Grrl Power #867 – Tour from the stars
Yeah. Earth is apparently open for business. At least some aliens seem to think so.
The first panel here didn’t quite land like I’d hoped. I think if you look at it long enough, you can tell it’s a guy leaning down to look out the windshield of his car at a rocketship that’s landed in the middle of times square. The reason it doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped is because if this was a TV show or a movie, you’d get a clear shot of the guy, then the focus would rack to show the spaceship, and neither one would be at 50% transparency.
I considered cutting the panel in half and doing a focus change, but I thought it’d be too small, and it still does work. It’s not elegant, but you can tell what’s going on if you spend a little time on the panel. Lesson learned for next time I guess.
So… a big part of me is convinced that I’ve seen almost this exact joke somewhere before, but I can’t place it. It could be one of those self-cryptomnesia events where I thought of this joke a long time ago and then when I re-thought of it, I thought I was repurposing it from something else I’d seen – or if I’d actually just recycled someone else’s joke. I hope I haven’t, but I don’t know, this feels like something I would have seen in… I want to say a Men In Black movie? But the aliens are secret in those, so they wouldn’t be wandering around. Well, if I copied this joke from elsewhere then I apologize to whoever popularized it. Or whoever did it first – honestly a scene like this could have appeared in half the books you guys recommended last time.
Speaking of which, there were a lot of great suggestions for space opera or at least sci-fi books under the last post. My wishlist has swollen considerably and I’ll be checking a few of them out at least. I should have mentioned I’d already gotten into some Honor Harrington though. Quite a few recommendations for that. I really liked the technical space battles in them, something I wouldn’t think I’d be into, but I got to something like book 7 or 8 and was like, eh, I get it, and didn’t follow through with the rest of the series. I guess I can always go back to it.
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Oh wow, first..I never get to be first :)
First on scene, Y.
First to comment, N. Man ya gotta comment.
Yeah, being first commenter means nothing if all you say is, “First!”. You gotta have something relevant to say.
JoeGuy gets first comment credit.
I second the motion.
Didn’t take long for the tourists to show up.
They seem nice, at least.
So did Vehemence, lol. He was quite nice to Sydney.
Then he started fighting :)
He still is.
He is even more nice these days since they keep him high all the time to stop him from goding Hulk again.
Plan B if aliens start trouble to the point even Maxima can’t stop them. Let Kevin out.
If Kevin succeeds where Maxima fails, then who’s going to reign in Kevin again? Enquiring minds want to know…
Sydney talked him down before, but that was backed up with the threat of Maxima blowing his head off (not in the fun way) if he didn’t surrender.
Just as last time the entire team or for the new variation Squidwardia(by pushing him through an aetherian causeway to the Alari home world(after having made a deal with the Alari first to take on their agressor for tech))
That thread only worked, because they already controlled him, they can do it again, because he has shown to be able to tank significantly less than he can output.
They can also put traps in him. Examples: plant first a nuke in his head you can set off at all times and design a power stealer install it in him and activate it when needed.
Well clearly if they unleash Kevin and he rampages uncontrollably, then they will have to stop him with Sciona.
If Sciona rampages uncontrollably, then they will have to stop her with the Alari world destroyers.
If the Alari world destroyers start destroying worlds uncontrollably, then they will have to tell Halo to take the gloves off!
I propose a new in-universe curse for when things really hit the fan: “Halo’s Mittens!”
Why are there people who keep thinking letting Kevin out is a good idea?
It’s literally one of the worst ideas in almost any situation.
Basically it’s ‘Let Godzilla out to deal with the escaped maneating lion from the zoo.’
“Release the kraken to deal with that great white shark.”
“Launch the nuclear missiles to stop the bank robber.”
Simply swallow the spider to catch the fly, what could possibly go wrong?
Actually, didn’t Kevin just want to cause violence to power up? Giving him exactly what he wants sounds like a pretty good way to make him less angry about being forced into a room keeping him stoned 24/7.
Though having Dazzler put a microbomb in his skull would definitely be sound advice.
Godzilla’s the hero in a substantial number of the movies. I don’t know that he ever fought a lion though.
Godzilla Final Wars.
-while often regarded as a dog, Shisha are usually regarded as part lion.
King Caesar is a shisha, who along with Anguirus and Rodan fought Godzilla in the 2004 movie Godzilla: Final Wars.
*also the movie is apt to bring up as the premise was aliens (once again) took control of Earth’s monsters to attack the Earth. Godzilla who had been trapped in ice at the time escaped the brain washing by the aliens *so did Mothra somehow but her role felt more like a cameo to be honest*, and humans lead Godzilla to the different monsters by antagonizing him with a flying drill submarine and he’d attack the other monsters as he came across them…and in the end was going to turn on humanity after words anyway if not for a magical size changing Minya…
also earlier in Godzilla vs King Ghidorah they tried to bring back Godzilla (whom they had banished via time travel…yet everyone remembered him up to that year they went back from…anywho the time travel is whack in this movie); anywho, they tried to bring back Godzilla because the “Futurians…not aliens but might as well be* had unleashed a new monster, King Ghidorah, Godzilla fought it, won, and then proceeded to attack Tokyo, so they had to then revive Ghidorah as Mecha King Ghidorah, and defeated Godzilla once and for all…till a meteor showed up, but no more future people came back to help; but they did continue to harvest the future tech to make other giant robots and the entire 90’s series really was (every solution brought about another problem, including the very first back in 1953).
Walking down the street and seeing alien tourists land in the middle of the road start taking pictures and trying to get random people to take them on tours, “. . . Fucking tourists.”
That reminds me of my one trip to New York City in 1990. After seeing the New York of 60’s and 70’s television I had an expectation of what it would be like. For the most part it was much cleaner and the people much more pleasant than I expected. There was one exception. As we got of the shuttle van at the hotel a little old lady walking her dog scowled at us and made one comment, “Damned tourists.”
Cool. I was just making a bad tourists joke but sorry to hear that happened.
And then the CHUDs came out…
That’s when you kick them out of the car and hand them $20 to call a cab home, lol.
Ah, I see the translatorapp is as good as Google translate.
Google translate got a bad rap initially, but it works pretty well nowadays, for routine stuff. Certainly any emails I get from banks & utilities get auto translated very clearly every time. And I was able to use it to good effect when I occasionally got into translation problems living in Bulgaria.
Google translate is just comedy gold when attempting to translate Cebuano. Seems to work well enough for German, though it has trouble with specialized technical jargon.
wait a second … isnt specialized technical jargon what the bureaucracy + law system over there uses for …everything of record?
Not just for everything of record… for everything on record as well…heck, they use it for everything, full stop.
Until the COVID I used to make decent spending money cleaning up machine translated ad copy and user manuals for companies lacking Employees fluent in written English, Most of the time it was 2-3 hours a month to make $40-100 depending on the size of the document.
I’d say marginally better.
I regret that on this occasion I actually can’t sledge Google, ‘cos no-one else has a decent grasp of general AI either. You can’t just chuck lexicons into a computer and expect useful translations, it takes a grasp of the national cultures as well. Hell, we’re even approaching the point where US English trips up Pommies and vice versa. Aahhh, I think I’m not supposed to say “Pommies” any more. Can I say “Bu*&er”?
Hey, googlebot, stop trying to pretend to be human!
I like that… “trying to pretend” :)
:-D
I always appreciate a good (canine) licking :)
Let’s hope that the aliens aren’t as evil as Google…
I had one suggestion to the visitors. When the locals can’t understand your native language just remember rule one of communication: JUST. SAY. THE. SAME. THING. SLOWER. AND. LOUDER.
Whoops. Illegal aliens. There goes the planet. Well, at least they aren’t Spaceballs.
Looks like a distinct improvement to me.
Local police officer: Excuse me, ma’am? (He is really questioning the ma’am part) but you can’t park there. That is a no-parking zone. Could you please park it somewhere else?
Spokes-alien: You be giving recommendation of untranslatable location?
BTW, Times Square, being the name of somewhere specific, is generally written in Proper Case.
Local Cop: Well, there is some room for that thing near the American Museum of Natural History. It is right on the edge of Central Park. I’m sure some of the people there, like Neil Dagrace Tyson, would love to talk with you.
Oh no!!! They’re here to steal all our air!!!
Curses! Our one fatal weakness!
Don’t worry. They’ll never break the code on the planetary security shield.
What genius set the password to ‘password’?!?!?
“12345? That’s amazing! I have the same combo on my luggage!”
I’d make it longer, but I can’t remember what comes after “5” [:(
Use your fingers!
Start the count with them …
The universal gold-card…on Earth anyway, it might be used for fish wrappers other places…
and they might have a shortage of plastics so foodwrap is invaluable to them…everyone profits :)
Gold in any advanced society should still hold some severe value due to its numerous usages in advanced technology and the like. It as a medal has some fairly unique properties, and while it is presumably with advanced technology not as rare and hard to obtain as it is for us on earth right now, it would still presumably be a finite resource available in only a certain quantity.
So while it’d be less valuable to them than it would be to us, I imagine it’s not exactly going to be equivalent to plastic.
To put it another way, Gold would never be available for their equivalent of $1, but if on Earth it might be worth $1000, for them it might be their equivalent of $50, so it would still presumably be mutually beneficial, yes, assuming we had something of value.
In some of the “spaceships are basically the family car/Semi” type games its kind of hard justifying high exchange rates for gold, even granted our solar system probably got lucky in having an inexplicably naked proto-planets core in it (Psyche) as the reality is that most gold on the planet sank to the planets core at least once.
Granted the fact that we seem to have a surprising amount of gold out there may itself be unusual, or we may actually be gold poor.
I think gold may get as cheap as aluminum. Some asteroids are ‘differentiated’,
meaning they’ve separated into layers by weight -and then were smashed into bits.
All it takes is one mountainous lump with atoms about the same mass, and ‘rare’
earths aren’t rare any more.
Rare earths aren’t actually very rare, they were named before it was realized how common the ores were.
The problem is that mining and refining them tends to be really dirty. So we wound up letting countries with no environmental protections, and abundant child slave labor, do it for us.
Rare earth are a bitch to refine because the outer shell of electrons is the same while the next inner shell is the one that changes.
Saying that gold will become relatively cheap (aluminum isn’t exactly cheap, after all) is like Trump saying that covid-19 “will eventually disappear.” He’s right, as long as you care to leave that statement open for the next few hundred years, and not many people care much beyond what happens in their life span. The time frame for when humanity will start mining asteroids may well be beyond the life span of the species.
Trump is just so concerned about always being right even when he’s constantly wrong that he’ll twist his own words, which had a clear context of being in the near term, to mean “at any point in the future” if that’s what it takes for him to be right. No matter how many people die in the interim because of his inaction and over optimism that miracles would save the day instead of him having to come up with a plan that actually does something positive and non-harmful.
Oh yes, because Shtrump is personally going out, forcing people at gunpoint to mass-congregate and ripping off their masks and spitting in each and every face
Oh, forgot that he had a medical degree and was the world’s leading doctor and scientist
Why would you assume this? Gold is a rare element because of scarcity, and that scarcity isn’t limited to Earth. Heavy element like gold are scare throughout the universe. Gold takes multiple sun-life-spans* to create naturally, and this doesn’t change with advanced technology. Even if you allow matter transmutation you must assign an energy cost. If you aren’t ignoring physics in your super science and just having it be magic that breaks the laws of physics, it will take far more energy to transmute water (hydrogen is the most common element, oxygen is the third most common element, so water is a readily available and cheap source mass) into gold than it will to convert it into carbon.
But if you have free or near-free energy generation technology, and can transmute any common existing metal (say lead for tradition’s sake) into gold at even a moderate scale, then gold would be as common as plastic so long as the market had as many uses for it.
No reason at all to start with water when there’s a bounty of elements with a much closer atomic weight.
Now this is interesting.
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
You’d definitely need …
Was it the bitcoin reference?
Wow. I’ve just been censored. Here is the original post, minus what seems to be the offending part:
You’d definitely need an enormous amount of cost-free energy. We have managed to do the trick. But do you have a spare particle accelerator?
The apparently offending part contained a link to investopedia dot com, about digging for small part currency, which was included to give an idea of the huge expenses involved.
And, the censorship was very very fast.
WordPress auto holds comments with more than three links in them for review. Spammers tend to put a lot of links in their comments. I was about to approve it, even if my own initial thought was that it was spam because of the investopedia link. :)
Ah, thanks for the headsup Dave. It’s good to know you have a human insertion point to keep the AI honest. Is this AI teachable?
And on a separate topic, keep the cliff-hangers coming, they’re the chili in the lime pickle!
As I pointed out, there isn’t a bounty of elements with a much closer atomic weight. Hydrogen and oxygen are vastly more available than anything you might care to name. If you don’t believe me, just do a Google search on the most common elements in the universe. Then you’ll see, substantiated by a third party, that I am right.
Your next error is this:
Even with a nigh-free resource there is an opportunity cost that cannot be ignored, unless your technology is just magic and has no governing principles. If you can convert hydrogen into carbon, an element which is and will always be in huge demand, then you are not at the same time converting hydrogen into gold, a task which physics mandates is a much more energy consuming process. Gold is an element with some very specific uses, none of which require vast quantities. So diverting your transmutation facility from carbon production into gold production costs you the opportunity to make carbon during the time and with the energy that you’ve diverted into creating gold.
It’s irrelevant that hydrogen is more common – we’re not trying to convert the entire galaxy to gold, just enough for its “very specific uses”. On Earth the most common elements in the crust are silicon and aluminum – we could use those for all the gold we’d ever need without even needing to mine asteroids, let alone using up any of our water supply.
As for opportunity cost, it’s waste of time to use hydrogen for gold or carbon. Given near-limitless energy and the interstellar travel in the Grrlverse, we could easily mine asteroids or even entire moons for common dense elements and adapt those instead, possibly even capturing released energy in the process to increase efficiency. Pre-collected material sources like asteroids and moons are millions of times denser than the hydrogen clouds around stars, regardless of the overall mass, so they are far more efficient to work with.
Regardless of the process, we only need so much gold or carbon-based materials. I’d expect to meet the (ongoing) demand by collecting, adapting, and recycling existing resources long before we need to start duplicating the processes of a star by turning gases into solids.
Gold is only ‘rare’ because of it’s difficulty in obtaining it, or at least, current Dirt tech makes it difficult (or costly) to obtain
Gold foil is not that strong. I would not recommend using it as a wrapper for food.
I can also see the conversation the driver has tomorrow.
Broker: How did you get five and a half pounds of gold?
Driver: Well, you see, there was this alien lady. At least I think she was a lady. Anyway she wanted a tour of the city.
Normally I’d say the better option is to sell it to a collector, but the “rare alien artifacts” market is about to be flooded, so cashing out for the bullion value is probably the best bet here.
The “rare alien artifacts” market might be fairly limited, if Archon can shut it down post-haste. The gold will always be worth its weight in gold, but a rare gold coin is worth more than its weight in gold, and the same should hold true of an alien artifact made of gold.
The Disney show Phil of the Future opened with the family buying a house with “fish bowl pebbles” that were all diamonds.
Which, for a spacefaring civilization, would be about right. Carbon is CHEAP. Crystallized or nanotubule carbon for them would likely be the same as plastic is to us.
Gold, platinum group metals and such could at least have some use as galactic currency, because those are universally rare, unless large scale elemental transmutation is a thing.
Platinoids, yes. Most of them are incredibly useful. Catalysis, excellent electrical properties, corrosion resistance, high strength, high hardness… but gold is too soft for anything but electrical contacts. Unless you allow it with titanium under extremely high pressure for the beta phase. Then it’s useful.
Gold toilets would be easier to keep clean.
They still eat carbon.
Ummmmm. mmmmmmm. Do youse have much of a clue how many jewellery diamonds are sitting in very big safes all over the world right now? I mean, not in jewellers’ safes, but in the diamond miners’ safes.
Many decades ago when Tanganyika became independent from the British Government, the De Beers Group suspected the new government was going to nationalise the Stephenson Mine. They sent a rep to Dar es Salaam, and informed the new administration that any attempt to nationalise the mine would result in De Beers “flooding the marketplace” with jewellery diamonds from its safes.
The value of diamonds has been propped up by the Cartel Economy, and is completely artificial. The De Beers threat — if carried out — would have reduced the cost-per-carat to some tens of US dollars.
In this story we also have supers who can crush coal into diamonds with their hands like Superman. Diamonds will not be a very good investment herr.
Actually that would be from Graphite into Diamonds, Coal to diamonds involves multiple phase changes, each resulting the removal of Hydrogen Nitrogen Sulfur and yes Oxygen, eventually a Phase change to Grahite, and Then from that to Diamond. Ironically it would be easier to turn Coal to Syngas then CO then precipitate that into Graphite, although theirs also a process for Converting Syngas to Naphtha and or Wax and from there to Graphite
Please don’t ruin Superman with realism.
Well, neither is gold if that one guy ever decides to sell his stash. Superpowers have a tendency to destabilize economies. Imagine what a teleporter capable of moving an entire shipping container across an ocean in a second would do to things.
There was this comic, (Starbrand, I guess), where some guy ended up with incredible super strength. Trying to crush coal into diamonds was the very first thing he tried.
Couldn’t get his hands to seal tightly enough, ended up covered head to toe in graphite dust.
Imo the Honor Harrington series isn’t worth following after book 8 or so. It really goes downhill after they all break out of hell.
Funny, as diamonds once were worthless for jewelers until they created the legendary ad campaign that is now forgotten aside from the most famous line: „Diamonds are a girls best friend.“
Blame De Beers for that one. They did it.
At least as significant as the advertising success, De Beers also took control of the supply to create artificial scarcity. They also succeeding in marketing the idea that diamonds should become heirlooms, effectively killing the second-hand market to this day. Stories abound of rejected suitors selling off their ‘tainted’ engagement diamond for only a fraction of the original value, sometimes even to the same store it was purchased from days earlier.
And they are trying to spread the belief that man-made diamonds (and other ‘jewels’ like ruby’s) produced as an offshoot of some other production are not as good (or even ‘fake’) when compared to their diamonds
I love the rocket ship! It’s so perfectly 50’s/60/s sci fi cover material!
Red Rocket! Red Rocket!
Yeah I had to simplify it so it was recognizable in the reflection.
Not that I’m a legendary starship designer in the first place.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from the previous panel, with Max saying that New York had a situation that the local authorities probably were not equipped to handle, but it was not anything like this.
I am looking forward to seeing how they’ll handle it. I expect a lot of alien complaints at the local tourist office on Alpha Centauri.
I mean clearly the rocket is illegally parked, the aliens don’t have a valid permit for their vehicle, avoiding air traffic controls, safe airspace regulations for missiles, rockets and aircraft, disturbing the peace and any number of other charges they could make stick; they better have more gold than that.
Perhaps They have already bought the street. Foreign investors get away with a lot.
Did someone mention the Ian M Banks culture novels to you? I hope someone did.
Wouldn’t the veil cover the alien’s appearance to look human? Even with the rocket, surely the veil would hide the people that didn’t see them leave the rocket? We also know the veil isn’t damaged as per Pixel explaining why Sydney could see her form while Olivia could not when they met.
Or maybe aliens have now been taken off the Veil coverage, now they are known to the wider world? But then, this would make Earth more expensive as Dabbler has stated Aliens used Earth as a cheap tourist destination BECAUSE the Veil offered them coverage without having to pay for said disguise. Or is it now a destination that doesn’t require coverage because people now know about aliens?
This also would present another problem. If the aliens just hand over gold, it would ruin the Earth economy and could cause more problems for us as a species. Wasn’t there something that indicated some sort of space police force during Cora’s first trip to Earth with Sydney to prevent this exact situation from occurring?
Sure and they will arrive thirty minutes after the last moment at which they could possibly make themselves useful.
Yes it would. No doubt word will be spread (by the same mechanism which previously told tourists that they must disguise themselves when visiting Earth), that gold (etc) must not be handed out in large quantities.
Loved what the XKCD substitutions app did for your comment there.
“Wouldn’t the veil cover the alien’s appearance to look human? Even with the rocket, surely the veil would hide the people that didn’t see them leave the rocket?”
The Veil does not blanket change all alien life to look human (or other innocuous things). Like a computer, each different usage has to be programmed in. So every new race, on its first arrival, needs to be added in. So if a space ship full of different types of species arrives, and many of them are tourists from races which have not been to Earth before, then, no, the Veil would not hide them.
Likewise if the space ship is of a type which has not been programmed. After all humans build new types of vehicles all the time. So it cannot be made so vague that a new type of Boeing gets tweaked to look like a hot air balloon!
Finally Humans are now expecting aliens to be landing on Earth, so the Veil would not attempt to hide them anymore, as I see you go on to say. And yea, there is no additional expense in needing to buy a disguising device, as that is no longer a requirement to visit Earth.
The sex tourism will still be cheap mind, for anyone who doesn’t mind looking down the back of the sofa for some of the kids’ toy bricks.
I imagine that The Veil still works for aliens, but presumably, it only works for aliens that intend to be hidden by The Veil. (And/or–the options aren’t mutually exclusive–only works for the aliens who were on earth before aliens were revealed publicly.)
These aliens very much appear to have zero intention of hiding at all. If they never intended to be hidden by the veil, then I’d assume the veil would never apply to them. (I believe–I could be mistaken on this, but I think this is accurate–that it was established that The Veil has some amount of intention behind it? That someone’s intentions can make the difference between whether they’re disguised or not.)
Oh, one other aspect I forgot to mention. There is such a range of alien life, out in the galaxy, that the author has previously indicted that most of them are not covered by the Veil. So most needed to bring along a disguise device. But those are readily available so was not an issue.
yeah getting the feel these are thrill seekers who bypassed the tourist board and snuck down illegally. Like backpackers in Europe sneaking across boarders to see the sights tourists don’t normally see and for the thrill of it.
That first panel is magnificent.
Agreed.
Taken with DaveB’s comment from the previous comic, I think it would have been better situated there, if looking at just the continuity, but not the composition issues that he raised. Simply because I did not take it as being Time Square, and had slept since reading the previous comic, so it looked like some alien place to me.
However anyone reading the comic through, without such a delay, would have the visual impact, without the loss of continuity, just by turning the page. So all is well in the long run.
OOF! Well this is clearly going to be a fun trip for the gang. XD
Y’know, If Aliens are going to keep showing up, Earth is going to have to set up a vetting program so we’re not all killed by an Extra-Terrestrial virus we have no immunity to
*hides under the table, whining*
“… an Extra-Terrestrial virus we have no immunity to”
Which would, in turn, likely have no way to infect us either. Unless panspermia (or too much sex with Succubi), meant that alien life had similar genetics to us.
Although, for those who like to use this counter argument, I am sure that if the galaxy does have a lot of alien life, there will be some nasty bugs which have tricks to do nasty things to radically different eco systems.
For instance, even if the majority of things are inert in terms of genetic compatibility, I bet that by products which are toxic would work just fine in killing life off. Then think of things like plastic munching microbes or ones that rapidly metabolise concrete into custard or steel into rust.
Mmm, maybe rust is a transitional stage to a type of life? It already checkmarks various of the definitions for life (and shaped some of our other ones to specifically avoid including it). Just as organic compounds are precursors to carbon life, perhaps there is a strain of life which has rust as one of its key components? Makes their blood red or something? ;-)
Plastic munching microbes is covered very well in the book; Mutant 59, The Plastic Eaters; by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, first publication 1971.
Problem: Cora already established in her press conference human form and probably DNA is pretty common in the galaxy.
Alien viruses not being able to find a host in humanity makes sense up until the point where to realize that every alien we’ve seen is perfectly capable of fucking humans, and several of them have done so.
If you’re going to throw out the book on realism to the point where all aliens have compatible sexual equipment, then alien viruses and diseases being transmitted to human isn’t so far out of line.
Hell, all those aliens that can fuck human might be perfectly fertile with them as well. We have Dabbler’s multi-species heritage as an indication that this is not only possible but happens as a matter of fact. I sure hope Sydney wasn’t counting on space woof seed being incompatible with her eggs, because her formerly sexually shy person doesn’t seem likely to have been on contraceptives, and we didn’t see any evidence that they used any other form of protection.
Unsure of exact pages, but I’m pretty sure Cora said that galactic STDs had been pretty much eradicated, I think with medical intervention. I also think I recall Sydney stating way back that she was on the pill, but perhaps she only alluded to its convenience for the secondary side effects.
DaveB, I have to say thank you for the recommendations of Three Square Meals and Savage Shore, I read TSM the first time you mentioned it and then went and bought the kindle version of all the books on Amazon and finished all of the Savage Shore stories over the weekend. Really enjoyed both immensely.
If they visit Australia, they’ve GOT TO visit Kinsley Chicken, they have the best Chips!
OK New York it’s time to go the Disneyland route.
He he he. OK that has me splitting my sides. And, yea, no matter how weird looking, those aliens are getting a tour!
OK, hold up a paw if you found the alien to be sexy.
Then ay which one.
;-)
She has on the 1960’s clothing of tomorrow.
Call me when the Puazi show up on Earth. I’ll gladly schedule and conduct extensive tours.
Dave is certainly generous with the sexy aliens.
Dave is generous with the sexy. Full stop.
Well this is going to get rather concerning very quickly! I mean, I’m sure there money is as good as anyone else’s, but as it’s been mentioned, even well meaning actions might screw up Earth’s economy royally. And that’s not considering if any of these tourists decides to be less then friendly to the locals, or vice versa.
If it’s just a single tour ship visiting New York, it’s possible there could be containment, especially if there’s enough of a show that Earth or it’s various nation-states can and will enforce customs. But if there’s ships like this landing all over the world, I doubt they’ll be enough metahumans to go around, and at /that/ point… there may need to be rather drastic actions taken.
(And I know I’m probably taking this much too seriously, but that’s half the fun with a new page!)
That’s probably why someone called Archon.
I still disagree with that being the best case of action.
I would call lots of infantry, some helicopters, a diplomat, a few generals and military administrative staff, the military medical reserves, Arc light and Dabbler.
I think this is the best course of action, because a. super powers will be near useless, b. infantry is better in organisation and order than Archon and c. the sheer power of some super powered individuals will need to be kept a secret to avoid interstellar war(until now all encounters between aliens and supers were either untraceable to the galactic community or with very few survivors at the side of the aliens who also had reason to keep it secret,
Well I could make out the guy looking out of the windscreen OK, on first look. But the scene seemed more like somewhere on Fracture, or an alien planet, rather than Times Square!
There were a couple of similar things (especially if focusing on cleavage), likewise in Terminator 2. Both of which featured posters and then busts/cleavage being adjusted. But that is a very different gag to this, and here the gold is the focus, rather than the cleavage.
Love the inclusion of the Standard Galactic Alphabet in panel 5. :-D
Might I suggest that the alien’s word bubble be coming directly from the translate device. With maybe a first word bubble underneath, mostly covered up by the translation.
I think she is reading a translation she entered and then speaking herself.
RE: The first panel: I could not in fact tell what was going on there until the author commentary and even after it, I still have trouble deciphering what’s going on there, so I agree, could be more clear there.
RE: the gold joke: things like this are a dime a dozen, where societies will look to trade things they think are of value with humans, who show no interest in them, but then the humans see the gold and want that, when the societies have little value on the gold. It happens everywhere, even in our own planet’s nonfictional history!
You can also see similar tropes to this where people who’re either aliens or from the future come to our modern times and use a device to obtain or produce cash, frequently with some form of commentary in the process. (About how humans placed an actual value on pieces of paper.)
So it has been done, and is so often that the question isn’t whether it was done before, so much as, which of the dozens of possible sources was the inspiration you actually got this comic from.
I dunno which movie the joke might have been in, but the last panel reminds me vaguely of Race to Witch Mountain.
So is the Veil on the fritz?
It works for bar hopping aliens but not for Cora and her crew. So your guess is as good as any other.
Best. Dad. Ever!
An impromptu lesson in economics, entrepreneurship, and cultural outreach!
To be honest, I am almost 95% sure that i would act the same. Maybe I would let the aliens in my car, drive to the next bus stop/metro station where a line to my home passes and unload the kids. They appear to be old enough (approximately 12-13 years for the girl an 8-9 years for her brother) to manage the tour home on their own. Then I’d drive the nice aliens around a bit and when I get back, I’ll have a) a lot to tell the mates at the watering hole and b)enough money to placate the missus and the kids (maybe a trip to Disneyland/-world etc.).
Maybe in a regular town, but if it is new york, then probably not
Is New York REALLY that different? Can’t say, I am not from the US, nor from the northern american continent or the southern. But in my city, which is at the same time open for weirdness and at the same time very blasé about it, this is how I would act.
Only i would go to Euro-Disney.
In fact,on several occasions i and some friends had to walk through the city center in full LARP outfits (once even as a group of orc mercenaries), and we got mostly just curious or bewildered glances.
if we had stopped a car and shown the driver some hard cash, I guess we would get a ride, same as the aliens.
And I am not speaking of a small town here, but of a city with over a million people.
A perfectly resonable response
This looks like a scene which could have easily happened in a Heavy Metal Magazine story. Ah, my childhood. Thank goodness it’s still going!
I see nobody noticed the third paragraph on the alien’s display device”My hovercraft is full of eels”. Classic SF line.
Not classic SF. Classic Python.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grA5XmBRC6g
Sadly, the Honor Harrington series dropped off sharply in quality after Ashes of Victory. That’s where Weber originally planned to end the series, and it shows.
The spinoff Saganami Island series was more like the original series in quality. But I only read the first few.
I’d put the peak at Flag In Exile, which I’ve heard suggested was the point at which Weber stopped having to listen to editors. Books after Flag are noticeably slower paced.
At least up until the finale – Uncompromising Honor proves Weber can actually finish a series, and moves faster than the immediately previous books…
Damned if I wouldn’t do the McDonald’s drive-thru window first. The first question out of my mouth would have been “Do you have devices that can tell you what to eat?” and the second “What do you like to eat?” I was running through the conversation in my head — breaking down what people on this part of the planet ate in the morning, and so forth — and I realized that they’d probably need a lot of samples, for both the aforementioned scanning devices and their own taste-buds. Mickey Dee’s would give them plenty for both.
I mean, I’d tell them all of this beforehand. And promise Aquatic Dude that we’d do fish for lunch (he’ll either want fish, or ANYTHING but fish). AND tell them not to flash the gold because that two ounces they’re waving around can be defined in months’ worth of salary and the feds are going to be tiresome about people getting paid in gold. They gotta get a credit card or something, and that’s outside my job description, Space-Lady. Maybe they can convince a Target manager to take gold under the table for a box of activated pre-paid debit cards… okay, okay, it’s not outside my job description after all, but maybe you folks should tell your own governments to set up a consulate or something… :enters the drive-thru: Yeah, one of everything. Yes, *everything*. You’ll see why…
…Oh, and two extra chocolate shakes. Forgot about the kids.
If you want ‘safe-to-eat’ food (not to mention, plain edible), Macca’s is the last place you want to go
Looks more like a snek-dude, then aquatic
Blowing up the picture on my desktop: yeah, that could be just a distortion of the light through the bubble helmet, not bubbles and a little bit of air of the top of it. Guess it’d be seafood all around, then.
You wouldn’t want a McDonald’s to start with…Too limited a menu. Rather take the aliens first to an all-you-can-eat place. [been years since I was a regular at such places, so I don’t know the best, but…] Just tell them to take tiny samples of anything they find interesting. If they find several things they like, we just stay. If they love something, we move to that sort of restaurant.
You do the paying of course. Or rather, they are, but have already paid.
Not really *that* limited. Eggs, milk, cheese, toast, cake, breads, various meats, a variety of common spices, various hot and cold drinks; pastries should be on the list, but that’s what most people have for breakfast on this part of the planet. More importantly: thanks to the drive-thru, I can get them their samples without them getting mobbed at the breakfast tables. Although being in NYC might complicate that, sure. But then, if I was giving a NYC tour on the fly we’d walk and take the subway.
Lunch we eat somewhere else, sure. A lot of options, there.
The optimal approach would be to take them through a bunch of drive-thrus, for a variety of reasons:
– keep them moving to see the most sights while tasting the most variety
– keep them from being mobbed (and possibly poached) by other locals
– justify asking for a few more gold bars to “cover the food”. They’re travelling, and nearly certain to have at least a handful of bars apiece no matter how far they think just 1 might get them. Fuel costs and the driver’s time come with the vehicle, but unless you’ve scheduled a tour the food is always separate from the cab.
Sounds like you read most of the particularly good books in the Honor Harrington series. After a while David Weber reached the point that TVTropes calls “protection from editors”: basically he became a big enough name that his stuff sold anyway, and he didn’t need to listen to those busybodies telling him he should rein it in and try to tell a single coherent story in a book rather than just throw in any scene that he thinks seems interesting, no matter how irrelevent it is to the story as a whole.
Also, “don’t repeat the same 20 page scene six times across six books word for word just to try to show that all that stuff has been happening at the same time.”
Anyway, once he could do what he wanted without anyone stopping him, his writing kind of… sprawled, as my family tends to put it. He could still tell a good story, but he would take about ten times as many words to do it.
I wonder how long it will take until that troll Dabbler start messing with these translators. My hovercraft is full of eels.
Classic pulp sci-fi style for their spaceship, all the love.
Surely nothing bad will come of this.
Not the first time we’ve seen a potential threat to the value of gold in this comic.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-368-billions-of-bullions/
I wonder if Dues would have issue maintaining his facade if all his gold here was also devalued so he suddenly *wasn’t* able to use his ‘wealth is the greatest superpower’ lifestyle anymore.
He owns a country and cutting edge technology(established that it’s cutting edge even for aliens in his shopping trip), this is probably not a dent in his wealth.
This was meant slightly tongue-in-cheek to King Midas’ post. Dues owns a country and cutting edge technology because he has half the world’s available gold supply – if that suddenly became 1/10 instead of half he would be considerably less wealthy by comparison.
Also, Dues doesn’t do anything, he pays other supers to do things for him, if the influx of gold was such that it would make gold effectively worthless Dues would need to find another metal to extract to maintain his ‘lavish’ lifestyle.
He has cutting-edge tech… because he snuck off planet to get it
It doesn’t appear that Deus and the Auromancer are the same person. Deus’s wealth comes from his controlling interest in the manufacturing concern Machina Industries, not from high-efficiency private mining. Whoever the Auromancer is, he keeps a far lower profile than Deus does.
Gold is valued as a conductor in electronics, so its price being depressed to the point where Deus could use it in manufacturing would probably be a net gain for him.
The gag of a tourist not understanding the rate of exchange and giving a local gold?
Discworld.
Well you can bet Deus is going to try and make a profit off this before any government.
I hope those aliens, and their “gold” is decontaminated.
That driver is a stereotypical New Yorker. A spaceship has landed and is blocking the road and in the first panel he just looks resigned to the usual traffic gridlock.
Who said it was blocking the road? You do know that some roads end in what is called a ‘T-Junction’, right?
OKAAAYY… Where do you have a road junction where you can get tea?
Where was it shown he got the tea where he was stopped?
He could have gotten it five blocks back through a drive-through, believe they even have them over the ditch
Unless you were being smart about ‘T’ being ‘tea’ (a ‘T-junction’ is where three streets come together, rather than four resulting in a crossroad… and don’t start about ‘what caused the road to be angry?’ probably had an Aussie walking over it)
What, can’t I have pun?
Apologies, was tired and thought you were being rude, that comment from me was uncalled for :(
Accepted. Although I can be rude, but your post wasn’t that impolite.