Grrl Power #1433 – A handful of complaints
For this page, I did google “how long do boobs take” or… something along those lines. Obviously the answer varies from person to person, and in a the cruelest twist of the knife, the age that they actually start growing varies by years, a fact that is no doubt responsible for all sorts of insecurities. If you’re the first girl in your class, I assume all the other girls get envious while you turn into a bundle of self-consciousness, and if you’re the last girl, I can only imagine the derisive remarks from the popular enboobened mean girls and boys who are jerk-butts.
Sydney is clearly trying to convince herself that big boobs are dumb. She knows the holo-boobs are temporary, and while she also knows that Frix could probably medical her up a permanent enhancement, like I said, she doesn’t particularly suffer from A-cup angst. She might be able to talk herself around to a B-cup, but among all the other reasons not to do it, she’s a very public figure and she probably wouldn’t be excited to read all the comments online about it.
All that said, Sydney’s next question will be, “So do the showers have holo-projectors in them?” She already knows they have full-length steam-free mirrors, much to her horror. Fortunately they’re optional. They’re actually part of the holo system, which does, in fact, mean there are scanners of some sort in the showers. Because Cora and crew are perverts… by our Terran and especially American standards. No scanners in the toilets though. They’re space perverts, not German. But while Sydney’s not thrilled with watching herself in a full-length mirror while she’s sudsing her gunge, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know how to have fun with holo-jumblies in the shower. Especially if holo-system can touch up any areas she’s not fully happy with.
Hey, quick question. Is the web page slow for you guys? I can’t figure it out, because on my work computer, and the laptop I used when I was visiting my parents’ house (which I now use in our game room when I’m posting the comic some nights) the web page is unbelievably slow. Like, 20-30 seconds to refresh the page. When I’m posting the comic, I keep getting messages from WordPress that I’ve lost connection to the server and saving is disabled, and that pops on and off and I have to wait to get the new post updated. My computer is connected to the router with ethernet, and the laptop is on wi-fi. But here’s the thing – If I check the page on my phone using the same wi-fi connection, the page comes right up. Same thing on my wife’s phone. And when I checked the page on my phone using some business’s wi-fi, it came right up. I’ve tried Firefox and chrome on my work machine and laptop, and I can’t figure out what the heck is going on. Maybe it’s some plugin I’m using since both machines are running basically the same configuration, but I couldn’t guess which one might be causing it, since I’m not running a “make your own personal website dog-ass slow” plugin, but I thought I’d see if the page was really slow for anyone else.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I feel like most of your page load time is probably going to be loading from the over a hundred different sites that your javascript is farmed out to, especially since the vast majority of those are not referenced directly, so the DNS lookup can’t even start until after the javascript page that wants them is loaded, and there’s something like ten levels of nesting.
pixel.tapad.com tends to be reported for an extended period of time. I don’t know if there’s a problem with that particular site, or if it just happens to get maligned disproportionately because browsers generally only report one site at a time and most of this stuff happens in parallel, but there’s a serialization step at the end and it’s not going to stop showing a site until that serialization gets through the responses which doesn’t necessarily happen in the same order as results come back. Also, pixel.tapad.com is very easy to read while others in the set are not, so it’s more memorable than many of them.
This feels more like the ‘suddenly gaining a tail’ issue. Part of it is dealing with the new aspect especially since it is right on your mind and the other half is trying to adjust for it in a few minutes when everyone else already had a lifetime or a couple of years getting used to it.
Give it enough time like a training regiment and eventually people will adjust and not even notice the strain anymore. Though considering these are breasts and Sidney had always wanted a bigger pair… The increased notice and focus on them will probably last a bit longer than if she suddenly grew a tail.
I can attest, the years of difference does exactly what you guessed it does for self esteem and dumb teenager remarks. I myself had to slap (or otherwise threaten the manhood of) at least 3 guys in my class cuz I was one of the first to start “growing”. Only took me a couple months, though. Bra shopping was a nightmare and a half for costs and wasted bra sizes
You know, I figure that that sort of hard-light holo-tech was probably developed, and then led to a HUGE increase in the popularity of body-mods (by various means). Like, being able to take a version of yourself and tweak, tweak, tweak, view, experience? That’s gotta do SOMETHING to anyone’s psyche, unless you’re the most self-confident person around.
small blemishes, musculature, skeletal anatomy like shoulder width, height, or jaw projection, depth of forehead ridges, length of horns or fingers, tails, scales, skin patterns…
Even if those sorts of cosmetic modifications already existed (via genetics or cybernetics), the hard-light tech must have severely increased the demand that they become cheaper, safer, and more readily available.
Even just on this page, Dave’s done a great job of showing that Sydney, while aware that she really doesn’t want the ‘bazonga blitz’ package, might very well try out a small boost, or maybe something with her hips or legs, and find herself tempted towards changing herself. I imagine a lot of people suffer some small amount of dysphoria about themselves (again, tiny things- like, I’ve got a little benign mole under one armpit that gets annoying, or would’ve liked to have inherited my grandpa’s nose bridge), but have psychological coping systems because changing those things would be more trouble than coping with the dysphoria. But with the sort of widely available super space modding, suddenly a lot of those barriers vanish.
I don’t think, were I put in this sort of situation where I could ‘take it for a test-spin, that I’d be able to avoid the temptation to get a set of horns growing and a tail installed. Possibly even some scales. Like, I’m not angry or sad or experiencing distress that I DON’T have those features, but if they were available, I think I’d WANT them.
I mean, if you look at the general alien population that is probably what’s going on. On Earth we’re mostly seeing supers so that’s the standard we set, but unlike some comic worlds regular non-supers are mostly normal with perhaps the motivator of exercise being a bit more common due to all the super model grade people around.
Aliens however, the human-like ones at least, even just out and about random people, all seem to fall into some version of attractive and it’s safe to assume most other aliens are far more in their ‘idealized’ looks than would be natural. It’s a pretty safe bet that the general galactic population has pretty consistently engaged in experimentation and perfection of their preferred look on a wide scale, and culturally has gotten it to where things are normalized and it’s pretty expected for someone to look the way they want and not be questioned or stigmatized for ‘having work done’.
I would think if you were living in a society where “having work done” was widely and inexpensively available it would lose a lot of its stigma. Being all natural could become a stigma or a status symbol.
I’d think Harem would have a super physique in which would keep her from getting back issues :p That and all the working out.
Hey syd: Just remember – “more than a handful is more than enough.”
If you’re having a problem on one machine only and it’s happening on both Firefox and Chrome, it’s probably either malware or a Wi-Fi driver issue or some kind of sketchy DNS redirection. Those two browsers use entirely different plug-in architectures, so something affecting them both as a plug-in would have to be part of another installed program, such as either a security/antivirus application, password manager, wallet app, a functionality add-on using a browser-to-system hook like Java or Flash, or, well, malware. I’m not saying it *can’t* be legitimate (again: antivirus, Java), but whatever it is, it’s global to the machine.
You also mentioned it happens on two different PCs, so whatever it is, it’s affecting both, but it’s something that’s not present (or built different) on your phones. Does it also happen when you take the laptop out of the use and use someone else’s WiFi? Does it happen if someone else brings their laptop to your house?
Anyway… my first suspects would be either your security package’s web filtering, with malware as the second possibility, especially if the two PCs talk to each other a lot or share USB drives back and forth.
Well, the website image is coming up pretty quickly, but yeah, now that you mentioned it, *something* else on the page has been still loading for quite some time. I suspect that your desktop and laptop browsers may just be giving indicators of a slow page (like not loading all pics first) that a phone browser would be optimized to hide.
*checks indicator on Firefox tab*
Yup, still loading. And…… literally, it finally stopped as I’m typing this. Total of a few minutes. Yeah, something’s slowing the site down.
Plugging the page source into ChatGPT or Claude can give few suggestions on POSSIBLE problem scripts and solutions.
The thought of boobs coming in reminds me of sixth grade or so. There were the girls who seems to have enormous boobs at the time but most of the early bloomers grew into their bosoms and most of them are average build. I can’t say that I am proud of how we sixth grade boys handled that at the time. A flip side is that some people blossom late. One of my relatives was barely a B cup into her twenties. Her breasts started growing when she got pregnant and after the baby came they just kept on growing. She ended up getting a breast reduction as they got uncomfortably large. They still grew some after the reduction and in her forty’s she is back to around a D cup.
gonna whack herself with them lmao, the softest concussion
Hmmm. There is lifting a foot and there is driving your own feet further into the ground. As a classic fridge-logician I am now wondering what the arena floor is made of. Must be some damn tough stuff.
If going for shock value, it would have been sufficient to simply rise from the footprint and carry on with the fight. The announcers would have been just as shocked and awed by the demonstration of toughness.
Ixah!Maxima is already known to be strong, but she didn’t have to tip her hand quite so early on how strong. She could have saved that surprise for a later opponent.
She’s not applying force to the ground, she’s flying. She’s probably habitually flying even when she IS walking on the ground, if you could fly by a mere act of will you’d probably get so used to doing it that walking was just flying while going through the motions.