Grrl Power #790 – Anti-aliased
“Some of my best friends are demons. Well, one demon, and… best friend is a bit strong. Friend. Work buddy. Friendly but occasionally sexually antagonistic teammate.”
So Tamatha grew up, obviously aware that she was a ‘monster’ of some sort. She didn’t even know what kind for a while, but the tail narrowed it down. The mentor she mentioned brought her up to speed, but even now she’s concerned that she’s ‘bad’ because she’s a ‘monster.’
Some people were wondering about how sexually immature succubi operate. I think I addressed it in the post accompanying a previous page, but I don’t recall which one. It will be addressed in a next page or two.
Sydney does not have undercover chops. A statement which should surprise no one.
![Ultimate Arsenal (Full Metal Superhero Book 9) by [Haskell, Jeffery H.]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/517KEPsEOiL.jpg)
The next Full Metal Superhero book is available for preorder. Won’t be out till after X-mas, but hey, preorder now and it’ll be like a late present you bought for yourself that you forgot about. That’s how it always works when I preorder stuff.
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.
Yes. Man buns are a crime against humanity.
I like them.
Sorry, I was sleepy, and misread that, I thought it said Bums. :)
Hey, nothing wrong with a good man bum.
Where’s my scissors?!?
Beg the difer. Aldough most can’t make it work. When it works, it fucking works.
Yes, but how many people are kick-ass samurai?
There may be a man out there somewhere that can make it look good, but I haven’t seen him yet.
For those stuck on the stereo type samurai may I suggest the following cultural references.
Sikh, Chinese topknot, Goths, Lombards, Vandals, Vikings, Bulgars, Cossacks.
Looking at that list I can’t help but feel there is a theme going on here and the modern western men of the Hipster/metro type availing themselves of the style without the associated cultural touch-points is what is turning people off.
It is when they combine it with the neck-beard, flannel shirt, skinny jeans and the “ironic” attitude that it becomes truly a crime against culture.
Think back to bell-bottoms, fringe vests, hair perms, and Gremlins. Such travesties should be forgotten, but if we do, they come around again as retro-chic. Look at the horror that the over-sized birth-control glasses have been causing for the past decade.
Since my generation gets ridiculed for The Mullet I think that it is only fair that I get to mock the younger folks for their weird-ass hair styles. I mean what was with that Soul Patch thing about ten years back?
The Mullet by itself is bad enough, but what name do you call that thing that often went with it where the mustaches continues down to the jawline and trails up to merge with the porkchop sideburns? Especially bad when the person trying so hard to maintain a Mullet was losing hair up top and did a combover.
The White Trash Stash
I saw a middle-aged guy with a full-blown mullet and porn-stache just yesterday. Still looked horrific.
Ah, yes, the non-conformists trying to buck traditional standards and mainstream trends by simultaneously conforming to all of the trends the non-conformists adhere to until they become mainstream.
“Dad, please stop saying ‘yeet’.”
Quickest way for parents to kill a trend is to adopt it. My mother once said “trippy”. I abandoned the word on the spot. (Yes, you now know my age within 3 years.)
Okay grampy, put a stop to that moronic Fortnite ‘dance’: start dancing around your grandkids
Okay, never heard of the Fortnight Dance but I do remember the warcraft safety dance.
Wow. She failed at this whole incognito thing almost instantly.
I’m sorry, were you expecting something else?
We all knew that she couldn’t keep a secret. Pretty sure that was a running gag of sorts in the beginning of the comic. The real question is, what’s the expectation after she eventually blows their cover? Are we taking bets on how much of the building is left after they get done?
Actually, in the beginning she kept her secret pretty well. She told the truth, but in between a whole lot of ridiculous lies, so Joel and presumably everybody else believed that it was just another lie.
70%-that room is completely toast along with some surrounding area, but most of the building should be fine if only because bystanders. I say this because we all know some supervillain is listening on on this conversation
+1
I don’t think it matters much. The point was to avoid a huge crowd, but one or two people knowing won’t hurt.
If those one or two are the correct people. Thankfully, Sydney is usually right people. Unfortunately, Sydney is sometimes wrong people, but she does know not to be posting the secrets on a blog or something like that.
Sydney doesn’t do incognito well. But when she is making skill rolls she does get to add “Confuse” to the skill description if that counts.
Give Sydney time, there is a CHANCE she will learn to keep secrets, especially secrets THAT big…
…A CHANCE, never said it was definite…
“Hah hah ahhhhh… I’m a HUGE security risk.”
Vaping! Sweet!
I must say, I was terribly disappointed by vaping.
Here I thought we’d developed a new way to inhale flavored smokes with no nicotine tar etc, and I now see we’ve just made a better way to get nicotine, tar etc.
ALSO, with crappy third world vap capsules coming in and damaging peoples lungs, this calls for govt legislation and regulation and damages my naive libertarian “The market will sort it all out” world view. Again.
That is what is called a false dichotomy. Both are simultaneously true, and I know a lot people who unquestionably believe that they would be dead by now had vaping not finally created a way to stop smoking which worked for them.
Me, I never smoked anything.
The problem is that vaping is supposed to be a tool to quit smoking, but instead it’s just being used to introduce a new generation to something that had been dying off.
I also don’t know a single person who actually stopped, best case that just started vaping instead. And that is like someone being proud that they are only stabbing themselves with a penknife in one lung now instead of both.
But, to be fair, nicotine by itself is just a stimulant, no more harmful than caffeine, possibly even net beneficial. It’s the tobacco itself that’s really vicious, that stuff can cause skin cancer just by touching it, it’s possibly the most evil plant on Earth.
Except for my nemesis, smilax. I mean, what sort of plant has thorns on it’s ROOTS? Seriously…
But, anyway, once you take the tobacco itself out of the picture, there’s really no reason to regard vaping as worse than drinking coffee.
Aaah, NEGATIVE. From Wikipedia:
“Nicotine has been shown to produce birth defects in some animal species, but not others. It is considered a teratogen in humans. Nicotine can harm adolescent brain development.”
OK, OK, I know Wikipedia cannot be considered any better than a Class 3 resource, but the primary and secondary sources it uses are good.
Nicotine is NOT harmless. Let’s face it, anything that can be used as an insecticide _cannot_ be good for you. Did I mention nicotine is highly addictive? It is actually trooly reelly the thing that forces you to light the next coffin nail.
You don’t have to be stupid to start, but if you don’t stop, you could be stupidly dead. Quit while you’re ahead. And yes, most governments don’t have the male genitals to simply ban its use and sale. Politicians have no excuses, this stuff is more anti-social than carrying a gun.
I don’t normally make personal comments, but I’m prepared to break the rules when necessary: Brett, if you want to say nice things about nicotine, DO THE RESEARCH FIRST.
While I agree that nicotine is very far from harmless, there are two things that you’ve missed here.
1) Tobacco contains much more than just nicotine, which makes it much more dangerous than straight nicotine. In the case of cigarettes the affect is even more pronounced by the deadly garbage the industry adds to them to make them even more addictive.
2) Caffeine is a natural insecticide and some people can’t function without it. I don’t mean the people addicted to it. I mean people like me who use it to control ADD. You think Sydney’s ADHD is bad? Just look at me when I for whatever reason can’t get my morning coffee and you’ll see bad.
Humans aren’t insects. Caffeine isn’t entirely harmless, but its side effects are minimal compared to nicotine.
How is it you think caffeine isn’t addictive? The people who can’t function without it are *clearly* addicted.
It’s just a drug that’s not *quite* dangerous enough that we’ve decided to ban its production, sale, possession, and use.
Personally, I feel like the banning of use and possession of small quantities of it brings with it an entire host of problems, which is why the people who make illegal drugs want them to continue being illegal. If you can’t use the drug without breaking the law, you’re not free to seek help with your addiction, and you’re not free to seek help for the underlying problems that caused you to get addicted in the first place.
Banning the use of drugs is and has always been a trap.
But monetarily great for everyone except the end user.
Stop the WAR on drugs and BAM so may unemployed ENFORCERS and their associated bureaucracies.
Also the for profit prisons would be so bankrupt.
He never said it is harmless, just that is “no more harmful than caffeine” which, too is technically an insecticide and highly addictive, so if they outlaw vaping they should outlaw caffeine, too.
False, studies have shown nicotine causes motor-neuron specific brain damage.
Wait – teratogen? Like those mists that make inhumans? Cool.
jk. (ducks)
> And yes, most governments don’t have the male genitals to simply ban its use and sale. Politicians have no excuses, this stuff is more anti-social than carrying a gun.
Criminalizing drugs generally does more harm than good — see the entire Prohibition era for why. Much better is to keep them legal but tax the crap out of them and make cheaper, safer alternatives easily available.
Nicotine is WAY more addictive than other mild stimulants, like caffeine. True, the usual delivery mechanism introduces a huge host of other chemicals that mess up the entirety of the respiratory system, including inducing some cancers that are seen extremely rarely outside of active smokers. Vaping removes some of the extra chemicals but introduces others and the volume of smoke from vaping devices can be much higher than from a cigarette or a cigar.
I still would recommend not breathing smoke; smoke inhalation is third leading cause of death in fire-fighters[citation needed].
As for smilax, thorny roots are probably meant as a defence against burrowing animals eating its roots. That tends to be hard on plants, so the ones that put some resources into root defence got them eaten less often, and so survived to pass those genes on to their offspring.
Your ignorance is appalling. Nicotine is a poison, the tobacco plant uses it to kill tobacco pests.
Caffeine and capsaicin are also poisons. :D
Caffeine is technically an insecticide, but humans aren’t insects. No long-term studies have found any harm from nominal caffeine consumption.
Nicotine has been shown to directly alter human motor neuron configurations. Essentially, when you remember any action associated with nicotine, you get a compulsive craving. This isn’t just harmful from an addiction standpoint; it’s also harmful to fine motor development and long-term memory formation. In a less exacting sense; nicotine causes brain damage.
Don’t equate two things just because they seem similar in your mind. That’s not how the world works.
Our nervous systems are similar enough to insects that virtually any neurotoxin that kills insects kills us.
We just tend to not think about it much due to the LD50 being size dependent and we’re much bigger than bugs. We tend to not think about how much bigger we are properly, due to the complications of math. An ant is generally measured in millimeters, while we usually grow to be more than a meter tall. That means we’re about a hundred times bigger, right? No, actually, it turns out the other two dimensions are also important, and we turn out to be more like a million times bigger. (Ants are incredibly varied, with some being super tiny and others being disturbingly large, so this approximation is very rough.)
If you take a million times more caffeine than it takes to kill a carpenter ant, you’re probably not going to handle it very well. But we don’t *do* that.
I dunno, as someone who was able to go from a pack a day smoker to only vaping, and reduce the amount of nicotine intake from that to almost nothing (mostly the habitual part of the addiction left for me)… If you are going to be stabbing yourself in the lungs with a pen knife it is a lot better that you only stab one rather than two.
It’s not like I think vaping is a safe alternative, but it is more safe than smoking a pack a day. Lesser of two evils and all that.
Vaping is largely unregulated compared to Tobacco products. Do note that the same era of cigarettes led to things like “Full Tar” and “Radium” (yes, the radioactive element) branded cigarettes because people thought that was somehow superior. https://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/brandnames/radiumcigarettes.htm
You’re gambling with your life just as much as with cigarettes. Best to just quit.
Remember that quitting requires dedication and a strong mindset; failing once or twice isn’t unexpected. Don’t get upset if you can’t quit right away. BUT if you get complacent and think you’ll just do it next time? Nope. Take it seriously
Nicotine alters your brain so you literally require it to function until you’ve been off the drug for a while. This is why it’s so hard to quit smoking. Nicotine patches have been shown in studies they don’t increase quitting rates for this reason. That said, they’re less likely to kill you than tobacco or e-cigarette products.
Research has found that relapse after quitting for more than 1 year is typically due to stress or depression. Take stock of your life and resolve stress. It’ll also assist with losing weight, if you need to. Same with eating healthy – it reduces stress and makes you less likely to relapse.
Also, exercise is good for health and it helps you establish routines that increase your drive and motivation. BUT you don’t actually need to exercise to quit smoking or lose weight. It’s just something doctors tell people.
Hope this helps!
That depends on the locality.
In the real world, not regulated by the federal government of the United States turns out not to mean unrelated. In much of the United States vaping is regulated in the same way cigarettes are because the individual State governments chose to make it so.
Sure it’s unregulated. I’m also able to mix my own ingredients so I can control what is in it. Yeah, it contains volatile organics and toxic substances. Many of which already exist in greater degrees in regular cigarettes. I’ve got no delusions that vaping is “safe” and I would hope anyone else that does it also knows that it is obviously risky behavior, but this is a matter of degree. I will note, I also don’t really trust the cartridge type e-cigs enough to use those products.
I get that you were trying to be inspirational with quitting encouragement, but please keep in mind that everybody’s life and capabilities are not the same. Someone with severe clinical depression, executive function disorders, and severe anxiety, for example, may find it impossible to achieve what you are talking about. That doesn’t mean they aren’t dedicated, are getting complacent, or aren’t taking it seriously. Maybe for them harm reduction is the middle ground that can be accomplished.
Nope, if you have clinical depression, executive function disorders, and severe anxiety and choose to also do drugs, you’re compounding the problem. I would know seeing as I had/have all three of the disabilities you mention and then some. Failing to quit ABSOLUTELY means you aren’t taking it seriously.
Harm reduction is what they tried to do with Hitler during WWII. How did that work out?
Listen, you can rag on me for being negative, alright? But I already went the positive route and you shot me down. You get what you ask for.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch for company’s to claim it’s to stop smoking, when only 8-9% of high-schoolers now smoke. Here in Maryland, 13.9% of people are smokers. They’re trying to preserve market share.
It was always just the robo-dog version of candy cigarettes. Companies are not your friends. Companies that turn a profit selling poison doubly so.
I’ve seen more then a few accounts where someone claimed they stopped smoking by switching to a different source of nicotine without seriously changing any habits or anything. They’re under the impression vaping a safe alternative mainly on the grounds that it’s new enough that we are just now beginning to understand the long term health risks. So now they’re pissed because people are calling for the kind of regulation that really should have been there from the start.
As a general rule of thumb, the free market approach is a horrible way to manage addictions. It’s kind of important to have a reasonable amount of regulation.
The complete intellectual vacuum in that assertion is truly astounding.
You start by pretty much asserting out right that the people posting on this forum and others who posters on this forum do not exist. That the people who used vaping to quit nicotine are imaginary.
A figment of someone’s brain.
Then, having dismissed their very existence you go on to opine that every problem must be solved by regulation.
As Lex Luthor would point out, you truly have a golden brain.
When did I claim that people posting on this forum don’t exist or that nobody uses vaping to quit nicotine? I simply stated that some very vocal people have used it to quit smoking without making any attempt to quit nicotine. Nor have I claimed that regulation must be used to solve all problems.
Perhaps it might be better to argue that you cannot have a truly free market in any situation where consumers don’t have a real choice. The arguments are generally based on the idea that most people will make reasonably good decisions and the total impact of the economy will be favorable. They don’t hold up when people can’t easily walk away from a product.
For the record I’m not in favor of a complete ban. We start getting a better grasp of the health risks, immediately respond by overcompensating until we can do some better studies and set things at a more appropriate level. Cut back until a better informed decision can be made. Sucks in the short term but I don’t think it’s unreasonable when dealing with health issues.
Talking about doing broad strokes here.
“every problem must be solved by regulation”
Nope, not every problem, addiction problems.
…. And a few others as well.
See, Free Market is great (I call myself a lefty, but capitalism has one great point, and that is the Free Market), but really, as soon as addiction and dependencies are at work, said Market stops being Free.
If you MUST HAVE something in order to not suffer or even die, then you are no longer Free in that regard.
Thus, The FREE Market is unable to handle dependencies and addictions, as it requires the people buying and selling to be free and able to do reasonable decisions.
But, again, if you are dependent on something … then said freedom is tampered with.
That is also why capitalism on its own DO NOT WORK as a single system.
…. That is, unless you want monopolies everywhere that practically creates their own states with their own laws.
…. A bit sorry for digressing into more direct politics, but often the reason for being anti-regulation seem to be due to believing in the Free Market … which i actually don’t mind nowadays, just that, as i pointed out, dependency is not being free, and thereby, it is not possible to rely on the Free Market, as you can no longer choose.
Addiction may influence decision-making, but I don’t believe that it strips people of all agency. If it did, no addict would ever quit of their own free will, and many do. I don’t presume to tell you what substances you may or may not consume, because I operate from the premise that you probably know how to manage you life better than I do.
Free markets don’t create monopolies, they destroy them. Monopolies are sustained by force, typically supplied by the government. The only way to sustain a monopoly without force is to provide a product or service that’s better or cheaper than any possible competitor, forever. That’s almost certainly not possible. If someone does manage to pull it off, then no one is being harmed, so what’s the problem?
Free markets destroy monopolies. Amusing. As a Robber Baron with Deep Pockets I can flood the market with a cheaper product. When you go belly up, I buy you out at pennies on the dollar and return to my price gouging ways.
If the free market contains enough smart people, this doesn’t happen. This is why I never buy Hess gasoline, despite being in an area where they operate. I remember back when they had a monopoly in this area, and had price gouging ways.
We are, of course, therefore doomed.
“If the free market contains enough smart people”
Ah yes, the fundamental false premise behind capitalism and democracy. That a dominant majority of the market/electorate have the knowledge, capability, and inclination to choose based on what is best for society overall, rather than what is most convenient for them personally in the immediate term.
> Free markets don’t create monopolies, they destroy them.
In a theoretical sense, true. In the real world, baloney. Regional resource base matters — you’re not going to have more than one hospital in a small town. Likewise, economies of scale matter — Windows completely owned the OS market in the 1990s, Rockefeller owned the oil market in the 1890s, etc.
Free markets aren’t a magical thing that happen any time buying and selling are happening. Free markets have strict requirements: elasticity of demand (people can choose not to use the product), multiple suppliers, price transparency (people know how much a thing costs), etc. Health care is not a free market because there is little to no elasticity of demand, prices are not transparent, and regional resource base frequently does not support more than one supplier.
I have a dihydrogen monoxide addiction. I know, it’s bad, but… well, my mother was an addict, she used dihydrogen monoxide while she was pregnant with me, and now I’m stuck addicted to it also.
Because of this, the free market has always been a myth?
I don’t think it really works that way. If anybody in the free market can choose to become a vendor for a product, being addicted to that product doesn’t necessarily make the whole market unfree. Of course, for my own case, we have entered an era in which we don’t have a free market due to the pollution of many of our natural dihydrogen monoxide sources. This stuff is literally everywhere, but most of the places I could get it around here are polluted to the point where I can’t use it. The city pipes it into my home, but only after polluting it with a substance that I’m allergic to.
The market is still *pretty* free for me, as I have a fair amount of choice in which pusher I go to for my fix. Many of them also ship product that contains allergens I can’t handle, often the very same allergen that the city adds. But those brands are generally seen to be inferior by the customer base as a whole, so there’s still a dozen bottlers of dihydrogen monoxide whose products I can use and are available around me, and they have pushers all over the place.
I realize people will say my situation isn’t comparable. But, I literally cannot break free of my addiction. I feel like the biggest difference is that things like caffeine require a larger investment to set up a production center. Dihydrogen monoxide is one of the most abundant chemicals on the planet, so there’s no need to produce any more of it. It’s just a matter of isolating samples of sufficient purity. There’s also no negative stigma associated with being a dihydrogen monoxide vendor. As such, there’s always far more competition.
Regulation may be used to reduce the impact of addiction on the market, but it can also be used to increase the impact of addiction on the market. If only a few companies are allowed to produce a product, it becomes scarce, so the portion of the market that is dependent on that product goes way up. Most of the time, the makers of a particular regulated product have enough leverage on the process used to codify that regulation that they are able to get a stronger grasp on their target market.
If only a few companies were allowed to sell bottled water, for example, the market would be anything but free.
Please understand, I’m not against regulating the market. I agree that there needs to be some. I’m just saying, be careful of *HOW* you regulate the market. Big pharma has a lot of influence on the regulation process. They exist as they do today in large part due to having been able to regulate some of their competition out of existence. They continue to war against the freelance pharma in an effort to get an even bigger stranglehold on the market.
> dihydrogen monoxide
Cute. :> What is the additive that you’re allergic to?
No additive needed.
It kills just under 4,000 per year in the United States.
Truly terrifying stuff, here’s a site dedicated to facts and safety tips. You probably have some in your home right now! 0_o
> The city pipes it into my home, but only after polluting it with a substance that I’m allergic to.
> Many of them also ship product that contains allergens I can’t handle, often the very same allergen that the city adds.
I should have said “allergen”, not “additive”.
Personally don’t touch the stuff, haven’t in decades, it mkes me ill
I saw someone pour some over a single malt one time.
I had to kill them – it was the only decent thing to do…
The market typically sorts things out by hurting people. Some people learn from their own suffering, some learn from the suffering of others, and some just suffer until they die. All while other people reap the benefits.
Yeah “let the market sort it out” requires something to very publicly go wrong before the market can react. You need regulations and auditors checking things beforehand.
Before the FDA and the like with all their anti-free-market rules there were things like lead paint, a little white lead under the tongue to calm anxiety, chromium and cadmium based colouring and sweets for extra bright colours, asbestos as fireproofing and sound insulation.
Heck even with those agencies we still get all sorts of goodies like lead in vinyl and rubber, Bakelite in dairy products to fool the protein sensors, palm or mineral oil sold as virgin olive oil and the list goes on,
Nothing naive about it. Fools buy untested products. Fools die. The market goes away. People learn. The problem is that we keep trying to protect people from their own stupidity.
Natural Selection at work. All of the Animal Kingdom from the dawn of animal-life on this planet & still on-going has (literally) lived & died by that creed.
What makes anyone think that Humans are above the Laws of Nature anyway?
Human arrogance, historically. We just have the opportunity to communicate how things work, and so some smart people can use that information to make things that work according to those principles. This lets other people think that means we should be able to do what we want because we can control all of nature. We can see where the wrong assumption is, can’t we?
But we’ve also got the Darwin Awards to point out how far human arrogance can go, don’t we?
ಠ_ಠ
Those are more about straight up stupidity – for real arrogance, you need to look to politics or industry-wide corporate scandals that result in the bankruptcy and/or deaths of thousands of innocent people.
Or, you know, your average housecat.
The problem is that they don’t die (at least not quick enough for the market to die out), but become addicted, slowly suffering the consequences while being driven to keep consuming it. These product stay alive because they keep their victims coming back, begging for more.
Because people who are already addicted to cigarettes (the vast majority of the vaping market) gradually become addicted to nicotine through vaping.
You truly have a dizzying intellect.
You seem to have a problem with those back-handed Ad Hominems.
You should have someone check those out.
Also, you seem to imply that SKy is claiming that people already addicted to nicotine get more addicted to nicotine through vaping.
That is not what SKy is saying.
SKy is pointing out the effects of CHEMICAL DEPENDENCY aka addiction.
You seem to be implying that other people were not already talking about people who were using vaping to quit.
Before you go on with your bait and switch attempt to defend SKy, you might consider paying some attention to the whole conversation which has been going on since this morning.
Now, if you want to have a very limited conversation focused only on the tiny part of the vaping market which doesn’t begin vaping having already been addicted to smoking then make it clear that you are starting a new conversation and that your focus will be strictly limited.
Don’t make claims of victimhood either for yourself or someone else through asserting that the subject has a narrower scope than it has had.
My comment still stands, it was appropriate within the context of the discussion which has been going on since this morning and there was nothing at all back handed about it.
You basically said, that people addicted to cigarettes only become addicted to nicotine after using vapes
Truly madam, you are the pinochle of intellect
No. I replied to SKy’s assertion that people who vape mostly don’t die quick enough (like why is it a good thing if they die? I want them to not die. You’ll have to ask SKy) but instead gradually become addicted to nicotine.
My point to SKy was that the vast majority of people who vape are already cigarette smokers and they are already addicted to nicotine. Yes I was snarky in my phrasing, but the statement didn’t deserve to be taken as though it had merit.
So it was SKy who said that.
I only mocked the notion
There was more in the news today and it seems that the CDC has been neglecting to mention that virtually every case of Vaping related illnesses so far has involved CBD oil with vitamin E as a cutting agent. A combination not found in commercial cartridges. Since it would be an expensive and difficult task to disassemble and make your own tiny cartridges for the pen sized ecigarettes this means that virtually all illnesses have involved the larger hookah type units. The CDC should have and could have announced this before, but for some reason chose not to.
Again, people too stupid or cheap or lazy to buy from a licensed seller, deserve everything they get
Unless you know they are from the hookah type units, you are just surmising, it’s just as likely it’s from black market dealers, just like the majority of the cocaine deaths are from small-time dealers who only have a limited supply and cut it with toxic shit to double or even triple their supply: they don’t care if the user dies, they are only in it for the quick buck, not repeat business
I know for a fact that disassembling the cartridges for the little pen sized units is both difficult and likely to destroy the cartridges. That is by design, as they don’t want competing suppliers.
And I know people who make their own flavors, but not with hemp oil or other additives to get them high. They use the Hookah sized units, as I said. Because the cartridges for the pen sized units destroy themselves during disassembly and because the hookah units hold much more.
Just because I don’t use the devices doesn’t mean that I don’t know a bunch of ex-smokers.
Are you talking cigarettes or insurance?
You are a couple of arguments short of a twitter, there.
Who ends up paying for the people who are harmed and don’t die? What are the cascade effects?
It’s a pretty lame argument.
Fools buy untested products. Fools die. The market goes away. People learn. The problem is that we keep trying to protect people from their own stupidity. – Marc vun Kannon
In a case where the fools only harmed themselves, this approach might carry some weight. Unfortunately, the vast majority of cases are not so self-contained. Protecting people from their own stupidity is one thing; the problem is usually protecting them from the overflowing stupidity of others.
Honestly, breathing something in to your lungs other than air or something prescribed by a doctor is probably not a good idea long term. Flavorings in vape pens have been seem to be causing lung damage similar to the “popcorn lung” seen in workers exposed to the flavorings in microwave popcorn.
As Tuscahoma Jack put it “Honestly, breathing something in to your lungs other than air or something prescribed by a doctor is probably not a good idea long term.” On the other hand, vaping is “proven” to be waaaaaaaay safer than smoking.
The British medical establishment considers it a golden gateway to quitting smoking, purely on the basis that they’ve judged it to carry only 5% of the health risk of smoking tobacco (and with their universal healthcare system insuring that 100% of the costs for lifestyle choices impacts the government’s bottom line, they pay serious attention to these things).
So, someone switches from smoking to vaping and then quits altogether: big win. Someone switches to vaping but continues vaping: still a big win because he’s still far less likely to get sick off it and cost the government money.
Someone who takes up vaping who never smoked? That goes in the loss column. But assuming the Brits are correct and vaping really is 95% safer (current research indicates it likely can be if done right), then even if you got 10 people who started vaping for every smoker who quit or who never started because vaping exists as a satisfying alternative, health-wise you’re still far ahead of the game. You save lives.
The real wildcard is the lack of regulation. I don’t believe bans work: if nothing else, Prohibition proved that. But requiring all manufacturers of vape sticks and liquids to adhere to stringent safety standards is a must. Meanwhile vapers should keep abreast of the latest research regarding sticks and liquid. For general and unbiased information on the state of the debate, see Politifacts.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/oct/21/vaping-safer-smoking/
Again, the safest bet is just to not inhale stuff into your lungs.
(+2) ↑This❗↑
The other problem is that in the US vaping is so unregulated that, well
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2019/a1031-lung-injury-cases.html
Seriously there would have been a knee jerk government mandated recall by now if this has been almost anything else. Granted in this case it was most likely caused by third party juice, namely pot extracts. Which is ironic because it’s been long known that you don’t put Hemp oil Into room misters since at least the 80s for the exact same reason. (given my dating preferences I ran into that bit of advice years ago) I guess the theory that marajuana use damages memory is true….
Those knee-jerk government responses only ever happen to industries that don’t put big bucks into politics or an easy scapegoat.
Cigarettes kill? Nah, lets listen to the industry studies.
Cars that explode and kill people, lets listen to the industry studies.
Global warming, nah lets listen to the industry studies.
Please note that the majority of these independent studies are all by the exact same people.
Why worry about supposed fantastical conspiracies when there are plenty of them right in your face.
Just answer this question. If it was true then who is making big bucks from it?
AFAIK, vaping doesn’t involve any tar. Vaping may not be harmless, but the best science currently available suggests that it’s about 95% less dangerous than traditional cigarettes. Is it possible that there may be long-term effects we don’t know about yet? Sure. But based on what we definitely know about the long-term risks of smoking, vaping is currently a better alternative.
Markets do tend to sort out problems, if they’re allowed to work. Without prohibition or overly onerous regulation or taxation, black markets wouldn’t exist. The problems making big news mostly involve black market THC vapes, which aren’t generally available from reputable, legal providers. If they were, I’m willing to bet you’d see far fewer problems. Proposed government bans on flavored vapes (or vapes in general) will only serve to drive more people to either buy black market products or revert to smoking.
(For the record, I’m an ex-smoker (ten years smoke-free, congratulate me!) and I’ve never vaped in my life and have no plans to start.)
Congrats.
“Markets do tend to sort out problems”… to the benefit of the profiteers. If there is a cost to consumers, to society or the environment? Companies don’t give a dog’s end. In a free market, people will add any cheap thickener or colorant or flavor to shave a fraction of a cent off production costs. As long as it doesn’t kill the consumer too alarmingly quickly it’s A-OK. Which is why you have to regulate things to make those human costs cost the companies. That includes costs uncovered retroactively, because otherwise they tend to just keep court cases in the air until all the people they gave melanoma to die.
“Without prohibition or overly onerous regulation or taxation, black markets wouldn’t exist.”
Which as an argument against regulation is about like saying “if you just legalize slavery then we won’t have all those shady human trafficking groups.” Besides, someone has to pay for those regulatory agencies that keep disreputable providers from mucking up the market and consumer confidence. Should that be you, who doesn’t smoke? Or the companies who profit from not having such disreputable competition?
More power to someone who uses one as an alternative to smoking, but they weren’t introduced to help people quit smoking. They were designed to turn a profit and expand the consumer base. They are the new candy cigarette.
Also why in gods name is there this much discussion of vaping in the comments section. Let’s discuss genocide!
Nicotine, yes. Tar, no. You get the drug w/o the cancer-inducing elements. At least that is my understanding of vaping.
As for the “crappy third world” carts. We don’t need legislation, just don’t buy from the shady guy on the street corner.
Same here thought vaping was an alternative to nicotine smoking, not simply a less-mess way
Didn’t realise this had turned into such a long anti-smoking rant thread, not gonna read it all
Couple points: as someone else said, many things hyu-mons consume are toxic to other animals, that have little or minimal effect on them, like chocolate and capsaicin
Also, one of the things these anti-smoking ads get tossing out, is that cigarettes contain arsenic, wanna know what else contains arsenic that is consumed on a regular basis by hyu-mons? Almonds and apple seeds
I don’t actually know much about this, but I think that vaping is not a nicotine smoking alternative. It’s an alternative to get nicotine that does not involve all the other crap in cigarettes (tar, fillers, etc), since vaping is water vapor with nicotine and other flavors usually.
Again, I’m not even remotely knowledgeable about this but I’m pretty sure that was the original point of vaping vs smoking. It’s not as unhealthy, even though it’s obviously less healthy than just not smoking OR vaping. It’s sort of like the patch, but with a variety of flavors and motion habits.
Unless someone uses Hemp oil in the juice, then you literaly playing Russian roulette. With a derringer. Granted that may be more relivant to the HIV/AIDs community….
Pretty sure that six deaths out of millions of people using vapes isnt ‘russian roulette’ – especially when the six incidents in question were from black market vape stuff instead of normal store-bought vape juices. Pretty sure more people have died from bad reactions to nicotine patches.
Although again, I only know the legal aspects, I don’t know anything about vape stuff in general. Plus saying ‘vape juice’ just sounds so gross in general.
Confused what vaping has to do with HIV/AIDS though.
I just re-read steven’s post and now see what he was saying. If someone puts hemp oil IN the juice (ie, tampers with the vape juice).
Yeah, it does seem, at first, that they are saying that you are playing Russian roulette unless they add the Hemp oil
Yeah :) That’s how I initially read it :)
Like said: that’s what thought/I> it was, instead of inhaling nicotine smoke, it’s relatively harmless flavoured smoke
Please define relatively harmless.
22 cal to the temple compared to a 50 cal long round?
Smoke is literately suspended particulates and outside of the sinus filtration system, which you are bypassing by oral inhalation, there is no other defence for your lungs outside of a thin mucous coating over cilia which isn’t designed to handle such a load all at once.
To paraphrase Forrest Gump “monster is as monster does”.
+1
“I’m Sydney…. Sydney, Australia! I have a famous opera house!”
Dabbler:-“Is that what you’re calling it now?”
Such massive teeth! The teeth!! The TEEEEEETHHHHH!!!
Yeah, can’t say I like the direction the art style is going
You mean, the same direction it’s been going for the last couple hundred+ pages? o_O
A small question to the comment: What are “undercover chops”?
I am not a native speaker and google didn’t bring up anything useful. I somewhat doubt that “chop suey piano” is related here.
In this context read “chops” as “skills”. Sydney has genuinely horrible undercover skills.
Thank you.
Try this: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/chops or this https://www.englishbaby.com/lessons/5043/slang/have_the_chops
English is so laced with idiom that in order to fully understand a casual native speaker, it’s almost like you have to learn a second language within the first.
We’re not quite at “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” levels, but English is like 10% of the way there.
Actually I’d imagine most languages are like that, but I don’t have enough linguistic chops to confirm it.
*”Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” is a reference to an episode of Star Trek: TNG where they encounter a race that speaks only in metaphor. Which I wouldn’t normally explain, but as you’re not a native speaker I thought I would clarify.
“an episode of Star Trek: TNG” — Season 5, episode 2 – “Darmok”. One of the best portrayals of aliens being, well, alien.
1) Naw, Darmok was nonsense. It’s still just Hollywood humans with bumps on their noses. The Japanese in 1900 were more alien than anything ever shown by Hollywood. There’s no long-term C.J. Cherryh aliens in Star Trek, ever. The Borg were nonhuman, until someone made a “queen” because it was easier and less nonhuman. Species 8472 (from fluidic space) was the same until they made Ray Walston their spokesman.
2) The solution to that stupid Darmok scenario is – “Data, please ingest all the stories for every civilization within 5 thousand light years of these guys. Find me five stories where two people saved the day by ignoring their boss’s orders. Keep finding more and giving them to me until he gets it.”
3) If you want to understand most of the common metaphors in English, you just need Milton and Shakespeare. That’s roughly half of what we used, fifty years ago. Most everything else is long-tail one-offs from a movie here, a song there.
My wife, the linguist, tells me English is a creole language kluged together from a number of other languages. That’s really only a step up from a patois.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” — James Nicoll, on Usenet, in the 1990s.
Who was quoting an early 20th century newspaper columnist.
You know, I was going to comment in response, but I think this pretty well handles it. Assuming by “English”, you mean “Left Pondian”.
(To be kind, the pond in question is the Atlantic Ocean. Left of that, if you keep the North Pole up, is to the West. That is, American English.)
Nope. Remains true of the language as found on Ol’ Blighted. Why do you think pork comes from pigs and beef comes from cows? (Hint: NormanFrench vs. Saxon Anglish).
It’s a bad habit formed so that Norsemen could flirt with Saxon babes.
I assume “linguist” is being used colloquially rather than technically here. Jokes aside, the “genesis” of English isn’t really too different from most other languages.
Hey, Picard was communicating quite well with them by the end of that episode.
Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.
Yeah, I never did figure out how you were supposed to learn the metaphors, and the history they’re based off of, if you don’t have a language that doesn’t rely on them to communicate them the first time. Don’t think they really thought that one through.
I envision their race as a species whose meme culture was so prevalent it gradually supplanted their entire language.
It’s a ridiculous concept for a language that “works” as a gimmick for a Star Trek episode, and that’s about it.
It’s simply not possible. There would have to be a “nursery” language, or learning through dance and motion, or they would have to be fully telepathic or learning meaning by absorption. But that’s only the most obvious flaw.
Once Enterprise knew it was situational metaphors from stories, all they would have had to do is search through archives for all stories that had elements they wanted to convey.
Find me examples where two people on opposite sides saved the day by disobeying superiors.
Find me examples where second-in-commands made better decisions than their commanders.
Find me examples where two warring factions took a smoke break.
Find me examples where people fighting stopped in order to do something more important.
It really isn’t that hard, if you aren’t trying to force the characters to be plot zombies.
“Find me examples where two warring factions took a smoke break.”
Can’t find that, but I did find an event during World War 1, when both sides ceased fighting on their own (despite orders) where the Germans started yelling Merry Christmas to the British soldiersin the other sides’ native languages, the German soldiers lit christmas trees, came out of the trenches unarmed, and the British soldiers did NOT shoot them. Both sides stopped fighting to shake the hands of the enemy soldiers, played a soccer game with each other, exchanged PRESENTS (mostly cigarettes and plum puddings), etc.
Then went back to killing each other the next day.
It was never repeated again despite soldiers on both sides wanting to (officers were threatened with disciplinary action if they did it again, on both sides).
It’s historically known as ‘The Christmas Truce of 1914’
Actually, they did try the following year, with the plan from the ‘Higher Ups’ to use it as a trap to kill the other side when they came up from their trenches, basically, it ended up with both sides going “Nah, you go first!”
I was under the impression that the higher ups on the German side threatened court martialing anyone who tried it, or did not shoot the enemy soldiers who tried it (the Germans were the side that initially put down their arms for Christmas in 1914 the first time).
Is what you said something that actually happened or is that a guess you made? I’m asking seriously since I genuinely do not know. I just know what happened in Christmas of 1914 because it was on the History Channel.
Don’t be so quick to put it all on the German Command, especially when the Allies – well basically the French and the English where the officers got their positions due to social position and not competence or intellect. The French liked straight lines on their maps and the English always sent the colonists out first when things looked dodgy, even to them. Either group enforced their orders with the threat of being shot on the spot by other soldiers to stupid to not shoot the officers.
Wars only stop when the Generals have guns to THEIR heads or they have already lost them, their heads that is. Well that of finding a grenade in their bunk at least once.
Did TNG writers really think ANYTHING through?
They got rid of the science consultants early on since they tended to cramp the writers creativity with things like science, logic and consistency.
Nah it’s actually pretty undestandable. The Federation already learned all the WORDS to the language, and the letters, but they just couldn’t relate those words in a way that the aliens could understand. Probably because the aliens used to have a more standard language, then it evolved into a language entirely based on metaphor. It doesn’t seem that useful for a spacefaring race, but it’s still possible in an infinite universe there’d be one race that has a really unusual way of having sentence structure. Sort of like how some pictographical languages are extremely difficult for people who know cyrillic or romantic languages to learn, even if you learn all the actual traditional chinese or whatever letters. Because there are also different scripts for the kanji, like hiragana and katakana.
And no I don’t know what most of that means – I just googled it since I have friends who know chinese, japanese, and korean, while I do not. And they’ve tried and failed to explain it to me so this is my very amateurish attempt to explain why it’s so difficult to learn compared to romantic languages like English or French or Spanish (English is one of the easiest because you usually don’t even have to have masculine and feminine for words – it’s almost designed for people to be lazy about the language so that it’s a lot easier to learn for a wide variety of people).
Learning it as your first language wouldn’t be any harder than learning any first language, provided it’s consistently used. We don’t learn the actual meanings of words until we’re much older. Kids know how words are used to convey intent, but they seldom really understand the definitions of more than a handful of words until after they’ve been using them for years.
For example, there’s no meaningful difference between saying “Blue” or “The sky at noon.” One is the name of a color, and the other a metaphor for it, but they would both be used in the same way and would be equally difficult for a child to learn (assuming we ignore the length of the second example). I would assume that their children would learn individual words first, just as the Federation had learned the individual words by the time of that episode, and would learn the socially acceptable metaphors as they grew older. Using the same example, a parent could point up and say, “sky.” Later, the parent could point to something blue and say, “the sky at noon,” alternating until the kid gets it, just as you would teaching any kind a language.
Now, the REAL issue comes when trying to use metaphor for something a highly advanced, space faring species would absolutely need: Math.
Communicating in pure metaphor would make mathematics beyond simple arithmetic impossible, and even that would be incredibly difficult. This was actually addressed in the Star Trek novels by added a second layer to the language: music. Per the novels, they communicate complex ideas, particularly math, through an complex structured language of musical notes, which they communicate “verbally” through whistling.
That’s true :) Not sure how you’d ever do math via metaphors :) In most harder science fiction, the way different very alien species first communicate with each other is with math because, in order to become a spacefaring race, there are certain mathematical conceps that you HAVE to understand in order to actually make the science involved in space travel work, and basic math is considered a ‘universal’ concept. Metaphors are subjective. Math is objective.
The problem with your example of using ‘Blue’ and ‘The sky at noon’: the noon sky isn’t always blue
I knew about “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”, but thank you for clarifying.
English has more words than many languages, it had many influences from outside. Slang and regional idioms add to that. I have learned that whenever I don’t understand a word, don’t assume a meaning from context or try some reverse language induction with thematic superposition or stuff. Instead, simply ask. That is much more reliable and often faster.
I always think of Mutton Chops hair style when I hear the word chops. This just makes me giggle thinking of Sidney wearing Mutton Chops to be undercover.
Chops to me are pork rib steak. An open hand strike attack in martial arts also comes to mind. Mutton chops to me are lamb chops that started too old.
The English language is a giant meme.
https://youtu.be/65CFesU4KVQ
How does she get the hoodie on over the wings?
As mentioned in yesterday’s comments, zippers hidden along the seems in the fabric.
A lot of fashionable dresses work that way.
Since the wings are a normal appendage on her body, I would assume she can flex them about a bit. She has to cut holes into the backs of her hoodies obviously, but getting the wings through those holes is probably no more difficult for her than it is for us to put our arms through the sleeves.
The only thing I know about Vamperella is that she is a comicbook character.
I seem to remember that she could extend and retract her wings like
the landing gear of a 747.
Wouldn’t that hurt like a SOB?
Coming out and going in?
Not if that is the natural way it works, on her planet.
I read Vampi, when it was in comic form, in the 1970’s. I have always been a fan of Vampi, I even watched the movie.
It was pretty good in the seventies. She seemed to be a favorite of miniatures sculptors, and it seemed like every company which made miniatures for fantasy gaming had one that was pretty obviously Vampirella.
… The first casualty of girl’s night out is the plan. Something tells me this is going to go sideways well before they even leave the building.
Of course it was going to go sideways! Sydney was involved! No plan survives contact with her! Even her own plans!
So if Tamatha grew up believing that she was a monster, does that mean she grew up on Earth under the care of people who didn’t know what she is? If she grew up off planet she’d be aware that people come in many shapes, sizes, colors, limb count, etcetra. If she grew up under the care of her apparently Succubus Mother her Mom would have clued her in.
I suspect we have an interesting backstory waiting in the wings. (Pun intended)
She could have grown up off planet among mostly human spacers who didn’t know what she was perhaps her wings hadn’t manifested, and runaway or got lost when the ship made a stop at earth.
Hoping to see Decolette as the mentor.
A problem with that theory occurs to me: how far does the veil stretch from earth? remember, it took what, six? eight? (it’s been a while) of those pylons to keep the whole planet in the proverbial dark. to get much further than the moon would be silly huge coverage, for mortal mages and whatnot.
What if it turns out that she was named in honor of the guy her Mom seduced to have her. The dude had some weird name. Mom couldn’t remember it exactly, Mathicus or Maththighs, just that it started with Math.
Tamatha – In the language of the Succubus’s it means daughter of Matthias.
Who do we know named “Math”?
I now want this to be canon.
I agree with this notion. Math deserves a succubus daughter.
Maybe, butt does his daughter deserve Math for a father?
That’s kinda like giving Quagmire a daughter… oh wait, they did, for a single episode
The veil would not have been needed until she matured enough to start growing wings and the tail. If she got off on earth say 2008 she’d have been a lost alien teen among normies when she started to manifest.
She could have been a foundling given to human parents, who did/could not know because of the Veil.
As they don’t know what she is and don’t know the Veil exists, they can’t tell her.
If you hide stuff and nobody finds it, is it because you hid it well or there is a system that you don’t know about that makes sure nobody could find it anyway?
Mom: Tamatha, there’s something we have to tell you about yourself.
Your father and I think you’re old enough now to know the truth.
(And it’s this point where comments being uneditable and irrevocable is a nuisance,
but I trust my co-commenters to supply 2 of the 3 I didn’t post)
Apparently I *can’t* trust my co-commenters to comment.
https://youtu.be/GZQAvtFO_uA
Highly doubtful that she’s from off-planet. Succubi aren’t aliens- Dabbler just happens to ALSO be half-alien in addition to her Succubus heritage.
So I think Tammy here is probably the offspring of a careless Incubus, raised by her human family. It’s possible, even, that she was born with wings, tail, etc and the Veil just made her family and doctors and stuff not notice it.
An incubus is a stage that a Succubus morphs into during the complicated Succubus reproduction cycle.
“Some people were wondering about how sexually immature succubi operate. I think I addressed it in the post accompanying a previous page, but I don’t recall which one. It will be addressed in a next page or two.”
I think you covered it on the body of a previous page; to wit, that it’s theoretically possible for a Succubus to survive on a diet of meat, veg, drink, and satisfying their tantric energy needs through strictly radiant sources, rather than generating their own.
A link, a link, your chocolate-stuffed ghost peppers for a link!
Ah, the tickle laser. Hopefully to be seen used in a battle soon.
I don’t know about stuffed but chocolate-coated, candied ghost peppers are genuinely amazing. If you take incredibly small nibbles, that is.
Dave covered it a little bit in the Author’s Commentary on page #311.
I’m actually not sure what early life is like for succubi. They’re not born sexually mature certainly – physically how would that even work? As I think about it, it makes sense that they’d be born normally and that their tantric energy needs are a fraction of what a mature succubi’s are. They start off supplementing from their mothers, (which invites all sorts of questions about family units and succubus/demon culture in general) and as they grow up they can absorb minimal ambient energy from others. While succubus sex ed is comprehensive, they still go through the usual teenage fumblings while they learn to draw energy directly from a partner.
Well, I can’t say I know anything about how a sexually immature succubus operates, but there’s SCP-166 for some possible comparison.
Perhaps work like the Wraith from Star Gate Atlantis who can eat normally until adulthood but then lose the ability to properly digest food and can now absorb life energy from humans.
I assume the Veil just works on anyone that doesn’t already know about it.
Okay, am I the only one who feel that Tamatha’s face sit firmly into Uncanny Valley territories ?
Try watching The Monster Club https://youtu.be/lyHZQXt5mwg for a good explanation of why humans and ‘monsters’ are all the same.
Oh yes, “Monster Club” features one of Vincent Price’s best creepy speeches, extolling the human propensity for slaughter.
The thing is the “uncanny valley” is a personal effect, everyone has their own unique reaction to human-like depictions. I have a visceral reaction to the titans in “Attack of the Titans” manga and anime, such that I really can’t watch more than a minute or two, but others have less of a problem. Tamatha for me is very cute, doesn’t look disturbing at all. I can see how her appearance could cause that effect though.
The only one so far that made me double-take was panel 5 today… something about the sudden appearance of the little vertical lines between nose and upper lip, maybe.
Hey, he probably spent like three hours doing shading on the upper lip. It’s probably the best drawing he’s ever done.
It’s hard getting the look of the upper lip right.
Succubi may get more neotenic tendencies than human faces, though humans are already pretty neotenic.
Yeah, the art style is going toward “early sonic film” at an alarming speed…
Ah yes, nothing like a genocide joke to get a chuckle.
Where did you ever get that from? My ancestors, were the subject of the US’s, attempt at genocide, we are still here.
Someone equated the nicotine thread to genocide
Genocide was injected into the conversation by Sydney’s dialogue.
It’s plainly obvious that Sydney is talking about two extremes. Genocide at one end, vaping at the other extreme.
If you insist on reacting with contrived horror, like this, you may make idiots doubt the real horror of genocide.
If any idiots are reading, the Holocaust was real. I met survivors.
And other genocides were real too, like Rwanda. The Holocaust is just the worst example of genocide so far.
The Mughal conquest of the Indian subcontinent is the worst so far, we just don’t have accurate figures.
Sydney came close to blowing her cover…
Will we get to meet Tamatha’s mentor!?!?
Maybe we already have. We know of two Succubi currently on Earth, so it is possible for it to be one of them.
Who said her mentor had to be on Dirt?
And as you said, we know of two, that doesn’t mean there are only two on the entire mudball
Who said her mentor necessarily had to be a succubus?
One of these days I hope that Dave decides to do a small flip book or section Sydney counts off the troops that she’s managed to perform or do in real life as compared to comic books. Including this newest one the unsecret secret identity
Sydney doesn’t “do the troops”, that’s Dabblers raison d’être.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-501-1-down/ it was her whole. I come back from the dead Trope that I was referring to plus she identified several of them including when she was spelling the helmets to go ahead and foolishly reveal his plan well they were all healthy and listening or something like that I’ve included a link to the one where she’s having her own Trope unlocked goal in her Imagination
Can I just say from personal experience “coming back from the dead” is very uncomfortable in that you have to die first, and that REALLY hurts, and then you have to “be not dead” and that REALLY, REALLY hurts. 0/10, would not recommend.
And this is another second on the preview option so that we can check for formatting and missed HTML tags.
Ag! I clicked on that then spent an hour reading my own comic.
^ Justice has been served. :)
I’ve gotten sucked into the archives several times while looking up a specific strip; kinda tempted to run the entire series through an OCR tool and extract all the transcripts just so I don’t fall victim once again.
A good story will draw you in. Honestly it’s a good sign that you can enjoy reading your pass work
Aaaaaaaaand here we go! Sydney has a groupie. Well, she probably has a lot of them……but still……..she has a groupie! And a cute one at that!
Is it just me, or is Sydney’s face all over the map in today’s comic? And not just like her usual expressiveness: she looks like six different people to me.
Six different faces, and not even one resembling a human being…
Kind of like the art at the very beginning of the comic.
By the stars those last couple expressions. Tamantha’s especially.
Waiting for her to forget she’s wearing a wig next.
[facepalm] And ten pages later – nightclub explodes.
“SYDNEY – Who’d YOU TELL !!!”
“Ah, just an underage succubus”….. *SNAP* Saying that Sydneys speech about human monsters isn’t a super thing. It’s a Nerd thing. Let’s be honest what Nerd hasn’t wondered at the monsters humans be, And it’s soo cool getting Sydney to doing stuff that shows off her nerd cred in a cute way like this.
I used to tell my niece. “There are no monsters under your bed or in your closet. They’re more likely to be parked across the road in a plain white minivan, offering free candy” Her mother, my sister, wasn’t amused.
Most of those “monsters, were members of the child’s family. Stranger Danger, is a myth.
It’s not a myth, it’s just not the majority.
↑This!↑
Stranger Danger is a different kettle of reasons than ‘problems at home’.
Depending on where you are in the world stranger danger mostly refers to kidnappings. The kids who get picked up off the streets like mentioned are basically dead after 24 hours. The people who would kidnap a kid for personal reasons may keep them for a while but usually kill them, or sell off as slaves in foreign lands.
Danger in the home or from relatives is often long running but the kid usually has some freedoms, simply having to live with the horrible secret of their homelife…..
Either way their bad scenarios and are some of the most clear cut examples of “Humans are the real monsters”.
A lot of them also die.
Or are damaged enough to endure lifelong medical problems.
I thought it was a bit of a nerd thing like #6 is reference to the deathworlders
Did… did Sydney just got her own sidekick?
Now you got me picturing Sydney cosplaying Batman at a ComiCon, with Tamatha cosplaying Robin.
I think we have our next vote incentive!
As long Tamatha is cosplaying as Damien, ok!
No, Carrie, Damien is a dick (and not the fun kind, even his dad thinks he is a dick, and his mother dumped him on to the largest anti-social psychopath on the planet, which tells you what his own mother thinks of him)
I only thought of Damien because he’s the grandson of a “demon” (Ra’s Al-Ghul).
Ra’s ain’t no demon, he simply calls himself the ‘Demon’s head’ (or some such nonsense) because it ‘sounds cool’, he’s no more a true demon than Vandal Savage (if Ra’s didn’t have access to the Lazarus Pool, he would have died long ago)
I’m already quite smitten with Tamatha, and I’d love to see her sidekicking Sydney.
with those in there, Sydney never needs to worry about someone stealing her purse.
Seriously, giving Sydney a secret name other than Sydney was a big mistake to start with. Its not that unusual of a name, and gives her a chance to learn chops without giving away the whole show. Vice cops are not trained in a day. I would imagine the best starter Secret identities are the ones that only a few key differences are changed, and that would make pulling it off easier. Giving a kid a middle name could get them thinking them down that path if they don’t normally use it. My dad went by his middle name because kids are mean to eachother.
How Tomatha get into that bar?
The Veil makes her look 48?
Bouncers never stop a succubus.
It’s one of their powers.
Hypnoboobs. Is there anything they can’t do?
She looks like overly tanned Sydney in that last image, lol.
Tamatha is freaking adorable.
That was the idea. :D
Fan-girl on fan-girl is the new fan-girl fetish.
Sydney’s actually doing better at keeping her identity secret than I expected. I mean, she’s gone at least ten minutes without revealing her true name to someone without a vested interest in keeping her secret for her.
Does seem a bit weirder of late, yeah
I bet the mentor will be the jill of all trades. Dabbler. As some kind of out reach program for wayward demons.
OMFG, if Sydney gets a girlfriend… *mind blown*
Eh… I am not bothered by the is a succubus… I am bothered by how HUGE Sydney and her eyes and teeth are in this… its a bit anime uncanny valley-ish… I normally have no problem with it but I notice it more because it seems its the author/artists art style changing over time.
And this is just a critique and a personal feeling of mine, nothing more. I love the story, I love how genuine and natural it feels, and I plan on seeing where this coke and redbull fueled chariot ride ends (hopefully not an inevitable crash).
Do you realize that “Uncanny Valley” refers to something becoming more disturbing as it gets closer to accurate?
It’s the dip toward creepy between unrealistic, so non-threatening, and very realistic, so non-threatening.
It’s why cartoons don’t bother us despite the clear broken biology, but that one Sonic design was just creepy looking.
If you meant the original design for the Sonic movie: the problem with that was the design didn’t resemble the ‘real’ Sonic correctly, it’s like the art team had never seen the cartoon series or played the game and went for something ‘realistic’ (the new design is far more accurate)
“Demons are people too. Same for vampires, aliens, and lycans.”
This seems to be true… but also kind of radically weakens the argument for why the Veil should be allowed to exist, doesn’t it?
Also, I got to say, the “demons” should really think about rebranding. Since they do not actually seem seem to be spirits tied to the universal concept of evil and sin, opposed to the Divine and all its works… why call yourself a demon, you know? They ought to call themselves “magical human subspecies” or something and laugh nervously about how “obviously our horns and wings helped inspire the popular concept of demons in mythology, which we have nothing to do with, many of us are Christian actually”.
Unless there actually is a Hell in the world of Grrl Power? Really unclear about that.
1)Not everyone would be as understanding as Sydney. Though they do plan to reveal themselves.
2)That’s what most humans ascribe the word “demon” to, mostly due to fear and superstition. It probably means something different to actual Demons.
“This seems to be true… but also kind of radically weakens the argument for why the Veil should be allowed to exist, doesn’t it?”
not really, if you consider how humans treat other humans. I’m sure there were civilizations, humans civilizations, that if could had the chance to hide behind the veil wold have jumped at it.
Think of it this way: Black man in the deep South. Same species just a slightly different color.
I still believe people spell demon incorrectly, it should be Dimen, as in ‘from a parallel dimension’
In the RIFTS RPG Demons are dimensional travellers with sometimes radically different physiology to the locals.
Hi there Mr Wormy Sir. Tankard? Stout of ale? Oh no, no critter ball billiards or magic deck poker for me thanks.
That also means that Humans are considered demons at other locals within the multiverse.
The Twilight Council has upon occasion had to employ extremely bloodthirsty measures to prevent its component groups from killing off (early on) or provoking unstoppable retaliation from (recently) the human population. Of the factions within the Twilight Council, Vampires and Succubi need humans around to feed. But either group is fatal to humans if they draw too much sustenance from a normal human at one time.
Tamatha is potentially dangerous because she hasn’t yet been trained how to stop when enough is enough drawing tantric energy directly.
The Semper Vigilantis personnel here really should return her to her mentor or bring another Succubus in to keep an eye on her.
She hasn’t shown sign of doing anything, you are judging her (and condemning without trial) based entirely on her species, not her actions
I have judged her to need supervision and training before being around relatively fragile males in a meat market where humans go to get laid.
Fear not.
I also judge other teenagers of the human sort to need supervision and training…when given the keys to a new Corvette parked in front of the house on their fifteenth birthday.
I guess I’m just mean.
How do you know that fifteen year hasn’t had three years’ worth of training and supervision before getting the car as a reward for showing they are a good and safe driver?
Because they live in the city, and to practice driving on the roads requires a learners permit which one cannot get in the United States until age fifteen.
Wow, and no one ever drives without a license
Plenty of places to practice without going on the roads, like malls or shopping centres on the weekend, those parking lots are huge
To be fair to Tamatha, we don’t know that she is now untrained and dangerous. We know that she wasn’t raised as a ‘normal’ succubus, and that she was later found by a mentor who presumably trained her, but we don’t know how long it’s been since she started (or indeed finished) that training.
Tamantha is adorable.
So much unanswered. Yet, at least.
We’ve been told by Dabbler (taken with a grain of salt, because nothing says Dabbler has to be telling people the truth) that only succubi are born, never incubi, so.. what happened for her to be raised in a non veil aware environment? Non-existant incubi knocked up her mom? Succu-mom abandoned her? Tragic Bambi-esque backstory.. Mom?!
Inquiring minds want to know!
Buut buut but Dave, the man-buns are so convenient when you can’t be bother to style or want to work out.
Just don’t do top knots.
Pony-tails
Top knots are for Kender :P
worried to Fangirl in 60 seconds
Now I’m wondering how many grifting Halo imitators there will be who just have some light-up orbs in a bag trying to get something out of suckers.
“Yeah I can’t actually let you see me use them indoors, but I’m totally Teh Mitty Helo. Here’s the Venmo to join my super-secret VIP fan club.”
Tamatha’s expression in the last panel made my heart smile. Thank you so much for that today.
Hugs!
Yeah. And how great is it for a young girl who’s thought of herself as a outsider or “monster” her whole life to not only meet her idol but so have that idol validate her ‘otherness’ so completely?
So, this succubus grows up not knowing she was one… Anybody else thinking “Lost Girl” ???
I figure that Tamatha is here to passively feed off of tantric energy from everyone around. While succubi raised among their own kind might be “early bloomers” by modern western standards, she wasn’t, so her need to feed probably came before she was prepared to do so in the normal manner. I wonder if succubi children have the same needs and are fed by mom feeding in close proximity.