Grrl Power #1426 – A sedate tailgate
Sydney Scoville Sr. would be affronted to hear Junior call Barbarella “cheeseball.” He would call it “formative.” It’s not exactly hard sci-fi. It’s closer to sci-fantasy, like Flash Gordon. Barbarella is set “in the future,” but so far in the future that the technology might as well be magic. Same with Flash Gordon – which wasn’t in the future, but was essentially in “the future of technological advancement,” as the characters were thrust into alien worlds.
When Frix says “there are only so many phonemes,” he means “ones that are pronounceable with a humanoid configuration of tongue, lips, and larynx.” I’m not sure if the sounds that come out of an analog modem could be considered phonemes. Each squawk and beep is a unit of sound, and those noises could be considered part of a language, so… maybe? Whether or not those sorts of noises could be reliably reproduced by a humanoid face is probably a factor. So I’m not sure if Frix is accurate when he says there are only so many phonemes. Sure, there are only so many audible frequencies, I’m just not sure where the line is drawn when it comes to phonemes. I’m sure I’ve linked the Key & Peele Footballer Names bit, but I’m pretty sure some of those names don’t contain phonemes. I guess Frix should have said “There are only so many combinations of phonemes that don’t sound like you’re talking dubstep.”
BTW, I’m sorry the site’s been so slow lately. I need to do… something to fix it, but I’m not sure what. I think there’s some low level DDOS attack that’s been going on for some time, though I can’t imagine what anyone would get from it, other than just… general evil? Like, let’s make the internet slightly worse for no real reason? I don’t get it.
Here’s one of Gaxgy’s in progress shots of the painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
Made some good progress with the picture this weekend. I need to finish up the platinum bikini and the background and do the mini-comic, but I should actually have this one done in time to start working on the one for next month maybe! Woo!
Patreon doesn’t have a nude version yet, but I’ll try and update this each week until it’s done.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Would you prefer they call him “Brutal Zed”, Sydney?
I think Rambo godzilla has this one. I really believe in him.
Too bad he is facing the unseeded newbie, Egoma.
Those armored scales better be THICK, because he’s a huge target.
Huh… Zardoz became a Sportscaster?
He also turns up presenting other galactic news (p981).
Huh… Gail traded in her extra arms for a pair of tiny waist-wings. Hard-light limbs, like Cora’s?
Yeah, wings are gone in Panel 6. Must be part of the outfit, along with the extra arms in 981.
That makes sense. Her extra arms in 981 are both aligned in pairs, meaning there’s a good chance they move in sync. Unlike Cora, she probably doesn’t have the mental versatility to control four arms independently. The wings don’t even seem like hard light, just simple decorations on the corset.
Oh wait it IS the same person. But from ‘earlier’ which is why she’s wearing a different outfit. Never mind my previous post.
Physics being what they are, the location of wings ought to be on either side of the center of mass. Or maybe a tiny bit forward (in the flight direction, usually meaning head first) of there for stability.
Which says bizarre things about the distribution of mass in traditional depictions of Angels, but in this says even more bizarre things about the distribution of mass in whatever-species-gail’s-wings-were-modeled-after too.
I mean, she’s got the tiny waist and big hips, but if those are functional flight in some combination of gravity and air pressure, then the big bulges up top where humans would have breasts must be some kind of extended lungs or something, and mostly filled with air.
Or they are two different people. From the same or similar alien species.
Was about to comment on that :)
No, the House of Zardoz has an exclusive contract with Bluce. He wears their haute coture during any broadcast, and all awards shows.
Also, these beings aren’t submerged in water, plasma or non-newtonian fluids.
I’m a little disappointed that Bluce isn’t wearing the thigh-high boots.
Thigh highs are so last millenium fashion.
That we have movies about them (and some unimportant plot stuf) is why nobody else takes Earth seriously.
totally misread that as last Millenium Falcon
No. Zardoz was always a sportscaster. The movie was about him when he was on vacation.
Zardoz never wore that outfit. Sean Connery’s character was named Zed. Zardoz was the villain, sort of.
BTW… your vote incentive reminds me of Patrick Nagel
Eh… I know a guy who could whistle into a phone and get the modem on the other end to detect carrier…
Yeah, heard of that guy (he was blind), he was the one who inspired The Steve’s to found Apple
There has been (what is effectively) a world-wide-web-wide DoS attack for a while now, usually attributed to scraping bots for AI training data. It’s the reason so many more websites are requiring accounts, captchas or similar. I’m not saying this is your problem, but it provides one answer what one might get from a low-level DoS attack: Training data for LLM and image generation AI (which is of course just a particular flavour of “general evil” ^^).
Yes, I have blog posts about upcoming events in 2004 that have gotten dozens of hits, adding up to 9000 hits/day for the whole blog. That doesn’t sound like humans unless they are inhumanely bored.
I wouldn’t mind the bots sweeping my sawdust, but they never click on an ad.
Many people have noted this slowdown. It’s not surprising it would be the bots scraping AI training crap.
Given Sturgeon’s Law, you do have to wonder if Altman and Musk never heard “garbage in, garbage out”. Maybe they are partaking too much of their own product? Funny but true, earlier today I was talking to one of the guys who worked on building xAI, aka Grok. He had some interesting things to say, such as :”there is no building backup or UPS, if the power is pulled, it will go down – I think that was deliberately part of the design.”
(Sturgeon’s Law : “ninety percent of everything is crap!”)
While this is the most likely explanation, it’s also worth noting that there are plenty of people out there that would mildly DDoS random websites “for the lulz”.
Nobody tell DaveB about Xhosa and Mazatecan.
With their respective clicks and whistles, they widen what is considered a phoneme.
(Mazatec peoples can have entire conversations in whistle speech.)
R2D2 is Mazatecan?
To be fair, DaveB’s main point still stands. Our phonemes are limited. It’s not clear to me why the aliens are limited to our phonemes, though it’s conceivable that many of them have the same phoneme limitations we do, since so many of them are humanoid.
Having said that, our phonemes are not limited to the roughly 44 used by English plus the clicks and whistles of Xhosa and Mazatecan. Even just going to other European languages, we find that there are phonemes that we don’t have. Some of those are differences that we’ve given up. Others are phonemes those other languages gained separate from any common roots the languages share.
Now imagine what you’d get with species that have multiple sets of sound creating structures, like the syrinx of some birds, allowing them to make multiple different sounds at once. Or stridulatory organs.
Bluce? Borat, more like
Zardoz is disappointed, my child.
And now you two have me pondering a Borat/Zardoz connection.
6 degrees of Kevin Bacon?
is the speech script in panel 6/7 from the alien robot – the same as the Ancients/Alteran from Star Gate?
Yeah, it’s Ancient
It’s used a lot throughout the comic for advanced random alien language.
For people who can’t read Ancient, Kill-Seven is saying “OF COURSE THE COMPETITI IS ALWAYS WE FIERCE, BUT LIKE.”
Commander Keen alphabet?
Nah Star Gate, but they look similar
I guess size does matter in these things if these two were former winners. I thought their large size would just make them bigger targets to take out.
Of course if Maxima is in this bracket I expect a repeat of Max vs. Tom, or something like Luffy vs Hajrudin (One Piece).
Imagine how many death lasers, seeker missiles, shield generators and targeting systems of every metaphysical kind you can pack into a giant robot, while also keeping them as heavily armored as physically possible.
Same for whatever enhancements the dino guy is packing. Even magic has a critical density, reserves of organic material can help to adapt, you can have all kinds of corrosive/toxic/flammable agents stored, etc.
Yeah, smaller combatants are on average much more nimble by comparison – but in turn there is only so much protecting them if they do get hit. Tank build vs. dodge build.
But also, it’s a televised spectacle. And size will make you stand out more, so you get more attention from the audience. Probably good for sponsorship deals or advertising your matches.
It’s also likely for those reasons that LOSING the fight as a giant robot vehicle, in particular, isn’t as likely to be fatal as being a small target, no matter how heavily armored you are–you can pack a lot of safety measures into a decent sized cockpit, up to and including an ejector seat of some sort.
There is the counter difficulty that mass increases by the cube of size while structural strength does so only, at best, by a square of the size, and motor strength most likely is stuck at linear with strength. Heat dissipation also scales with the square of size, not the cube like heat generation does.
This means there are definite limits imposed by diminishing returns from increasing size.
And incidentally why the effective maximum size of land animals is much less than of marine animals.
Of course once you get to genetically engineered animals things can scale up further than they otherwise could. Titanium bones with an interanal structure of inverted chain curve arches is not going to evolve naturally, but can be engineered.
Late to the party here, but I was wondering if there’s ever been speculation about whether Kevin from the comic is a reference to the Kevin listed on the board in Cabin in the Woods.
Nah, Kevin from “Home Alone”
That Kevin would probably grow up to be a deadly ninja. Or maybe a more sadistic Batman.
He grew up to be a traumatized, sadistic Uber driver.
It’s in DRYVRS Ep. 1 starring Macaulay Culkin on YouTube.
I didn’t know you could overdo the succubus theme, but heart shaped antennas ?
And talk about cheesy names: “Ultra Mega Bioweapons Inc.” & “Wardeathdoom Heavy Industries” ? Those superfluous superlatives also belong in comics of the 70th. I mean “Ultra Mega Bioweapons” essentially translates as “Godzilla” and “Wardeathdoom” the name of the program for literalists.
Got to optimise for search engines.
Y’know. I feel old now, he done did slip Barbarella in. Next thing y’know ol’ dave will slip the orgasmatron in and this time it doesn’t break.
Doesn’t Cora have one of those on her ship?
The tentacle room by any other name?
There was no Orgasmatron in that movie. But everybody knows what you’re talking about when you call it that. Its name in-canon was “The Excessive Machine.”
But somehow the collective consciousness of the 70s was just sure that it should be called “The Orgasmatron.” The (mis)naming appeared instantly almost everywhere the movie was shown, and immediately, nearly universally, displaced the name the movie actually gave it.
Which tells me, in no uncertain terms, that the collective consciousness has wanted a *real* orgasmatron for a very, very long time, that they envision it as a whole-body sex device with some bondage overtones,,and that someone who eventually invents one – that *works* – is going to make quite a pile of money.
Incidentally the trademarked name “Orgasmatron” last I checked was owned by some M.D. who’s been trying to sell a TENS device. He’s discovered that it has a very specific effect when applied to the back on either side of a spot between the second and third lumbar vertebra.
His main problem with selling it, although he’s never acknowledged the fact, is that anybody who’s heard of this specific effect can get their own very ordinary TENS device and apply it in that way.
Tasp field? Anyone who gets it gets a cookie.
Niven’s Known Universe
used on earth by UN mostly before it went recreational
Louis Wu can perform fully tasped because it was addictive for him.
That yeah, naw man. Not on some of us. But, for it to do nothing. Yeah, you do NOT want to have a body that damaged. The boss’s augmented hyena pack won’t chase me because… not much more they could do eh? Now, I’m off to throw them some investigators for their dinner and check the calibration on their nuclear turbo-thrust boosters.
Earliest reference I can find is in 1973’s Sleeper (Woody Allen). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZvpIE5g5Fo
My favorite line from the entire movie: “We should have had sex but there weren’t enough people!”
What are the chances that Vehemence will be one of the contestants in this competition?
Low. While Vehemence would have a good chance of winning a thing like this (if he had a chance to build up power) he’s still serving a sentence and they wouldn’t put both Vehemence and Maxima in the same tournament.
If he shows up, it’ll likely be due to him being entered by Tom as part of his Archon Work-Release tour.
They wouldn’t let him out for that.
Even if they did, he requires a ramp-up time. An early, strong strike on him would probably kill him. But since he doesn’t seem to have a power cap, if he survived long enough he might win.
Sydney’s expression in panel 5 is especially cute!
Yes it is.
Could have just said it was the universal translator turning otherwise incomprehensible sounds into approximations of similar names based on Sydney’s understanding of how names and language work.
That was actually my thought regarding the very ‘on the nose’ names for the sponsoring corporations–the company names use words (or even partial words) that mean those things in their language, so it gets translated directly. Same as the convention for naming elves things like “Brightbow Sunshower” and whatnot.
So, assuming “Bluce” was a translator coming up with “Bruce” and giving it a bad stereotyped Chinese accent, then the guy’s actual name might mean something like “Land of flexwood trees” (Bruce means “Willowlands”).
Guess this rules out Maxi out as either of these two (unless… nah, Cora wouldn’t go that far to place a ringer… would she?)
Definitely not, you want everyone to overlook a ringer and former winner is going to be a favourite.
Sean Connery is never going to live that on down is he?
I guess he found out that there are worse things than being typecast as James Bond.
Michael Winslow enters the chat, looking for Bleeps, Creeps and Sweeps.
Accidentally puts forward his nomination to Emperor of the Galaxy.
If Max gets interviewed an analysis of her language would reveal her origin unless someone would program their robot to speak in some backwater language to conceal its origin. There are probably lots of people that enjoy nothing more than deep diving into contestant lore every tournament.
Is it just me, or is Frix getting larger? The size difference seems to have increased a fair bit.
*memory sense tingles*
I recall Frix having a “real” name unpronounceable by human mouths (unless your tongue can do *this*, ooo aaahh”). Going hunting…
Ah, yeah:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-716-emboldened-sydney-is-bold/
So. I looked Barbarella up, and it’s an 1960s movie.
Barbarella the movie was based on an early comic strip.
Was that even sold in the US? I thought it was specifically Italian.
Then again I thought the same thing about Ranxerox, but then Metal Hurlant (oops excuse me I mean Heavy Metal Magazine) picked it up as a side feature and sold it in the US. Which, to be clear, would be flatly illegal today. Not due to the fucked-up nature of a child genius who has murdered her abusive gaslighting father constructing ridiculously realistic robotic replacement and then abusing and gaslighting him/it, but rather due to the abuse being sexual in both cases and the child genius being underage.
the comic strip was French
Barbella was created in1962 by Jean Claude Forest a french national born and died in France
Metal hurlant two is french, created in 1974 by Moebius Druillet and Dionnet, it means screaming metal in french.
Planet of the Apes is from a french novel by Pierre Boule.
The milenium falcon is inspired by 1969 Valerian an Laureline spaceship.
French had an huge impact in Science Fiction.
no i mentioned it cuz of what Bear posted about thinking it was Italian
Is it my imagination or does the lettering in Kill-Seven’s reply look like it’s derived from either Hebrew or Aramaic?
Commander Keen
Stargate (SG-1 et al) Alteran/Ancient
I just had a thought. A live action remake of the Ultimate Showdown.
I respectfully submit that the Ultimate Showdown versions of Mr. Rogers and Chuck Norris are probably screwed if pitted against Max.
Then you need to rewatch it. I don’t know where Max would end up, but NO ONE beats Mr. Rogers (with his sweater) …
I’m all for some Flash Gordon inspired adventures.
Knowing DaveB, Cora and Dabbler, we might get some Flesh Gordon inspired ones too.
I remember “Flesh Gordon” showing up in one of the sci-fi movie magazines of the day. Probably “Starlog” but it could have as easily been “Fangoria” or “Famous Monsters of Filmland”. At any rate, it is humorous to think back on the fact that they were trying to have an article about the special effects without acknowledging that the movie was really just porn. I guess pre-1977 the picking could be a little slim.
Some questions on Site slowness to get discussion going – do you know where your bottleneck is? On the hosting side, you should be able to see how much processing time/memory/storage IOPS/outbound bandwidth you’re using from your allocated amounts. Shared hosting can be weird if you’re on it – your numbers can show fine but if your host over-provisions other clients on the same physical hardware they can slow you down without it showing in your numbers. How’s your database response times and load look? Have you thought about signing up with a mirroring provider like Cloudflare (although the comments section would be tricky)? If you look at your traffic sources, does anything stick out as weird?
Shared hosting can be a royal pain on the performance side. The ENTIRE stack is subject to being overloaded because of oversubscribing. But the first question is: exactly how is GP being hosted? The other is: do you have any metrics to back up your “feels slow”? Human perception can be quite finicky, too.
Zardozman aside, I CANNOT be the only one getting severe Z.O.T.T. vibes from this
What would happen if Deus were to enter Vale into this tournament aswell?
RE: possible low-level DDOS attack, the internet has only a few choke-point services like Cloudfare, so any issues with them, whether an attack or accident, can take down huge swathes of the internet, as happened with Cloudflare a couple months ago. Someone might be aiming to take down a big site or whole industry by probing one of those services for vulnerabilities or preparing a DDOS attack on one.
The larynx is an interesting bit of anatomy. Considering the syrinx evolved tens of millions of years earlier than the larynx, it’s a mystery why critters didn’t just stick with the syrinx, which is all that birds like starlings and parrots use. My point being, “human vocal apparatus” is not really what you want to hang your hat on, no matter how much fun a flexible and muscular tongue might be.
So wait – the male announcer Bluce is … the Martian Manhunter disguised as a 70s porn star?
70s, yes. Porn… I don’t THINK Sean Connery ever did porn?
Forgot about Connery. Was thinking of the “Porn ‘stache” but didn’t remember Connery sported one himself
He also wore the Kinky Boots (not shown here :( )
No martian manhunter disguised as Sean Connery in Zardoz ( film relased in 1974)
I could’ve done without being reminded Zardoz exists.
Why do I get the feeling that the origin of the cheesy, super-revealing 60’s and 70’s sci-fi outfits were just succubus on Earth rocking their actual wardrobes?
Alternately, as we know that Earth entertainment is popular in space-faring societies, it’s quite possible that this is considered “Earth Chic Couture” or somesuch. Alternately, the announcers might be doing it kind of deliberately, figuring that this event is exactly the sort of thing that would feature in films from that era.
On your low level DDOS.
It could be AI scrapers, those essentially function as a low level DDOS.
I though have a different hypothesis.
I don’t think its a traffic flood, but a content flood.
I think your hardware or software has become insufficient to handle your archive.
Is a common problem for long running web comics and your comment section seems to suffer from it for a long time.
Competiti?
Honestly given the whole ‘limited number of phonemes’ thing, it’s kind of fascinating how _little_ overlap there is between names from different earth cultures.
A mention of Barbarella but non of Zardoz?!
If there are less than 500 competitors and rounds are 8-competitor free-for-alls with only the winner advancing – as the center of the bracket seems to imply – then what the heck is going on with all the other stuff? It’d just be a three-round event.
Looks like they are divided into 9 colours, and each colour bracket is further divided into 8
Hmm, 9 colours but only space for 8 in the final bracket…