Grrl Power #802 – Sydney marks the spot
Really they should have just known to follow Sydney. All the good stuff happens to her. It’s like she has a luck field around her, only it’s an “Adventure Impetus Field.” I guess that should be added to her official unofficial list of powers.
Krona’s console says “Moonjump” BTW. That’s just the base mod that puts a 1/6th gravity effect on herself. Krona’s probably rocking about 94 pounds. 1/6th of that is like 16 pounds. That’s not a lot, but I’m not sure her legpower would get her up to the roof of the club. She has a multiplier on the Moonjump so she only weighs about 8 pounds now. That part is easy for her to code. The hard part was making it so she doesn’t blow away by the lightest breeze when she’s mid-jump. She had to make it so she weighs 1/12 normal to gravity, but retains her mass in respect to other forces of nature.
So yeah, her time-loop-sort-of-but-not-really kerfuffle notwithstanding, she’s actually a pretty good programmer.
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does anyone else thing Sydney should switch shirts back and put her wig in the bag so as not to blow her pink haired secret identity, or is it just me?
Yes, it is just you, because it’s not a ‘secret identity’, it was simply so she could have a night out without getting mobbed (like what happened to Vahriah)
Even without establishing a fully-developed identity, she presumably wants to go out incognito again in the future, and being able to re-use the same disguise (or even a small handful of disguises) is much easier (and more comfortable) than starting from scratch every time if she keeps revealing her identity anyways.
We… are talking about Sydney here, all she has to do is open her mouth and her identity is blown :P
Her disguise is just crowd control, not secret agent stuff, as long as she doesn’t show up on TV like this her disguise should keep working.
Yes, this
Frankly, sydney can easily disguise herself to go out, the only real issue is she needs a invisibility field like just above her head to make the orbs hidden. (or an invisible high tech version of “tubey” so she can go out)
She’s still NEW to the whole “being an operative” thing. it’s only been a couple of weeks. Sure she can trade beams with mecha-cthulu and do FTL travel with her orbs, but the sort of keeping your details on the down low” action you have to do as an operative is not Sydney’s bag.
Aranea lost her mask, does that mean we will see that she has no eyes (when most are expecting her to have eight)?
“The hard part was making it so she doesn’t blow away by the lightest breeze when she’s mid-jump.”
Frankly, instantiating separate variables for gravitational and inertial mass is one of the first things I’d automate as standard practice if I had her system.
She may not have a choice: if it’s not in the API… As I understand from her envy of Halo’s balls (ermh…), she has access to the dev console, not the engine source. And recompiling and in-place patching the universe is an iffy proposition anyway.
IIRC, Bad Things™ would happen to physics if the gravitational and inertial mass were decoupled. At the very least, the equivalence principle is a postulate of General Relativity, meaning she would lose the mathematical framework for her hacks.
Maybe she’s just (!?) limiting the way her mass interacts with the Higgs field….
I’m actually surprised Syndey didn’t Lightbee through that vent system right away, a teenager she had some fun chatting with just got abducted. I don’t see why she wouldn’t let that distract her from her “orb-free evening” and just jump straight into “snoop” mode. Seems uncharacteristic of her to me.
What vent system?
Just like with Harem’s *VORP*ing, Sydney kinda needs to know where she is going for the LightBee to work: she can’t see anything while using it, she has to either know where the destination is (ala Alari Prime when attacking Squidward) or staop every now and then to get her bearings (ala Wars Marehouse when she went looking for Pixelicious… oh, and Sci-fright)
Of course Sydney can see with the Light Bee. We watched her do exactly that investigating Sciona, and we watched her do so again scouting her way inside Squidward’s shield while she hid in the rubble
On page 497, Sydney can’t see the lightbee through a window that’s grimy on the inside surface (and the holo-Sydney, of course, can’t wipe the dirt off the inside surface). Sydney specifically tells Harem that she can ‘feel’ when the lightbee probe is in a solid object instead of an open area, and that she can’t see with it until she manifests the image of herself from it.
So, yes, she can see, hear, and talk (but not touch) using the holo-Sydney manifestation, but the little ball version only has a vague sense Sydney describes as “I can feel a path, but I can’t tell what’s around me. I guess I can only tell what’s not around me.”
Yes, thank you, she can ‘sense’ her surroundings, she just can’t see or ‘interact’ with them
Again, with Squidward, she could see her destination (their foot), she was just under the impression they were protected by a force-field or she would have simply flown in person (plus she was worried they might see her in person as well)
I choose to believe that Krona had her powers add an actual boing sound effect to her jumps.
Seconded.
Thirded
Reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon in which one kangaroo is annoyed at another – “Just jump, you fool: don’t go “boing” every time you do it!”
And for those who haven’t heard The Good News™, The Far Side finally has an official site and is in daily rerun syndication!
DaveB makes it sound like Sydney has a virtually permanent, low-level infection, of a minor Luck virus from Red Dwarf.
It would explain a lot.
Now she just needs the sexual attraction virus to stop the luck virus. But that would cause a whole slew of new problems.
The Marvel power is “chaos seeker”, if I recall.
Or the GURPS (?Dis?)-Advantage “Weirdness Magnet”
She may *weigh* eight pounds … she still MASSES 96 pounds.
The wind will still have to act versus her *mass*, not her weight.
The only drawback is that she could possibly be knocked off-balance by a wind gust.
Remember the old physics saw regarding the little girl and the docked QEII.
What about Sydney’s Recon Orb?
The lack of a Force Field implies she feels invulnerable, like she would
by sending a Hologram of herself on recon.
Or, she is, as someone else implied, using Flight and Tru-Sight (personally believe it’s just Flight)
The fact there is no ‘Real’ Sydney still beside Specs and Pixelicious totally rules out using LightBee and HoloHalo
I misread that as ‘Bacon Orb’…..
Mmmmhhhhhh Bacon….(Homer voice)
“…And I use this orb to distract villians with the smell of cooking bacon. It’s super effective”
how did her wig stay on with pixel’s jumping and presumably sydney’s flaying?
Comic magic
You noticed her wig staying in place (like the three or four dozen commentators who posted already), and yet failed to notice her hands, feet and eyes had gone… o_O
Meanwhile, I noticed the eyes… but not the hands, feet or wig.
To be fair? The Time Loop But Not Really was…KIIINDA one of those things that takes a master level programmer to even DO. It’s like…
“Hi. I made a game in a single week. From scratch.”
“What agme?”
“ET, the extraterrestrial.”
“That’s…the worst game ever.”
“…Yes. But it WORKS….and If I had another week I could fix the bugs.”
“You don’t have another week.”
“Well, send it out then!”
We had ET for the Atari in the early-mid 80’s, and never had any problems with it, so, looks like they did have that extra week 9or it’s just some bullshit Urban Legend shit that everyone believes and propagates to sound like one of the ‘cool kids’: “Everyone is talking about how bad this thing is, I have never even heard of it before, but if I agree, then maybe they let me hang with them!”)
I have the dubious honor of having been one of those people who was a kid at the time and owned the game. It was awful. I could make a list of the bugs in the game, starting with the awful hitboxes and rotating scenery… But honestly, I’ll let how few hours I put into that game compared to other games I no longer even remember the names of speak for how memorably bad it was.
What system did you have?
I mean, really. When you can have trees rendered sideways or upside down on a 2d screen due to how retardedly the game map and travel was coded, something is seriously screwed up.
Moonjump wouldn’t need to do anything special to avoid breeze issues if it just shields her partially from the pull off gravity. You still have the same Mass on the moon, and hence the same resistance to being pushed. You can jump a lot higher and further because you aren’t being pushed down as hard, but it would be bo easier for a breeze to shift you than on Earth.
Same mass, different weight.
Of course I am assuming she’s mimicking the moon with her power via a gravity hack, not doing a very different thing with a mass hack, but hacking your mass would have unintended side effects (such as the mentioned breeze problem, seriously increased acceleration, decreased momentum (and noticable air resistance)…. Mass hacking would be weird.
Indeed it would be. It would affect the acceleration rates of not only the body on the macroscopic scale, but the speed of blood movement, cell biology mechanics, and the way subatomic particles interact with light and each other. You’d need to be able to fudge for the effects on how matter works, or else it would probably be lethal.
Of course, in that vein we already have Stalwart. I think. Increasing gravity instead of increasing mass would mean you’d fall over way too fast.
“All the good stuff happens to her.” I think I’d refer to that as a first-person plot development field.
The funny thing here is that you don’t even realize that you’ve described the relationship between mass and weight perfectly.
So, this shouldn’t be hard for Krona at all. “All” she has to do is to hack the gravity local to herself. Her mass remain unchanged because she isn’t hacking that at all. And therefore she can jump large distances but will remain unblown by the wind.
Gravity is how much you weigh. Mass is what hurts when it hits you.
All the images in the title bar…I swear it looks like Peggy said something hilariously embarrassing about Maximal and everyone else is looking right at her, all shocked..
I have several questions about those images. Like how some of the random images, especially some of Sydney’s, become utterly unhelpful for identifying the character when taken out of context, or how some characters who co-own the last slot have actually been more prominent in the story than Anvil, who merits a permanent slot…
Well, Anvil is a sergeant, so, guess rank hath it’s privilege :P
Also, Anvil was more prominent early one when Dave built that site functionality, so the answer to most of your questions is probably “Dave’s working on the comic instead upgrading of the site.”
Maxima. Damned spellchecking…you know I like transformers!
Ok she is kinda a sloth when it comes to waking early and doing physical training, but acting like a spoiled teen who doesn’t want to do her shores when the life of someone she just bonded with is at stakes? Asked by the tutor who just gave her free lunch even.
If not fur duty, not a little bit curious? A supernatural teen has been kidnapped through the vents of a crowded place without any witness.
Also the no shield is kinda out of character. Last time she went searching for a mia person she presumably got killed.
Sydney may be under the affluence of incohol. I think she’s had more than tee martoonis.
Sidney has become an asshole.
She’s a whiny recruit in basic training who just lost a pass off base and has to get back to training.
↑»:This!:«↑
Welll… maybe not “whiny” ~ » roll•eyes «
She’s also trying to do as much as possible without pulling out her balls all the time
Plus she’s probably a little drunk.
Great opportunity for her to learn about the relationship between great power and great responsibility. I’m sure there’s a well know saying about that…
But yeah… her hesitance at pulling out her orbs might lead to some bad consequences (?)
Last panel: when a loud noise attracts her attention, shouldn’t she TURN AROUND?
Umm, no, because maybe you don’t want to see what the loud noise and wet thump was
Think about what a limb breaking sounds like, now multiply that by eight…
Maxima or Anvil can afford to keep the loud noise behind them. Syd is as yet un-ballooned, but at least has the presence to alert the others as a “first responder” should. I would assume that on tomorrow’s strip she has both turned around and bubbled-up.
It’s entirely possible she still has battle-fatigue, which is a bit like concussion: it’s not always obvious and can produce symptoms well after the event train.
Honestly, how many people, in reals, when they hear a loud thump or crash behind them, immediately turn around and look at what made the noise?
How many would be in the next county before they stopped filling their panties?
Remember the Council Chamber Calamity? A veteran adventurer (Dabbles) jumped, and Maxi only turned because she already had the ‘heads up’ from Sydney
Sydney, here, at least had the presence of mind to let the others know before investigating
How many movies have you seen, where the guard hears a noise, and goes to investigate without letting anyone know, thus allowing the good (or bad) guy to get them out of the way and sneak in undetected
This way, if something does happen to Sydney, the others will know there is a reason for her (blessed) silence
At least we agree on Syd letting the rest of the team in on the secret as a first response :)
How many peeps in reals..? Quite a lot as it happens. Many of us have either been in the (enemy-facing) military, or work in jobs where what’s happening behind you does reeelly matter because SOMEBODY FORGOT to tell everybody…
Oh yeah, the movies :( How many plots would be ruined if characters would only do as they are supposed to?
But I’m still going with Syd’s battle-fatigue :) And this event was supposed to be at least semi-therapeutic…
Ex-military would know, immediately turning to face the loud thud could be the wrong decision: if it’s a shell, then it’s about to explode in your face if you turn around
The proper course of action, is to duck, cover and report, and then investigate. If you have no way of communicating with others, then you damn well stay put until someone (hopefully) arrives
Maybe in this case the appropriate response is to launch upward at a high rate of speed angling sharply backwards to put the building spiderthump was tossed through in the way…while the orbs shred the purse and take up their usual position.
Come back low and bubbled ready to use the Lighthook or the PPO.
Also, it was stated much earlier, and sometimes obliquely, Maxima was testing / training sydney. That plus the combo of sydneys adhd means it is very likely that sydneys “panic” or trained reaction is report in & put up the Shield Orb.
(since Maxima is a former nerd, she has probably noticed sydney minor “protagonist” aura where everything seems to occur around her in some way (lately anyway))
Probably, butt we are talking about Sydney here, a cereally untrained nerdette with an overactive imagination
If this was an RPG, I think Sydney has the disadvantage, called “Trouble Shooter.” It’s being at the right place at the wrong time, and named after the 1st hero to have it.
it’s being at the
What the heck is Sydney holding in panel 2?
Her handbag, containing the Orbs. As seen through the flailing-effect nutcracker filter.