Grrl Power #1468 – Princess Alice of Batenberg’s Gambit
Prophylaxis, in case you don’t know (that includes me, I had to google chess terms) just what it’s called when you “play defensively,” or at least try to deny your opponent whatever strategy he seems to be going for. Like in pool, you want to sink your balls but if possible also leave the cue ball in a bad spot for the other guy in case you miss.
Ryzyl didn’t cast Mirror Image, he cast… I don’t know. Army of Me or something. Basically one of those high level spells that creates actual copies of him that have the same equipment and spells and stuff that lasts all of 10 minutes, or something like that. And when it ends, he gets the memories of each one back. Good for quickly exploring a dungeon, overwhelming an opponent, pooling all their coin and cheating a merchant out of his bushel of apples, that sort of thing. Actually, if the spell was really well crafted, there’d be an option to not absorb the memories, because most of what he’s going to get back from this encounter is a lot of crushing, burning and choppy-choppy.
In panel 2, Max is doing an “X” swipe, followed by a heart stab – hopefully that’s more or less what it looks like – but as I’m posting this, I realize that the heart stab is a little superfluous, because she’s stabbing right in the middle of the X, which has already been thoroughly quartered. She should have stabbed him right in the middle of the face, probably. Although, during her 3 months of hyperbolic time cargo deck training, she probably got up to the point where she was fighting fairly advanced magic wielding opponents – advanced like “has spell in place that allows them to shrug off a single fatal blow somehow” or “upon receiving a fatal wound, this spell rewinds time to just before the injury was received (up to three seconds) and teleports you up to 10 feet in a safe direction.” Which is one of those high level spells that does no good if you get chopped in the femoral artery and it takes you a minute to bleed out. But it’s great against decapitations and boulders, whether launched via catapult or giant. So I guess Max is just making sure her kill shots stick. It’s the sword equivalent of the double-tap.
Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SNL proved that Chess has cheerleaders.
I recall a filksong “Cheering For Chess” depicting a culture-reversed world where the jocks were the disdained outsiders.
You want dry sport commentary that tries to be dramatic? Try watching a snooker tournament. By gods, they’re tedious.
Yup, best commentary I’ve heard…was not at a tournament. Just one of the OLD, I mean OLD guys in the snooker parlor commenting on some guys that were part of an impromptu tournament that was so casual it was chill. He only had a beer or 4 in him. Good times, I’d rather play snooker than 9 ball or billiards. I ain’t accurate, but I can cram those leaves until I can get a nice run.
“Whispering” Ted Lowe of British snooker commentary fame made history here as described on his Wikipedia page from which I stole this
Lowe occasionally uttered a gaffe on air; one of his most famous quotes being “and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.” He once told viewers that Fred Davis, struggling to rest one leg on the edge of the table in order to reach a long shot, “is getting on a bit and is having trouble getting his leg over”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lowe
Everything I know about snooker I learned from Mitchell and Webb.
That reminds me of the Darts sketch from ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqxXNZcIdwM
IU believe you mat have been snookered, then ;)
Contrasted and mocked, of course, by an iconic bit where Brian Blessed did snooker commentary. Look for it on YouTube.
What the…
/pause for a rapid bit of searching.
Oh. My. Gods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP11L9jRW94
So what happens when someone dies or gets eaten?
Then they’re ded.
I’m the world of chess, Magnus Carlsen has, in the last six months or so, gotten commentators more excited than normal by playing (and often winning games with) what appear to be properly bonkers strategies and openings
Seeing “In the world of chess” following “then they’re ded” really threw me for a loop, but I guess it just replied to the wrong post.
I’m kinda disappointed. For a second there, I thought the chess world was really hardcore.
From the first match and earlier commentary, lots of contestants are non-sapient. Either remotely- or AI-piloted. If they “die” they get rebuilt bigger and better for the next contest. For sapient contestants, they can say “Yield” and instantly get teleported away to an emergency medical bay. This is what happened to the opponent Maxima “cored” in her first fight. Probably not restored to 100% health considering he had a massive hole in his chest with a big chunk of spine missing (assuming he has/had a spine), but at least alive. Automatic force fields dropping into place to protect a sapient in the case of imminent death have also been mentioned, but from the fight scenes so far I don’t see how this would work.
The guy she’s fighting now has already tanked a full-body slash, which explains the slash-slash-stab today.
Presumably the guy getting chased by Eat Chicken could yield/teleport as his legs are being chewed on.
All that said, it’s been established that sapient contestants can and do die in spite of the safety measures.
Is Sydney even watching the match at this point?
I can only find a reddit link but chess commentators are *not* staid: https://www.reddit.com/r/indiansports/comments/1hcm8xm/the_moment_when_ding_liren_blundered_in_the/
(apologies if this doesn’t turn into a link, I’ve not tried commenting before)
Anyone else getting Lilith Crane (Bebe Neuwirth) vibes from the female chess commentator?
Yes, and Zach Smith (better hope there is no little boy around, or they would be in Danger :P )
Yes! She is a dead ringer. Plus “eschewing prophylaxis” sounds like how she spoke. I’m so glad I’m not the only one.
Absolutely I did. Glad to see I’m not alone!
I was getting Lilith and Frazier vibes from those commentators.
I’m not a fan of being pedantic, but I’ve seen this one far too often to not comment: in Panel Two it should be “eked out a victory.” “Eeked” is what a too-nearby mouse did when it saw Ixha fighting.
If you hadn’t pointed it out, I would have.
Cora and her crew need their own side story. Doesn’t need a full comic, but something to give their characters more depth.
I wondered what Lilith Crane was doing these days
Lilith was always an alien, on Earth conducting long-term research
isnt that the duplication dude from the evil rich people arc? the one being eaten by the space graboid.
It has the general “cowl and cloak” theme like the Ascender outfit (p1116 is a good example — I’m dithering over which pic to use on the grrlpowercomic.fandom.com wiki page), but there isn’t much resemblance beyond that.
Addendum: My brain skipped over “the duplication dude” from the comment. That’s Ted aka Goon Squad (p1138 shows a crowd of him); his outfit doesn’t really look like that guy’s at all.
Well, Ixah doesn’t really look like Maxi either, and we never saw what Ted looks like without his helmet (for all we know, ‘Ted’ may be an ‘Edwina’)
Kirby has entered the tournament.
Evil Kirby/Eat Chicken must have a limit on the powers it absorbs and re-uses …. perhaps a time limit? Otherwise it would just go around acquiring power by eating things slightly less powerful than itself, and end up a demigod.
Unless it has a natural enemy. Or is a construct.
Whatever the limit may be, it might not matter so long as the power lasts through the current match. It seems to have started with a relatively weak competitor that it could catch (therefore no flying or superspeed). Since there are only (presumably) 8 contestants in the ring, it would be interesting to see a growth path that would lead it into being a threat to Max.
So, he’s using the Shadow Clone Jutsu from Naruto
There’s a part of me that wants to poke Sydney’s halo until it’s horizontal.
I definitely didn’t read panel 2 as an X-slash followed by a stab…I thought the X was just supposed to indicate how intense the stab was
Max doesn’t seem to be having as hard of a time here.
She’s going to have a problem with that chicken, isn’t she. :|
Nah, just go after the non-bitey end.
One plasma proctologist prep later, it should be easier to deal with.
Also, that let’s audiences see its face during attack.
Nah, do a Breen (from “Delve”) and dive straight in, and carve her way out
All depends on how quickly the absorption happens (ie instant like Buu or longer like the Sarlacc)
“Bree” is the elf from Delve.
“Breen” is an amazing creator of terrible, terrible films.
Breen is Bree+Jen
Did you come up with that portmanteau? Because she’s still listed as “Bree” on the Delve character page and I’ve never seen her called that in the comic.
Yes
Ah, you are talking about Delve, the webcomic. I was confused, as I thought you meant Delve, the webnovel. Interesting comic, I have become interested in it.
Didn’t know there was a different webnovel, been reading the comic since it started
hello yes just chiming in that I would join the patreon to see a vote incentive involving chess announcer lady, she is very pretty
I hope Frix is peeling those grapes
The commentators would use the player names, not the piece colors. During preliminary rounds they might use contestant numbers, but by the semifinals they would have the player names in front of them for easy access, and would likely make a point of knowing the proper pronunciations.
I must therefore conclude they are commentating on the following chess match:
Arthur White, playing as black, vs Victoria Black, playing as white.
Is… is that Dr Lilith Crane and Doctor “Danger Will Robertson” Smith getting flirty over chess? o_O
You’ve obviously never seen Gotham Chess comment a Guess the ELO game!
“And he sacrifices . . . the ROOOOOOOOOOOOK!”
“This is NOT checkers, people! Just because you can take a piece doesn’t mean you have to take the piece!”
Yes. Chess does have banal announcer banter, as does poker.
lol. Looks like our poker champ is breaking out the chess set, this is going to be one heck of a bid!
Now imagine the sportscast being interrupted by a pirate transmission by Max Headroom like the Chicago pirate broadcasts, and have Max commenting how he’d like to examine Ixah more closely “As a connoisseur of the female form”
OK, I had ChatGPT make a quick and dirty “What this might look like if it was canon” page over on my DeviantArt page (RedwoodTheElf) – This is TOTALLY non Canon and just a fan page, but it may give you a chuckle, particularly how GPT decided to have Max mock the commentators by faking images of THEM participating as combatants.
I call right now that at least one of the combatants will join the main cast. I don’t think it will be someone like Oob from DBZ who fights because he needs the money, because if you can compete in the unlimited class you have other ways of earning it (and incidentally so did Oob actually). I doubt it will be someone on the same level as Maxima+Sword or even just regular Maxima, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the Pixie but that’s really just wishful thinking.
Ooo! Ooo! it’ll be Chicken-Eater! And then Halo will make jokes about the spice needing to flow!
I wonder, could you win simply by delving into mind control magic, letting the dangerous foes get ganged up on by the weaker ones, then using said magic to just get whoever remained to go ‘Yield’ and thusly remove themselves from the tourney? Or is mind control one of the few things forbidden?
Seemingly, nothing is really forbidden except bringing in additional competitors (or full battleships). I assume the issue is more along the lines of “people/droids/etc taking part in this competition rarely can be mind-controlled”.
I recall talk about how Halo’s Orbs make her equivalent to a military spaceship, a “full battleship” if you will, BUT still an individual and therefore qualified to enter the unlimited class tournament. It would be interesting to discover that the Orbs were originally built for exactly that purpose a very long time ago. Some interstellar P.I. is trying to put the clues together right now…
Shadow Clone Jutsu is a reasonable approx of what the guy has.
In D&D there’s an OLD level 7 spell from 1E Oriental Adventures called Body outside Body that makes multiple others, but not 10 of them, and they can’t cast spells like the Shadow Clones can.
Clones from Naruto are really overpowered, even if they are one-hit-kills.
It’s like a beefed up version of Simulacrum. I wonder how many clones survived the AoE attack since it seems like a bad idea to turn yoir back to 4 assassins.
Now we need to see a page where one of the contestants gets hit with a pro wrestling move and one of the commentators cries out, “by gawd he’s been broken in half!”
didnt ryzyl gt turned into a clutzy fatass goblin shortstack recently?
(ref valsalia’s lusty argonian maid’d comic for those wondering)
This arc is lagging a bit for me
As regards the X-strike, my money is on ‘He pissed her off and she’s making DAMN sure’.
The most common commentator I watch is Pia. As a mid-level grandmaster who has been playing for longer than most chess players have been alive, she is, usually, better at the game than the people she commentates on. She will, at times, show on the screen one or more possible lines the players could go down, sometimes 10 or more moves long while waiting for a player to move. Relevant comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/18zeil6/gm_pia_cramling_is_a_delightful_commentator/ Sample of her commentating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z4HMCTAphs
One reason for less banter in chess commentating is that I rarely see multiple commentators at the same time for the same match.
In the successful Xstrike, note that the sword cleaves the paving segment before it cleaves the assassin, and then impales the paving block before it impales the assassin.
“And when it ends, he gets the memories of each one back. Good for quickly exploring a dungeon, overwhelming an opponent, pooling all their coin and cheating a merchant out of his bushel of apples, that sort of thing.”
Naruto’s Shadow Clone Jutsu had a “get the memory of each clone on releasse” thing going. It was originally invented for scouting and distractions. Hence the “one hit limit”.
But Naurto could spam it so much, he also used it for accelerated training.
Do an x and then stab in the center is like a double tap with the gun.
rule #2 of zombieland(2009): double tap. I recommend this movie
I’ve been learning chess on Duolingo. A move where you target two pieces at once is called a fork. So, naturally, it’s important to focus on forking the queen.