Grrl Power #1404 – And I would walk 63,500 light years…
It’s safe to say this guy’s stride to inseam ratio is an outlier. You need special mathematical notation to indicate how many standards he deviates. Cases like this are why functions like “trimmed mean” are necessary.
So yeah, dude went out for a stroll. From somewhere, probably in or near our galaxy, on a celestial object, presumably orbiting the galactic center in a certain direction at a certain speed, onto a ship that is almost definitely moving in a different direction and at different speed. A FTL speed. It’s safe to say this guy slays at hopscotch.
I’m not really sure what else to say that doesn’t give away who and what this guy is, even though to me, it seems fairly obvious. }cough{
Oh, one other thing. Originally this was a standard sized page, but I’m really getting tired of cramming important moments into panels the size of 1/9th of a page. So I expanded this one, and I will probably do it more in the future. It doesn’t necessarily mean I can make those big panels all crazy high detail or anything. It’s not like I suddenly have a team of background guys that can draw 3-point perspective cityscapes for me while I concentrate on foreground art. I just want to give the important moments a little more weight, and in comic lingo, that usually means more page real estate.
But in expanding the now final panel, I wound up cutting the planned final panel. Originally, he shows up and looms as you see here, then there’s a panel of him leaning over Sydney, looking at the orbs, and that’s when he says Curious, etc. That panel made it clear he’s 1) there to check out the orbs, and 2) no one can see him. I think this version of the page is slightly more ambiguous in those regards, but not so much that I think it’ll throw you guys into a maelstrom of confusion, cats and dogs, etc.
A hint that he can’t be seen is that while he is backlit by the viewscreen and so is Sydney, he’s not casting a shadow on her. Which made me realize that if you could be invisible and somehow still see yourself (you wouldn’t be able to) you’d either be absolutely pitch black, because light would be bending around you and you would therefore not be illuminated, or you would be fully lit, without any shadows or ambient occlusion, because light would be passing through you equally… but there’s no way you’d be able to see yourself like that. Or see at all, really. But still, you’d look like a 3D model that was evenly globally lit.
Yes, yes, a magic spell that made you invisible could include an illusion that only you can see of yourself so that you can still pick locks or whatever non-fumbling-around-blindly activity you need to do. But then that illusion would have to make some decisions about illumination.
There’s also the option of not being invisible and just blocking people’s perception of you. That’s difficult because you have to block perception of footprints, cast shadows, B.O., etc. Not that standard invisibility block odor or anything. And there’s also the complication of perception blocking in a world with electronic cameras. It’s one thing in a fantasy world, but if blocking the perception of digital eyes requires a whole other level of hand-waving.
But then you have a guy who can amble a jillion parsecs like it’s nothing, and you don’t even need to try and justify anything. They’re at the “dude can do some shit.” level, and that’s all the explanation needed.
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.
I see that and all I can think is “IGNORE ME!”
They’re purple, they’re obviously somebody else’s problem. See below for more information
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem_Field
Thanks or posting this exactly thing. The genius of Douglas Adams.
I get the feeling Sydney and Max would be immune to an SEP field based on that information. Sydney is so wild and seems to accept almost anything immediately, and most things are somebody else’s problem but she interacts with them anyway. Max on the other hand… I feel like she treats everything as her problem, even the things that aren’t. Also her origins are impossible enough, and Sydney’s impossible enough that I’d think she’d be used to it.
My first thought as well.
Putting me in mind of an old character of mine (no accusation, I never even drew the guy), called Zahnon the Dimension Walker, I pictured a similar head but more golds and yellows, and wearing a yellow cowboy hat and a poncho over a Marvel’s Celestial style armor body. Funny enough the one time I got him involved in a story he took on the form of a puppy wearing that same hat and acted as the familiar for a summoner alongside his sister Sahralia the star killer and their mother Rokonaka the Dark Empress of the Void…as a blue ferret with horns and a dark red fox-squirrel respectfully. and typing that I wish I had made that series its own thing instead of at the time tying it into this whole other monsters tournament thing I was into at the time, LoL (decade later hindsight).
I’d watch that.
It honestly is one of my big writing regrets that I wrote that series shorter than it deserved and shoved inside another series, I think in the hands of someone better at slice of life the concept could have blossomed better. This was also like ten years ago and my bad habit of insisting everything have a shared continuity and my ADHD writing habit of going off on tangents before circling back around.
But yeah, I’ll jot down ideas of shows or stories I’d want to read or watch and then try to write them, most are “pilot episode” shorts like (what if some Isekaied as the AI of a mech suit) or (what if someone isekaied as a teddy bear or a Kawaii world character in a cutsey world) or various other plot ideas. Most only being one chapter or a handful till I hit that “I have no idea where else to go with this story” which is also why I tend to keep things in one world because I can just go off on another tangent and insert these characters back into the narrative when I want…which doesn’t make the most coherent story, but it is a hobby not trying to make money off of it.
but yeah, I have been tempted to go “what If I just isolated and extended some of these if I got a good idea to make it, its own thing”.
“That’s difficult because you have to block perception of footprints, cast shadows, B.O., etc. Not that standard invisibility block odor or anything.” …The number of stories/ideas I’ve made based on these thoughts is pretty high. (My favourite approach is “it blocks scent, sound, cast shadows, reflections, etc” but does not negate the impacts you physically have on your environment. So, say, if the floor would creak under you, that is still audible to those around you, if you bump a chair, they can still notice it’s moved.
Which is real fun when you write an intelligent character who has to fight a series of enemies(low tier demons, in his story, whom he didn’t have spiritual perception to see),he cannot perceive.
INvisibility that can be defeated by a bag of flour isn’t great -especially once people know it’s possible.
what is funny is this trope falls under “older than dirt” or older than writing perhaps as we see it in some pretty old folklore, for instance the Shedim in even ancient Judaic folklore were said to leave behind footprints if you covered the floor in a powder or sand. Despite their near divine powers these bird legged beings would leave behind giant chicken like footprints.
You are invisible, not intangible: you can’t be seen but can still be heard or touched
STEEEEEEEEP made me think he was producing a beverage almost but not quite entirely unlike tea.
exactly! Just thinking about making the tea was enough to cause the effect!
It’s M(s/r[s]) Nth!
You know they are from an VERY advanced civilization, cause he (?) can wear a turtle neck with that head.
and slippers while traveling through the galaxy
Since we are all just tossing around theories….
It seems to me that an Nth guy would have already seen lots of Nth tech. While it may be the orbs that originally caught his attention, it is quite possible that the ‘delightful surprise’ here may well be Daphne and her superpowers.
I remember a few pages years ago where Deus sort of explained to Dabbler and others that the origin of superpowers seemed maybe to be due to some transcendently powerful entity messing around with the fundamental nature of the universe, somehow focused on Earth. That sort of thing might require the next level of tech beyond the Nth (Nth+1?), which would presumably be interesting even to the Nth.
No, wouldn’t be Daphne: she hasn’t used her powers this trip
And, unless they have been sleeping for the past year, why only now are they interested in Sydney’s balls?
No, there is something else going on, we will just have to wait and find out (sometime in the next ten years :P )
Given that the thing that happened immediately before this was Altus explaining wormhole physics to Sydney, and the flyball reacting, it seems like maybe something about Sydney learning about the fields that a ball operates in does something that this Nth is interested in?
Given what those matrushka objects are theoretically being used for (And demonstrated in Schlock Mercenary) Could he be a mental projection of the object’s (watchman?)
Did we just notice the Travel orb light up? And Sydney noticed it? I thought maybe the orb someone is going to go into leveling mode, but now I think it lit up to alert the user that someone did some traveling in the vicinity. Is Sydney going to do a ninja scan when she realizes what her orb was telling her?
Oooh, that means maybe flattop also has orbs, but they’re enclosed in the flattop???
FlyB did light up, but no, Sydney didn’t notice
Magical Invisibility is really just a matter of uncoupling yourself from any Platonic Ideal other than “nothingness”.
Then even when they perceive you their mind simply translates you into a version of Nothingness.
Is he wearing uggs?
Glorafide slippers!? With a Turtleneck?
Steve Jobs if he had lived to 2015.
Come on Sydney senses need to be going crazy right now! Grab the orb and meet Papa Space Stepper!
And here I thought the next page was gonna have Sydney going, “Holy shitballs where the fuck did you come from??” xD
Still possible :)
I imagine the rest of his observation would go like,
“ANALYZE”
It starts scanning the log files of the orbs, something only an Nth could do
“MISSING? STOLEN. FATE OF THIEF?” *Just a close-up image of the garbled Atherium image of Earth* “UNFORTUNATE.”
*scrolls log* “NEW USER REGISTERED ON . TRAINING MODE? TUTORIAL DISABLED. AMUSING.”
*continues to scroll, observing all of Sydney’s shenanigans over the past few years*
*what appears to be a grin spreads on its face*
“…QUITE AMUSING.”
Whoops! That was supposed to say “NEW USER REGISTERED ON [Garbled/Incomprehensible Nth Space Calendar Date]” but I used lessthan/greaterthan signs and I guess it thought it was code and baleeted it. xD
Minor clarification, but the timeframe of the comic so far (unless Dave has retconned it) has been less than “a few months”. In episode 4 Sydney was revealed to be a Corporal, and we started a flashback of “a few months”. As of now she’s still a Private, so we’re still in the flashback.
The first day of comic time took something like five years of real-world time to cover.
But Sydney had the orbs for an undetermined amount of time before joining. Then there is the time skip, which this guy can probably observe just as easily. So a couple of years of Sydney’s adventures with the orbs is probably accurate.
this is making me think, that odds are the whole ‘flashback’ bit is just a setup bit, admitted they eventually DID have the flashback end in ‘HIMYM’
Beats my guess from the last panel that he was actually inside one of the orbs, possibly imprisoned there.
Comfy sweater AND slippers. We are most definitely dealing with an advanced being who knows how to comfy.
He was doomscrolling in bed when this happened. So these are his pajamas…
The vision while invisible problem is easily solved with low power laser eyeglasses. Most photons hit your invisible screen and are virtually propagated to the far side, so they hyperspace tunnel through you without being disturbed. Near the eyes there is a simulated photon emission arrangement so that photons headed for the eyes are duplicated. One does the hyperspace shunt and comes out your far side without being disturbed. The other continued in normal space until it reaches your eyes, letting you see.
As for the alien, his probes have ‘detect extreme shaggy dog story’ so he appears to listen, entranced, for however many millennia are need are needed to reach the punch line.
Any shortening or lengthening of the path light takes would result in a lensing effect, even if the photon ends up on the same trajectory and line it would have been on, but early, or late.
Tunneling implies shortening. Interception for simulation, duplication, and reemission will lengthen the path. Depending on how its done it may also lower the overall energy level of the resulting photons due to the law of energy conservation. If the energy is reduced, it results in red shift.
Lastly, any mass, even that of an invisible object, will bend spacetime, thus creating a lensing effect even if it doesn’t otherwise interact with light.
Suffice to say there with sensitive enough instruments, there are plenty of ways to detect an invisible object unless that object is both massless and does not interact with the light in any way.
The object calculates the distortions in the fly and negates them.
When dealing with advanced beings you just have to think outside the box of how “vision” works, you don’t need light, or sound, you just need a system that can perceive and feedback the data of your surroundings. So a multidimensional imager that detects the energetic or mass expressions of the spatial dimensions…awareness of the space. Or can sense gravity at even the more local levels, every atom bends space to some degree, if we have some spatial geography sensory ability then one can detect all the mass around them. Now its unlikely to look to them like it does to a photon receptive system as surface visuals depend on what wavelengths get reflected back the most or bent/refracted, but it would still be something analogous to sight.
Hmm an Extra-Temporal entity. That’s… concerning.
IGNORE ME!
Dude didn’t skip leg day..
Her orbs were in a rock layer right? If those were from his/her/their species, than they had had time to develop even more bonkers tech!
He’s kinda Kirby meets Warren.
” Originally this was a standard sized page, but I’m really getting tired of cramming important moments into panels the size of 1/9th of a page.”
Okay, hard stop. Unless you’re selling physical paper books (Hino takes a quick look over the site and does not find a bookstore) your output format is the average person’s down-scrollable screen. The limitations of a “standard sized page” have nothing to do with your comic or your art. Certainly not enough to make the latter suffer for the hypothetical former.
It was stated very early on in the comic that he intended to sell a graphic novel once it got to a certain length.
That never came about, but the habit and workflow has stuck.
By now, that would be a real doorstop if it’s one book.
Tolkien eat your heart out.
Martin and Jordan too (I suppose they have more total output, but not as an omnibus).
Like the “GoldBricks”, one assumes, only ideally with better binding.
More like this is just two regular-sized pages stuck together (if you look closely, you can see the join)
“PPSST That’s one… small… step… for man… One… giant leap… for a giant nail in a dress.”
Sydney: Anyone ever tell you that you look like that alien from Venture Bros
Alien: IGNORE ME
HEY! Only Alucard can take very enthusiastic walks. You’re infringing aliendude!
Getting Watcher vibes.
One way to do invisibility where you can see but can’t be seen and are effectively transparent is to modify your eyes to aee a different range of frequencies, and then making yourself opaque only in those frequencies, with an added effect of false coloring ofwhat you can see. This is a similar effect to that of pure silicon, which is transparent in a range of the heat spectrum (you can see heat sources through a pane of silicon) but opaque in our visible spectrum (can’t see visible light colors/shapes through that same pane).
There is the “Someone Else’s Problem” field form of invisibility.
Ah, the good old semi-reliable SEP field. I think his outfit is unorthodox enough to be “unexpected” enough to trigger the field.
I want to know how he got that Turtleneck sweater over that head.
Obviously he folded it through some extra dimensions.
im predicting one of two things; 1. its a vorlon encounter suit, what we consider the alien to be, is how we percieve them. not what they actually look like. and 2. the sweater is the actual alien, the encounter suit is just the support frame.
I am reading that in Abbaturs voice.
OH no a dude just spawn over Sidney shoulder, LET’S hope he doesn’t get tongue shoulder overthrown to the ground like Amorphous in the bank holdup.
I for one am here for that.
I’ve actually thought about the “conditionally invisible” situation before, in the context of vampire reflections. I think what I came up with was some sort of ‘split pseudo-photon’ where every photon [both those reflecting off the invisible thing and those passing through it – both of which have to be tracked per photon, hence the ‘split’] has some sort of state determining who and what it is visible to.
Primitive primate species, cannot comprehend our ways, but can comprehend our technology. Intriguing..
CUDA here is going to have fun watching Sydney. A less likely user of Nth tech, one cannot imagine!
Casually stepping on board of a spaceship.
Half a galaxy away. While it is in FTL.
Good news is that he probably is not a direct danger? If he bothers with invisibility, he at least prefers to avoid conflict.
But then his curiosity could be a danger in itself
I haven’t seen FTL transit this precise since Sol Bianca.
And the Nth makes their appearance! I’ve been waiting for this moment, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen at such an unclimactic point in time. Makes me wonder how much longer the story is going to be.
It’s nice to see that they’re apparently okay with Sydney playing with their balls. Artifacts of immense power that are essentially the toys of higher beings are one of my favorite tropes.