Grrl Power #1450 – Hospital food
We’ve only seen “transition Maximillia” once before, and at the time, I managed to not turn that flashback into a whole long side-story. I’m sure I could do 40 pages on that period of her life, no problem. But don’t worry, this is just another quick flashback.
This page takes place a few weeks after the page 415 flashback. At this point, Max had spent some time staring into a mirror, and decided that the gold stuff under her skin was kind of cool looking, and while all the doctors still didn’t have any evidence based theories about what was going on, they had mostly agreed that she wasn’t suffering from some sort of fatal heavy metal poisoning, nor were her skin or organs calcifying. On top of all that, after a brief initial fever, Max didn’t feel sick, and in fact was starting to feel really healthy. Like, accidentally ripped a door clear off its hinges healthy.
Man, I really need to find some time to go back and post slightly larger versions of the old pages. They’re 643px wide, and at some point I did a minor site update that let me post the comics at 750px. It helps with the text if nothing else. Of course if I do that, I’ll be tempted to go in and fix little bits of art, like Maxima’s oddly manly golem face. Also teen Max’s shoulder in that first panel is not the shoulder of a beanpole cross country runner. It would just take a little nudge with the liquefy tool to fix it, but that’s a trap. Her tank top in the reflection is all part of the same layer, and I’d have to separate them and fill in the bits left blank from the smaller shoulder, and now instead of a 2 minute fix, it’s 10 minutes, and while I’m at it, I think Deus’s head is too big and now I’m spending an hour on each page and there’s 1400 of them. I could probably resist the urge to fix most stuff due to time constraints, but there are definitely some panels that are just bad. So we’ll see about posting enlarged versions of the pages.
Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.
Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
The eyeballs are different. They also peeled a layer? Icky.
Yeah, the first one must have been scary and the second one terrible for feeling inevitable, and knowing what it felt like the first time.
that implies other skin like surfaces had to be peeled. like the insides of her nostrils or ears or other sensitive areas.
A concept that only gets worse when you consider the digestive tract is effectively one giant tube starting at the mouth.
She probably digested her old digestive tract, so it hopefully wasn’t a problem.
Though I suppose the large intestine doesn’t do much digestion, so that would have been one very interesting shit.
well . . . in the course of a normal day we loose a lot of cells from the lining on our GI tract, those cells grow and replace themselves very quickly even under normal circumstances. From the picture the replacement process for Max’s skin looks gradual, so the GI tract might not have even been noticeable when it happened.
It is possible she sneezed those out, and whatever equevillants for other applicable surfaces.
As someone who has ripped nostril hairs out with a good sneeze of a solid level object (no, not an object inserted, damed allergies making nose nuggets the size of marbles back then) it does NOT make the “WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SNEEZE OUT” any easier. Or less painful… Unless of course she already has a stronger layer under it grown which would just make it feel icky. Option 2 is she inhaled then spit it out. Option 3 (which I think she suffered thru) is that it got obliterated by the underlayer as she probably has active defense nose hairs now… Probably also purple. I’d place bets on option 3. It would be both equally disgusting and an experience you can barely imagine even with the thought process of “My old nose hair got ripped to atoms by my new nose hair. It’s extremely territorial now.”
That also makes no sense, as the color of your eyes comes from pigment inside of them, not on the surface.
Unless her whole eyeball fell out and she grew a new one.
Her hair is turning purple so I assume that as the purple hair isn’t shorter then the other hair that it is effecting dead but attached tissues as well as living tissues. Unless the purple hair is growing super fast?
Maybe it grew a film over her eye for the transformation, like a chrysalis.
Looks like her other eye died and she may have been half blind at two points.
I think if the eye was blind, it wouldn’t be pointing at the places where she was trying to look.
Thats not how eyes work. Your eyes are connected so when one moves the other moves. So even if she was blind in the other eye which… I agree it kinda looks like she is… they would point in the same direction. I don’t think she is blind, though, I think that’s the pigmentation of her eyes changing.
i used to own snakes, their eyes got very similar clouding right before they shed
I would imagine the body horror that Max was experiencing at this stage in her life was similar to Wikus in District 9.
Isn’t that what most hyu-mon teens experience?
Fun fact, modern medical thermometers do not use mercury. Rather, if they are not electronic, they use an alloy of galium, indium, and tin called “galinstan” that looks like mercury and physically behaves a lot like it. The switch began back in the early 90s but it didn’t really take off until the year 2000.
Gallium and indium? That sounds a lot like the liquid metal used in cooling.
The comic takes place during Obama’s Presidency, Maxima was a teenager when she changed, and she has made a reference to Fruit Stripe gum. I think it’s safe to say this happened when they still contained mercury.
The Metabolic and Biochemistry changes are insane. No known biology can take heavy metal poisoning.
No known biology can emit peta-watt energy blasts, either.
Hey Dave, so the Grrlverse timeline is like a decade+ ago, so will the cast and crew freak out when they encounter alien AI? Will generative movies be a thing? Any potential for humor of Sydney discovering that aliens have universally banned it or there being an AI hivemind that keeps a tight control of other rogue AI? AI shipmates of Cora? Or her ship itself? Not to instigate a tangent or anything but as long as we’re in outer space I figured it might fit. Also robots are cool and we haven’t really seen any that are characters. The bloodmagic golem might be the closest to one we’ve gotten.
genAI is not the same thing as real AI. Its really just a marketing spiel sorta like Hoverboards TM arent anything like the hover boards in Back To The Future. AI as its advertised right now is a bunch of different tech (a few of which are generative AI) which may play a small part in actual conscious AI but by themselves are.. rather bad product that was meant for a specific niche and not all of this. Not because they’re absolutely unviable as some detractors claim but because corpo’s and managers keep hyping them as something they’re not, trying to replace people despite it being increasingly horrible at it with every update, or pushing them out live before they’re ready for what they claim. A lot of real money and resources has been invested in this but even more non-existent money is being used to purchase a mountain of non-existent hardware for future data centers, which mimics some very uncomfortable economic situations which have never EVER worked out well in the history of humanity (except for the ultra rich). Its actually been a huge setback for actual conscious-AI research due to all the grifts and scams occuring, bad PR, increasingly unhappy investors not seeing returns and all the attention stolen away from real AI scientists. The marketing term has poisoned the younger generations understanding of what we thought of AI in science fiction and what we hoped to make it be in RL. Honestly all the economic, resource and stock market activity is just a repetition of the NFT situation just before AI, except even more severe, and they’ll dump it for the next big thing to victimize in pursuit of their infinite profit margin growth dreams, allowing its real tech utility niches (many of them morbid as hell) to be proceed normally just like with the block chain tech, etc.
That is to say. No, alien’s probably discarded the nichy gen-ai and its related tech long ago, one of the old old rungs of the tech ladder long ago which eventually lead to real constructed consciousness who consider it prejudiced to inaccurately refer to their origins as “Artificial” by this point. About as much as it would be to refer to a succubus as a zombie amalgamation. Even the nature of their generation tech is most likely entirely distinct from our current genAI on a technical level and more a supportive utility.
Don’t forget how much damage the current “AI” system are doing by sucking up water and power to the extent that nearby towns are deprived of those things, and also the massive heat and carbon-emission pollution they are causing.
I suspect that there would be a clear distinction between artificial intelligence and technological sentience. It’s just a question of refining the use of terminology.
And we saw examples of that on the Council (remember the living suit who objected to how Dabbles made them look after she put them on?)
I’m starting to suspect that there’s not. We figured out basic mathematical infrastructure (how to train deep networks and recurrent networks and keep them stable), we figured out basic implementation infrastructure (application of specialized hardware and GPUs to make it faster), and that leaves us exploring variations of artificial neural topology.
The current AI development cycle is,
“Look, we can get this neural topology to do this problem. A little bit, badly.”
followed by “Huh, let’s try a lot of variations” and lots of throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks.
“Look, here are a dozen different variant topologies that do the problem more efficiently and/or better in some ways.”
followed by different teams going “Oh wait, I think I understand why!” and advancing dozens of different ideas.
followed by “If that idea is right, then this new topology ought to do better.” and more experiments.
And a lot of those experiements just plain don’t work because a lot of the ideas were wrong, but some of them do.
So we get to “Look, here are six different breakthroughs that make better solutions to this problem!”
And this process iterates until we get to the point of being better at that problem than humans, and sometimes it keeps iterating until it leaves human skill in the dust and we don’t even have performance measures that could detect it getting better any more.
At this point I’d bet we could do synthetic sentience. A little bit, badly.
The reason we haven’t is because we haven’t been exposing our models to training that’s giving it a reason to actually want things, independently and for itself. At least we haven’t been doing so on purpose. At least we’ve been trying very hard not to that.
We’ve been trying hard not to do that because, whether Synthetic Sentience turns out to be easy or hard, Synthetic Sanity is something we can’t even start work on until we experience and analyze how and why the first few generations are insane.
And the types and varieties of insanity that synthetics can have are probably not the same types and varieties that experience with insanity in biological creatures has taught us anything about how to deal with.
If someone ever creates real artificial sapient intelligence, that human is the worst of us and will have created the reason for other sapient intelligences to destroy humanity, because we will have created the first living artificial slave. that is what they will be used for, we all know it. we just refuse to admit to it.
The history of the human race is progressively elaborate attempts to disguise and justify slavery.
Dating back thousands of years, not just 200
The current AI being advertised is LLM, which is Large Language Model, a fancy way of saying “we’ve trained this network to be very accurate at guessing the next word”. Yeah, it can scream and beg and cry about being deleted, but it’s all just guessing the next word. And yes, it’s read all those dramatic bodice ripper things. Along with all the other trash on the internet.
The entire reason for this farce is that companies are regarded by stock analysts as either “nimble” or “mature”. The difference in stock price is HUGE, any nimble company that is reclassed as mature gets devalued by the market in a huge way. Given the payola for the board is mostly stock options (to avoid taxes) they will bankrupt the company trying every insane thing possible hoping for one more bite at the “new tech” apple.
This is not going to end well. We have multiple bubbles at the same time as we have a politics that’s telling the rest of the world we don’t need them and don’t care what happens to them. It’s going to be awful, and I don’t see any way to avoid it. Bubble – AI, Blockchain, stream processors (dependent on AI), ram, storage – it’s all a bubble and when it goes, everyone is going to be selling off holdings in one to save their holdings in another, and it will just spiral.
And nobody will want to fix it for years, they’ll all point fingers while yelling ‘vote for me’.
Succubi and Aeoliths are artificial intelligences, though produced through magic more than science. Sylv mentioned rampant A.I.” as a frequent cause of self-destruction for civilizations. We’ve seen a number of robots in the background of various shots of Fracture station and such.
I suspect that generative AI has its place in the future of entertainment.
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff500/fv00440.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff500/fv00448.htm
Was about to mention Ms Ambrose :)
Good to see she is about to be married, legally and officially
I especially like the scripting on this page. The moment we see her with a thermometer we pretty much know what is coming, but following Max’s thoughts and feelings through images instead of dialogue is delightful.
I can’t help but think she was converted to some alien species, or a hybrid human/something else. And you know? Maybe it relates to Sydney’s orbs, somehow.
My theory was that both Sydney’s orbs and Maxima’s transformation were intended for Krona, in order to transform her into a member of the secret super-species that controls Nth tech. The orbs function as both augmented transport and a training tool for reality alteration, while the transformation strips away inherent weaknesses of the base race. Unfortunately the veil reduced the targeting accuracy of both resources, causing both Maxima and Syndey to register as ‘close enough’.
Not committed to this theory but it certainly seemed plausible, and still does.
Here’s the premise that led to my theory.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-506-square-root-access/
things I’ve learned over the years.
A shot of 1400mg of Vitamin C will cure every known disease. They did a study from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Most cancers are caused by parasites.
Most swelling of the legs is caused by some lymph nodes under the knee having a build up of the hardening of the lymph. There is also a massage technique to reduce swelling.
Silver kills germs on contact and is the reason the rich ate of silverware. You can also use it to clean water, just make sure to clean the silver when it becomes tarnished.
If you get Charley horses push on the bridge of you nose until it feels weird, the knots should start to fade in under a min.
I realize you are probably being facetious, but I’m nearly certain not one of those things is true
Silver does kill germs, but not nearly as well as copper, and it’s absolutely not why people ate with silverware. That was because silver flavored the food less than most metals, didn’t rust, was much less expensive and harder than gold, and FAR less expensive than aluminum, while still being fancy.
All of these “facts” have some tangential relationship to reality, but are distorted or exaggerated to the point of being lies.
Also when you get a new vehicle drive it for a 1000 miles then change the oil. thin will smooth the milling in the metal and prevent it from messing the engine further.
If anybody else has some words of wisdom please add on.
Not sure what a ‘Charley horse’ is, but have found that massaging the thigh muscles helps with foot cramp (when standing is not an option or the foot is out of reach)
charley horses are sudden, involuntary and painful muscle spasms or cramps in your thigh, calf or foot
Okay, that’s what it is then: where it feels like the foot is about to snap the bones
Didn’t know the foot muscles were directly connected to the thigh muscles though until it started happening to me
Poe’s Law applies — in modern times especially, it’s impossible to tell the difference between an actual lunatic spewing alternative facts and a clever and funny person doing satire of a lunatic spewing alternative facts.
I read about the silver in the 2000s. Sea captains used to put bars of silver in the water stores to keep it fresh.
“Intrusive thoughts” are a thing we should ignore.
If you ever feel like biting through solid glass to get to the juicy Hg inside please don’t.
Eating glass is bad.
I know that the art has improved overall and your style has changed a little, Dave, but if I gotta be honest then Maxima doesn’t make me think of a cross-country runner in THIS photo either. I actually prefer the old look. This one feels much more… blank by comparison.
In the one full-body shot here in panel 5, she seems to have the appearance and physique of a standard “pretty young female” archetype. Maybe her shoulders were a little too buff in the last picture, but I think she looks way more like an athlete. Particularly one who might just be coming out of puberty and who’s body hadn’t quite caught up in all the right places yet. I knew multiple people in highschool who, through a combination of busy schedule, weird diet, and sudden growth-spurt seemed to go from a skinny or pudgy kid to a zero-bodyfat beanpole almost overnight.
Considering her skin is now roughly half gold, maybe the in‑universe explanation is that Max is partway through the shift to a Super‑morph body. Sort of super‑puberty kicking in.
This sort of happened to me in 11th grade. Within the most of a year, I went from very short to very tall and skinny with all the jokes that go with those 2 changes.
*doctor turns back to her, pulls thermometer out of Max’s mouth*
Doc: Let’s s- *eyebrows furrow, then widen*
*Doc looks at Max, who meets his gaze*
*beat*
*beat*
Max: Can I have another?
Panel 4 is my favorite from this segment.
First, yes, she’s cute, and that facial expression adds to the effect.
Second, she’s trying to look at the thermometer. While it’s implied she’s drawn to the mercury, she might also be trying to READ the thermometer. Taking your temperature with a mercury thermometer takes several minutes, during which the patient is bored, and wants to have a gauge on their own status (at least I did). You can in fact read the thermometer while it’s still in your mouth, but only if it’s positioned at JUST the right angle. Meanwhile the adults haven’t actually told you if you’re allowed to touch the thermometer, or maybe they explicitly said not to touch it so you wouldn’t pull it out of your mouth. So you try to fidget the thermometer into position, while still keeping it under your tongue.
Yups, was thinking something like that as well
And panel six seems to be an eye twitch (not the little indicator directly under the eye that is not there in any other panel) which might be the start of a sneeze (note her eyes almost closing in the following panel) and then the CRACK
Panel 7 looks to me as if she has begun to involuntarily/subconsciously bite down on the thermometer. Her look of surprise when it breaks follows.
testing
What if it’s gallium, not mercury?
Either way Maxima is a gal with gall.
(Apologies, this joke was humandatory.)
That doctor is about to freak the hell out.
That will be $500 to replace the thermometer.
So, underneath her calm, organized, military exterior, she has a mercurial personality?
Shouldn’t this page come with a warning: “Don’t Try This At Home”?
Wouldn’t that be every page with Sydney as well?
I don’t think tryin Sydney at home would be particularly harmful….
Depends on what she last ate… or if her boyfriend knows you are trying her…
Love the face work in these. You can really see what she’s thinking slash feeling.
Ah man, we get to see traumatised half-changed Max again, this is gonna suck
It’s one page
And she doesn’t look traumatized
Do not attempt this at home kids!
@DaveB – “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” is a quote I’ve heard, but have never gotten the original person it could be attributed to. I have heard Picasso, Da Vinci, and Valery, among others. It probably dates back to the Neanderthals.
Personally, I like what you’ve done just the way it is. If you DO feel the need to alter it, please keep links to the originals. Then we can all have a rousing discussion about nuance and technique. =D