Grrl Power #935 – Delta mask
I was going to go on a tangent about various systems of law enforcement on today’s page, but Achilles’s “Good enough for me” isn’t going to be the end of the “Aren’t you under arrest” issue, so I’ll save that discussion for a near future page.
Instead, I’ll talk about being careful what you name incidental characters if you have a habit of promoting them to tertiary status. All of the mercenaries names were: Detla, Agmoe, Madlab, Ips, Teza, Tabe, Crimoon, Lapha, and Garamm. Their names are all jumbled up Greek alphabet letters (except for Garamm because I’m a dumbass and for some reason thought Gamma had an “r” in it? Maybe it was late when I wrote the first page his name appeared on.) Sometimes alien/fantasy names come easy to me, but usually I’m sitting around for five minutes and all I can think of are words like Glib-flnr, Gubbus, Ralnvimborb, Flob Zilm, etc. I was having trouble with the merc’s names so I went the Greek Jumble route. Partially to amuse myself, but knew it would’ve been fun if someone figured it out, not realizing I had fucked up Garamm’s name at the time. (Just add a 10% dumbass factor in the future when you think you see patterns in the comic.)
I kind of like the name Crimoon, same with Madlab and Agmoe. Lapha’s name is fine, as is Garamm’s, I guess. Detla… eh. It’s okay. It’s not Glib-flnr, but it could be something a little cooler like Zandriel or Warsyl.
More relevant to this page, I have to wonder how societies that wear masks work. I actually didn’t get the idea for this from the Mandalorian, it was way back from the 2001 Justice League cartoon. Hawkgirl never took off her mask in the first two seasons, and even jammed it back on her head once when someone knocked on her door. But then the next two seasons, and everything else I’ve ever seen an iteration of Hawkgirl in, she barely ever wears her helmet, so I guess it was just a quirk of those first two seasons. Probably no one got around to designing her face with the helmet off. (Honestly with the simplified art style they used, all the women looked identical. The series had anime face syndrome, where characters were only identifiable by their hair and costume.)
Anyway, in a society where everyone wears masks, I guess you’d have to rely a lot more heavily on fingerprints or something. That, or everyone would have to have some unique feature on their mask, and you’d have to heavily rely on social mores that people wouldn’t switch masks or duplicate someone else’s. Also, you’d run into a problem once your population hit a certain level where you’d just run out of unique mask designs, and someone would have to wear a mask with a mark right in the middle that looked like a coiled turd.
Even besides the mask issue, if a race all looked basically the same, in ways that their brains weren’t specialized to differentiate, like if Starship Trooper Bugs evolved to the point of independent sapience and started up a society that was less based on obedience to a queen and a lot of tunnel digging and instead started inventing cars and TV and stuff, but they can’t visually distinguish each other because it’s all based on scents, would their driver’s licences have scratch and sniff patches on them? Would their TV’s be smell-0-visions? Or would that evolutionary path lead them to only invent radios and no one bothers with TVs because they can’t figure out the tele-scents angle?
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TBH I think the ‘mix up Greek letters’ approach worked really well, especially with the extra letter thrown in for Garamm. Gaamm just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Writing names that both look sufficiently alien and are actually pronounceable is bloody hard, this seems like a smart way to do it.
Gamam and Magam could be a bit better, but you best be careful or you’ll have Magma to deal with, and there goes your security deposit.
Can you imagine how many infighting techniques you could learn and master if you cant get hurt training?
with no down time for pulled muscles, bruises, torn rotator cuffs, shattered kneecaps ect. you would learn it faster then that could teach it to you.
That depends on how much pain is a motivator. I note that I haven’t seen people making this claim about Wolverine learning a lot of infighting techniques, but that may just be due to the amnesia bit.
Having said that, I’d say Achilles probably has extensive infighting techniques that are based very much on the bit where he can’t be hurt. As a result, he *looks* like an inept martial artist that somehow keeps winning, … and that’s part of how he keeps winning. What does not work for you or I is perfectly fine for him, because he has no physical weaknesses that we’re aware of. If you don’t believe that this is part of how Achilles fights, just go back and look at the restaurant brawl, where he blocked a sword with his eye.
As such, there is no mastery of traditional fighting techniques that he’s particularly interested in, unless it’s the choreography to look like a possibly skilled normal martial artist.
He seems to practice the squick factor and throwing his opponent off by using his invulnerability as a gag. “Fight like an invulnerable frat boy”.
Back on p126, there was a hypothesis that Wolverine doesn’t look like he’s learning a lot of infighting techniques, because those techniques are all designed for Baseline Human levels of durability. Instead he develops his own techniques that take advantage of his strengths – like catching a blade in his arm rather than parrying it, if doing so will get him the opening for a decisive hit. What would be a major wound for a Baseline is to him often just a (painful!) temporary inconvenience, so he has a lot more ability to make those trades.
quick question why do you all keep saying “infighting”?
unless this is a boxing match that means conflict amongst peers.
Infighting is also used as a synonym for close-quarters combat. It’s easier to type too.
I was going to say Melee is the better term, which I have seen used in many games, anime, and movies to refer to fighting at short range either hand to hand or with weapons. Oddly the definition claims it is a confused battle between multiple people in hand to hand combat.
funny enough looking it up “close quarters combat” as a military term means close range combat with firearms.
infighting means either when boxers get right up against each other or a conflict between individuals in the same group.
so I moved from the dictionary to the thesaurus.
https://www.powerthesaurus.org/hand-to-hand_combat
Well it seems Infighting is used amongst many other terms for hand to hand, but given 99%,,,,scratch that every single time I’ve ever heard or read the term infighting used except this discussion right here was to refer to conflict between individuals in a group; I am going to stick with melee to refer to combat at close range using hand to hand or melee weapons such as axes, claws, swords, and such.
so my vote is for (Melee).
Another vote for the obviously superior Melee
Agreed. “Infighting” means fighting amongst people nominally on the same side.
There is a fossil phrase however – “close in fighting” that refers to the moment when closing forces finally clash on the field. “in” there is part of the phrase “close in” – which was a command given foot troops in the field when it was time to switch from ranged weapons like bows and rifles to contact weapons like rapiers and swords. In fact those are referred to as “close in weapons” for the same reason.
But there was this word, “infighting”, and there were these weapons and tactics labeled “close in”, and the word kind of morphed and took on the meaning of meelee combat. There are a lot of words that glommed meanings from other words like that. It’s one of English’s more annoying habits.
Incidentally did you know “Mercy” and “Mercenary” come from the same root?
“Meelee” FWIW, has not been used as a coded military command for anything, as far as I know.
Y’all are definitely not military types or have been out long enough for the acronyming part of your brain to atrophy. Close-quarters Combat is easy to type when you do it the right way AKA: CQC. CQC is what you use when you don’t have time type or pronounce that three word phrase.
Note I am not military. I have entirely too many friends who either have served in the military or are in active service.
Not a modern military order. This is back in the day when the rifles only fired one shot between reloads, and people reloaded without cartridges. And earlier than that, when most soldiers didn’t even have firearms to choose from.
“Close in” became a phrase civilians used, and then the armies needed a different one.
Thank the nine I was having a moment there… thought I’d lost the plot!
Smell-o-vision was fun when I was a kid. Pick up a pack of scratch cards at a participating store or in the mail and smell your TV special!
Magam, magma, agmam.
Magmar
Many short tentacles with light wave receptors in the ends that come out of where a humans eye socket would be could be a reason to stay masked.
Or two more mouths, each of which open wide to consume light.
Or souls.
ala game soul reaver . Was pretty cool too.
Pirates wore eyepatches during ship boarding so they’d have one eye adjusted to the dark interior of the ship, rather than being blind for a few critical seconds when breaching the hold. I can see an assassin doing something similar with an third eye that sees infrared or some such.
With great respect, that’s a popular urban legend but I’ve never seen any evidence from historical sources to support the idea that you’d sacrifice binocular vision — so very useful if you’re in a fight — for a fleeting advantage when going below decks. You have to win the fight abovedecks first; anyone left in the hold has got a problem because with control of the sails you decide where the vessel goes.
I don’t know of any evidence that national navvies or privateers used the technique either. It’s not taught today in any military academy.
[IIRC according to “The Great Mutiny” during the Spithead and Nore mutiny, there was one frigate with the abovedecks controlled by loyal sailors and the below deck controlled by mutineers that continued to patrol the North Sea keeping a lookout for the Dutch fleet.]
Mostly just referencing it for the trope familiarity; protecting night vision is used in other stories as well. There’s been some arguments for and against, but it’s not like that demographic kept extensive records, and certainly not ones a historian could really lean on for that detail.
One of the popular arguments I’ve seen against it is that with eyes adjusted to different light sources, binocular vision doesn’t work and the pirate would lose depth perception, critical during boarding action. That’s only partly true though – depth perception is possible with monocular vision, since it relies on a variety of effects. Switching eyes (i.e. closing the ‘day vision’ eye below decks) is a plausible solution.
Personally though, I think pirates generally didn’t wear eyepatches. Possibly because ninjas kept stealing them.
There *are* period fencing manuals, and none of them I’ve ever heard of addresses one-eyed technique. Because the technique it is currently taught in no military or martial arts school I’ve ever heard of, the burden of proof would be on the extraordinary claim, and there’s no evidence for it.
Melee fencing one-eyed is a really bad idea if there’s more than one opponent. Your chance of getting blindsided really goes up.
And for what advantage really? The rare occasion that you want to go fight in the dark part of the hold, instead of opening a hatch – which would be necessary to enter the hold anyway?
One eye means you have to keep looking around to have any decent depth perception at all. It would make for a very messy fight. I say this as someone who trained with the sword and has only one eye that works.
Funny thing. MOST of what we know about pirates comes from fiction. Specifically, from Peter Pan by J.W. Barrie. Very little of what actual pirates were all about is taught anywhere. The ONLY time a pirate was documented as making someone ‘walk the plank’ was apparently after one had read Peter Pan.
Fairly sure more pirate lore came from ‘Treasure Island’ than Peter Pan
rewinn:- And where do you think the term ‘being blindsided’ came from?
If you mean by ‘period fencing manuals’ as being from the 16th/17th centuries, then you are wrong: fencing is a modern sport based on the old sword-fighting manuals you are thinking of
Got me curious; in case anyone else was wondering, the Golden Age of Piracy was 1650s-1730s. Treasure Island was published 1883 (150+ years later), and Peter Pan in 1904.
Thank you for the dates, knew Pan was written long after pirates or even Treasure Island, so unless they are talking Penzance Pirates (or modern ‘pirates’), doubt any would have made someone ‘walk the plank’ only after reading Pan
Also, the first movie adaptation of Treasure Island is why most pirates speak argh (or however you spell the fucking word), and that’s because that is simply how the actor spoke from where he came from
Clowns. The dreaded Caribbean Covert Clowns stole them, until they were decimated by the robot dinosaurs of Barbary.
I had heard it was done to protect one of the eyes from muzzle flash so you could switch it and continue fighting.
Not sure about either, after all earrings were supposed to protect against scurvy as well.
The story that I had heard about eye patches (other than lost eyes or blindness) was that they were worn by shipboard navigators to protect one of their eye from the sunlight reflecting off the ocean or through their sextant.
Keeping one eye adjusted for darkness does seem to be a commonly accepted theory though (apparently Mythbusters tested it and found it plausible).
There IS some truth to that. Old school navigators and ship captains had lots of tricks and guarded their secrets better than anyone might think. Just because they didn’t have GPS or the internet didn’t make them stupid. Far from it.
One interesting thing. I was taught how to use a sextant in order to do historical interpretation, basically teaching history in costume, by a retired US Air Force navigator who used one on the job until 2003. Flying across the Pacific Ocean is no joke even today. Try doing it before GPS was available or if your GPS systems goes kaput. Dead reckoning and navigating by the stars WORKS but it is hard to do. And if you get it wrong? Bad things.
Yep, my father was in the air force and originally trained as navigator before crossing over to pilot. He told me stories of using a sextant as well, his training was in B-25 Mitchell bombers in the late 1950s.
Well with an all female pirate crew a huge crate of eyepatches would do very nicely for bikini day.
Arrgggh indeed!
Reminds me of a very funny Fredrik K T Andersson picture:https://www.deviantart.com/derangedmeowmeow/art/Patched-Up-Matey-2006-721340513
Sucks you now have to join dA if you want to see ‘mature’ content, instead of just entering your birthdate :(
Indeed. Just google “fredrik k t andersson patched up” and you will find it. By the way I recommend Andersson’s art for all who enjoy crude and stupid humor which should include most of those who enjoys this comic.
Me hearties, it all be a misunderstanding.
Captain Billy’s crew demanded to know why thar be a large collection of thongs in his sea-chest.
“Lads, this be not me underwear. This be my patches. Aye, patches!”
There was a society in the first season of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century that all wore masks with distinctive markings on them due to a nuclear or chemical war centuries prior. Had something of a Romeo and Juliet plot as Buck tries to get them to remove the masks and see that they aren’t ugly. The twist reveal is that it was the opposite, everyone looked identical. All the men were like they were cloned from the same handsome blond-haired, blue eyes man and similar with the women. The purpose of the masks were to actually GIVE everyone an individual identity (makes me wonder if the episode was partly inspired by the old Twilight Zone episode regarding beauty where humanity was forcibly turning everyone into beautiful people from a small selection of templates and destroying all historical evidence showing anything to the contrary) but the stigma used to require everyone to always wear them came with covering up the truth so nobody realized that.
Maybe her race sees things on a spectrum that make masks useless at hiding their identity. Heat vision where it isn’t simply a formless blob. They can feel an electromagnetic signature that radiates from the body. They have x-ray vision and their planet’s atmosphere heavily filters their sun’s brightness so they only wear the mask when out in the wider galaxy to prevent eye damage, and the whole mate thing is just because everyone wants to see under the mask and she’s being funny. Maybe her whole race is a look-a-like race and the mask is a way to express individuality and other (less ninja) members of her race have much more elaborate masks. This is fun.
Since she says she’ll only remove the mask for her mate that sounds more like a cultural thing, seeing the exposed face being something seen as either obscene or sacred so that only your significant other is allowed to see it.
Such as a wife’s hair being only seen by her husband in Orthodox Jewish sects. (For a moment I spelled that “sexts”).
I get the feeling ARC will have a lot of the office staff switching out in the first year or two. Usually the paperwork of such an organization would be bad enough, but between Superpowers, Supernaturals, Aliens, Magic, Psionics, ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Unknown’?
I see a real nightmare here.
There will wind up being a tiny little core of harder-than-hard admin staffers that everyone else relies on, who never, ever file to transfer or quit. They will be like a fucking ball bearing
“You pulled on Maxima’s cape. You stood between a hungry Halo and the all-you-can-eat special at Fusion. But dare you face… the wrath of Janice from ARChives when you misfile a report???”
“Nope. I’m out.”
*immediately retreats to her office to triple-check the manual before filing*
Rule: Never, ever, ever, EVER fuck with or displease the admin geeks. You will never see a stamped leave chit again.
DAMN straight!
ALWAYS stay on the good side of the admin people or your life won’t be worth living!
Always always always be friendly to the gatekeepers. If you treat an admin or executive assistant poorly during your interviews, you will never ever be eligible to hire, because even if there is no formal rule about it, and even if the hiring manager doesn’t ask her opinion, your paperwork will mysteriously be misplaced…
o.O Wait civvies use the term Leave Chit?
Do you ever feel like a stamp collector when getting that signed? Honestly I’m not entirely sure why it’s still done in paper form, I mean we have email for a goddamn reason…
Army brats like me do and yes, it confuses LOTS of people.
I knew what you meant only because the Scouts had a ‘Knife Chit’. It implied some sort of permission.
The ‘Radar O’Riley’s’ of Archon :D
“…of ARChon, yes Sir, Colonel we already processed authorization for that joke. Sign here.”
*shuffles paper*
“Also here’re the request chits for Dabblers ‘discretionary research fund,’ and you told us to remind you to never ask for any itemized report from her again after the mayonnaise and suppository kits episode, Sir.”
You know… I laughed at that, but I HAVE seen an itemized report that had mayo and supposities included and it wasn’t funny at all.
I have a cousin that’s an E.R. nurse. Their team keeps a running list of the weirdest stuff they’ve had to extract from people’s butts, and yes that list honest-cross-my-heart includes a jar of mayo.
We pulled a catsup bottle (buttle?) out of a Marine once, back when I was a corpsman. X’D
Now I want her “This is my human costume” shirt…..
Yes, but im actualy a Dragon.
Challenge. (X’D
https://sapone.store/product/this-is-my-human-costume-im-really-a-velociraptor-shirt/
Closest I can find is a velociraptor. Close enough?
Ps someone show this link to Daniel.
Oh.
My god.
…
THIS CONVERSATION! X’D
Hideously jealous as I am, I now want DetlAchilles to be a thing! <3
…how much ship have we gotten out of this last arc? It feels like a bunch.
That aside…I’m hoping the command green lights this, under the caveat that “we are a team, so you have train under all of us.”
And then, like, add Leon & the either information warfare geeks. And can you _imagine_ Detla & Math going at it? I get this feeling that she & Max actually get along super well, and she takes Sydney on for some less-Math hand-to-hand training, and they wind up, like, not besties but like low-key snark bitches together, and eventually we’re all going to super sad when she leaves, prolly joining Corra’s crew, but she better stay off the space-woof boyfriend because Sydney andholyfuck im having a manic episode jhfcoab. (O).(o)’
+1
+1
Your talking about how a society where everyone wears masks might work made me think they might have some kind of central mask design registry. Maybe upon reaching adulthood everyone designs their own mask and registers it, maybe in the same way clowns register their unique made up faces…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/gallery-london-houses-dozens-clown-egg-portraits-180968914/
i mean if you think about it, how unique do the masks even need to be? there are only so many names in standard naming convention, i even worked at a company where there was another person with my exact same name! would always get confusing emails from people in other offices as a result.
In short, they would only need to be unique to a point where a stranger had something to refrence you by, then you would get a nickname to go by. like where there are multiples of people called Jeff in a social group, they inevitably get called “Tall-Jeff”, “Hairy-Jeff” etc.
I can match that tune! I grew up in the same town, but a different township, as someone with the same name as me and whose father had the same name as my father! And when 1i moved to Canada, but worked in Michigan, crossing the border twice a day became interesting when someone with the same EXACT name and the dame DOB as I got a restraining order taken out against him, or had a warrant, or something – and I got stopped every single day crossing back into the US!
Under Roman customs, there were a limited number of things they would name their kids, so everyone had nicknames (agnomen and cognomen). That’s why one Gaius Julius Caesar is called “Caligula” by historians, another “Germanicus”, although others after the real Germanicus inherited “Germanicus” among their other names as well.
“Julius Caesar” is a brand name more than a personal identification.
As for Caligula, I would probably get an anger problem too if the entire Army decided to call me “Boots”, and then the rest of the country picked it up.
It’s a diminutive for the standard Roman combat sandals, so in English “Caligula” is more like “Combat Booties”
And then after finishing college and getting over their angsty first breakup, they get 1 do-over to change their embarrassing first choice to something more mature.
Just so we are clear,
she is blue, has pointed ears, eyes (or semblance of visible), cannot show her whole face except to her mate.
You sure Orko and the Trollans aren’t the inspiration here?
Orko’s people are blue, have pointed ears, while their eyes are visible they hide their faces, and only show their faces to the one they are to marry.
The mask thing reminds me of a short story adapted to a trek episode where everyone was an exact copy of each other and the masks were the easiest way to tell them apart.
Something about cellular repair capabilities so advanced that it prevented mutations as well as viral infections.
The Trek episode kinda messed this premise up, like most did.
The short story had a higher tech bent to it, since the masks designs were based on the wearers’ consciousness, sort of like a super tech brain scan mood ring. It was a murder mystery on an interstellar liner.
This was supposed to be a reply to Insidious [sigh]
Buck Rogers In The 25th Century had a similar premise, except the identical appearance was due to genetic damage from a war and nobody (except perhaps some elders) knew the real reason everyone had to wear unique masks and never reveal their faces.
the moment I was talking about, one of the few episodes that also painted Orko as an intelligent responsible character, instead of a childish bafoon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmkx7a7ldO0
I used to run and play Traveller and other such fun sci-fi RPGs and coming up with truly alien names was fun while it lasted, which wasn’t all that long.
You can give a character a name in “R’lyehian” like mglw’nafh, and it will quickly devolve to a one or two syllable tag like Bob or Face or Dishpan.
Yes! That was the game used the text-to-voice program to come up with alien-sounding names for (or maybe it was MegaTraveller? haven’t played it in over 25 years)
Of course, alien names don’t HAVE to sound alien. “Ford Prefect” for example.
I want that T-shirt “This my human costume I’m actually a alien” to good lol
Further thoughts on the masking of characters. Rumor has it that Pedro Pascal, who played Din Djarin (The Mandalorian) was fed up with having no face-time on screen. He reportedly asked (?) to have some scenes where his face could be seen. Perhaps he wanted the publicity? It would make sense.
“Hey, I play The Mandalorian!”
“Sure you do, big guy. And I’m Darth Vader.”
“No, REALLY! I’m The Mandalorian!”
“Come off it, he’s (taller, younger, older, shorter, etc.) than you, and you don’t sound anything like him. If you’re him, where’s your mask?”
That would get old quickly.
Looks like he should have gone with Marvel’s movie franchise. Characters are constantly exposing their faces for no justifiable reason whatsoever, even in situations where it would put them into harm’s way just to show off the actor’s face. Nobody with a mask ever remains masked so you never see the actor’s face (leaving out edge-cases like Rocket and Groot).
Zero confused me, he puts the sock on for no apparent reason and then immediately takes it off.
Zemo , autocorrect got it before I noticed.
That rumor is bunk by the way. The second part of that rumor is he left the show because of it. This was before season 2.
Funny…
Another actor who never showed his face was Hugo Weaving. But then again, how many people saw ‘V For Vendetta’ or remember it? He didn’t HAVE to show his face to act and that was one of things that made him so good in the role.
But yeah,. that rumor from the Mandalorian was debunked by several people, Pascal included. He stated for the record that they told him flat out, that he would not show his face much, if at all. he relished the challenge and did a DANG good job.
Then again? This is the internet. Facts need not apply.
‘V For Vendetta’ was a great plot-twisty movie (M Night Shamallama’sdingdong should take notes on how to twist the plots)
Seanan McGuire has a series (Incryptid) where one of the main characters is a telepath. Her entire race looks like identical twins because they use their telepathy to distinguish other minds and never evolved to tell one face from another. If their telepathy is blocked, they can’t tell people apart unless they really know the other person well. So they all evolved to look like the exact same idealized human.
That would not fly in real evolution.
A) It’s not individual identification that different looks matter with… looks are primarily a way to flag health and fertility status.
B) Looking the same means genetic similarity, which means one bad disease can wipe out your race. Human diversity is why a novel disease like COVID has a moderate death rate, relative to the Black Death or Cocoliztli, each of which killed more than 30% of the respective populations of the time. Only a third of the population seems to be vulnerable at all to COVID, and most people who get it fight it off with relatively little health damage.
Point A is not precisely true after culture becomes the driving factor in evolution. And there’s no reason that various mental factors and feedbacks couldn’t serve the same purpose as glossy hair.
Point B is possibly valid, though. Where did those numbers come from?
Adding to Point A that they might very well look different, but members of the culture/species never learned to differentiate by physical appearance due to their telepathy.
Infants are unable to tell faces apart for several weeks and since they cant see anything at a recognisable clarity that is more than a foot away (I think 10 inches, actually), the first face they learn to recognise is of the person holding/breast feeding the infant most often, usually the mother or wetnurse. All others are just identified as not-the-mother, but it takes longer for the infant to recognise specific not-the-mothers.
If this telepathic race learns to recognise minds faster than it learns to recognise visible objects, it might never learn to recognise faces, even if they are distinct.
Yep. There are humans who lack the ability to discern faces.
Achilles’ attitude towards Detla’s arrest status and vow of no lawbreaking reflect the attitude of an ex-vigilante turned cop.
Achilles is looking kind of off model on this page, and on the previous as well now that I thing about it. He’s gone from Blond to a sort of mousey brown and his features are a bit muted from his ‘Not a Scratch’ posing who knows how many pages back.
Does he have to concentrate on his ‘public’ face, of is his model being changed?
That’s the thing with a hyu-mon artist: they don’t always draw the same face the same way every time, not even on the same page, either because of artistic evolution or simply having a bad day or it’s been a long time since they last drew the character they forget how they should look (or a mix of all three). Remember how ‘off’ Math looked during that cookie-baking scene when all-but Sydney came back from Alari Prime?
Just look at how much Sydney or Maxi has changed
Inconceivable… Have you watched the Princess Bride recently, or been thinking about alternate meanings of the word, as in birth control?
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Kept meaning to comment about that :D
George Carlin actually used that as one of is “Brand Names for Birth Control” routine, along with “Preg-not”, “Embry-no”, “Papa Stopper”, “Womb Broom” and others.
I still say she’s not given up on her mission. She’s learning his moves, then at some sudden but inevitable moment she will betray him, kidnapping someone in the group to haul off to space slavery.
I was thinking a Sith sort of thing, she must study until she masters his techniques and then can defeat him and become the master.
Okay, 100% done now. Grrl Power fanfiction,
I do apologize if some characters are off in how they’d react or behave in certain situations. I am not DaveB so I don’t know his characters that well outside the events they’ve already experienced so I had to try and approximate some of them based on how they handled other situations. Also on their dialogue or how involved they might have gotten, this isn’t a visual medium unlike the comic so had to pick and choose mental moments to write out.
part 1 (not too happy with part 1, feels stiff to me)
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Grrl-Power-fanfic-scenes-1-3-875769092
part 2 (a little looser, I like this better than part 1…possibly because the central focus is a scene I already had on the back burner but never a good opportunity to work into a story)
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Grrl-Power-fanfic-scenes-4-5-875780553
part 3 *finale unless I can convince myself to make another in the future, but I will want more data on how Maxima handles some situations. Not too happy with how I handled her here, but I tried to approximate her reactions based on the situations so far in comic…but over all I liked writing this part the most…probably why its longer than the previous parts.
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/Grrl-Power-fanfic-scenes-6-8-finale-876198526
Ah yes. A good face mask and eyeglasses does wonders for facial recognition.*snickers* take that ya gov peepers!
commenting on the blurb,
the naming thing can be tricky. I feel I have gotten better at fantasy character names considered by three original star characters were named (Rhuen, Rhoan, and Rhulan)…
funny enough these days I find I have more trouble with every day human names.
Its one thing to name a monster, The Doll Collector, or The Moonlight Dancer, or Crimson Mask, things like that are descriptive names.
Fantasy character names just come to be, Byron Lia, Jinron, Pima, Yumi, Hollia, Claire the Alchemist, and so on.
which you’d think, well these are partially normal names anyway.
But start to write a horror story and where the human is supposed to be an audience surrogate and I keep getting stuck on a name *so sometimes choose not to name them…one excuse for writing first person, either don’t bother with a name or make the name once near the beginning and forget what it was by the end LoL*
but I find myself sometimes repeating names like Susan, Sarah, Paul, Peter, John, Mike, and other such names. I think part of the problem is knowing people who had a specific name and thinking, “I’m not writing about them, so pick a common name from the region that is also not a name belonging to anyone you’ve met…and then I go and name them something like Samantha Stevens forgetting where I heard that name before…
its like writing a story about that time George Bush was a little kid being haunted by a three eyed goblin under his bed and then a week later being like…oh…right George Bush…duh.
try to be too original though and run the risk of ignoring the spell check and not realizing you screwed up a name. I named a city Yan’ta, and didn’t realize till like the fifth read through that at some points I accidentally spelled it Yun’ta.
on the facial recognition thing. Funny thing, chickens can tell each other’s faces apart; it comes down to a specific instinct, which can actually be damaged in humans resulting in people having a very hard time telling other people’s faces apart. As one psychology text book I had put it, it wasn’t important for early humans to tell one chicken apart from another but telling Bob apart from Rob was very important when Bob is your friend and Rob wants to kill you.
It is hard to imagine a vision based species not developing visual clues to tell each other apart, and if it is scent based, likely be a species with a distinct scent and strong sense of smell.
funny enough television is one of those things which may be very uncommon in the universe. At least how humans use it, telecommunications technology and entertainment technology may not be developed side by side, with the later in some cases not developed at all if the species lacks a sense of being entertained like giant intelligent eusocial insectoids for instance, have a need to communicate long distance but no real want or need to have a device that has to kept on. (history of early Television is an odd one, developed to quickly report and show emergencies, but to keep people having it on had to incorporate plays and visual versions of radio shows), a very backwards history from what one might expect.
“like if Starship Trooper Bugs evolved to the point of independent sapience and started up a society that was less based on obedience to a queen and a lot of tunnel digging and instead started inventing cars and TV and stuff”
You mean like the Starship Trooper Bugs? But from the books instead of the atrocious movies?
Meh, this comment section stole my smiley…
😀
I was looking to see if anyone commented on the book. It’s important to note they’re very different things. Example: The book is about personal responsibility to earn the right to vote, and many of the jobs are well non-military, like being a postal person or working on scientific projects if IIRC they mention that even if you were blind and in a wheelchair, they could give you a job counting caterpillar “hair.”
“The book mentions pilots, police, scientists, and terraformers as other options, and offers up absurd examples of counting hairs on a caterpillar by touch as an example of how far it can stretch.” Quoted from https://www.rifters.com/crawl )
Also notable is the fact that the bugs build spaceships, wield weapons are in fact a “person” to some extent. Their mindsets are alien, but they are technology users.
For the Hawkgirl from the Justice League cartoon, the reason she always wears the mask in the beginning is she is a Lieutenant in the Thanagarian Military. Sent to Earth as an advanced scout. So her outfit and mask/helmet are her uniform.
In the seasons after that she been kicked out for betraying her people, and so no longer wears the uniform.
I am curious if its the grapple techniques she wants to learn, or the super powered invincible. When she finds out she cannot copy his invincibility it will also add another chance for angst.
Hang on, I thought Hawkgirl stopped wearing the mask after she saved earth from her people. symbolically separating her from her mask-wearing heritage. Given that heritage had no problem blowing up a planet of a 7-9billion sapients I can’t blame her.
I just want to say than i appreciate panel 6. Thanks, Dave! :)
This discussion, both the author’s AND the other readers, is why I love this comic so much – a bunch of people that think about (and devote significant mental resources to) the same things I do, that everyone else always thought I was weird for!
“if a race all looked basically the same, in ways that their brains weren’t specialized to differentiate”
i’m pretty confident that can’t be possible, if nature gives you the brain capacity to identify your self, it mean you’r brain will have to identify what is you and what is other.
Even the smallest crack in the shinny armor of an insect-like specie woudl become noticeable.
And don’t forget natural selection = diversity from genetic and environnement so even a same genetic would give differences.
i once heard that african ppl notice the differences in skin’s color faster that white ppl. and white ppl notice faster the differences of faces’ shapes.
excuse my english, it’s not my mothertongue
Yeah, naming stuff is hard, so I usually end up using a random name generator I found some time ago:
http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/
As for those mercenary’s names, it seems that some of those might end up being call-signs. Using your real name can help your notoriety, but it also makes it harder to lay low if a gig goes south (like this one did).
That, and if you find too many gigs go south, a new call-sign may be easier to find clients with…
On those last questions: Yes. It is awesome.
…and one year later, after their wedding, in the honeymoon suite, Detla removes first her negligee, and then at last her mask… underneath which are a mass of writhing tentacles and oozing pustules, and 11 tiny eye-stalks like on a crab.
Achilles throws up all his wedding cake and flees the hotel.
Yup yup!
Well clearly Detla is not able to be trusted, as no sane person would make this vow without a host of qualifiers. Or she is utterly naive and therefore still unable to be trusted. Or she has no honor and therefore is not to be trusted.
It is almost impossible to avoid breaking any laws at all, especially given our convoluted legal system and the fact that many unenforced laws remain on the books. There may well be laws against unmarried people having sex in Texas, as just one example. And Detla “taking someone as a mate” is not going to be recognized as a legal marriage… Or there may well be laws against “sodomy” which probably covers a few things that Detla and Achillies might like to get up to if they ever do “take each other as a mate.” Or miscegeny laws, which probably covers human/non-human sexual relations. And that’s just a few laws about sex! Dropping something on the street is littering. Speeding is breaking the law. The list goes on and on, but the point is that we all probably break a few laws in any given day even if we remain inside our homes and sleep all day long.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many jurisdictions would consider human/alien sexual relations to be in violation of the laws against bestiality.
Not Texas.
(2) “Animal” means a domesticated living creature, including any stray or feral cat or dog, and a wild living creature previously captured. The term does not include an uncaptured wild living creature or a livestock animal.
Clearly, Detla is not domesticated.
I think they would be OK with most things like speeding which would just be a fine ect..
those other ones like in Tennessee its constitutionally illegal to Duel, or challenge anyone to fight a duel. but it probably has not been enforced for over a century.
Just because a law is not enforced doesn’t mean that the law does not exist.
Speeding is misdemeanor, as long as you’re not going very fast. This is a crime even if it can be paid off by a fine.
Or, alternatively, she is from a society which is not anal about trivial laws that nobody in society is bothered about. In which case she would not consider it to be breaking her vow if she were to fly a kite in London. As most sane members of society would not consider that to be a crime, regardless of any local bylaw to that effect.
In malazan tale of the fallen by steven erickson there was an island of people who all wore masks marked with various notches, the less notches denoting higher rank. If I remember correctly rank was also determined by martial ability.
So, under her human costume, do you recon she is a bug, a writhing mass of tentacles or … *shudder* … like Vance?
*sniffle*
What has happened to the GrrlPower Wiki? I tried to look up the cast list (on Fandom) and it did not recognise the link.
I would like to point out, in case nobody else has (I didn’t read all of the comments) that names are often repeated, DAVE. There are also cultural systems of contextual or descriptive naming (why do you ask, Two Dogs?)
Is there last name ‘Onecup’?
He’d have given his right arm for it to be Onecup.
Conventionally, if the “hero” is a savior figure, their initials are J.C.
I resemble that joke!
looks to be a long time training since i don’t think you can just learn invulnerability. But hey good on her aim for the top i guess
Well Math did quite well in learning how to fight better than most supers. Without being a super.
So … maybe.
Ok, probably not. ;-)
Jokes aside, such a society would quickly develop measures to identify individuals, if it allows individualism and doesn’t opperate on extreme collectivism, or even hive-mind.
The suggestion of unique mask designs with the honour system to only ever wear your own mask reminds me of the Guild of Clowns in AnkMorpork (Terry Pratchet’s Diskworld). In one of the books, it was an important plot device that no clown would ever wear the make-up face design of another clown. They have an archive of “faces” (shelves of painted eggs displaying the face designs of past and present clowns) and it is unthinkable to the guild members that it might even be physically possible for somebody to wear the “face” of another clown. It just isn’t done…ever!!!
However, Detla’s mask design doesn’t look unique or personalised, looks more “faceless goon” uniform (or maybe it’s a design that denotes a specific clan or caste affiliation?). But since it covers only half the face, doesn’t come with a voice modulator and still shows the hair, there might be enough features available to recognise her. Her society would probably struggle identifying a person who shows their eye-section but covers everything between nose-bridge and chin. Also, she has horns, which might be finger-print unique to each individual, with features and details so fine that we humans wouldn’t be able to identify individuals, but is normal for her society (like a zebra can identify another zebra by the stripe pattern, something most humans are unable to do).
The clown face egg registry is a real thing, Pratchett didn’t make that one up.
Didn’t know that. That’s awesome. But I doubt, real clowns find it inconceivable that somebody else might put on their “face”
Being probably the only one of her species on the planet, the mask is really kind of a formality. Most folks, if they see her, they’re going to be able to identify her later.
That said, she does have amazingly human-esque proportions, so somebody could convincingly masquerade as her, and there are recent Alari immigrants who have the same skin tone.
Also, if she thinks she’s going to be able to “learn” Achilles’ invulnerability, which is the foundation of his combat prowess, …. if she manages it that would be very interesting indeed. I am imagining someone(DEUS) importing a few hundred of her species to “shadow” various supers.
Naa, with that mask they are bound to think that she is one of the illuminati or a Mountie (it is very difficult to tell Americans apart).