Grrl Power #910 – Jabber blabber
When I sit down to write a page, I know basically what I want to happen on it, and have a general idea of what the dialog will be. It takes some time to actually compose it and sort it into comic panel friendly chunks, but for this page – I knew what was going to happen on it, but had no idea what I was going to do for the dialog.
Sitting down to write it though, I wasn’t really worried. One of the secret powers of ADHD (for me anyway) is kind of never having to worry about writer’s block. It pours out like goo from a massive lanced boil. Doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good, or that I won’t just sit in my chair spinning and daydreaming twenty different scenarios instead of actually typing something out. The point is, quantity is not the issue. I stared at the screen for about 15 seconds and was like, “Hmm, what is Sydney going to verbal diarrhea about… ah! Jabberwokky’s kiss cure.”
Actually I had that story banked for another page or three, but I think it’s at least as amusing in this form.
Fun fact, Jabberwokky was supposed to be obnoxiously chatty, which is where she got her nickname. But I forgot to do that every time she showed up. Maybe she switched her meds right before her first appearance.
By the way, for those of you wondering, Clip Studio Paint does not handle large blocks of anti-aliased text well. The program is embarrassingly single-threaded. It’s actually amazing it’s as fast as it is, but I would really like to see some GPU support.
Check the vote incentive to see Sydney not naked. Check Patreon to see her… well, you can guess.
Boobs.
(. )( .)
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
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Lois McMaster Bujold had her hero Miles Vorkosigan do something like that in the novel “Brothers in Arms”. He was dosed with the in universe truth serum but because of his medical conditions it made him hyper and so he poured out everything BUT what his enemies wanted to hear. It’s still a great idea and you executed it very well.
Hah! I was about to mention that very thing. Apparently hyperactivity vs truthserum is a trope now. Although I find it hard to believe Dave hasn’t read Lois. Everyone should.
I read several of her novelettes which were published in Analog magazine. And just recently I’ve bought and read the first 4 or 5 of the books in the series. They are good reads, but our esteemed author doesn’t appear to appreciate novels unless the main character is an improbably talented male with a harem of females.
Came back into the cell reciting Shakespeare’s Henry VIIIth… awesome scene…
Miles Vorkosigan would latch onto any tangent that popped into his mind while on truth serum, and then follow the various tangents to the end. Kinda like mental Wiki tag.
Yes, but in her case WITHOUT the filter of Miles’ willpower and intellect. Also, I don’t remember him having trouble breathing… shutting up, yes, but not any physiological effects. In fact, didn’t they have to use a Fastpenta antagonist to get him to stop…
Anyway, congratulations to the unnamed villains and their new “turn the steam of consciousness into a raging river of drivel” serum.
There couldn’t get him to stop. He just kept going and going and going until he hit the end of the play.
*They
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT MADE GLORIOUS SUMMER BY THIS SON OF YORK!
God that was fantastic.
“Now is the Windows of our disk contents, made glorious SimEarth by this son of Zork”
One of my favorite series. Any suggestions for similar stories/characters.
I have Asperger’s (now simply filed under High Functioning Autism) and severe adult ADHD (mental hyperactivity primary).
When I was working as a substitute teacher at one school, the English class I was covering made the mistake of asking me to explain what a paradox is. This resulted in a 15 minute mini-lecture that included anything from simple paradoxes, to paradox riddles (e.g., “The next statement will be false. The previous statement was true.”) and off into various theories of time paradoxes (e.g., split realities, closed/infinite loop, existing result… the last being that if you could have done it then it would have already happened, and even folded timeline such as was explained in Avenger’s Endgame but before that movie came out).
I’ve had the comment made about me similar to Lois’s friends in “And Man and the Wasp” saying “You asked the question. He’s like a jukebox. Drop in the quarter and you have to listen to the whole song.” Mostly because the depth my answers often go into (with what my wife refers to as “biscuits” or my therapist says “squirrel” about which are little side trips or comments in a conversation) when I’m asked about a lot of different things. In part because I often tend to synthesize an answer from my existing knowledgebase and that leads to other concepts. (Do NOT engage me in any abstract discussions like for philosophy, theology/religion, psychology, sociology and so on where the mind can run free.)
The funny thing is I have a reputation for being incredibly talkative even though I actually spend most of my time not saying a word. It’s just when I DO decide to talk that the dam breaks.
TL/DR: I can REALLY relate to Sydney in this strip.
Errr… Luis’s friends, rather.
Errr… Luis’s friends.
(Sorry if this is a double up. The first attempt to correct didn’t appear.)
That’s the second mention of Luis in these comments, so I did a search for “And Man and the Wasp” (sic) and when my search engine changed the first “d” to a “t” I thought, “Oh, yeah, that Luis!” but he usually did a better job of staying reasonably close to the topic and now I just have to look up that clip even though I’m down on Disney cause they owe Alan Dean Foster those royalties…
Hah! You and me both, man. Also Asperger’s and ADD here (though not ADHD).
Most of the time I can be incredibly quiet, but if you’re talking about a topic that I randomly have a lot of knowledge in and then show even the slightest bit of attention to me, then that quarter’s been dropped, and the whole song comes out
Yes, I can relate. Do you ever call it ADOS? That being Attention Deficit..Oh Squirrel! (alt version Attention Deficit..Oh Shiny!)
*points to his comment above where his therapist says “Squirrel!” every time he starts going on a side comment mid-sentence*
Yeah. Kinda. And the “Squirrel!” thing is a reference to Dug from “UP!”
By the way, yes. I have literally cut off in mid-sentence and said “Oh look, a squirrel!”. And not as a joke in the slightest. (I was talking with my wife while we were driving down the road… yes, I was in the passenger seat… and I saw a squirrel and it just happened.)
One of my fun ones when I go so far on a tangent that I forget what I had originally been talking about is to say “My train of thought derailed. There were no survivors.”
I like the acronym even better as a corruption of the networking DDOS attack – Attention Denial of Service, where your brain can’t cope with anything else until you’ve flushed out everything you thought of to say about it.
Oh, it gets better.
I’ve taken 2 years of public speaking, 7 years of theatre, 2 years of choir, and am a former member of Toastmasters. I have a voice trained for talking. Then I also have an advanced degree in Social Psychology, so I know how groups and individuals behave and react.
That whole ADoS thing… I can draw others into it as well. Not where all my attention is demanded by what I’m saying, but where I can pretty much have most people focus completely on what I’m saying and basically mesmerize their attention. (This ability works as well over a phone line.) I regularly end up on 30-60 minute customer service calls or visits, for example, where we start talking about something as a side comment and then *boom* there goes 75% of the total contact time where I’ve ended up giving them thoughts, insights, hypotheses, and new perspectives on whatever it was we started talking about… and they don’t even realize the time has passed until I apologize for blowing their MPI out of the water. I’ve done this with random people at the store, in restaurants or coffee shops, and basically just wherever a conversation can happen.
The funny thing is, it’s never intentional. It’s like the incidental side comment ends up effectively being a statement of “Hop in the car! We’re going on a road trip. No idea where we’re going, but we’ll have a blast on the way!”
Thanks. I’ll have to remember that one.
I can attest that this has ALWAYS happened to me having serious extreme ADHD, i motormouth when i talk about everything a give it my “life story” and people just stand there like in a trance
If their goal was information why get it from Halo, the juniorest member? Because her powers are easiest to disable?
If you’ve been paying attention to the comics, you understand that her greatest power isn’t that she has the orbs.
It’s that she is so genre savvy it’s pretty much Deadpool and Ambush Bug grade without actually breaking the fourth wall. (And it goes for virtually every facet of geekdom, not just comics as with the two characters exampled.)
That, and she seems to remember EVERYTHING. (It’s all shoved haphazardly in boxes and filing cabinets in her mind, but it’s there.)
My guess is that it was a question of opportunity. Sydney made the classic D&D error of “splitting the party” and thus made herself a target.
ADHD is often treated with stimulants. Adderall is one step down from meth.. If the drug they gave her was stimulant based, she could be about to actually have a cardiac arrythmia or anyurism if the dose is high enough.
Remember during her interview at Archon HQ? Maxi said that if they upped her meds, she would be on meth (which is probably what you just said)
Pretty much everything thats been tried as a truth serum is a depressant or relaxant. The idea being to lower inhibitions and degrade logical thought. In practice they make the target so susceptible to suggestion that they’ll say just about anything, true or not.
Sydney just has an atypical reaction.
ADHD is kind of atypical and ironic in the way that we can be pretty excited and completely stoic from one moment to another. also that by some twist, stimulants somehow makes you calmer and more focused. hence why, for some low leveled ADHD people, coffee can help. within moderation of course.
MACH is not wrong about ADHD meds, i had to go off of some of them and it more of less gave me, from what i understand, minor withdrawal symptoms.
not fun, i now have a better understanding and empathy of Drug addicts people.
Surgeries up until the last few decades knocked you out with sodium pentothal; which really does sap your will (My sister bullied me into going on a trip that I had already decided not to go on).
More modern anaesthetics do fun stuff. I was put under for a surgery 9 years ago, but the doctor/nurses had a fairly long conversation with me that I have no recollection of. It made/makes me feel my brain was hacked and I don’t know what secrets they accessed.
Propofol (aka: “Milk of Amnesia”) is the fun one. It’s the one they use most often now (and what Michael Jackson was overdosed on, incidentally).
I’ve had to go in for procedures a number of times (I’m 50, so… yeah… anything from kidney stones to being scoped) and that’s what they use.
The anesthetists think it’s kinda neat that I can tell them exactly when they’ve hit the injection into my vein through the IV… and exactly when it hits my brain. (More that not only am I that aware of my body, as many Aspies are, but also I’m lucid enough right up to the point of going under that I can still communicate clearly.)
The first time I ever got scoped but before I’d fully woken up apparently I had been talking and saying some strange things. I asked my wife for an example and yeah… what she told me was something I’d thought a number of times but had never said, which was proof enough to me that she was telling the truth.
As for ADHD medications…
They can’t medicate mine for two main reasons.
The first is that my Autism and ADHD seem to help balance one another out somewhat. (Hyperfocus/scater-focus, and the like.) So if you medicate my ADHD out of the equation, I become much more classically Aspie in my behavior and hyper-focus.
The second is because after a certain age (about 35-40), the risk of a stroke or cardiac event skyrockets for most ADHD meds. For the most part, the only stimulant I use at all is caffeine to just help balance things enough.
I got put on dexedrine at the age of 7. Dexedrine was cheaper, so drug of choice if kid wasn’t too lean. At the time dexies were very popular illegal drug, but they settled me down (My mom called it my glue pill, cuz it held me together). Sadly, one of its side effects was to inhibit growth and I am the shortest male on both sides of my family. Also sadly, none of the current drugs help anymore.
Ah, the Blabber Mouth trait. Villains never suspect it.
The Spanish Inquisition of hero traits.
Our chief weapon is surprise… surprise and fear..
This is like when those goons gave Luis the “truth serum” in Ant Man & the Wasp.
“You put a dime in there you got to let the whole song play out”
“He like human jukebox.”
So she used the Miles Vorkosigan method of defeating a truth serum… nice.
I would lay odds that Sydney herself has read Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, including the one everyone is referencing with the truth serum scene. So my guess is that she’s exerting at least some conscious effort over what she’s spilling, which is one reason we’re not hearing things like passwords or information that would allow these villains to defeat Archon in general or any of our heroes in particular. We’ve already seen her activate ADHD powers before when trying to figure out a way to defeat a supervillain — that guy who got his power from other people fighting, whose real name turned out to be Kevin. So this is another use of that power. Way to go, Sydney!
did … did sydney just filibuster a truth serum
Sydney uses Wall of Sound, it’s super effective.
So what do these idiots think our idiot knows? Sydney knows a lot of classified info but how much would these guys know about what she knows
This feels like it was inspired by Hitchiker’s Guide’s Prak and the Whole Truth. Love it!
Yup, that’s what I was thinking too.
Reminds me of the end of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
”Tell me everything.”
Oh wow…I’m actually concerned here. I mean, I know she survives this, but with the things her eyes are doing…this just feels way more dire than any of the other situations she’s faced for some reason.
I LOVE this…
They gave “truth serum” to someone with ADHD? You fools!
The fun part is that Truth Serum doesn’t make you any more inclined to just blurt out the truth like they often show in movies. It does what it did to Sydney in that, when used right, it makes you just drowsy enough to be susceptible to being guided in the questions you answer and it slows down your filtering response so the answer is most likely to be the first one that comes to mind.
I’ve been given sodium pentothal (one of the more common barbituates used as a “truth serum” because it being fast acting with little in the way of adverse effects when used in moderation) when my wisdom teeth came out. When I had come to again, the nurse said I was the fastest extraction they’d ever had (all four teeth in 17.5 minutes), but it took them about five minutes before they could start because I wouldn’t stop talking as they gave me just enough to safely put me under but apparently I can talk in a very lucid manner in my sleep. They finally had to brace my mouth open and depress my tongue in order to do the extraction and I just kept on trying to talk.
All because the orthodontist asked me how I’d been doing lately just before they hit the IV with the anesthetic.
(As I mentioned, I have severe ADHD and Asperger’s.)
So the bad guys disengaged her thought-to-speech regluator, so she’s just saying everything she’s thinking. They’re lucky she didn’t start singing the song Batman was singing in her earlier “Super ADHD Brain” episode.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-278-alarmingly-disorderly-harnessing-of-doom/
oh my god so much words so many tangents… I wonder how many hit dices that text has…
now i wonder who thought that giving an medicine that stimulus the brain to someone that has ADHD was an good idea..
They should be glad Sydney didn’t launch into Swear-Mode
If she had, the paint would be blistering on the walls and the air would be turning blue.
Instead, it’s just Sydney’s face turning blue because she can’t catch a breath :P
this reminds me of a story i read years ago, about how some “security” people administered a untested truth serum on one of their own people, thinking they had stolen classified info. but when they started asking all sorts of random questions, and he was able to answer them, even tho they had no way of knowing it. story ended when everyone realized he was able to tell absolute truth even if he never knew it before he was asked. it ended with him taking out his captors and escaping to keep them from killing him
sydney reminds me of what some computer programmers would call a random number generator. even tho she telling truth, her mind is acting like there are a thousand superballs bouncing around in her skull at high speed, connecting everything in there together
i am wondering if the orbs have some ability to sense her life in danger, and something like their skill tree pops up to use all them to protect her
“Be ready with the pencils minions, she’s about to drop some knowledge.”
Looks like these goons made the same mistake as the bad guys in “The Goonies” when interrogating “Chunk.”
That is an awesome reference and the only one of it in the entire thread. +1 internet.
Verbal DDOS! But looking at her eyes she’s at risk of meltdown.
It’s just like the Chunk Interrogation scene from “The Goonies.” Love it!
Sorry, quasi double post. Didn’t think the first one got through. My bad!
Wall of text crits for 9999.
it’s super effective!
DekwaDoes Fainted!
I’m loving that each panel slowly zooms in on the way Halo’s eyes are dilating and contracting, but I’m also confused why there’s sometimes a silver-white ring between her pupil and iris. Is that a Thing That Actually Happens In Real Life, an artistic choice, a thing with her powers, a side-effect of the drugs, or something else?
I believe that the changes in Syd’s eye colors are a result of her glasses communicating with Cora. The pupil dilation may be a result of the adverse reaction she is having to the Truth Serum.
Glad to see someone else noticed that little detail also.
Just waiting for her to start laughing about the frogs.
I read all of this in the voice of the original Alvin from Alvin and the Chipmunks. That show really should have been named David Seville and the Chipmunks.
CPS’s poor text handling is what’s stopping me from ditching Adobe PhotoStrator altogether.
They seriously injected a person with ADHD and extensive knowledge about all things nerd with a truth serum?
Better have Concretia conjure you up a couple of chairs boys, You’re going to be here for a while.
Whelp. There went the 3 min until the cavalry arrives. Wonder if Nora has had any experience with any alien with ADHD and no mouth filter.
So… it turns out Sydney’s self control is actually godlike… and this is what she’s normally holding back…
This is why I rarely drink. It tears apart the small amount of control I have.
That’s not a bad defense against psychoactive drugs- no brain to mouth filter + a brain that has so many tangents a telepath would get a migraine = uncontrollable spill of data with no defining focus.
That, and I’m pretty sure Sid there is experiencing unpleasant side effects from having ADHD meds AND a ‘truth’ serum in their bloodstream, so she may be hallucinating a little.
Or a lot.
Yeah. Many of us with severe ADHD think in a spiderweb pattern when our brains hit third gear.
Add in Asperger’s, and you get fractals.
(If you have severe depression and also have panic/anxiety disorder, such as I do and you somehow end up in R’lyeh if you take a wrong turn or two.)
I’ve said many times “Spending a day in my shoes is a walk in the park. Spend ten minutes in my head… and your next six months are in a padded room.
Not surprised, ‘truth serum’ is about lowering barriers, it’s not a magic lasso! In someone like Syd it’d totally turn out like this ^^
Halo uses “unending babble”. It is super effective!
Usually when the bad guys give you the truth serum and you start running off on tangents they smack you around to stop it right?
So I see she takes her truth serums just like Miles Vorkosigan does ^^.
This made me think of one of the Hitchiher’s Guide to the Galaxy books where a witness in an alien court case was injected with a drug to make him tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” but they accidentally overdosed him and he started telling ALL of the truth, driving most of the court insane with the revelations he spouted out.
ahhhh yes the freight chain though train.
When you start thinking about something which brings in more thoughts which in turn leads to multiples ideas trying to make their ways out at the same time which in turn reminds you of something you thought about the other day which in turn makes you think about how if you changed one thing would have affected the outcome which in turn makes you think of the multiple universe theory which makes you think of the marvel cinematic universe which in turns makes you think of how sad you were that IRONMAN Died which in turn makes you think at how heart warming the scene in the plane in the latest spiderman was with tom holland which makes you think about how i managed to write all of that when all i wanted to say was that i can empathize with sydney.
i wrote all of that in the spur of the moment without having to think. it’s a real thing y’all.
Like others, first thing I thought of was Luis from Ant Man and the Wasp.
Arnold under truth serum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYcPK3FwTB8
I loved that :-)
Ah. The Prak defense. Well done.
If that’s the guy from Life, the Universe, and Everything who gets over-injected with truth serum during a trial and starts spouting THE TRUTH, and drives his entire planet mad, and Arthur finds him later, and he tells him “I finished, there wasn’t all that much of it, anyway”, then yes, I was thinking the same thing!
Everyone else keeps talking about this ‘Miles Vorkosigan’ guy, guess I should read him someday.
“There were some good bits about frogs.”