Grrl Power #959 – Enchanting 101
Happy being slightly to moderately hung over from July 4th if you’re in America and happened to party last night, or if you’re not in America and just decided to get drunk for totally unrelated reasons.
Sometimes I need to google things about military culture, but this time, I’m was pretty sure calling your C.O. an ekwensu ọcha is not usually allowed. (Google it.) Max and Kenya obviously have a friendship that transcends such things.
If you’re over 30, you might have grown up with “flesh” colored crayons and band-aids. That was before those industries were like “Oh… right, other races.” Still, it’s easy to think of tannish-peachy-khaki as “flesh” colored, (especially if you’re white and living in a majority caucasian nation/area) and that’s only partially because we don’t really have another words with succinctly describes the caucasian skin tone. It doesn’t help that there’s quite a variety of hues possible under the caucasian umbrella* (and that’s before you get into makeup companies trying to convince women they have a “winter” complexion or whatever is going on there.) If you had to name the color of the old “flesh” colored crayons though, you’d probably say “peach.” I actually think that’s what Crayola did at any rate. Still, Leon telling Max she had peach colored hair was not his first instinct. He wasn’t trying to be un-woke about it, I mean, there are people with gold, brown, blue and purple skin standing right in front of him. (Cora is just off panel, trust me.) He really just meant “your hair and skin match and no one can pull that off.”
*The Caucasian Umbrella sounds like a fascist world view, the name of a band, and also something a serial killer might have.
July’s vote incentive is up!
You guys don’t know who this is yet. (Her name is Xerxa.) I will give you one single guess what she might be from. (And no, it’s not Dabbler’s mother.) It was a piece I had half finished from a little while ago and given my time constraints this month, I threw a little polish and some background on it and here you are. Unfortunately there aren’t nine separate versions because she’s not wearing a ton to begin with. Hopefully you can read about that soon. I hope you like it, personally I think it turned out pretty good.
As always, nude version 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.
I am Caucasian, I am also a person of color. Pasty beige is a color.
I am in shape. Round is a shape.
“I have the body of a God. Buddha’s a God, right?” (Fat Thor from Endgame also works)
Buddha is neither a god nor fat. Perhaps you think of Budai the fat happy chinese monk.
Lots of western people confuse the Buddha with Budai, because they’ve been so brainwashed by monotheist nonsense, they can’t easily get their heads around anything more complicated or nuanced.
Not brainwashed, just underinformed. And Budai is identified as Maitreya Buddha in Chan Buddhism.
Yeah, I didn’t think of that. So in a way Buddha is fat, that much is true.
I thought Buddha was a title.
As I understand it, it’s a description-of-state that’s also used as a description-of-specific. Anyone who achieves Enlightenment may be described as a buddha, but there’s only one who is The Buddha. Similar to how many fantasy-type settings will have minor devils of various types and grades, answering (directly or indirectly) to The Devil at the top of the hierarchy. Or the way that a clan-based society may have many with the surname Mackenzie, but The Mackenzie is used to denote the chief.
Again – not a religious scholar. Not even really religious. But a quick bit of research is saying that Buddha was not only the title, it was also the name of he founder of Buddhism.
Gautama Buddha.
Also I’ve also read that his name was Vamadeva Gautama. Soooo maybe Buddha IS a title -and- a name? Sort of like Caesar?
My understanding is that the ‘Gautama Buddha’ form of the name is with the inclusion of the honorific, and that it’s backdated to times before it was earned for the sake of recognition and consistency.
It’s similar to the way a Saint’s actions would be recorded along the lines of “Saint Thomas More was martyred for refusing to endorse King Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church instead of the Pope”. Those actions predate his official canonisation (in 1935) by 400 years or more, but he’s named including the relevant title regardless because that’s how the reader knows it’s that Thomas More.
when Im in Japan I find myself trying to explain Christianity. Its like oh you have three Gods but what is Gabriel Im like um no we have one God who is a Triune God. (Its complicated lets leave it at that, the “Short answer” explination of whos who with roughly 40 Individial 1-2 thousand word entrys of the more known Angels and Demons, and thats not counting the various Saints and other Individuals.
(the 40 “Individuals” include the Seven, the fallen, the Debate on Adam and Eve, some old Testimant Figures, the early Christian Saints and so on.
Yes, it would be humorous to have Bharda try to correctly state any small subset of Christian apologetics. (Let’s say Methodist.) The chance she’d get it right is nil, just like the majority of Americans and Buddhism.
Apologetics?
…you want me to defend the assertions of the carpenter’s cult? To what end?
And make no mistake, I can do it. My study of Poli-Sci I included a deep dive into the works numerous prominent followers of the god of getting nailed to sticks. Which isn’t at all surprising, giving that such cultists were always very interested in meddling in temporal affairs.
Shall I begin with Augustine & his discourse on the collapse of Rome being divine punishment? Or should we instead pursue Thomas Aquinas & his nonsense about the divinity of unjust rulers? Maybe you’d prefer a bit of Calvinism, and a detailed explanation that life has to suck for the poor, because they somehow deserve it, and because an an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful, all wise, invisible, skydaddy “has a plan?”
…
Or, maybe, you should rethink trying call me out.
While there were some early Calvinistic Methodists, that faith tradition is now Presbyterianism. Methodism explicitly disagrees with Calvinism and instead is based in Arminianism. So, in other words, you weren’t able to do what YupYupNope suggested you would be unable to do. Instead, you deflected while also being deliberately unkind. That certainly can shut down conversation, but it will also make people think less of you. Just something to consider.
Normally you piss me off. Tonight I think I’m in love…
@Jay, ya boy brought up xian apologetics, which is explicitly the practice of defending the assertions of that cult from criticism.
For example, one could ask, “Why does the god of getting nailed to sticks permit wicked rulers to come to power?” Apologetics addresses this, in one way, by the argument devised by Aquinas, stating that, “wicked rulers are put in their stations by the god of getting nailed to sticks in order to vex wicked peoples for their sins, to test the virtue of good peoples, proving their virtue and sincere seeking of his perforated grace, and also to vex the enemies of said god & his cultists.”
I am paraphrasing, of course, though that last one is a favorite of Trump apologists when confronted by his multiple divorces, and obvious lies, and cruelty, and various sins, which he clearly does not repent.
What you seem to be babbling about are the squabbles that resulted in the cult’s various schisms, and the creation of its myriad sectarian sub-cults, and in this case, specific variations of the Protestant variant, which primarily differed from the Catholic strain by asserting that ordinary cultists could communicate directly with the god of getting nailed to sticks, without the intercession of priests.
A handy coincidence, when one is seeking the favor of medieval Germanic princes who are chaffing under papal authority…almost like xian intramural cult squabbles have more to do with the here-and now, than the hereafter.
Though, in fairness, it isn’t just the carpenter’s cultists that do that. Every religious cluster is riddled with “deep spiritual conflicts” that just super-duper-coincidentally happen to mirror various political struggles across the pages of history. Admittedly, however, the various cults emerging from the worship of the nameless desert demon that pretends to have created everything from nothing, possess all power, all knowledge, all wisdom, and be omnibenevolent (unless you stop telling him how amazing he is and regularly groveling for his favor, or making him the sole motivator for literally everything you ever do, in which case, lake o’ fire time) are the all-time champions of ecumenical acrobatics & weird-ass sectarian conflict.
As for myself: I don’t especially care whether or not you, YupYupNope, or anyone else feels my attitude towards any particular religion, or religion generally, is “unkind.” Religion is far and away too often “unkind” in its attitude toward human beings, and that’s before we even get into the specific cruelties inflicted by specific cults on particular sets of victims. And yes, I’m especially unimpressed by the cult of the god of getting nailed to sticks, though the other cults of the nameless desert demon that pretends to create & control the cosmos aren’t particularly winning groups either, in my book.
tl;dr – Frigus fabulam, frater.
The thing about religious nuts is that they’re too fscking judge-y.
Also, blaming religion for contemporary politics? Didn’t poli sci teach you to discern the two?
@Nope
I’m not “blaming religion for contemporary politics,” so much as pointing out that there hasn’t ever been any actual separation between the two.
Political actors use religion to justify bad action, and religious actors invoke political actions as proof/motivation for dogma & decrees. It’s two-way street, always has been, and it’s shitty. Whether we’re talking about the Anglican Church, which exists only because a Tudor king wanted yet another divorce, or the friendly attitude of the Catholic Church towards the Third Reich, because of the dogmas of blood libel, or any number of other insanities, it’s all but impossible to separate the two. Even the nominal separation of church & state in the US is ignored when inconvenient.
“In God We Trust” didn’t show up until the Cold War, when it became desperately important to so many paranoiacs to differentiate the US from the “godless commies.”
*sigh*
If I roll my eyes any more, they’re going to fall out.
I actually don’t think so. (Yes, without the benefit of a poli sci degree.) There’s the message of the religion (often misunderstood), and the rules to live by (idem dito), presided over by an organised church, and then there is the political playing field shaped by having a society where everybody has to adhere to the rules of the church.
That last thing is what makes people bend reason into pretzels to try and match their real-world desires to fit into the religious framework. Without the dominant position in society the need for such fig leaves diminishes or at least become a lot less important for society at large.
Which isn’t to say the religious won’t bend reason into pretzels anyway. Like I just finished a book that starts as an introduction to how the weather works, moves on to a story about chasing tornados, then about finding religion instead, and ends with a sermon full of the usual. The thing that really stuck in my craw was the religion-induced logic failures. For example, traditional hot-button abortion is bad, says the book, because life is a gift from god and therefore god is the only one allowed to take it back, or not. That’s not the usual way we go about with gifts, is it? Suppose I give you a bottle of wine, does that give me authority to say when you can drink it? No? Well then. Sure, life isn’t a bottle of wine, but if god retains the authority then it’s not a gift.
Anyhow, I would prefer to separate the teachings of the religion from the political apparatus, if any. (If the religion claims that’s impossible, why, we can hold either accountable for the misdeeds of the other, no? Maybe we should do that some more until they learn to behave themselves.) The reason is that the artifacts arising from their intersection would have far less need to exist if the religion would not be politically dominant, or even if the top rulers inside the religion would be a bit less stuck on the rules, and so they aren’t really relevant to the teachings in and of themselves. Those people come and go, but the religious value of the religion ought to be a little more lasting. For if it isn’t, well, not much of a religion then, is it?
Is Lillith mentioned in there or is this from the biblical stories AFTER the bible was put into a single text around 95AD? Because I know they removed a LOT of the older stories from the Hebrew Bible and other stories surrounding the Old Testament at that point, including the idea that man and woman were made at the same time from trees or something (Adam and Lillith) then Lillith left, Adam was bummed, and God made Eve but this time required a rib from Adam.
If I got any of this wrong, then sorry – I’m not a biblical scholar. :) Most of this I think I got from PBS or the History Channel.
Lilith was NEVER in the Torah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_of_Sirach
Basically Lilith as first wife of Adam was a thought piece written by Ben Sira using the name of a Mesopotamian monster over why Genesis mentions the creation of woman twice.
there are many non-dogma stories like this but for some reason this one just caught on with the imagination of painters and then to the general public.
“Lilith was NEVER in the Torah.”
I didnt think I said the Torah, I said the Hebrew Bible. In other words, I meant Old Testament. The Torah is only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. My bad, since it’s usually used interchangeably to mean the entire Hebrew Bible as a more generalized term. I should have been more specific.
“Basically Lilith as first wife of Adam was a thought piece written by Ben Sira using the name of a Mesopotamian monster over why Genesis mentions the creation of woman twice.”
I’m not acutally going to disagree on this because this is way out of my wheelhouse of knowledge but I really do think I remember watching something on the History Channel about Lillith being mentioned in the Old Testament or the orally passed down stories and was one of many stories that was left out when the stories were all put together in a single book by a group of cardinals or something along those lines, where they left out a LOT of older stories, including Lillith.
But I could definitely be wrong since I don’t even remember the name of the show that I’m referencing.
@pander although your terminology is confusing, but your statements are accuarate. The Hebrew Bible is indeed the hebrew equivalent of the protestand old testament. It’s also true that Lilith is indeed never mentioned in the Thora, but she is in isaiah 34:14, meaning she is part of all the things relevant to your discussion(Tenach, “Hebrew Bible and the old testament.)
What you’re talking about you saw on the history channel did happen, not once, but around 6 times. Let me explain: The scriptures of Judaism are in their very nature expanding until the end of Judaism(They’re essentially the history of the Jews with a strong religious connotation), but although basically everyone agrees not all Judaic and jew describing text should be in the scripture(The 90.000th grocery list doesn’t have a lot to add) not everyone, which texts should be skipped. The people who study, which text to skip are called dogmatists. If we focus on the Tenach/old testament(skips the Talith, Internal church rulings and new testament, so we don’ t have to deal with the difference between Christianity and Judaism, because that can get tiring fast) we can split it into two fronts with origin stories with a deviation of a single book. You’ve got with or without the books of apocrypha, which are books about 400BC until 200BC. Both Christianity and Judaism have two groups of groups who disagree, which front is better. All these groups of groups have had a moment they decided to follow their version except the christian non-apocryphaic ones, because they had several, due to being the first to who translation to multiple languages was preferable.
“Basically Lilith as first wife of Adam was a thought piece written by Ben Sira using the name of a Mesopotamian monster over why Genesis mentions the creation of woman twice.”
According to the Wikipedia article on Lilith this is sort of right. Adam having a first wife got suggested more early by a Rabbi, but he used a terminology that meant his words can be interperted as “Eve got recycled” or “there was somebody named Lilith before Eve who got destroyed before she was made.
The trees in Ben Sira’s text where undisputably new.
Now my personal conclusion:
I conclude that Lilith is one of these name drops people have run amock with, without canonical information, but enough imagination you find more often in the christian Theology. Examples of other such name drops: the leviathan in Job, Job’s 4th “friend” and the entity mentioned in Levitics for who a goat had to be send into the dessert.
The lilith that is mentioned is not the first wife of Adam, what is mentioned later (that so many translations re-translate to screech owl or something) the Lillim or lilliths were basically desert demons, spread disease, kill babies, seduce men, ect…
it was a name drop for Ben Sira to use it, a name that would be well known in the culture, but was never part of the actual faith or those stories in their original context.
PS: I have like zero faith in the history channel anymore after crap like that treasure hunter guy claiming a broken sword somehow proved King Arthur was real…and tied to a fight with Lancelot…Lancelot…a character whose author we KNOW THE NAME OF. As a work of fiction.
plus all the ancient astronaut stuff, that insulting clash of the gods show that recycled its footage, tried to claim Hades was in the Bible, used bias sources, only covered specific versions of myths without referencing the others, recycled the same interviews for different topics, ect…
basically, Lilith was one of the names of a demon floating around the Middle East, people had prayer bowls and such to protect babies from it, and so on. So using that name for a mother of demons isn’t any different than a modern author inserting Satan into a story (or how so many retellings of fairy tales would replace the ogre, dragon, or pagan god with “the devil”, or saying something called “Goblin” was the mother of all goblins.
So let’s put it this way
Lilith (character)
-inspired by Jewish folklore demonic creatures
-author: Ben Sira
*creatures reimagined as a singular entity for a story inspired by a inconsistency in religious passages.
Your first usage of “Buddha” is a nonspecific reference, rendering your point silly.
In western society with little interaction with actual source Buddhism, and instead novelty items from stores like Nirvana, the majority of exposure to Buddha are little statues of a fat bald man being marked as “Buddha”, so it is not unreasonable that most westerners would think of him as fat as that is the image presented to them the most often.
here from wal-mart
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Oriental-Furniture-6-Sitting-Laughing-Buddha-Statue/45846734
I’am a Redguard!
You are a Person of Pallor. Flaunt it.
Just not outside on a sunny day. Like Sydney or Ingsol, us pasty folk may burst into flames if we aren’t careful.
I am not white, I range between Avid Apricot and Copper Harbor. Check with Sherwin-Williams paint samples, the ultimate authority in color.
I think Sherwin Williams or Home Depot actually has a machine where you can put your hand on it and it will make paint that color. :)
Ladies & Gentlemen, we’ve just solved racism. X’D
Woo!
Home Depot! How Doers Get More Done! Including solving racism! Always knew that home improvement would be the key. :D
Like my eyes, (‘hazel’) my skin is multi-hued. Everything from albino white to dark chocolate freckles.
My flesh, OTOH, is usually various shades of red, though I’ll admit the fat is more of a pinkish white.
In this case flesh colored could be acceptable as it matches the color of her flesh.
I was thinking along those lines, too. It uses whatever color the flesh is to color the hair and eyes.
more and more this looks like a good way to disguise Max. The question would be though would a person be fooled?
Terry Pratchett famously closed all it took for him to camouflage was to take off his hat.
That can’t be right. The sheer awesome radiating from the man would have blown his cover immediately.
Presumably, people just realised he was trying to be incognito and left him alone to be polite.
#justkiddingbutpratchetttrulyisgreat
John Cena was just hiding behind Terry Pratchett the entire time
More and more, this looks like a function that needs to be incorporated into EVERYONE’S choker. Once the bugs are worked out. The ability for anyone to make these changes (especially if/when they have the capacity to take other forms) would be an essential asset in anybody’s toolkit.
Hm. Like the holo-disguises from page 36–91?
Those seals are apparently more complicated/expensive for Max to be using on a regular basis. Also, the Band-aids they use might not stick to Max’s skin.
Also, also, if every super is wearing a disguise choker like Max, people might start looking for the disguise chokers.
All we have to do is get Arianna-types and fashion-mogul types to get everyone to wear chokers because they’re “in.”
Won’t be a 100% success rate at any point, but even if it’s just a fad, some people liked to wear chokers before, and some will like them after the fad is over.
Alternatively, the chokers might could have a function to change shape so that they can conform to the neckline of whatever the wearer might choose to don as a torso-encasing garment (shirt, dress, etc.; if it covers the nipples, this choker is meant to conform to its upper limits as long as that garment is worn, and when that garment is removed, it returns to choker-form until and unless its wearer wants it in another. A second “Default form” might be that of a necklace. Some people really don’t like the way a choker fits; a necklace form lets it be worn the same way without the associated hassles.
I don’t think there was a reason it *had* to be a choker, though. If Dabbler can make an anti-debuff earring, she could put the color change spell in a different accessory. Max just doesn’t typically wear a bunch of jewelry.
I don’t think the choker will be that obvious, though. Arianna would never leave the money from official ARC-SWAT chokers on the table. Even if she did, the cosplayers have already started making them for themselves.
Yup, could easily just change the accessory format to bracelet, anklet, or belt. Strip of flexible material + fastener is a versatile format.
Agreed, although I could also see an argument for the spellwork needing to surround / interact with the main spinal nerves or some other major internal system to function properly. Auras / chakras / whatever the Grrlverse has are almost certainly stronger at the neck than a wrist or ankle. If nothing else, the programming aspect is probably easier if you work from the center outward than backtracking through an extremity, although a belt or vest would have the same advantage in that case.
We would then need a disguise choker designed to disguise a disguise choker….
Starting to sound like the missile, anti-missile missile, anti-anti-missile-missile-missile problem…
But if everybody’s wearing an active disguise choker (and the shape issues can be solved or worked-around), then all the observer can tell is that there are a lot of people wearing masks. They might make a decent guess that this group corresponds to ARC-SWAT, but they won’t know which one is which until either the masks come off or the abilities come out.
Why wouldn’t they be fooled? Skin tone and hair color are pretty significant physical traits as far as physical visual recognition goes. I mean just look at the Drake interviews on Jimmy Kimmel. A wig and a fake beard were enough to let him interview people and they responded with comments they obviously would never actually say to Drake because they didn’t recognize him. Going from literal gold skin and metallic purple hair to a normal Caucasian skin ton and blonde hair is even more extreme. She would still be a strikingly beautiful woman, but not the visual spectacle she currently is. Also keep in mind the original story arc where Max was introduced. She was in a bank, surrounded by dozens of people who didn’t notice her outstandingly unusual appearance just wearing a hat and sunglasses.
Whenever “regular people” are being interviewed on those late night shows, they are all actors.
Oh, they noticed. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-35-purple-hair-no-chance-shes-a-main-character
Ugh, highly advanced magic and technology and the best programming paradigm they could come up with is basically Labview. (With apologies to any of my fellow scientists who enjoy LabView progamming… )
would g code be better? maybe Basic, the peeks and pokes might actually appeal to dabbler.
LabVIEW was fine before NI started updating it every year in a way that required you to replace all your code everytime you bought a new A/D encoder. I remember getting so frustrated I started trying to write Python utilities.
Whenever I hear conversations like that, it fully explains why there are billions of lines of COBOL code still in legacy production. It works, it is backward compatible forever, and mainframes make awesome big servers.
When your newfangled crap gets stable, you can talk.
“COBOL has been criticized throughout its life for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These weaknesses result in monolithic, verbose (intended to be English-like) programs that are not easily comprehensible.” (Wikipedia article)
As one who had to study it for my Certificates, I can say authoritatively that the only critics were those who could not get Fortran or Algol to do the same job… And who had trouble even figuring out what programs in those languages were supposed to be doing. I dunno who wrote the “not easily comprehensible” bit in Wikipedia, but COBOL has been widely regarded as the most easily understood progamming language anywhere, mostly because it was designed to be used by accountants and bookkeepers and be explaineable to HoDs. The fact that it enjoyed huge support from US DoD due to its properties also helped.
You’re quite right, Old Guy. COBOL just… works.
I’m from a different era, I suppose. To me it seemed like an odd blend between SmallTalk and HyperCard. Both of which my spell checker disavows, so I suppose I haven’t touched them lately.
Dabbler’s circular sigil, if the circle expresses control flow, is like virtually all game programs and most interactive programs where there’s a central “event loop” and everything branches off of that in response to user input. But in “event loop” code the key to efficiency is to keep that central loop as small as possible, making everything else the result of branches in the control flows that lead away from it.
The event loop itself, in the ideal case, becomes a simple REPL – “Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop.” In terms of the way magic is supposed to work, that would be something like “determine the caster’s will and intent as related to this spell, translate that will into action according to the capabilities entrained in the enchantment, perform that action, Repeat.” The “one and done” spells Dabbler’s talking about would lack the “Repeat” step.
Efficiency in either case would mean each of those steps, however arbitrarily complex and many-branched, are conditional branches from the REPL and anything you’re clearly not doing can get passed over without spending time out of each iteration deciding whether to do it or not. The REPL itself is efficient because it remains small. Dabbler’s dragon-ish looking enchantment may be Dave giving us a deliberate example: The REPL according to this theory would be the small circular bit directly in front of her, and the entire structure depending on it is all conditional action.
You might also want to look at it, though, through a hardware or firmware lens, or matrix transforms, or whatever.
One sigil may be reading the universe, identifying objects and decompositing them into unique textures and colors and forms, then continuously feeding that information on into the cycle. Another may be calculating, another may be “spraying” the desired output colors and textures onto the forms.
It’s not individual pixels being recolored, it’s set operations.
True. A VHDL like VeriLog or GEZEL might be a pretty good match in fact, since we have sigils functioning as both code and hardware.
Even her irises are Caucasian flesh colored.
Oh, gawd, you’re right. It’s so disconcerting. I bet it would be downright bizarre to see for real.
Well, not in the Grrl Power universe, but in the real one for sure.
Interesting… so in theory, everyone has their own little signature of style when programming magic as it were. One could theoretically fingerprint someone based on a magic spell and determine exact origin and even where they were taught it.
Reminds me of some shadowrun (sci fi)novel where some deckhead found some old code and claimed it has to be a “gates” due to how (crappy) it was written….
This is not an exaggeration. I’ve worked in a dozen different programming languages at six different companies, and in every case, after a few months, I could recognize without fail the “fist” of every programmer who worked there. Including knowing instantly when I was looking at code someone had “stolen” from other sources – snippets from the web, examples from references or textbooks, etc. are all obvious when you know how someone’s code “looks” normally.
Several others developed the same skill, of being able to look at some code and instantly know which engineer had written it. But it was really, really hard, even for us, to figure out what exactly we were looking at and how we knew. placement of declarations, Indentation style, placement of parens, etc… but even when those things are controlled by eg a “code beautifier” reformatting everything to a so-called uniform standard, we could still tell. In a lot of cases, we could even tell if we were looking at code in a different programming language than any we’d seen before from that engineer.
So, yeah, if someone had actually worked with “gates” code previously for more than a few months, and had whatever cognitive quirk it is that gets triggered in some people when we see other people’s code on a regular basis for a while… then yeah, he’d probably know.
I occasionally make an attempt at writing stories. I wrote a scene where the adventurers don’t realize their in the near future yet. One programmer is looking at code for a device. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear *I* wrote this!” :D
There’s a similar scene in Robert Heinlein’s “The Door Into Summer”, in which the protagonist encounters a commercial product that is constructed eerily like he himself would have made it. Turns out there was a good reason.
I understood your reference to ‘fists’.
Telegraphers could recognize people by their Morse Code.
Is that where it came from? I thought the term as applied to programming style originated with people knowing each other’s handwriting. Now I’m trying to remember where and when I first heard it applied to code style.
One of the earliest – possibly the first – was when somebody glanced at some code and referred my questions about it to Robert because Robert wrote it. And I asked how he knew and he said, that’s just Robert’s fist. But the term was used all over the software industry back in the 1990s and 2000s. And I believe earlier, but I can’t attest to it before then.
I’ve often thought that to survive as a professional programmer, you either need to be blind to those personal identifiers… or have a strong stomach.
It’s like they say about how many different ways a computer program could be written is equal to the number of different programmers involved, plus one. Every programmer has their distinctive style & yet they could all write a program that includes all of the functions that an employer wants to have but the specific tasks could be programmed in a different order & with different sub-routines u\being used to organize & prioritize each function.
Then of course, there’s the employer who hired a programmer in the first place is going to have their own ideas on how the program is supposed to function…This is the “plus one” as it appears in the above statement.
is that a wight devil quote from ace ventura?
Yes, yes it is! White devil though ;)
Much more like “pale Vehemence”. That’s how I read the Wikipedia entries, although I confess I should have spent a bit more time and followed any refs to Grade 1 resources.
I’ll be a bit pedantic. Khaki isn’t really a color, it’s a type of textile weave. You can blame the army for the two becoming conflated.
Yabbut dirt-color just sounds gross.
I do ceramics, dirt colors are fun, especially after applying fire.
Khaki is Afghan or Persian for “dust”, so it’s the tan dirt of thee area.
I suppose you object to “china” being used for porcelain as well. Or “rose” for a medium pink. Linguistic terms arise by usefulness and association.
As someone with a Master of the Arts, with a focus on ceramics and thermodynamic engineering, I object to ”china” and ”porcelain” being used to describe the various types of white ceramic, especially white earthware that has not been fully vitrified. I especially object to the used of lead, and untested sources of cobalt and cadmium being used to glaze those products.
Okay, now do “rose”… GO!
I have no problem with Rose. She’s a nice gal, a bit thorny at times, but a nice gal.
*on phone with bank* “Yes I need to take out another mortgage on the house. Sorry yes, it’s just I have to keep hiring ninja hit squads and they’re not doing their friggin jobs well”
Maybe you’re hiring from the wrong clan – you’ll need to find one where the members don’t keep shuriken off their work.
Et tu, Brichins? ET TU?!?!
I know, a Brutal betrayal – I will Caesar and desist.
Go stand by Random Guy and Testicules in the corner.
If I ever become a supervillain and enslave the world, I just want you to know I’ll point to this as the turning point that drove me to the dark side.
True, true, I can see the relevance. Fortunately Deus already has his list of requirements ready.
So, I saw the Ninjas. We had a barbeque on a tiny grill with meat-onna-stick and beer. It was fun. By the time they left they had decided to go into Sumo. They said you were quite difficult to work for, a real Pander Bear.
That was just so bad. No. You don’t even deserve another ninja hit squad for that one. Go stand in the corner and think about what you did. Go. Shoo. Now. Bad.
LOL. Random Guy’s getting chased by a Pander Bear. He’d probably prefer a Pander Bare though.
Go stand in the corner by Random Guy. Shame.
You can’t call it ‘chased’ if I don’t run away.
Heh Max having Fun with her gift.
Yeah, when they’re talking about the Red Man, they’re not talking about me after I sunburn.
I just realised Anvil was calling Maxima ‘White Devil’ from Ace Ventura 2
Thank you! I tried Googling it, as suggested, but the first two hits didn’t help too much and the third result was this page. So I went to Google Translate, and it says it means “The Devil is pure.” I’ve not seen AV2 since it was in theaters, so I hadn’t remembered that at all.
I kinda like #4.
Next you’ll tell me that The Nickel contains no or hardly any Nickel.
(75% copper, 25% nickel.)
These days, Canadian nickels are made of a special formulation of stainless steel. Same with dimes, quarters and the outer ring of a two-dollar coin. There is some nickel in there, but not much.
It turns out the loonie ($1 coin) and the inner bronze piece of a $2 coin are also steel, but electroplated in copper and nickel to have the correct colour and electromagnetic properties. Check out mint.ca for more info. ;)
And British ‘copper’ coins have actually been steel with only a thin copper [bronze?] coating since some time in the 1990s or even the late ’80s: Enough so that a magnet reasonably nearby can/does affect them.
American pennies are copper plated zinc and will dissolve in the rain.
Which is useful for when one falls down the plumbing. It will be gone in a bit, instead of clogging.
They make decent barnacle deterrent for small boats.
RandomGuy wins for most obscure factoid posted.:)
Xerxa not wearing a ton is an understatement. She appears to have had a mishap with a cellophane tape dispenser.
fortunately she has no body hair to be pulled out by this accident.
So a win-win for all of us.
Americans need to let go of their race fixation or at least stop telling the English speaking world it can’t use words that accurately describe reality just because somebody wants to pretend to be butthurt and claim the high moral ground. When I was in Papua Nui Gini I had a friend named Rupa Kala. He told me it translated as “Black [man]”. He was so black he had blue highlights. Did I stop calling him Rupa Kala? Of course not. He totally owned it. Being 6’6, gleaming and muscular certainly helped. The girls were checkin him out and he knew it. Good times.
Telling Americans what to do? Bitch please, Americans tell everyone else what to do.
Americans tell Americans what do to. Europeans just pretend not to listen. the rest of the world wishes it was American.
warning. the above post may contain sarcasm, hyperbole, and other attempts at funny. please read responsibly.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IhnUgAaea4M
I feel this is the appropriate place to put this.
Why do you care what words Americans do or don’t use?
Still, using “flesh” for just one color is a denial of reality. Even within a given race.
Even within a single chicken.
I thought that ‘Flesh colored’ was a reference to the Crayola Crayon Company.
The Crayola Crayon color name flesh was changed to peach in 1962.
>Google it
My default search engine is Duck Duck Go and the first result of “ekwensu ọcha” was this very comic, lol.
I get stuff about a deity of a small african group?
Does anyone know what DaveB is referring to?
Ekwensu means devil, ọcha means pale/clean/pure, ọlaedo means gilded. So, ekwensu ọcha means “white devil” as in a term for European invaders, while ekwensu ọlaedo would mean golden devil.
When I used google to translate it, it came up “the devil is pure” lol.
Very similar etymology for the Cantonese “gwáilóu”.
I’m getting references to a trickster deity that was retconned by Christian missionaries as Satan, which is another retcon, because Satan in the OT was Gawd’s prosecuting attorney, the one who presented your evil acts for judgement.
And yes I did study religion back many years ago when I was trying to decide what mine was.
The way I learnt it (ie, as according to a religion that as an adult I no longer follow)
Satan was made for the purpose of tempting humans away from the righteous path, because God’s gift to humanity was free will – and that meant nothing in the absence of a choice. Man could not be “good” unless making an active choice not to be “evil” and Satan was how God presented us with that choice.
But because of his job, Satan always saw humans at their weakest and worst, and became convinced that the Angels, like himself, were more deserving of God’s love than humans. And he rebelled against God.
And as his act of rebellion … he does exactly the same job, because Angels lack free will and it’s the job he was made for. But now he does it with hatred and jealousy and resentment, instead of in love and service and with pride in doing it well. And as a hateful, jealous, and resentful being, as an Angel estranged from God, he lives in pain and sorrow and misery.
But still, he continues to do his job, because he’s still an Angel, he has no free will, and that’s his nature.
I no longer believe, but that explanation of Satan still seems to make more sense to me than most mainstream treatments.
Mostly because I’m a practising atheist… Opus the Poet has the best handle of Satan, who turns up almost exclusively in the Book of Job which is probably pre-Genesis composition.
We don’t hear very much about Satan until we reach the New Testament and the Gospels, pretty well 2000 years later than Job. By now, popular thought and superstious religious beliefs have reformatted the old “accuser” (much like the fate of Loki the Trickster’s characterisation in Norse mythology) into the current incarnation of evil.
The religion doesn’t change, only the contents.
I got the same on google XD
I kind of read the ‘flesh-colored hair’ as ‘your hair is the same color as your flesh’. It took the backpedaling to realize the ‘specific color’ interpretation.
Technically, that’s exactly what happened. The color being applied to the flesh was also applied to everything else. It the assigned color, density and specularity etc for “flesh” had been bright green, then the hair would have been that.
A couple of people’s pc responses to the accurate term was just a throwaway.
I went to high school with an eventual major beauty contest winner. She really DID have the same color hair and skin. She looked like she’d been molded out of one big piece of caramel.
???
Like Lisa Simpson?
Aaaahh, DaveB… That word “skien” in pp 2 and 3… Shouldn’t they be “skEIn”? Or did you just use Succubus-speak?
Gah!!! I KNEW I started counting on the wrong finger! That should have been “pp 3 and 4”!
Yeah, it’s a word that doesn’t see common use. “Skein”, as in yarn.
Uh, maybe. Could be magic lingo though. :/
That would fly :)
Maybe literally O_o
To me, “flesh-colored” should be that slightly pinkish-red color of muscle tissue, not any kind of skin color.
That would be meat-colored.
Meat is flesh, and vice-versa, unless you’re talking organ meats. They come in many shades of brown, red, and grey.
Read that as ‘in many shade of brown, red, and gravy.’ :P
Would a manta black Max shine?
Like a block of highly-polished obsidian, until they fixed these bugs. And, honestly, if Dave reads this, I hope we get to see an obsidian version of Max (or, any of the characters, really). With practice, the ability to quickly adjust color, hue, shade, reflectivity, etc. would be tantamount to a cloaking spell spell under quite a number of circumstances. Especially if even minor hard light effects can be incorporated.
Concretia would be -awesome- in obsidian.
Added bonus – Obsidian falls on a 5-6 on the Mohs scale. It’s in range to be in Concretia’s sweet spot.
And considering that when freshly flaked/knapped it’s sharp enough to cut individual cells, it might be a surprise powerup. But, you do need an 800 pound block of the stuff first.
If you want an 800 pound chunk of obsidian, all you need is about a thousand pounds of felsic basalt (just buy ‘black sand’ from your local landscaper) and get Max to melt it into slag with a very carefully limited application of her personal energy beam. Or ask Halo if she’s got a pew-pew setting that will slag it without scattering it all over.
You could do the same thing with magnetite and silica for a hazy, near-transparent obsidian that’s translucent and could look pretty awesome. (but challenging to draw).
Forget Halo, get Brooke to slag it
Don’t forget that Obsidian is formed not only from molten rock, but also from rapid cooling. If it cools down at a normal rate, it forms crystals & irregularities.
True obsidian – volcanic glass – cools down from exposure to water, so fast that no crystals have a chance to form, creating a black, smooth surface with the consistency of rock & a smooth, polished surface like glass.
So, Max, Sydney &/or Brooke may be able to superheat the basalt, but they still need somebody to cool it down rapidly. Maybe get Xuriel in on the action.
The training pool is pretty deep…
I believe Brooke can also absorb heat from things, but doesn’t like doing it. She should be capable of making blocks of obsidian on her own.
I can see Max going to a comic convention with the choker set to ‘drow’.
VANTA black is dark because it is not smooth. It’s an acronym that stands for Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array. VANTA black is a CVD coating, not a pigment. Since Max’s skin is very smooth (paint/makeup won’t stick to her), she would retain her shininess.
https://media.giphy.com/media/Qs1aHvvivlnm8/giphy.gif
that is all.
So Max is an officer and Anvil is a non-comm,thus an unique friendship that transcends all manner of rules and regulations???
Er… Are they a romantic item or something? I mean, where is the potential for corruption? (Ganging up on Siddles aside…)
Max is the in-field commanding officer and Anvil looks to be the Sergeant-Major (at what level depends on the organizational structure, possibly RSM). It not uncommon for the senior officer and senior NCO of a unit (company, battalion, regiment, etc.) to be friendly and translate that to a positive professional working relationship. In this case, the ladies have a stronger friendship than most and they let themselves be more casual in the their relationship than most officer/NCO relationships.
Kenya is a Lieutenant. I touched on this awhile back. Yeah she would probably fit in as a Sergeant Major except she’s too young and not mean enough. Maybe an Executive Officer, but she doesn’t have the rank, Major Hiro would most likely fill that slot. Real life CSM Plumly as portrayed in Mel Gibson’s “We were Soldiers” would be the epitome of a Sergeant Major. Dave’s depiction of Arc and its ranking system seems a bit screwy as Max is a Lieutenant Colonel which is a battalion level commander. But, he’s only scratched the surface in his presentation of Arc as a battalion sized unit consisting of between 300 to 1000 personnel. That said, Dave’s shown different departments within Arc such as the Armory, Intelligence section, Technical Support, IT, Quartermaster etc. so that one could easily extrapolate a battalion sized unit with all the ranks currently displayed and not yet seen. The one thing we haven’t seen and is sorely lacking is LTC Max’s bad assed Command Sergeant Major. (Hint, hint, nudge, nudge) Dave.
Or, you can just realize that each member of Arc Swat wields the amount of firepower of a platoon, company, reinforced battalion, brigade, squadron or fleet, depending on who we’re talking about, making it somewhat silly to try to align them to the number of personnel in a regular unit. (Also, their pay grades are not aligned to the normal services, obviously.)
Lt Col is as good a rank as any. She’s O5, which is the rank that leads a squadron of Naval aircraft.
https://www.military-ranks.org/air-force/lieutenant-colonel
The responsibilities of a Lieutenant Colonel include commanding a squadron in the mission support group, maintenance group, or in a medical group, or directing operations in the operations group. They might also be the head of a wing staff department.
https://www.military-ranks.org/navy/commander
Commanders may also lead squadrons of aircraft, be placed in charge of a small shore mission, or serve on the staff of a senior officer aboard a large Naval vessel.
I googled ekwansu ocha and this page is the 4th result.
well, shader is a thin added under the luminance layer on some programming languages. they are now on hue, so it’s the next? but it’s OO so i guess is the applet in the same package? I’m guessing now.
well, they could tweak the opacity control or add an shader applet.
So, in panel 4, does Max look like the Woman of Steel, which, of course, usually refers to Supergirl?
I thought more like Nickel.
At least the birthday girl is having some fun with it! ;-)
Dabblers face in panel 6 is just pure win.
I mean, in context, he’s right: it is specifically flesh-colored, where the flesh color is a defined thing for that skin. The hair is LITERALLY using the same color as the flesh-tone.
So, in this specific case, he’s absolutely right, and not being at all thoughtless. It would be flesh-toned no matter what color it was because it would match the tone of the flesh – whatever that was.
I can recognize this Windows XP wallpaper from second panel everywhere.
God dammit there’s always someone who is faster than me. XD
I do a lot of color work. Woke or not, it’s hard to not say the word. This is embarrassing since PC issues aside, it just isn’t accurate. These days, I’ve been trying to get into the habit of saying “Nordic pink”. (I used to say Caucasian pink, but that term covers a surprisingly large pallet.)
Caucasian, was originally, a designation, for a range of mountains, the Caucus Mountain, from south-east Asia!
It still is: the Caucasus mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Generally considered to mark part of the border between Europe and Asia (or Europe and the Middle East, depending on how you choose to define that part).
If you do a lot of colour work it’s time to learn that a pallet is a flat timber tray to which goods are anchored for shipping, and a thing with a selection of colours is a palette.
Hey, Dave B. in the first panel Dabbler says “Arcanum++ is, which is what this choker is written…” Did you intend that slip up? Granted she does occasionally struggle with English, but usually for comedic effect. If you want to you could probably chalk it up to her thinking in code while trying to talk, or it may be possible to twist it into a programming joke that nobody catches for a page or two.
Apologies to all for any grammar, spelling, or word choice, mistakes of my own. I’m writing from my phone and English is stupid even if you speak it natively.
Dabbler is saying “Arcanum++ is (object oriented) and that’s the code base this item is enchanted with.”
I just assume that Arcanum++ is like C++, and for the layperson who can’t program, both are equally indecipherable. :)
C… C++, the syntax is creative. I maintain that mind altering substances and multiple languages were involved.
The story I was told in college is that the syntax for C was mostly the result of drunken bets, often of the variety of “I bet you can’t write a parser than can parse this!” It’s deliberately ambiguous and difficult, because it wasn’t intended to be seriously used.
Unfortunately, a lot of computer science jokes end up being taken seriously, because that’s what the people involved put the most effort into.
With both of them there are red dragons to be concerned about.
Max looks good in grey/silver tone.
Always had a thing for grey and light silver skin tones, especially for powerful characters. Made my own hulk knock-off called Golem-Gal like that once; sadly underused character *its one thing to design a character, its another to figure out what to do with them in a story*.
something about the grey/silver speaks of being strong, guess the steel association doesn’t hurt lol.
adding,
although the red lips stand out now, maybe if they were blue.
She’d look like she was suffering from hypothermia, or one of the viewers of the Hunger Games in the Central City.
few colors look good on a silver backdrop, blue, gold, purple, a different shade of grey *like a darker shade*, or a shade of black.
or oddly a lighter shade of red,
think dark elf
I am also taking into consideration the affect with her purple hair and eyebrows with the silvery skin. change the hair to hair, orange, ochre, and a few others the red lips work, but going purple, purple strips, silver, red surrounded by silver, has this odd affect making them stick out a little too much.
Colossus from X-Men manages to pull off silver skin pretty well. :)
To be fair to Leon, you could also interpret his comment as “Your hair is the same color as your flesh”. Like, if Kenya had brown hair the same color as her skin, she’d also have “Flesh colored hair”.
Exactly.
The fact that anyone would get butt-hurt, or fear that anyone else would get butt-hurt, about about a simple statement of this kind show just how far the “woke” crusade has gone, and how terrified it has made everyone over minor semantic issues that in a sane world no one would get bent out of shape over.
Sensitivity is good, but hypersensitivity is derangement, and “woke” jumped that shark quite some time ago.
Or maybe it was just a joke?
The problem would be that we’re not living in a sane world, and it’s not the “woke” who are to blame for that. They’re trying to fix legitimate problems within a framework that resists any problems being fixed. There’s a point at which you get frustrated at the lack of progress and start prioritizing approaches that accomplish something, even if they’re less than ideal or have undesirable side-effects.
Some people would like to actually benefit from progress, rather than just hoping someone generations from now will have a better life than they themselves are currently living.
I was looking at one of those maps the other day where someone has cut out outlines of all the countries out of wood from trees native to those countries, and a thought occurred to me.
Different varieties of people have the same colors as different varieties of wood. I’m close to ‘maple’ in skin tone, meaning I’m one of the world’s whitest white boys. My neighbor is more ‘cherry’ meaning in this case a golden-reddish-bronze color, and the guy across the street from us is ‘walnut’ or a dark brown. Interestingly enough, there are many places where both ebony-colored people and ebony wood are native.
I don’t quite know whether to actually share this insight with anyone in person; I’m afraid I’d mess it up and make it sound insulting, when honestly I just think it’s kind of neat.
That is interesting. Considering that all skin fulfills the same basic function, regardless of color, and so does all wood, I wonder if the variation in each is due to similar environment pressures such as amount of sunlight, or if it’s just random variation because there is no relevant environmental pressure.
I would say that the variation in wood, which extends beyond just color into properties like hardness, flexibility, porosity, weight, has more practical impact on us than the variation in human skin, yet we devote far more attention to the latter. Probably because we associate so much of individual human variation to obvious features such as skin tone, and nobody’s really interested in critically examining those assumptions to prove or disprove them. People are pretty heavily invested in their assumptions, and critical examination casts doubt, even if the conclusions agree with your assumptions.
I think he could have saved the “flesh colored hair” comment by saying “by which I mean your hair is the same color as your skin.” See, then it isn’t that her hair is the “flesh” color, it’s that her hair is the same color as HER flesh
He’s so excited by the programming challenge that he momentarily reverted to speaking in geek, which is to say, he defaults to the most socially awkward way of expressing himself.
And he nailed it!
*Imagines Hannibal Lector making rude umbrellas*
…
*immediately cringes to death*
your imagination needs a leash. does it consent? (sorry recently finished axiom’s end, you kinda had to be there)
Regarding panel 4, a number of years ago I was at a restaurant and the hostess had a similar look. Her skin tone was neither brown nor pink nor “white”, there was a distinct slate/ash quality to it. Very striking.
Lol, what’s the magical equivalent of PHP?
PCP
Wouldn’t he just mean that her hair colour matched the colour of her flesh?
Perhaps one day we’ll reach a point where “flesh-colored” can mean “a color that looks like flesh” rather than “a color that flesh looks like.”
Um, so is drab pink marketed as ”flesh-lite”?
Ekwensu is a trickster of the Igbo people who serves as the Alusi (god) of bargains and the tortoise. Nigeria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekwensu