
Spider-Man? With great power comes great responsibility?
Bat-Man? Never kills (yes I know Batman killed in the first couple of years before his origin was revamped, but for all but 2 years of his history, Batman does not kill)
Superman? Has the power of a god, does not use it to take over the planet. Instead uses his powers to help people of his adopted world.
X-Men? If ever there was a fable showing the evils of racism and bigotry, it’s X-Men.
What’s the difference between the importance in lessons from those fables and the importance of parables from religious dogma? I can cite a lot of comic book-based stories where you go ‘wtf hero?!’ but it doesnt mean that I suddenly ignore the good lessons as well. I don’t have to believe that Spider-Man exists in order to believe that a person who has great power should use that power responsibly, lest he or she becomes a tyrant or a detriment to others.
Very often it’s the same messages, and usually those messages originally were told in RELIGION.
Again:
Spider-Man – “With Great Power comes great responsibility.”
Bishop Mandell Creighton (1887) – “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Batman: “We do not kill.”
First of the Ten Commandments: “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
“And there’s no wiggle room: You either believe that every word of the bible is absolutely true, even though it is self-contradictory, is full of fairy tales and ‘scientific facts’ which we now know to be incorrect, or you must admit that parts of it are falsehoods.”
I’ve never said the Bible is true, or that it is not self-contradictory. I’m not even religious (plus even if I was, I’ve never been Christian). I’ve never said that there are MANY things in it that are most definitely not even remotely scientifically accurate or possible. But they are still parables and lessons, meant to impart certain meanings for their societies and cultures. It’s more about the message than the details, just like you don’t think that Aesop’s Fables are based on real talking animals, but the morals of the stories still have worth.
Not to mention, science is constantly wrong as well. Claims about technology one year are shown to be completely inaccurate 10 years later. Case in point – the structure of an atom. It keeps changing every time they have new information. It does not mean science is stupid because it used to have an incorrect answer, and only a fool would claim that there was NO chance that the science of the time was wrong, even if the majority of scientists agree on something.
Or diets. What’s considered a healthy diet one year by experts is considered actually unhealthy years later. Like the whole ‘fats vs protein vs carbs’ argument. Religion also has food-based laws which have very logical reasoning going back to the beginnings of judaism, but… they don’t seem to change as much (plus kosher laws really do make sense for a time before pasteurization, an inability have consistent heating of certain meat products, and plates which were made of either wood or clay and able to easily transfer germs and parasites.
“And once that is done, then comes the discussion of which parts, and why should we believe any of it when some of it is acknowledged to be lies? Hint: It is all lies.”
I do not think that saying ‘don’t murder people’ or ‘don’t steal from people’ or ‘you should be nice to each other’ or ‘you should care for your fellow human being’ or ‘good is preferable to evil’ are lies.
Oberon – Your diatribe is so fundamentalist in nature as to be hilarious. The level of faith you express is remarkable.
Your claim is paramount to saying, “if you believe in science, you must believe every damn thing that science NOW claims, literally.” In other words, the claim is completely ignorant of how knowledge and complex paradigms work.
Religion must be understood contextually, and, no, one does not have to be literalist to believe that the Bible is inherently true.
Case in point – “Again I say, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Clearly, it’s impossible for an actual camel to go through the eye of an actual needle, so “if you believe the Bible” then no rich persons could ever enter heaven, right?
Except, “the eye of the needle” is what they then called a half-closed gate in a walled city. (It still is called that in some cities.) In order to protect the city from raids, the upper half of the gate would be closed at dusk, so they could fully close the other half quickly in case of an attack. To enter the city at night, a caravan would have to unpack the camels, take them through, then pack them again. Or, instead, they could cause their fully laden camels to kneel, and walk, on their knees, under the gate.
So, a proud rich person must either unburden herself, or deeply kneel, to carry all her riches inside.
Understanding what the language actually meant at the time it was written opens a world of understanding about how people relate to each other and to God.
The pretense that you, Oberon, get to make up rules about how a few billion people whom you don’t know must make their decisions and interpretations, about a literature that you don’t believe, don’t agree with, and don’t know, is just hubris.
The chances are pretty good that no one in the world knows the correct interpretation of every scripture in the Bible… just like no one in the world knows the actual current state of “science”. Everybody knows various beliefs that have belonged to each of those bodies of knowledge that are demonstrably wrong. That does not in any way affect the validity of either corpus… just that interpretation.
We just do the best we can, in both regards, and try to maintain honesty and integrity with regard to what we do and don’t know, and what works and what doesn’t.
That’s all.
No, no, no, you tool. That’s not how it works. If you want someone to believe in your invisible man then it is on you to prove that he exists. There is no way to prove that something does not exist, so your demand is a false method.
I could as easily say “Through scientific means prove Thor does not exist.” And since you cannot then you should worship this god or at least acknowledge that he is just as divine as your own fairly tale idiocy.
Pander, this is a complete non sequitur. I’ve read the bible, which is a lot more than I can say for most Christians.* It has some good parts and a whole lot of bad parts. I don’t need to believe it is true to appreciate it as a work of mythology.
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* It’s fascinating to me how many Christians have never read the bible. I mean, if you actually believe that it is a book containing the words of an actual God, you’d think that reading it would be a top priority. And yet somehow for a great many Christians it is not. It leads me to believe that faith is more about the surrender to an authoritarian leader, the church, the priests, etc. than it is about an actual belief that there is really a God. Because really, how idiotic would it be to actually believe in a fairy tale?
Nice Dal, bring in the “the Bible can only be understood accurately if you bring in the linguists, lawyers, and philosophers” argument. It’s a load of shit.
Please explain why an actual God of all creation would choose to communicate in riddles rather than speaking clearly and unambiguously. I mean, multiple wars have been fought over doctrinal differences, and all those deaths are on the head of a deity who couldn’t be bothered to make his meanings unambiguous. The God of the parable, the contextual understanding, and the interpretation is a monster, guilty of the deaths of millions or persons who didn’t need to die.
“No, no, no, you tool.”
Cmon don’t call him names. You lose a debate when you go straight to insults.
“That’s not how it works.”
That…. actually is exactly how the scientific method works. The scientific method is about disproving hypotheses and theores, not proving things. There are VERY few scientific laws. That’s the reason that trying to disprove the existence of God is a fool’s errand. You can’t disprove something that, by its very nature, relies on Faith in the face of a lack of empirical evidence. In the same way that you cannot disprove the existence of Dark Matter (there’s no proof of dark matter or dark energy existing – it’s just a placeholder because otherwise the equations for calculating the mass and energy of the universe simply do not work. Dark matter is just ‘matter that we can’t see but we’re assuming is there.’ They had a similar theory in the 18th and 19th centuries, called the Aether (the unmoved mover) in science. It got disproven in 1903 by the Aether Wind Experiment.
“I could as easily say “Through scientific means prove Thor does not exist.”
Um… yes. You cannot disprove Thor either through the scientific method. Same reason as I mentioned above. You cannot disprove something that relies on tenets of Faith. They’re diametrically opposed concepts.
“If you want someone to believe in your invisible man then it is on you to prove that he exists.”
One could posit a theory that ‘God’ exists within the first 1 to the negative 35th second after the Big Bang, at which point physics breaks down. No way to disprove that either, since science cannot explain what happened at that point in time. Science also has the M-Brane theory, which involves extra dimensions and the spaces between those dimensions.
To be clear, I do not think there’s an ‘invisible man in the sky’ (to borrow from The Invention of Lying) but I don’t summarily dismiss the importance of religion because I’m not going to be THAT hubristic. I’m hubristic enough as it is.
Also… AGAIN…. you are confusing dogma with religion. There are religions which do not involve an invisible man in the sky. To quote Jordan Peterson’s description of how Sam Harris’s arguments go, it is “a 13 year old’s conceived notion of a strawman Christian Fundamentalist, without getting into the roots of the matter involving what religion actually is.”
“There is no way to prove that something does not exist, so your demand is a false method.”
No… if there’s no way to prove that something does not exist, then you cannot assume it does not exist as a scientific fact. That’s literally how the Scientific Method works, and why it’s running in circles to try to argue about the existence of God in science. It’s also why ‘Christian Scientists’ are rather ridiculous as well.
“Pander, this is a complete non sequitur.”
You should know me well enough by now that I do not argue in non-sequiturs. My statement was DIRECTLY logically related to yours.
“I’ve read the bible, which is a lot more than I can say for most Christians.”
I’ve read quite a bit of it, as well as the Torah and some other religious texts, and I do know some of the stories that were also left out of the Bible when it was condensed to written stories instead of oral tradition, like Lilith, the Book of Judith, the Book of Tobit, and the Book of Wisdom. It’s good to study up on stuff if you’re going to argue them after all. But I notice that you seem to be fixated, when arguing religion, with just CHRISTIANITY. Why is that? It seems like a limited worldview.
“It has some good parts and a whole lot of bad parts. I don’t need to believe it is true to appreciate it as a work of mythology.”
The whole point of the Bible is to relate parables and lessons. The universe itself is vast and unknowable to limited beings like ourselves. It’s difficult for us to often grasp even a fraction of the truth. So as humans, we tend to make stories in order to relate what fragments of the truth we can glean, so we can understand them. They do the same thing with theoretical physics, since most people are not going to understand the formulas and equations. Thought experiments. Think of the Bible (and other religious texts for that matter) as thought experiments meant to relate a message, rather than getting hung up on the details. Shroedinger did not actually put a cat in a box and expose it to a radioactive isotope. And the cat was not actually simultaneously alive and dead. They are mutually exclusive states of being (unless you’re a vampire). But the story does explain a very basic concept behind quantum physics. It’s a teaching tool. Religious dogma is also a teaching tool, but for morality lessons.
No one is saying you need to think the details of the stories are true. If they do, then they’re making the same mistake you’re making – getting caught up in the dogma instead of the lesson. It’s just a teaching tool, and like you mentioned, a lot of fundamentalist religious people (although for some reason you SINGLE OUT Christians, which I think might be a bias on your behalf) take it too literally. It doesn’t make the belief stupid though. Try to use a different religion btw when arguing, because you’re acting like Christianity is the only religion that has fundamentalism.
“if you actually believe that it is a book containing the words of an actual God, you’d think that reading it would be a top priority.”
Actually, almost nothing in the Bible is claimed to have been written directly by an actual God (except for the ten commandments, I suppose, although it seems to be clearly another example of a parable/social engineering to normalize certain laws to have a functioning, stable society). Everything else are stories written by people. That’s why a lot of them are called things like ‘The Book of Judith’ or ‘The Gospel of Mark’ or 1st and 2nd Maccabees (which relates an actual historical event and was written in Alexandria in 124BC). You’re confusing the Bible with the Quran. The Quran is the text who’s proponents claim were the direct words of an actual God.
“the Bible can only be understood accurately if you bring in the linguists, lawyers, and philosophers” argument. It’s a load of shit.”
That’s literally not what Dal was saying when he said ‘religion must be understood contextually. He’s saying the same basic thing I’m saying – that you do not need to take religious stories and parables as fact, when it’s meant to give a system of morality norms for a functional society through the use of a mixture of storytelling and historical re-enactments (some stuff in the Bible did happen, at least in part – a lot of mythology has a toehold in historical truth, just made a little more snazzy so people will pay attention to the stories).
“Please explain why an actual God of all creation would choose to communicate in riddles rather than speaking clearly and unambiguously.”
There are a few ways to respond to this, although I’m again standing by my statement that whether or not an actual God exists is irrelevant, if the morality laws being passed on are useful.
But let’s steelman this a bit. Lets assume that there’s an actual God, despite the fact that neither you or I actually believe that there’s an invisible man in the sky. And again…. you keep using a Christian God despite Christianity being only one of MANY religions that have existed on Earth, because you seem to have an inherent bias against that one religion. But anyway, back to the question. Why would he/she/it communicate in riddles, rather than speaking clearly and unambiguously.
1) Because speaking clearly and unambiguously could be too confusing. I can explain the in-depth details of quantum theory to you, and it would be incomprehensible (if I had the actual knowledge to explain quantum physics). But I can very easily explain the Shroedinger’s Cat story, which gets the basics through to you. Maybe a Creator would pass along his/her/it’s communications in riddles because that’s all our limited minds can comprehend.
2) Ever play the game of Telephone? God explains something to Moses. He explains it to his people. It gets passed along, certain parts are changed or forgotten, usually because it was an oral tradition. Suddenly something that might have been clear is now a riddle.
3) Riddles and stories are interesting. Dry facts are …. usually a lot less interesting. People tend to pay more attention to things that are interesting than things that are not interesting.
4) Maybe the quest to understand the riddles gives the answer meaning.
5) He/She/It does not want to give us the unvarnished truth because we can’t handle it, or God just doesn’t feel the need to tell us and thinks we should figure it out for our own damn selves. And if we don’t, then we’re lazy and not worth telling anyway.
There. I gave five plausible theories on why an all-knowing Creator might not give us the plain truth. :)
“I mean, multiple wars have been fought over doctrinal differences, and all those deaths are on the head of a deity who couldn’t be bothered to make his meanings unambiguous.”
You’re making an assumption that, if there was such a thing as a deity, that that deity would actually see much of a difference between life and death, or think that war in general was a big deal at all. It’s a microcosm in the grand scheme of things.
Reminds me of something from Sandman comics that Death of the Endless said.
“There really isn’t time to argue about this– and I just don’t have the energy. I’ve got too many other things to worry about. Stay if you have to. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“The God of the parable, the contextual understanding, and the interpretation is a monster, guilty of the deaths of millions or persons who didn’t need to die.”
Again that assumes it matters whether you live or die to some omnipotent being in the grand scheme of things. But we’re still getting off the point that religion does not necessarily require you to believe in a specific deity being real, that’s more an element of dogma than just ‘religion.’
But it does make me think of a scene from The Invention of Lying on this exact argument. :)
MARK: “Number seven: The man in the sky who controls everything decides if you go to the good place or the bad place. He also decides who lives and who dies.”
MAN: “Does he cause natural disasters?”
MARK: “Yes.”
WOMAN: “Did he cause my mom to get cancer?”
MARK: “Yes.”
WOMAN #2: “Did he cause that tree to land on my car last week?”
MARK: “Yes.”
The crowd is quiet for a long beat….they’re mulling this over. The first man to speak is a blue collar guy with a thick Brooklyn accent.
BLUE COLLAR GUY: “I say f*** the guy that lives in the sky!”
The whole crowd erupts in agreement. People stand up shouting, flicking off the sky.
MAN #2: “Yeah! That guy’s a f**king a**hole!”
WOMAN #3: “That motherf**ker better hope I never see him face to face!
MAN #3: “That guy’s a fucking coward! Hiding up there and doing bad stuff to us! Why doesn’t he do it to our faces?
WOMAN #4: “We need to stop him before he kills us all!”
MARK: “WAIT!”
Everyone quiets down.
Mark: “This guy who lives in the sky and controls everything is also responsible for all the good stuff that happens.”
The whole crowd “aaaahhs”.
MAN: “He’s the guy who saved my life on that fishing trip when the boat capsized?”
MARK: “Yup.”
MAN: “Did he capsize the boat?”
MARK: “Well, yes.”
WOMAN #3: “He’s the one who killed my grandmother and left me those millions of dollars?”
MARK: “You betcha.”
WOMAN: “So is he the same one who cured my mom’s cancer?”
MARK: “That too.”
The crowd thinks this over.
MAN: “So he’s kind of a good guy, but he’s also kind of a prick too?”
MARK: “Right. But check this out: Number eight: Even if the man in the sky does bad shit to you, he makes it up to you by giving you an eternity of good stuff after you die.”
The crowd “aaahhs” again.
GIRL: “As long as you don’t do any of the bad stuff you listed, right?”
MARK: “Right. Of course.”
GIRL: “So it’s kind of a test?”
MARK: “Yes. Right. (PAUSE) Well, that’s it. That’s everything I know.”
I am well versed in history. And I am well aware that a lot of scientific advances were made due to religious persons or institutions funded by religion. What you appear to be unaware of is the fact that the church was able to have educated persons on its payroll, and had the discretionary capital to build colleges and other institutions, only because they had a complete chokehold on the culture based on their spreading of lies, superstition, and fairly tales.
You cannot commit atrocity after atrocity after atrocity for centuries and then point to some good works and say “See? We do good work” expecting that everything else is supposed to be ignored in a twisted example of “The ends justifies the means.”
Religion ruins everything.
Tell that to all the hospitals, universities, and charities started by religion.
Well now you’re just proving that you are an idiot as well as a believer in fairy tales. Exactly what part of
do you think doesn’t apply precisely to your citation of hospitals, universities, charities, etc?
The ends does not justify the means. No amount of hospitals, universities, or charities can ever make up for the monstrous things done in the name of religion.
You appear to like warmongers, murderers, and pedophiles who also help little old ladies cross the street. Just fuck off with your attempts to justify wars and mass murders and all the other evils of religion.
Stalin and Mao were atheists, who ran societies which were grounded in atheism. Those two societies alone were responsible for over 100 million people in the last century alone, which is more than the entirety of every religious war since the beginning of western civilization… combined.
And please note, I’m agnostic, I’m not religious by any stretch, but I am not going to be so blase as to ignore that we get to live in a stable society BECAUSE of ancestors who were religious, often with dogma which we might find to be fairy tales. Even pre-monotheistic stuff like Aesop’s Fables were based on earlier religious dogma of their time. Religion didn’t just spring up in every society to have ever occured in human existence from neanderthals to modern man for no reason – there was some cultural evolution-based need for it, and we dismiss that fact at our own peril.
I think I’ve mentioned this in the past. You confuse religion with dogma, and belief with authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the cause of the mass deaths you are describing, whether religious authoritarianism or secular authoritarianism. Show me a single death caused by Jainism, for example. You won’t be able to.
Also, you can’t dismiss that religion (whatever the dogma happens to be) is THE foundation principle for morality in human beings that separates us from the law of the jungle. When a lion kills a person, you do not think the lion is evil for doing so, but when a person kills another person, there is the morality question of whether the murderer did so for good or evil purposes.
I’ve mentioned the last time that there was a huge discussion on this comment board that religion can be for good, or for evil, as can secularism be for good or for evil. But the concept of good and evil are inexorably tied to religion, because the foundation of all society’s morality is always going to go back to a religious reason. You will not find a single society that has ever existed on Earth which did not get the foundational building blocks of its civilization from one religion or another. Even in the most secular of modern societies, it was originally going to have been based on dogmatic tales for one religion or another. The dogma might eventually be discarded as fairy tales, but the morality gleaned from that dogma remains, and I do not see a way in that you can get the morality concepts without being in a society that had been built based on some form of religion with some form of dogma, because moral norms of good and evil is not something that occurs unprompted in nature.
There is very little difference between strong authoritarianism and religion. The deity is replaced by the ruler. In North Korea Kim Jong-il did exactly this. He made himself into a God that his people worshiped. He was credited with the same sorts of miracles that Jesus is credited with, never poops or pees, can control the weather with his mind, etc.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/8292848/The-Incredible-Kim-Jong-il-and-his-Amazing-Achievements.html
This is exactly the same as religion, and all authoritarian regimes share a huge amount of commonalities with religion. So please, don’t try to hold up authoritarian leaders who were either atheists or who tore down religious institutions as examples. It’s all just the same tricks under a different name.
“There is very little difference between strong authoritarianism and religion.”
I don’t think you know nearly as much about religion as you purport to know, or you wouldnt say something like that. You know of specific fundamentalist views on certain religious dogma, and you take that to stereotype ALL religion. Look up Jainism. Or Taoism. Religion, just like secularism, can be either authoritarian or not authoritarian. Also, Kim Jong Il is similar to how other fascistic, communist, and socialist regimes have replaced a deity with the STATE as the substitute deity. A secular deity, if you will. Which is why Mao and Stalin have such an insanely high bodycount that every single authoritarian religion combined can’t even match.
“So please, don’t try to hold up authoritarian leaders who were either atheists or who tore down religious institutions as examples.”
You’re contradicting yourself now, because you’re now simultaneously disagreeing AND agreeing with me that secular leaders can be just as horrible, or more horrible, than religious leaders. Becuase they put the state in the place of a deity and do just as bad things (actually far worse, historically). Like I said, your beef is with authoritarian dogma (which can be religious or secular), not with religion per se.
Hi. Atheist here who learned respect for the flag in the Boy Scouts and the military. So, well outside of your overlap.
Also, there is nothing sacred about the flag, there’s not a hint of that in the flag code*. It is a simple matter of respect for the nation, as the flag is considered to be the representation of the nation.
.
.
* But as you mentioned, you’ll probably hear the word ‘sacred’ in association with the flag from either Christians or right wingers. Remember that Obama’s two terms were so relatively uneventful, scandal wise, that Fox News Entertainment had to resort to blowing complete minutia way out of proportion in order to continue to barrage of Obama hate for their viewers 24×7. And one of those ‘stories’ was “Obama doesn’t wear a flag lapel pin! Therefore he obviously isn’t a patriot! RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!”
But apparently a president literally taking money from foreign nations to enrich himself in direct violation of the Constitution is beneath the notice of Fox News Entertainment , just business as usual.
I guess it’s not more than a technicality, when the motto is still “In God We Trust”, and candidates can’t stand for election without pretending to be practising a faith.
I find it highly interesting that the “In God We Trust” on money and “under God” in the plejalegis were not added until the nineteen-fifties, as some sort of reaction to godless communism. Nor have I pledged allegiance to any damn rag on a pole since grade school. The constitution? Yes. Flags? Do not be absurd.
I’ve never pledged an oath to the flag but I did take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of each of the states in which I’m bar certified.
“I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of , and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of attorney and counselor-at-law, according to the best of my ability.” At least that’s how it went in both states for me.
It differs from state to state though.
Pennsylvania:
“I do solemnly swear that I will support, obey and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth and that I will discharge the duties of my office with fidelity, as well to the court as to the client, that I will use no falsehood, nor delay the cause of any person for lucre or malice.”
Washington has this freaking long oath that’s separated into like… 8 sections.
If you don’t take the oath, you can’t be an attorney. Mainly because being an attorney is more htan just a profession – we also are admitted officers of the court, and to be an officer of the court, the oath is a requirement. In fact, most statutes about attorneys do not call the position of attorney as ‘job’ or ‘profession’ – but rather it’s referred to as an office, sort of like how the Presidency, the Legislature, or other elected officials are offices, not just a job. (ie, “persons admitted to the bar of the courts of this Commonwealth and to practice law pursuant to general rules shall thereby hold the office of attorney-at-law.” instead of “shall thereby have the profession of attorney-at-law.”)
Moreover, requiring attorneys to take the Oath of Office if they want to be attorneys was upheld by the Supreme Court (Cole v Richardson, 405 US 676, 681 (1972)). The oath is legally enforceable. Some states also have ‘So help me God’ in their oath as well, although that part doesnt have to be said.
Um…. I’m not christian, but the Constitution is based on a judeo-christian worldview, heavily influenced by English law and Greek philosophers.
As for respecting the flag, most countries have it as a crime to desecrate its nation’s flag, while in the US, desecrating the flag is protected by the First Amendment (the US is the only country where freedom of speech has been written into the Constitution since its founding, without exceptions beyond defamation and calls for physical harm). A few other nations also allow for flag desecration for freedom of expression reasoning as well.
If you googled and didnt find any evidence of this, then that says something more about Google’s algorithm. Here’s a few places where it’s illegal to desecreate the flag, and in most of these countries, you can and will be imprisoned:
Algeria
Argentina
Austria
Brazil (not only can you not desecrate the flag, you must RESPECT the flag – if you do not, it can be a criminal misdemeanor)
China
Croatia
Denmark (it’s legal to burn the national flag, but illegal to burn the flag of the United Nation or Council of Europe)
Faroe Islands
Finland (not only illegal to desecrate, but also illegal to disrespect it or remove it from a public place where it’s set up)
France
Germany
India
Hong Kong
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Malaysia
Mexico (not only illegal to desecrate the flag physically, it’s illegal to desecrate it in writing, like in a poem)
New Zealand
Norway (it was illegal until 2008, and is now legal)
Pakistan
Peru
Phillipines
Portugal
Russia
Saudi Arabia (plus because the Saudi flag bears the shahada, it’s conidered holy and even the slightest violation of the flag can receive penalties for blasphemy)
Serbia
South Korea
North Korea
Sweden (considered to be disorderly conduct to burn the flag, misdemeanor)
Switzerland
Thailand (not only illegal to desecrate, it’s illegal to duplicate on a non-flag)
Turkey (you can get anywhere from 3 to 18 years in prison)
Ukraine
Uruguay
Also, in Australia, it’s not illegal to desecrate the flag, but there are specific rules involved in HOW you can desecrate the flag or it will be considered a crime of disorderly conduct.
I guess it’s the difference between legal theory and practice.
In practice, flag idolatry seems rare in most of the countries you list. They don’t actually prosecute people for doing naughty things to the flag, and citizens don’t get into long discussions about flag worship – which they do in USA. See above.
This gets long and hopefully not too ranty. I apologize in advance. :)
The USA actually has almost no rules on use of the flag outside of the military. This is not legal theory, it’s legal practice, because there are actual law cases on this subject, including a famous SCOTUS case (listed below). Law cases means it was tried in court (so it’s not just theory) and found that flag desecration bans are unconstitutional.
‘Flag idolatry’ (if by which you mean punishment for disrespect of the national flag) is NOT rare in most of the countries I listed. In some countries, like Saudi Arabia, the flag literally IS idolatry, since it’s considered holy because it has holy symbols as part of the flag. But it makes sense that there would be more focus on highlighting the US when there’s an upswell of patriotism or national pride, vs when the same thing happens in MOST other nations. It’s just very pronounced with Americans in the media because pro-American advocates tend to be a lot louder about their patriotic (or even counter-patriotic) displays. It’s why we have all the fireworks on the 4th of July. Lots of Americans just happen to like that sort of thing. Plus the US is the only military superpower left in the world, and the largest economic superpower of the economic superpowers (just ahead of China, I believe, who is the second largest economic superpower). So… the US tends to get more attention.
In any case, I have yet to see many long discussions about ‘flag worship’ btw (she said during a post involving a long discussion about flag worship, I recognize the irony).
When there are any discussions even in that periphery, it’s usually as part of larger argument or conversation about some sort of protest against US policies, with one side becoming more anti-American in their arguments and the other side becoming more patriotic or nationalistic in theirs. It’s rarely actually about the flag itself, though. And when it is, it’s usually because of some dispute that causes ‘woke’ agendas (‘woke’ refers to political correctness), like the ‘Betsy Ross flag on the Nike sneakers is racist despite Betsy Ross being an abolitionist’ kerfuffle recently, or the people who started complaining about Chris Pratt wearing a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Gadsen Flag T-shirt.
Also, the US government (as well as most of the states – 2 states out of 50 still have laws about flag desecration, but they are untested and if they ever went to court, they’d likely be found unconstitutional based on Texas v Johnson, see below) do NOT prosecute citizens in the US for doing naughty things to the flag, except for if you are in the military, which is because of the different military branches’ Codes of Conduct. For civilians, it is protected under the first amendment. The most recent relevant SCOTUS case was decided in 1989, over 30 years ago (Texas v Johnson, 491 US 397), which ruled that flag burning was symbolic speech, and laws outlawing desecration of the flag were unconstitutional. Federal law on this was decided decades earlier. Even before that, it was basically non-existent for there to be any prosecution of flag desecration.
As a practical thought experiment …. go to one of those countries I listed and burn their flag in public. It will not be good for you. You will most likely go to jail, or at the very least pay a significant fine (and if you don’t pay the fine, you will go to jail). But you will not see anything about it in the news, unless the news is about an American who burned a foreign nation’s flag on their soil, in which case the news will be about an arrogant American, rather than about the idea that flag desecration laws stifles freedom of expression. On the other hand, in the US, you will NEVER go to jail for flag desecration, and at least half the time there won’t even be a public outcry, largely depending on the context (ie, doing it at a funeral for a veteran will get more public outcry than if you’re doing it in a protest march against US policies, which are both recent examples I’ve seen in the news, the latter of which didn’t receive any real scorn).
You are a good lawyer. No execution for you.
:) Yay, I get to live and rant another day. :)
I haven’t seen any discussion of flag worship, except for a few mistaken comments that there is actually flag worship in the US. I am not aware of anyone who literally worships the flag or considers it holy. That would be a really extreme and very fringe belief. A discussion on whether or not people should hold the USA flag in high respect as the representation of our nation, however, can easily evoke passionate opinions.
I agree with you there Oberon. :)
Googling anything tends to produce U. S. centric results as Google is a U. S. centric company.
Although founded in USA, Google is used worldwide.
Indeed, it has a large European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland to service the huge demand from Europe/Middle East/Africa.
The location in Ireland is probably far more closely related to the huge tax benefits the Irish have used to attract corporations to locate there than it is to any actual need to be physically closer to any specific market.
That is a different issue, although interesting.
The point is that the internet (including Google) is no longer US-centric, but world-wide. They had to have a HQ in the European Union.
Google (and all other search engines I’m aware of) customizes their results per country, and even by state/city. It has nothing to do with nationalism of the company(s), it’s just good service to provide something locally relevant. If there’s a skew towards US-centric results, that’s probably a result of just having proportionately more US data in their system.
I know this has nothing to do with how internet searches work, but it’s interesting information, which probably has something to do with the historical idea that the internet is US-centric, despite being worldwide.
Most of the primary backbones of the internet are owned by the US. I forget what they’re called, but it’s the physical cables themselves. One of them is located in Long Island, in Mastic Beach. Another is in Tuckerton New Jersey. They link America’s eastern seaboard with western Europe, and serve as some of the most dense, crucial infrastructure points in the world. To quote an article in Gizmodo: “Skype is broken, as is every other means of talking between continents over the Internet. You can’t email your friends abroad. You can’t order Barbour coat from the UK. Tweets from the Middle East are stuck there.”
Plus there are 13 servers, labeled only by a single letter, backed up hundreds of times over, that are responsible for decoding _________.com (and .net, and .org, etc) before serving up the corresponding IP address. Knock these machines offline, and the alphabet isn’t part of the internet anymore; if you want to navigate what’s left of the web, you better have a pad and pencil, or an extremely good memory. I think 12 of the 13 servers are located in the US (one’s in Manhattan, one’s in Miami, and I think one’s in New Jersey) and they’re owned by a few different US companies (RIPE NCC, TELX, and a few others), while the 13th one is located in Seoul (owned by The WIDE Project).
Plus I think a lot of the super data centers are also US-owned and located in the US (in NYC, Los Angeles, Miami, and Palo Alto). There are a couple in Paris and London also though (two each).
So it’s not really that surprising that the world wide web and the internet in general is very US-centric.
I believe you are confusing the long haul fiber (the “backbone”)with the peering points (exchanges) at which networks connect, such as MAE-EAST, MAE-WEST, etc.
I… don’t think I am. But it’s possible I’m confusing terms. I’ll check when I get home. Thanks.
So, there are actually dozens of international undersea cables around the world, owned by both government and private industry – the US is now just a fraction of the entire network. This article has a pretty good map from 2016, along with some other fun info like the specially designed ships used to install them and a video of a shark trying to eat one.
As for the 13 ‘main’ servers and data center locations, that’s a fun rumor based on the number of ICANN name (~DNS) authorities for a given network zone – here’s a good writeup on it. There are hundreds, even thousands of distributed servers at over 130 locations worldwide, none of which are the ‘main’ servers – Tyler Durden can’t just drop a few buildings and wipe out the internet. Microsoft’s Azure cloud service alone has dozens of data centers in Europe and Asia – they (and other cloud hosts) build where the people are, for both financial and technical reasons.
Aw man, I wrote up a long response to this that got lost, but in brief – the international ocean backbones are more numerous than you think, most are not connected to the US, and nearly all are owned by telecomm consortiums or major tech companies, not governments.
Similarly, most data centers are also outside the US, even for US-owned companies. Microsoft for instance more data centers in Asia and Europe (combined, not each). Basically, they build them where the demand is, for technical reasons.
And finally, 13 is not the number of ‘main’ servers for the entire DNS system, but the number of authority organizations in the relevant networking zone. There are thousands of ICANN servers within those domains, at over 130 locations*, in a redundant peer system where none of them is the ‘master server’.
* Sorry Tyler Derden, the internet is more robust than you thought.
…aaand, in spite of posting the first version hours ago and reloading the page just before writing, it only now shows up again as “awaiting moderation”. Curious if DaveB rejects the second one, will this response disappear with it?
I am curios if you can say exactly why Google “had” to have an European HQ. And since their HQ is in California, and the very term HQ implies a singular as there cannot be two heads, what the European “HQ” is actually referred to as.
Yes but Google tends to do its algorithms customized based on the country. Which is one of the big problems right now that companies like Facebook and Google have been having with certain nations like China, and the EU now that Article 13 has passed.
“To head off the inevitable comments:
1) Yes, the flag is still hanging wrong.
2) No, he has not reposted the previous pages with this error, so he probably will not fix this one either.” – O.B.Juan
While the flag’s orientation is against protocol, changing it at this stage would require DaveB to either [i] make significant edits to several previous pages, [ii] break continuity to have the flag ‘magically’ reverse itself, or [iii] come up with an in-comic excuse for someone to reverse the flag, and incorporate them doing so, thus drawing attention to the error. It is an error, and it can be corrected for next time, but ‘curing’ it for this specific scene would be a disproportionate diversion of limited artist/writer time.
eather xenovarchy deems planet deathworld and offlimits and makes it prison planet or deems to dangerous and plans to blow it up. or so on. or we get peace talks or something or people wont beleave the videos or information due to how out of this world it was pun intended
Considering how easily Earth repulsed the Fel that the Xenovarchy couldn’t even slow down I don’t think they’d do well directly attacking Earth either. Blockade would be a better choice for them.
I got the impression that those two were simply scouts. If the Xenovarchy brought more resources to bear, I’m sure that that ship could have been slagged instantly.
That’s the problem with being a galaxy-wide police force. There’s a while lot of galaxy to cover with the available resources, even with insanely fast warp travel.
They seemed to be beat cop level patrol officers “in hot pursuit” of the Fel. If the Twilight Council’s alien representatives are covering up Earth’s supernatural elements from other aliens, the cops could just find their report buried with no follow up. If the aliens on the TC are only concerned about covering up the existence of aliens on Earth from people on Earth, we may be in for a bumpy ride.
It seems like a the Xevoarchy would be likely to just liaise with someone at Archon as a local law-enforcement force for the Sol system, so no sweat . . . but if they get wind of Sydney’s Amazeballs, bricks will be shat.
No microaggression intended towards species with particularly masonry-like fecal processes, of course.
Bingo.
Look up wombat poop. It’s awesome.
Can I not look up wombat poop and lie and say I did? Because I do not want to look up wombat poop, please sir.
To save you the trouble, it’s remarkably brick-like. Square and all.
Good to know. One more thing to check off my bucket list.
They also kind of stack it in little cairns to mark territory. So it’s actually about ad masonry- like as you could reasonably expect out of a digestive process.
I like this. It also provides a really good reason (for the plot) to NOT have Sydney on-camera while the intergalactic police were observing…
You’re comparing what appears to be the equivalent of two single person cop cars with something classified as a “super battle carrier.”
I don’t see why they’d do either honestly.
Let’s put what just happened in perspective: First, imagine that the Nazis founded a new nation and managed to get powerful enough to rank among the worlds most powerful militaries. Now imagine that some dinky little 4th world nation no one’s ever heard of sank one of their aircraft carriers with a single shot from an infantry based weapon. Would the rest of the world be in a hurry to cut that nation off or destroy them? Not a chance. That’d be a nation whose good side you’d want to be on.
I’d immediately add such a nation* to both my “friendly overtures” and “watch closely” lists, but be very hesitant to put them on either the “allies” or “enemies” lists just yet. Sure, they suddenly have a big stick, but no track history in wielding it safely and responsibly long-term, and likely no international allies well-positioned to advise them on doing so. Aligning with a wildcard is risky business.
*[cough] North Korea [cough cough]
I thought about using North Korea as an example, but I felt that the Fel, as described in the comic, represented a much greater level of evil than an isolationist dictator ship merits. Plus they do have some allies (China and, to a lesser extent Russia), whereas a Nazi nation would definitely stand alone and be universally hated. They seemed a much better parallel.
That nation would earn itself a lot of attention, and a lot of ‘Maxim 29‘ wariness. And depending on its actions and policies once it does come to notice, potentially a strong dose of ‘do unto others before they do unto you’ from one or more of the existing big players.
Oh no
Strange to think high level supers only evolved on Earth. Perhaps some kind of experimentation? Something that goes beyond whatever upgrades the advanced races have developed.
Due to the complexity of DNA, every organism responses to exposure to X rays, Gamma rays, Cosmic rays, Super Serum, Dark Matter, Anti Matter, Quantum Entanglements, Transformium, Unoptainium, Rareasfuckium, Phleborium, Radio Waves, Alpha Waves, Epsylon Waves, Solar Flares, Unspecified mix of chemicals combined with random lightning strike, Kryptonite, Trauma of watching one’s parents get shot in a dark alley, Irradiated Spider venom, etc… in a different manner…..Human organisms just happen to respond to these things by randomly developing mutations that result in off the scale superpowers.
Or maybe, earth is an ancient landfill for out-of-date and primitive n-tech and the exotic matter seeped into the ground water…
Didn’t they say that they ruled out genetics as the source?
Perhaps they just ruled out individual variation as the direct cause of super powers. Dave hasn’t done a deep dive into the subject, just a light surface-treatment.
The human genome as a whole could make humans more susceptible to whatever the direct cause is.
It’s sort of like homosexuality. We’ve tracked down a couple of very strong genetic markers. But having those markers isn’t a guarantee that someone will be gay, and lacking those markers does not guarantee that someone will be straight. It’s a complex mishmosh of genetics and environmental factors, some of those factors in utero and some in childhood development.
Then there’s situational/environmental homosexuality, which just throws another factor into the mess.
Yep. Sandy says that scientists ruled out evolution as the culprit for the same reasons Sydney mentioned.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-139-safety-pins-almost-as-good-as-unstable-molecules/
I am 100% sure it is connected to the Nth artefact. Cora pretty much confirmed that supers don’t exist anywhere else: she is VERY well-travelled yet the skills of Maxima and the others deeply surprised her.
My theory is whoever died/disappeared with the orbs seeded the planet: some people got the part of their god-like abilities (which could be normal for them). This would explain why the arrays of superpower are so vastly different: we literally didn’t saw anybody with the same skillset (there are some who has lookalike, yet different powers). Everyone got a tiny part of this Nth being, acquiring tiny fragments of its power.
Or a galactic civilization arose and evolved into an Nth level before.
Before they vanished they created “seeds” of a sort to accelerate the advancement process should another civilization arise again on Earth. Once earth reached a certain level the seeds began changing some of the population.
They may have visited Earth but due to the age of our sun compared to the rest of the galaxy any life that started on Earth wouldn’t be one of the early ones on a galactic scale. Early ones would have been near the core.
Yes, but planets near the core would tend to be sterilized on a regular basis by energetic stellar events like gamma ray bursters. So it doesn’t seem likely that advanced life would develop there.
I don’t think Earth would be where the Nth evolved, as it’s been suggested that there are so many humanoid species in the galaxy because the Nth seeded the galaxy with them. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-690-gotterdammermcguffins/ That means the Nth probably predate most life in the galaxy.
But an Nth dumping site? maybe.
Nth as I read the passage is not a particular species.
Its a stage of development after space wizard after which the race in question evolves out of pr transcends this universe.
Yeah “near the core” was a mistake I should have said “nearer the core” :)
A lost Nth colony, a bio-weapons experiment, trying to create potential avatar bodies that are just fleshy enough to interact with the physical dimension but powerful enough to house their super ascended potential so they can return to the material world without damaging it outright by their presence alone, trying to make dolls that won’t break when played with. So many possibilities.
Maybe an nth race was experimenting with ways to have their powers without having to handle their physical orbs? If they were two-handed like yoomons, the limitations would have annoyed them. So they figured out ways to incorporate their orbs into the genome. Max has shield, fly and pew-pew built in – maybe there’s another super that has more than three orbs?
Maybe they had seven hands :)
Maybe they simply owned / used the orbs until they fully absorbed their powers. This gave the powers as well as trained them how to use them by levelling up. Sydney just needs to live (a few thousand years?) until she absorbs the powers and can then pass the orbs on.
I like my seven-armed alien theory better because it’s sillier. :)
But your idea is cool too.
Or they don’t (NEED) to use them, but they act as conduits for their power into the material world as acting directly would damage the material world too much /more than they’d want to.
That’s a nice theory, but since the orbs appears to be objects and not sentients I’m not sure there’s much justification in speculating about a “Nth being.” Just from a logic standpoint, a species which was already superpowered would not have much need for objects which are superpowered. If Maxima’s super battle carrier destroying blasts are a feature of a “Nth being” then they would have very little use for the PPO which is (probably) less powerful.
As an example we actually know about, humans have invented a lot of technology so that we can overcome limitations in ourselves. We build homes with HVAC systems because we don’t have a very wide range of temperature tolerance, unlike many animal species on Earth which do have a greater temperature tolerance and therefore have no obvious evolutionary need to evolve intelligence so they can make heated and cooled residences.
In GURPS IST (International Super Teams) humans are different from other races due to certain happenings. All other races have an ability common to all members (telepathy, force fields, etc.). Shortly after the precursors did their genetic mods to us, we got hit by a gamma pulse. This locked down the development of our racial ability and scrambled the coding. A few supers popped up over time until another gamma pulse activated our now scrambled power coding. Resulting in supers.
GRR Martin’s Wild Cards (20+ anthology novels) had Earth as the testing place of his super virus developed by some other DNA compat humanoids.
if the virus infected you –
90 died
9 were jokers (bad mutation)
1 was an Ace aka super power(s)
Earth was quarantined last I read after they found out about the virus.
These are a good read if anyone is looking for some other superhero stories. Primarily written by big names in the scifi/fantasy genres, and the newer authors were well vetted. Edited by GRRM, typically with one or more stories from him in each novel. Spans the period of time between the end of WWII and the present day.
Meanwhile in the Marvel Universe, he ‘classic’ Origin of Human Advanced Potential was attributed to experimentation done on proto humanity by first the Celestials, then the Kree. And possibly other alien benings less well known about. the Celestial seeding created the potential for mutation, as well as the Eternals, Deviants and other minor offshoots. The Kree experiments resulted in the Inhuman race.
Finally, in the recently written “Marvel One Million BC” it has been revealed that Thors dad Odin and a whole posse of proto human mythological god-heroes faced down that first Celestial invasion, and it was a lot more than a “genetic seeding” it was a judgment day, and the Proto Earth before humanity was found wanting, these god-heroes banded together to save the Midgard Realm, as Odin considered it a part of his kingdom to defend.
Long story short, they obviously won the war, but a Celestial Egg of some sort was left burried deep beneath the surface of the Earth unknown to anyone, even hidden from Odin sight and other magical or superhuman / supernatural forms of detection, and this living celestial egg has been gestating for one million years, bleeding out it’s vast cosmic energy into the living planets ecology and eventually affecting everything living on it, and other than a few specific cases of legacy from the One Million years gone god-heroes, human potential for super powers is generally due to all this Celestial Egg energy, unique to everywhere else in the known universe.
I think that as is all too common, this has changed a lot and been retconned over time. The Celestials were initially tied only to the Eternals, who were a group of superhumans on Earth separate from mutants or inhumans.
i like to think of the supers like the inhumane form marvel comics.
they were a weapon made by a alien race and my guess is the race that made Syd’s orbs is also the race that made the supers. either their race was dying out or leaving this universe behind and some one wanted to leave behind something to help the younger races.
Oh well, when they report in, it looks like Schrodinger’s Space Cat is getting let out of the Cosmic Cube© sooner than expected, huh?
Even if the space cops didn’t call this in are we to believe that the Alari ship in Africa nor the aliens on the Twilight council DIDN’T have eyes on this? The cat’s out one way or another.
All the alien holiday makers who were watching the news recently with the Archon press event.
I thought about including them but then I remembered Max sent the news people underground – where they wouldn’t be able to film the battle. Any aliens vacationing on Earth would most likely be using local resources, go native, so as not to draw attention to themselves. So it’s possible they wouldn’t see what happened.
Alien sex tourists who visit earth don’t spend their time watching television.
You don’t need dosbox for it: http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
Oh, but for that authentic look and feel (and the original bugs), dosbox is a must!
Juffo Wup?
I see what you did there…
Beautiful callout, indeed. Took me almost a minute to place.
An escaped Deepchild?
Came here to say that. Yay, Star Control references!
The Mycon evolved, it looks like!
Indeed! Sweet reference, Dave!
If that message gets out then earth is probably fucked.
A Fel incursion is one thing, an actual galactic invasion would take more than just a few powerful beings to stop.(If it ever came to that.)
A planet that successfully resists invasion has to be invaded?
You’d think that if the Fel were a problem for everyone and some backward
world has a solution you’d want to be on their good side.
It’s a standard balance of power situation. If earth had slugged it out for a few days, they would be considered crazy powerful and the ultimate ally.
This is very different. They kicked their asses with virtually no colateral damage with time left to get to the the movie… for a matinee.
They’re not just powerful, they are dangerous in a destabilizing way.
Imagine if at the end of WWII Switzerland not only had an atomic bomb, but they were the only people who could produce them, and they were offering them up for sale to the highest bidder.
Someone would launch an OP who’s entire purpose was to turn Switzerland into a crater.
Sure, they are not Merc’ing themselves out, but some would be open to the idea, and eventually, no matter how peaceful earth is, someone will decide we are too dangerous to survive.
Your attempted parallel fails completely, as the Twilight Council has been trying to keep a lid on the unique aspects of earth for thousands of years. With a certain amount of cooperation from some alien representatives.
In your analogy, Switzerland would need to be trying to hide the very existence of it’s atomic bombs for it to be a parallel.
Justification isn’t there.
I may or may not have read a story in Analog Science Fiction decades ago where
Switzerland keeps the fact of having secret agents a secret.
Not sure whether it was Analog, but yes, i remember such a story. Switzerland never seems to be invaded because any time someone starts looking like they will, “unrelated” bad things happen to derail them from carrying it out.
There were a lot of assassinations covered up as accidents or domestic violence, and none of it traceable to the Swiss.
The Swiss get left alone because the leaders of almost all countries have money in secret Swiss bank accounts. Nobody is going to nuke the city that has the bank where all their money is.
Back when I was in the army I was stationed with the 180th AVN CO in Schwäbisch Hall Germany. We had one pilot who joked that if the balloon went up between the US and the Soviets, he was going to fly his helicopter to Zurich and land on the roof of the biggest bank he could find.
Note that after some 400 years as a mercenary state after the Napoleonic Wars Switzerland had had enough of it. Neutrality and in 1484 they wanted to copy the USA. From its Confederation period 1776-1789 and did so with modifications that worked unlike in the USA. Also during World War 2 it was estimated that it would have taken at least 66 divisions to fully attack Switzerland and even then they weren’t sure they could succeed without incurring heavy losses. Having nukes would seal the deal and they would never sell them. They would threaten to use them if certain steps are not taken to stop more war. It might work for awhile. Especially if most of the physicists moved to Switzerland than the USA or what would later become Israel.
You really need to read ‘The Mouse That Roared’
It is an old book but it is at times extremely funny.
It deals with the question of ‘what happens when a country so small that not even its neighbours are aware of its existence most of the time’ acquires the ultimate doomsday weapon?
And how would it get said weapon?
Switzerland isn’t anything like Gran Fenwick. Besides every man that is militarily trained and armed they were read to make it next to impossible to invade. The win would cost far more than leaving Switzerland alone. Though Himmler did entertain some Swiss as part of his multi-national SS brigades.
Imagine all those atomic scientists going to Switzerland instead of the USA and Britain was where they got the know how to make at least uranium bombs which even Japan and Germany could have built.
Invasion?
It was one ship and, at best, a 100+ foot soldiers.
That’s how many had been shuttled down from the ship before Maxima turned into a Fel crucible. From the size of the ship there could have been many times that number.
There are some issues with the scale. The Fel ship appears to be approximately the same size as Cora’s ship. The Fel ship was classified as a “super battle carrier” by the space cops (spider man™ and sexy mushroom lady).
Cora’s ship is manned by a ~5 person crew, and they can still manage it even with several of them off board doing things like finding Sydney or participating in press conferences. That doesn’t jibe with the sort of size, crew capacity, etc that the phrase super battle carrier evokes.
Defeated by a handful of locals who weren’t expecting an armed attack from an alien ship and troops.
They may be police but farmers with pitchforks could have been the first opponents if this was anywhere else.
Anyone considering an invasion would now expect this response planet wide.
Unless they learn about the rarity of Supers.
The parking lot fight implied supers are more common than previously fought; but due to not having the community structure of supernaturals (being a super is born into a family of normal humans as far as they know, their friends, family, everyone is normal, and society tells them super powers are only in fiction; and any realistic look at what it would take to try and be a super hero or villain and anyone with basic super powers would shake their head and hide their powers out of fear of being labeled possessed, evil, or taken by the government and experimented on”
In fact Sydney displayed all this at the start of the comic, she’s had the orbs for sometime now, tested them out as privately as possible, hid she had them from family and friends, and feared the government would take her away. Now imaging you just have basic D class telekinesis (you can make an object like 10% of your body mass hover a few feet off the ground for like a minute), or you can shoot your eyelashes off as a tiny tazer darts, ect… you aren’t about to go and try and be a super hero, and depending on the culture and upbringing might think you have an evil spirit in you or something. The prevalence of super hero comics and movies would be the only reason someone at D+ into C class (can flip a car over one handed level of super strength) and such would even consider putting on tights and patrolling the city.
Marble Maiden is likely up into C class at least. But even higher levels, unless you are also bullet proof chances are you don’t want to take your chances with CIA spies breaking into our house to tranq you and take you to some hidden bunker under the Nevada desert or something to experiment on you.
Oddly you can also have S class who just don’t want to be heroes or villains. Nothing about having powers means you are driven to use them. In fact being too powerful could be enough reason to not want to be a hero either, especially if you have no low setting. Imagine having Necrokinetic bolts as a power, you kill everything that can’t resist that. which is most things. Hard to “save the day” and be a champion of justice when your power is auto-kill. Or you fire plasma blasts that have one setting (blow up the damn building), can it be any wander whomever Sciona got the blood from for that psy-blast was able to be caught when their power was a combo of blow up everything in front of me and I also can’t see what I am hitting once I start.
The way it’s phrased made me think of Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade.
+1
The Conquistadors were one ship and 500 foot soldiers and they were pretty good in their invasion of South America :).
Cortés captured the “living god king” of the Aztecs and the army that vastly outnumbered them and could have overwhelmed them with ease was afraid to attack for fear that he would be hurt or killed.
Just another example of how religion ruins everything. I mean, if your god can’t even hold his own against a few hundred guys, or is even capable of being harmed by them, what kind of god is he anyway?
If I recall correctly, the Conquistadors did also employ about 10,000 natives from other enemy tribes who were a bit sick and tired of the Aztecs ripping their beating hearts out of their chests as human sacrifices to help as well, and Montezuma II had originally thought the Conquistadors were gods themselves.
Actually it would result in a massive intel op. ” Ok this happened in ONE geopolitical location. How many others are there in all the others? Well find out!”
So, Maxima could deliver the power of a hurricane all by herself, if she had a bad hair day in the Atlantic Ocean, in just a few seconds?
Yeah, I’d be shocked too. No more trips to the Bahamas for you, Colonel.
Ugh, that was an unfortunate reference on my part. My apologies to everyone for that tasteless bit of timing.
Kinda fitting after the whole “Can we nuke hurricaines” thing.
The worst part of this was that Trump wasn’t asking if they could nuke hurricanes. He was telling the people gathered in that briefing that this was the solution to hurricanes: Nuke them before they get here.
And because he is such an egoist who cannot stand to be told that he is wrong (Several NOAA officials were threatened with firing for the contradiction to Trump that Alabama was in no danger from the hurricane, making them submit a false statement, which they did so unsigned, that Alabama was in danger from the hurricane) it was of course awkward to figure out a way to convince him that this was not the way to go… Someday there will come a time when some career bureaucrat doesn’t want to lose his job and some idiot thing Trump wants that they didn’t even try to talk him out of because of fear for their jobs will get a lot of people killed.
Well… the hurricane did veer away from Mara-a-Lago and Florida entirely. Probably got spooked off by the threat of a nuke. :)
You made a mistake, but you owned up to it. That puts you ahead of some I could mention. I have no respect for a man who can’t say ‘I was wrong.’
*nods* Truth.
Since I am evidently far older than a lot of posters on this forum, I will point out that scientists seriously considered the possibility in the past.
Look up Jack W. Reed.
Yes, in the late ’60s IIRC. We had responsible government then, and they …politely… told the US to forget about it if they didn’t want a megaswarm of toxic bees put in their house. “Those are OUR cyclones, and you DON’T get to fiddle. Nuke your own and then tell us how safe it is.”
OK, I looked up Jack W. Reed and it looks like no one considered him seriously.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-man-who-wanted-use-nuclear-weapons-stop-hurricane-17988
However, enough idiots think it’s a good idea that the NOAA has had to write up a FAQ page for it.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html
Ok. I’m 67, 68 in Nov.
Well, I still think that anybody in their right mind should be scared to death of a lady that absolutely _could_ start a hurricane by herself.
Can’t wait until the space police ask why Sydney was on the space station, being in a viral video encouraging the eating of too much spice at once…
As Sydney found out later in the bathroom “the spice must flow”.
Apparently even her nigh-unconquerable digestive system has an upper limit, a lesson she deeply regrets having learned.
Or perhaps not, as, since it took what was basically a Space Pepper to overwhelm her, and nothing from our world so far has provoked similar intestinal trauma, she might’ve been thrilled to discover she could theoretically handle anything grown here on Earth…
Even pepper heads have to start out somewhere, it’s an acquired resistance, and it’s only as resistant as you’ve trained up to.
I mean, I love spicy foods, eat my hotdogs with wasabi instead of mustard, but that one time I ate a whole can of habanero peanuts… Let’s just say capsaicin and abrasive particles are not a good mix on the exit end!
If she could import some grakz, start out nibbling a little each day, she’d probably be able to handle it just fine a year later.
I had ghost peppers and a Carolina reaper at a friend’s house about a month and a half ago.
Sydney will probably be going back for more Grakz, and eventually it won’t even phase her.
My tolerance has gone down with age, not up. And in a kind of weird way. Tolerance isn’t the right term. I can still eat spicy things, my tolerance peaks at habanero levels of cap. But as I have aged my physical responses have changed to the point that I no longer eat spicy food in public, because my scalp becomes a river and that’s just awkward.
And afterwards “Your arse must glow!”
We would also accept:
“In burning day, in painful night,
no a-hole can resist this plight.
Let those who worship spice’s might
beware my power: Red Sphincter’s light!”
There’s a ring, and I’m pretty sure there was swearing and oaths involved, so . . . .
I’m sure the ring came out with a little bowl cleaner.
In darkest day, our brightest knight will conquer all who deign to fight, so let those who worship evil’s might beware our power, ooh, a butterfly!
the Neko corps oath.
+1
possible second sally /
‘Pet me…. pleeeeeeaaaaassssseeeeee’
Another ring.
Sydney doesn’t even know that she is already Galacti-web famous for starting the “Graktz Challenge” meme.
Luckily Sydney wasn’t there
A video of halo using the spheres sent to someone who actually knows what they are may just be a bad thing
I’m honestly not sure what would be more terrifying to people, someone with nth tech items or someone with the same power levels in their own body.
I think the items are more scary. A person can be reasoned with. Items, especially items tied to a fragile person, could have ownership transferred suddenly.
But remember we are talking ’bout semi- (at least) -sentient items, which (who) seem to have no interest in moving away from Sydney. Too lazy to look up the page, but even Max was unable to shift them… I wonder if there is an auto-user-protection mode somewhere in the skill-tree?
Actually I also wonder if the orbs occasionally have a giggle at some of Sydney’s antics :)
The Orbs are proximity-locked to Sydney currently, but they’re no longer shackled to the previous user’s corpse. Want to bet your national/planetary security on how long it takes for them to let go of a dead user, if there’s a live candidate present?
Maxima could have the same problem if the geode symbiote wasn’t a natural organism and someone recognizes it as a lost bio-enhancement suit or something.
They don’t show up on video. :-)
I’m not sure they actually want Sydney to level up any more until she’s viewed as less of a loose canon. They’ll probably urge her to spend any future points she gets upgrading something other than the PPO, until she’s demonstrated greater tactical awareness and better aim.
The shield orb, for sure, both because it already saved their behinds on the Alari homeword, and because Sydney is a “mushy human” who needs it. Com and tentacle orbs, too. But the PPO is terrifyingly powerful for somebody like Sydney to have, and at mach 16, she’s already fast enough to cause tactical weapon grade sonic booms.
The may want all the help they can get after Earth’s superpowered assets are revealed on the galactic stage. The PPO was definitely not a priority, but she has plenty of useful options.
Points in the PPO could unlock more reasonable modes of fire or allow overpowering shields. I also wouldn’t recommend it yet but weapon upgrades could make things safer.
“Honestly, the team should be involving her in as much combat as possible since she’s the only one who gets a direct benefit fighting. I mean, everyone on the team benefits from fighting, but Sydney literally levels up.”
So does Vehemence…level up from combat/violence, that is. She happens to need to apply the violence directly as opposed to just soaking it up.
They already gave her orders (maybe it was just suggestions, dunno) on how to apply any new points. I’m not sure if she followed those orders, or if she has already leveled past the brief path they laid out for her, however.
Hehehe. Frix has a PKE Meter! Nerd out! Hehehe
At least we can rest easy knowing that the Earth is safe from any marshmallow based threats.
That’s a big Twinkie.
He’s using it to scan her boobs.
Hey… For all I know…..
All boobs shall be scanned. For Science!
Of course.
You know, Earth’s entry in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reads as “Mostly harmless.”
Just sayin’.
Earth in the Hitchhiker’s universe IS mostly harmless. This Earth though….Let’s be real: Stalwart, Hiro, or Anvil could each have probably handled the ground troops single handed, even Math could have dropped the ground troops in droves, Jiggawatt made extremely quick work of the shields that are from the sounds of it their best asset, Achilles could have frustrated the Fel just by standing in front of their canon so they couldn’t shoot anything else, and either Max or Sydney could have stopped the entire invasion without help. With the whole team on hand this was a massive curbstomp against a galactic scale boogeyman. And that is just one team – granted probably the most elite team – of supers. Earth of the Grrl Power universe is very far from harmless.
By number of people supers are still rare so Earth as whole is still mostly harmless ;)
At least Archon thought they were rare.
Then Kevin sent all those unknown supers to attack the restaurant and it was discovered that supers were not as rare as previously thought.
By a factor of ~100. Which is fairly unrealistic. Not the number of supers, but that all of those perfect physical specimens were unknowns. You’d think that there’d be plenty of supers, hiding their abilities or otherwise, who are models, actors, singers, or in other professions where their perfect bodies bring them wealth and notoriety.
There should have been at least one panel where someone said something like: “That chick Hex? Doesn’t she look a lot like that Victoria’s Secret model Mary Maryson?”
The press conference battle here reminds me of the Vancouver Event in the Deathworlders/Jenkinsverse setting (aliens who don’t realize how fragile they are in relation to humans (and how ineffective guns they can fire without killing themselves will be against humans) attack the Earth intending a live-broadcast demoralizing victory . . . and land in the middle of a hockey game).
In the Jenkinsverse, the galactic bureacracy panics and tries to seal the humans up inside our own solar system with a force field. The dialog on this page seems to indicate that option wouldn’t work on an Earth that includes Maxima in its population.
Oh…
Thank you very much, sir.
I just had to google that ref. and now I’m hooked.
*Pedant mode activated*
It’s not the galactic bureacracy that panics and seals them in. It’s one race, the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun. And….um….the rest of that thought is spoilers. I mean more than what’s already been spoiled.
*End pedantry*
One ship of them at least.
MOSTLY harmless.
The supers (and I guess the Council) are the exceptions that make it ‘mostly’ instead of ‘entirely.’ :)
Unfortunately for the Fel, that ‘mostly’ refers to the geographic/population concentration of harmfulness rather than its maximum degree. The dangers of excessive editing…
If it makes you feel any better, Dave, I didn’t see Maxima as posing “like a model,” but rather as if she were making a finger-gun and blowing imaginary smoke off of it. Which, at least, to me, makes sense in a context where people are gushing over her just-demonstrated destructive blast. Looking smug over being the most devastating superweapon in the known Galaxy is pretty in character for her.
She IS surrounded by attractive men that have no place in her military environment. She might haveto be super careful with familiarity between officers and those of lower rank, but those dudes are Open Game for her.
When’s the last time that happened for her?
Probably with coalition forces in the middle east.
But Frix is one of them, and Sidney isnt jaded enough to not get jealous.
Ok, either that engineer is off by a couple decimal points in his estimation, or the weapon and shield abilities of galactic community ships are rather impressive, considering that ONE petajoule is the rough equivalent to a quarter megaton of TNT.
If that guy’s estimates are anywhere close to accurate, as far as focused destructive potential goes, I’d have to say that Maxima definitely has it going on!
Ja – also terrifying that they have TWO city killers on the team. Let’s assume that “several hundred” translates to 400 petajoules (trying to go a little low). That’s a 100 megaton blast. HOPING that is near her top end, because if she went off pointed at the ground she’s going to kill everyone within about 18 miles. And then you have Jiggawatt tossing around antimatter – every gram she can generate is another 43 kilotons…
As long as she can only generate positrons, it’s not so bad; You can’t store them, after all.
Positrons are the lightweights of the anti-matter world, only 511KEV. Since lightning runs upwards of a billion volts in some cases, and probably averages around 100 million volts, her anti-lighting is only a half percent more energetic. OK, 1 percent, once you take into account the positrons annihilating electrons.
The only thing that makes it particularly threatening is that one percent radiates in all directions as highly penetrating gamma radiation. You’re mostly ok of a regular lighting bolt misses you, but if an anti-lighting bolt misses you, you’re still going to be sunburned all the way through.
Your post got me interested in the exact math of this, so I decided to work it out and post it. For simplicity’s sake, the following will assume that Jiggawatt maxes out in her positron production at an average lightning bolt’s power.
An average lightning bolt has around 15 coulumbs of electric charge, this is equivilant to 9.36 x 10^19 electrons. Double that to give the total number of annihilated particles, 1.872 x 10^20. Each particle destroyed produces a 0.511 MeV photon. While those aren’t the highest energy photons ever, there’s a lot of them. I looked up the joule output of each annhilation, appears to be 1.6 x 10^-13, so total energy release is (9.36 x 10^19) * (1.6 x 10^-13) = 14,976,000 joules.
That’s … a lot. She’s not knocking over a city block with that, but absorbing a dose at close range is going to be baaaaaaaaaaad.
Interesting about the positrons. The Ghostbusters use miniature positron colliders to generate their anti-ghost beams. Also the planet killer in “The Doomsday Machine” used anti-protons to slice up planets. “Pure, absolutely pure”.
They are also produced in the decays of certain short-lived particles, such as positive muons. Positrons emitted from man-made radioactive sources are used in medical diagnosis in the technique known as positron emission tomography (PET).
I’m betting Maxima is probably standing smugly like that because she just got told (and proved) that she is stronger then any known defense in the universe.
I’ve seen the device Frix is holding on a Sci/Fi show somewhere but I’ll be frelled if I can remember which.
Oh right! It’s a PKE Meter from “Ghostbusters.” Also seen in “They live” “Suburban Commando” and “The Family Guy.”
Hahaha, damn son, gonna have to pull your geek cred for taking so long on that one! XD
Admittedly, I’d forgotten or maybe didn’t even realize it was in Suburban Commando, so geek infraction forgiven.
Sam and Dean Winchester have their own version http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/EMF
bad news and good news:
The bad news is that a message has been sent that Earth has supers.
The good news is that it has been sent by standard EM broadcast.
Her report should make it back to headquarters in five or six hundred years.
Bad news again.
The EM broadcast only has to reach the hyper transceiver concealed on the dark side of the moon.
So, ~2 seconds.
Space cops to the rescue. Lets tell everyone they homicidal xenophobic monkeys just kicked the crap out of the religious homicidal zealots, without out understanding how. Yup this is going to end well. Someone may want to invest in asteroid insurance.
Now before someone rail about how I keep refer to the human race as xenophobic homicidal monkeys. Look up some history, we have people with our own species. Once we have an external threat as long as we are out of the bucket they are screwed. Bucket is the gravity well we currently live in it is easy to drop rocks in a bucket.
The Fel are not religious.
They are corrupted by Stygian energy and are much more akin to a zombie hoarde or a hive mind.
given the artifact stuff and Stygian being analogous to chthonic, getting a cultist vibe of ancient evil gods from them.
I have a little problem with the idea of several hundred petajoules of energy in one blast. You see, the Tsar Bomba–most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated–released about 210 Petajoules, according to Wikipedia. And energy doesn’t just dissipate into nothingness behind the target. Yes, Maxima could unleash some kind of blast like that, but the backblast would instantly transform the air around and behind it into a violent plasma.
It’s kinda like that XKCD thing on relativistic baseball: https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
The comic clearly isn’t aiming for any kind of serious scientific realism (it’s about superheroes for pete’s sake), but it bugs me when you glance at the hard science (by mentioning petajoules) and then ignore the actual consequences it would have in reality.
I think the whole point is that she was able to concentrate the power into a confined beam.
Any monkey with a basic knowledge of nuclear physics and a truckload of uranium can make a bomb that big.
“Any sufficiently advanced…” etc. The wormhole ‘long gun’ in the Schlockverse wraps all of its energy payload in “gravity braids” to contain and direct the shot, so it doesn’t blow up the gun itself. Granted, it’s only every fired in vacuum, but I don’t think that would make much difference. Sure, you’d have some localized heat, but I think it’d be similar to how lighting traces an ionized path rather than a uniformly expanding shockwave from a non-directional blast.
I think once the shield was breached, Max basically just waved her plasma cutter and sliced the ship in half. The bulk of any residual energy is now well on it’s way to Mars’ orbit.
For a superhero story which does try for maximum scientific accuracy, see The Fall of Doc Future (and related stories).
Since the main character can achieve relativistic speeds there’s a lot of focus on physics.
Well now comes the fun part. What are the galactic laws on battlefield salvage? By a life form not technologically advanced?
They would need to send in only persons in Nth level hazmat suits (or Achilles), since the Fel seem to spread by what may be a transmittable agent (like Borg).
Disposal of the casualties on the ground should be pretty thorough as well. If this were a standard Sci Fi movie the army would haul off the bodies for study, only for them to infect the researchers and start an infestation that threatens a plucky group of misfits trapped in the lab:
– The person one day from retirement
– The beefy soldier/secuity guard
– The young female reporter doing a story on the lab
– Two researchers who had a bitter divorce but must now work together to survive
– The corporate spy sent here to steal secret alien tech
– The IT nerd/hacker who must find a way out through all the security systems
You missed the question. Alien tech can now be salvaged by a bunch of lower tech beings, and probably reverse engineered. So what are the space lawyers gonna say about it?
“I have ironclad paperwork that forbids you from… um, please don’t point that at me.”
Unless the ship was stolen property and the crew was enslaved, I’m guessing that “to the victor go the spoils” is going to hold. “Hey, I killed it, I get to keep it.“
Well from the description of the Fel, it’s pretty much a given that the crew are enslaved.
I think if there were a known way to remove the Stygian energy without killing the host Cora would have mentioned it.
If there are any Fel survivors maybe Krona can do something nobody off planet has been able to achieve.
HFY.
Maxim 1: Pillage then burn.
Maxim 1; Pillage, rape, then burn.
If the tech is too advanced they will be unable to use it. So it may sit in a vault if they can build a vault for some time.
I have ADHD like Sydney, maybe worse. I can’t count the number of times I’ve ruined (MELTED) pans and kettles after starting them on the stove. And that’s no where near twenty minutes.
So yes, Sydney forgettting what she watching 20 minutes ago, with a flying trip and probable conversations in between as distractions, yeah she could easily forget it.
I have severe ADD and also have a bad habit of forgetting I’ve left a pot on the stove, but I’ve never managed to melt one. The worst I’ve done is, after an hour or two, boiled off all the water and had to scrub nasty mineral deposits out of the pot. What kind of cheap pans and kettles are you buying?
I didn’t exactly *melt* a pan, but that time I forgot I was making a batch of shrimp stock, and it ran dry, one of my nice copper laminated pots delaminated. And, did you know that a week in a George Foreman can turn a baked potato into ceramic?
You *could* melt an aluminum pan over a gas burner, though.
That’s what kitchen timers are for. Set one… even if you don’t plan to walk away.
My wife melted a hole in the bottom of an aluminum pot, when it boiled dry on an electric stove. And my sister, when she was a teenager, welded bacon to a cast iron frying pan; 30 years later, you can still see the ridges in the pan.
We have a sand blaster at work, and more than one of my cow-orkers has used it on their cast iron cookware, for reasons.
Probably melted a spoon or spatula. Maybe the plastic/rubber coat on the handle of a pot that was touching an inuse pot.
To some those mineral deposits ARE ruined.
My father has never been diagnosed with ADD but he shows a lot of the symptoms to my untrained eye.
I came home after work one day my first year after HS and my father was rushing to his car as I was walking up the lawn. I said “Hi” and he said “Can’t talk, late for my bridge game.” He hops in his car and drives away.
I enter the house and find the kitchen a shambles. The suspended ceiling of translucent panels below the rows of fluorescent lighting was all shattered, with shards of the paneling everywhere. There was a broken cast iron stove burner trivet (not sure what the official name is for these, the removable thing you set your pots and pans on above the burners), and the white walls were all a kind of very light brown color, like an ochre or a very milky tea, but not a solid color, kind of mottled.
As I learned later when he came home, he had wanted a snack and had indulged in his terrible habit of placing a can directly on a burner to warm up. This time it was baked beans. Then he wandered off and promptly forgot about it. Being on very low heat this time bomb took a while to develop, and then detonated, spraying and flash-drying the beans in a fine mist all over the walls, with the force of the explosion breaking the trivet and the ceiling panels.
After he told me my first question was “And you couldn’t have taken 10 seconds to warn me that’s what I was walking into?” Apparently that slipped his mind also when he went into the kitchen, saw the time on the stove clock, and realized he was late for his bridge game.
I’m just glad that he forgot it entirely, and didn’t walk into the kitchen just as it went off… He has a very high IQ, is brilliant at many things, and has the common sense of a puppy.
I’ve never been diagnosed with ADD either.
But, when I saw somethin on TV that showed how it affected adults who had it, I found myself thinking “Oh *@#`☆!_*, That sounds like me!!
Fortunately, I’ve somehow managed to keep th consequences of my distractability from being as… extreme as the ones you gave for examples from your father’s case.
I’ve only once boiled eggs till the pot was dry.
“its not that alien races are bad at war, its just that we are really, REALLY good at it.”
something a read somewhere
IIRC it was something from the Kzin series. “There’s a reason Humans stopped studying the ways of war”. Oe something like that.
Forget modeling.
How can someone put a hand on their hip – without putting their thumb behind their back – and think of anything but their hand?
too bad Halo is a member of an established American Super team, or she could go grind Xp on random conflicts on Earth. :)
Better yet, merc herself out to off-world conflicts. Better pay, “harder opponents”. Results off-world cred, higher xp.
GalacticTube: Dirtlings are dangerous because they can…
Destroy a FEL Supercarrier with ONE shot!!!
Eat Grak with no known side effects!!!
…
“No known side effects” is fair, as I would imagine that Sydney would go to great lengths to avoid letting anyone know about the side effects she did experience (“turn on your fart light,” request for tub of ice creams to sit in, DK-Class Intestinal Paradigm Shift scenario, etc.).
I just figured Max was letting herself preen a bit after one-shotting a hostile spacecraft.
“Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet.” – N. Fury
Nothing like an actual outside threat to get humans working together.
Uh, kinda begs the question: How does the galaxy *NOT* know about super powered humans already? It’s been hinted that there are hundreds, if not thousands of aliens on earth, and the knowledge of supers has been known on earth for quite some time. So, none of these alien visitors have communicated this to the rest of the galaxy? Shit, with social media on earth, we know what someone else has eaten for breakfast thirty seconds later across the planet, and everyone around the planet knows what socially unacceptable tweet a celeb said ten years ago within twenty minutes of someone finding it. We know the galaxy has interstellar communications and some flavor of social media, so what gives?
It might be the LEVEL of human super abilities that is news to off-worlders. They knew that human supers or ‘hupers’ as they call them, could do things like lift heavy objects, run fast, fly, or generate electricity. They did not know some of them could individually put out power equal to a thermo-nuclear bomb.
Maybe up until now watching human antics was the galaxy net equivalent of funny cats videos. And now they find out the cats can shoot frickin laser beams.
They may know there are supers, but not the extent of their powers. Maxima even said “I’ve always wanted to do that”, meaning she hasn’t gone full blast before.
I have yet to hear the author Dave say that she has went full power on that blast. That could have been a 10% power and she has never went over 5% so far.
There’s a girl from an obscure African village who can run a mile in three minutes! A long dead religious leader has been found alive on a small Pacific island! A special diet will let you to lose 50 pounds in 5 weeks! A primitive from a backwater planet destroyed a Fel dreadnought single-handedly with just their mind!
The galaxy is a bigger place than Earth. The amount of fake news is even bigger.
-10 points for not mentioning bat boy.
That, I think, may be the best reason I’ve heard yet. It’s essentially like an article from the Galactic Weekly World News.
It is one thing to report F through C class supers. Like, this one can climb walls, this one can lift ten times their own body weight, this one can make objects up to 20% their own mass levitate; this one over here can punch through concrete with little effort; and this one over here can fly without machine or natural biological assistance but only at a running speed and has a flight ceiling of about three hundred feet.
But to report B, A, S…and heavens forbid (no one in this comic qualifies…yet) OMEGA, is ludicrous and likely very small percentage of the super population *given no one is having crater and mountain shattering fights anywhere*.
Heck even believability of that might be taken as hyperbole. You tell your friends you saw a super head dive through a street and plow through it like it was made of bubbles, or summon lightning and tornadoes; they might think you mistook a lesser ability for that or that the super was actually a demon using high level magic.
I daresay being able to one-shot a hostile warship with shields up would put Max in Omega class.
yeah but having to balance her stats out might have made her a glass canon at the time. So like with any super, an omega feat does not an over all packaged Omega make. Like Storm from the X-men, Omega level powers but her body is 100% human, one sniper and she’s taken out, which unfortunately gives her an over-all rating in the C-range; supernatural beings tend to be easier to classify thanks to their power and physiology generally staying equal *a weather controlling supernatural being generally also has immortality, near invulnerability, and high levels of strength* for example.
However, when this comic started and the Vehemence fight I had Maxima pegged as a solid A class. But this omega level feat even with power stat cycling, she must be S with S+ and Omega potential. Because as strong as Vehemence got, nothing he did that was observed in the fight was really above an A class, even his regeneration was A-class regeneration as it was implied he couldn’t regrow his head (an S class regeneration feat)…or maybe just never had to find out we can guess.
Your scale must be a lot higher than mine if you had Maxima pegged as A class. I had her pegged early on as roughly equivalent to Superman, which puts her solidly in S class. Maybe Omega class, depending on which Superman writer we’re talking about.
Maxima is nowhere near Superman’s level as she is far from invulnerable to physical force. Even with her armor maxed out, Vehemence was able to break her nose.
And Superman has been KILLED. We have literally no point of reference for Vehemence’s strength other than “He broke Maxima’s nose, and then got stronger”. We do, however, know that Maxima is tough enough to ignore explosions that are far beyond what it takes to liquify a tank like it was just a warm breeze. Honestly your take away from him breaking her nose should have been “OMG, this guy just broke Max’s nose. How strong is he??” Not “Max must not be that tough.”
And it was only because she was grandstanding. Part of breaking that nose was leaning into the punch.
A belated idea for Sidney’s last exclamation on the previous page: MAKE it an exclamation. Add one word and remove the question mark for another exclamation point. “BUT THEY HAD A PRESS CONFERENCE WITHOUT ME!!” …like this is what has been foremost in Sidney’s mind during the trip back to the HQ, even over seeing the alien battlescape she’s flying above.
Major continuity issue.
The Universe KNOWS already the Twilight Council has to have data to keep the disguise tech working.
No, some of the universe knows that.
Huh… apparently those Alien vessels run on 4-core linux machines, seing how that fungus lady has htop open…
Except they pronounce it “line-ux”.
It seems that the humans that got off world ages ago and got their DNA edited probably got the parts of their DNA that held super power removed. While the space humans live a life generally far better health wise, but they can never get the super powers left to those on our home world.
Now that is said, Did everyone forget what Dues was doing by taking a load of Xeno tech he just got not all that long ago? I am sure he will have Hyper space drives and high tech guns and shield to protect the Earth from the xeno invasion that is sure to come.
First, I love that the two Dabbler-compatible alien uber-geeks are inspecting a hyper-idealized female form (with pointy ears similar to theirs, no less) up close and personal, but are ignoring her actual body in favor of complete focus on their device readouts.
Second, a quick hat tip to this community’s reading taste. After seeing ‘Deathworlders’ references for months (years?) on this forum, I finally looked it up and started reading it (via the ebook compilation on the author’s site, instead of the Reddit threads), and it’s fantastic. My phone tells me I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours on it the last couple weeks, and am only like 1/3 through. I fully intend to go read the early tie-in works once I finish.
Hmm. What are the chances that Irradon (https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-443-league-of-extra-atypical-gentlemen-and-ladies/) is a member of the Galactic police, or has some sort of influence?
Should be about a hundred percent.
Remember how surprised Cora was that Sydney had a device which generates Aetherium Causeways which fit in her pocket?
Contemplate that the Council had a Brane ripper not much bigger in a vault. Perhaps a different type of Gateway (and not self powered enough for extended openings) but still very small.
I am guessing that the Council’s Vault is a repository of things which arent supposed to be possible even on high tech worlds. The Xevoarchy high command probably sent in rhe Sorag centuries ago.
This’ll probably get buried, but I could see Syndney making that exclamation as a joke on the previous page, given her genre-savviness. There is no active fight going on, and so she does that to relieve tension or something.
And since I’m in a posty mood, why hasn’t Cora and team put their Alari refugees in touch with the Alari colony ship, or at least let them know it’s here?
I get that we don’t know anything about the Alari ship, and that the people on it could be a splinter group that had some sort of ideological viewpoint, but at least give them the option of reaching out to them. If they compatible, then Cora could offload them and resume transporting the Fel Artifact of Unspeakable Cuddles to its destination.
Or, if they’re doing the interstellar equivalent of transporting the One Ring to Mount Doom, then they may have just found Gandalf with a Plasma Torch…
I’m reminded of an Asimov short story, ‘victory unintentional’ where a limited and misrepresentative sample of human capabilities leads a (vastly superior) hostile alien force to surrender.
I don’t remember who wrote it, but there was a story about an alien race who came down to earth to determine how difficult Earth would be to conquer. Their ferocity index was a function of intelligence, strength, speed and viciousness. More intelligent is more dangerous. Adults are more dangerous than juveniles. anything which causes something else to back down is more dangerous still. One of the aliens is killed by a bear, which was so big and fast that it registers near the top of their scale.
Later they see a wolverine back a much large bear off a kill… the wolverine is therefore totally off their charts.
Then the pet wolverine goes home and his master, a five year old girl — and obviously a child from the size of the door — pops it on the nose.
They were still screaming when they hit hyperspace.
This totally off topic, but there was another ‘misunderstanding Earth’ short story I liked from a long time ago. A pair of alien researchers are sent to observe Earth Biology. They land in a New England forest in late summer and are under strict orders to not contaminate the environment. They wear containment suits when exploring and one day one of them accidentally rips a hole in his suit on a tree branch. They repair it on the spot but are worried about the effect. Over the next few weeks they observe that first all the leaves on the trees turn color and then start falling off. They worry “Oh no, we killed the planet. We are never going to get another assignment after this.”
Yes, I remember that. Their home planet had no axial tilt. Their entire civilization retired from space flight after that.
The mouse that roared Q-device
Supers may only exist on Earth, but paparazzi are universal. Current most read newsfeed: “The Galactic Enquirer”.