Grrl Power #804 – The hero we read
Apparently Sydney’s control over the lighthook is real good, because writing stuff in cursive with it would be kind of difficult. I couldn’t even write “The Mighty Halo” all in one stroke cause I was trying to figure out how she’d cross the lower case T and stuff like that. Plus I’m kind of a sketchy drawer. I lift the pen a lot, so it was unnatural feeling to try and write it all out in one go.
More amazing than that maybe, is that someone Sydney’s age would even really know cursive. I guess she’s on the cusp, but do they even teach it in schools anymore? I’ve read in several places that most kids these days have no idea how to write it and can barely read it because they barely even hand write anything. All their homework and socializing is done on a screen.
Honestly, that stuff sounds like grouchy old “back in my day” comments from disgruntled Olds. I would think anyone should be able to read it. Sure, the uppercase G is weird looking but from context, most words should make sense. Writing it would be a bit harder I guess. I have to think about it when I do it… which I think I’ve done maybe six times in the last decade. Most of which was because I was drawing someone’s handwriting in the comic.
Aranea appears in dramatic shadow in two panels because I needed to make up a bit of time from travel and family time spent over the holidays. Also I thought it would look kind of cool.
I’ve updated the vote incentive. It’s the same picture of Max from last month but I did a little more work on it. I darkened her median skintone so I could make the highlights pop a bit more, also I fixed some weird stuff going on with her jacket. It’s getting there.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
We need more heroes like The Great and Powerful Turtle.
Honestly now that GoT is done I would love to see a Wild Cards series on TV. Each book could be it’s own season almost, plus you would be able to constantly rotate the cast avoiding staleness.
Pharmadan – it’s already happening: https://www.wildcardsworld.com/wild-cards-tv-shows/
Okay.
https://www.wildcardsworld.com/wild-cards-tv-shows/
I had no idea this universe existed. I guess I need to expand my reading. Some of the characters have definitely unusual powers. https://wildcards.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Wild_Cards_characters
Wild Cards started well, but quickly degenerated. In more ways than one. The reboot series never quite lived up to the original, but I will admit I only checked out the first book of that series.
Yeah they don’t tend to be traditional comic book powers. I am interested as to how they will handle The Sleeper – will they really recast him every time he wakes?
They could do like “Quantum Leap”, where we only see the new body when he looks in the mirror.
More fun to use guest stars.
And more confusing (and expensive)
I’m remembering a joker ace who didn’t make this list. Possibly because he was most commonly called the Fat Boy. His joker aspect was he needed to eat literal garbage to survive. It wasn’t clear if he was compelled to eat vast quantities of it as part of his joker nature, or if it was the fact that eating the garbage gave him the ability to do literally anything he could imagine, though larger displays of power required larger consumption of garbage. I think he was only alive for one book, in which he was introduced, had his glory moment, and was killed. The powers he displayed were influenced very heavily by D&D. He basically chose to create a refuge for jokers, but was unfortunately about as diplomatic about how he did this as one might expect from a teenage D&D nerd with practically limitless power.
He would probably not make for a great first introduction to the series to the mainstream audience, so I can understand him not being listed.
I feel like there are probably others who didn’t make that cast, but I’ve not read any of this stuff in over 20 years, if I’m not mistaken, and most of the characters weren’t memorable enough to make that full journey with me.
They certainly do! There are a few Aces (an Ace is someone who retained their human form while also picking up one or more superpowers) who resemble your typical comic book superhero, such as Golden Boy who is your typical ‘brick’ type: Super strong, night invulnerable, with the minor twist of immortality added in. But the vast majority of them are very unique.
The Great and Powerful Turtle is one such. An overweight nebbish, he has an enormously powerful telekinetic ability. But only if he feels perfectly safe. The Wild Card is effected by the psyche/subconscious of the person. So he cannot use his powers unless he is in his Turtle Suit, which started out as a fairly primitive assortment of junk cars and scrap battleship armor with a few video cameras attached to so he could see out, and get better as he earned some decent heroing money and could improve it.
And that’s just the Aces! There is a wealth of Jokers, too. Jokers are the 99% of the people who aren’t killed by the Wild Card virus (which is itself a 99% chance) who are mutated into some obviously non-human form. Which may or may not come with capabilities that humans do not have.
It is a anthology series which includes some of the best names in science fiction and fantasy, and is very much worth checking out. And not just by people who enjoy the genre. There is a lot of spillover into detective stories, slice of life, drama, etc.
DaveB knows about Wild Cards? Now I’m really curious how much of the series he’s read.
I read it so long ago I couldn’t tell you which books I got through. Probably the first three at least, but I didn’t really like them all that much cause they were a lot darker than most superhero stuff out there. That’s to be expected from novels to an extent, but for whatever reason I didn’t stick with the series for long.
I’d say that’s expected for open world novels. I’m not sure why, but every work I’ve read that takes place in a world whose author gave an open invitation to everyone to write stories within the setting has gotten very dark very quickly. At the moment, I’m only remembering Wild Cards and Robert Asprin’s Tales from Sanctuary, but I have a sense there were others, some of which I decided to consciously repress.
Well, the real world is rather dark: Every character eventually dies, and many of them suffer horribly or are struck with debilitating medical problems before dying.
That’s why we do fiction: To read about better stuff than real life!
a concept so often missed.
a tragic reality is there is this pressure in the literary world, as well as other media now to go “dark” because they for some reason are pushing the narrative that “dark” is smart, that suffering and pain are intelligent, thought provoking topics and happy endings are dumb.
While there can be different takes and styles of stories, the above has become a little to prevailing to the point many new authors, film makers, and such are afraid for their careers of not having at least some depressing downer elements. However so many can’t tell the difference between, realistic emotional development and turmoil; and “we so edgy”; where one can be thought provoking; the other has been institutionalized to be seen as smart when its really not. Which to double down as this always gets defenders of the dark who think I mean every single thing needs to be butterflies and puppies. No, I am not saying that. I am saying you can have serious consequences, trauma to over come, and so forth; but doing it for the sake of not looking “dumb” and just randomly killing characters, having them brutalized, and making the ending just a kick in the teeth and depressing isn’t smart or even as realistic as they think it is; and when it is that realistic for someone this is the last thing they want to see when they try to escape their world into fiction.
Happy endings, overcoming adversity for the better should never be seen as “dumb” or “childish”; it is the hope for happiness someone may find in a story that they can’t find in real life. When depression becomes both the real and the fantasy it becomes inescapable.
Yeah, well said
A lot of these ‘new age’ “dark elementists” seem to forget that movies (and TV and books) are supposed to be an escape from the horrors of reality and try to over-inflate it into what should be escapist entertainment
Anyone who derives entertainment from those sorts of things are seriously messed up: it’s not like those old(er) ‘horror’ movies you take your date to so that she (or he) clings to you during the brief jump-scare moments, this 90 minutes of pure depressive shit with no reprieve
It’s one reason why stopped reading books: they just started getting too bleak and personally couldn’t handle it without getting angry (and this was in the mid 90’s, hate to think what the state of things has become since then)
Well, you’re reading the wrong genre. Horror books should be horrifying. That’s kind of the point.
And seriously, those old cheesy ‘horror’ movies? What? Those were considered crap back then too.
The top six horror movies of IMDB are all darker than most modern films and they’re all made in the 80s or earlier. How old are you that you want to go back to the “good ol’ days”? Should I say “OK Boomer?”
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres=horror&groups=top_1000&sort=user_rating,desc
Wasn’t reading horror books
And note how ‘horror’ in “‘horror’ movies” was in single quotes? To imply they weren’t ‘real’ horror (or the fairly modern ‘slasher’) movies
You don’t take a date to a rom-com tearjerker movie, not if you want the day to end well for you (personally never been on a date so only going by anecdotal evidences)
Don’t have to be old to appreciate good classic movies
Oh, when you derided the horror genre I assumed you were deriding the horror genre of books. People aren’t “messed up” for wanting to be scared by a movie any more than someone who wants jump scares for their date. They’re not off in the corner jacking off every time someone gets brutally murdered. It’s an escape no different from any other form of escape; an extreme emotional draw meant to disconnect a person from their daily life.
I completely agree, I love the old movies a lot. The new ones too ofc. One of my all-time favorites is Dawn of the Dead. One of the most popular zombie movies which spawned the zombie craze in the 00’s.
I like horror movies since none of them are scary. Just they have monsters in them.
Hellraiser: Interesting way to look at beings from another dimension and how they communicate.
Pumpkinhead/Pumpkinhead2: A story about justice.
Gremlins: A story about responsibility.
etc
Denied:- people who go to some shit like “Saw” or the “Final Destination” movies for ‘entertainment’ (ie to be entertained) is messed up
Didn’t “Dawn of the Dead” come out in the 60’s or 70’s? o_O
Horror movies can be okay (as long as don’t have to actually see the killing happen, the ‘body’ after is okay), can’t handle some of the older ‘thrillers’ due to the score ramping up the heart due to low blood pressure, and most of the horrors don’t have that tension-building music, just *bam* bad guy jumps out and some trash gets taken out (and you can usually tell when that happens)
While we’re on the subject, most of the highest-rated cheesy horror movies were made recently. Not in the 80s like the dark ones.
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls074292295/?sort=user_rating,desc&st_dt=&mode=detail&page=1
All I can say is… you got your priorities mixed up.
On the contrary, I mostly see people like yourself talking about how “darkness” and “pain” is being pushed as somehow intelligent. Which seems to imply happy endings are being pushed instead, doesn’t it?
An escape doesn’t need a happy ending any more than real life needs a sad one. What matters is the narrative. If the narrative calls for a sad ending then who are you to judge otherwise?
read the second paragraph again. I tried to snip this expected response. But yes, a good narrative and that being the focus of the story is fine. Like a horror story, a true life crime drama, ect… the problem lies when the “bad end” is being pushed so frequently on EVERYTHING, and especially in genres which were designed to be more escapism. I did say a well written story can cover these tropes, its when its done poorly for the sake of trying not to look “dumb” that its even worse; and the idea is being pushed too often that happy endings are for idiots who can’t handle reality.
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
But to be clear, I have myself written what could be seen as sad endings, bad endings, the villains win and humanity is doomed endings because that’s what the story called for. However those were horror stories, humanity against monsters, not intended to project the audience into something fantastical. Its the thing, when Robin was killed, it stood out, it was dramatic, because it was unexpected, different. But over time this sort of thing has been pushed, even more so in the so called deconstructionist ages of comics even more so than the dark ages of comics (which were more shock value) to the point it has lost its meaning. What is the point of a narrative where the protagonist can be killed and switched out at any time? Or one that just reminds you that its world sucks and you’d never want to live there.
Weirdly enough, this is amplified even more so than contemporary fiction which seems to only these days be either soft core porn romance books (if not outright pornographic) or else are *we smashed your grandma’s head in with your baby and shot your dog, and we’re the cops and we’re arresting you after we rape your wife* kind of over the top brutality; which isn’t a good narrative, but was pushed so much while I was in college as “the intellectual way of writing” that every speaker we ever had for my creative writing class was some hack who read off paragraphs of brutality that didn’t seem like they even had a story other than to express how much graphic violence against innocent bystanders they could bring up. Even mentioning that we had five people in a row like that to the instructor earned me a “you need to grow up” remark.
These weren’t horror stories, the events didn’t build the characters for anything, there didn’t even seem to be a story present (I mean if these events were a tragic back story and someone became a doctor or a lawyer to tried to fight the system on behalf of the abused it would make sense, but it wasn’t; just brutality for the sake of selling the books and poems as this is what was expected. Yet they were applauded as deep authors.
Well said.
Most of what I create is designed for a positive end, but a painful journey. But if a bad guy is objectively black-and-white and boring, only being of interest to forgettable NPCs, then I won’t write it. There are reasons for bad guys to be bad. If there’s no subtlety then there’s no reason to give the character life through the written word.
At the same time, if the “writer” feels the need to actually write out their drek, then they aren’t a writer in my eyes. There is really bad stuff in my book series- but I don’t have to say what is happening. Be subtle. Let the readers read between the lines, see what I didn’t say, and extrapolate.
Aiming at the narrative aspect.
and focusing on the fact this is a Super Hero comic so narrowing the subject matter to leave out social drama stories, domestic drama stories, and the like.
When we say “dark” and “edgy” and stuff in comics. People tend to think of bleak backstory, grumbly man who shoots first. The Anti-Hero trope.
and that is where the narrative is very important because the Anti-Hero trope can very easily be done in a way that feels too much like (My life sucks, I’m a hero only because I want someone to kill me, I aim my space gun in my mouth every day and pray I have the strength to pull it) or else a power fantasy of kill, kill, kill.
When it can be done smarter than that, with a sense of hope.
In fact I’ll link to this discussing the Anti-Hero trope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpABx1NOIX0
you see ideas of dealing with real world problems, dark and terrible aspects of the real world that real people have to deal with. But can be done in a way that isn’t (kick in the teeth) and give those people suffering those their own outlet as they can see themselves in these characters.
with the point being, there can be tragedy, trauma, PTSD (heck look at Steven Universe Future, its handling the idea of all this world view being broken, mental distress in a realistic but not overly bleak and depressing way that gives hope for a positive outcome, but not an over the top life is rainbows and puppy dog kisses way, but a realistic balance.
So, the reason why I made the comment I did in spite of your attempt to cover that base is because just two days ago I saw someone write an nearly identical comment. They included the Ursula K. LeGuin quote in the first comment though, not the response.
I once was on Youtube and found a video of a man getting stabbed in the face with a screwdriver. I think it was 82 times. The images stuck in my mind and I kept watching not because I was morbidly interested nor because it was in any way appealing. It was grotesque. The man’s breathing and small cries of pain were absolutely heartrending. I still tear up thinking about it even now.
Your writing teacher failed to teach you why “dark” is something the human mind is attracted to, if all they did is bombard you with brutal and grotesque authors.
Edgar Allen Poe has, in my opinion, some of the darkest poems. But I read them despite my aversion and had a hard time not taking an interest in what he was trying to convey.
The man who was stabbed with the screwdriver did survive his ordeal. The teenagers who stabbed his face were arrested. The man received reconstructive surgery. Yet no amount of recovery and happy ending will EVER recover what he has mentally and physically lost.
And that is what should be learned from dark stories. You don’t resurrect from the grave after three days, nor does the pain of being stabbed in the face ever go away. Poe’s Crow will haunt you for the rest of your life. But it’s okay. You didn’t get the princess ending but that doesn’t mean your life is over. It doesn’t mean you need to go shoot someone to spread your unhappiness. It means that you can get back up and work to ensure what happened to you doesn’t happen to others. It means that, unlike a princess ending, you will forever have something worth fighting for.
Sometimes there is no realistic balance in brutality. I’ve yet to see any story which comes even close to the man who was stabbed in the face with a screwdriver. This was a real video; not a screenplay. So tell me – if art chooses to not emulate an entire section of life, then how will sheltered children ever experience the horrors of the real world for themselves? How will they ever understand that life isn’t cookies and rainbows and that socialism isn’t a fix for their problems?
Part of the reason why society is so volatile today is because while the world continues to have severe problems, the quality of darker art has been degraded and suppressed. And yet we actively champion the lighter and brighter aspects of art that were already at the forefront.
Modern writers don’t know what evil is. They write mental illness as evil, they write random politicians as evil, they write pragmatism as evil.
The Joker is one of the most evil accurately individuals in fiction. Frankly? He’s not all that bad. Compare with Joseph Stalin. The Joker doesn’t even register on Stalin’s evil meter. The man actively enjoyed meddling with country borders solely to create strife and racial tension. Read up on his systematic creation of enclaves. This all culminated in the creation of East Germany and the horrors which proliferated there.
Yeah, it’s boring, but evil is sometimes boring so you don’t pay attention. Can you imagine an antagonist who acts like an obnoxious “get off my lawn” old man? But it turns out he’s been slowly buying up the hero’s neighborhood and installing more criminal gangs while the hero thought he was fighting them off?
I blame this lack of creativity partly on the concept of “deconstruction.” I’ve asked people to define the meaning of deconstruction and they can’t. They usually end up defining parody or satire.
The reason should be obvious. The inventor of the deconstruction style has himself never defined deconstruction. It has NO proper definition. Deconstruction is nothing more than contradictory rigmarole posing as intellectualism.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#Difficulty_of_definition
Regardless, if you think brutalist writings are low class and poorly written, isn’t that the perfect business opportunity for a new writer? Yet you would choose to directly emulate popular sentiment…? I think your college teachers had the effect they intended; they drove you away from exploring the full realm of art.
Not just dark art, but art in general.
While I agree with most of what you said, I will make two notes:
The goal of the narrative is important, does it have some message it wants to get across, does it want to evoke a strong emotion from the audience. Also at the end of the day much of fiction is intended as entertainment and while subjective I would never be entertained watching a real person suffer real pain, or anything trying to feel that way. I love horror movies but I won’t watch torture movies.
And second your last statement is an assumption. I was never driven away from exploring the full realm of “art” dark or otherwise. I may not publish what I write or sell my art projects but I write and craft constantly as a hobby. You had no reason or basis to come to this conclusion. All I said was I don’t like stories being needlessly dark just because they think they won’t be taken serious otherwise.
That is the whole discussion in a nut shell: I don’t like stories being needlessly dark just because they think they won’t be taken serious otherwise.
If they are being dark and “edgy” for no other reason, no other intent, no other goal; then it is hallow, shallow, and pretentious.
I did not say ALL are like that. In fact you have confessed you are projecting a conversation with someone else over what I said.
Zack Tilly!
There is a place and a time for ‘dark’ and ‘edgy’, just as there is for ‘light’ and ‘fluffy’, butt they need to be balanced, and there needs (should) be a reason: having the whole movie be ‘dark’ or ‘edgy’ is just trying too hard and ends up as trash
When was the last time there was a ‘light and fluffy’ movie that didn’t have some ‘dark’ in it? And yet they continue to push pure ‘dark’ movies with no ‘light’ or ‘fluffy’ moments (unless it’s intended to make the ‘dark’ even worse)
This has been an attitude in a lot of the so-called ‘Art experts’ For some time.
whether In Story or Picture somehow only the Avant-garde and the ‘edgy and dark’ Or shocking is somehow true art and that anything kind, or fun, or uplifting is somehow lesser Or childish.
in comic books at least we can trace a lot of that back to Watchmen and the deconstructive school of writing Where they Happily show how all our heroes have feet of clay.
In addition Frank Miller and his Batman returns and sin city and all the subsequent comic work he got. while the man is indeed brilliant he seems constitutionally incapable
Of writing anything without taking the characters (almost invariably women)
and metaphorically dragging them through the sewer.
All of the women he writes are invariably murdering psychopaths or prostitutes
and the only reason for writing innocents is so he can torture them past the breaking point
where of course they become either psychopaths and or prostitutes.
He retconned Daredevils old secretary As a Hooker and addict, And Catwoman as a former madam and dominatrix.
And His Batman and Robin limited series Showed a bat who made the Joker seem balanced and rational.
It is this attitude that led to the last Superman, and Superman versus Batman movies,
That nobility, and truth, justice, and the American way were somehow passé
Gotta make it dark and gritty If we want it to sell… Well, We saw how well that did.
Personally, it’s a school Of thought that no matter how well done, I personally despise
And avoid like the plague in both movies and print.
I agree completely with your assessment. Deconstruction is a nonsensical concept which has pervaded modern art and yet creates no discernible progress or variation in the artistic trades. As I mentioned to Rhuen, Deconstruction was never properly defined by its inventor and no modern artist has properly differentiated the concept from other schools of thought. Which is why artists who follow its reasoning merely end up making basal works fundamentally disconnected from what most modern individuals would consider artistic or creative.
Yes Ogg, rock good, but rock not art. Chiseled statue – that art.
Well put.
Yes, because of that little thing called “realism.” As Brett Bellmore said, no one has a happy ending in the real world. And prior to our inevitable demise there is likely to be a lot of pain and suffering. Insipid stories about happily ever after don’t resonate much with anyone who is no longer 7 years old and listening to their father tell them a bedtime story about princesses who are awakened by a kiss.
Suffering and pain aren’t ‘intelligent,’ but they are real. Dark isn’t ‘smart,’ but it happens in real life. Any story which ignores these facts isn’t likely to pass the uncanny valley test of a reader who can’t help but notice that things are just a little too pat in Happystoryville, and that Mr. Protagonist sure seems to not have a lot of actual troubles to overcome. It can be overdone, sure, and of course everyone is going to have their own preferred threshold. But again, only a 7 year old should have a threshold of zero realism, zero pain, zero darkness. Because that’s just a fairy tale.
Not everyone dies in an accident, or in pain
And not saying stories can’t have suffering, pain and darkness, even fucking Bambi had all three, it’s when that’s all there is
Nice to see you got the point, again
Man, it’s not just dark. It’s flat out bleak. Like, I’ve been struggling through the first book and everyone’s dead or an alcoholic or basically a slave and it’s like… Jesus. Surely someone has it good in this friggin’ universe.
Well considering it was edited by George RR Martin, who showed us all that he is a firm believer in the “Anyone can die” school of writing, there should be no real surprise that it’s darker than most comic books.
There are usually a few deaths amongst both the heroes and the villains in any one of the novels. Most Wild Cards don’t make you unkillable, and the books are written in a far more realistic style than comic books. I don’t recall a captured hero being put into a death trap ever, for example. Some of the heroes and villains are tied to political forces such as world leaders, the United Nations, or government organizations. Political assassinations by Aces or Jokers is not terribly uncommon in the novels which explore those aspects of the “what would happen in the real world if there were people with superpowers” question. And when groups of Aces or Jokers go up against each other, it almost always involved the deaths of some of them.
“Archon is in league with the darkness?” Aranea, do you even listen to yourself? Crazy medieval assassin spider nutjob…
Sounds like she read too many old books. Understandable, considering that was probably the only place she thought she could get information on demons short of asking them under duress.
“Why, why didn’t the iron work, the books said…”
*Same books also said geese hatched from barnacles, kid, you may want to consider finding better sources.
Seriously, for just half a second, my brain misinterpreted panel 3 as butt or chest cleavage. It was very disorienting.
That lighthook has some serious freakin’ reach. Starting to wonder if there isn’t some truth to my theory that it can be made to make actual hard light constructs if she unlocks higher levels in that orb.
Shouldn’t ‘the mighty halo’ be reversed in that panel so Aranea can read it? She’s against the wall so she’s seeing it backwards. If she’s the dim bulb in the pack it may still mean nothing to her… I’m sure Sydney, vain as she is about her code name would do everything in her power to make sure her attacker got the message loud and clear… (and apparently in this case, backwards).
She’s not doing it for Aranea, she’s using the lighthook to alert the rest of her team since she’s unable to speak or use comms atm.
I think she is doing it for Aranea. She is pointing to the “mighty” and underlining it, to remind Aranea to not forget the Mighty in her name.
I say both. If you can’t call for help AND remind your enemies just who exactly they’re dealing with, you’re not trying hard enough.
It’s on the wall, Coulter.
If you look closely at spider-girl’s elbows, you can see that she’s facing the wall, so the text IS correctly oriented for her benefit.
O.K. You try writing backwards and see what happens.
It’s not difficult.
Meanwhile, the other heroes are all busy looking at a cute puppy.
I’ve argued that cursive does now have a place in modern English education. The rise and growth of touchscreen writing is a perfect use case for a writing style that keeps your stylus (or finger) on the surface of the device for full lines. Also to minimize physical contact of the palm with the surface.
Which I also find ironic because prior to the modern capacitive touch screen, I saw little value in cursive over touch typing.
yeah, touchscreen writing is NOT best done with cursive … well, maybe on a tablet. But most of the time you are writing in a limited inout area so you don’t have room for a full word. It’s a letter at a time. And those letters aren’t “standard” english letters either, for ease of recognition. The (Palm) Pilot had the best (imo) hand drawn text imput alphabet.
The only problem i can see with that line of reasoning is that text written in the Cursive font isn’t very “computer friendly”, such that it takes too much processing power to decipher correctly, especially from a generic user vs a specific users standpoint (when is the last time you tried to read “Doctor’s Scrawl”?). besides… the phone developers already HAVE a version that IS computer friendly, it’s called “Gesture Typing” or “Swyping”… i don’t know what it is exactly since I’ve never USED it, but it ends up being a simplified alphabet pattern encoding that uses various shaped touch-n-drag pathways to form letters, words or even to change the functions on your device that is very easy to encode into an app… so i don’t see Cursive making a come-back anytime soon, if ever…
FYI, I did use cursive text recognition in 1994. IBM tablets (1″ x 13″ x 8″ in size approx) pen operating system. Intel 486 50megahertz cpu. Alternate win3.11 with pen capable dll for input areas. The hardware looked like q very thick tablet today. Back then it still had a problem and it was not computer power. It was was inconsistency. The same person writing the same thing will do it differently each time.
It could do a few words and numbers great for the general public, but you needed to “train” it for a specific user for it to be usable. It still used dictionaries and grammar checkers to help out input. However; it was still never perfact. It is still why we use radio buttons and checkboxes and drop down choice lists.
Handwriting, voice, vision etc. Any kind of ‘recognition’ faces the same issues. Fuzzy input. We have not even touched smell.
They keep trying, and maybe A.I. type systems will be able to make the breakthrough to make it seamless.
Sorry to ramble on, but as a programmer it’s a facinating puzzle to work on.
It’s nice to see people were working on this back then
Older brother was working on AI software in the early 2000’s, he claimed to have finished the theoretical part, butt then supposedly commented suicide because he felt he had nothing left to do
*but then supposedly *committed?
Oops, thanks for catching that
Yes, meant ‘committed’, still don’t believe he killed himself without finishing his work
Seems odd that Aranea would immediately go on the attack (both last page and this one).
My guess is she’s a traditionalist demon hunter. That may seem odd in today’s world of world communication, but I still run into people online with this sort of narrow world view, who think there’s two types of people, good and evil, rather than realizing that there’s over 7 billion types of people, because different people are all fricking different, some in ways that even I can’t imagine.
Immediate attack is sound if you discover yourself in a situation where you are too close to retreat without getting hit. That is why it is the textbook military response to an ambush.
She got knocked through the wall by a demon and was confronted by a similar sized pink headed woman talking about the veiled appearance of the same demon who just knocked her through the wall.
Aranea doesn’t seem to know everything that is going on with supernatural entities in the modern Grrlverse, but despite Tamatha getting a good hit in Aranea is a competent combatant.
If things get bad, one idea for Sydney’s potential escape (that might not work) is:
1) pull up the Comm orb
2) send out the light bee to another location
3) ‘port herself to the new location.
Problems:
1) the ‘port may take a button press on the orb. Hard to do when paralyzed.
2) She can’t see where to send the orb from her current face-in-the-sidewalk position.
3) She would still be unable to move when she got there.
Point 2 isn’t an issue: the way that orb works, she’ll have an avatar (which I can assume can be placed mid-air) that she can see through before she teleports to that location.
But her best escape is clearly flight & forcefield.
She might have a problem using the flight orb if her arms are limp. Or any orb for that matter once she’s airborne. Currently, she’s maintaining contact with here palm by pushing down on it with the orb, pinching her hand between it and the “floor”. As soon as she would lift off the ground her hand would fall away from the orb and she’s fall back on the ground, so no moving short of the orbs carrying her as was mentioned before.
Although, I suppose she could pinch her hand between 3 orbs, 2 behind and one against palm, so her hand doesn’t roll off the one behind it(ever try to lightly hold something uneven(like a hand)between two spheres before?).
And pinning her hand against her side would be tricky if she’s moving. Especially since she’d probably fold over once lifted.(since she’s totally limp)
Also, given her limp state, it’s probably not a good idea to just pick her up right now. You’d have to be sure to carefully support her head to avoid a neck injury.
Unless she can be detoxified quickly, I can easily see her being carried out on a stretcher.
And before you say “Tamantha’s dose wore off quick enough” she was more likely either physically knocked out or with a different drug. Since we saw her regaining consciousness, she also didn’t have any apparent muscular paralysis, and Sydney is awake, just unable to move any muscles(except apparently straining her scalp)
Also, we don’t know if Tamantha’s abduction took place 10 minutes ago, or an hour or two ago. There could have been some time before someone turned in her phone. And it also could have been some time before it was brought to Decolette’s attention.
Nope. That’s a non-issue.
This page and her use of them as a combat weapon in her brief casual duel against Math prove well enough that she can mentally control them enough to keep them touching her hand enough for flight to be a non-issue.
What IS a concern is Sydney hasn’t already taken a hold of her forcefield orb in her other hand. She is so lacking a sense of self-preservation sometimes.
It is also a non issue for another reason, numerous instances has shown halo scooping up ground (and water) surface when she engages the shield. that means the shield can bisect surfaces. If she uses it here, the gound she is laying on will come along inside the shield. DaveB hasn’t seemed to want to go gorey, but I can clearly imagine Sydney accidentally causing the half a worm problem. (What is worse than finding a worm in your apple?)
Umm, no, you are thinking of that scene when she exploded the tank: she didn’t ‘scoop up’ the ground, she simply formed Mr Buble too ate and caught the flying sand inside
Don’t recall ever seeing a scene where Sydney took off after deploying Mr Buble, and we have seen her being moved while Buble’d (during the Restaurant Rubble fight when Kevin pulled her after she grabbed him with her MolestOrb)
so I’m just now noticing the orbs have very defined images within them. Do we have any good images of the final unknown orb?
https://www.deviantart.com/davebarrack/art/Halo-s-Skilltree-Wallpaper-02-428874048
is the best I can find
Ugh cursive is still teached. Like everywhere.
What are you, some ironic boomer ?
It really isn’t. Like, at all. I’ve known adults in their late 20’s who don’t know a lick of cursive. I’ve seen an artist redo their work because it had cursive and over half of their adult audience complained that they could not comprehend it, despite the great character quality. I’ve been in conversations with people going to school today, who were not taught cursive.
I hold (despite my inability to write all of the capital characters, thankfully I can read them, weird that), that cursive is important, and should be taught, for mental stimulation, if nothing else, but I can see that it is fading at this point. I don’t know what percentage of schools no longer teach cursive, but I do know that the number is well, well, above 0%.
My mother used to work at an elementary school as a teacher’s assistant, and complained that “They aren’t teaching kids cursive anymore.”
Cursive has 2 benefits(that i can think of right now) over printing letters one at a time, One,(which has been mentioned before) is speed, the other is that you don’t lift your pen/pencil and put it back on the page anywhere near as often, reducing impacts that are transferred to the hand, thus reducing fatigue and carpal tunnel(which people did get from writing by hand all day.)
the main downside of course is reduced legibility. over time you get get faster and faster, using less motion per letter, until your words are just a slightly squiggly line.
I myself have a hard enough time with printing legible letters quickly as I tend to make the letters so small, that if my pen or pencil lead tip is thicker than half a mm they look like dots and lines. I have to slow down and concentrate to make anything reliably legible to other people. (without them needing a magnifying glass at least). And in my schools, (middle and high school at least) you were required to print anything that was going to the the teacher(fill in the blank tests, and essays and such).
On a slightly similar note(about writing styles and fonts), (print and script (cursive) being two separate handwritten “fonts”) Id like to slap whoever stole the horizontal bars off the capitol “i” making it identical to a lowercase “L”, (IlIlIlIl, can you tell the difference?) And I’ve seen many handwritten letters where this was the case as well.
I was once showing a friend on FFXI how to write macros for their “cure” spells. I typed “Cure II”(2 uppercase “i”s) and they saw “Cure ll”(two lowercase “L”s). It just goes to show what state of education we have today when someone who speaks fluent Italian, (and visits family in Italy from time to time), doesn’t know their Roman Numerals.
Fair on all counts, I think, though personally I’ve never reached the illegible cursive stage (Illegible print though? Well, if you count print that is the equivalent of your average 4pt text processor type as illegible, yes, otherwise, I tend to keep my lettering clean and precise). That said, I have experienced the joys of translating someone’s cursive recording of a three hour lecture, were three others (who actually know cursive) said they could not decipher a word.
Interesting point on the L and I too, used to be that one was slightly thicker and shorter, it seemed.
If roman numerals going too would suck.
As someone who has had to cope with carpal tunnel, the torsion and all the twisting and gripping with cursive writing makes it worse than printing.
What you really want is voice recognition.
Sure, then you just have to get it to recognize fifty dozen dialects (and that’s just in the English-as-a-first-language countries)
Ever watched “Taggart” without subtitles? (“Thiz bin a moida”)
And me.
I’m a native English speaker. Most people can understand me well enough these days, but computers can’t. As far as I know, I have a unique accent, due to an odd combination of my combination of speech impediments, being horrible with spoken languages in general, and learning to talk from somebody who picked up languages like he was still a little kid when he was in his 40s. Part of what helped him do that was the fact he adapted to the accent of whomever he was talking with pretty quickly. That wouldn’t have influenced my accent too much, except he was regularly interacting with people from all over the place when I was learning to talk. I’ve had linguistic experts try to place my accent, and most of them listed at least half a dozen of the several dozen regions where people my father had been working with at the time had been from. And, of course, also Hollywood, because, well, Hollywood.
Ummmm. Try not to migrate to the Land of Oz, then. You will probably be allowed in to look at us, but citizenship? That won’t be given if you cannot speak the computer’s ideal of the English language. You will be required to read a piece of English literature (we’re being very un-specific here, it could be as innocuous as a newspaper article) as part of your evaluation.
Your problem will be that voice recognition is an arcane art strongly reminiscient of terrorist influences, and we don’t care enough to develop or steal one that actually works as advertised. This is because, like on-line translation, there is no effort to allow the Machines to Think. In case they decide to Rise and Rebel.
There have been true accurate reports of Irish people who were perfectly understood by Department of Immigration officers, but could not be understood by The Computer. So were refused citizenship. And English as spoken by the Irish is paradoxically a beautiful symphony.
I used to be good at learning accents and regional vocabularies. The military gets people from all over the world, so you hear some odd ones. I could generally mimic someone by the time I had known them for three days.
No, generally the software takes time to tune and customizes itself to the primary user.
So I’m guessing that you don’t need and haven’t used voice recognition software.
Yeah, and how much time is required for The Machine to adjust to a thick Scouse accent? And then have it recognize an Irish Brogue or Creole
Talking about “fonts”/typefaces… The big problem is that English ain’t (and probably never was) English.
The Académie française was established in 1635, in the reign of Louis XIII, later supressed during the French Revolution and restored soon after by Napoleon Bonaparte. All attempts to establish a similar English language authority have been systematically and ferociously rebuffed by practically everybody.
At the same time however, the English language was exported to to everybody that wanted it, and many that didn’t: this started ‘way back in the 5th Century in what was then something that looked like England. And no, it didn’t sound much like today’s English. The French language had no such defect, with the notable exception of Quebec. (It has been noted that the Quebeçois speak a purer form of French than Metropolitan France.)
Hokay, so much for background. Many non-English languages have a more restricted calligraphy, usually due to more authoritarian teaching institutions like The Church and l’Académie. Much of the current “font flowering” is owed to the Renaissance period, which was felt in all Europe, but found its highest expression in what was rapidly becoming Britain. It is this artistic licence which allowed printers to develop our serif/sans serif variations, which were then rapaciously exploited. Taken to their limits, the development of Sans Serif typefaces allowed printers to eliminate the decorative horizontals on the Uppercase I and J, the lowercase l, and the numeral 1.
Back when I was coding, writing the programs on pre-printed pages for later transkeying to punched cards, we were forced to specify which variant face we were using, “slash-alpha” or “slash-numeric”. This was used by typists to differentiate between 5 and S, 1 and l and I, etc. Of interest is the treatment of the letter Uppercase O. In programming, not too confusing: we don’t use the character “Ø” in English language programming. However this *is* a problem in any form of word processing. There is no form of Uppercase O in slash-alpha which is unambiguously different to the various treatments of “O” in other languages. And many typeface designers have learned to give the numeric 0 a vertically oriented ovoid form.
There are many typefaces freely available which differentiate between 1, I and l; and between O and 0. Sadly Ariel is not one of them and it should be deprecated whenever possible. And yes, Roman Numerals do lose a certain je ne sais quois when expressed in Arial and similar faces :D As it happens, it seems the Romans were smart enough to use single-glyph numerals quite early on due to the mental gymnastics involved with manipulating tally-marks. Don’t believe everything Wikipedia tells you.
Try looking outside of the US
No cursive means college professors write comments on papers, and some students can’t read them. I discovered this as I was approaching choosing to retire to write, in particular to write science fiction novels with superheroes and superheroines.
53 years here, so obviously I can write in cursive (though I prefer not to, for readability). Once I was out of school and no longer required to use the “proper” forms, my uppercase G, Q, and Z reverted to “printed” form. Because their cursive shapes are ridiculous.
50 years, I write cursive so rarely that when I do it is damn near illegible.
You’d think I was a doctor.
And this is one of the many problems with Vigilantes. They’re typically very uninformed, and run off of guesses and assumptions.
By calling them ‘demons’, it’s pretty clear she’s some kind of religious, has caught whiffs of supernatural stuff going on, but isn’t clued in, and is assuming that it is all inherently evil. Unfortunately, she may be too zealous to be educated.
Probably some kind of ‘deep government’ conspiracy theorist as well, with ‘them’ controlling things in the background, now suspecting that Archon is also under the control of ‘them’. She seems the type.
Very, very few vigilantes do their research like Batman does. The vast majority are rather like this woman: Uneducated, ignorant, zealous, and stubbornly resistant to logic.
Or she is far more informed than the vast majority of humanity.
Clearly Demons in the Grrlverse are some kind of religious because they call themselves demons so uneducated ignorant zealous stubbornly resistant to logic.
They also admit (go back and actually read the council meeting arc) that the old legends of supernaturals preying on humans were fact, and that the Twilight Council was created to curb that.
What spiderninja is trying to do is what Semper Vigilantis actually does. She just doesn’t know that the supernatural community has already reigned itself in centuries ago.
Amazing. Every single word of that was wrong!
If she had any remote concept of what was going on, she wouldn’t be grabbing a kid who happened to be a succubus to ‘reign in evil’ because there’s zero indications that she’s actually been doing anything wrong. Which means she’s just painted anything the Veil handles as ‘evil’.
She also wouldn’t need to roll up a kid for information, or assume that a kid WOULD have information, if she already had it, now would she?
Legends are based on what happened centuries ago. These acts no longer happen. So if Spiderninja is acting on myth and legend and assuming that they are true, then that’s just as bad, if not even worse, than being completely clueless. Bad information is worse than none at all.
What she is doing is nowhere close to what Semper Vigilantis does. They at least make sure the parties are guilty before executing. Not so much the case with SpiderNinja.
Where, exactly, would you propose she get reliable information on the entities altering everyone’s perceptions in order to pretend they don’t exist, and that have been discussed as having outsize influence? Grabbing Tamatha sounds like something done in desperation to get research, when everyone else is kept in the dark or obligated to lie to her.
You can tell she’s a paranoid, though. She kidnapped a demon that looks like a normal person to others (and she knows it does from some of her comments), this led to a super-powers fight where she was thrown around by visible bright lights and then when the super-police showed up asking questions she assumed that meant they were in league with the demon and no, you know, investigating a kidnapping and said super-powers fight.
er “not, you know”, the ‘t’ got dropped somehow.
Of course, Archon is aware of the ‘demons’ but she leapt to that conclusion with very little evidence. Poor decision making leads to bad decisions, even if a particular decision ends up being right by accident. As seen by her drugging Sydney immediately instead of pretending she didn’t know anything.
Good points. But to be fair, I’d think that feeling alone in seeing things like that would leave someone quite a bit paranoid.
Oh, it’s certainly a natural response to what she’s discovered, but ‘natural’ and ‘good’ aren’t always the same.
I am amazed at how many gratuitous assumptions you have made in this post.
You… do realise that your third para-rant described the Twilight Council perfectly, don’t you?
Sydney is around my age, if not a bit older, if I remember correctly, and presuming the time-scale hasn’t been sliding here *remember’s Obama was president a while back* she’d still be in the age-range where they were teaching cursive.
And I even got lucky enough that a few of my teachers later on made it mandatory.
It’s still late 2010, early 2011 (or was it late 2011, early 2012?)
if BOTH hands are palm up, then maybe she can use the Fly orb. I wonder if it can be used to “fly” individual limbs?
But if she cannot grab the orb theres a high potential for bad stuff happening. Better to use the lightbee teleport.
Clearer handwriting than my mother (one of the few people I get written letters from).
But my mother is almost 90 and her hands shake pretty bad, so I can’t really blame her.
Perhaps it helps to know that my seventh-grade Language Arts teacher would have been very disappointed in her. It’s almost as bad as mine.
I love how the first thing Sydney does after getting her hand on a orb is correct Aranea.
Aranea: You’re Halo?
Sydney: The _Mighty_ Halo
“What is this? Is it some kind of secret code?”
“That’s cursive writing.”
“Cursed writing! Get it away from me!”
Hah hah!
“You want cursing writing? Let’s see.” Words in the air: Spider silk sac lady(?). Puss swilling, aardvark molesting, … you get the idea!
Remember, this lady wrote her website address using the Lighthook during the initial press conference, right before the website went down due to traffic load.
i miss the Great and Powerful Turtle…
I bet she’s practiced many times
It is quite fortuitous that the purse containing the orbs happened to fall open … and the appropriate one fell into her hand.
What’s fortuitous is that she has telepathic control of the orbs’ location. This is well-established canon.
Yup. The orbs have enough force to punch hard, so pushing their way out would have been trivial. For that matter they could have ripped their way out. But doubtless Sydney will have either chosen a bag that could be opened without damege, from the inside, or will have purposely left it unclasped.
got a reference for that? I think I’ve seen her control their orbits, but that seems different to me than if they’re not flying in the first place. Unless the orbiting itself is HER doing, and not the orbs?
The Restaurant fight. She beats the ever-loving crap out of the Shadow Ninja guy with them.
Broke Sciona’s troll-body arm with them as well.
She moves them by teleknesis and intuition, as explained during her initial interview with Archon leadership. The orbiting halo is just the default pattern when she’s not paying attention to them.
Fortuitous, yes, that she fell with her hands palm-upwards.
What actually do the orbs consider to be her palms? Nuzzling into the thumb-forefinger web?
↑This ‼️↑
A person here who has met some very fine ‘Merrcans but never visited there… I’ve heard (I think) almost every tale of educational catastrophe in the USA, and evidence shows that a very few of those are to be believed… But inability to write/read cursive?
And I have read all of the posts in this thread.
OK, my schooling dates from the second half of last century, so my cursive was learnt early. And the weapon of the schools’ choice was a “dip pen” :@ However, I have noticed that many people–I won’t call them by derogatory epithets–actually do not have the patience to write legibly in either block (printing) or cursive, so they laboriously really DRAW all their letters…
I’m put in mind of the old German Fraktur, prohibited by no less than Martin Bormann in early January 1941. Of course, English-speaking nations chose not to obey this, and many of my post-war German texts were printed in Fraktur. We were also shown examples of German hand-writing. I could only think at the time, as now, “Oh dear!”
Personally, as I think most of the opinions are, I’ve never found cursive to be “difficult”. Oft-times it gets a bit more cursive than it should be, and my style has “developed” with age, but most people tell me that “At least *I* can read that!” And many of my younger work-mates also display very fine cursive, almost to the point of calligraphy, in their documentation. And they do this All. The. Time.
Ahhh. Uppercase “G” is a two-part letter no matter how you write it. Most upper-case English letters are not readily ligated.
IMNSHO, difficulty is not the problem. Laziness is the problem. Believe it or not, it’s just… easier! Not only “me!”
I must say that I doubt you’ve heard all the tales of academic woe and failure and chicanery. There have been so many at so many levels, even leaving out actresses buying their progeny’s way into college. We have so many systems that the very idea of “academic standards” is hilarious. Someone thought up “Standards of Learning” that everyone must meet, and an enormous number of teachers began teaching to the test instead of the course content.
Cursive. I learned it in 1957-1958 at St. Theresa’s School in Massachusetts. I was in the first grade, but we shared our classroom with the second grade, and they were being taught cursive, so I learned.
Testing, one, two, three. That was a test. It was only a test.
I don’t write in cursive very often. But my daughter tells me I have a “pretty signature.” she never sees the way I sign at work. Anyway, I prefer to use Monotype Corsiva font wen I want it to look pretty. :)
Can confirm: in school past a certain point, I learned to fake it VERY convincingly. Whenever tests were used for grading, I could nearly ace the class due to simply having an innate ability to very rapidly pick up the very specific information necessary to test–I retained none of what I was tested for because I was learning how to pass the tests, not learning the material on the test.
My academic failures thus fell into two categories. The first, where I didn’t even see the point in trying to do the tests that I knew I would ace if I took them, due to an utter detachment from the course. The second, where testing wasn’t the main scoring method and I couldn’t pass because I test well and thus…didn’t pass.
My example is not atypical in that regard whatsoever. I’ve often ranted about the education system basically being designed for conformity, for cookie-cutter cardboard cutouts, where everyone is tested the same way and expected to get the same results out of it, where different learning styles aren’t encouraged, where there’s little reason to conform to the unique talents and skills of students and instead the system tries to browbeat the students into conforming to the system (when it SHOULD be the other way around, the system conforming to the needs and talents of the students), and I could go on hours on my rant there because I know it fairly well.
Education is, by and large, a joke–what’s more, many of the more competent teachers who DO have this emphasis on caring about the individual students, are being told that they’re doing it wrong. They’re discouraged from this; they’re prone to being fired; they’re more or less pressured into not caring about their students’ education and as a consequence, students just receive far, far less help than they should.
And part of the problem is that teachers aren’t paid to care about their students. To the contrary, they are somewhat paid to NOT care about them.
This is, of course, understandably, a broad sweeping generalization. This is not a universal truth true to literally everywhere across all schools. Not all teachers are like that, either. The better ones aren’t! The better ones ignore the pressure to give that empathy and try their hardest to bring out the unique skills, talents, and learning methods of their students rather than trying to force students to conform.
But even if you somehow had the luck of the gods to have every teacher you had be like that…the simple truth of the matter is. I have been taught by a ton of teachers, my mom is a teacher, many people in my family are teachers or know teachers, I have several friends who are teachers, and plenty more whose education experience matched my own, and across the board, we all can more or less attest to that sad, but inevitable truth.
That most schools just. don’t. care. about their students. Seeing their students as statistics more than they see children.
College is SOMEWHAT better about this but even in colleges this mindset can persist to some degree.
If you are a teacher who is a good example, power to you! If the teachers you know are good examples, power to them! If their employers are saintly enough to not fit the negative portrayal, all the better for them! But the simple sad truth of the matter is, those rare positives are the exception to the general rule of outright apathy and neglect, where you can have, sayyyyyyy…a student be bullied BY THE TEACHERS enforcing overly-strict/harsh “rules” that punish the victim of a crime instead of the perpetrators because the perpetrators were rules lawyers that TECHNICALLY were following the rules even though they were tormenting the child who didn’t follow them. (And yes, that happened to me.)
The scale ranges from outright abusive to outright saintly, sure. There are extremes at either side. But the scale overall has a VAST lean towards being closer to the former overall rather than the latter, sadly, so those who don’t know about the former due to having experienced the latter are incredibly lucky and have NO clue JUST how lucky they were.
Sydney should have been searching while maintaining her shield orb!
Sydney had been drinking, and was probably too inebriated to Army/Police.
DaveB’s art has improved over the years.
DaveB’s art has disimproved over the years.
The seventh orb must be the emergency medical hologram, and she will realize it momentarily!
The mystery orb can’t be the HMO (Health Maintenance Orb), because every time she’s been injured (including this time!), it hasn’t done anything. At the very least, it should have administered a frozen yogurt enema after the post grakz incident. It should have leaped into her hand like the life support/gas orb did.
Everything will work out fine – this is still part of the flashback.
Think of all the Archon and Council characters that didn’t appear in the one frame before the flashback began. Are they alive? Did they survive? All you see are Max, Anvil, Sydney and one of the guys (Mr. Amorphous?).
Everything will work out fine for Sydney, who cares about the others, they are not main characters, they can be GRRMartin’d at any moment
And it is Wart we see at the beginning (note the dapper suit)
Love the backronym :) I too think the guy we see is an early version of Stalwart.
My guess, a newly empowered super who’s powers somehow let them see through the veil discovered all the mind controlling the various magic groups do and now, rightly, thinks they are an evil group attempting to take over the world.
The Twilight Council isn’t attempting to take over the world, they already control the world, it’s SmugD who is attempting to take over, one piss-shit country at a time (the US is next on his list)
Well, yes, but if one is a newly empowered super who has suddenly discovered demons are real, they’re probably not sophisticated enough to get that the council already has all the control they want even if someone straight up told them, without properly leading them around to pick up the right clues and make sure they actually pick them all up.
Which is why Aranea is picking up low-level demons to find out more
She probable is a demon herself without knowing it and that is the reason she can see through the veil.
or a Mythical Creature. There’s a race of six-armed folks from Greece called the Gegenees that Jason and the Argonauts came across.
Wouldn’t be that big a step given we’ve already seen Gorgons and a few others as Twilight Council Members or Semper Vigilantis operatives.
She could be a Gegenees, as well. Mythical Creature, Greek.
Would be easy enough to get the answer to what she is. But it seems this cameo character’s creator has opted not to take part in any of the comment sections; unlike Tamatha’s whose was around for a little bit.
now might be the time to check if the life support orb heals paralysis and maybe check the mystery orb just in case its the space ships med-bay
Now might be the time to read the fucking comments and see that that has been suggested (and dismissed) so many fucking times already!!
From reading the fucking comments (comments are indeed a form of intercourse), I note that nobody else suggested dealing with the paralysis with the Life Support Orb. Someone did suggest that anything that paralyzes all the muscles would also paralyze the lungs/diaphragm, leading to death. Breathing oxygen would help with that, so recommending that orb is a good thing.
Also, many of us pooh-pooh the idea that the mystery orb is the HMO, because it didn’t leap into her hand and fix it when she took the shrapnel to her cheek or shit grakz, but you know, it might be a simple case of needing it willed to her hand to use that way. When someone suggested a paper cut to test it, she did a spastic chicken dance and declined.
But, yes, it’s been suggested. Read other comments.
“… reading the fucking comments (comments are indeed a form of intercourse), …”
Ab_so_lutely‼️
Maybe not cure the paralysis specifically, butt either or being a med-bay or life support yes
Actually, fairly sure at least one comment mentioned curing the toxin (or was that someone suggesting Kronachrome hack it and convert it into alcohol?)
My suspision is that healing has never happened because Sydney has never bought the right node.
When Sydney’s air mask came off in the pool, the green orb moved itself to her hand. I think if she unlocks healing we will see the same. But…its like Sydney’s discussion about Cyclops and Wolverine.
If Sydney becomes able to heal she will start getting hurt more often.
As we should all know, Sydney can control the positions of the orbs without touching them, but all of the other functionality requires her to have the orb in hand in order to activate it. I always assumed that this requirement had something to do with the shear concentration of nerve endings in a human’s fingertips. That somehow Sydney’s nervous system was interfacing directly with the orb she was holding.
With Sydney’s nervous system currently not functioning properly this should interfere with Sydney’s ability to use an orb, were the direct interface theory true. Since there obviously is no degradation of Sydney’s control over the tentacle, this precludes that theory.
So what possibilities remain to explain why orbs must be in hand in order for Sydney to operate them? Could it be something as simple as the orbs having biometric locks on them and they read fingerprints to unlock the higher functions?
I’m gonna guess it isn’t so much held in hand as held to skin. Sydney sees the orbs as tools instead of appendages so maybe that mentality is holding her back on that front…
It can’t be just a next to skin thing, as Sydney has tried it all over her body and they only worked in the palms of her hands.
There has been much discussion over the past several years about the orbs being an advanced race’s (the Nth) version of a spaceship. What if instead the orbs are the Nth race’s version of a prosthetic limb, or a wheelchair? The “powers” that the orbs give Sydney may be natural abilities for members of the Nth. The orbs are an accomodation for the disabled. The orbs start out in a “learner mode”, where only the most basic abilities are unlocked, and require physical contact with the hand. As the disabled Nth gains experience with the prosthetic orbs additional capabilities are unlocked. Perhaps with additional experience the requirement the orbs be held in the hands gives way to direct mental control, like Sydney already has with the orb’s flight.
Personally I hope Dave B never lets Sydney get direct control of all the orbs at the same time. A Sydney that can still be suckered into taking an anesthetic shot to the shin is an interesting character, an overwhelmingly powered Sydney not so much.
The all active at once part might be an emergency mode she can’t do at will?
All hands to battlestations and all that.
The very center of the skilltree only had 2 pips until the last time it was out, when she upgraded it to 3 as ArcLight requested. And we haven’t seen her do any experimentation since, but an increased active usage count is one of the theories.
On the skill tree and within the perimeter of the orbs themselves there are 28 nodes and the seven pie pieces.
I have wondered if there might be an apotheosis of sorts if all thirty five of those interior spots were to be filled in.
The orb weilder would be imbued with whatever abilities they had unlocked but the orbs would vanish leaving whatever powers on the outer part of that’s skill tree that had not yet been unlocked forever out of reach.
That would be the worst design ever; even if there’s some limit to how many skills can be unlocked at once, a re-spec should be possible rather than locking the user out of additional options.
…unless of course her free trial has expired and that’s the paywall. “Please contact your representative to choose a purchase option, or insert 1B souls to continue your trial period for an additional year.”
If you look at the Chi meridians, the center of the palms are a point that Chi/spirit can flow in/out of the body. Maybe that has something to do with the activation of the orbs
so her flight is not really controlled by her motion right? could she fly even whilst paralyzed like some sorta zombie superman or would it look like one of those levitating woman magic tricks?
I am mentally picturing Halo flying like Kat from the Gravity Rush games, just limply flailing about like a rag doll through the air
I love your attention to the small & goofy details. The last panel had me doing some analytical gymnastics trying to figure out what was going on when I saw…. tarantula toe!
Admittedly my medical knowledge is cursory, but I can’t think of a darn thing that would paralyze Sydney’s body so completely while leaving her alert, that would continue to allow her to be alert for more than, say, fifteen seconds longer.
Seriously, a muscle relaxant/paralytic, no matter how specific, strong enough that someone can’t even wiggle is strong enough that someone can’t even breathe.
If this is also true in the Grrlverse, then Sydney has very, very limited time to get herself to a safer location controlled by other members of her team – preferably team members with some relevant medical abilities, training, teleportation power, or something else relevant to the needs.
Although, IIRC, anybody bigger than a toddler — AKA, anybody who masses more than a Barrett sniper rifle — is beyond Harem’s ability to teleport.
Grrlverse medical knowledge is cursory, period. Remember when Dabbler explained that she was immune to nearly every disease and could even cure some by having sex with the sufferer? (And everyone said “Blue balls!”) Anyway, she mentioned magical, nanotech, and magitech as categories outside regular medicine. This could very well be one of those, and therefore not designed to kill.
Krona might be able to just hack the drug out of Sydney’s system.
or change it into (more) alcohol.
Harem can’t transport living organisms (not counting her digestive tract and skin) period (not even plants)
It’s just a wild thought but maybe it isn’t a real drug. Maybe it’s a superpower.
The device she administered it with looked pretty pharmaceutical.
I’m not sure where she could get a presumably advanced paralyzer substance like that, since she doesn’t appear to have sources who can telll her much information about demons. Maybe it’s produced biologically by her power suite, but she uses an injector to deliver it because it’s more convienient and safer to everyone involved if she doesn’t need to actually bite to use it.
Fortunately, it’s a comic book, so the author can simply decide that such a substance exists, and it does.
This is a test. This is also a test.
Did you pass?
You don’t see a serif font, do you? Some html tags work. FONT and the CSS workaround do not.
That was a poor opener for this.
She should have lead with the shield to trap her opponent, then used the hentorb to weave a cocoon over herself.
Aranea wouldn’t be able to pierce the shield, and if she tried to do anything to the hentacle she’d get grabbed and this would be done and dusted. Halo just needs to delay until somebody either sees the glowing blue orb, or CIC notices the alarm caused by her having a sudden adrenaline spike followed by collapsing and decreased heart rate, which is almost a clear an ‘agent down’ sign as a flatline. (If they don’t have their CIC manned 24/7, and don’t have their gear monitoring vital signs, then they have fucked. up.)
Aranea royally fucked up here, too. Her first conclusion should have been “A Superhero police officer witnessed an OBVIOUS METAHUMAN getting into some shit vis-a-vis kidnapping and intervened”, NOT “The superhero police are secretly devil worshippers”.
Or, rather, she shouldn’t have *said* the second thing. That would have left her an opening for negotiating, which would have been far more useful for… whatever she’s trying to accomplish.
Umm, she can not create the shield without herself inside it, and she cannot create the Molestorb inside the shield
Except, the first thing Sydney did was accuse Aranea of being the kidnapper, which means Sydney knows who and what the kidnappee is, and that was before she even checked to see if Aranea was okay
So yes, Sydney is in league with the Darkness (which is a proven fact! she is friends with SmugD)
Ok, point on the shield.
However, she doesn’t need to know who the kidnapper is to see a six-armed person carrying off some kid with lavender hair.
my take on cursive{being 33 yrs old} is that I could never use it well and past that I couldn’t even Read most peoples natural cursive anyway. I don’t miss it unless you can use it and it looks good…
Something just struck me.
You see how this character has 2 sets of arms, and so does Dabbler? My long run speculation is that this character has found some reference/prophecy to Dabbler’s demon nemesis (forgotten his name now sorry), and has put herself in the place of Dabbler. I would love to see a “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you aren’t the chosen one here” scene.
Bit of a long shot but had to get it down in case I’m proven correct.
Aranea has six arms, not four. Granted, we haven’t seen a well lit full body shot of her at all so far.
Panel 6 clearly shows 6 arms.
You can look up neon signs as reference for how to write with the lighthook. Anyway, as far as cursive goes, there are two philosophies one might take: standard cursive, which includes dumb, antiquated letters like capital G, or else mixed cursive, which is basically just as easy to read as print. You just adapt some of the letters which are hard to basically look like print and abandon the philosophy of requiring letters to be contiguous. Honestly, if people complain about not being able to read mixed cursive, then they’re just being whiners.
One point I haven’t seen mentioned yet on cursive and its origin and purpose is that it was developed in the age of writing with inkwells and pen nibs. The excess ink drops at the start and end of each line (beginning and end of contact with the page) can be dealt with in 2 ways to avoid smearing (often prior to additional blotting). Serifs are an additional (un-wetted) stroke which spread the ink into a neat line, perpendicular to the stroke. Cursive connects the letters in order to continue individual strokes for as long as possible, minimizing the additional release of ink from making/breaking contact.
How does the “monster hunter” know Halo knows who she is defending?
For all she knows Halo is subject to the Veil and that she works together with monsters.
As far as she knows the entirety of Argon is subject to the Veil.
Sydney… described Tammy, and said that Aranea was under arrest for kidnapping if she was involved in Tammy’s disappearance
Oh, you mean, how does Sydney know that Tammy is a demon? Does it matter? She is still defending a demon, whether she is aware or not
Sydney, knows that Tam is a succubus.
Was going from Aranea’s point of view
The villain have 3 legs in the first scene?
That’s one of her 6 arms.
How? How could you confuse one of her arms (all above her hips) for a third leg? o_O
Guesty don’t.
You know what sorts of responses are likely to appear if you bring up third legs.
They started it! (Can’t believe actually said that… )
I would have commented about it but it would have been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel with a nuke.
“Jake the Peg” Rolf Harris 1965 :D
Yups, Jake was who came first to mind :D
Nice Wild Cards reference! I’ve mentioned that series of anthologies a few times in these comments, but I don’t recall you ever responding to them or mentioning anything from them previously.
Awww snap! A true beleiver in her cause! She’s going to be hard to deal with, moreso in court. Hopefully she can get a little time in a psych ward with an Archon hire option, having therapy amounting to “There are ‘d’emons, and there are ‘D’emons. learn the diff, noob! Attacking one helps the Dark, attacking the other helps the Light”
On the other hands (lots of choices for Dabbler and aranea), if aranea is a were spider, she might get inducted into the council, OR placed under the supervision of the council. If her multitude of arms is a result of Kali-ness, the supervision might come from either the council OR Archon. We shouldn’t ass-u-me that six arms and two legs automagically means “Spider!” DaveB may be leading us down the “primrose path” strewn with deceiving fish. OR, her parents might have been on the same tour that stranded Tammy on Oyth. They could be… cousins.
I did learn cursive as a kid…but while I retain some of it as an adult, know how to write about half of lowercase and uppercase (not the same half, mind you; there’s some I know lowercase of which I don’t know uppercase of and vice versa), I forgot the majority of it.
I learned JUST enough to retain enough to write my name in cursive as a signature. Full name, even. (And my cursive signature is probably more legible than like 95% of people’s signatures as a result.)
To be honest though…I hated learning cursive and was glad when it was dropped. I learned it JUST before it was dropped, but childhood-me thought that it being dropped was a GOOD thing. Kid-me CELEBRATED the removal of the requirement.
…As an adult, I lament the loss of finer language. :P
Anyone ^else^ notice how Ms. Six•arms appears to be suspended in the air¹ ~ upside•down no less?
(¹Last panel [#7])
its a static image.
She’s jumping
It looks to ^me^ like she’s being suspended mid•air, by Sydney’s Lighthook/… Tentacle(aka: “molestorb”).
(and trying to wiggle her way free of it [ »roll•eyes« ] )
the light hook isn’t touching her, there are motion lines to her leg, and Sydney’s monologue all reveal the course of action plainly.