Grrl Power #952 – Puns are the dangerest form of humor
Military training montage! For a given definition of “military” and “montage.” And “training” if I’m honest.
The number of times any given instructor has fantasized about This-Is-Sparta-ing some obnoxious trainee is definitely not zero. This is the primary advantage of working with supers. Achilles especially can be used as a frustration pressure valve. If you ever need to just stab someone or break a printer over a head, it’s got to be very therapeutic to know that you can, whether you actually ever do it or not. It’s also probably not very satisfying to stab Achilles, cause it doesn’t have ANY effect beyond slightly nudging him. No “hey, quit it.” or even “That tickles.” He’s fully on board, and then he sticks the knife between his teeth does a flying faceplant into a curb to see if he can break the blade.
The final Star Justice just came out. I’ve always done a fair bit of reading, sometimes books, sometimes comics or webcomics, but I think this series was the one that shifted my primary source of entertainment to book. It’s still in my top 5 series of all time, alongside Tamer, Paul Kidd’s Justicar trilogy, Three Square Meals, Binding Words, and Upon a Savage Shore. I really should make a page with links to all my favorites and the other recommendations I throw out there.
Anyway, Star Justice is some damned good high action space opera with a slow burn harem.
The new vote incentive is up! Welcome to Dabbler’s Damsel in Distress University.
Worried that you’ll end up in a deathtrap, precariously balancing a bomb with a mercury switch (or a canister full of tickle powder) while you struggle to escape? Then sign up now and you can practice your death (or tickle powder) defying escapes in the safety of the classroom!
Courses include Deathtrap 101-401, Tying up the Supervillain’s Henchwoman once you Escape Leaving her in the Very Same Precarious Deathtrap 101-201, Having Dinner with the Supervillian While he’s Holding the City Hostage 101-401, Holding Your Breath for Fun and Profit 101, Lockpicking 101-301, Ropework 101-406, Labyrinth Navigation 101, Blind Fighting, Oil Wrestling, Seducing the Guards 101-403, and many more!
As always, nude versions are up at Patreon.
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.
Not sure if someone asked this or pointed it out. But… Is the orbs influencing Sydney? Previously when she wasn’t holding the orb, she could get vertigo. But now it’s like zero effect and the like. And even laughing about it. Could to many passives in this sense could permanently alter Sydney?
I don’t think she’s laughing because she’s falling. There’s not much more amusing to some people than getting a groan when they tell a bad pun. And that was a REALLY bad pun and basically a more extreme version of the groan reaction. My guess is that’s what she’s laughing at.
Actually, that was kind of brought up in the scene with Maxima on the roof. The always on featherfall passive appears to include the “Cancels out vertigo” function of holding the flight orb.
I may have mentioned it in a previous strip’s comments.
Someone should be concerned that the Orbs are influencing Sydney’s brain.
If they can turn off Vertigo, what else can they turn off?
Or (ominous music cue) turn on ?
They might have been turning *on* her vertigo, as a “you want to use your flight orb now” warning.
Communication from them might be that subtle.
I’d be more concerned with how she might be influencing them…assuming they can receive as well as transmit. Admittedly, assuming a lot on my part.
Imagine if, hypothetically, your first human was Sydney.
Orbs with original user:
power output ########
flight speed ######
safeties at full capacity…
Orbs post Human users…:
power output NEEDS MORE DAKKA!!
flight speed FASTERFASTERFASTER!!
safeties WHO NEEDS ‘EM!!!
OK, I REALLY want me some Orbs! Might have to hide them from Daniel the Human though…
Imagine a waaagh! of Orks getting their hands on these orbs… the Orks very existance in large groups makes technology work better (or just work period) based on sheer belief that it works. Imagine THAT effect enhancing the orbs already admittedly OP powers >:D
It is changing her the same way any other form of automatic, passive feather fall and vertigo protection would change a person.
Survival instincts can be a bitch to deal with. Not having them normally would be a serious disability. But she simply no longer needs them, that should be liberating.
The Orbs can effect local physics. A subtle effect might be to produce a gravity field to conforms to Sydney’s body and stabilizes her sense of equilibrium. A leap from this is, instead of flying, she could power up her shields and become the proverbial immovable object.
Sydney already proposed the idea that the orb upgrade might have gotten rid of her vertigo.
I’m with Seneca on this. People who make puns should definitely be thrown off high structures. :)
So, Deus should be thrown off a high structure for the pun in his name, scar and company?
Deus’s name is not a pun. They named the pun after him, clearly.
Obviously Deus want us to throw him from a high structure. It’s all part of one of his complex yet brilliant plans.
I don’t know, he seems too clever to pull something as boorish as a B’rer Rabbit trick.
Too clever to try it? Or clever enough to realise that you’ll think he thinks it beneath him, and you won’t therefore expect him to do it anyway?
Whatever you think it is, he is already 12 steps ahead of you.
Ah yes, he has a sizeable investment in the local window glass trade.
And before you say ‘but Deus Ex Machinae is ancient greek in origin’, I will counter with Deus is clearly a time traveler. :)
Or I will just say the very laws of time and space are subservient to our lord and savior, Deus.
Amen.
Deus is not a time traveler, that would br ridiculous.
He has a time traveler in his employ.
And the time traveler in his employ is future Deus.
Dues’s ego is too big for him to work for himself. he must have another plan. hopefully one not as full of holes as the emperor’s.
Deus is a self made man. Therefore the only person he CAN work for is himself.
Also there are tax breaks for employing yourself twice…
He knows all the tax loopholes! :)
Another example of how he is a hero, not a villain. He keeps the evil IRS from getting money.
Deus is a time traveler. But so far, I think only forward, one second per second.
Which is still pretty damn impressive when you stitch about forty billion seconds together. Or, a little over 1200 years.
Because that scar on his face looks *EXACTLY* like the way some people who lived in Northern Europe about that long ago marked the criminals they exiled from their tribes for unforgivable crimes.
Could be just me, but that’s what I thought of the instant I saw him. Dunno it’s what Dave had in mind but it made perfect sense to me.
Is Deus’s scar Dave’s oh so subtle request to draw X-men for the MCU?
Not out the window? You don’t seem like the type of lawyer to leave us defenes-less. Even so, if you have some psychological thing about buildings instead we’ll certainly make allowances for your edifice complex.
Windows are expensive to replace.
Also you also have a star next to your name on the List like Random Guy does now because of that edifice pun, mister. I would have let ‘defenes-less slide but nooooo you had to give that extra push.
That and given that people have actualy smashed out windows because they assumed they were un breakable and because insurance company’s were getting tired of hurricane damage, most modern high rises in Houston at any rate now have windows that are very resistant to breakage from either direction, and most of the rest have plans to replace there glass
As for “unbreakable glass”, remember the Darwin Award winner from 1996:
“Garry Hoy (January 1, 1955 – July 9, 1993) was a lawyer for the law firm of Holden Day Wilson in Toronto who died when he fell from the 24th floor of his office building in Toronto. In an attempt to prove to a group of prospective articling students that the glass windows of the Toronto-Dominion Centre were unbreakable, he threw himself against the glass. The glass did not break when he hit it, but the window frame gave way and he fell to his death.”
He isn’t the only one to earn it for that there are a few that have tested the window and found it fails.
Just had a potted houseplant land on the sidewalk next to me. It was defernistrated.
I’m making a list. Like Sydney. You and brichins are on that list. Ro is also on it and on the first page.
Ack, I’ve been delineated!
On The List WITH a star next to your name.
AND DEMARCATED!
But seriously. there is no need to rain on my parade. Sydney’s antics are a tor-ential pain. It is on only natural that falls to see the gravity of the situation and is properly propelled from the precipitous precipice.
Your children are now on the List as well. Like klingon law.
If you are going to put me on the list for using egregious puns, then you should at least use my real name. I’ll tell it to you in the Author’s Note.
alliteration makes up for the punny humor.
That would structural discrimination.
Replied to wrong comment.
We should have listened to Pander, now she’s going on a rampage
You’re all on the list! ALL ON THE LIST!
Because if it should chance to happen, that scapegoat must be found,
She has a Little List.
Yes, she has a Little List.
Of those whom, if gone missing, none would ask that they be found.
She has them on The List.
Yes, on her Little List.
Like pedantic Grammar Nazis who demand you be aware,
Of each and every misuse of the words ‘there,’ ‘their,’ and ‘they’re.’
For the mill they are grist!
Oh, I think you get the gist…
CrossFit enthusiasts, and all fad dieters as well,
And newly pregnant tourists back from Paris – rot in hell!
You know you’re on The List!
Is there anyone I’ve missed?
Ok Bharda has a ‘Get off The List Free’ card because that was cool.
since she intends to start a bar she needs skills like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvipPYFebWc
That music video is hilarious on so many levels. Plus cool.
Okay…. you’re… not off the list but you’ve gotten the asterisk removed from your name.
Lindsey Stirling does those moves LIVE while playing….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrutzRWXkKs
as predicted.
That would be structural discrimination.
Yes,… but how do you get the structure to consume the drugs in the first place?
I’ll go get my parachute now…
“Missed it by that much.”
I didn’t want to imagine the flying faceplant with a knife in one’s teeth, but I did…
Made my skin crawl…
Seeing the instructor untethered is making both my military training senses, and my occupational safety training, twitch. Also, why it the rappelling harness under her belt? I have never seen that, it that a new thing? And how is the back of the harness configured?
I can’t honestly think of any way the back could be configured, where if you actually needed it you wouldn’t get a reverse wedgee, and possibly end up hanging upside down hoping your pants don’t peel off.
That’s not a complete harness.
Hell, Sydney gets a fancy harness thingy? Luxury! When the Army taught me rappelling we made our own harness on the spot out of a rope.
I’d tell Sydney to get off my damn lawn, but she’s taunting me by hovering a few inches above it.
I can still make that style of harness (learned it from some ex-military folks), and did for years if I bumped into a friends that were adventuring but didn’t have spare equipment to borrow. Good harnesses are so cheap now though (and me less poor) that if I take it up again I’d way rather just spring for one; even if you tie it with webbing instead of rope, a real harness is far more ergonomic.
Oh yah. In the Navy they have you make that same kind of harness out of a rope, only if you’re in the Navy you call it a bosuns-chair.
It might just be because Seneca doesn’t have three hands, and doesn’t trust Sydney to actually hold it in place.
I think the art style is changing for the better :D
I prefer Dave’s early style. Much more expressive. 3D-rendered faces feel off for me personally.
They do for me as well. He seems to be moving to blend, which is a much less jarring experience.
Either that or he now has multiple artists working for him…
…deprecipated?
can she even repel still? or would the feather fall markedly slow her decent
That’s part of the test.
Her slow fall should be like a parachute.
There when needed.
other wise diving into beds gonna be a butt. think its safety aka you want to fall so you fall in combination of safety mode like if knocked out. and thus the thought to fall or not fall acts more like opening wings of a wing suit at that point if can control the glide.
The ultimate compliment for a pun is lynching.
I was very upset when MSE got kicked off of Amazon. He writes good stuff.
Who? And why?
I wonder how far the super strength characters could throw her?
I’m sure some educated person could analyze how to best use the fastball special with Halo as the projectile. She seems resistant to acceleration related injuries inside the bubble but said bubble also add a lot of drag.
One of those shield upgrades has got to be either the skin tight shield, or the shield shaped like a giant scale model of the user, which of course moves and bends the same way as the user.
Or a arrow shaped shield for fast traveling in atmospheres.
She was already able to shape it into a bullet-shape
Ask Dabbler whether you can borrow her custom trebuchet (the one that launches giant dildos).
Quite far I would think, just not as far as other people, so long as she is on an upward trajectory she should move nomraly, its the falling she slows
I want to see Max throw Achilles into orbit just so he can reenter the atmosphere face first, and face plant into something on the ordinance range.
But the real life problem is that his terminal velocity is going to be less than 200mph…..
Same as a skydiver in a head down position.
We need to wire osmium and tungstan to him – wire, because duct tape will burn off on re-entry…..
If he is invulnerable then nothing can harm him. not even reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere.
tht would then beg the question of whether the feather falling only slows descent (vertical component), and leaves the horizontal component in tact – if so, the super strength characters could throw her QUITE far – perhaps orbiting the Earth more than once, below typical LEO altitudes… if Sydney didn’t bring something to distract her… also, you’d have to wonder if her acceleration toward Earth is controlled by proximity to the planet’s gravimetric center, or if it’s simply limited by the change in proximity…
like… being in LEO distances from the surface, but stationary would require a certain “force” to slow her descent, but if she’s ~10 miles above and moving fast enough that a ballistic projectile such as an artificial satellite would roughly maintain it’s proximity, she wouldn’t need any “force” to keep her afloat, because she’d be missing the Earth constantly, just as human-placed satellites do, so any “force” produced might make her “rise” into a higher orbit
(all of this again, until she grabs the fly-ball and pushes herself down)
I don’t think the balls would have such a design flaw, considering the intelligence of the entities that created them, but… just saying…
I don’t get it. Even after reading some of the comments I still don’t get it.
That’s ok. As far as puns go, it was pretty much crap.
“Rappeling” means to descend a vertical surface by sliding down a rope, usually in a series of controlled hops.
“Repelling” means to drive something away from you. Saying “I find that thing repellent” means that you really dislike the thing in question.
Always remember to thank a person if you throw them off a building. It’s only polite. ^_^
That’s how I’ve always gone through life. Mama Pander taught her children to be polite.
Except to punsters, those she taught you to destroy.
Obviously.
I for one appreciate that you don’t shout at us, even when you slam the door on our creativity. You’re always so curteous.*
* And now I’ve mentally pocketed the correct spelling for the next lawyer-themed discussion.
Should Sidney expect to find herself getting frequently defenestrated, now that it can’t harm her? (unless the one throwing her didn’t bother to open the window first, obviously)
Petition to Dave:
This commenter, and all replying below, hereby petition that the Cast page be updated such that Seneca’s existing “Who’s Who?” picture be replaced with the one she is making in panel 4 in future updates, until such a time that an even better picture comes along.
(Strike that part about the cast page, realized she wasn’t on the cast page mid-post, tried to edit to fix, screwed up the edit. This petition is for the who’s-who box on the right of the comic pages.)
I can do a similar feat but I’m actually grabbing people by their clothing and I have to make sure I don’t ‘Spiderman’ the person I’m grabbing…
That being said, throwing someone off a building when you absolutely are sure they can’t die from the sudden stop at the bottom either because you can catch them before that point or there’s something else to catch them is super satisfying.
It seems like today is Seneca’s lucky day. I’d bet that she’s not the first person that has wanted to throw Sydney off the roof (& probably won’t be the last, either)…
DaveB, I don’t know why you don’t know why windows get their own word for this. I mean, seriously, it’s clear as glass!
*ducks & runs*
On the List.
We can see through your sharp responses, you act all annoyed with our silli(ca) jokes, but you’re so transparent – we know you love it.
*flees to underground bunker*
The silli(ca) one is so shameful that I don’t even need to put you on the list (again) for that. It will haunt your lineage forever.
what do you mean its terrible. Silli(ca) is just a dry joke.
At this point it is a running gag. Also Mr. Carborundum would like to have a word with you.
isn’t he stuck to the glass?
Please don’t say that sort of thing. I’m not that kind of gel.
Stop it, you. I’m not that kind of gel.
what about the judges who pun puns in their opinions/rulings?
If you have ducks and runs perhaps ducks was undercooked?
It’s like you all are the Agent Smiths of puns now.
We have corrupted this forum with our puns. I’m so proud of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvLQMMaVmzU
This feels very much like my struggle against the punsters.
you love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0uTz7uur8I
Interesting fight scene, the characters look like they’re from the Matrix – too bad they never made any sequels.
It’s clearly a fan film sequence.
Pretty sure the word for the non-window version of that action has become ‘yeet’.
defenestration is an objectively funnier word nonetheless
For some reason, I LOVE the way the orbs chase her around when she’s moving fast. It’s adorable somehow, like baby ducks waddling after their mom.
I think I have a theory for the passive on the “life support” ball. Sidney was able to go into cold, empty space with just the shield ball protecting her. Or, was it? We already know her shield is not entry level, it has some degree of being able to allow certain things like visible light through, but not harmful effects. I’d be interested to know how UV rays are affected by it, but let’s question for a moment: Does the shield trap heat energy, or is Sidney surrounded by a reasonably comfortable temperature because of the life support passive? Has she been cold or overheated at any point?
Temperature control and radiation type damage recovery would be cool, but I think a lot for a passive ability on the life support orb.
Rather I think the life support orb passive is why sydney has an almost instinctive understanding of the orbs usage – anytime sydney has a thought of “i wanna try to do …” she somehow understands what to do with the orbs? (as examples, the shield size, or know that the point she had just used on the PPO was for rapid fire)
A passive ability that is basically an instruction manual, that tailors itself to the user, would be immensely useful, but not overpowered by itself.
I don’t think the shield lets ANYTHING pass through it. Anything at all.
Rather, it uniformly blocks everything, and then displays a perfectly safe *image* of what’s on the other side, and reproduces sounds that are safe. (Conversations, but not sonic attacks.)
Sounds and images that are dangerous because of information content, (The names of elder gods, for instance.) could be a grey area.
I can accept that is possible, but until/unless DaveB decides to tell us, there is just no technically evidence to prove it yet. (we know sydney has been in explosions, and she & others can see outside the orb, but no one has said if its a real effect or “orb generated”)
Hadn’t considered it from that perspective though.
For that matter, since the Life Support Orb passive was the original question… the passive for that orb might be the reason that there isn’t more damage from general energy sources, or temperature extremes.
The passive part of the life support orb might be automatically knowing what type of atmosphere is safe for her
Just from a personal perspective…. permanent slowfall sounds just AWESOME, that could be really, really fun to play with… the go-pro videos you could take, especially since the wind sheer doesn’t appear to effect Sydney, would be national geographic level cool
Oddball thought. I wonder if the passive falling ability would cause her to spin slowly backwards when she uses her blast
Using the orb has no reactive force on Sydney, she used the rapid fire orb on the Blood Golem & it didn’t make Sydney move from it. Its either an effect build into the orb itself, or because of the “magically created” type of attack the PPO does, the orb doesn’t have a standard Newtonian reaction to force.
Vertigo I’d say is less fear of height and more like fear of falling that height
so with deep knowledge that you cant fall as in fall fatally or even get injury from falling, you likely dont have fear either
I’d love to see Halo using the lighthook and flyball together to pretend to be Spider-Gwen
honestly perm slowfall just sounds like a horrible thing to have it makes you a slowly moving target you would have to constantly be using the fly ball to keep you mobility up. and in casual life it would just be a pain also how would the slow fall interact with say an elevator as tec the elevator would not be descending faster than you
No elevator moves fast enough for slowfall to be concern. Several attraction in theme parks might became less fun, though.
Perhaps running down steps or a ramp *might* engage slowfall and make it a lot slower than expected, mostly because at some point both feet could be off the ground and she’d be in freefall for a split second. I would presume that Sydney has enough control integration with her balls that they can tell when NOT to engage a passive power and this won’t be a problem, but who knows?