Grrl Power #1373 – The A-Team gets clean
See how it all ties in? Faulk and Cora and Max were talking about Peggy’s foot, and now she has an ticklichy shower foot. Writing!
I had originally planned to have a lot of conversations in the comic take place in the showers, because, well, glistening superheroines. There are two reasons that this is only the third or fourth appearance of the showers in nearly 1400 pages. One, I just kind of keep forgetting to do it. Like if I have people standing around the base talking, it’s usually out in the lounge. Well, also, if the scene requires mixed company, then it can’t take place in the shower. The team is not that progressive. Also certain characters wouldn’t quite make sense wandering in for a line or two. Like Arianna probably doesn’t use the showers all that often. Not never, but while she may do a morning jog with the team, she’s not doing obstacle courses after lunch, or early afternoon weight training. Also, if she’s giving Harem or Dabbler a warning about sexual harassment, that lecture loses some of its gravitas if done while soaping one’s bosoms.
The other reason is that despite several attempts, I have no idea how to use Blender. I did actually make a 3D model of the room in Blender at one point quite a while ago, but then realized that I have no idea how to texture a room? I don’t know how to texture an apple, but that’s a pretty easy tutorial to find. UV unwrap, apply texture… that’s basically it. But an interior? It’s one thing to apply “stucco” to a wall, but this room has tiles that have to line up correctly, and I imagine that involves slicing the room into dozens of component pieces… well, probably it means making one chest-high wall then duplicating it with an array, etc, etc. But I don’t know how to do that stuff. And so… I have to draw the interior of the room in 2D and lay in all those textures in perspective each time there’s a camera change. Well, not each time. I just have to do it once and then I copy/paste it all for other panels with the same angle. It’s quite a bit more work than having two characters stand in front of a brown wall, for sure.
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.
We’re going to need a closer look at Maxima’s face in the bottom left panel.
Shows like Harley Quinn have made a lot of us realise, superheros are way more fun when they let the mask slip. Maxima, aka Ms Perfection, aka “Fire a nuke at me, and I’ll shrug it off”, making a “Dafuq was that?!!” face? Absolute work of art
So, I’m guessing not a deliberate prank, but Frix knew this was a possibility.
The foot is baby new, never been used yes it even has that new foot smell. So all the nerves are working in near prefect order, there is no damage of normal living on it and she has been living for several years without one. So all this is literally her body relearning to live with a foot.
I have suffered nerve damage to my legs, and I can tell you 2 things: 1) Sensations are different from before the injury, and 2) Cat fur is ticklish, like ants crawling.
Her brain has to process those new sensations, when my nerves did what healing they could, my brain had to learn that my legs were in fact still there and how to use them. My right foot insisted that the normal way was to turn inwards when I walk, it’s been 42 years and I still have to watch or I take a fall. I had to give up on driving a stick-shift for that reason. And using a left-foot gas petal was a bit weird at first.
I’ve been reading the comments pretty much since the beginning of the comic. Granted, we like to talk about our maladies but it seems like there is a relatively high incidence of nerve injuries among the commenters. I wonder how the statistics of that works. Is it that we are the people who have time to sit around and comment on comics? Or does the comic appeal to those of us who also end up with that sort of injury? It is likely of course, that I am just more attentive to injury centric comments.
General nerve damage is something a lot of people experience I have a spot on my thigh that gives me problems. In my case it is mild neuropathy, which is cause by my Type 2 diabetes. So as type 2 became more common we ended up with a lot of people like me. Then there are folks that just get hurt it happens a lot more than you would think.
We find the defendant guilty, Your Honor.
In his defense, Cora does not actually have any limbs…
And is pretty heavily modified from a baseline human, genetically speaking.
I think it is simply that her nervous system is not used to the “new hardware”, so the signals get a little mixed up
The nerves are as new as the limb itself, the brain didn’t receive stimuli over it for a looong time.
We are “tickled” due to nerve information we aren’t used to. Hence, it tickles.
I am male, so I don’t know how much more do females get stimulated by tickles but if that particular genre of pr0n works as a guide, it’s a lot XD
I don’t know if its intentional, but it feels very much like Sydney has grown somewhat out of her… awkward modesty? Not sure hot to describe it but she doesn’t seem to be seeking a shower hot enough to produce consistent, covering steam or hunch over and cover up at every opportunity.
I do like the various different arm and background positions to covery everyone up just in time, Austin Powers style.
I think it says something about their medical advancement that Frix can just prank someone like this and it be no big deal to correct it.
Pretty sure this is all a setup to send Peggy along with them. Which makes sense to have someone from base who is familiar travelling with Cora and can keep Sydney out of trouble while Maxima might be busy fighting.
It’s possible that months of daily (or more than that) multi-person showers combined with being in better shape (all that running) have somewhat desensitized her.
DaveB did say in those early shower pages that Sydney would grow over her fear of showering over time, after all it has already been a couple of weeks in universe and they shower together at least twice a day, more depending on the activities, with that much interaction at some point it just becomes routine
I think its been upwards of 4 months in-game. We had a big skip for Sydney to graduate training.
Honestly it could have been a year of special training also giving Deus enough time to industrialise Gatlyn. I know he threw money at it and had the Alari, but things still take time to build.
Just the space travel / relativity time dilation skip was a month or so. Plus other time skips that weren’t well documented. Several characters have gone from captured/surrendered to apparently full unescorted run of ARCON, and that doesn’t happen overnight.
We’re definitely less than a year on, though, so still in 2010 and still in the “flashback” that started in comic 4 because Sydney is still a Private.
Speaking as a dorm dweller through most of my college years, you get used to it. The showers in my first dorm were just a cube lined with shower heads. No partitions. If you are shy, you start taking your showers late at night but sooner or later someone else comes in and the world doesn’t end.
i feel like it being Peggy, the other member of the A Team, makes it less awkward for Sydney; she might be a bit more zealous about covering herself if it was one of the more pectorally potent persons
to be fair. it’s so common now for her and after all the stuff she has been thru. showering probably isn’t as big a deal as before. also I’m sure everyones self esteem gets a boost with dabbler around lol. how can you not feel good about yourself if you have a knockout alien babe constantly wanting to get a peek and showing interest like that.
Your super power is: You can tell when people are talking about your foot.
It’s no Ultra Invulnerability, but I’ll take it.
It causes your foot to itch.
Noooo!
…and now she has an unblockable, untraceable (though admittedly easy to jam) Morse Code receiver.
Peg’s-foot, Peg’s-foot, Peg’s-foot; Peeeg’s-foooooot, Peeeg’s-foooooot; Peg’s-foot, Peg’s-foot, Peg’s-foot
Did you mean to do the morse code for SMS or did you typo SOS?
Unfortunately, this doesn’t really work unless she can distinguish who is causing the sensation, because there’s enough people on the team that they’re *absolutely* going to get some interference.
And that’s before the public finds out.
Did you let AI draw Sydney’s hand in the middle left pannel?
Syd is pulling back from the edge a bit to look at the floor. So her hand is just holding on by finger tips. The crease we are seeing is her thumb and pointing finger as the hand is flat. I did the the same motion with my hand, to see why it looked odd, and it looks similar.
You know…if the shower scene conversations are really only for special occasions, I feel like they’d make good fodder for some of the NSFW rewards. Same scenes from a different angle without the intervening text (and soap) bubbles.
Also, seconding the opinion that we need more of Maxima’s startled expressions.
I think this every time I see a semi-censored scene that had no outright sexual activity, just nudity.
Not specifically here, either, just a general ‘I wonder what this would have looked like if we didn’t have weird hangups over nudity and sex’.
Also, second (or whatever count it is now) the vote for closeup on Maxima here. Prettty pleeeeaaaase?
Smash cut to chase scene!
How long will it take Peggy to get use to her new…appendage?!?
It’s a personal thing, everyone’s different. Peggy still has to get used to having it, and to deal with what is clearly the inner guilt at having the option of getting it back. I’m sure once her replacement is commonly known someone will come up with the request of getting a cell forge for vet’s.
I’ve heard of phantom limb syndrome, but not phantom-itchy-artificial-limb-that-you-actually-can-feel-that-feels-like-the-real-thing-syndrome?
Reverse Phantom Limb.
Is it actually detecting when people are talking about it? Normally I’d say that that was impossible…. But…..
“Peggy’s foot? Ask Peggy to check her messages. “
Peggy’s foot: “Error. Peggy’s foot is not connected to microphone.”
There are blender addons for making tiles and all of that, it has been a while sense I bought one but it is not likely to set you back more than 20 bucks.
It’s actually possible to tickle yourself, but the amount of zen “I’m doing this deliberately but not letting that part of my brain over there know that” is probably too difficult for most people without practice. And she would have known she was doing it.
…Wait, is this real? Are humans not supposed to be able to tickle themselves?? I have definitely scratched the bottom of my foot and had a tickle feeling reaction
That was my reaction as well.
I have heard, many times, that people can’t tickle themselves, but that doesn’t match my lived experience.
It’s actually an effort not to react to the tickling sensation when touching my own feet
It’s hard for most people to set out to tickle themselves. The knowledge that you’re doing it tends to prevent the tickle sensation. But it’s hardly the hard and fast rule that some people make it out to be.
I think some people may have a different perspective on their perspective than others, and that might enter into it. If ones body doesn’t really mesh well with their idea of self, it may be less obvious to the operative part of the brain that it’s a self-touch.
To be clear, everybody’s different, so maybe I’m just talking me here, but on my most dissociative days, I was extremely self-ticklish. At least that’s gotten to be less of a thing over time. I still dissociate sometimes, but it’s been decades since I last dissociated to the everything tickles level.
I remember being able to tickle my self at like, age four. I was very ticklish as a child but well into my adult years, I’m not ticklish at all. Kind of miss it.
Put me in the tickle-self column as well.
However, there is still a difference. For the most part it is just the bottom of the foot that is self-ticklish and a couple other ‘sensitive’ spots. Being tickled by someone else though I am pretty sure can be triggered in WAY more places and is ‘stronger’. Though I ain’t a kid anymore so it has been a while since the last tickle fight, so I am not sure how much that still holds true.
Soooo…. if someone happens to make you a 3d shower room, we would get more shower scenes?
I like your train of thought! I’m certain there are some readers here with the skills who’d gladly volunteer their services in exchange for more hygiene sequences in the comic.
Has anyone else noticed that Peggy’s chest tattoo makes it look like she has a hairy chest when she has certain shirts on?
If you’re not planning to export the scene or parts outside of Blender, you can skip UV mapping and use dynamically applied materials. Which means, you could have a texture that is a single tile, and Blender would tile it across the surface accordingly, with as many tiles as needed. My Blender experience and skills are in doing rooms and other hard surface things, and I love dynamic textures for when I’m not trying to make like a game part or something. I never use basic unwrap for things like a wall. I kind of discovered the dynamic texturing feature by accident, messing around with the material node editors to figure things out, as I could not translate a tutorial on creating material for a person’s face or an apple to something like a steel I beam or Walls and Floors, which I have modeled a lot of.
For something like a wall, the UV map would consist of a single surface area that covers the whole UV map area. Afterwards, you have two approaches: a single wall texture image with the tiles that gets applied to all the walls. However, the exact size of the tiles might vary slightly if the walls are of varying lengths. Or, you create a texture image specific to each wall in an attempt to make sure the tiles are all as close to the same size as possible.
If you like I would be open to trying to model a few of the space in the headquarters building, or the whole building. Modeling structures is a bit of a passion of mine.
and even if plan to export them to other programs you can bake the materials into textures, the default process in blender is a pain in the ass but there are addons out there that make the process a literal button press
I do have some experience in blender and honestly creating a shower room this simple is unlikely to be pretty hard, recreating the entirety of Archon HQ is likely to be harder but still theoretically doable and it would likely be pretty useful to have a 3D model of the facilities since its the one place that the characters spend like 90% of the time
Blender contest, with the winner(s) getting a cameo?
Showers, comic store, maybe a few conference rooms and Faulk’s office… what else?
A prank was my first guess.
i think her brain just isn’t used to have a leg there anymore, will take some time to get used to
like periodically, her brain goes all “whow, there is a whole bunch of sensory informations coming from that empty space, creepy” and that’s where the itches come from
and for the tickles, we usually can’t tickle ourselves because our brain learned to not freak out when the sensory info of being touched match the info of touching ourselve, but her brain hasn’t registered the sensory info of her new leg yet, so it freak out when something touch the leg, even if it’s herself
I know you can access the emails. Send me an email, and I will review your blender file and UV it in a way that allows you to easily color it, while also providing instructions on how to do so. All I ask for is credit.
I kind of feel like Peggy should have an old tattoo on her leg that abruptly cuts off whenever the new growth begins, at least until she can go and get that re-done. She might need to pick a new artist, as the original one might have some awkward questions about what happened to their artwork.
sort of a sign of new beginning BUT if just touching it is causeing her to tickle and make girly sqeals what heck is the needle in tattooing going to do XD
Or have the regrown leg tattooed primer colour and a ‘new construction’ sign :)
Wait, is Cora human or is she humanoid?
I’m pretty sure Cora is humanoid, but was born without limbs. She has “hard light” limbs that function like normal limbs but can also be adjusted in a variety of ways.
she is human, her skin color is a gene-mod that she applied to herself, she wasn’t born blue
the blue allow her to photosynthesis
I think there was an author comment and even some in comic text indicating she’s human, with some very light genemod.
Cora is human, which she explained during the press conference after bringing Sydney back.
Did they say she was from Earth?
That too is explained in the comic somewhere.
Humans have been “exported” from Earth since yonks, and have formed communities in interstellar society since.
Genetically they’ve not even had the time to diverge much from us, barring deliberate SpaceTech™/Magical mods.
So Cora is as “stock” Human as us, descended from forebears “liberated” from Earth.
Given that the “Originator” humans came from pretty much anywhere, but relatively few in number, “ïnterstellar” humans would probably be a more homogenous mix of racial traits than over here on Earth, because they’ll have been Getting Around a lot more, so there’d be more admixture. Especially in a culture that’s *far* less Tribal than over here Earthside..
Only thing you can be pretty sure of, is that on average they *won’t* be pure Caucasian, because about every single trait that makes us Whiteys look like us Whiteys is pretty much recessive.
For some reason Cora-before-mods is firmly pegged in my mind as “Creole”. Like Rihanna in her younger years.
Dunno why…It just seems to …fit…
Blender tip. Break up each wall or floor section into separate objects. Apply the textures individually.
Given the hatchet job the ‘contractor’ we used before this one did to the bathroom walls, there’s no requirement for tiles to line up in any plane. I’m pretty sure they were off centre in dimensions we can’t even see. At least this last one just didn’t bother filling in the nail holes in a length of moulding around the shower…or painting it.
I can sympathize with her as well as anyone with ‘phantom pain’ or ‘lost limb syndrome’. Hhaving frozen both feet when I was about six or seven, to the point where the Dr told my mother I’d probably lose them (good thing he was wrong), and then doing it at least twice more (they freeze very easily now) before hitting my teens, having had the skin slough off full thickness, right to the dermis, due to an antibiotic allergy reaction…TWICE !!! and pinched nerves from a badly twisted ankle in my teens the ‘Dr’ insisted was just a sprain but was broken in three places and didn’t set properly, and more nerve problems from a broken back a few years ago slipping out of place every so often, I’d be happy for one day where my feet didn’t itch/burn/tingle/feel like they were on a live wire/just plain hurt. Having to put up with that when they weren’t even there would be maddening. You never realize just how many things you’ve hurt over the years until you have to explain to a Dr why his pet theory for everything probably isn’t applicable in this case and watch his eyes go wide :)
I just thought his pet theory is wrong because different people are different and his pet theory doesn’t allow for even a tenth of the variation we’ve probably all seen.
Admittedly, that doesn’t go over nearly as well as explaining why one is a special case that they didn’t believe was possible. That feels like it’s a lot easier than it should be with a lot of doctors. The only doctors I’ve met that it didn’t seem like I could manage that were doctors who as far as I could tell didn’t have personal pet theories about people. To be clear, in both of those cases, they absolutely had those when they were younger, but by the time I was their patient, they’d encountered enough exceptions they seemed to have given up on figuring out one of those that would fit the new data.
As well funded and well appointed as this headquarters is, it seems a bit off that they have big old shower pits for the crew to frolic about within.
Same reason the military has lots of money but doesn’t build shower stalls or seperate bedrooms in recruit barracks: breaking down barriers perceived or otherwise, and not giving people a convenient place to conceal illicit activity.
Also, why is he not currently lecturing at Harvard Medical School, seeing as how he is a graduate of a higher medical school and knows Clarekian Medicine (Which is indistinguishable from magic….)
Because they can’t afford his rates.
Because our dear Woof would be mostly switching between ROFLing behind the lectern for the sheer stupidity of his students, and sheer exasperation at the stubborness of the Medical Profession when it comes to New Things.
You’d be surprised how *averse* Academia is to New Ideas.. It’s why I GTFO as soon as I could, and got a real job.
Even setting up an experiment and *proving* things work according to your ideas can’t convince some of those Clowns..
Another new piece of information from this page: When Peggy’s hair isn’t all spiky looking from hair gel she has a Three Stooges ‘Moe’ haircut.
“I have to draw the interior of the room in 2D and lay in all those textures in perspective each time there’s a camera change. Well, not each time. I just have to do it once and then I copy/paste it all for other panels with the same angle. It’s quite a bit more work than having two characters stand in front of a brown wall, for sure.”
Surely Cora can sell the ARC base a brown “paint” that’s as safe for shower surfaces as having those little grippy ducks which adhere to the floor of a tub.
Have Cora do a shower scene with the team and offer to hook them up with brown “space shower” paint.
I don’t think brown would make a good paint for the floor of a bathroom.
There’s a subtle difference between ‘easy to clean’ and ‘not showing the dirt’ ;)
Tickling oneself is easy – just have an operation that turns an area on your arm/elbow into a GIANT funny bone zone – just smaller than the palm of your own palm. The skin lower on the arm is anther weirdly off sensation area. A super fun benefit from surviving Cancer.
Stop perving at Jake’s butt with dreamy eyes Sydney :P