Grrl Power #1366 – Ding dang dong
Lapha was indeed a guttersnipe at one point, in case you forgot.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned the following before, but it’s been years since whatever page that was, and it’s relevant to this page, so I claim author’s privilege.
Anyway, I have a distinct memory of a scene from an episode of Thundercats where Panthro finds a chunk of gold, not a vein or some scattered dust, but like a beachball sized boulder of the stuff just sitting on the ground, and he says something to the effect of “Stupid gold! So worthless! Bah!” and he kicks it off a cliff.
Okay, first off, I know the Thundercats weren’t human, and were generally stronger than Joe Sixpack, but if that boulder was half a cubic meter, it would have weighed about 10 tons. Second, gold is chemically very useful. It’s an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, and is almost totally chemically inert, and would make a great radiation barrier if cost or weight wasn’t a factor. It’d probably also be great to stick in the center of a projectile if you wanted to pack more mass into your shot. A straight-up gold bullet would probably be a bad idea and get jammed up in your barrel immediately, but if it was steel-jacketed, it’d probably be pretty effective.
Even when I was 13 or however old when Thundercats came out, I was like “Geeze, did gold insult Panthro’s mother or something?” It was just bad writing. Some sort of ham-fisted out of place anti-consumerist/capitalist message in a cartoon that was, like most other cartoons of its time, 30 minute long commercials for toys. (Huh, I just checked, Thundercats came out in 1985, so I was indeed 13 at the time.)
So it’s not that gold doesn’t have value in the wider Grrl-verse, it just doesn’t have “it’s valuable because we say it is” value. The fact that it’s rarer than 90% of other elements on the periodic table is a factor, but once mining comets and fracking all the moons around your local gas giants becomes an option, you’re still going to wind up with piles of the stuff.
I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the background there with the table and the food. I guess I envisioned some sort of forest trail obstacle course there behind the Archon building, and there’s catering? That doesn’t seem very military-ish. I don’t think the Army usually has a Kraft Services table set up outside the training area, but considering Harem can teleport while holding a plate of ding-dongs or a pan of enchiladas, and there’s 5 of her, setting up a picnic buffet table would take her all of 14 seconds if she had the food ready. Actually the table itself would probably exceed her carry limit, as would a cooler full of ice and drinks. She’s have to bring bags of ice separately, and maybe one 12-pack at a time. Yeah, she’d have to set up the table before hand, then she could pop the food on as soon as everyone had their backs turned.
The vote incentive is finally done!
The update to the TWC image is pretty minor, but the Patreon version has the bonus comic as well as nude versions. I will strive to make the next one more timely.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Deus was able to pay for the Mass Fabricators with something that could fit in a backpack he could carry.
That suggests there must be something on Earth with value that Max can pay to Cora.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-679-spree/
Dabbler mentioned the galactic society is quite fond of our entertainment
Halo the mighty eating ___ viral videos in three… two… one…
The things with value will be art pieces and entertainement industry products …
Perhaps a reedition of the heart invasion genre in a parody compilation could be used …
The succes of Fu Manchu in asian audiences is due to the outré tone.
And if inthe galactic comunity a WTF (Watch Terrible Films) comunity exist , Turkish space opera could be a gold mine.
Buy the rigths and propose it.
A galactic Nanardland – in french un nanard is the term for a terrible film when ,without parody intent, a film director rips his pants to make tent canvas, those WTF ( what the f… ) moments – with a subscription.
Can I just say I think Garamm and Lapha might just have the most wholesome relationship I’ve ever seen in a comic.
You can. And I would agree.
After all, he loves love.
Deus paid for the Mass Fabricators with whatever he put in a single backpack. So there must be something on Earth that holds value.
…Then again, it could have been the entire box set of Archer.
I know they’re technically bad guys, but they’re so gosh darn cute together.
They’re not even really bad guys. Just Mercenaries. They do shit jobs because they had to.
I remember that episode. I don’t remember anyone kicking it off a cliff, but I don’t doubt it. I do remember Panthra molding a chocker like clay and Cheatara wearing it for the rest of the episode.
They were digging for thundranium ore, and one of the byproducts was ‘this useless gold stuff’ that drained off because it was lighter. Panthro had a big chunk of it in his fist.
He molds a choker for Jitara. This was the episode where the Sword of Omens was broken by getting Tigra and Lionel to fight one another. The guy who could reforge it was beat up by Mumm-ra, and needed a bath of molten gold to regain his power and the sword. So the excess gold from the Thundranium mining was heated up, did the job, and the Sword was reforged.
In the anime “I’m the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire!”, the MC is reincarnated from a miserable life on Earth. He’s still convinced that collecting gold is the way to being truly evil, something he’s terrible at; dude hasn’t got an evil bone in his body. Everyone around him in his pseudo-scifi environment knows that gold is a basically a junk metal, but they collect piles of it to pay him because that’s what he wants.
I read a story many years ago that might be apropos. It was set during the energy crisis of the 70s and their explanation was our energy was being used to create mass. Special mass, immune to radiation etc and during the Cold War, presented a very attractive strategic resource. Everyone knows E=mc2. What they did in this story was use the transitive property so m=c2/E. With power generator, especially what Max uses for shopping trips, that might be a way to create pure reaction mass.
You wrote that wrong it would become “m = E/c2” and it’s not even that, as E = mc2 is just a way of describing energy at rest for a particle/object. The full equation is E2 = (mc2)2 + (pc)2 where p is momentum so you add the Lorentz factor and account for relativistic movement.
To simplify matters scientists set c = 1 and then show that energy, momentum and mass must be conserved as it becomes E2 = m2 + p2. So “m” really becomes this: m = sqrt(E2 – p2). :)
Thanks. It was an attempt to use the extra energy Deus has access to for another purpose.
Ok it’s been touched on by others but my guess is that Max wants to get her team some space experience and if offering their services in exchange for keeping him.