Grrl Power #1421 – Tinkocalypse?
I know what you’re wondering. If Gaxgy has a treasure hoard, and he frequents a station that has several “Petty Gold” lockers, wouldn’t he just clean them out each time? Well, the answer is simply that he’s allowed to grab a handful each time he drop by, same as everyone.
It got me thinking, if dragons are attracted to gold because it’s valuable, what would they do in a post scarcity society? I guess their hoard might shift to something else valuable, like information. But I don’t know about a dragon sitting on top of a pile of thumb drives, so maybe instead they’d be a librarian, shushing everyone who wants to check out their collection of rare books? I dunno. It’s a cool visual, but I feel like there’s more to the “dragon like gold” than they’re greedy. Cause really, it’s not like the dragon goes into town to buy craft honey and swing by the butcher and knickknacks for the cave. They don’t have a need for money, they can eat a herd of sheep if they want and what’s the local constabulary going to do? So I keep going back to my theory that gold is pretty and clinky and used for nesting and impressing the ladies. But then, why would lady dragons hoard hordes? Of course, there’s no reason a lady dragon can’t enjoy having a clinky pile of gold and gems to roll around on. Maybe if it’s a mating thing, they horde so they can brutally reject any guy with a small one. (Insert joke here about lady dragons being just like lady… ladies.)
Anyway, on to stuff about this page. Showing a “Super Smart” a bunch of alien technology seems like one of those force multiplier situations. I did like in Endgame when Rocket told Stark to calm down, that he was only a genius on Earth. But Stark was able to accomplish a lot starting from Earth tech levels and infrastructure. And also, Rocket, you’re a genius raccoon-GELF thing, but you’re not rolling around in a suit of nanobot armor that allows you to fly and shoot laser beams from a bottomless energy source. But each genius to his own. My point is, what would Stark or Reed Richards or uh… another Super Genius… Man, I’m blanking out. I was trying to think of an evil super genius, but honestly, most of them are either pretty dumb or are simply one hit wonders. Doc Oc made wiggly tentacle arms that interfaced with his nervous system and could move in ways that human limbs don’t. That’s fucking impressive. But then he kind of just… robbed banks and fixated on the fact that Spider-Man kept whooping his ass. Green Goblin made a flying little bodyboard thing. It’s the size of an open pizza box, and can carry a human being, no, at least two human males. I’m sure there was a scene where he was kidnapping Mary Jane while towing Spidey behind. That’s fucking impressive. But then he uses it to fly around tossing goblin-themed grenades and… rob banks, I assume. Yeah, I know, golden/silver age comics weren’t always the deepest analysis of the social-economic motivations of super villains. But still.
What was my point… Oh right. So what happens if Reed Richards or Stark or Doctor Doom got a month to study Nidavellir. (The Star-Forge used to create Stormbreaker.) I’m sure there have been plenty of examples of super smarties getting their hands on alien tech, but it never really caused any significant shifts in power levels or Earth’s tech level.
We’ll see what comes of Digit getting elbows deep into a Starforge.
Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!
So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
DAVE! Did you overlook Agatha and other sparks of Girl Genius, or antivillain Dr. Universe of Spinnerette?
Yeah, was just thinking of the dragon from Girl Genius who likes books :)
I always liked the idea that dragons liked gold because it was just the right level of soft/malleable and firm to support their hard scaled, heavy, yet supple bodies correctly. The fact that coinage and treasure comes in small ‘beans’ is a bonus for form-fitting and rolling around, and gold, unlike other materials or metals that might fit the bill, doesn’t tarnish.
Gemstones and magic weapons and such are there for texture (oooh back scratcher) and a little bit of scouring. Other things are because if you’re going to be collecting valuables, why not collect valuables?
Yeah, I imagine there are various piles in the lair, to be used like the different types of sofa, one for lounging on, one over where the heating is just right for sleeping, and probably a massive one for impressing guests that’s fairly close to the entrance, and gives you a good view of the collected knickknacks, or gifts and souvenirs collected over the years.
Treasure as a dust bath for dragons makes surprising sense
That’s exact;y how I’ve always thought of it. A superior way of scratching all those dragon-mites from the scales
Aaaaaaand now I’m picturing Max doing Gaxgy a favour and going over him for fleas like a monkey
Don’t forget the valuables they have because valuable seekers came by and dropped some off as their last act in this world.
Well, I suppose some of them probably fed the dragon as their true final act.
There was a movie in the 80s called Flight of Dragons. I may be misremembering where they said that dragons sometimes accidentally spark/flame in their sleep, so they need bedding that is not flammable. Gold is a soft metal, so it is good bedding. The rest of the treasure (gems and whatnot) is just what comes with the gold.
I’ve always thought that they’re like crows with the: ‘Oooo, shiny!” And gold just happens to be one of the rarer shinies, which just makes it more desirable.
Gold. Ductile, con-duc-tive. While there are only a couple at Richard’s/von-doom level in marvel universe earth, Peter Parker is only one step down. There’s an annual where he takes a formula to reed (as Spider-Man) asking if it’s as bad as he thinks that the author got kidnapped. And Reed points out that there are only a handful on the planet who could read the formula, let alone understand the implications. Always liked that one.
It’s worth noting that Peter Parker’s a polymath, able to operate in mechanical engineering (webspinners), chemistry (web fluid) and electrical engineering (the spider-tracers). Stark, by comparison, is more focused, as a mechanical and nuclear engineer.
And then there’s the fact that Stark went to the best schools and usually has access to top-notch materials (even the original suit was built in a stocked lab). Richards, likewise, had university or government backing for most of his stuff, and even his rogue rocket ship was built with university materials. Parker? Yeah, he was building that shit in the garage of his aunt and late uncle, using whatever he could scrounge up on his allowance, as bestowed by their fixed-income, social security collecting selves.
Give him proper facilities and training, and Parker should’ve wiped the floor with them.
Stocked lab? The MkI Iron Suit was built in a freaking cave! That’s why it looks the way it looked
WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
To be fair, said cave was stocked for his work. Poorly, but well enough. Also, that was after Stark had the education Freemage was pointing out Parker didn’t have that Stark and Reeds did.
Stark also cracked time travel in an afternoon, and made a new element (but give part credit to his dad for that one).
Parker did that as well… after being sent back thousands of years in the past
Okay, may not have been in an afternoon, but literally using sticks and stones
let’s see, what’s the inventory like: stick….stone…..oo! Random spider!
Still wasn’t a lab, it was a cave he was held in to design weapons
In the “Shadowrun” setting, Great Dragons tend to hoard stock-portfilios and megacorporations.
My favorite explanation for dragon hoards comes from a side story of The Fall of Doc Future: It’s a great way to attract food (adventurers) right into your home.
I never thought of that. Plus, it’s free entertainment. Put in lots of traps and see who makes it through.
I wonder if Digit’s next harpoon will be tethered with an energy line instead of chains or an energy harpoon tethered with chains.
Or… an energy harpoon tethered with energy line
>> Maybe if it’s a mating thing, they horde so they can brutally reject any guy with a small one. (Insert joke here about lady dragons being just like lady… ladies.)<<
I did use that idea in a modern-universe dragon story once: Papa-dragon talking to young Daughter-dragon who did not like cats: "Just think of them as tiny boy-dragons in cheap fur coats." (..or something like that; it's been a while. ;-))
The next harpoon will go through the 4th wall.
There is a lady on Tik-Tok called dndhart who has posted multiple skits about a group of adventurers in the DnD setting who encountered a dragon who hoarded something other than treasure, then set themselves a quest to seek out all the dragons with alternative hoards and interview them about their hoard. Each skit is a meeting with a separate dragon and they form a sequence of skits as the party encounter stranger and stranger hoards. Enjoy. OGH.
Sydney’s been awfully self aware lately…
The idea of Sydney switching her brain off is hilarious. Intrusive thoughts are to her what entropy is to the universe.
Panel 3: of all the imagery shown, I find the rubber duck is the most disturbing. What did Digit learn about the duck???
If you want a story where the genius inventor actually does change the world, go read “A Thing of Vikings” over on Ao3.
Which flag is Sydney flying?
or wait, is that just what’s on the wall?
Yeah, it’s the lines showing the direction to various rooms
I had to comment because no one has commented that Frix is holding a box of Hamdingers. Which I assume is a MST3K reference, and not because of a love of 70’s canned meat.
At first pass I thought he had a box of hammers, and it would be used for a later joke.
That’s dumb.
Indeed!
I remember a movie (“Dragons’ World?”) where dragons went after platinum; it got embedded in their teeth as a catalyst to light their fires when they exhaled a certain gas.
Hydrogen (it was a plot point in in Isaac Asimov mystery story)
Fun fact: Pathfinder actually gave some of their dragons interesting hoarding preferences.
Gold dragons favor gold and artistic works.
Bronze dragons favor valuable books and scrolls.
White dragons hoard everything, but especially magical items.
Copper dragons are the interesting ones, however, because they actually have a sweet tooth. And that’s often reflected in their hoards, which often contain plentiful wines, chocolates and baked goods.
Just imagine that…your starving adventuring party stumbles upon what looks to be the candy room in Willy Wonka…only to find out that it’s the hoard of a Copper dragon who is quite furious about how you ate the wine and cheese he’d wanted to eat that afternoon. That’s *actually lore friendly!*
In one of my universes, male dragons have to put together a hoard because it’s a required condition to provide the resources for a female dragon to create an egg for them.
In another one, certain dragons eat metal and poop gold. Which is great until their eggs hatch, then the baby dragons eat the gold…
… Sydney should be panicking way more than that. Heck, Max should be panicking and isolating Digit to find out EXACTLY what she’s trying to tinker with.
That’s no joke. Iran has built a sizable and varied selection of drones (Intelligence and Weapon Platforms), just from ONE stealth spy drone one of the US 3-letter agencies lost back in 2011. Their development jumped DECADES from the one drone. That’s just real engineers (bright, but not super-genius level) working from ONE sample of slightly advanced tech.
Now take a super-genius and give her a couple hours with REAL ADVANCED ALIEN TECH. Without a hard leash (and outlet) she’s going to wreck ALL earth’s power structures and economies. Quick. Hard. Fast.
People collect Butterflies, and Geodes, and River Rocks, and grow plants, too…not because they’re valuable, but because they are *pretty*!
Not *everything* has to be justified six-ways-from-Sunday… Don’t overthink your own milieu, buddy!
On the “Super Smart” thing…
Heinlein did a riff on that, 85-ish years’ ago. (Look up “Andrew ‘Slipstick’ Libby”, or the short story “Misfit”.)
Dragons hord gold unless more expensive metals become available. They almost always go extinct once fissionable materials become available. 《Cough, underground nuclear test, cough》
I’m told that dragons were a medieval metaphor for gluttony: the hoarding of things beyond any hope of personal utility. A dragon hoards gold and women, neither of which it has any use for. Yay, women as property views of anachronistic societies? *wince*.
I’ve heard two different setting explanations for why dragons hoard gold that I really liked; Living and Dying.
Male and Female dragons could easily see ones ability to make a grand nest of gold as suitability for mating, like you mentioned, or it could be that they *react* to the presence of gold over a certain threshold by becoming ready to make eggs. Dwarves may be able to smell gold and gyms, but to dragons a strong enough cocktail of them is the starting gun for baby-makin season!
On the other hand, the death side of things is that since Dragons are such a long-lived race, when it DOES come time to go, they require a pharaoh’s hoard in order to secure their place in the afterlife. Maybe unlike most races, they CAN take it with them, or at least it has to have enough metaphorical weight to get them choice seating in what comes after. Did your hoard drive adventurers to madness at the mere prospect of a single handful of its unmatched lucre? If so, you’re DEFINITELY getting into Draconic Super Heaven, with maidens served thrice daily and simpering servants to fulfill your every whim for all eternity, only daring to consider stealing when you find yourself with a need to make an example of someone!
This isn’t a regular rubber ducky; he’s looking to the side not forward.
GUESSES:
-Sentient duck tape?
-A sample of a mundane technology (plastics, plastic ducky colorings) that she never bothered to learn but can now star trek replicator style print?
-A sentient spying tool??
It’s worth noting that there are different sorts of ‘super intelligence’, too.
First, you’ve got people who are just very, very smart. Dabbler, for instance, seems to fall in this category. Add that to centuries of experience, and she’s able to think rings around most folks.
Then you’ve got the folks who’re literally super-intelligent–if a setting has power-blockers, they actually become dumber if they are put under the influence of one. Deus is pretty clearly this sort. This is a matter of processing power, essentially–his brain runs faster, and can multi-task (so he always is working on any problem he’s been made aware of, even while doing lots of other stuff, as well–including Daphne). His only real limitation is that he DOES need to be aware of something in order to come up with a suitable counter. Sure, he can probably intuit a lot from subtle hints (think of the scene from the original Watchmen comic where Ozymandius is watching, like, 50-100 television screens at once, and almost instantly predicts how just about every stock is going to go, and what sorts of advertising campaigns are going to be needed), but he CAN be surprised. (And, psychologically, he seems to enjoy it when it happens.)
And then you have Digit, who is probably more akin to a Girl Genius Spark–she’s a weird scientist, as well as an intuitive engineer. Mundane machines just are immediately analyzed by her to become obvious in function (hence why letting her wander around the station is potentially Earth-shattering, literally–every device she encounters, she knows what it does, how it works, and how to improve or adapt it). And she might be able to produce machines that just straight-up break the laws of physics, particularly conservation of matter and energy (this isn’t clear, yet, but that harpoon-gun didn’t seem large enough for all the chains that came out of it). However, while other people MIGHT be able to use those devices, non-super-engineers wouldn’t be able to reproduce them.
Is Digit a spark? Did she just break through for the second time? That would be concerning…
Or maybe a Ork Mekboy.
Or the offspring of both :)
Most super intelligences aren’t driven by anything because they were smart enough to eventually resolve all that mess and leave it behind. Reading “Science and Sanity” is most helpful.
Dr Doom is driven by the fate of his mother, whom he wishes to rescue from hell. This has made him more than a little monomaniacal. Most of the others are, as Dave said, one hit wonders.
Resources are an issue with any technology. If you know exactly how to build a star ship or the death star beam or whatever you can think of, and it requires some form of exotic matter than can only be made with near stellar energies which can only be obtained with a different form of exotic matter that – – – . Given we live in a universe where magic really doesn’t seem to exist, that guy is pretty well screwed. Sure, neat stuff will be produced, but not the things they REALLY want to make.
In Michelle Sagara’s “Elantra” series her Dragon species have a very flexible concept of “My Hoard”. The Emperor (who is a Dragon) takes the entire empire as his Hoard, and gets very annoyed with anything that threatens it. Another Dragon takes knowledge as his Hoard, and presides over a really large library. Not every Dragon succeeds in choosing a Hoard, and some who do are driven insane by the desire to protect/own and have to be hunted down and destroyed by the other Dragons. One Dragon explains to a Human “the concept of Hoard is hard to translate into your language. The best translation is “MINE”.”
“We have such sights to show you!”
…Hamdingers?
has anyone else here that is reading this (besides me) also eaten an actual Hamdinger?
they haven’t been sold for, literally, decades.
i’m not even certain anyone here knows what they were.
as potentially the only person here that has any practical experience with Hamdingers, including knowing their flavor and how opening a can of them looks/sounds/feels (it is an emotional experience… a miserable, emotional experience), i’m begging any of you with that knowledge to step forward, so i will not feel so…
…alone.
> they haven’t been sold for, literally, decades.
… so, *would* any remaining ones still be edible (a la Nth-level MRE) or not? ;-)
Were they edible to start with?
Nope. I mean, yes, but you’d likely become very ill and regretful.
Yeah, technically you can consume anything, just not always be able to survive the consumption :P
all mushrooms are edible, some only once
How do they differ from SPAM?
SPAM is spiced ham made by taking a bunch of pork parts nobody wants nor can use, cooking it, blending it, and pressing it into a mold.
Hamdingers were actual ham steaks, cut to fit in a can.
the similarities are that both come packed in that weird ham jelly, and both are horrible.
they were edible, but you wouldn’t want to. decades later, you still wouldn’t want to and it might kill you.
I’ve read a few sci fi novels where the big memory storage is a ridiculously small memory bead, the Heechee series where they are memory fans, like hand fans; and vs a data DVD or something, those seemed unnecessarily ungainly. Imo, ideal would be easily grippable, like a thumb drive or Star Trek isolinear chip, have an interface that doesn’t rely on compatibility (USB C seems the closest so far), and potentially unreliant on another system to decipher it, like PC-on-a-flash-drive.
… Unusual Dragon Hoards you say? :-)))
https://lizardshuffle.tumblr.com/post/126369250634/iguanamouth-bertb0t-antique-symbolism
https://lizardshuffle.tumblr.com/tagged/hoards
I remember some fantasy setting that had dragons collect gold due to it giving of a subtle magic energy that they used for mild nourishment/enhancing their might.
I was about to have a profound personal awakening. Then I took my scheduled dose for ADHD. One could say I kneecapped my progress but it must have been the wind.
Hey, Dave? I just thought you might want to take another look at Digit’s hands in the panel where she us skipping off, I’m pretty sure the right and left hands are switched
Look again: they are palm down, which means the thumbs are on the outside… as shown
@daveB
Nitpick on 6th panel. Digit’s hands are in a very unnatural position without breaking her wrists. Switch the thumbs from outside to inside and i think you’ll have what you intended.
It’s entirely possible without any wrist-breaking. Can’t speak for how natural a position it would be, but even being as inflexible as I am, I can just about manage it, so it should be pretty easy for many people.
In fact, for me, the palm-up version you’re suggesting is barely any easier.
I mean, I presume dragons like gold for the same reason people like gold. Gold only has value because we DECIDED it has that value. Gold is actually really useful as an electric conductor, but ancient people didn’t even know conductivity was a thing. No, gold was simply 1) rare and 2) pretty. As such, it became a status symbol. And as a status symbol it had intrinsic value. You couldn’t grow it, eat it or drink it or anything (you could trade it but no one else would eat or drink it so the gold stayed in the economic system) so the supply was relatively stable and could only slowly grow through finding more of it.
Again, it serves almost no practical function in early societies beyond being used as a marker for value, which again, is something humans decided to make up. I suppose given we made up dragons, it could have some special value to them, but I’m fond of a saying from another comic paraphrased as “dragons are just giant fire-breathing magpies.” Gold is shiny and people collect it in as large an amount as they can, so of course it’s going to be the subject of fascination of any being that spends any significant amount of time around humans and likes shiny things.
remember, Dragons breathe fire. In their search for a bedding material that won’t go up in flames every time they exhale in their sleep, they found that metal works well, and gold is a very soft (and therefore, to them, comfortable) metal to sleep on.
was surprised to learn gold has a higher melting point than iron, too!