Grrl Power #1348 – Do as I telepathy, not as I do
I might be overdoing it a little with how good looking this guy is supposed to be (and granted, that profile view isn’t really doing him any favors, but roll with me on this.) But as the Mythbusters say, if something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
That said, making a succubus arch her back at you does not carry the highest difficulty factor in the known universe. They were explicitly made to be sex slaves, once upon an age ago. Those instincts are still in there, especially for the younger ones. (Not inappropriately young ones. I mean the sexually mature, newly collared ones.) Dabbler is 187, which is well past the journeyman succubus stuff, but she’s still a little on the young side.
Fun fact, “average” or “mean” is the sum of all numbers in a set divided by the number of numbers, “median” is the middle value in a data set that’s been sorted small to large, “mode” is the most commonly occurring value in a data set. They all have their uses and flaws. A “trimmed mean” is often the most representational function, because it excises the top and bottom 10% of the data set before you calculate the average. This is useful because let’s say you want to figure out the average salary at Twitter. Well, let’s say most software engineers there earn 90K, most general office staff earns 60K, most building staff like janitors earn 30K. But there’s this one asshole who earns $4 billion dollars a week, and if you have 100 staff total, that one cyberdouche is going to wildly throw off your average calculation, thus “trimmed mean” becomes useful.
I bring all this up because while succubi can be very long lived, their age distribution is a little odd. Vampires have a pretty predictable population falloff with age. Tons of young ones that don’t make it ten years (or even a year) because after getting turned, the think they’re immortal and the toughest thing on the streets, then after all the impetuous punks get dusted, the decline becomes a little smoother. Figure about a 50% drop-off in population in the first decade, then the ones that make it past that first filter tend to be better survivors, so maybe 60-70% make it to their first century, and their survival rate tends to drop by about 10% per century after that. i.e. about 50% of the remaining population makes it to 200, 40% make it to 300, 33% make it to 400, 25% make it to 500, etc.
95% of succubi make it to 100. They spend a fair amount of that time being “sheltered” for lack of a better term, by their “master,” who, in this day and age of a vigilant and vengeful council of Succubus Matriarchs, ensure that fledgling succubi are all but coddled. After their first century, a lot of them will have set out on their own, often outliving their masters. There’s a lot of different paths for succubi, so survival rates vary, but major drop-offs in population don’t really start occurring till about 300. They’re not innately ageless, but if their tantric magics are well-developed and they have a steady diet, they can become functionally ageless. But the older they get, the more likely they are to get embroiled in ancient magics, high-level politics and other hobbies that can become dangerous. The “trimmed mean” of succubus ages is somewhere in the early 400’s. The “mean” age is right about Dabbler’s age. The “mode” is like… well, that’s probably not a useful number because any population will always skew extremely young unless there are weird gaps in birthrates. Which does happen to succubi since they tend not to have children till they’re out and about and independently established. But the number would still be something like… 12?
I’m going to try something with this new vote incentive.
This month, I’m closing on a new house, selling my Mom’s house, finishing packing Mom’s house, moving city to city to the new house, forwarding mail, canceling utilities, all that. And after that’s done, I get to start the process of selling my old house, which needs a little work before it can realistically go on the market.
SO. I’m going to try and do this vote incentive in stages. Currently it’s just pencils. The TopWebcomics one will update with colors and detail until we get to the no clothes versions, then that will continue over at Patreon. Also there will be a comic or two in between each version to fill out the story.
I know it’s hard to tell from just the pencils, but this is Heatwave and Jiggawatt. The comics will explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. Although I feel like even saying that much makes it easy to guess, but hopefully the journey will still amuse.
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.
Is Dubbler blinking with 2 sets of eyelids or is it a motion thing?
Dabbler’s already lost one eye to misadventure, so installing a selectively opaque armored nictitating membrane seems sensible for a Tinker like her.
That’s either the >blinkblink< of shock, or she's reflexively fluttering her eyes at him
I think you’ve missed what happened. The blink is not important. What is important is that her pupils went from daylight narrow to fully dilated, a sign that she is extremely interested in what she is looking at. The question should be whether that is an automatic response or a deliberate ploy? (I’m assuming succubi have control over things that indicate interest or arousal.)
Is he maybe an incubus?
No such thing as an incubus in the Grrlverse (that is canon)
Oh my, is Flash’s attractiveness so great that even Succubus’s are not immune? This does not bode well for our species.
Succubi don’t seem to be “immune” to anything they fancy. Some just have more self-control and subtlety than Xuriel.
Not a high pole at all, considering her self-control is 0.1
That’s like the least impressive feat he has preformed so far.
He’s a super and super attractive.
To her he at least qualifies as a full squad of marines in pure nutritional value.
So this guy referred to both of them by name and rank, is he an ex member of ARC-swat, or some other military organization that worked with Max in the past?
In-game he’s well read. I have no idea what DaveB is doing with him
I’ve seen a few references now to Flash Drive in a game. What game is this? My Google-fu is normally pretty good, but it’s failing me in this.
Crap! In my searching I found a fan-edited grrlpower wiki page that’s badly out-of-date. There goes my weekend :(
(grrlpowercomic dot fandom dot com)
By my understanding, the game in question was a tabletop RPG (also known as pen-and-paper RPG) that Opus the Poet played in (and therefore was unlikely to be widely known outside his group of friends before he showed up here). Think D&D, if that’s what you’re most familiar with, but it would almost certainly be a different system; I’m guessing it was a point-based RPG like GURPS, HERO System or Mutants & Masterminds. In particular, Opus specified his cycling power to be “Flight In Contact With The Ground”, which is similarly worded to the “Only In Contact With A Surface” flight limitation in HERO System; I can’t seem to find a specific equivalent in those other two, but all three have generic customisable limitations (“Flaws” in M&M terminology) that could be applied for this effect.
“Flight In Contact With The Ground”
That is indeed a Hero System / Champions specific power ‘flaw’ on Flight that you don’t see in other super hero games, which instead specifically have you buy super speed / super running and [clinging (only at super speed)] to simulate that construct.
Aha, that makes sense. I’ve never personally played it, but I’m familiar with that type of TTRPG system. Thank you for responding.
They’re celebrities. Adrianna made sure of that.
Pretty safe to assume any super knows at least some variation of their names, depending on their primary news source. If our guy is mostly watching/reading traditional news media, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re most often referred to as “Colonel Leander” and “Ms. Xuriel”.
Plus he’s working right now. If you value your company’s image, you usually don’t go around calling influential people in the military or other positions of power you’ve never met before by their nicknames.
*Ms. Tantalis
Hands were faster than my brain…
Given his skill set it seems possible that he has made deliveries to and from ARC in the past. If you are on someone’s regular delivery route it isn’t that unusual to have a “Hi, how’s it going” level of recognition.
Delivery services seems like it would be another viable niche for supers who aren’t into the hero gig. If he was a super discretely employed by the Twilight Council it would be even more likely that he would have made deliveries to ARC.
So, wait–does panel two mean Max *can* hear telepathy, is it a special case with Dabbler’s eartacle contact (and it was like hearing her voice through a tinny radio connection), or was Max not picking up anything from her at all, which is why the static?
I’d treat telepathy as individualized. Dabbs can use it through her eartacles. That requirement for physical contact may, in turn, make her either:
A: Better able to contact Max in comparison to other telepaths who just use contactless sendings, albeit with some static, or
B: Less able to contact Max, because she’s not quite in literal contact her, and thus producing static.
C: Just as affected by Max’s shield as any other telepath.
Essentially, we’d need to have another psychic try to get into Max’s head in order to pin it down.
He had to get security clearance to deliver to the site, was informed about Max, asked around about Dabbler, especially after the whole “Galtyn Demon Army” situation.
10$ that he is Incubus
Are Incubi a thing?
Certainly IRL although we’ve never seen one in-universe
We haven’t seen any here yet that I recall, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Surely some of those fleshcrafting sociopathic wizards must have been interested in male sextoys/slaves.
Yeah, I know it’s been stated there are no incubi, but the notion that the sociopathic wizards included no bi-/homosexuals, AND they never saw any purpose in making a sexbomb spy who is capable of James Bonding his way into a female-led organization was always kinda sus to me. Or just kinda not-thought-through on DaveB’s part. (Hell, in the earlier stages, you’d expect male bodied constructs to be created by creepy wizards who just wanted to watch….)
I think the implication is that the particular group of arch-mages that developed the original proto-succubi were from an extremely patriarchal society, and presumably hostile to anything other than strict heterosexuality. It does seem more likely to me that such a society would create sex slaves than one that treated different sexes and sexualities equally. Power does often allow people to contravene the rules of society, and there’s certainly an interesting interaction depicted between two of the early arch-mages in the field. Any motivation to make male sex constructs may have simply been too isolated to gain the critical mass necessary to start and maintain an independent species. From Dabbler’s telling, it was the succubi matriarchs, and not the arch-mages, that actually gave them reproductive capability, and they apparently chose to ensure that all their progeny be both female and succubi, regardless of what they reproduced with. They made a strictly matriarchal culture in response to the strict patriarchal one they escaped.
In the broader universe, however, it’s perhaps surprising if such experiments were isolated to that single group of arch-mages, and some other group might make different artificial life that would parallel incubi, but they presumably wouldn’t be considered the same race.
Dabbler stated to Sydney about 10 years back now that there are no Incubi, especially given that Succubi are already artificial creations.
So there’s no reason to think Deus might’ve figured out how an incubus would work and come up with something capable of casually seducing Dabbler purely as a countermeasure? /s
Or the occasional trans succubi.
Or a succubus who knows a gender bending spell.
That’s probably why there are no Incubi. Succubi can do the job if needed using spells.
“If you don’t want any of your bodyparts slapped, smacked, punched, pinched, twisted or ground under my boot, don’t put it on me without my express permission.”
— most of my characters.
But not “severed” or “destroyed”? I hope people appreciate your restraint.
Why am I not surprised that Dabbler can do the T&A pose?
There’s probably classes on it at Succubus U.
…and Xuriel was not the top in the class for the subject, since it didn’t involve explosions or new technology (this includes magic).
Doesn’t mean she didn’t pass the course.
A true artist would find a way to include explosions in a T&A pose. Superheroines like Psylocke and Storm are great at using their powers to enhance their posing.
the course is mre about the extra credits anyways
I mean, what course?
The class is for NOT being in the T&A pose
There’s probably a class on it in Succubus Elementary School
Given how information is likely one of the few items that are very much not post-scarcity in space society and how succubi were designed as spies and assassins, I suspect Dabbler knows a lot better than she lets on how intrusive reading people’s thoughts is.
It might be that she just thinks she can take advantage of the fact that the primitive earthlings don’t realize that she knows perfectly well how intrusive it is and how hostile an act of attempted espionage it is to randomly try to read the mind of someone with a security clearance.
That, or she just doesn’t care how intrusive people find it, because she herself doesn’t see it that way. Chaotic Neutral in action.
And her intent being “hold a private conversation, I’m not going diving in your childhood here” meaning she doesn’t see why anyone else would have a problem with it either.
Dabbler’s not great with boundaries.
She doesn’t know that Max isn’t thinking of something confidential at that time.
And she is not great with boundaries – but given the value most of her society would likely place on information it seems unlikely that the general interplanetary society would not be just as much if not more strict about information security than earth is because it’s one of the few things that is still truly valuable.
Even if it’s part of her personality, given the origins of the Succubi it doesn’t seem unlikely that this is an intentional part of their design as spies. Spies who are mindful of boundaries might be less likely to find things out. This does not mean she isn’t aware that most of her society (not just earth society) would find the teletentacles an outright security risk and place heavy restrictions on their use or even physical blocks anytime she was to be permitted in the presence of any of their military personnel.
They might even just put a blanket ban on all succubi and similarly capable creatures/beings anywhere near anyone with a security clearance and Dabbler is taking advantage of the earthlings not knowing that such restrictions exists among other societies for very good reasons historically. Think of her as the 35-something year old hanging out among 16-20 year olds because people of their own age find them too immature or too creepy or are too familiar with their tricks to let them close.
She might not be able to date in her own metaphorical maturity range because she’s considered an information predator there and handled accordingly.
Point of order. That’s not a trimmed mean as such but a winsorised one. Though winsorisation is of the set of trimmed means.
I’m fairly sure the way Dabbler just stood in front of Flash gave Maxima a VERY good look at the script on her backside.
Agreed. Max might be interrupting Dabbler’s shannies on the next page, and I look forward to it.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that saw that! Also, weren’t we JUST talking about mind control? It was literally just a subject that Maxima was squinting at and here suddenly Dabbler’s going from disgusted at the lack of artfulness to full bore simp. Either she’s playing it up for funny, this is some secret weakness cause of the ‘young succubi’ thing, or this guy has (hopefully) unintentional pheremone/seduction powers.
If so, I hope it requires at least a predilection for it because seeing Maxima get hit with this too would be… very disturbing. Though on the plus side it would be obvious enough for Sidney to notice and maybe take action?
Or he’s simply such a snack that even an older succubus might be tempted to go full-on fuckdoll for him.
Just reminding people that FD’s comliness was god tier at 1st level and by the time the game ended he was 8 points past that or like 20% worse (for him) because with the disadvantage I had to add 2 points every time he leveled up. His teammates were making passes at him if he didn’t put his veil on when he took his helmet off. By the time the game ended there were riots from when his helmet was torn off in battle and he was bare-faced in public. I took advantage of that once when we were trying to break up a lesbian crime cartel. I just rode into their hideout and took off my visor but kept my helmet on. They started fighting over FD and the rest of the team just mopped up after.
{Text Segment} “I was told there’d be no math.”
Throwing out the lowest and highest data points? Is that P Hacking?
P-hacking is doing things like measuring 20 things in a study. Then you publish only the single measurement that passed the p=0.05 bar.
The standard P test is saying “this has only a 5% probability that it’s a result of chance”. If you measure 20 things and each of them has a 5% chance of passing, there’s actually about a 65% probability that at least one of those measurements will pass just by random chance.
This. P-Hacking is what happens when you start your ‘experiment’ without an actual hypothesis. Instead, you do a ton of different measurements (say, monitoring diet of a study group, and then also tracking medical conditions). So you check for stroke, diabetes, heart disease, UTIs, cancer and dementia. Then you look at everyone’s diet and find a correlation between yellow food dye and one of those conditions. Then you study a paper saying, “Yellow Food Dye Found to Inhibit Dementia”. Then you go on to the next study, letting this BS stand as the last word.
I liken p-hacking to breaking in a pool game, sinking the 7 ball, then calling it afterwards.
One of the methods to resist this is pre-registering the study, which is basically publicly stating “These are the measurements we’re going to be doing” before starting the study.
It can slow things down because if there’s a surprising result halfway you don’t get a chance to redesign the study. But considering the percentage of non-replicable studies out there, pre-registration seems like an overall positive.
The better approach is to bite the bullet and use the initial broad-spectrum study as nothing more than Stage 1. Stage 2 would be a focused study to attempt to replicate the suggested possibility from Stage 1, with other variables accounted for.
But that would be real science, and most food science, especially, is sponsored by interested parties.
I wonder how long it will take Dabbler to realize she just exposed the “rear” of her shirt to Max
The realization will likely happen the moment Max, with terrifying calm, orders Dabbler to go back to the nearest secluded area and change her clothes… or else.
Except she doesn’t need to, she simply changes glamours rather than clothes. I doubt she is even wearing anything at the moment.
He looks a bit like Tom Dumoulin. Fairly succesful, now retired, cyclist. I actually thought Dave had based FD on him because of that. Maybe he did and I just missed it in the sea of comments though.
“Mode” isn’t really useful for continuous distributions like age. Mode is used for distributions of things that have discrete values that change in steps, like “how many fingers do people have?”, where the average might be something like 9.5 due to careless shop teachers who are missing several fingers, but no particular person has 9.5, so stating 9.5 is kind of misleading. So you go with the mode, instead: 10.
I know someone with 9.5 fingers. He lost half of one in (surprise!) a shop accident with a table saw. He wasn’t a teacher, though.
But I do agree with everything else you said.
Add careless construction workers and people doing home improvement projects to that list. FireDepartmentChronicles already featured at least one incident that I remember.
Mode can be fractional even if all your datapoints are integers. (if you have an even number of datapoints)
Sydney would probably not bat an eye at telepathic communication or have an overreaction … it’s 50-50 Dabbler should test it on her sometime
sorry for our french, portmanteau plural goes portmanteaux
No in french this definition of portemanteau is mot-valise …
A porte-manteau plural porte-manteaux is a coat rack .
I’m a french native speaker … born in Champigny sur Marne , mainland France.
Pretty sure every reader suspects that it’s not the bike that Xuriel wants to ride
Fun fact: Average comes from an older term (averi) that essentially means ‘damage to the ship’. In early shipping ventures the averi would count not only actual damage to the ship, but also any damage to shipped items that reduced the profitability of the trip. Once the ship returned, the averi would be deducted from all stakeholder’s returns based on how much of it they’d funded/provided in tradables. This lead to the math that we generally called Averages, and later to the various types we know today where people were trying to get more and more accurate for different types of situations.
Ok, if I hadn’t read this page’s description I would’ve thought “Wow, he even got Dabbler? He must have some kind of superpower related to seduction if he can outseduce a succubus of all people.” but if you intended for her to be an easy target then that’s a different story. I mean, Dabbler usually comes across as a very dominant kind of succubus (see e.g. her very first entrance into a meeting that introduced Sydney’s orbs where she put on glamour, or when she cowgirled that one guy they fought while he was under Vehemence’s influence, or the way she talks to Tom in general, or how she handled that alien woman who took Sydney’s mind hostage recently), so turning her into a horny schoolgirl should be the second hardest thing to do besides getting Maxima to act that way.
So, without reading the commentary I would’ve speculated that maybe her bare nerve getting slapped lowered her resistance to mental influence for a fraction of a second, so his sexiness aura flowed inside her like water.
But if Dabbler and others are simply meant to also have a cute submissive adoring side to them I welcome it.
The origin of succubi would push them towards basically being able to determine what you want, and then catering to it or resisting depending on what her goal is.
I’m reminded of the TV series Lucifer.
He asked people what their desire was mostly so the audience could hear it. I suspect he wouldn’t be surprised by it all that often (or even ever). But *acting* surprised may have been expected of him, and may even have been part of what they desired…
What do you want? – Mr Morden, Babylon 5
Mr Morden’s associates even managed to give Vir what he wanted.
I must say that I didn’t expect to get a discussion of the types of means in your comments. (As someone who studied statistics, I approve, of course, but it was unexpected.)
It does seem that Mr. Legs is someone who would throw the average off quite a bit. It will be interesting to see how and how much he figures into plot lines at this point. I’d put my bet on minor dalliance, but you can never tell.
Ellie looks rather put out at Dabbler’s ahem presentation….
Er… I’ve clicked back a few pages and I’m not seeing where Lorlara left and Elsbeth arrived. Is there an unlinked page that I’m missing? Did they fast-forward several minutes?
Lorlara got pushed through the portal (“Get going you Category 5 Windbag!”), but I’m going to assume you meant Sciona. You didn’t miss anything. My guess is that when Max started hovering to leave (“Speaking of reports…”) and Dabbler caught up to her, Sciona made herself scarce (their conversation was over, and sticking around would be risky). Elsbeth showed up when Dabbler’s porno sense started tingling from the approach of Flash Drive, commenting on her delivery being about to arrive; I’m assuming she got a notification on her phone and left where she was working, then decided to join Max and Dabbler instead of waiting by herself.
Yes, my mistake, I meant Sciona.
Lorlara left with Deus. Ellie’s been here all along, just in other locations; she’s the one this scene opened with, working on the enchantment with Sciona looking on and asking questions (that she already knows the answer to) so she can hide what/who she is from them.
Sorry, I got Lorlara and Sciona confused, I intended to ask about Sciona. You are absolutely correct about Lorlara passing thru the portal though, thanks.
I think you might be looking for the word “lordosis.” It’s the word for the “arch the back” thing you’re talking about. Here’s the wiki on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis_behavior
To be fair, Dabbler’s not just looking for a shallow hookup. She’s looking for a gourmet meal…
Another fun fact: some dictionaries define average to mean either mean, median, or even mode.
In my experience, only desperate researchers and dishonest marketers make use of ‘median is an average’, and only dishonest marketers use ‘mode is an average´.
I do recognize that when working with a large dataset that’s not in a computer, computing the actual mean can be difficult. But I also recognize that this is 2025 and basically everything in first and second world nations is computerized these days. Back in the day, it may have been a necessary dodge, but it hasn’t been the case in most of the US for most of my adult life.
No, they are all averages, no matter how honest the speaker may or may not be… The trouble is, if it’s unspecified, “mean” is assumed to the point of them being virtually synonymous, allowing people to mislead without technically lying.
There are valid non-dishonest uses for median and mode; they’re just not as widely useful outside the most trivial cases (e.g. “the average person has two arms” is referring to the mode, but is also so unremarkable a statement that people don’t think about it). But yes, generally, anyone who makes a claim about the average of something but is referring to the mode or median — and doesn’t make it clear they aren’t referring to the mean — is almost certainly trying to fool someone.
And Max finally sees the back of her shirt which she plans to use to further the mating attempt with the cyclist.
So, wait–does panel two mean Max *can* hear telepathy, is it a special case with Dabbler’s eartacle contact (and it was like hearing her voice through a tinny radio connection), or was Max not picking up anything from her at all, which is why the static?
Pretty sure that panel is Dabbler got Max’s thoughts on Elsbeth’s gobsmacked flirting using her eartacle, but Max’s skin made the thoughts all static-y when Dabbler heard them. And then Max reacted to feeling Dabbler’s eartacle on her skin.
Dabbler is reading Max’ thoughts by contact telepathy. The syntax is obviously Max, Dabbler doesn’t speak like that. The “static” is due to Max having some sort of inbuilt resistance to Dabbler’s power (“inbuilt tinfoil hat”… actually that’s not a good metaphor given that Dabbler really does gave that ability)
The title of this page is “Do as I telepathy, not as I do,” a play on “Do as I say, not as I do.” The static-speech basically complains about Elsbeth going all mushy, and then almost immediately thereafter we see Dabbler pretty much do the same thing. So that’s pretty clearly a thing Dabbler is “saying” (“telepathing”) to Max over the private channel afforded by the eartacle. The statement also matches up with Dabbler’s kinda-grumpy face, not to mention I wouldn’t expect Max to be complaining about Elsbeth’s seduction attempt being artless, but I could absolutely see Xuriel making such a complaint.
So the problem I’m having is that, so far, all the men in this comic have been depicted as super buff, so why is this guy so special? Shouldn’t the ladies be used to this sort of thing by now? It isn’t like they don’t regularly see literal superheroes in various states of undress. Makes me a little disappointed in Dabbler here.
see Opus the Poet’s posts over the last few strips.
Those on the team are restricted drain status. Delivery guy with no council or Archon status, with security clearance seems to be available. Thus when Dabbler needed a refill after the parking lot super brawl, she picked one of the opponents.
But will his ‘turn girls to mush’ power work on Max?
Noticed a detail and wondered if it was a deliberate thing or a happy accident. Dabbler has four hands of four digits coming up to sixteen. Which on a Succubus would be “sex”-teen. Coincidence? I think not.
Dave has waited years for someone to find this joke, I’m sure.
DaveB, I’m confused. What did you mean with “They spend a fair amount of that time being “sheltered” for lack of a better term, by their “master,” who, in this day and age of a vigilant and vengeful council of Succubus Matriarchs, ensure that fledgling succubi are all but coddled.”?
What’s confusing about it? Dabbler went into a great deal of detail about the history and nature of succubi and their master/slave bond (starting back on page 993), and the current status of succubi society basically inverts the relationship, where the master has a lot of obligation to care for their succubi, in exchange for the multitude of benefits to having one. So he’s saying that they’re generally kept out of harm’s way by their masters, rather than having to fend for themselves, and therefore have very good life expectancy, until they set out on their own and take more risks.
The sensitivity of Dabbler’s eartacle reminds me of a Babylon 5 episode where Londo is playing cards and cheats by using his prehensile ‘tail’. Only when he’s caught does it transpires that it’s not a tail, but a far more sensitive organ.
Maybe she can’t help it but Dabbler jumping in front of Elsbeth like that is incredibly rude.
Dabbler, do you want to get cursed by a mage? Because this is totally how you get cursed by a mage.
Dabbler: “Been there, done that.” :P
So basically Max just nut-tapped Dabbler. Ouch.
That is a expected response to holding your nuts to someones face in public.
Surprised we didn’t meet this guy in Episode 147!
Hrrmmm… Opus has been reading the comic for at least that long, but DaveB didn’t set up a patreon account until page 179, and while I don’t know when the cameo character option was added to the Archon tier, the first cameo character was on page 203, so presumably it was sometime in that interval. No idea when Opus joined at that tier, but I do think he’s been waiting a while for his cameo to show up.
Additionally, Opus has indicated Flash Drive’s superspeed only works with bikes (specifically, bikes he has himself built, although that restriction may not apply in the Grrlverse), and that was a picture of a running event. Further, that had one character from each country, and Maxima was already there representing the USA, leaving nowhere for Flash Drive to be (I’m pretty certain most Olympic running events would allow for more than one participant from each country, even for final events, but “one per country” was clearly what Dave was going for in that picture).
did he just… seduce a succubi?
“You find stairs arousing.” – Maxima to Dabbler, just before the Restaurant fight.
no, i mean that her eyes went all “whooom” or something… that means his super powers are affecting her mentally
Dabbler: I just did the equivalent of sending you a PM! It’s not like I attached a read-triggered script that rewrites parts of your brain to make you more receptive to sexual suggestions!
Maxima: That was… terrifyingly specific…
Dabbler: … only when they ask…
Max: YOUVE DONE IT MORE THAN ONCE??
Dabbler: Not on Earth! And yes, enough that I have a shortcut to the script in my implants. Not every species is prudish like yours…
Ellie in P8 ready to cut a bitch.
Speaking of survival rates: Back in 2007 google published a study on how long rotating disk drives last:
“Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population”
A surprising result is that a lot of failures actually happened in the first year.
My understanding is that the failure curve for most devices with moving parts is U-shaped.
A relatively high failure rate right out the gate, then a steep drop, gradually rising over time.
I work the returns desk at a hardware store, and this absolutely fits my experience. We have a lot of tools brought back in the first couple months of ownership, usually just replaced with an identical one. On the other hand, I almost never have someone bring back an item that failed during the extended warranty period. Basically, in modern manufacturing, you’re always going to produce a certain percentage of lemons that fail almost immediately. Anything that survives that period tends to last beyond the warranty.
For most of human history, this actually applied to us, too–infant mortality was HUGE in prior eras, but if you made it to about… 10 or so, i think it was, you stood a decent chance of getting into your 40s or 50s. It was that huge bubble of dead kids that made age expectancy seem so much worse in historical data sets. (Don’t get me wrong, life expectancy HAS gone up, just not as much as lots of people believe.)