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.”
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.
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…
As fancy Nth tech as this guy probably is, you’d think they’d give him a comfy chair to sit upon.
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.
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.
Yeah, short version of TMac is “Your Americium has decayed” dispose of it responsibly and get a new one.
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.
When a turtleneck has those shoulder patches, it is a Tactleneck, as pioneered by superspy Sterling Archer.
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.
Everything can be found with xyz coordinates if you use enough exponents and symbols.
Trust me, my calculus professor said so.
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.
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.