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.
There’s lore in the Draconomicon about dragons needing to Eat Their Entire Hoard near the end of their lifespan. If it’s enough treasure, then the dragon can choose its final resting place and just Decide To Die Immediately, passing on to their afterlife on the spot.
If it’s not enough treasure, they’re stuck entering their Twilight years, torturously fading into fragility and senility until they die of Old Age like any mortal.
“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?”
The TTRPG Pathfinder recently reinvented their Dragons.
After the whole OGL debacle, they realized they had to “file off the serial numbers” from the 10 DnD Dragons and they went ham with making new dragons. Culminating in the “Draconic Codex”, where they even went into each Dragon types “collection habbits”. So, that book might give you some ideas:
Adamantine Dragons love entertainment and hoard connections to entertainers.
Cinder Dragons (former red) prefer things that can stand the heat of the lair.
Conspirator Dragons seem to “hoard” schemes and conspiracies that they started. Really just “for the fun of the game”.
Coral Dragons are artist gardeners. Their garden ist their hoard.
Bog Dragons (previously Black Dragons) like Oral stories. So they hoard heroes to keep telling their life stories – including making them undead.
Omen Dragons collect stuff that might be usefull in a potential future timeline.
Vorpal Dragons (created when a Jabberwocky was slain with a Vorpal Blade) like bladed Weapons. Since they can also do “Nonlethal beheading”, they could also collect heads like in Futurama.
Cloud Dragons “are like cats”, meaning they have quickly shifting interests of the week. Their hoard is mostly the remnants of past interests and projects.
I feel like Constipator Dragons would prefer metamucil.
Oh wait… conspirator dragons
i vaguely recall reading something someone made about dragons hoarding gold because its the only substance that can allow them to breed healthy offspring. the more gold, the larger their clutch and therby the better prospective mate.
Kang.
Didnt Tony Stark learn how to make his Uru Armor from the Dwarves who forged mjolnir?
“ackshually” He didn’t learn how to make the uru armor. He did made the other 7 weapons for the other heroes working with the dwarves, “Repulsor nodes and Stark tech inside and enchanted uru outside”.
But when it was time to enchant/bless the weapons by Odin by throwing them into boiling Uru. He Just dons the Bleeding edge armor (neurally linked armor stored inside his bones, extremis 2.0) and throws himself into the Uru.
After the battle, to remove the enchantment, he “sweats it out like a fever”.
So in the end, the Uru armor was an enchanted Bleeding edge.
“I feel like I should report this conversation to Max…”
“Yeah, I know, golden/silver age comics weren’t always the deepest analysis of the social-economic motivations of super villains. But still.”
Spider-Man: Wait. You can rewrite DNA on the fly, and you’re using it to turn people into DINOSAURS?! But with tech like that, you can cure cancer!
Sauron: But I don’t WANT to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.
And that’s when DC went Venta-black Dark: “If they won’t willingly use their powers for good, we will make them!” and plugged Superman into a battery and strapped Flash to a perpetual treadmill
And people wonder what makes someone a villain…
The Sauron cancer-or-dinosaurs thing wasn’t silver age, though it *felt* pretty silver age. It was post-2000. The Flash treadmill was Bronze Age, if I remember correctly.
the Endgame thing is, I think, inspired by a comics moment.
Stark decides to do some “outer space” stuff (as Quill had been telling him how good it is) and stuff happens, the armour needs repair- Rocket is telling him off, something like ” these things wouldn’t happen if you used decent materials instead of this cheap weak stuff.”
Stark is trying to explain that “these materials” are the strongest most advanced on the planet, and Rocket, obviously, doesn’t believe him that a planet can be that backwards.
I just noticed: Frix is carrying a box labeled “Hamdingers.”
Does this mean someone will be escaping the ship in an emergency craft?
lol, hamburgers shaped like hammers
I remember a sci fi book where the “Gravity plates” can only be made in an artificial gravity field. This meant all advanced spacecraft needed advanced spacecraft to be made. Obviously this circular technology was originally made way in the past by aliens who understood how to make the first gravity controller, but every race introduced to the technology never really tried to figure it out, instead just improving their plates over and over (more precise fields making more precise plates making more precise fields).
Enter humans, who figure the whole thing out and save the day from the bad aliens, because they weren’t satisfied with the original answer.
Ah yes the first contact base lines stories by Ringo for the Schlock Universe. I’ve worn out all three and no in the book they did not. But they did ask who made the first Grav Plates. ;) All it takes is a 4deg mark of graphite and BOOM. But how I learned about the crow bar is a story for another time Junior Space Eagle.
Wait what??! SF writerJohn Ringo wrote precursor material for Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary universe?!
Where the hael is people getting ‘hamdingers’ from?
All we see is ‘Ham…gers’
To answer your dragon alternative to gold question, I’d check out the D&D 5e Stat Blocks and Lore Blurbs for Dragons. There are now SO MANY versions of dragon in 5e, that now they horde pretty much anything, depending on species and alignment. :-)
Oh. I always wondered what people saw when I said the words “I have an idea!”
Panel three is quite illuminating
Back in the 70s a fellow named Peter Dickinson penned a theoretical evolutionary biology paper on ‘real’ dragons as a species that evolved lighter-than-air flight by processing calcium into hydrogen gas with ‘fiery breath’ as a side effect.
He suggested that dragons were less ‘attracted’ to gold than they were simply prone to accumulating it because they would have been constantly producing small amounts of hydrogen gas and other chemical runoffs involved in their metabolic processes that would steadily corrode away whatever they used as bedding…except for relatively inert materials like gold that would build up in a prime nesting site over time, as it passed from dragon to dragon across generations. He does suggest some ways by which dragons might have grown to associate gold with humans, seeking it from them and leading to some of the various mythopoetic conflicts between man and dragon.
The Flight of Dragons is an interesting read, if you can find a copy; the book, not the cartoon by Rankin-Bass that was a loose a synthesis of the book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson and another book entirely, the Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson (which was also a good read as I recall).
Billionaires hoard wealth they could never use even if they tried, so there’s no reason dragons can’t hoard gold they never need to use. Hoarding is literally a mental illness, it doesn’t need to make sense.
Reed Richards got his hands on alien tech all the time, and often improved it or made something better. He, like Stark, just didn’t share his tech with anyone unless the fate of the world/galaxy was in the balance.
Dr. Doom is an “evil” genius. He made armor that could compete with Stark’s and also learned magic. He used his genius to save the universe twice, and tried to save Earth from itself several times. Even the Panther God that gives Black Panther his powers read Doom’s mind/heart and was convinced that Doom needed to have all the vibranium to save the world by conquering it to stop all the fighting before The Big One destroyed the planet, but the “heroes” stopped him anyway, and the planet continued to almost get destroyed or conquered on a monthly basis. He was really more ruthless than evil, at least in the 2000s.
Reed Richards is useless because his tech is all in the ‘near future’. It’s so well known its a TV Trope. Stark is the same way. Any advancements are off-screen and soon to arrive in the near future, so the story is always based in the present day.
Also, a ton of the tech he knows how to make CANNOT be mass-produced, due to rare elements or the things required to make it simply being one-offs and not existing anywhere else.
Also, Reed gets paid NOT to bring some of his inventions to market, as it would drive many businesses out of business quickly. But really, the main reason is so the prevailing technology of the setting is the current day, and his improvements are ‘coming soon’ but never get here because of that.
The movie ‘The Flight Of Dragons’ says that dragons hoard gold for bedding because it’s the softest non-flammable material they can find in large enough amounts.
How many pages has it been since this comic actually had a fight or some tension? I guess most people are here for the tits at this point. You should make a new year’s resolution to improve the pacing on this a bit.
The comic has always been about “The extraordinary person in the ordinary circumstance.” Everything that happens in between the superhero action. It has it to set the stage, but the author doesn’t want to burn pages just drawing fight scenes that don’t advance the elements of the story that are interesting to him. I don’t think he wants a repeat of the parking lot brawl from the early pages of the comic, and thus has improved the pacing by spending less time on fighting.
It’s primarily a humor comic. Pretty much every page that isn’t part of an action scene, and some of the ones that are, has a punchline. If you’re not here for the humor, you are going to be very disappointed.
Huge dragons need something that can hold their weight but is “soft”. For something that measures it’s weight in tons gold is soft.
My brain is trying SOOOO HARD to make Digit’s “La la la” be the Smurf song.
Reference to Dee Dee from Dexter’s lab, I’m pretty sure. She generally causes mayhem in laboratory settings, so a bit of foreboding meta-humor.
Waaaaiiiittt…. That’s a “Forbidden Planet” reference there, isn’t it?
Some fantasy settings do offer some form of justification of this, and one of the earliest examples I remember growing up was the Dragonsbane novels (Barbara Hambly). As Morkeleb the Black explained it, gold in particular resonated with dragon song (and magic by extension?) and would sing it back to them. This resonance isn’t entirely beyond being sensed by others, and leads to the perception some have the dragon touched gold was ‘tainted’. Purified gold enhanced this, as I recall, making the horde of gold goods made by dwarves (?) more attractive. By the same rote, a dragon might be repulsed by gold it sensed as being tainted in some other way.
The singing of this gold was seemingly soothing on the level of a narcotic as it sings the dragon’s resonance to itself, and could be seen as highly addictive. As such a dragon might rarely leave it’s collection but for dire need, creating a lethargy and self-imposed binding if the dragon does not exert the will to break from it.
(This is anecdotal – i haven’t had time to indulge outside of audio books in a very long time, and while I wish to refresh my memory of the entire series, only the first seems readily available in audio book format. Sadly the only form I can really soak up while working. Need to find a good source for the Winterlands sequel trilogy when I can.)
This lead in my youth to the theory that, in the same way it is for electrical conduction, gold might serve a similar purpose as a magical one. Further, this is more readily available than potentially more advanced conducting methods technology might later create. Even now, gold is a major commodity for quality electronics, and makes a good argument for a similar value in fantasy settings. A lot of famous magic artifacts incorporate gold, no?
No specific settings come to mind, but I know I have seen a similar line of thought elsewhere in fiction.
Setting it’s possible application as conductor or reagent in magical uses aside, a dragon hoarding gold often seen as an embodiment of greed in literature , and in settings where a particular breed or faction of dragon has such a tendency is often given the same habit. Other settings will extend that hoarding to different faculties if there are diverse breeds, and indeed some might horde knowledge or other things they align as seeing value in. It can make for it’s own fun creative alternatives, like a dragon obsessed with artificing hoarding materials or devices and so on and having a very cluttered lab!