Grrl Power #1403 – Matrioshka brains are the ultimate man caves, right?
There’s a lot of stuff I have yet to reveal about the Grrl-verse, and there’s this weird temptation to just sit on canon secrets forever, so occasionally I have to remind myself that, oh yeah, I’m telling this story, and un-revealing stuff is part of the storytelling process.
I would have to say I’m not a huge fan of Jack Kirby’s art. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the hell out of the guy and I more or less assume that he’s the single most prolific comic artist of all time, and his art style basically defined all modern superhero comics. It’s just that if I was looking to emulate someone’s style, he wouldn’t be my first choice. I do kind of like Kirby Dots though. Do an image search for that or Kirby Krackle. That’s why I threw a little in there on the first panel.
That said, when trying to draw large amounts of nebulously high tech stuff, I can easily see where his distinctive tech noodling arose from. When you’ve got to fill a bunch of space with “tech,” and you’re not some insane manga artist who has a staff of background guys who you can assign to draw gears and wires, certain designs kind of happen without too much effort. Not that this page in particular has a lot of high tech noodly design work on it, but I mention it because this page kind-of-should-have had lots of tech that’s so high-tech that it’s barely identifiable as tech. But the other way to go with insanely high tech stuff is to say it’s unobservable. Not invisible, but more that it resides in another dimension or in a microverse or is otherwise beyond normal perception.
Now, taking all that into account, when designing this guy, part of me was tempted to give him a high tech looking outfit. Some kind of armor or holofoil spandex or something, but then I thought, is there any tech that would be better than a nice sweater? I mean, yes, probably. Cora’s hard light holograms are already pretty high tech, but combine them with molecular fidelity and a system that keeps them and the wearer at the perfect humidity and tempurature and never has a lose thread or a scratchy tag and never gets that waxy deodorant buildup in the armpits even if you launder the shirt after every wearing. Eventually there’s going to be some wear and tear. But still, a nice cable knit sweater is hard to beat.
How he gets the turtle neck over his head plate thingy is where the real tech-as-magic comes in. It’s either some kind of distance de-relativeizer distortion field, or there’s some buttons on the back.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Percent chance that this being’s race are connected to Syndey’s orbs?
“Miss Sydney, you really don’t want to know what we use those orbs for.”
How often does Sydney shower with the balls out?
I wonder if first panel on the next page will be just Sydney casually looking around this “difficult to find place”. Probably not, given the context in text update, but it would be funny.
Damn those detectors. Three months, three months of that beep. Searched the top of every cabinet. In every cabinet.
Bloody thing was on the floor under a cabinet.
Crawled into a dark place to die?
I left for a 5-day conference a few months ago. The beeping started when I was still on the plane headed out. It took my wife 2 days to figure out that the beeping was coming from the carbon-monoxide detector she had unplugged while rearranging furniture over the weekend. By then I had received many dozens of texts and phone calls, a few of our neighbors had been recruited to help, and she had disassembled most of the smoke detectors in the house.
Three months would probably have resulted in a divorce or a demolished house.
Can’t help but ask… how is un-revealing stuff different from sitting on canon secrets forever? Unless you propose to make a tour all over the world with the MiB memory eraser. Maybe you meant to “unveil” stuff from time to time.
In other news – yay, space wizards! Except when they notice their toys are being used and want them back…
Maybe after this he’s going to pull this page, copyright strike the internet archive and any other party holding this.
Common way of un-revealing artistics works on the internet.
Yet I agree he probably means reveal or unveil.
As fancy Nth tech as this guy probably is, you’d think they’d give him a comfy chair to sit upon.
Who’s to say that he’s not sitting on a tall stool under that tunic?
he was the stool originally, but he evolved and took over control.
That hat/head DOES have a furnitural vibe…
Maybe he’s floating under that tunic
Holy crap it’s a Matrioshka Brain?
For casual readers who don’t have a grounding in heavily theoretical sci-fi: a Matrioshka Brain is a very large number of shells built around a star (heard of a Dyson Sphere? This is a Dyson Sphere inside a Dyson Sphere inside a Dyson Sphere inside… etc. etc., you get the point). Each shell is at a slightly different temperature as you go further and further outwards, and it uses the temperature difference between each pair of adjacent shells to generate useful energy. In theory, a Matrioshka Brain can translate as near to 100% of a star’s output as possible into electricity (or sci-fi equivalent), which is then used to power computing systems woven through the Brain.
Given their immense size and power availability, Matrioshka Brains have been theorised to be powerful enough to DELIBERATELY WARP REALITY ON A MASSIVE SCALE. They’re functionally computerised GODS. And not piddly little “sit on a mountain shagging beautiful women” gods like Zeus, I’m talking big-G omnipotent GODS like the Abrahamic God. If the Nth have a Matrioshka Brain at their disposal, no wonder people speak of them the way they do…
Dang, now I feel let down when I build a half-dozen matrioshka brains in Stellaris and all I get is a ludicrously excessive amount of science resource production.
1 Dyson sphere would need several planets’ worth of material to construct. Nesting several inside each other would probably require more raw materials than you can get from one solar system. You are going to have to raid neighbouring star systems to get enough to build the third layer.
You don’t need to read Schlock Mercenary (past book 17, iirc?) to fully appreciate Matrioshka brains, but I did the former and learned the latter.
I wouldn’t say that M-Brains are actual reality-warping gods, but they are computers on humanly unimaginable scales. Physics is their plaything. To make it short: Anyone with an M-brain that works like the joke concept that Dyson/Bradbury proposed, would break the comic’s story with a blink of an eye.
However, I do believe that guy is not much larger than a human, at most ten times larger. Which in turn means, that his Otherwhence machinery is not quite an M-Brain like Dyson/Bradbury proposed, or it would have a million times the diameter it appears to have in the comic. Thus it must be a micro-version at best. The guy we see here is an entity at least as powerful as the alien that Sydney destroyed on Sciona’s homeworld, but not an entity a billion times as powerful.
Hey, you remember when Sydney said that the Fly Ball seemed like it was low on fuel? This guy is probably the gas station attendant.
I had no idea that smoke detectors can actually go BAD after a significant period of time. MY house was built 20 years ago.. I moved in as son as it was finished. One of my smoke detectors started beeping this weekend. One single beep like every 5 minutes. Changed the battery… still beeps every 5 minutes. had to unplug it and let the internal charge deplete before it would shut up. Now I just need to buy a replacement.
Yeah, they work using a small alpha particle source (don’t worry about it, even if it was unshielded – it isn’t – it wouldn’t be powerful enough to hurt you unless you scavanged a whole bunch of them and then ate them) which decays over time; nominally it has a half-life of 432 years, but there’s only a very, very small amount in a fire alarm so even a small amount of decay still impacts it.
The detector circuit can’t tell the difference between the alpha particle stream being disrupted because there’s smoke particles blocking it and it being disrupted because the source has decayed, so if you leave it long enough it’ll start going off randomly (because the radioactive stuff has decayed too far) and won’t shut up.
Make sure to look at the box, if it’s a kitchen detector you might want to get a photoelectric rather than radiation detector, they’re far better when it comes to reducing false alarms when cooking.
Technology Connections did a video about them a while back: https://youtu.be/DuAeaIcAXtg (apologies if this makes you go down a rabbit hole)
Yeah, short version of TMac is “Your Americium has decayed” dispose of it responsibly and get a new one.
Had to replace mine a few months back, having only moved in a few months earlier. Turns out the model the previous owners had installed was discontinued, and the compatible replacement doesn’t use Americium, but an optical-based system. No fear of it being set off by a random decay, but I did have a fear of it being set off by the ceiling light, that the the site was quite close to. No false alarms (or real ones) so far, luckily.
Maybe its knitted in place?
Or it fastens up the back.
Or he have a detachable head. It’s the fashionable thing this season.
Clearly only a problem to 3-dimensional plebes.
Maybe he puts it on like pants
I’m imagining a high-tech zipper where you hold the bottom parts together and it just sorta goes ZZZZP!
When a turtleneck has those shoulder patches, it is a Tactleneck, as pioneered by superspy Sterling Archer.
Elasticated collar.
Not 100% on mysterious alien expressions, but I’m pretty sure t hat is a look that says “Dammit, I’m the one who has to deal with this, aren’t I?”
“Oh, the boss is going to be pissed about this. Might as well call my wife and say I’ll be late for supper.”
Not Ningauble of the Seven Eyes (from the Lankhmar stories) unless there’s another eye under his hat or something (come to think of it, Sydney has seven orbs – maybe that’s where they come from!) but I’m expecting severe reality warping to ensue whoever it is.
I think knitted sweaters are one of the most stretchy things to wear. I think enough to get over a really big head. Maybe the sweater is so high tech that it’s knitted in 4 dimensions and is even more stretchy.
A big, super-high-tech surveillance room full of eyes. Am I the only one reminded of Makiel’s surveillance room in that book series, “Cradle”?
Or the old school depictions of what angels really looked like.
You know the really scary pictures.
My first thought of panel three was that we were about to see some sort of concert.
Well it does look like some kind of very fancy Sci-Fi drum set when seen like that.
Probably practicing his Phil Collins pieces.
Have you seen Interstella 5555? If not, give it a shot. It actually starts with a concert on some alien planet and more precisely a zoom-in on the planet until you get to the concert stage.
I was thinking the similar … thats a kin big sound system!
Probably going to crack into a drum solo
Everything can be found with xyz coordinates if you use enough exponents and symbols.
Trust me, my calculus professor said so.
But not with [b]standard[/b] xyz coordinates it’s what these symbols and exponents are for.
Also he teaches math not physics meaning that although one might be able to make a true statement one might not be able to make a meaningfully true statement with it.
Take for example Hannibal’s army.
Carthage, Turkey and Rome are all a mathematically correct answer, but one would have to add a timestamp to give it meaning.
I’ve always thought that if I were a race with super tech that I would move my civilization inside a star or 3 and use a giant mobius type of arrey to house my population in whatever habitat they felt like. I finate energy, can gather matter into whatever type you desire. and being inside a star it mostly keeps out those lower tech races rom bothering you.
If you really don’t want to be spotted start chilling inside or around a rotating black hole.
Nothing without a continuously running engine can escape and you can still access the outside.
Energy is also no problem you can just fire lasers into the core and get an intensified version back.
I figured just make it invisable to most sensors, make it out of hexagonal diamond or something simerly as tough, shape it to controle the flow of the star so it would be stable longer and maby last a few billion years longer before it evuntally died.
with great techical knowledge comes imortality if you want it.
Use aviatars to know whats going on on the planets for fun. maby help or hinder them as you please. Be a god, or just live a life as a mortal, your choice.
This guy needs a mug that says “You don’t have to be crazy to find this place but it helps”
maybe he wants the irony of the sweater just being made from cotton.
Steve Jobs was just a avatar he used to sightsee as. Created the all that tech because we were untidy in his opinion.
So… is Sydney’s blue orb the remote eye for them and this guy just woke up to the fact it’s displaying something other than the interior of a poster tube, or is this somehow what the compressed blue ball actually looks like?
Because if it’s the first thing, this implies there are other sets of these balls out there in the universe.
I expect it gave a ping, because it’s detecting signs of “reasonable advanced” technology.
Specifically wormholes.
Galactic level DJ or the lord of the SHROOMS.
I know this isn’t what you were going for but now I’m picturing the orbs being spaceships for tiny people, Sydney’s are actually seven scouting ships. They find a host, form a symbiotic relationship, and observe how the power they offer is used. Now we’re zooming way, way in to see the guy piloting the fly orb.
“Meanwhile, at the Death Star of Solitude…”
The tabletop at the top of its head is actually a helmet and nosepiece that slot in so the glowing edge blends in visually with the top eyes. Take helmet off – put sweater on – put helmet on. Presto!
Look it is the Trans Warp equivalent of EC’s Elevator Operator.
Why is the copyright notice for this page from 2024?
Considering the topic of the previous page, the orbs are… wormholes? The gravity boundaries of the various universes? And they’re also the pupil of the Eyes That Watch?! And flat-top helmet guy is concerned about being watched, maybe?
SO many questions…
Oh I was wondering what the deal was with the Ominous Close-up in the previous page…
So, I landed on the cast page by accident and noticed Anvil got retconned from Sergeant to 1st Lieutenant. Wanted to find an example of her being referred to as Sgt., but got bored after tapping through 50 pages.
Well, if u think about it, last time the orbs were in The Fracture, and (most likely) exited through one of those wormholes, they ended up in that place that the Log showed full of glitches. And then they appeared on earth with no way to know for how long and in a VERY suspicious place.
The theories are building up.
Unfortunately not quite true. The REAL last time the orbs were in the Fracture and then exited through one of those wormholes, Cora was bringing Syndey back home from her solo misadventure on post-apocalyptic Alar.
That might not necessarily prevent this from being related, though…
Technology is like infrastrucutre: if you actively notice it somebody has failed and/or you’re a nerd.
It’s why there is such a race for the thinnest tech.
As such the introduction of unobservable tech in high tech settings is completely understandable.
Now as for the technobabble to explain this.
My technobabble explanation for this specific comic.
The explanation it’s just really far doesn’t easily hold here, because it’s according to the author hard to localize with standard xyz coordinates.
So a few options.
1. This thing is inside a black hole.
All gravity screws with the topography of space and thus its xyzu coordinates, but black holes do it to such an extreme extend that you need special coordinate projections to understand it.
If you’re afraid they won’t be able to escape:
a. they have ftl, so the blackness of a black hole doesn’t apply to them.
b. They could be stationed in a rotating black hole still allowing escape without easy observability and even more coordinate screwery including the need to start watching for all kinds of horrible time dilation.
2. It’s still really far away, it’s just so far away that entering the coordinates in a standard analysis tool causes a buffer overflow.
3. Its momentum isn’t meaningfully tied to that of earth/Sydney and thus you also need time to make a useful statement about its position, but that would apply to everything that isn’t geosynchronised to it making it possible that this is just a satellite or an aircraft carrier with a cool description.
4. As an extension on 3. Its momentum is so erratic unpredictable(logical defensive measure in interplanetary warfare and side effects of screwing too much with high energy projects) that even xyzu(includes time) coordinates are worthless, since we want to observe things happening over time requiring in practice 5 dimensional coordinates to make a useful statement about its position.(This was my explanation for the 5 dimensional coordinates requirement in schlock mercenary for long gun shots)
My general explanation without too much author commentary:
I tend to justify this kind of unobservable places by placing them really really far away. Essentially all fictional highly advanced civilizations have ftl, so apparently the maximum speed of information doesn’t do them anything and as such they can just place anything you’re not supposed to see and only visit via portals or other fancy tech on locations so far that observing them would introduce a delay than longer than your star will survive.
This often still works for advanced+ or advanced++ civilizations like the nth where you’re even more unimaginable advanced than the already hyper advanced alien civilizations mentioned before in the story, because while they tend to have ftl travel still tends to take some amount of time(often thanks to star trek multiple days stretching my leeway) and infrastructure.
Since lots of astrophysical theories tend to be build on “space is even bigger than that” you even can point to existing astrophysical theory.
For example
If intergalactic travel is expensive for a civilization like the aliens these nth people could have figured out how to travel between “gravity wells” as in points without common gravitational vectors(a.k.a there is no shared “Great attractor”) or “universes” as in places with unrelated hubble constants(a.k.a there is no shared notion speed/acceleration of the expansion of the universe).
These are both things current scientific consensus places under the category of “pretty likely” and not directly observable with the current laws of physics no matter the mental gymnastics.
Is that alien wearing a turtleneck?
I think it’s Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer.
Gotta agree about Kirby. I can recognize his talent and prolific output, but never have liked his style. All of his characters look brutish to me. Kept me from reading Marvel stuff for years.
My two thoughts on this are:
1) This is a Nth level civilization that made Halo’s orbs, and it just noticed something odd, hence the side eye.
2) This is a high tech civilization that lives inside of “warp space” and is advanced enough to actually scan and see Halo’s orbs. If they’re connected to the planet destroyers Halo had to teal with before, this little ship is about to get large company. Or they’ll crash the games, either or.
Y’all just had to know what was inside Sydney’s orbs. This is the blue one.
Inside the blue orb:
Adam: “Morning Bob, It’s surveillance duty for you today.”
Bob: “Morning boss. Nice, I could use a slow day today.”
Adam: “Don’t thank me, Sydney is watching hentai again.”
Bob: “Not the furries again!”
Adam: “Afraid so. Have a extra ration of brainbleach after your shift.”
Bob: “Thanks boss.”
I dunno folks. I think the crystal wall in front of Shroom Head the Magnificent here looks an awful lot like the inside of the geode whence Max got her powers:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-414-the-o-g-s-origin-of-the-gold-stuff/
I’ll address this since it’s a pretty intuitive guess. I had the choice to fill the mid-ground of that panel with the aforementioned Kirby-esque “tech-stuff” or a bunch of crystals that might look either cool or high tech. And I didn’t want to draw tech stuff.
At the risk of crossing the beams, I think that character in the last panels is Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer from Girl Genius…
.
girlgenius fandom com/ wiki/Othar_Tryggvassen,_Gentleman_Adventurer?file=Otharportrait.jpg
(strip the ? clause to get the scoop on Othar)
I NAME HIM HAMMERHEAD. (or her. Or it. Or 01. Or 10. Or nail, as this character obviously is not hammer gendered). Alien pronouns are HARD)
These pages will have to be printed on paper in an odd order with arrows.
Perhaps even having to go flip a page, get spoiled accidentally seeing the wrong panel, then go back or something.
When hammerhead realizes this, the headache will make him feel hammered — and he might need a new pronoun.
Dave, as a big fan of the hidden gem/one-season-wonder that was Might Orbots, I’ve really enjoyed the cameos you’ve gingerly placed in the background of this comic over the years. But the Umbra and Shadowstar reference here is undeniable and I’m absolutely here for it! Nicely done!
Hah, I didn’t think about that while I was drawing it, but it’s fair to call a partially enclosed sun a shadowstar.
Fun fact, I named my first cat Umbra.